Ahmadinejad walks away with a win

His Columbia engagement gives him what he wants -- legitimacy -- and his hosts look rude to Islamic eyes.

by Tim Rutten
LA TIMES

One of the world's truly dangerous men, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left New York a clear winner this week, and he can thank the arrogance of the American academy and most of the U.S. news media's studied indifference for his victory.

If the blood-drenched history of the century just past had taught American academics one thing, it should have been that the totalitarian impulse knows no accommodation with reason. You cannot change the totalitarian mind through dialogue or conversation, because totalitarianism -- however ingenious the superstructure of faux ideas with which it surrounds itself -- is a creature of the will and not the mind. That's a large lesson, but what should have made Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University this week a wholly avoidable debacle was the school's knowledge of its own, very specific history.

In the 1930s, Columbia was run by Nicholas Murray Butler, to whose name a special sort of infamy attaches. Butler was an outspoken admirer of Italian fascism and of its leader, Benito Mussolini. The Columbia president, who also was in the forefront of Ivy League efforts to restrict Jewish enrollment, worked tirelessly to build ties between his school and Italian universities, as well as with the powerful fascist student organizations. At one point, a visiting delegation of 350 ardent young Black Shirts serenaded Butler with the fascist anthem.

Butler also was keen to establish connections with Nazi Germany and its universities. In 1933, he invited Hans Luther, Adolf Hitler's ambassador to the United States, to lecture on the Columbia campus. Luther stressed Hitler's "peaceful intentions" toward his European neighbors, and, afterward, Butler gave a reception in his honor. As the emissary of "a friendly people," Luther was "entitled to be received with the greatest courtesy and respect," the Columbia president said at the time.

It was such a transparently appalling performance all around that one of the anonymous authors of the New York Times' "Topics of the Times" column put tongue in cheek and looked forward to the occasion when "the Nazi leaders will point out that they were all along opposed to any measures capable of being construed as unjust to any element in the German population or as a threat to peace in Europe."

Arrogance, though, is invincible -- even to irony.

Three years later, Butler sent a delegation of Columbia dignitaries to participate in anniversary celebrations at the University of Heidelberg. That was after Heidelberg had purged all the Jewish professors from its faculty, reformed its curriculum according to Nazi educational theories and publicly burned the unapproved books in its libraries.

It would be interesting to know if any consideration of these events -- and all that followed a decade of engagement and dialogue with fascism -- occurred before Columbia extended a speaking invitation to a man who hopes to see Israel "wiped off the face of the Earth," has denied the Holocaust and is defying the world community in pursuit of nuclear weapons. Perhaps they did and perhaps that's part of what motivated Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president now, to deliver his extraordinarily ill-advised welcoming remarks to Ahmadinejad.

Bollinger clearly had an American audience in mind when he denounced the Iranian leader to his face as a "cruel" and "petty dictator" and described his Holocaust denial as designed to "fool the illiterate and the ignorant." Bollinger's remarks may have taken him off the hook with his domestic critics, but when it came to the international media audience that really counted, Ahmadinejad already had carried the day. The invitation to speak at Columbia already had given him something totalitarian demagogues -- who are as image-conscious as Hollywood stars -- always crave: legitimacy. Bollinger's denunciation was icing on the cake, because the constituency the Iranian leader cares about is scattered across an Islamic world that values hospitality and its courtesies as core social virtues. To that audience, Bollinger looked stunningly ill-mannered; Ahmadinejad dignified and restrained.

Back in Tehran, Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leading Iranian reformer and Ahmadinejad opponent, said Bollinger's blistering remarks "only strengthened" the president back home and "made his radical supporters more determined," According to an Associated Press report, "Many Iranians found the comments insulting, particularly because in Iranian traditions of hospitality, a host should be polite to a guest, no matter what he thinks of him. To many, Ahmadinejad looked like the victim, and hard-liners praised the president's calm demeanor during the event, saying Bollinger was spouting a 'Zionist' line."

All of this was bad enough, but the almost willful refusal of commentators in the American media to provide their audiences with insight into just how sinister Ahmadinejad really is compounded the problem. There are a couple of reasons for the media's general refusal to engage with radical Islamic revivalists, like Ahmadinejad. He belongs to a particularly aggressive school of radical Shiite Islam, the Haghani, which lives in expectation of the imminent coming of the Madhi, a kind of Islamic messiah, who will bring peace and justice -- along with universal Islamic rule -- to the entire world. Serious members of this school -- and Ahmadinejad, who was a brilliant university student, is a very serious member -- believe they must act to speed the Mahdi's coming. "The wave of the Islamic revolution" would soon "reach the entire world," he has promised.

As a fundamentally secular institution, the American press always has had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that Islamists like the Iranian president mean what they say and that they really do believe what they say they believe.

Finally, there's the fact that the neoconservative remnants clustered around Vice President Dick Cheney are beating the drums for a preemptive military action against Iran before it becomes a nuclear nation, as North Korea already has, thereby constraining U.S. policy in northwest Asia. After being duped by the Bush administration into helping pave the way for the disastrous war in Iraq, few in the American media now are willing to take the Iran problem on because they don't want to be complicit in another military misadventure.

Fair enough -- but that anxiety doesn't exempt the press from being realistic about who Ahmadinejad really is and the danger he really does pose to all around him.

Strategies of Attrition (II)

GermanForeignPolicy.com

[See also Strategies of Attrition (I) and Strategies of Attrition (III).]

BEIJING/LHASA/BERLIN
(Own report) - German politicians have announced an escalation of the chancellor's Tibet offensive. According to comments made by the Prime Minister of Hesse, Roland Koch (CDU), Angela Merkel's meeting with the Dalai Lama is only the beginning of large scale interference into China's internal affairs, that also should incite other Western states to give up their reservations. Berlin considers the moment particularly favorable for activities to weaken Beijing, because as the host of next year's Olympic games, the People's Republic is restricted in its capacity to retaliate. Berlin's Tibet activities are part of a cross party general consensus and are in line with old traditions of German foreign policy, that, already in the 1930s and 1940s, considered Lhasa as an important base for interfering in Central Asia. The German-Tibetan contacts, that were established at the time, have not only outlived World War II, but are still functioning today, as german-foreign-policy.com reports in the second part of its series focused on strategies of attrition.

The Free World
Soon "other state and political leaders will follow the chancellor's example and intensify their support for the Dalai Lama's non-violent struggle for more autonomy in Tibet," declared the Prime Minister of Hesse, Roland Koch (CDU) [1] only one day after Beijing rescinded its cancellation of a bilateral foreign ministers' meeting, showing it was willing to relent after Germany's affront on September 23.[2] Koch declared, that the Chinese government has "to realize", that "the free world is not prepared to forget or conceal the situation of the Tibetan people."[3] It would become "more difficult", to exclude "the human rights question" from the discussion on the Olympics. So-called NGOs, among them the "Reporters Without Borders" are launching campaigns accordingly. Their activists are organizing demonstrations in Beijing and have excellent connections to the media in Germany. This organization is known for similar campaigns against the Cuban government and does not deny to have received subventions from US-Sources.[4]

Tradition
The government's Tibet policy is supported across party lines in Germany. Among the Dalai Lama's sympathizers since the 1980s are Roland Koch, (CDU), as well as many in the Green party and since the early 1990s, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, closely affiliated with the liberal FDP Party. Ethnic minority group ("Volksgruppen") experts, trained in German ethnic models, from the Germanophonic Northern Italian "South Tyrol", are counseling the Tibetan "exile government" on questions of "autonomy" (german-foreign-policy.com reported).[5] Berlin's interference in Tibet is following, above all, the traditions of German policy, which already back in the 1930s and 1940s considered Lhasa to be an important base in Central Asia. At the time, scientists or so-called scientists made expeditions into the conflict-ridden western regions of China. The Soviet Union and Great Britain (via India) were also trying to gain influence. Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan) and Tibet were the targets.

Caucasian Racial Element
The zoologist Ernst Schaefer was one of the first protagonists of the German Tibet research. In 1931/32 and from 1934 to 1936 he participated in two German-American Tibet expeditions. In recognition of his services for zoological research in this area, he was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer. In 1938/39 he led a third expedition: "Tibet expedition Ernst Schaefer. Under the patronage of Reichsführer SS Himmler and in connection with Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage) e.V Berlin".[6] The search for traces of the "Aryan race" in the Tibetan mountains was one of the important objectives of the SS and "Ahnenerbe" expedition. A few years later, Bruno Beger, one of the participants in the expedition, announced, that he had recognized a "Caucasian racial element in the Tibetan nobility". This is how the Nazi racists justified their efforts to use Lhasa as their base in Asia.

"Friendship, Mister Hitler"
The 1938/39 Tibet expedition established the first contacts between the governments in Berlin and Lhasa. "Under the slogan of the ‘meeting of the western and eastern swastika' [7] political contacts with the Tibetan government could be made in Lhasa", according to an analysis of the Tibet research during the Nazi period.[8] As they left for home in the summer of 1939, Ernst Schaefer and his colleagues received a letter from the Tibetan leader, in which he declared that Schaefer had sought to establish closer ties between the government of Berlin and Lhasa: "Your Excellency, King Mister Hitler, we agree (...) with your desire for mutual friendship." The Tibetan government's effort to become more independent from the British colonial power was the motive behind this rapprochement.[9]

"A Little Sabotage"
The subsequent Tibet expedition targeted London and was discussed in Berlin on September 4, 1939, one day after Great Britain entered the war. Ernst Schaefer, Bruno Beger and the Foreign Ministry participated in this discussion. They decided to send 30 officers of the SS to Tibet, under Schaefer's command, with enough weapons to arm 1000 to 2000 militias, that they planned to recruit to fight against (British) India. Schaefer was ordered to receive training in the "SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler". "If you have to solve a military problem, you have to first be trained and educated as a solider", is how the "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler explained the scientist's re-education: "A little sabotage and explosions won't do the job."[10] But these plans conflicted with plans to weaken British positions in Asia with the aid of Afghan allies, and were finally dropped because of inter-ministerial disputes in Berlin.

"Pan Mongolian" Vassal
German plans for Tibet became topical for the last time, during the Nazi rule. in 1942. Impressed by the Wehrmacht's advance on Soviet territory, Himmler ordered the "total exploration of the Central Asian vital living space ("Lebensraum")".[11] When, in the summer of 1942, Japanese troops advanced into the region bordering Tibet, they encountered a German ally in Lhasa - the Dalai Lama. The god-king's camarilla was hoping to disengage itself from Chinese, Soviet Russian and British influence and to eternalize the Tibetan feudal dictatorship. The goal was to create a "Pan-Mongolian Federation" - under the leadership of the Third Reich and Japan.[12]

Skull Collection
Germany's endeavors both for Mongolia, as well as its activities in Tibet outlasted the war. Ernst Schaefer's collaborator, Helmut Hoffmann, became professor at the Munich University, where he set "the scientific standards for the German Tibetology".[13] In 1952, Bruno Beger set out on his next Tibet expedition. Until 1943, the same Bruno Beger pursued "Mongol research" in the Auschwitz death camp and assembled a "collection of Asian skulls".[14] In 1994, he was the Dalai Lama's official guest in London.[15] He also maintained good contacts to another protagonist of German Tibet activities: Heinrich Harrer, who had also been an SS Central Asian activist.[16] He visited Lhasa for the first time between 1946 and 1950, where he worked as a teacher of the incumbent Dalai Lama. He has written several books on Tibet, which are still popular in Germany. When the Green Party began to reactivate German Tibet policy in the 1980s, they also used his writings.[17]

Centrifugal Forces
The mixture of ethnic ingredients containing obviously racist elements and trivial concepts about religious life in the Far East, is now being enriched with "questions of human rights", which serve the German geopolitical expansion policy. As in the past, the object is to use Tibet against the Chinese central state and the centrifugal forces of dozens of nationalities to wear down Beijing from the interior.

In the next sequence of this series focusing on strategies of attrition, german-foreign-policy.com will expose German and Japanese plans to include Mongolian allies in a joint policy against China.

[1] Koch: Weitere Staatschefs werden Dalai Lama unterstützen; Der Tagesspiegel 26.09.2007

[2] see also Strategies of Attrition (I)

[3] Koch: Weitere Staatschefs werden Dalai Lama unterstützen; Der Tagesspiegel 26.09.2007

[4] Les mensonges de Reporters sans Fronitères; www.voltairenet.org/article127332.html

[5] see also Strategies of Attrition (I)

[6] Reinhard Greve: Tibetforschung im SS-Ahnenerbe, in: Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht. Ethnologie im Dritten Reich, herausgegeben von Thomas Hauschild, Frankfurt am Main 1995

[7] In Tibet sowie weiteren Staaten Asiens wird das Hakenkreuz traditionell als religiöses Symbol verwendet. Eine politische Bedeutung ist damit nicht verbunden.

[8] Reinhard Greve: Tibetforschung im SS-Ahnenerbe, in: Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht. Ethnologie im Dritten Reich, herausgegeben von Thomas Hauschild, Frankfurt am Main 1995

[9], [10] Peter Mierau: Nationalsozialistische Expansionspolitik. Deutsche Asien-Expeditionen 1933-1945, München 2006

[11], [12] Reinhard Greve: Tibetforschung im SS-Ahnenerbe, in: Lebenslust und Fremdenfurcht. Ethnologie im Dritten Reich, herausgegeben von Thomas Hauschild, Frankfurt am Main 1995

[13] Peter Mierau: Nationalsozialistische Expansionspolitik. Deutsche Asien-Expeditionen 1933-1945, München 2006

[14] Im KZ Auschwitz selektierte Beger über 80 Häftlinge, die anschließend in das KZ Struthof verschleppt und dort für eine Skelettsammlung getötet wurden.

[15] SS-Offizier Bruno Beger; www.mdr.de/kultur/film/1376801-hintergrund-1376705.html

[16] Heinrich Harrer trat 1938 von der SA zur SS über und nahm 1939 an der deutschen Nanga Parbat-Expedition teil. 1939 geriet er in britische Gefangenschaft, konnte 1944 fliehen und erreichte im Januar 1946 Lhasa, wo er schließlich Lehrer des heutigen Dalai Lama wurde.

[17] vgl. z.B. den Sammelband "Tibet - ein vergewaltigtes Land", den Petra Kelly und Gert Bastian, beide Bundestagsabgeordnete der "Grünen", 1988 herausgaben.

Blackwater Founder and West Michigan Native Funds Right-wing through Foundation

MediaMouse

Blackwater USA founder and West Michigan native Erik Prince funds a variety of rightwing and religious causes according to a review of grants awarded by Prince’s Freiheit Foundation. Prince, who’s Blackwater has drawn considerable attention for its work in Iraq, post-Katrina New Orleans, and Colombia, also has strong ties to the economic and religious right both through the contributions of his Freiheit Foundation as well as his parents, Edgar and Elsa Prince, who are prominent supporters of the religious right both in West Michigan and on the national level. Additionally, Erik Prince’s sister is Betsy DeVos, who married into one of West Michigan’s most well-known rightwing families and has made been a career organizer for rightwing and Republican causes. While several reports on Prince have made some mention of his lineage and his political contributions, there has been no detailed examinations of his “philanthropy.”

From 2000 to 2003, the Freiheit Foundation gave financial support to three organizations that can be described as being a part of the economic right—the Grand Rapids-based Acton Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Grand Rapids-based Education Freedom Fund. The two entities with roots in Grand Rapids also are organizations in which Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos has had a leadership role. The Acton Institute—a think-tank blending religion and free-market economics—has received more than $210,000 in funding from the Freiheit Foundation. The Education Freedom Fund, also based in Grand Rapids and directed by Betsy and Dick DeVos, received $30,000 from the Freiheit Foundation in support of the DeVoses ongoing organizing in favor of school vouchers and the privatization of education in the United States. In 2001, Prince’s foundation gave $30,000 to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of the more prominent rightwing think-tanks and a strong supporter of both free-market economics as well as the Bush administration’s foreign policy. The AEI supports an aggressive imperialist policy and has several members that are part of the same group of neocons involved in the Project for a New American Century that campaigned for the Iraq War.

While Prince’s family has contributed greatly to religious right groups, Prince’s foundation has primarily funded conservative Catholic or evangelical organizations that do not have clear ties to the religious right. A major exception is the Freiheit Foundation’s $500,000 grant to ex-Watergate felon Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, an evangelical ministry operating within the United States’ prison system and receiving financial backing from a variety of religious right funders. The Freiheit Foundation has also funded Christian Freedom International, a group that works to document the persecution of Christians around the world and provides aid in the form of physical assistance and coordinated prayer. The organization is led by former Reagan White House official Jim Jacobson who is a member of the secretive religious right Council for National Policy (Prince’s foundation gave a $450 to the Council for National Policy in 2001). The Freiheit Foundation generously funds a number of other religious organizations, including the Haggai Institute, an organization founded in 1969 to train Asian, African, and Latin American Christian leaders to “train others” and evangelize for the Christian faith, who was given $200,000 in 2001. Crisis Magazine, a self-described “politically conservative” magazine that reports on contemporary culture through a “traditional Catholic” perspective, has received a nominal amount of funding from the Foundation ($3,500). Controversial and anti-gay Senator Rick Santorum is one of the magazine’s regular columnists. Catholic Answers, a group that publishes tracts and other literature to aid Catholics in evangelizing. The group came under some scrutiny in 2004 for a voter guide that it produced outlining five issues that it termed as “non-negotiable” for Catholics—abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, and human cloning—and arguing that Catholics should vote for candidates that have the church’s position on these issues (source).

Prince has also supported universities, including Catholic University of America (which maintains a “Marriage Law Project” reporting on efforts to define and preserve marriage as between heterosexual couples only (source) and Christendom College, both of which firmly believe in the importance of religion in everyday life. Prince has also provided $195,000 to the Institute for World Politics, a graduate school in Washington DC offering training in “statecraft” by examining diplomacy, military strategy, the formation of opinion, and other such topics taught by former government officials from the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, and other such agencies as well as private institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute. Like the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute for World Politics promotes a foreign policy in line with that of the Bush administration—a policy that has functioned to help Blackwater earn government contracts and to increase Prince’s own fortune.

Cheney to address secret group

The conservative Council for National Policy will meet in downtown Salt Lake

by Thomas Burr
Salt Lake Tribune

Vice President Dick Cheney will speak to a super-secret, conservative policy group in Utah on Friday during his second trip to the state this year.

Cheney will address the fall meeting of the Council for National Policy, a group whose self-described mission is to promote "a free-enterprise system, a strong national defense and support for traditional Western values."

The organization - made up of few hundred powerful conservative activists - holds confidential meetings and members are advised not to use the name of the group in communications, according to a New York Times profile of the group.

"The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before [or] after a meeting,'' a list of rules obtained by The Times showed. The group did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Czech Republic President Václav Klaus is also expected to address the Council for National Policy's meeting in downtown Salt Lake City. After his speech, Cheney will meet with Klaus, the vice president's office said Tuesday.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who ran the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, will also be in Utah on Friday but his campaign did not respond to a question about whether he would talk with the group.

Cheney's visit is expected to be short, only a few hours, according to people familiar with the trip's details. The trip coincides with fundraisers in California, Colorado, Nevada and Wyoming, Cheney's spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride said.

All of the events on the trip are closed to the public and the news media, McBride said.

Cheney last visited the state April 26 to give the commencement speech at Brigham Young University.

Strategies of Attrition (I)

GermanForeignPolicy.com
[See also Strategies of Attrition (II) and Strategies of Attrition (III).]

BEIJING/LHASA/BERLIN
(Own report) - The German chancellor is reinforcing Berlin's special relationships to Chinese separatists, in spite of Beijing's massive protests. The Dalai Lama had talks in the German Chancellery, for the first time, Sunday, Sept. 23. He is the leader of a self-proclaimed Tibetan exile government, with its headquarters in India, which is calling for the secession of Tibet from the Peoples Republic of China or at least special rights in accordance with the German model of "autonomy." The Dalai Lama is a western ally, helping to weaken Beijing and hamper its rise to the status of world power. For decades he has been enjoying the cross-party sympathy in Germany and is receiving support from conservatives, liberals and Greens alike. Still his meeting with Angela Merkel has been met with criticism, because business circles fear retaliatory actions on the part of the Chinese government will have a negative effect on their business. German strategies of attrition against Beijing, their historical precursors in the first half of the 20th century and the scenes of current measures, are the themes of a series of articles that german-foreign-policy.com began Monday Sept. 24.

With his visit to the German Chancellor, the Dalai Lama crowned his several weeks of touring Europe. Subsequent to his stops in Spain and Portugal, the self-ordained Tibetan Exile ruler met with the chancellor of Austria. Over the past few days he has toured several of the German federal states. In Munster (North Rhein Westphalia) he was awarded the honorary doctor title of the University. In Hesse he met with the state's prime minister, Roland Koch. As with his previous visits - the last being in July in Hamburg - the Dalai Lama was greeted with cross-party expressions of sympathy. He is expected to return to Germany for several major events in May 2008.

Support
Indicating the effects of German behavior, Beijing has responded to the trip of the Dalai Lama, and particularly to his audience with Chancellor Merkel. The Tibetan dignitary leads an exile government, based in Dharamsala (India) and lays claim to control over Chinese territory ("Greater Tibet"). Even though originally the demand was for Tibetan national sovereignty, the Dalai Lama, in the meantime, claims to also be satisfied with comprehensive rights of autonomy. "These Tibetan demands for religious and cultural autonomy are supported by the German government" confirmed Thomas Steg last Friday.[1] Beijing points to its rights of sovereignty and reserves for itself - in accordance to its own discretion and without the interference of former colonial powers - the granting of autonomy for minorities within its borders.

German Model
The role model for the rights of autonomy, that the Dalai Lama is demanding from Beijing, is patterned on the German ethnic model "Volksgruppenrechte" (the rights of ethnic minority groups). In the Northern Italian autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige (South Tyrol) this is in force and has done nothing toward ending efforts toward secession. Already in 1993 an assistant of the European Academy Bozen, in Alto Adige, contacted the "foreign minister" of the Tibetan exile government.[2] This academy, that has an ad hoc "Volksgruppenrecht", Institute was founded with the participation of the foreign ministry of Germany.[3] The Dalai Lama personally visited Bolzano in 1997. Still during the 90s, the Tibetan exile government began consultations with the European Academy on the question of "Volksgruppenrecht". "South Tyrol has definitely the character of a role model for Tibet" explained the Tibetan exile ruler during his second visit to Bolzano in 2005.[4]

National Flag
The Dalai Lama, whose demands for autonomy and secession could permanently weaken the People's Republic of China, is enjoying cross-party support in Germany. The Green Party was among the first to take up the Tibetan cause in the political arena. It was the first to put pressure on Beijing with a resolution on "human rights violations in Tibet" in the German national parliament (Bundestag) (October 15, 1987). Two years later, on April 20 to 21, 1989, the Greens organized an international hearing on "Tibet and Human Rights" that was held in the SPD conference room in Bonn and received wide attention. Roland Koch (CDU), who, today, is the prime minister of Hesse has also been engaged in the cause for Tibet since the mid 1980's. In 1995, he organized the Dalai Lama's first appearance in the Hesse parliament. Ten years later, as the Tibetan dignitary received the Hesse Peace Prize, the Tibetan national flag, which is not recognized, was flying at the federal state chancellery in Wiesbaden.[5]

Strategies
The Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation, closely affiliated to the German liberal FDP party, began its extensive Tibet activities in the early 1990's. Since 1991 it has been counseling the Tibetan exile government "on all questions of political education".[6] Together with the exile government, whose headquarters is in India, the Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation organizes international conferences on Tibet. The second conference, held in Bonn in 1996, led to diplomatic fallout, culminating in the closing of the foundation's Beijing office. It has yet to be reopened. The last conference took place in Brussels last Mai. At the invitation of the Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation, more than 300 participants, arriving from over 50 countries, discussed "human rights" and "strategies of Tibetan exiles'".[7] According to the foundation, it was "the most political" conference on Tibet ever: "This was also due to the opportunities that the Olympic Games, to be held next year in China, open to the Tibetans and which were also examined in Brussels."

Risky
The German Chancellor's offer to hold talks with the Dalai Lama is obviously one such "opportunity". This invitation caused hefty discussions in the Foreign Ministry and provoked resentment in business circles. German businessmen fear a loss of business, because of China's self-assured retaliation. As an initial reaction, Beijing called off negotiations on patent protection for German goods. Other retaliatory measures are expected. According to the Director of Research for the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), Chancellor Merkel's meeting with the Dalai Lama is a "serious foreign policy faux-pas in a subordinate conflict".[8] In Berlin it was a rule that the chancellor visits Beijing with business delegations, and contacts to Tibet are maintained below the highest political levels. Chancellor Kohl's visit to Tibet, in 1987, is exemplary. He defied "human rights" demands and followed the course of German export interests. Accompanied by numerous businessmen, he met the Chinese governor in Lhasa - only a few weeks after the US-Congress had passed a strongly worded Tibet resolution and amid strong protest of an anti-China public.

Powder Keg
In meeting the Dalai Lama, the Chancellery is taking a major risk. As one hears in Berlin, Beijing is probably avoiding any conflict with Germany and German firms, immediately preceding the Olympic Games. The opportunity for intensifying support for Tibetan separatism without risks are therefore growing. And this, it is said, is quite desirable. As Roland Koch, the prime minister of Hesse, is said to have learned during his trip to Tibet last July, the chances are growing to intensify the pressure on the People's Republic of China and Beijing is worried that if the Tibetan dignitary (72) dies, rebellions could break out in Tibet and in other national minority areas. According to Koch, Chinese government circles are speaking of the danger of Tibet becoming a "powder keg" [9] with serious consequences. "If it doesn't work out good there (in Tibet, the author) it could have repercussions in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia" rejoices the Dalai Lama with the two other potential secessionist regions in mind: "after all, these three autonomous regions stretch over half of the Chinese territory".[10]
In the following issues, german-foreign-policy.com will report on how German foreign policy, in 1930's and 1940's, through evoking so-called rights of autonomy and other means of pressure, sought to create a Tibetan-Mongolian federation, under German Japanese hegemony.

[1] Regierungspressekonferenz vom 21. September

[2] Endzeit am Dach der Welt; ff. Südtiroler Wochenmagazin 28.07.2005

[3] see also Minderheitenrechte

[4] Dalai Lama in Bozen: "Südtirol als Autonomie-Modell"; www.stol.it 31.07.2005

[5] see also Reisefieber and Druck ausüben

[6] see also Die Tibetfrage

[7] Dalai Lama sagt ab - Gerhardt kritisiert Belgien; www.fnst-freiheit.org

[8] Krise zwischen Peking und Berlin; Süddeutsche Zeitung 21.09.2007

[9] Roland Koch rechnet mit Gesprächen zwischen der chinesischen Regierung und dem Dalai
Lama; Focus 22.07.2007

[10] "China mischt sich auch in Deutschlands Angelegenheiten ein"; Süddeutsche Zeitung 21.09.2007

Prologue: Dealing with Myths

Excerpted from
Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football
by Dan E. Moldea

Years before he became president of the United States, actor Ronald Reagan portrayed Notre Dame's George Gipp in the 1940 Warner Brothers movie Knute Rockne—All-American. Gipp had died of pneumonia in December 1920 after an illustrious college football career. His purported deathbed request to Rockne, "Win just one for the Gipper," was used during a locker room pep talk and helped to inspire Rockne's 1928 team in its upset victory against Army. And, as the Gipper incarnate, Reagan used the line to inspire voters to elect him to the California governor's mansion and later the White House. To those who saw the movie and listened to Reagan utter those now-famous words, Gipp epitomized the virtues of good character, sportsmanship, and "the right way of living."

History, however, now shows that Gipp, a man of truly questionable moral values, probably never made any such request on or off his deathbed; that Rockne, who was known for grasping at anything to incite his players, had fabricated the incident; and that Reagan's movie further embellished the Gipp/Rockne charade.

Hollywood, which is notorious for cooking up such fantasies as the Gipp/Rockne story, realizes that most Americans view sports as a vehicle of inspiration and entertainment. Thus, sports history is routinely manipulated. Left unquestioned, stories like that of the Gipper become permanent fixtures of Americana. Regardless of the facts, the American public continues to believe the legend of George Gipp's deathbed request to Knute Rockne.

The difficulties in debunking the myth about one college coach and one of his players is an indication of the problems in dispelling the legends about an entire institution, particularly one as popular as football. Powerful forces in America have built empires around these myths; and the preservation of these empires and the personal wealth of those who own them depend upon the maintenance of the legends.

In the Reagan movie myth of the lives of Rockne and Gipp, there is one scene in which Rockne chases away a gambler who is looking for an edge. Rockne, played by actor Pat O'Brien, tells him, "We haven't got any use for gamblers around here. You've done your best to ruin baseball and horse racing. This is one game that's clean and it's going to stay clean."

Considering that Gipp, with the knowledge of Rockne, was a notorious sports gambler, the O'Brien quote perhaps best illustrates my point. [1.]

To a large degree, the National Football League (the NFL) has become the embodiment of the Gipp/Rockne myth. It has wrapped itself around the American flag and strutted into America's homes to the thrilling stir of brass and percussion music as the choreography of bone-crushing tackles in dramatic slow motion flashes across the nation's television screens. Based upon the illusion, the country's love affair with professional football has given sports fans confidence that the NFL is an institution unencumbered by corruption.

However, the greatest threat to professional football is also institutionalized: It is the institution of organized crime in America—and its control of illegal gambling and illicit drugs.

At least twenty-five million people bet a total of over $25 billion each year on National Football League games. Bobby Martin, the nation's premier oddsmaker, told me, "Nobody really knows how much is bet. It could be twenty-five billion. It could be a hundred billion. Nobody knows for sure."

Jack Danahy, the former security chief for the NFL, told me, "It was a joke trying to estimate the dollar figure. I remember I once got a call and was asked to provide a figure on how many bookies there were in New York. I made a fast call to the New York Liquor Authority, and I found out the number of licensed bars in the city. I multiplied it times two. I called back and said that I had it on an authoritative source that there were 14,756 bookmakers. Even though it was bullshit, he bought it. I figured that every decent bar in New York had at least two bookies."

Indeed, betting on pro football games has become a veritable American institution-with individual gamblers averaging wagers of between $100 to $500 on a single sporting event. And of all the money that is wagered on NFL games, only a small percentage of that amount is placed in Nevada, the only state where sports gambling and bookmaking are legal. The situation has been further exacerbated by the media. Newspapers insist on printing the line, for upcoming games. The television networks have hired oddsmakers to predict the outcomes of games. Law-enforcement officials estimate that each time an NFL game is nationally televised, the volume of legal and illegal gambling increases by an estimated 600 percent. The dollars wagered increase dramatically during the play-offs. And bets skyrocket for the Super Bowl. More money is bet on pro football in a single month than on major-league baseball in an entire year.

Politicians and the media have failed to educate the public about the dangers of gambling, causing massive public insensitivity to the issue. During the spring of 1989, charges were filed against baseball great Pete Rose, the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, alleging that he had bet heavily on baseball games. In citing a Washington Post poll taken during the Rose investigation, sports columinst Thomas Boswell marveled that the survey showed "strong national support for Rose, even if he's bet on baseball and, more amazing, even if he's bet on the Reds. . . . In other words, almost half of all people who identified themselves as serious fans fundamentally disagree with the game's long-standing rules [against baseball personnel gambling] that have not changed since the Black Sox scandal of 1919."

"The only thing that keeps the NFL going is gambling," former all-pro defensive lineman Alex Karras, who was suspended from the NFL for gambling in 1963, told me, "and I have objected to the hypocrisy within the NFL for not facing up to that." Karras is probably right. Gambling has made football more interesting for millions of Americans. But gambling has also brought Mafia figures, bookmakers, layoff operators, loan sharks, and juice collectors into the game. Law-enforcement authorities say that the largest source of revenue in organized crime's gambling operations comes from wagers on NFL games.

Donald Dawson of Detroit, a convicted sports gambler, told me, "The NFL turns their collars around and pretends that they're holier than thou. They say, 'Oh, we can't have gambling on football games.' And up in the stands there are eighty thousand people who have money down on their favorite teams. Betting has made football, and the NFL knows it. It's the bettors who made bookmakers. The bookmakers didn't make bettors out of people who didn't want to gamble. People like to bet on sports, and the NFL has profited from it."

As all gamblers know, bookmakers are not too concerned with which team wins or loses a particular game. They are concerned only with balancing their books, hoping that an equal amount of money is wagered on both teams in any given contest. Bookmakers collect a 10 percent commission on the losing bets they book. Consequently, all a bookmaker wants out of life is a volume business and a balanced book.

The effective manipulation of the point spread—a form of handicapping in which oddsmakers predict how many points one team needs against another in order to even out the public betting on a game—will help ensure the bookmakers' vigorish, or commission. The total pool of bets—and how those bets have been placed—will cause the point spread to be adjusted, up or down, before a game is played.

Ronald Goldstock, the chief of the New York Organized Crime Task Force, told me, "If a bookmaker can't balance his books and suffers a major loss he can't cover, he will be forced to go to some Mafia loan shark and borrow the money at a five percent weekly interest rate. If he loses the following week, too, he'll be forced to borrow again. Sooner or later, he'll have to pay—one way or the other. Bookmakers, like gamblers who bet borrowed money, dread that visit from the mob's juice collector, who will break their legs or worse if they don't pay up." Thus, the idea that gambling and bookmaking are victimless crimes is another myth.

There is also a myth that today most bookmakers in the major cities are independent contractors. Special agent Charlie Parsons, formerly of the Las Vegas FBI office, told me, "It's difficult to find any truly independent bookmakers in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and in the other big cities who operate without the permission of the mob. There are actual members of the LCN [La Cosa Nostra] who are bookmakers themselves—and that's their major source of revenue. They take the layoff action themselves, while others [who are independent] pay a percentage to the mob to do the same thing."

To ensure its investments, the underworld has infiltrated every level of the NFL—from the players' locker rooms to the owners' luxury boxes. For years, mobsters, bookmakers, and big-money gamblers have maintained relationships with NFL team owners, coaches, players, trainers, and game officials—relationships that have threatened the integrity of professional football. And these associations pose more far-reaching dangers to the game than the specter of a fixed game.

At present, the NFL confirms that there have been only two attempts to fix NFL games. The first was in 1946 when gamblers tried to bribe two New York Giants players to throw the NFL championship game. The other was in 1971 when a player with the Houston Oilers was allegedly approached and offered money by a former teammate to shave points. According to the NFL, neither attempt was successful.

However, this is also a myth. This book will provide evidence that there have been many other attempts to compromise the integrity of the game—with far greater success.

Today, NFL games are rarely, if ever, fixed. The mechanics of bribing a team member or a referee who can guarantee the outcome of a game without raising suspicion are so intricate that the risk far outweighs the return. Seemingly everyone, from the NFL commissioner's office to the highest echelon of the organized-crime syndicate, appears to be concerned about maintaining the integrity of the game.

When I asked Jack Danahy whether there had been attempts to fix NFL games while he headed the league's security unit from 1968 to 1980, he replied, "I'm sure there were. I think that in ninety percent of the cases, the ballplayer didn't even bother to report it. He didn't want to go through the hassle. It's a lot easier to say, 'Look, you bastard, I'll hit you in the mouth if you don't get lost.'

"Approaches are very, very subtle. A guy isn't going to walk right up to a player, and say, 'Here's ten grand. And I want you to drop that key pass at the crucial moment in the game on Sunday.' In some instances, the player probably didn't even realize that he was being approached.

"That's the danger of drugs. They can potentially compromise the players. Thomas 'Hollywood' Henderson [a former Dallas Cowboys star linebacker] would've been an ideal situation. There's a guy who played a hell of a Super Bowl. Of course, he was a colorful guy. He was attracting as much attention as the rest of the team put together. Within a year after that, he confessed that he had a terrible habit, and that he had shot something like a hundred and sixty thousand dollars on cocaine. That's a dangerous situation—because the potential was there for him to be compromised by his dealer."

Despite the fact that organized crime has always enjoyed a financial bonanza through its control of gambling on NFL football games, local, state, and federal governments have done little to stop it. Professional football has become a sacred cow, seemingly immune to anything more than incomplete probes by law-enforcement agencies. This book will document numerous examples of collapsed and even suppressed investigations.

Much of this material has never before been published. With the help of my associate, William Scott Malone, I have uncovered a wealth of government documents and conducted dozens of public records searches, as well as over two hundred interviews. Because former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and the NFL team owners refused to be interviewed for this book, I have been forced to use selected statements made by them that have been obtained by other reporters with whom they have cooperated. In those cases in which previous reporting has been done, I have been scrupulous in crediting those who were responsible for it. And when describing a previously reported situation, I have attempted to advance the current state of evidence.

I am a crime reporter, not a sportswriter. My job is not contingent on maintaining access to and the goodwill of the personnel of any particular team or sports institution. Friends of mine who do write about sports have expressed the need "to behave" and admit that they have willingly become a part of the NFL's sophisticated public-relations machine on occasion in order to maintain their sources of information. I believe that the need for this professional access and goodwill has prevented a fair and responsible analysis of the relationship between professional sports and organized crime by all forms of the sports
media.

Punitive action has been the norm against those who cover sports and are critical of their local team management. One close friend, Washington reporter and author Robert Pack, wrote an article critical of Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke and was banned from the Redskins' front office, locker room, and even the stadium, which is paid for by public funds.

Further, this story doesn't presume criminal guilt by association—although associations between NFL personnel and gamblers clearly violate the NFL's own rules. Yet, organized crime is "enterprise crime," crime by association, and operates accordingly. The leaders of the underworld have developed conspiracies that have resulted in criminal empires. And the NFL has often fallen prey to them.

What this book does is outline the patterns of association that have been tolerated by the NFL while the league and the federal government were claiming to take a hard line against organized crime and its influence on professional sports. In fact, the NFL has too often been lax in the enforcement of its own rules, and law-enforcement agencies have permitted the NFL to get away with it. This sweetheart relationship has greatly contributed to the myth about the integrity of the NFL.

Consequently, the NFL is sure to attempt to discredit this book, which strikes at the heart of the business of professional football, in any way it can-just as it did with an article I wrote about this subject after the 1987 regular season. An unnamed league spokesman said that the story "was a cut-and-paste job and not very factual. It was filled with inaccuracies, gossip and innuendo." [2.] But that response was a complete turnabout.

In fact, I read my article to the current NFL Security director, Warren Welsh, prior to publication to solicit whatever changes he felt were required. And, because of Welsh's expertise and inside information, I trusted him and made several necessary modifications upon his advice. In the end, he told me that it was a "fair and accurate" report. However, the NFL, for reasons only its unnamed spokesman can explain, changed its tune after the story was made public. But no one from the league would meet me face-to-face in a public forum to explain what its specific objections were, even after having been invited to do so on two national television programs on which I appeared.

Predictably, with the publication of this book, the league's now-familiar tactic will be to remain aloof from the charges, deny them from afar, and then send its front line of defense, the loyal sportswriters, to attack the messenger. But, once again, in good faith and asking only for confidentiality, I offered this manuscript to Welsh for his review. But neither he nor anyone else from the NFL responded.

For the record, this book, just like my article, has been fact-checked extensively, read by sports and law-enforcement experts, and closely reviewed by attorneys. Sooner or later, the fans of honest football will be forced to enter this or a similar fray and finally demand accountability from the NFL.

—DAN E. MOLDEA
Washington, D. C.

Notes:

1. Grantland Rice often told a story about an incident that occurred during halftime of a 1920 game, just before Gipp's death. Rice reported that he had been told by an assistant coach for the Irish, "Being behind by three points, Rock was really laying into the boys. He had about finished when Gipp, standing nearby, asked me for a drag of my cigarette. Rock looked up and spotted Gipp leaning against the door, his helmet on the back of his head, puffing the cigarette.

"Rock exploded, 'As for you, Gipp, I suppose you haven't any interest in this game . . . ?'

" 'Listen, Rock,' replied Gipp, 'I've got five hundred dollars bet on this game; I don't aim to blow any five hundred!' "

Rockne said nothing and never disciplined his player who had been gambling on the outcome of his own games.


2. "Page Six," New York Post, 9 January, 1989.

Money, Guns, & God

by Christopher S. Stewart
PORTFOLIO
October 2007 Issue

Inside the apocalyptic—and profitable—gun empire of Justin Moon, the C.E.O. who may someday lead the Unification Church.

On a blustery night in December 1999, Danny Guzman left his house in Worcester, Massachusetts, and headed downtown to Tropigala, his cousin’s nightclub. Tropigala occupied a bunkerlike, one-story brick building on Main South, a street that was home to shuttered storefronts, rooming houses, and a creeping underworld of drug dealing and prostitution, punctuated by the occasional shooting. Despite the upcoming holiday, Tropigala was packed with its usual, mostly Hispanic, crowd, and Guzman, a handsome 26-year-old with a muscular build and deep-olive complexion, settled in with a drink.

Just before 2 a.m., as the club shut down and crowds spilled onto the street, a man named Edwin Novas—a 20-year-old heroin dealer from the Bronx who sported a boyish mustache—started causing a disturbance. Details about what happened are murky, but Guzman was somehow drawn into the scuffle. Novas allegedly drew a 9-millimeter pistol from his waistband and fired, and Guzman was hit. Novas fled, followed by two friends. And at 2:12 a.m. on December 24 at Saint Vincent Hospital, Guzman was pronounced dead. SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Looking for a Scapegoat The world again turns to Jews.

by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

Who recently said: "These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War I. Why? Only to build Israel."

Some holdover Nazi?

Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as "bacteria" — controlled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States.

Who alleged: "The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs."

A conspiracy nut?

Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: "I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel. . . . It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery."

And finally, who claimed at a United Nations-sponsored conference that democratic Israel was "much worse" than the former apartheid South Africa, and that it "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming"?

A radical environmentalist wacko?

Again, no. It was Clare Short, a member of the British parliament. She was a secretary for international development under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A new virulent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spreading worldwide. This hate — of a magnitude not seen in over 70 years — is not just espoused by Iran's loony president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or radical jihadists.

The latest anti-Semitism is also now mouthed by world leaders and sophisticated politicians and academics. Their loathing often masquerades as "anti-Zionism" or "legitimate" criticism of Israel. But the venom exclusively reserved for the Jewish state betrays their existential hatred.

Israel is always lambasted for entering homes in the West Bank to look for Hamas terrorists and using too much force. But last week the world snoozed when the Lebanese army bombarded and then crushed the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, which harbored Islamic terrorists.

The world has long objected to Jewish settlers buying up land in the West Bank. Yet Hezbollah, flush with Iranian money, is now purchasing large tracts in southern Lebanon for military purposes and purging them of non-Shiites.

Here at home, "neoconservative" has become synonymous with a supposed Jewish cabal of Washington insiders who hijacked U.S. policy to take us to war for Israel's interest. That our state department is at the mercy of a Jewish lobby is the theme of a recent high-profile book by professors at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Yet when the United States bombed European and Christian Serbia to help Balkan Muslims, few critics alleged that American Muslims had unduly swayed President Clinton. And such charges of improper ethnic influence are rarely leveled to explain the billions in American aid given to non-democratic Egypt, Jordan or the Palestinians — or the Saudi oil money that pours into American universities.

The world likewise displays such a double standard. It seems to care little about the principle of so-called occupied land — whether in Cyprus or Tibet — unless Israel is the accused. Mass murdering in Cambodia, the Congo, Rwanda and Darfur has earned far fewer United Nations' resolutions of condemnation than supposed atrocities committed by Israel. A number of British academics are sponsoring a boycott of Israeli scholars but leave alone those from autocratic Iran, China and Cuba.

There are various explanations for the new anti-Semitism. For many abroad, attacking Jews and Israel is an indirect way of damning its main ally, the United States — by implying that Americans are not entirely evil, just hoodwinked by those sneaky and far more evil Jews.

At home, there are obvious pragmatic considerations. Some Americans may find it makes more sense to damn a few million Israelis without oil than it does to offend Israel's adversaries in the Middle East, who number in the hundreds of millions and control nearly half the world's petroleum reserves.

Cowardice explains a lot. Libeling Israel won't earn someone a fatwa or a death sentence in the manner comparable criticism of Islam might. There are no Jewish suicide bombers in London, Madrid or Bali.

This new face of anti-Semitism is so insidious because it is so well disguised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplomats and academics — and now embraced by the supposedly sophisticated left on university campuses.

When national, collective or personal aspirations are not met, it is far easier to blame someone or something rather than to look within for the source of the failure and frustration. More recently, someone must be blamed for getting terrorists (with oil and its profits behind them) mad at us.

That someone is — no surprise — once again Jews.

Compromise on Oil Law in Iraq Seems to Be Collapsing

by James Glanz
NEW YORK TIMES

BAGHDAD, Sept. 12 — A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government here.

Senior Iraqi negotiators met in Baghdad on Wednesday in an attempt to salvage the original compromise, two participants said. But the meeting came against the backdrop of a public series of increasingly strident disagreements over the draft law that had broken out in recent days between Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi oil minister, and officials of the provincial government in the Kurdish north, where some of the nation’s largest fields are located.

Mr. Shahristani, a senior member of the Arab Shiite coalition that controls the federal government, negotiated the compromise with leaders of the Kurdish and Arab Sunni parties. But since then, the Kurds have pressed forward with a regional version of the law that Mr. Shahristani says is illegal. Many of the Sunnis who supported the original deal have also pulled out in recent months.

The oil law — which would govern how oil fields are developed and managed — is one of several benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressing the Iraqis to meet as a sign that they are making headway toward creating an effective government.

Again and again in the past year, agreement on the law has been fleetingly close before political and sectarian disagreements have arisen to stall the deal.

One of the participants in Wednesday’s meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, who has worked for much of the past year to push for the original compromise, said some progress had been made at the meeting, but that he could not guarantee success.

“This has been like a roller coaster,” said Mr. Salih, who is Kurdish. “There were occasions where we seemed to be there, where we seemed to have closure, only to fail at that.”

“Given the seriousness of the issue, I don’t want to create false expectations, but I can say there is serious effort to bring this to closure,” he said.

The legislation has already been presented to the Iraqi Parliament, which has been unable to take virtually any action on it for months. Contributing to the dispute is the decision by the Kurds to begin signing contracts with international oil companies before the federal law is passed. The most recent instance, announced last week on a Kurdish government Web site, was an oil exploration contract with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas.

The Sunni Arabs who removed their support for the deal did so, in part, because of a contract the Kurdish government signed earlier with a company based in the United Arab Emirates, Dana Gas, to develop gas reserves.

The Kurds say their regional law is consistent with the Iraqi Constitution, which grants substantial powers to the provinces to govern their own affairs. But Mr. Shahristani believes that a sort of Kurdish declaration of independence can be read into the move. “This to us indicates very serious lack of cooperation that makes many people wonder if they are really going to be working within the framework of the federal law,” Mr. Shahristani said in a recent interview, before the Hunt deal was announced.

Kurdish officials dispute that contention, saying that they are doing their best to work within the Constitution while waiting for the Iraqi Parliament, which always seems to move at a glacial pace, to consider the legislation.

“We reject what some parties say — that it is a step towards separation — because we have drafted the Kurdistan oil law depending on Article 111 of the Iraqi Constitution, which says oil and natural resources are properties of Iraqi people,” said Jamal Abdullah, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government. “Both Iraqi and Kurdish oil laws depend on that article,” Mr. Abdullah said.

The other crucial players are the Sunnis and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Some members of one of the main Sunni parties, Tawafiq, which insists on federal control of contracts and exclusive state ownership of the fields, bolted when it became convinced that the Kurds had no intention of following those guidelines.

But the prime minister’s office believes there is a simpler reason the Sunnis abandoned or at least held off on the deal: signing it would have given Mr. Maliki a political success that they did not want him to have. “I think there is a political reason behind that delay in order not to see the Iraqi government achieve the real agreement,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Mr. Maliki. Mr. Rikabi was at Wednesday’s meeting.

Ali Baban, who as a senior member of Tawafiq negotiated the compromise, said that allegation was untrue. “I have a good relationship” with Mr. Maliki, he said. “This is an issue of Iraqi unity. This could cause a split in this country.”

Mr. Maliki has suggested returning to the original language agreed to in February and trying once again to push the law through Parliament. Mr. Salih says there is basic agreement on returning to that language, but conceded that Sunni participants in Wednesday’s meeting might insist on a deal that includes changes to the Iraqi Constitution to safeguard their interests in the distribution of revenues. A law on how the revenue should be shared is being developed as a critical companion piece of legislation to the draft law.

The central element of the compromise was agreed to in February after months of difficult negotiations among Iraq’s political groups.

The main parties in those negotiations were Iraqi Kurds, who were eager to sign contracts with international oil companies to develop their northern fields; Arab Shiites, whose population is concentrated around the country’s southern fields; and Arab Sunnis, with fewer oil resources where they predominate.

Those facts meant that the compromise law had to satisfy both the Sunni insistence that the central government maintain strong control over the fields as well as the push by the Kurds and Shiites to give provincial governments substantial authority to write contracts and carry out their own development plans.

Somehow negotiators managed to strike that balance, but soon after, the agreement began to crumble. Many of the negotiations centered on a federal committee that would be set up to review the contracts signed with oil companies to carry out the development and exploitation of the fields. The Kurds objected to any requirement that the committee would have to approve contracts. So in a nuanced bit of language, the negotiators gave the committee the power only to reject contracts that did not meet precisely specified criteria.

But problems immediately cropped up after the cabinet approved the draft law and, in what seemed to be a perfunctory step, it went to a council that was supposed to hone the language to be sure it complied with Iraqi legal conventions.

When the draft emerged from that council, the members of some parties, particularly the Kurdish ones, thought that the careful balance struck in the draft had been upset, and they accused Mr. Shahristani of meddling. Then the law languished in Parliament and, said Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, the Kurds decided to send a signal that they would not wait indefinitely and signed the contract with Dana Gas.

“It served as a reminder: ‘If you keep stalling, life goes on,’ ” said Mr. Zebari, who is Kurdish.

On Monday the Kurdistan Regional Government, or K.R.G., issued another rejoinder to the oil minister’s views that the Kurds’ moves were illegal. “His views are irrelevant to what the K.R.G. is doing legally and constitutionally in Kurdistan,” the regional government said.

Mr. Shahristani was apparently traveling and did not respond to e-mail messages sent Wednesday. But Saleem Abdullah al-Juburi, a Tawafiq member who participated in Wednesday’s meeting, gave his own assessment of the Kurdish agreements with Hunt and Dana Gas. “The contracts are not legal,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Ahmad Fadam, Ali Hamdani and Khalid al-Ansary from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from northern Iraq.

Oil Buddies

by John Marshall
Talking Points Memo

An article in tomorrow's Times reports that the long-negotiated compromise which seemed to be leading towards an Iraqi oil law -- a key 'progress' benchmark -- has apparently collapsed. All gone down the drain.

The story though connects up with another one we told you about just a couple days ago -- the decision of the Kurdistan regional government to sign an oil exploration deal with Dallas-based Hunt Oil, run by Mr. Ray L. Hunt.

The Shia and Sunni leaders believe the Kurds are opting for a sort of oil secession that puts them outside the whole concept of a law to share the country's oil resources. And the Hunt deal is apparently the straw that broke the camel's back, shall we say.

But remember, Hunt, in addition to being the son of legendary Texas John Birch Society extremist H.L. Hunt, is also a pal of the president's. Indeed, President Bush has twice appointed Hunt to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. So while the president is striving to get the Iraqis to meet these benchmarks one of his own pals -- and more importantly, political appointees -- is busy helping to tear the whole thing apart.

Big Coal Tries to Recruit Military to Kindle a Market

Big Coal Tries to Recruit Military to Kindle a Market Use as Liquid Fuel Is an Aim, but Cost, Pollution Are Issues

by Matthew Dalton
WSJ

The coal industry wants the U.S. military to jump-start a major new market for its product: liquid transportation fuels derived from coal.

The effort, however, faces skeptics who say the Pentagon shouldn't be subsidizing the high cost and potential environmental harm of what is known as coal-to-liquids technology.


The debate, unfolding in Washington, underscores the difficulty of finding alternatives to oil in a time of global supply concerns. Unconventional sources -- from Canada's vast tar sands, to natural-gas liquids, to ethanol -- promise to supplement supplies of crude from difficult-to-reach or politically unstable regions. Yet these sources face their own challenges, with cost often a major stumbling block.

Expanding coal demand beyond the traditional uses of generating electricity and making steel could lead to big profits for both coal miners and companies that develop coal-to-liquids technology. Greg Boyce, chief executive of major coal miner Peabody Energy Corp. of St. Louis, said at a conference last week that using coal to make transportation fuel could increase annual U.S. coal demand by one billion tons by 2030, compared with demand of 1.2 billion tons in 2006.

The problem is the plants that do the job are expensive to build and are profitable only if the price of crude oil stays well above $40 per barrel, according to industry estimates. Benchmark light, sweet crude is currently trading above $70 a barrel on New York futures markets, but the oil markets over the long term have proven susceptible to spikes and drops.

Yesterday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude for October delivery rose 1% to settle at $77.49 a barrel.

The plants, therefore, need military support to get built, Mr. Boyce said. "Lining up the $8 billion worth of capital without baseload off-take agreements is a challenge today."

A commitment from the Defense Department to buy fuel above the break-even production cost could ease doubts about the technology. That would require a change to federal procurement laws, an effort backed by the coal industry and some Pentagon officials, but challenged by skeptics and some lawmakers.

The industry says the value of a natural fuel resource in the U.S., home to some of the world's largest coal reserves, should be worth the higher cost of fuel made from coal. Political instability in the Middle East, along with declining global oil reserves, will pose more serious threats to the military's fuel supply over the next two decades, the industry argues.

"Competition for global oil is only going to get more intense and more pricey," said Corey Henry, spokesman for the Coal to Liquids Coalition, a group representing miners and coal-to-liquids technology companies.

The coal-to-liquids process, known as Fischer-Tropsch, is a proven technology, proponents say. Nazi Germany derived about half the military fuel it used in World War II from the Fischer-Tropsch process. South Africa relied heavily on the process because of international sanctions in the apartheid era that limited the country's ability to import oil.
[Coal]

Others are skeptical. They say the armed forces buy and consume a large percentage of fuel overseas, making it less useful to rely on fuels produced domestically. If the military wants to develop an assured supply of domestically available fuel, one option would be to create a military petroleum reserve that could be tapped in a crisis.

"Right now, coal-to-liquids looks to me to be pretty darn low on the reasonable list of alternatives," said James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Woolsey is participating in a report being prepared by the Defense Science Board, which advises the Pentagon, on the military's energy policy.

Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, who is also participating in the Defense Science Board's report, said the military doesn't need its own dedicated fuel supply.

"The notion that the Pentagon has to spend all this money to give itself assured supply is kind of a contrived argument," Mr. Romm said. "The consensus of just about everybody on the panel was it didn't make sense."

A major problem confronting the coal-to-liquids industry is global warming. The Fischer-Tropsch process produces more than twice as much carbon dioxide, the main global-warming gas, as refining fuel from petroleum.

Proponents say coal-to-liquids plants can be outfitted to capture carbon dioxide and store it in underground caverns. It can even be piped to oil fields and pumped underground to help retrieve oil. But adding this capability also adds hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of each plant.

A coal-to-liquids plant that doesn't capture carbon dioxide can turn a profit with oil at $40 per barrel, but a plant with this capability can be profitable only when oil trades above $50 to $55 a barrel. The industry estimates that building an 80,000-barrel-per-day coal-to-liquids refinery would cost $7 billion to $9 billion, compared with less than $2 billion to build a similar-size petroleum refinery.

There are other environmental problems with coal-to-liquids plants, skeptics say. The Fischer-Tropsch process also uses five to seven gallons of water for each gallon of fuel produced, according to a 2006 Energy Department report. "Many of the places they talk about putting these plants, like the West, don't have this type of water to waste," Mr. Romm said.

This problem recently led China to scale back major investments it was making into coal-to-liquids plants. In July, China's National Development and Reform Commission, the state's industrial watchdog, restricted approval for coal-to-liquids plants, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

The effort nevertheless has some backers at the Pentagon. The Air Force, which consumes the most fuel of the military services, supports using coal-to-liquids fuel. It recently certified the B-52 bomber to run on a blend of Fischer-Tropsch fuel and normal fuel. The Air Force plans to do the same for its entire fleet by 2011. The Air Force intends to buy about 400 million gallons annually by 2016. The service supports legislation that would allow it to sign 25 year contracts for supply, even at historically high prices above $50 per barrel, said William Anderson, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and logistics.

"If the legislation helps spur on a market that is necessary, we believe, to ensure our long term national security, we believe it's something that has a lot of merit," Mr. Anderson said.

The military faces a five-year limit on how long it can sign contracts for supplies. Without the certainty that the military will be there to buy this product, regardless of what happens to oil prices, investors are unlikely to back coal-to-liquids plants.

The Coal To Liquids Coalition hopes to extend the contracting authority to 25 years. Earlier this year, the House rejected several provisions that would provide loan guarantees and tax breaks for coal-to-liquids plants as part of comprehensive energy legislation moving through Congress. Changing the military's contracting authority is now probably the coal industry's best chance of receiving federal support.

A spokesman for Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declined to comment. A spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee didn't respond to calls seeking comment.

The Saudi Binladin Group is not liable for the Sept. 11 attacks

by Larry Neumeister
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Saudi Binladin Group is not liable for the Sept. 11 attacks, attorneys for the multinational engineering firm claim, because it made Osama bin Laden surrender his stake in the company 14 years ago.

Responding in federal court to lawsuits over the attacks, the lawyers wrote that in 1993, the terrorist mastermind was forced out as a shareholder in two companies his family owns.

The company filed the defense papers late Friday in U.S. District Court in answer to claims brought by representatives, survivors and insurance carriers of the victims. The plaintiffs, who seek billions of dollars in damages, allege the Saudi Binladin Group, along with numerous banks, charities and individuals worldwide, provided material support and assistance to al-Qaida prior to the attacks.

The plaintiffs contend Bakr bin Laden - Osama bin Laden's brother, the senior member of the bin Laden family and chairman of Saudi Binladin Group - was one of al-Qaida's principal financiers.

A judge in July had ordered Saudi Binladin Group to provide additional information about where the money for Osama bin Laden's 2 percent stake in the company went.

In the Friday filing, lawyers for Saudi Binladin Group said Bakr Binladin publicly renounced Osama bin Laden in a statement released to the media in February 1994. Two months later, the Saudi government revoked Osama bin Laden's citizenship and froze his assets, the lawyers noted.

These actions, they said, occurred well before the United States first placed Osama bin Laden on its list of designated terrorist individuals and organizations on Aug. 20, 1998.

Osama bin Laden has more than 50 siblings who share in the fortune amassed after Osama's father, Mohammed Binladin, built his construction empire, elevating his family to among the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia. The al-Qaida founder's financial worth has remained in dispute.

According to the court papers, Saudi Binladin Group was created as the surviving entity of Mohammed Binladin's construction company, which was formed in the 1930s. Mohammad Binladin died in 1967, and ownership of his companies was passed along to his children.

The lawyers said the Saudi Binladin Group had helped the United States, building the King Abdul Aziz Air Base, from which U.S. forces operated during the first Gulf War.

The Sept. 11 commission concluded that the Sudanese government took Osama bin Laden's assets when he left the Sudan in 1996.

"He left Sudan with practically nothing," the commission concluded. "When bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, he relied on the Taliban until he was able to reinvigorate his fundraising efforts by drawing on ties to wealthy Saudi individuals that he had established during the Afghan war in the 1980s."

Lawyers for the bin Laden family companies have said Osama bin Laden never received any buyout payment. They said the companies consulted with Saudi authorities, who directed that the money be placed in trust outside Osama bin Laden's control.

A message left Monday with a lawyer for the plaintiffs was not immediately returned.

Vital Lockerbie evidence 'was tampered with'

Fragments of bomb timer that helped to convict a Libyan ex-agent were 'practically carbonised' before the trial, says bankrupt Swiss businessman

by Alex Duval Smith
OBSERVER

The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake.

Nearly two decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland on 21 December, 1988, allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a crucial 'timer' - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the bombing to the crime.

The disaster killed 270 people when the London to New York Boeing 747 exploded in mid-air. Britain and the US blamed Libya, saying that its leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, wanted revenge for the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986. At a trial in the Netherlands in 2001, former Libyan agent Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life.

He is currently serving his sentence in Greenock prison, but later this month the Scottish Court of Appeal is expected to hear Megrahi's case, after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled in June that there was enough evidence to suggest a miscarriage of justice. Lumpert's confession, which was given to police in his home city of Zurich last week, will strengthen Megrahi's appeal.

The Zurich-based Swiss businessman Edwin Bollier, who has spent nearly two decades trying to clear his company's name, is as eager for the appeal as is Megrahi. Bollier's now bankrupt company, Mebo, manufactured the timer switch that prosecutors used to implicate Libya after they said that fragments of it had been found on a Scottish hillside.

Bollier, now 70, admits having done business with Libya. 'Two years before Lockerbie, we sold 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military. FBI agents and the Scottish investigators said one of those timers had been used to detonate the bomb. We were shown a fuzzy photograph and I confirmed the fragments looked as though they came from one of our timers.'

However, Bollier was uneasy with the photograph he had been shown and asked to see the fragments. He was finally given permission in 1998 and travelled to Dumfries to see the evidence.

'I was shown fragments of a brown circuit board which matched our prototype. But when the MST-13 went into production, the timers contained green boards. I knew that the timers sold to Libya had green boards. I told the investigators this.'

Back in Switzerland, Bollier's company was in effect bankrupt, having faced a lawsuit from Pan Am and having lost major clients, such as the German federal police to which Mebo supplied communications equipment.

In 2001, Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. 'I was a defence witness, but the trial was so skewed to prove Libyan involvement that the details of what I had to say was ignored. A photograph of the fragments was produced in court and I asked to see the pieces again. When they were brought to me, they were practically carbonised. They had been tampered with since I had seen them in Dumfries.'

Few people apart from conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists working on the case were prepared to believe Bollier until the end of last month, when Lumpert, one of his former employees, walked into a Zurich police station and asked to swear an affidavit before a notary.