May I Have the Envelope, Please

So why is the Bushgang so intent on encouraging democracy all over the world?
By William Blum

03/22/05 "ICH" - - I don't understand all this talk about how US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have inspired a "democracy movement" in the Middle East. Well, actually, I do understand it. People are desperate to derive something positive from all the horror wreaked upon the region by the American interventions, something to reassure themselves that what their country has done isn't so bad after all, that they themselves are not as gullible as they were starting to feel.

The bad news is that they're being gullible again. The only country in the area where anything of any political significance has recently occurred is in Lebanon, with a burgeoning movement to make Syria remove its armed forces. But this movement clearly arose from the murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on February 14, which has been blamed on Syria. What does this have to do with the United States? Do the people celebrating a US-inspired "democracy movement" think that the United States was behind the assassination? In any event, Lebanon has been a democracy for many years, as that word is loosely used by almost everyone; i.e., they've had elections on a regular basis, at least as credible as those in the United States, and a lively free press.

As to what happened in Iraq in January ... Imagine if during the Cold War, Hungary had held an "election" under Soviet occupation, in which the voters did not know the names of the candidates or what they stood for, and no candidate or party called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The American media would have had a field day poking fun at this farce.

Even more farcical was the presidential election in Afghanistan shortly before -- May I have the envelope, please ... The winner is Hamid Karzai, long-time resident in the United States, Washington's hand-picked, packaged, and groomed candidate, described by the Washington Post as "a known and respected figure at the State Department and National Security Council and on Capitol Hill."{1}

There were also elections in Palestine in January, which occurred following the death of Yasser Arafat. Do the celebrators think that the United States was behind Arafat's death as well? But here too, elections were held before; it's how Arafat became president. Seumas Milne of The Guardian in London recently observed that elections would have taken place earlier than January if the US and Israel hadn't known that Arafat was certain to win them. Milne adds: "The claim that democracy is on the march in the Middle East is a fraud. It is not democracy, but the US military, that is on the march."{2}

And now, class: In 25 words or less explain why the UN, the US, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, and other nations are insisting that Syria leave Lebanon without delay while saying not a word about the US withdrawing from Iraq. There are most likely many more people in Lebanon who want the Syrians to stay than people in Iraq who want the US to stay, one reason being that Lebanon borders only on Syria and Israel.

American imperialists, old and new

George F. Kennan, who is credited with formulating the basic foreign policy followed by the United States in the Cold War, died March 17 at the age of 101. He was what is commonly referred to as an elder statesman. In his years at the State Department he was recognized as the government's leading authority on the Soviet Union, and as the founder of the policy of "containment" of the Russians, a term he coined; he was also one of the authors of the Truman Doctrine. One of his best-known pieces of writing is "Policy Planning Study 23", written for the State Department planning staff in 1948. It read in part:

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. ... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. ... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. ... We should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

This is worth repeating not only for its intrinsic interest and its significance as a document of US foreign policy history, but as a means for making a comparison to present day policy. Those who intensely despise the leaders of the Bush administration are convinced that they are uniquely vile in American history. I would maintain, however, that there's very little of what we've come to fear and loathe about the Bushgang that can't be found in many previous administrations, and that if George W., on a purely personal level, were not such a crass, ignorant, dishonest, and insufferably religious jerk, his policies would be much more readily excused by liberals (though not by radicals) as they excused similar policies under Clinton and other Democrats going back to Truman.

What has distinguished the Bush administration's foreign policy from that of its predecessors has been its unabashed and conspicuously overt expressions of its imperial ambitions. They flaunt it, publicly and proudly declaring their intention -- nay, their God-inspired right and obligation -- to remake the world in their own image. The utterly callous attitude toward human suffering that marks the current administration's philosophy differs from Kennan's cold-blooded amorality in that the Bushgang has rejected his advice and do indeed talk about human rights and democracy ... ad infinitum. But so has every administration post World War II. Kennan was surprisingly out of tune with international public relations, or maybe he was just too honest to be a diplomat.

So why is the Bushgang so intent on encouraging democracy all over the world? Should that not be supported? Well, it depends on what you mean by democracy, or what the Bushgang means by it. I think that what Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al look for in a "democratic" third world country, or look to establish in that country, is that the government is corporate-friendly, that the society has the legal and financial institutions needed to remake the country so that it's appealing to foreign investors, that it will play ball with the World Trade Organization, the IMF, and the rest of the international financial mafia, and most important, that it is a capitalist system, enterprise nice and free, none of this socialist crap. That's what they mean by democracy. Least of all have they in mind any kind of economic democracy, the closing of the gap between the desperate poor and those for whom too much is not enough.

The United States and the women of Afghanistan

Last month Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, who commanded the 1st Marine Division in the 2003 Iraq invasion, told a conference in San Diego: "It's fun to shoot some people. ... You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."{3}

Some may be offended by the general's expressed relish for killing (and, indeed, he was rebuked by the Marine Corps Commandant), but his remarks about Afghanistan can only paint him and the United States as zealous supporters of women's rights in Afghanistan and lend credence to George W.'s claim of same. This would be rather ironic given the following slice of history that likely has never seen the light of a clear day in the mainstream media.

In the 1980s the United States played an indispensable role in the overthrow of a secular and relatively progressive Afghan government, one which endeavored to grant women much more freedom than they'll ever have under the current government, more perhaps than ever again. Here are excerpts from a 1986 US Army manual on Afghanistan discussing the decrees and the influence of the government concerning women: "provisions of complete freedom of choice of marriage partner, and fixation of the minimum age at marriage at 16 for women"; "abolished forced marriages"; "bring [women] out of seclusion, and initiate social programs"; "extensive literacy programs, especially for women" ... "putting girls and boys in the same classroom"; "concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics".{4} Neither the awful Taliban regime, nor the Islamic fundamentalist regime which immediately preceded it, would ever have come to power if the United States had not overthrown this government. And why did the United States in its infinite wisdom choose to do such a thing? Why, simply because the Afghan government was allied with the Soviet Union and Washington wanted to draw the Russians into a hopeless military quagmire. The women of Afghanistan will never know how the campaign to raise them to the status of full human beings would have turned out, but this, some might argue, is but a small price to pay for a marvelous Cold War victory.

Monkeys still on trial

Christian fundamentalists are waging a many-pronged assault on the teaching of evolution in public schools. At the state and local level they use lawsuits and school board debates to counter evolutionary theory. The Alabama and Georgia legislatures recently introduced bills to allow teachers to challenge evolution in the classroom; other states have approved new rules allowing the same; some localities paste stickers on science textbooks saying that "Evolution is a theory, not a fact." Students are encouraged to report teachers who don't give "the other side". Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a supporter of this campaign, recently stated: "Anyone who expresses anything other than the dominant worldview is shunned and booted from the academy. My reading of the science is there's a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had."{5}

Okay, but would they be willing to allow their tactic to be extended to political subjects? Would they permit stickers to be placed on history textbooks that say something like: "The idea that the United States has been a force for good in the world is a theory, not a fact."? Or stickers on economics texts which read: "For every free-enterprise 'success story' recounted in this book, there are many thousands of victims unmentioned." Let the debates be had.

The fundamentalists are not really as open minded as they would like to sound. What they'd really rather have is just creationism being taught and have evolution ousted from the classroom, but that strategy did not fare too well some years ago because of the sticky little issue of separation of church and state.

Not too long ago, creationists seized on a tactic that was devilishly clever. They began to say that the idea of evolution was no threat to their beliefs, for it was God who had created evolution. That approach seems to have been abandoned. Evolved, one might say.

The Hugo Chavez News Service

On more than one occasion in the past 18 months, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has accused the United States of planning to assassinate him; other Venezuelan officials have made the same charge, including the Military Intelligence Directorate, which claimed to have "overwhelming evidence" of a CIA-backed plot to bring down an airplane Chavez almost used in September 2003 to visit the United States for meetings in Washington and at the UN. The flight was abruptly cancelled.{6}

I don't know if the assassination story is true, but it certainly can't be dismissed out of hand, as the American press has done by using its favorite weapon, silence. The United States has already tried a general strike, a coup, and a referendum against Chavez, all failing to unseat him; assassination or invasion are about the only arrows poor Uncle Sam has left in his quiver. It should be kept in mind as well that the United States has been involved in the assassination, or planning for same, of close to 50 prominent foreign political leaders since the end of the Second World War.{7}

If the story is indeed true, it's a very smart move on the part of Chavez to publicize it in advance. "If anything happens to me, the person responsible will be President George W. Bush," Chavez has declared.{8} This can't help but make any Washington assassins think twice.

Another story the US media has ignored, which many people also had to learn about from Hugo Chavez, oddly enough has to do with Iraq. This is the story of Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli, an official at Iraq's health ministry, who said that the US military used banned weapons during its deadly offensive in the city of Fallujah. Dr. ash-Shaykhli was assigned by the ministry to assess the health conditions in Fallujah following the November assault there. He said that research conducted by his medical team proved that American forces used internationally-prohibited substances such as mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals in their attacks in the war-torn city. The health official announced his findings at a news conference March 1 in the health ministry building in Baghdad which was attended by more than 20 Iraqi and foreign media networks, including the Washington Post and the Knight-Ridder service from the United States.{9} The Associated Press reported the story {10}, citing Chavez as the source, but no mainstream media appear to have found it newsworthy; this stands in sharp contrast to repeated criticisms by conservatives that the American "liberal" media report only the bad news from Iraq.

America's report cards for a naughty world

Are the people in the State Department capable of feeling embarrassment? What do they tell their children they do for a living? The Department released its annual human rights report February 28 in which it criticized countries for a range of interrogation practices it labeled as "torture", including sleep deprivation, confining prisoners in contorted positions, stripping and blindfolding them, and threatening them with dogs ... Yes, that's right, the same methods used repeatedly by the United States on detainees at its far-flung prison empire. Moreover, the US turns over prisoners to be "interrogated" (wink, wink) to countries the State Department human rights report cites for the use of torture, a practice known as "rendition", of course making sure to first obtain a promise (chuckle, chuckle) from those countries that they will not torture the prisoner.

The State Department also puts out other annual report cards on the rest of the world, evaluating them on religious freedom, terrorism (state supporter of and uncooperative with the war on), drugs, and trafficking in persons. I'm waiting for evaluations on hypocrisy and condescension.

Our bodies, ourselves

All the hullabaloo about steroid use by baseball players inspires me to return to a question I raised in this report last summer in regard to the Olympics. Presumably steroids are banned because they give an athlete an unfair advantage over athletes who are "clean". But of all the things that athletes, and other people, put into their bodies to improve their health, fitness and performance, why are steroids singled out? Doesn't taking vitamins give an athlete an unfair advantage over athletes who don't take them? Shouldn't vitamins be banned from sport competition? How about various food supplements, for the same reason? Vitamins and food supplements are often not any more "natural" than steroids, which in fact are very important in our body chemistry. Why not ban those who follow a healthy diet because of the advantage this may give them?

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir. Email - BBlum6@aol.com

NOTES

{1} Washington Post, December 22, 2001
{2} The Guardian (London), March 10, 2005
{3} CNN.com, February 4, 2005
{4} US Department of the Army, Afghanistan, A Country Study (Washington, DC, 1986), pp.121, 128, 130, 223, 232.
{5} Washington Post, March 14, 2005
{6} VHeadline.com (Venezuela's Electronic News),
September 21, 2003
{7} http://members.aol.com/bblum6/assass.htm
{8} Associated Press, March 5, 2005
{9} Aljazeera.com, March 3, 2005
{10} Associated Press, March 5, 2005

Copyright © William Blum. All rights reserved. You may republish under the following conditions: An active link to the original publication must be provided. You must not alter, edit or remove any text within the article, including this copyright notice.

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The Mideast Comes to Columbia

by SCOTT SHERMAN
[The Nation, from the April 4, 2005 issue]

In December 2003 Rabbi Charles Sheer, the director of the Columbia/Barnard chapter of Hillel, the Jewish campus organization, dispatched an e-bulletin to alumni, students and supporters. There was much to report: In 2002 a movement of students and professors had urged Columbia to divest from companies that manufactured and sold weaponry to Israel. In the end, Rabbi Sheer had vanquished the prodivestment forces with a well-executed campaign that garnered 33,000 signatures. "There have not been any major divestment campaigns on any US campus, and almost no anti-Israel student-initiated activity--speakers, films or demonstrations--on our campus," Sheer noted with pride. "That's the good news." The bad news? "The battleground regarding the Middle East at Columbia University has shifted to the classroom." Rabbi Sheer was mainly referring to classrooms in a single department--Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC)--and he hinted that a counterstrike against MEALAC was in the making: "A student group," he wrote, "is currently working on a video that records how intimidated students feel by advocacy teaching...."

Ten months later the New York Sun, a small but influential conservative daily, broke the story of the video Sheer was referring to. The film, the Sun noted, "consists of interviews with several students who contend that they have felt threatened academically for expressing a pro-Israel point of view in classrooms." Titled Columbia Unbecoming, the film was produced by the David Project, a shadowy, Boston-based group that has ties to the Israel on Campus Coalition, an organization whose members include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee.

Over the next five months the Sun ran dozens of rough-edged stories about developments pertaining to the film, many of which appeared under the tagline "Crisis at Columbia." The paper also hammered the university in a series of editorials: "The Education Department recently indicated it will expand its enforcement activities in respect of campus anti-semitism," the Sun averred on November 19. "Our reporting suggests that eventually federal authorities will have to get involved at Columbia." Other local papers echoed the Sun's reporting. On November 21 the Daily News published a "special report" headlined "Poison Ivy: Climate of Hate Rocks Columbia University," in which the paper proclaimed, "Dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast." Similar sentiments appeared on the editorial pages of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, in the Village Voice (under the byline of Nat Hentoff) and on Fox News.

Local politicians, too, rushed into the fray: In late October US Representative Anthony Weiner, a Democrat who is running for mayor, wrote to Columbia president Lee Bollinger, demanding that he fire Joseph Massad, one of the professors assailed in the film, for "his displays of anti-Semitism."

The MEALAC professors singled out by Columbia Unbecoming--Joseph Massad, Hamid Dabashi and George Saliba--did not cower before the allegations. "This witch-hunt," Massad declared in a furious riposte, "aims to stifle pluralism, academic freedom, and the freedom of expression on university campuses in order to ensure that only one opinion is permitted, that of uncritical support for the state of Israel."

Dabashi, for his part, greeted the controversy with a mixture of indignation and melancholy. He was born in Iran, and has lived in the United States since 1976. "This is not the face of the United States that I can any longer recognize," Dabashi said recently. "This is not the country to which I immigrated and chose to call home more than a quarter of a century ago--a place where my political heroes lived, people I grew up admiring: Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, Rosa Parks, Stanley Kubrick, Ella Fitzgerald. How in such a short time could the face of a nation and the promise of its hopes change so radically, so unrecognizably?"

The current battle at Columbia is the latest salvo in a larger, post-9/11 conflict concerning Middle East studies on campus. In late 2003 the House of Representatives passed HR 3077. The bill, which languished in a Senate committee, mandated that area studies programs that receive federal funding under Title VI of the Higher Education Act must "foster debate on American foreign policy from diverse perspectives." HR 3077 sent a chill through many scholars of the Middle East. "This bill represented an unprecedented degree of intrusion by the federal government into what goes on in our classrooms and in our universities," says Zachary Lockman, chair of the department of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University.

An intellectual architect of HR 3077 was Martin Kramer, who, along with Daniel Pipes, has taken it upon himself to police and patrol the discipline of Middle East studies. Kramer is the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (2001), a senior associate of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and an indefatigable polemicist and critic. Since Columbia Unbecoming was first screened this past October, Kramer has been especially vituperative in his attacks on Massad, MEALAC and even president Bollinger. (In late January Kramer averred that Columbia's president "should have to jump through a hundred more hoops" before the MEALAC matter can be settled.) Pipes runs his own think tank, the Middle East Forum, which in 2002 launched Campus Watch, whose mission is to critique and harass liberal and progressive scholars of the Arab world [see Eyal Press, "Neocon Man," May 10, 2004]. The current developments at Columbia are deeply satisfying to Kramer and Pipes: A few months ago Harvard Magazine asked Pipes to delineate Campus Watch's recent accomplishments, and he replied, "Pressuring Columbia University to the point that the president has organized a committee [to investigate] political intimidation in the classroom."

The creation of that committee, which consists of five Columbia faculty members, would not have occurred without Columbia Unbecoming. But one can't easily speak of "the film," since a number of different versions exist. Columbia students close to the debate maintain there are at least six versions. The film has never been released to the public, but it has been selectively screened for Columbia administrators, trustees, students and journalists. This magazine requested a copy from the David Project and was repeatedly rebuffed. I finally saw one version of the film in its entirety at a packed campus screening in late January. What's clear is that Columbia Unbecoming is a propaganda film: one that portrays Jewish students as "silenced" by professors who "criticize Israel and...question its legitimacy"; in which vague and anonymous accusations are tossed about by students whose faces are sometimes blurred and whose voices are sometimes masked; which deliberately conflates what instructors say in the classroom with what they publish and do outside the classroom; and which attributes sinister motives to Columbia administrators and faculty, not one of whom is given the opportunity to respond to the allegations.

Columbia Unbecoming is a source of anguish and embarrassment to some prominent members of the university's Jewish community. Robert Pollack is a professor of biological sciences, a former dean of the university's Columbia College and a man who was instrumental in raising $13 million for the construction of the Kraft Center, a six-story building that is now the permanent home of Columbia's Jewish community. (Much of Columbia Unbecoming was shot in the Kraft Center.) "This building is a gift of the American Jewish community in its fullest happiness," says Pollack. "One must wonder: Why would a video like this be made in a building like that?" Pollack is no great admirer of MEALAC, and he clashed with Columbia's Edward Said over the Israel-Palestine conflict, but he has no patience for the view that the university is hostile to Jewish students: "It is a crazy, crazy exaggeration to claim that Jews are under attack at Columbia or that the faculty is anti-Semitic." And he is caustic about Columbia Unbecoming: "No one has seen the video," says Pollack. "There is no video to see. There's a cloud of videos constantly changing. It's innuendo and gossip."

Nevertheless, Columbia Unbecoming does lodge a specific set of allegations against MEALAC in general and Saliba, Dabashi and Massad in particular--allegations that have traveled far and wide, including to Israel, where the film has been screened.

George Saliba, a professor of Arabic and Islamic sciences, has taught at Columbia since 1978. In the film a student describes a heated discussion with Saliba outside of class about the Israel-Palestine conflict. She claims he said: "You have no voice in this debate...you have green eyes...you're not a Semite...I'm a Semite...I have brown eyes. You have no claim to the land of Israel." In late October Saliba obtained a transcript of the film from the New York Sun and dispatched a statement to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper. "The statements that she attributes to me in the transcript, marked between quotations, are blatantly false," Saliba wrote, "and I can say in good conscience, and categorically, that I would not have used such phrases." (Saliba also noted that the student received a very respectable grade for the class. Indeed, none of the students in the film have charged that their grades have suffered because of their political views.)

In its treatment of Hamid Dabashi, the David Project has neglected his academic scholarship on Iranian cinema, culture and politics. Instead, the film leans heavily on a single passage lifted from a recent essay he wrote for the Egyptian publication Al-Ahram, titled "For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine." The following words from the essay appear in the film: "Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left...its deep marks on the faces of the Israeli Jews, the way they talk, walk, the way they greet each other.... There is a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture."

Dabashi correctly insists that the David Project mangled the quote--inserting the phrase "Israeli Jews" where he had "these people"--and took the entire passage out of context. (The context was his description of a five-hour ordeal in Ben Gurion Airport, during which time Dabashi was searched and detained by Israeli security officials.) "The phrase 'Israeli Jews' never ever appears in that entire essay. That is not my vocabulary," he says. "I was referring to citizens of a militarized state, both its victims and its victimizers. I could have written that passage about Americans in Iraq or Janjaweed in Darfur." Maybe so, but Dabashi misses the point. What's troubling about the passage is its sweeping characterization of an entire people--"Israeli Jews" or not--as vulgar and domineering in their very essence. The passage can easily be construed as anti-Semitic. Dabashi, at a minimum, is guilty of shrill and careless writing. In panning for gold, his critics discovered a precious nugget, one that he would do well to disown.

Dabashi, however, sees himself as a victim--of Campus Watch, of the David Project, of American xenophobia and nativism. In June 2002 Daniel Pipes co-wrote a piece in the New York Post titled "Extremists on Campus," which lashed Massad and Dabashi. Returning to New York from a trip to Japan, Dabashi says, he found his voice mail overflowing with bile: "Hey, Mr. Dabashi," said one caller. "I read about you in today's New York Post. You stinking, terrorist Muslim pig."

Finally, there is the case against Joseph Massad, whom the film calls "one of the most dangerous intellectuals" on campus. One senses that he is the real target of Columbia's internal and external critics. Massad, a Palestinian, earned his doctorate in political science from Columbia, where he developed a close relationship with Edward Said. In 1999 Massad was given an assistant professorship in MEALAC, and he is up for tenure in two years. (His scholarly output would seem to make him a viable candidate: Massad's first book, on Jordanian national identity, was published by Columbia University Press. His second, Desiring Arabs, is forthcoming from Harvard.)

For Pipes & Co., Massad is something of a gift: He is strident, dogmatic, proud, deliberately provocative and utterly uncompromising in his defense of the Palestinian struggle. He is a man who traffics in absolutes, a man who often infuriates even those who are sympathetic to his views. Said worried about his young friend's propensity for careless rhetoric--a point that Massad himself acknowledged in his Al-Ahram obituary of Said: "He would caution (actually yell at) me against giving way to my 'youthful' enthusiasm in a world in which we have few friends and numerous enemies." Massad is a ferocious critic of Israel and Zionism, but he is also withering on the subject of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. (He supports a single, binational state.) To his detractors he is a devil figure, a "dangerous intellectual." Massad frequently acts out the role by unleashing a steady stream of inflammatory anti-Zionist rhetoric: "racist Jewish state" is a locution he constantly employs.

Columbia Unbecoming lodges two main accusations against Massad. The first concerns an alleged exchange that took place with a Jewish student, Tomy Schoenfeld, at an off-campus lecture that Massad delivered in 2002. Schoenfeld says he raised his hand and tried to question Massad, who, upon learning that he had served in the Israeli military, shot back, "How many Palestinians have you killed?" Massad denies the allegation: "Tomy Schoenfeld was never my student. I have never met him in any setting."

The second allegation concerns an incident that took place in April 2002, at the time of an Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp, in Massad's Palestinian-Israeli Politics & Societies class. A Barnard student, Deena Shanker--who does not appear in the film; her story is told by someone else--claims that in an acrimonious classroom discussion, she told Massad that Israel provides civilians with advance warning of impending attacks. She says he erupted with these words: "If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people then you can get out of my classroom!" Massad denies this charge as well. As he told the Jerusalem Post on December 24, "I have never asked and would never ask any of my students to leave my class no matter what their comments and questions were." Shanker stands by her account, and cites two corroborating witnesses, only one of whom was officially registered in the class that semester, though both were in the room that day. Massad has insisted that his classes include unregistered individuals and auditors who he believes are there to heckle him and monitor his teaching.

Nader Uthman, a MEALAC and Center for Comparative Literature & Society doctoral student who was Massad's teaching assistant that semester, says, "In Massad's class, the most prolific contributors to class discussion were students who disagreed with him, and many did not hesitate to interrupt him to make their point." Did Massad, on the tumultuous day in question, threaten to kick Shanker out of the room? Says Uthman, "To my recollection that never happened." Benjamin Bishop, who was present as a grad student that day, reinforces that view. "I have serious doubts about the allegation that Massad told a student to leave the class," says Bishop. "I don't have any memory of that."

Of all the allegations in the film, Shanker's is the most serious; threatening to throw a student out of class would certainly be a violation of professional ethics. The facts concerning what happened that day are murky, but the following can be discerned: On one side was a Palestinian professor who is an unyielding critic of the Israeli government. On the other was a Jewish student who, with Jenin in ruins, mounted an unapologetic defense of the Israeli military with facts she says she heard on CNN. If the faculty committee determines that Shanker's account is correct, Massad's transgression, though certainly reprehensible, would hardly justify the overriding thesis of Columbia Unbecoming: that pro-Israel students are systematically silenced by professors in MEALAC. Shanker herself insists that MEALAC is "a really wonderful department, for the most part." She believes that Columbia's Jewish community is too religious, and she has come to value MEALAC's secularism. "I definitely feel safer in the MEALAC department as a Jew than I do at a religious Columbia Jewish event," she says.

The roots of the Columbia conflict can be traced back to campus political developments in 2001 and early 2002. In March 2002 a network of national Jewish organizations met to evaluate what they saw as an alarming rise in anti-Israel activity on campus. From those meetings emerged the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), which is a partnership of Hillel and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. (The three organizations share a building in Washington.) According to a 2002 article for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a Jewish-oriented news service, top-flight talent was brought in to advise the ICC and assemble a battle plan. "Pro-Israel professionals from the elite consulting firm McKinsey & Company offered pro-bono services," the article noted. Those professionals created a document for the ICC arguing that "the primary goal for this year should be to 'take back the campus' by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet and coalitions." The ICC--which recently received a $1,050,000 grant from the Schusterman Foundation, and whose speakers list includes Daniel Pipes--has an impressive array of "members": AIPAC, ADL, Americans for Peace Now and the Zionist Organization of America, among others.

The ICC has a single "affiliate member": the David Project. The David Project is led by Charles Jacobs, who is a co-founder of CAMERA, the pro-Israel media watchdog group; the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, which calls itself "America's leading human rights group dedicated to abolishing modern day slavery worldwide"; and, along with Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol, among others, a member of the board of advisers of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The ICC's website lists a number of "regional ICCs" that receive "strategic advice and guidance" from the Washington headquarters. The regional ICC representative in New York is none other than Rachel Fish, the director of the David Project's New York office. Jacobs was tight-lipped in a recent interview: He refused to provide details about his financial backers, referring only to unnamed "individuals and foundations"; and he declined to elaborate on the extent to which the David Project receives tactical advice from professional pro-Israel lobbyists and operatives allied with the ICC.

What can easily be determined is that in October 2003, the David Project met with Columbia students and agreed to provide funding for a film that would give voice to their complaints. Rabbi Sheer, who ran Columbia's Kraft Center, gave his blessing: Sheer was already a fierce critic of MEALAC, having collided, over the previous two years, with both Dabashi and Saliba.

In April 2002 Dabashi and several other professors spoke at a campus demonstration against the Israeli incursions into the occupied territories. Rabbi Sheer was upset by the event--the speeches, he later noted, were "sadly reminiscent of the kind of speech one hears on Arab TV"--and complained to administrators about it. He also contacted Dabashi and requested the text of his remarks at the teach-in. Dabashi felt these actions were unnecessarily intrusive, coming as they did from a campus religious official, and thrashed the rabbi in an essay for the Columbia Spectator. (Saliba, in a separate letter to the paper, was also blunt: "Rabbi! Just preach! Do not even attempt to teach!") Nine months later Dabashi organized a Palestinian film festival on campus, which again brought him into conflict with Sheer. Sheer left Columbia in 2004; Hillel sources insist that his departure had nothing to do with his support for the film. But Sheer evidently decided to bow out in pugilistic fashion: He has a starring role in the latest version of Columbia Unbecoming--a film, he now notes with regret in his voice, that has harmed Columbia's reputation. Says Dabashi: "This film is his revenge on Columbia, and of course on MEALAC"--an opinion Sheer describes as "ludicrous."

Since Sheer's departure, the anti-MEALAC campaign has been energetically waged by a small group of undergraduates clustered around a charismatic 25-year-old student politician with shoulder-length hair named Ariel Beery, who is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. But other students have risen to MEALAC's defense. One undergraduate, Eric Posner, who is also a former IDF member, collected pro-MEALAC testimony from twenty or so majors and gave the material to the investigating committee established by Columbia president Bollinger. One student said of Massad: "He always made clear the distinctions between Zionism and Judaism and was unrelenting in his criticism of anti-Semitism and anti-Semites." Another student said of Dabashi: "He told me that he wasn't even reading the accusations about him because he didn't want to know which of his students might be talking about him or what they might be saying, for fear of being unable to treat them fairly."

In July 2000 Edward Said, in a symbolic act of resistance, hurled a stone near the Lebanon-Israel border, an act that infuriated his detractors and led to calls for his dismissal from Columbia. In response, the then-provost of Columbia, Jonathan Cole, with the authorization of president George Rupp, issued a statement in defense of Said: "If we are to deny Professor Said the protection to write and speak freely, whose speech will next be suppressed and who will be the inquisitor who determines who should have a right to speak his or her mind without fear of retribution?" With that statement, many at Columbia believe, Cole honored himself and the best traditions of the university. "I felt it was important to defend Edward as soon as possible so that our position was clear and could not be misinterpreted," Cole said recently. "Some on the outside did not like my statement, others applauded it, but it was, I believe, clear and unequivocal."

Today, many Columbia faculty members believe that on the question of academic freedom, Lee Bollinger, one of the country's pre-eminent scholars of the First Amendment and a man with a reputation as a liberal, has been rather less than clear and unequivocal. Bollinger did issue a press release on October 22 affirming that Columbia is "fully committed to upholding academic integrity and freedom of expression" and that the university "will not penalize faculty for statements made in public debate." At the same time, however, Bollinger insisted that "academic freedom is not unlimited. It does not...extend to protecting behavior in the classroom that threatens or intimidates students for expressing their viewpoints or that uses the classroom as a means of political indoctrination." In a recent interview, Bollinger came across as a beleaguered politician trying to locate and occupy the middle ground. "We must protect students," he said, "just as we must protect faculty. We must live by our principles."

Yet Bollinger has not spoken in a clear and decisive voice to the general public, or even to his own community. He did not respond publicly to Representative Weiner's demand that Massad be fired; he seems unwilling to offer even a perfunctory defense of the MEALAC department; and he failed to confront and contest a torrent of tendentious information from four New York newspapers. The David Project and its supporters have orchestrated a media barrage of sustained intensity against Columbia. By not responding forcefully to that barrage, Bollinger has conveyed the impression that his institution is not equipped to handle the allegations, and that his faculty are fair game for partisan attacks.

"Columbia's response has been a disaster," says Robert Pollack. "People across the boundaries of all disagreement on Middle East issues agree that we don't understand the silence." The administration "made a mistake in adopting an agnostic posture at the outset, in using the word 'investigate,'" says Columbia political scientist Andrew Nathan. "They should have said: 'We have confidence in our faculty governance procedures. Deans and faculty committees regularly review the quality of faculty, curriculum, courses and teaching. We will protect them from outside pressure so they can do their job.'"

Those observing the controversy from outside Columbia are also perplexed by Bollinger's behavior. "I really think Lee Bollinger has damaged every academic in the United States by his refusal to articulate a view on academic freedom," says Stanley Katz, an expert on higher education at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. "I don't know how to construe his unwillingness to speak out, except to say that either he's afraid to, or that he does not support academic freedom. I find both alternatives disappointing and unpleasant."

It is widely assumed at Columbia that Bollinger is under considerable pressure from pro-Israel alumni, whose ire could complicate his fundraising goals, and that his caution is connected to political imperatives having to do with Columbia's planned expansion into West Harlem--a $5 billion, thirty-year project on which Bollinger has staked much of his legacy. Bollinger is not eager to discuss these political imperatives, and he is currently awaiting the report of his faculty committee (whose members are maligned in the latest version of Columbia Unbecoming, partially on the grounds that two of them signed the 2002 divestment petition).

But the report, which is expected in late March, is unlikely to end the imbroglio. The coalition arrayed against Columbia seems increasingly confident and well organized. It has begun to campaign for an external body to investigate the charges, and has enlisted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Village Voice journalist Nat Hentoff in that cause. Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer can barely contain their satisfaction: In televised remarks to his Columbia supporters on March 6, Kramer noted that the MEALAC controversy could mark "a turning point" in the ongoing campus ideological war over Middle East studies.

There are signs, however, that Columbia's president is beginning to rouse himself: In late February Bollinger sent a powerful letter of protest on behalf of one of his top Middle East scholars, Rashid Khalidi, who was recently dismissed from a teacher-training program run by the New York City Department of Education on the grounds that he had made "past statements" critical of Israel. But Bollinger needs to go much further in confronting his critics. Asked about Martin Kramer's assertion that he should have to jump through "a hundred more hoops," Bollinger replied, "I have no doubt that some of the attacks on Columbia are ill motivated, and I have no respect for the purposes they are trying to achieve." If Bollinger indeed feels that way, he should speak in a much louder voice about why the attacks on his institution are ill motivated; who precisely is behind those attacks; and what are the larger "purposes" those critics are trying to achieve. Five years ago, George Rupp and Jonathan Cole defended Columbia in a most eloquent and capable manner. Bollinger has yet to pass that test. Meanwhile, we haven't heard the last of the David Project: The group has announced that it will produce other films about other campuses.

This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050404&s=sherman

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Secret US Plans for Iraq's Oil

By Greg Palast
Reporting for Newsnight - BBC

The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.

Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".

"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.

Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.

An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant, Falah Aljibury, says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat.

Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.

Secret sell-off plan

The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.

The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel.

Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department.

Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.

"Insurgents used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable,'" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.

"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming."

Privatisation blocked by industry

Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.

Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."

Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields.

He advocated the plan as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision.

Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."

New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas.

Formerly US Secretary of State, Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi Arabian government.

Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatisation. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves.

Ms Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec and the current high oil price: "I'm not sure that if I'm the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."

The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."

A State Department spokesman told Newsnight they intended "to provide all possibilities to the Oil Ministry of Iraq and advocate none".

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'Something was going to happen – it was going to be me or him'

By Nicholas Blanford, Richard Beeston and James Bone
An investigation by The Times finds clear evidence that Syria assassinated Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese politician

DAYS before Rafik Hariri’s assassination last month, the Lebanese politician had played host to Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, at his mansion in west Beirut. Mr Hariri had a warning for his old friend: the Syrians were after them.

“He told me that in the next two weeks it was either going to be me or him,” Mr Jumblatt told The Times. “Clearly he thought something was going to happen.”

Something did. On February 14 Mr Hariri was killed when 600lb of explosives apparently buried in the road outside St George’s Hotel in Beirut blew up beneath his car.

The blast has echoed round the world. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have demonstrated in Beirut, the world has united in demanding Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon and the drive for democracy in the Middle East has been given a huge boost.

Syria has repeatedly protested its innocence and no irrefutable evidence of its involvement has yet emerged. But a reconstruction of events leading to Mr Hariri’s murder, and interviews with at least a dozen Western, Lebanese and even Syrian officials, leave not the slightest doubt that the plot was hatched in Damascus.

The Times has learnt that Mr Hariri had enraged the Syrians by inspiring a UN resolution demanding that Syria stop interfering in Lebanon. US and UN officials repeatedly warned Syria not to harm Mr Hariri in the months before his death.

In mid-January, under pressure from Damascus, the Lebanese Government withdrew his 70-strong security detail, and immediately after his death the scene of the bombing was swept to remove any evidence of Syrian complicity.

“There does seem to be no other scenario,” a senior Western diplomat said.

The murder of Mr Hariri, an immensely wealthy Lebanese businessman who had rebuilt his country after a 15-year civil war, followed the collapse of his relations with President Assad of Syria last summer.

In August, under pressure from America to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, Syria had engineered changes to the Lebanese constitution to allow its ally, President Lahoud, to extend his term of office.

Mr Hariri, then Prime Minister, was a bitter rival of Mr Lahoud and strongly opposed the move. But Mr Assad summoned him to Damascus. In a 15-minute meeting the Syrian leader told him that the decision had been taken and that he was expected to vote for it in the Lebanese parliament.

Mr Hariri returned to Lebanon and drove straight to his summer residence in the mountains above Beirut. A former aide recalled that his mood was very bleak. “To them (the Syrians), we are all ants,” he quoted Mr Hariri as saying.

But Mr Hariri had his revenge. Using his close ties to President Bush and President Chirac of France, he secretly helped to bring Resolution 1559, calling for Syria to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, before the UN Security Council. “1559 was his baby. He was very proud of it,” a UN official said, though Mr Hariri’s aides played down his involvement.

On October 1 Marwan Hamade, a former minister and friend of Mr Jumblatt, was seriously wounded when his car was bombed in a Beirut street. His bodyguard was killed.

The bombing was interpreted as a warning to Mr Jumblatt. “Hariri was in Paris at the time and went crazy when he heard the news,” the aide said.

Two weeks later, Mr Hariri resigned as Prime Minister. He instantly became a magnet for growing opposition to Syria and was expected to use his political and financial muscle to lead the anti-Syrian camp in May’s parliamentary elections.

After the assassination attempt, Paris and Washington sent messages to Damascus warning the Syrians not to harm opposition leaders, specifically Mr Hariri and Mr Jumblatt. Richard Armitage, the US Deputy Secretary of State, reiterated that warning during a meeting with Mr Assad in Damascus on January 2.

But in late January Mr Hariri’s security detail, 70 members of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, a paramilitary police unit, was withdrawn. He was repeatedly attacked in the media by pro-Syrian figures. Several workers from one of his charities were arrested.

Mr Hariri was confident that the Syrians would not dare to touch him because he was protected by Washington and Paris. “Hariri was not worried at the time,” his former aide said. “He used to say, ‘You only die when you die’.” But that sense of invulnerability was soon to change. On February 10, Terje Roed-Larsen, a UN envoy, met Mr Assad in Damascus and told the Syrian leader to rein in his intelligence apparatus in Lebanon. He tried to persuade Mr Assad to hold a secret meeting with Mr Hariri to reconcile their differences, fearing that there would be further violence if the situation was not quickly defused.

“Larsen knew if there was no dialogue, it would end badly,” a UN source said. “He knew he had to move fast.” That night he saw Mr Hariri in Beirut for dinner. The Lebanese politician was prepared to talk to the Syrians, but only as an equal and not as a subordinate.

Two days later Mr Hariri met Mr Jumblatt at his home, and correctly predicted his own death. The huge blast shortly after noon on St Valentine’s Day was heard all over Beirut — a thunderous explosion that reverberated around the streets and into the hills, rattling windows and bringing anxious Lebanese out on to their balconies. A column of smoke climbed into the sky from the city centre, marking the spot where Mr Hariri and 18 others perished.

Lebanese security forces swiftly sealed off the area. “They cleared up the crime scene after the explosion,” one senior British diplomat said. “They are hampering the investigation.” Initially they tried to pin the killings on Islamic militants and said that a suicide bomber was responsible.

Three Syrian ministers interviewed by The Times this month all denied that Damascus killed Mr Hariri. But none put forward a convincing alternative theory, even though Syria has a vast intelligence network in Lebanon.

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"البوريفاج" وما يلي

أي رمزية هذه، أي مصادفة، ان تبدأ الاجهزة الأمنية هجومها الدفاعي المضاد في وجه المطالب المتنامية لحسم مسؤولية قادتها في جريمة اغتيال الرئيس رفيق الحريري في الوقت الذي أنهت المخابرات السورية انسحابها من بيروت.

لعل الاجهزة أرادت ان تقدم مساهمة توقعتها حاسمة في مسار الوضع الداخلي. ولكن دعونا لا نفقد الاساس في غمرة التفاصيل والتطورات المتلاحقة على أهميتها.

والاساس ان الحكم السوري للبنان انتهى. وانتهى لحظة خرج الخوف من النفوس ولم ينتظر أي اعلان. ولنتذكر هذا التاريخ في اطار انهاء القوات السورية اعادة انتشارها تمهيداً لانسحاب كامل لا بد ان يحصل عاجلا وليس آجلاً: في 16 آذار 2005 اقفلت المخابرات السورية مقراتها من حيث انسحبت. ولنتذكر ان الحقبة التي عرفت – اختصارا ونسبة الى المنطقة – باسم "حكم البوريفاج" للعاصمة انتهت ومعها اغلقت فروع هذا الحكم وأنزلت الصور المضخّمة التي تبلغ الناس من هو قائدهم أو تردعهم عن التشكيك.

وهذا ليس أي حدث. فلسنوات طويلة صارت كلمة "البوريفاج" رمزا للحاكم المخابراتي السوري لبيروت، المتحكم بسياساتها وسياسييها والمتحكم بشؤون أهلها كبيرة وصغيرة. لسنوات طويلة تحولت كلمة "البوريفاج" رديفاً للقهر والقمع والتسلط ومصادرة القرار وغير القرار، ولن ندخل لا في معاني الاستدعاء الى "البوريفاج" والدعوة الى "فنجان قهوة" فيه يمضي زمن قبل ان ينهي "الضيوف" قهوتهم ولا في معاني الأوامر الصادرة منه أو حج الانتهازيين والمتسلقين اليه.

انتهى. لا أسف عليه ولا خوف من عودته حتى بعد الزيارة التي قام بها العقيد رستم غزالة للموقع. فلن نفهم هذه الزيارة الا رغبة منه في القاء نظرة الوداع على المكان الذي أمضى فيه سنوات "عز" تغيب.

اليوم "البوريفاج" وغداً "عنجر". انجازات تتحقق أو هي برسم التحقيق.

فلنتذكر كل هذا أولاً لئلا يبقى أي مكان للحقد والضغينة بعدما تحررت النفوس من الخوف، والأهم، من أجل اكمال هذا الانجاز بأقوى العلاقات الأخوية مع سوريا وهي مطلب أكثرية اللبنانيين.

ثم فلنتذكر كل هذا لكي نبقي ما نحن مقبلون عليه في لبنان في اطاره الصحيح. الاساس تغيّر ولا بد ان التفاصيل ستلحق. الحكم السوري للبنان انتهى ولن يطول الوقت ليتهاوى النظام الذي ركّبه هذا الحكم للبنان. هذا أمر حتمي لا توقفه محاولات التفاف هنا أو تهديد هناك. فحكم الطبيعة انه عندما تتغير الصورة تتغير معها الظلال. وهل يمكن ان تخفي نبرة المدير العام للامن العام، بما هو معروف انه يمثل بل بما قال في مؤتمره الصحافي انه يمثل، حقيقة كونها التعبير الأوضح عما يلحق بالظلال؟

سحر بعاصيري

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THE MYSTERY OF MR LEBANON'S MURDER

By Robert Fisk
17 March 2005
The Independent

After the assassination of Rafik Hariri, his vehicles were taken fromthe scene on the orders of a former aide. And now, reports Robert Fisk,many believe the missing cars may hold the key to the killing

NOW HERE"S a strange story from Beirut. Strange, because it is one offear and suspicion about Rafik Hariri"s murder on 14 February; strangerstill because - although almost everyone in Beirut knows the story-much of it has not been published in Lebanon.

It involves a man called Ali Salah Haj and Hariri himself - and themysterious decision to move the most vital evidence of his murder fromthe scene of the crime. Some say it is all a mistake, the result ofinexperience or ignorance. Others believe it holds the key to how theformer billionaire prime minister was murdered in a bombing that costthe lives of 18 other innocents.

It all begins in the late 1990s when Hariri was prime minister. Helived in a palace of pre-stressed concrete in the Beirut suburb ofQoreitem and travelled everywhere with a government-supplied team ofescorts from Lebanon"s Internal Security Force.

Of the 40 men regularly on his team, Hariri regularly drove with one ofits senior officers, a man he liked, the heavily mustachioed Ali Haj."Things were quite normal," one of Hariri"s closest associates nowsays, "until Sheikh Rafik found that the Syrians seemed to knoweverything he was saying in his car. People thought he must be buggedor that there was a tap on his phone. And after a while, he decidedthat Ali Haj might be telling the Syrians what he was saying."

In a land such as Lebanon - where everyone listens to everyone else(Hariri had his own security informants) - that had to be investigated.

"So he told Ali Haj something very specific that the Syrians wouldn"tlike," the family associate says. "And, within minutes of meeting aSyrian official that day, the very same matter was raised with him.That day, Sheikh Rafik asked another security man to ride with him. AliHaj was relegated to another car."

Within a short time, Ali Haj was reassigned - to a Lebaneseintelligence post in the Bekaa valley where he dealt regularly withBrigadier General Rustum Ghazale, the head of Syrian militaryintelligence in Lebanon.

Now we flash forward to 14 February 2005. Hariri"s armoured motorcade,struck by a bomb of around 600kg, lies blazing in the narrow roadbeside the St George Hotel on the Beirut Corniche. The vehicles, pittedwith shrapnel holes, perhaps bearing traces of the explosives, formed apattern which showed how the bomb scattered the cars - as well as theorder in which the convoy was travelling.

But within hours - although every other burning car was left intactbeside the highway - Hariri"s vehicles had disappeared. The decisionwas taken by the man who is now head of the Syrian-controlled LebaneseInternal Security Force, a certain Brigadier General Ali Salah Haj.

He ordered that the wreckage should be removed from the scene of thecrime - and this, remember, was the location of the murder of the mostimportant figure in the history of independent Lebanon - and taken awayon trucks to the Lebanese Charles Helou army barracks. Where theyremain to this day.

Ali Haj was among the many thousands of mourners who later came to paytheir respects to the Hariri family. Witnesses later recorded he wasgiven a frosty reception. Ghenna Hariri, the young daughter of Hariri"ssister Bahiya, a Lebanese MP in the southern city of Sidon, greeted himwith the words: "Your place is not here." When he offered his hand toHariri"s widow Nazek - who now wears her late husband"s wedding ring ona chain round her neck - she touched her chest modestly rather thantake Ali Haj"s hand.

In a country where everyone believes in the "moamara" - the Plot - itis essential not to point the finger. No one has yet discovered who setoff the bomb that killed Hariri. But there are a number of remarkableelements about the Lebanese investigation.

The first is that, a month after Hariri"s murder, it has still given noinformation about it. Furthermore, the bombing took place in a part ofBeirut - site of a recent Francophone conference, close to thePhoenicia Hotel where many foreign dignitaries stay and within half amile of parliament - the most heavily guarded area of Lebanon.

For the killers to have avoided the attention of the ISF, the army, thetraffic cops and a host of other security organisations as theyprepared their bomb was a truly extraordinary achievement. And foranyone to have ordered the removal of the principle evidence from thescene of the crime was an even more unlikely denouement.

One of those working on the Lebanese security investigation hasadmitted there have been "many mistakes made", suggesting Ali Haj"sdecision to move the Hariri convoy cars came about because of hisconflicting loyalties - he had been one of Hariri"s own bodyguards butwas now a senior security officer - rather than any desire to cover upthe evidence.

He also said the police are convinced the killer was a suicide bomber,possibly an al-Qa"ida operative who targeted Hariri because of hislinks with the Saudi royal family. Hariri held Saudi citizenship.Hariri"s supporters are increasingly convinced the bomb was hiddenunder the roadway, down a drain or a telephone cable duct.

It"s easy to see how each theory suits their respective creators. Anal-Qa"ida murder clears the Lebanese and Syrian security authorities ofblame.

The bomb-under-the-road story suggests the Lebanese military securityinstitutions must have been breathtakingly careless in failing tonotice the planning and planting of the bomb.

The Lebanese and the Syrians believe in the al-Qa"ida plot - even theyare blaming the Israelis as a poor second - but the politicalopposition is increasingly fingering Syria for, at the least,incompetence, carelessness, even criminal negligence.

Hence Hariri"s supporters - even many thousands of those demanding thetruth about Hariri"s death - are demanding the resignation of sevenprincipal figures, all deeply in the pro-Syrian Lebanese justice orintelligence services. They include General Ali Haj. The remainder are:Adnan Adoum, the minister of justice and prosecutor general; JamilSayed, the head of Lebanese General Security; Mustapha Hamdan, head ofthe Lebanese Republican Guard; Raymond Azar, the head ofthe"mukhabarat" intelligence service; Edgar Mansour, the head of"national security", and Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of the securityservice"s "listening department", the "Amn el-Tanassot".

The authorities have refused to accept the list, claiming all arehonourable men performing their duties with patriotism and devotion.

Needless to say, there"s an old Arab argument which runs in parallelwith any ordinary policeman"s first question: in whose interest was itto commit the crime? Ask the Syrians, and they say they would nevercommit such an act, not least because the calumny which the accusationshave since brought upon Damascus have caused such politicaldisadvantage to Syria"s young president, Bachar al-Assad - who hashimself condemned the killing as a "heinous crime."

Syria"s political friends in Lebanon - some of them Bachar"sacquaintances - have been pointing out, accurately, that the Americanneo-conservative project for the Middle East originally drawn up byMessers Perle, Feith, Wurmser and others, called not only for theoverthrow of Saddam Hussein but for diverting of Syria"s attention "byusing Lebanese opposition elements to destabilise Syrian control ofLebanon."

How better to destabilise Syria in Lebanon than by killing Hariri?Those million Lebanese who demanded Syria"s withdrawal, the resignationof the Lebanese president and the truth about Hariri"s murder on Mondaydo not recognise themselves in this scenario. They also demanded toknow who killed ex-President Rene Mouawad, the Grand Mufti Khaled andthe Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt.

It is worth pointing out that the Christians among the demonstratorsdid not call for the truth about the murder of prime minister RashidKarami and National Liberal leader Danny Chamoun - because wartimeChristian militiamen rather than the Syrians are widely regarded astheir murderers.

The imminent return from self-imposed French exile of the messianic ex-General Michel Aoun - who led a hopeless "war of independence" againstthe Syrians in 1989 which cost thousand of innocent lives - is a clearsign that the opposition here could find themselves gravelyembarrassed.

Most, in fairness, do not personally blame President Bachar al-Assad ofSyria for Hariri"s murder. They were insulted by his speech in theSyrian parliament last Saturday but are well aware that far moreruthless men exist in Syria - and outside Syria"s borders - to whomHariri"s fate could be assigned, or even self-assigned.

Many opposition leaders, including Walid Jumblatt - it was his fatherKamal who was murdered - hope desperately Bachar was not involved. Butit remains the case the Lebanese security officers who were appointedto guard Lebanon on Syria"s behalf have established a wretchedreputation.

Why, for example, were three more bodies discovered at the site of theHariri mass murder in the two weeks that followed the bombing?

Ali Haj could immediately take the vital evidence from the scene of thecrime - something which no police force in the world would do - on thegrounds that he needed to "protect" it. But how come his investigationfailed to spot three corpses at the scene?

When the Zahle MP and former Syrian ally, Mohsen Dalloul, announcedthis week that the Lebanese authorities "knew" who had assassinatedHariri - who was the unofficial leader of the Lebanese opposition toSyria until his death - those same authorities were as silent as theproverbial grave.

Maybe they are listening to the million Lebanese who demanded thetruth. Or maybe they are just following the usual trade of all securityservices, silently listening to their telephone lines. I say thisbecause just three days ago, Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of the Lebaneseeavesdropping department, put a tap on my home telephone in Beirut.Well, there"s only one response to that: call any time.


(c) 2005 Independent Newspapers (UK) Limited . All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, distributed or exploited in any way.

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Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News

By DAVID BARSTOW and ROBIN STEIN, The New York Times

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.

Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.

Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.

An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.

It is also a world where all participants benefit.

Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.

The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies.

In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department.

What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their actions."

Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."

It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.

Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone in a broadcaster's editing room. Some news organizations, for example, simply identify the government's "reporter" as one of their own and then edit out any phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making.

So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department, the agency's narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm news program that is shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment as being by "AgDay's Pat O'Leary." The final sentence was then trimmed to "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting."

Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes. "We can clip 'Department of Agriculture' at our choosing," he said. "The material we get from the U.S.D.A., if we choose to air it and how we choose to air it is our choice."

Spreading the Word: Government Efforts and One Woman's Role

Karen Ryan cringes at the phrase "covert propaganda." These are words for dictators and spies, and yet they have attached themselves to her like a pair of handcuffs.

Not long ago, Ms. Ryan was a much sought-after "reporter" for news segments produced by the federal government. A journalist at ABC and PBS who became a public relations consultant, Ms. Ryan worked on about a dozen reports for seven federal agencies in 2003 and early 2004. Her segments for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy were a subject of the accountability office's recent inquiries.

The G.A.O. concluded that the two agencies "designed and executed" their segments "to be indistinguishable from news stories produced by private sector television news organizations." A significant part of that execution, the office found, was Ms. Ryan's expert narration, including her typical sign-off - "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting" - delivered in a tone and cadence familiar to television reporters everywhere.

Last March, when The New York Times first described her role in a segment about new prescription drug benefits for Medicare patients, reaction was harsh. In Cleveland, The Plain Dealer ran an editorial under the headline "Karen Ryan, You're a Phony," and she was the object of late-night jokes by Jon Stewart and received hate mail.

"I'm like the Marlboro man," she said in a recent interview.

In fact, Ms. Ryan was a bit player who made less than $5,000 for her work on government reports. She was also playing an accepted role in a lucrative art form, the video news release. "I just don't feel I did anything wrong," she said. "I just did what everyone else in the industry was doing."

It is a sizable industry. One of its largest players, Medialink Worldwide Inc., has about 200 employees, with offices in New York and London. It produces and distributes about 1,000 video news releases a year, most commissioned by major corporations. The Public Relations Society of America even gives an award, the Bronze Anvil, for the year's best video news release.

Several major television networks play crucial intermediary roles in the business. Fox, for example, has an arrangement with Medialink to distribute video news releases to 130 affiliates through its video feed service, Fox News Edge. CNN distributes releases to 750 stations in the United States and Canada through a similar feed service, CNN Newsource. Associated Press Television News does the same thing worldwide with its Global Video Wire.

"We look at them and determine whether we want them to be on the feed," David M. Winstrom, director of Fox News Edge, said of video news releases. "If I got one that said tobacco cures cancer or something like that, I would kill it."

In essence, video news releases seek to exploit a growing vulnerability of television news: Even as news staffs at the major networks are shrinking, many local stations are expanding their hours of news coverage without adding reporters.

"No TV news organization has the resources in labor, time or funds to cover every worthy story," one video news release company, TVA Productions, said in a sales pitch to potential clients, adding that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news releases."

Federal agencies have been commissioning video news releases since at least the first Clinton administration. An increasing number of state agencies are producing television news reports, too; the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department alone has produced some 500 video news releases since 1993.

Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be producing more releases, and on a broader array of topics.

A definitive accounting is nearly impossible. There is no comprehensive archive of local television news reports, as there is in print journalism, so there is no easy way to determine what has been broadcast, and when and where.

Still, several large agencies, including the Defense Department, the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledge expanded efforts to produce news segments. Many members of Mr. Bush's first-term cabinet appeared in such segments.

A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last Clinton administration spent.

Karen Ryan was part of this push - a "paid shill for the Bush administration," as she self-mockingly puts it. It is, she acknowledges, an uncomfortable title.

Ms. Ryan, 48, describes herself as not especially political, and certainly no Bush die-hard. She had hoped for a long career in journalism. But over time, she said, she grew dismayed by what she saw as the decline of television news - too many cut corners, too many ratings stunts.

In the end, she said, the jump to video news releases from journalism was not as far as one might expect. "It's almost the same thing," she said.

There are differences, though. When she went to interview Tommy G. Thompson, then the health and human services secretary, about the new Medicare drug benefit, it was not the usual reporter-source exchange. First, she said, he already knew the questions, and she was there mostly to help him give better, snappier answers. And second, she said, everyone involved is aware of a segment's potential political benefits.

Her Medicare report, for example, was distributed in January 2004, not long before Mr. Bush hit the campaign trail and cited the drug benefit as one of his major accomplishments.

The script suggested that local anchors lead into the report with this line: "In December, President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare." In the segment, Mr. Bush is shown signing the legislation as Ms. Ryan describes the new benefits and reports that "all people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending."

The segment made no mention of the many critics who decry the law as an expensive gift to the pharmaceutical industry. The G.A.O. found that the segment was "not strictly factual," that it contained "notable omissions" and that it amounted to "a favorable report" about a controversial program.

And yet this news segment, like several others narrated by Ms. Ryan, reached an audience of millions. According to the accountability office, at least 40 stations ran some part of the Medicare report. Video news releases distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, including one narrated by Ms. Ryan, were shown on 300 stations and reached 22 million households. According to Video Monitoring Services of America, a company that tracks news programs in major cities, Ms. Ryan's segments on behalf of the government were broadcast a total of at least 64 times in the 40 largest television markets.

Even these measures, though, do not fully capture the reach of her work. Consider the case of News 10 Now, a cable station in Syracuse owned by Time Warner. In February 2004, days after the government distributed its Medicare segment, News 10 Now broadcast a virtually identical report, including the suggested anchor lead-in. The News 10 Now segment, however, was not narrated by Ms. Ryan. Instead, the station edited out the original narration and had one of its reporters repeat the script almost word for word.

The station's news director, Sean McNamara, wrote in an e-mail message, "Our policy on provided video is to clearly identify the source of that video." In the case of the Medicare report, he said, the station believed it was produced and distributed by a major network and did not know that it had originally come from the government.

Ms. Ryan said she was surprised by the number of stations willing to run her government segments without any editing or acknowledgement of origin. As proud as she says she is of her work, she did not hesitate, even for a second, when asked if she would have broadcast one of her government reports if she were a local news director.

"Absolutely not."

Little Oversight: TV's Code of Ethics, With Uncertain Weight

"Clearly disclose the origin of information and label all material provided by outsiders."

Those words are from the code of ethics of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the main professional society for broadcast news directors in the United States. Some stations go further, all but forbidding the use of any outside material, especially entire reports. And spurred by embarrassing publicity last year about Karen Ryan, the news directors association is close to proposing a stricter rule, said its executive director, Barbara Cochran.

Whether a stricter ethics code will have much effect is unclear; it is not hard to find broadcasters who are not adhering to the existing code, and the association has no enforcement powers.

The Federal Communications Commission does, but it has never disciplined a station for showing government-made news segments without disclosing their origin, a spokesman said.

Could it? Several lawyers experienced with F.C.C. rules say yes. They point to a 2000 decision by the agency, which stated, "Listeners and viewers are entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded."

In interviews, more than a dozen station news directors endorsed this view without hesitation. Several expressed disdain for the prepackaged segments they received daily from government agencies, corporations and special interest groups who wanted to use their airtime and credibility to sell or influence.

But when told that their stations showed government-made reports without attribution, most reacted with indignation. Their stations, they insisted, would never allow their news programs to be co-opted by segments fed from any outside party, let alone the government.

"They're inherently one-sided, and they don't offer the possibility for follow-up questions - or any questions at all," said Kathy Lehmann Francis, until recently the news director at WDRB, the Fox affiliate in Louisville, Ky.

Yet records from Video Monitoring Services of America indicate that WDRB has broadcast at least seven Karen Ryan segments, including one for the government, without disclosing their origin to viewers.

Mike Stutz, news director at KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego, was equally opposed to putting government news segments on the air.

"It amounts to propaganda, doesn't it?" he said.

Again, though, records from Video Monitoring Services of America show that from 2001 to 2004 KGTV ran at least one government-made segment featuring Ms. Ryan, 5 others featuring her work on behalf of corporations, and 19 produced by corporations and other outside organizations. It does not appear that KGTV viewers were told the origin of these 25 segments.

"I thought we were pretty solid," Mr. Stutz said, adding that they intend to take more precautions.

Confronted with such evidence, most news directors were at a loss to explain how the segments made it on the air. Some said they were unable to find archive tapes that would help answer the question. Others promised to look into it, then stopped returning telephone messages. A few removed the segments from their Web sites, promised greater vigilance in the future or pleaded ignorance.

Afghanistan to Memphis: An Agency's Report Ends Up on the Air

On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how assistance from the United States was helping to liberate the women of Afghanistan.

Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once barred from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their burkas, taking up jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters off to new schools, receiving decent medical care for the first time and even participating in a fledgling democracy. Her segment included an interview with an Afghan teacher who recounted how the Taliban only allowed boys to attend school. An Afghan doctor described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians treat women.

In short, Ms. Clark's report seemed to corroborate, however modestly, a central argument of the Bush foreign policy, that forceful American intervention abroad was spreading freedom, improving lives and winning friends.

What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the interviews used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and shot the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the narration, much of which Ms. Clark repeated with only minor changes.

As it happens, the viewers of WHBQ were not the only ones in the dark.

Ms. Clark, now Tish Clark Dunning, said in an interview that she, too, had no idea the report originated at the State Department. "If that's true, I'm very shocked that anyone would false report on anything like that," she said.

How a television reporter in Memphis unwittingly came to narrate a segment by the State Department reveals much about the extent to which government-produced news accounts have seeped into the broader new media landscape.

The explanation begins inside the White House, where the president's communications advisers devised a strategy after Sept. 11, 2001, to encourage supportive news coverage of the fight against terrorism. The idea, they explained to reporters at the time, was to counter charges of American imperialism by generating accounts that emphasized American efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq.

An important instrument of this strategy was the Office of Broadcasting Services, a State Department unit of 30 or so editors and technicians whose typical duties include distributing video from news conferences. But in early 2002, with close editorial direction from the White House, the unit began producing narrated feature reports, many of them promoting American achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq and reinforcing the administration's rationales for the invasions. These reports were then widely distributed in the United States and around the world for use by local television stations. In all, the State Department has produced 59 such segments.

United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the domestic dissemination of government propaganda. The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, for example, allows Voice of America to broadcast pro-government news to foreign audiences, but not at home. Yet State Department officials said that law does not apply to the Office of Broadcasting Services. In any event, said Richard A. Boucher, a State Department spokesman: "Our goal is to put out facts and the truth. We're not a propaganda agency."

Even so, as a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told Congress last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such "good news" segments as "powerful strategic tools" for influencing public opinion. And a review of the department's segments reveals a body of work in sync with the political objectives set forth by the White House communications team after 9/11.

In June 2003, for example, the unit produced a segment that depicted American efforts to distribute food and water to the people of southern Iraq. "After living for decades in fear, they are now receiving assistance - and building trust - with their coalition liberators," the unidentified narrator concluded.

Several segments focused on the liberation of Afghan women, which a White House memo from January 2003 singled out as a "prime example" of how "White House-led efforts could facilitate strategic, proactive communications in the war on terror."

Tracking precisely how a "good news" report on Afghanistan could have migrated to Memphis from the State Department is far from easy. The State Department typically distributes its segments via satellite to international news organizations like Reuters and Associated Press Television News, which in turn distribute them to the major United States networks, which then transmit them to local affiliates.

"Once these products leave our hands, we have no control," Robert A. Tappan, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an interview. The department, he said, never intended its segments to be shown unedited and without attribution by local news programs. "We do our utmost to identify them as State Department-produced products."

Representatives for the networks insist that government-produced reports are clearly labeled when they are distributed to affiliates. Yet with segments bouncing from satellite to satellite, passing from one news organization to another, it is easy to see the potential for confusion. Indeed, in response to questions from The Times, Associated Press Television News acknowledged that they might have distributed at least one segment about Afghanistan to the major United States networks without identifying it as the product of the State Department. A spokesman said it could have "slipped through our net because of a sourcing error."

Kenneth W. Jobe, vice president for news at WHBQ in Memphis, said he could not explain how his station came to broadcast the State Department's segment on Afghan women. "It's the same piece, there's no mistaking it," he said in an interview, insisting that it would not happen again.

Mr. Jobe, who was not with WHBQ in 2002, said the station's script for the segment has no notes explaining its origin. But Tish Clark Dunning said it was her impression at the time that the Afghan segment was her station's version of one done first by network correspondents at either Fox News or CNN. It is not unusual, she said, for a local station to take network reports and then give them a hometown look.

"I didn't actually go to Afghanistan," she said. "I took that story and reworked it. I had to do some research on my own. I remember looking on the Internet and finding out how it all started as far as women covering their faces and everything."

At the State Department, Mr. Tappan said the broadcasting office is moving away from producing narrated feature segments. Instead, the department is increasingly supplying only the ingredients for reports - sound bites and raw video. Since the shift, he said, even more State Department material is making its way into news broadcasts.

Meeting a Need: Rising Budget Pressures, Ready-to-Run Segments

WCIA is a small station with a big job in central Illinois.

Each weekday, WCIA's news department produces a three-hour morning program, a noon broadcast and three evening programs. There are plans to add a 9 p.m. broadcast. The staff, though, has been cut to 37 from 39. "We are doing more with the same," said Jim P. Gee, the news director.

Farming is crucial in Mr. Gee's market, yet with so many demands, he said, "it is hard for us to justify having a reporter just focusing on agriculture."

To fill the gap, WCIA turned to the Agriculture Department, which has assembled one of the most effective public relations operations inside the federal government. The department has a Broadcast Media and Technology Center with an annual budget of $3.2 million that each year produces some 90 "mission messages" for local stations - mostly feature segments about the good works of the Agriculture Department.

"I don't want to use the word 'filler,' per se, but they meet a need we have," Mr. Gee said.

The Agriculture Department's two full-time reporters, Bob Ellison and Pat O'Leary, travel the country filing reports, which are vetted by the department's office of communications before they are distributed via satellite and mail. Alisa Harrison, who oversees the communications office, said Mr. Ellison and Mr. O'Leary provide unbiased, balanced and accurate coverage.

"They cover the secretary just like any other reporter," she said.

Invariably, though, their segments offer critic-free accounts of the department's policies and programs. In one report, Mr. Ellison told of the agency's efforts to help Florida clean up after several hurricanes.

''They've done a fantastic job,'' a grateful local official said in the segment.

More recently, Mr. Ellison reported that Mike Johanns, the new agriculture secretary, and the White House were determined to reopen Japan to American beef products. Of his new boss, Mr. Ellison reported, ''He called Bush the best envoy in the world.''

WCIA, based in Champaign, has run 26 segments made by the Agriculture Department over the past three months alone. Or put another way, WCIA has run 26 reports that did not cost it anything to produce.

Mr. Gee, the news director, readily acknowledges that these accounts are not exactly independent, tough-minded journalism. But, he added: ''We don't think they're propaganda. They meet our journalistic standards. They're informative. They're balanced.''

More than a year ago, WCIA asked the Agriculture Department to record a special sign-off that implies the segments are the work of WCIA reporters. So, for example, instead of closing his report with ''I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for the U.S.D.A.,'' Mr. Ellison says, ''With the U.S.D.A., I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for 'The Morning Show.'''

Mr. Gee said the customized sign-off helped raise ''awareness of the name of our station.'' Could it give viewers the idea that Mr. Ellison is reporting on location with the U.S.D.A. for WCIA? ''We think viewers can make up their own minds,'' Mr. Gee said.

Ms. Harrison, the Agriculture Department press secretary, said the WCIA sign-off was an exception. The general policy, she said, is to make clear in each segment that the reporter works for the department. In any event, she added, she did not think there was much potential for viewer confusion. ''It's pretty clear to me,'' she said.

The 'Good News' People: A Menu of Reports From Military Hot Spots

The Defense Department is working hard to produce and distribute its own news segments for television audiences in the United States.

The Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense Department last year, is now being offered to every cable and satellite operator in the United States. Army public affairs specialists, equipped with portable satellite transmitters, are roaming war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, beaming news reports, raw video and interviews to TV stations in the United States. All a local news director has to do is log on to a military-financed Web site, www.dvidshub.net, browse a menu of segments and request a free satellite feed.

Then there is the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, a unit of 40 reporters and producers set up to send local stations news segments highlighting the accomplishments of military members.

''We're the 'good news' people,'' said Larry W. Gilliam, the unit's deputy director.

Each year, the unit films thousands of soldiers sending holiday greetings to their hometowns. Increasingly, the unit also produces news reports that reach large audiences. The 50 stories it filed last year were broadcast 236 times in all, reaching 41 million households in the United States.

The news service makes it easy for local stations to run its segments unedited. Reporters, for example, are never identified by their military titles. ''We know if we put a rank on there they're not going to put it on their air,'' Mr. Gilliam said.

Each account is also specially tailored for local broadcast. A segment sent to a station in Topeka, Kan., would include an interview with a service member from there. If the same report is sent to Oklahoma City, the soldier is switched out for one from Oklahoma City. ''We try to make the individual soldier a star in their hometown,'' Mr. Gilliam said, adding that segments were distributed only to towns and cities selected by the service members interviewed.

Few stations acknowledge the military's role in the segments. ''Just tune in and you'll see a minute-and-a-half news piece and it looks just like they went out and did the story,'' Mr. Gilliam said. The unit, though, makes no attempt to advance any particular political or policy agenda, he said.

''We don't editorialize at all,'' he said.

Yet sometimes the ''good news'' approach carries political meaning, intended or not. Such was the case after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal surfaced last spring. Although White House officials depicted the abuse of Iraqi detainees as the work of a few rogue soldiers, the case raised serious questions about the training of military police officers.

A short while later, Mr. Gilliam's unit distributed a news segment, sent to 34 stations, that examined the training of prison guards at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where some of the military police officers implicated at Abu Ghraib had been trained.

''One of the most important lessons they learn is to treat prisoners strictly but fairly,'' the reporter said in the segment, which depicted a regimen emphasizing respect for detainees. A trainer told the reporter that military police officers were taught to ''treat others as they would want to be treated.'' The account made no mention of Abu Ghraib or how the scandal had prompted changes in training at Fort Leonard Wood.

According to Mr. Gilliam, the report was unrelated to any effort by the Defense Department to rebut suggestions of a broad command failure.

''Are you saying that the Pentagon called down and said, 'We need some good publicity?''' he asked. ''No, not at all.''

Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.

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