Al Qaeda not only seems to understand the nature of politics and media in democratic societies but also knows how to work the system to gain strategic advantages.

It would be naïve to assume that Al Qaeda will not vote in the coming American elections in November 2004. The issue that we must ponder is how it's going to cast its ballot? To understand how Al Qaeda will vote, we must try to figure out whom it will prefer in the White House, Bush or Kerry?

If John Kerry wins in November he will probably make the following changes in American foreign policy:

1. He will roll back American unilateralism and seek more international cooperation from Europe, South Asia, Middle East and the UN. Instead of a coalition of the coerced, Kerry will seek a truly international coalition. Coalitions built through a multilateral process will present fewer fissures in the anti-terror campaign for Al Qaeda to exploit.

2. Most probably John Kerry will be interested in reducing rather than expanding the scope and objectives of counter-terrorism. Neocon goals such as reshaping the Middle East, reforming Islam, reconstituting the United States defence doctrines and redefining old Europe, will be abandoned and under Kerry the US will concentrate more on eliminating Al Qaeda and associates than anything else.

3. Much of soft anti-Americanism worldwide is a result of anti-Bushism. Regardless of what Americans think, most of the world finds President Bush uncouth, obnoxious, arrogant, crude and a bully. His defeat itself will reduce anti-Americanism globally and will increase American prospects for victory in this war on terror.

Will Al Qaeda be happy with these developments? I doubt it. Anti-Bushism has helped them divide the world and the growing anger in the Muslim world as a result of George Bush?s policies has helped them gain recruits, clones and support. If Bush loses in November they will lose an important asset. Al Qaeda will become the sole target of US energies and surely that must be a disturbing thought to even those who relish the idea of dying while fighting America.

If George W Bush wins in spite of a terrible economy and millions of job losses:

1. He might interpret the victory as an endorsement of his anti-terror strategy and probably continue to expand the scope and objectives of his war on terror. Perhaps regime changes in Iran, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia may be back on the "to do" list. It is possible that Spain may also figure on the list of regime changes.

2. It is also possible that many European and Middle Eastern states may stop cooperating with the US. Already many nations resent President Bush?s policies and style, they may begin to actively oppose his global agenda. The easiest way to do so is to withdraw from the coalition and call for more UN participation. We might see more and more nations following Spain's example and disengaging from the American bandwagon.

All of the above will help Al Qaeda pursue its strategic goals: undermine the West, hurt Americans and American interests, destabilise politics and economies in South Asia and the Middle East and cement the growing cleavages between the US and Europe and the US and the Muslim World.

It is in Al Qaeda's interest that President Bush stays in the White House. Thus at the moment they are anti-American but Pro-Bush. Come November they will vote for Bush. . . .

Al Qaeda can make security a more pressing issue than economy by increasing their activities and even by targeting America again. Karl Rove, the president's political guru will probably work to ensure that culture continues to figure in the American voter's mind.

But if Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri are both arrested/killed soon, then security will be out of the reckoning and Kerry will win unless new jobs are created in hurry.

As we approach November, Bin Laden and his associates will increase the frequency and intensity of their attacks to ensure that George W Bush Wins. Al Qaeda will be determined to make security a bigger issue than economy so the worse the economy gets the worse terrorism we are likely to see.

A Louisiana Marine responsible for an offensive photograph made in Iraq last summer was awaiting word Wednesday on a disciplinary decision by the Marine Corps, a military spokesman said.

Lance Cpl. Ted J. Boudreaux, a reservist with the 3rd Battalion/23rd Marines who hails from Thibodaux, became the subject of a formal investigation last week after a photo in circulation on the Internet came to the attention of a Muslim public relations firm in Washington, D.C.

In the photo, Boudreaux is shown with two Iraqi boys. All three are smiling, and all three are flashing a "thumbs-up" sign. The middle boy is holding a handmade cardboard sign that reads in English, "Lcpl. Boudreaux killed my dad then he knocked up my sister."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which describes itself as "dedicated to presenting an Islamic perspective on issues of importance to the American public," but which also has been identified as "a radical Islamic group" by experts in congressional testimony, posted the photo on its Web site last week and demanded a Pentagon investigation. The results of that probe were expected Wednesday, but Capt. Jeff Pool, a local Marine reserves spokesman, said it would not be released until Boudreaux had been notified.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 15 -- A senior Iranian diplomat was shot and killed as he was driving to Tehran's diplomatic mission in Baghdad today, witnesses said.

Iran's state television identified the man as the first secretary of Iran's embassy in Baghdad, Khalil Naimi, news agencies reported. He was killed while approaching the embassy in his car, witnesses said.

The killing could complicate the mission of an Iranian government delegation that is in Iraq trying mediate the standoff between American troops and a rebel Shiite cleric. The delegation, which arrived in Baghdad on Wednesday, traveled today to the southern town of Najaf where the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, has been holed up.

The victim was apparently not a member of the Iranian negotiating team, and it was unclear whether the killing was related to the delegation's visit. . . .

On Wednesday, Lakhdar Brahimi, the special envoy, ended an 11-day visit to Iraq by outlining the beginnings of a plan -- he called it a "sketch" -- for a transition to Iraqi sovereignty; it suggested a weaker continuing role for the United States than the Bush administration has envisioned. Among other things, he suggested that the Iraqi Governing Council, the American-appointed advisory body seen by United States officials as the most viable nucleus of a transitional government after June 30, should "cease to exist" on that date.

American officials in Baghdad and Washington said the Iranian delegation was in Iraq at the suggestion of Britain, not the United States, although they said the United States had consented to the visit. But some American officials acknowledged that the moment marked a rare cooperation in 25 years of enmity between Washington and Tehran, even if the Iranians were trying to extend Iranian influence as well as broker a peace.

The situation was also odd for Iran and Iraq, which fought each other to a stalemate in an eight-year war in the 1980's. That conflict was prompted in part by Saddam Hussein's fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, about 60 percent of the country's population, would be influenced by the Iranian revolution in 1979 that brought a militant form of Shiite Islam to power. Many in Iraq's Sunni minority remain fearful that Iraq might fall under the domination of militant Shiite ayatollahs.

The Iranian delegation was headed by Hossein Sadeghi, the Foreign Ministry's director of Persian Gulf affairs. In remarks to reporters on Wednesday, he played down Iran's role, saying it would be one not of mediation, but of gaining "a better understanding of what's going on in Iraq."

But the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, said earlier in Tehran that the delegation was responding to an appeal for assistance, and would do all it could to end the crisis.

WASHINGTON, April 14 ? George J. Tenet and his deputies at the Central Intelligence Agency were presented in August 2001 with a briefing paper labeled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly" about the arrest days earlier of Zacarias Moussaoui, but did not act on the information, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Wednesday.

An interim report by the panel's staff offered a stinging assessment of the C.I.A. under Mr. Tenet's leadership and was made public during a hearing at which Mr. Tenet disclosed that he had little contact with President Bush during much of the summer of 2001, a period when intelligence agencies were warning of a dire terrorist threat.

Mr. Tenet, the director of central intelligence since 1997, testified that he had no contact at all with Mr. Bush in August, the month in which the president received a C.I.A. report suggesting that terrorists of Al Qaeda were already in the United States and might be planning a domestic airplane hijacking.

The agency later telephoned reporters on Wednesday to correct Mr. Tenet's testimony, saying he met once with the president during Mr. Bush's nearly monthlong vacation that August at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., and once again when Mr. Bush returned to Washington later that month. In defending Mr. Bush from recent contentions that he was not sufficiently attentive to domestic terrorist threats before Sept. 11, the White House has cited his face-to-face meetings with Mr. Tenet as proof of his interest.

In an otherwise dry day of hearings before the 9/11 commission, one brief bit of dialogue set off a sudden flash of clarity on the basic question of how our government let disaster happen.

The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI's Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001.

Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, "I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation." He added that he didn't see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, "on leave."

And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn't talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.

Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years?as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning?the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.

And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn't with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice?as she has testified?wasn't with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch. . . .

Anyone who has ever spent time in Washington knows that the whole town takes off the month of August. Despite the "threat spike," August 2001, it seems, was no different.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB?let alone the Moussaoui finding?should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title?"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"?was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)

Bush got back after Labor Day. That first day, Sept. 4, was when the "Principals Committee"?consisting of his Cabinet heads?met in the White House to discuss terrorism. As Dick Clarke has since complained, and Condi Rice and others have acknowledged, it was the first time Bush's principals held a meeting on the subject.

This morning, Roemer asked Tenet if he brought up the Moussaoui briefing at that meeting. No, Tenet replied. "It wasn't the appropriate place." Roemer didn't follow up and ask, "Why not? Where was the appropriate place?" Perhaps he was too stunned. He sure looked it.

The official story about the PDB is that the CIA prepared it at the president's request. Bush had heard all Tenet's briefings about a possible al-Qaida attack overseas, the tale goes, and he wanted to know if Bin Laden might strike here. This story is almost certainly untrue. On March 19 of this year, Tenet told the 9/11 commission that the PDB had been prepared, as usual, at a CIA analyst's initiative. He later retracted that testimony, saying the president had asked for the briefing. Tenet embellished his new narrative, saying that the CIA officer who gave the briefing to Bush and Condi Rice started by reminding the president that he had requested it. But as Rice has since testified, she was not present during the briefing; she wasn't in Texas. Someone should ask: Was that the only part of the tale that Tenet made up? Or did he invent the whole thing?and, if so, on whose orders?

I will . . . be going to New York to brief the Secretary-General and seek his guidance on the way forward. I also expect to meet the President and Members of the Security Council.

My recommendations to the Secretary-General will be finalized only after our return to Iraq and after we conduct more consultations, with more people in Baghdad and elsewhere in this country.

I can, however, share with you a few thoughts, a few preliminary observations and a few still very tentative ideas we are discussing:

1. We believe that the present security situation makes it more important and more urgent for the political process to continue and we expect all stakeholders to re-double their efforts to ensure this process is successfully completed.

2. Let me emphasise from the outset that in this political process in Iraq, the elections scheduled to take place in January 2005 are the most important milestone. There is no substitute for the legitimacy that comes from free and fair elections. Therefore, Iraq will have a genuinely representative Government only after January 2005.

3. What the aim should be, at present, is to put in place a caretaker Government that will be in charge from 1st July 2004 until the elections in January 2005. We are confident that it will be possible to form such a Government in a timely manner, i.e. during the month of May 2004. We see it as a Government led by a Prime Minister and comprising Iraqi men and women known for their honesty, integrity and competence. There will also be a President to act as Head of State and two Vice-Presidents.

4. According to both the 15 November 2003 Agreement and the Transitional Administrative Law, the Governing Council, along with the CPA, will cease to exist on 30 June 2004. Some of its members are already assuming other responsibilities. Other members will no doubt be called upon to participate in various State institutions.

5. During our consultations, a very large number of our interlocutors suggested that a large National Conference should be convened. We see merit in this suggestion. It would serve the all-important aim of promoting national dialogue, consensus building and national reconciliation in Iraq. A preparatory Committee should be established soon to start the preparatory work and the Conference could take place soon after the restoration of sovereignty, in July 2004.

6. The National Conference would elect a Consultative Assembly to serve alongside the Government during the period leading to the elections of the National Assembly which, it is agreed, will take place in January 2005.

7. To return to the subject of elections, a U.N. electoral team has been in Baghdad for some time now. They are working diligently to help with the preparatory work for the January 2005 elections. They have visited some cities in the North and in the South. Like us, their movements are somewhat restricted at present by the prevailing security situation. But they remain confident that they can help out. But it is important and urgent that, on the Iraqi side, the necessary steps are taken, so that elections can take place at the appointed time in January 2005. Naturally, the security situation has to improve significantly for these elections to take place in an acceptable environment.

8. Last but not least, during our consultations, in February as well as at present, we heard of many grievances which need to be addressed. Detainees are held often without charge or trial. They should be either charged or released, and their families and lawyers must have access to them. The issue of former military personnel also needs attention. Furthermore, it is difficult to understand that thousands upon thousands of teachers, university professors, medical doctors and hospital staff, engineers and other professionals who are sorely needed, have been dismissed within the de-Baathification process, and far too many of those cases have yet to be reviewed.

All these are ideas which will be submitted to the Secretary-General and further discussed both during the wide consultations scheduled to be organized by the Committee set up for this purpose by the Governing Council and by our own team. I believe that the political framework that I outlined for the setting up of the interim government, the organization of a national dialogue conference, combined with a number of confidence building measures addressing real concerns of the Iraqis, should, I hope, help this country to move forward towards recovery, peace and stability.

Today, the government provides as much solid, objective economic information and analysis in a month as it used to in a decade.

This steady flow of data is easy to take for granted; few things, surely, are as dreary as a soybean-export-price index. But the economy depends on these numbers; they make business smoother and policy smarter. (Recessions after the Second World War, for instance, have lasted about half as long as recessions before it.) This is why . . . the government?s basic assumption, at least when it comes to economic data, has been: the more information, the better, no matter how dismal it may be.

The Bush Administration has adopted a different approach: what you don?t know won?t hurt you. Consider Thomas Scully, who was, until recently, the head of Medicare and the point man in the White House?s effort to get its drug benefit through Congress. Last spring, Richard Foster, Medicare?s chief actuary, analyzed the Bush proposal and estimated that it would cost five hundred and fifty billion dollars over a decade: roughly a hundred and fifty billion more than the President had said it would. Scully, knowing that Congress was already leery about the price tag, and that Foster?s estimate might sink the bill, made sure that the numbers never got out. As Foster recalls it, Scully said that he?d fire him if they did. Foster kept his mouth shut, and the bill passed the House by one vote. Last January, the Office of Management and Budget issued its own estimate, which echoed Foster?s. The bill is expected to cost well over five hundred billion dollars.

Statistical expediency and fiscal obfuscation have become hallmarks of this White House. In the past three years, the Bush Administration has had the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop reporting mass layoffs. It shortened the traditional span of budget projections from ten years to five, which allowed it to hide the long-term costs of its tax cuts. It commissioned a report on the aging of the baby boomers, then quashed it because it projected deficits as far as the eye could see. The Administration declined to offer cost estimates or to budget money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A recent report from the White House?s Council of Economic Advisers included an unaccountably optimistic job-growth forecast, evidently guided by the Administration?s desire to claim that it will have created jobs. And a few weeks ago the Treasury Department put civil servants to work?at Tom DeLay?s request?evaluating a tax proposal identical to John Kerry?s, then issued a press release saying that the proposal would raise taxes on ?hardworking individuals.? (Lazy individuals breathed a sigh of relief.)

Politics as usual? Not really. Hard as it may be to believe, in economic matters the executive branch has traditionally succeeded at hewing to the ideals of objectivity and nonpartisanship. Under Republicans and Democrats, in good times and bad, the Commerce Department and the Labor Department have produced reliable numbers, even when those numbers have made sitting Presidents look worse. Presidents have tried to put their spin on the data, of course, and there have been notable episodes of deliberate manipulation, as when Lyndon Johnson moved the Social Security Trust Fund into the general budget, or when David Stockman fabricated numbers in the first Reagan budget. On the whole, though, good economics has trumped politics.

The people who have made this possible are among the most heavily scorned figures in American life?George Wallace?s ?pointy-headed bureaucrats.? Career civil servants are easy targets: protective of their bailiwick, certain of their indispensability, diminished by their sinecure. But what makes them assailable also makes them valuable. They?re the only professionals in government?the only ones who can say what they think instead of what they believe their bosses or voters want them to. Their long tenures foster expertise and make nonpartisanship possible. Would we trust the unemployment numbers if, every time a new President came along, he replaced the entire Bureau of Labor Statistics with a new crop of cronies and campaign aides?

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Some Iraqi nuclear facilities appear to be unguarded, and radioactive materials are being taken out of the country, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency reported after reviewing satellite images and equipment that has turned up in European scrapyards.

The International Atomic Energy Agency sent a letter to U.S. officials three weeks ago informing them of the findings. The information was also sent to the U.N. Security Council in a letter from its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, that was circulated Thursday.

The IAEA is waiting for a reply from the United States, which is leading the coalition administering Iraq, officials said.

The United Sattes has virtually cut off information-sharing with the IAEA since invading Iraq in March 2002 on the premise that the country was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

No such weapons have been found, and arms control officials now worry the war and its chaotic aftermath may have increased chances that terrorists could get their hands on materials used for unconventional weapons or that civilians may be unknowingly exposed to radioactive materials.

According to ElBaradei's letter, satellite imagery shows "extensive removal of equipment and in some instances, removal of entire buildings," in Iraq.

In addition, "large quanitities of scrap, some of it contaminated, have been transfered out of Iraq from sites" previously monitored by the IAEA. . . .

The IAEA has been unable to investigate, monitor or protect Iraqi nuclear materials since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003. The United States has refused to allow the IAEA or other U.N. weapons inspectors into the country, claiming that the coalition has taken over responsibility for illict weapons searches.

According to a stunning report posted by a retired Navy Lt Commander and 28-year veteran of the Defense Department (DoD), the Bush administration's assurance about finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was based on a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to "plant" WMDs inside the country. Nelda Rogers, the Pentagon whistleblower, claims the plan failed when the secret mission was mistakenly taken out by "friendly fire", the Environmentalists Against War report.

Nelda Rogers is a 28-year veteran debriefer for the DoD. She has become so concerned for her safety that she decided to tell the story about this latest CIA-military fiasco in Iraq. According to Al Martin Raw.com, "Ms Rogers is number two in the chain of command within this DoD special intelligence office. This is a ten-person debriefing unit within the central debriefing office for the Department of Defense."

The information that is being leaked out is information ?obtained while she was in Germany heading up the debriefing of returning service personnel, involved in intelligence work in Iraq for the DoD and/or the CIA. "According to Ms Rogers, there was a covert military operation that took place both preceding and during the hostilities in Iraq," reports Al Martin Raw.com, an online subscriber-based news/analysis service which provides "Political, Economic and Financial Intelligence".

Al Martin is a retired Lt Commander (US Navy), the author of a memoir called "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider," and is considered one of America's foremost experts on corporate and government fraud. Ms Rogers reports that this particular covert operation team was manned by former military personnel and "the unit was paid through the Department of Agriculture in order to hide it, which is also very commonplace".

According to Al Martin Raw.com, "the Agriculture Department has often been used as a paymaster on behalf of the CIA, DIA, NSA and others". According to the Al Martin Raw.com story, another aspect of Ms Rogers' report concerns a covert operation which was to locate the assets of Saddam Hussein and his family, including cash, gold bullion, jewelry and assorted valuable antiquities. The problem became evident when "the operation in Iraq involved 100 people, all of whom apparently are now dead, having succumbed to so-called 'friendly fire'. The scope of this operation included the penetration of the Central Bank of Iraq, other large commercial banks in Baghdad, the Iraqi National Museum and certain presidential palaces where monies and bullion were secreted."

"They identified about $2 billion in cash, another $150 million in Euros, in physical banknotes, and about another $100 million in sundry foreign currencies ranging from Yen to British Pounds," reports Al Martin.

"These people died, mostly in the same place in Baghdad, supposedly from a stray cruise missile or a combination of missiles and bombs that went astray," Martin continues. "There were supposedly 76 who died there and the other 24 died through a variety of 'friendly fire', 'mistaken identity' and some of them?their whereabouts are simply unknown." Ms Rogers' story sounds like an updated 21st-century version of Treasure Island meets Ali Baba and the Bush Cabal Thieves, writes Martin.

"This was a contingent of CIA/ DoD operatives, but it was really the CIA that bungled it," Ms Rogers said. "They were relying on the CIA's ability to organise an effort to seize these assets and to be able to extract these assets because the CIA claimed it had resources on the ground within the Iraqi army and the Iraqi government who had been paid. That turned out to be completely bogus. As usual."

"CIA people were supposed to be handling it," Martin continues. "They had a special 'black' aircraft to fly it out. But none of that happened because the regular US Army showed up, stumbled onto it and everyone involved had to scramble. These new Iraqi 'asset seizures' go directly to the New US Ruling Junta. The US Viceroy in Iraq Paul Bremer is reportedly drinking Saddam's $2000 a bottle Napoleon-era brandy, smoking his expensive Davidoff cigars and he has even furnished his office with Saddam's Napoleon-era furniture.

Hmm. On 4/15/04, Google News returns zero results for "Nelda Rogers," and her name no longer appears in Google-archived pages at almartinraw.com, where the story appears to have originated -- see The Sydney Morning Herald of 3/16/04 (byline Margo Kingston) for tidbits, and indymedia.org for a reproduction of a story from the now-defunct iraqwar.ru dated 6/20/03. See also two stories from the Iranian Mehr News Agency dated 3/13/04 and 4/13/04 (reproduced at commondreams.org, though its front page does not link to them on 4/15/04).

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, secured a decisive shift in US policy on the Middle East as he won pivotal backing last night from George Bush for his plan to disengage from Gaza and a handful of settlements in the West Bank.

While hailing the plan as a "historic and courageous act" which would provide a new opportunity to revive the peace process, President Bush publicly tilted policy towards the Sharon government by indicating for the first time that Israel could retain some of its biggest settlements on the West Bank in any final peace deal with the Palestinians.

At the same time, Mr Bush made it explicitly clear that any final deal would not provide for refugee families displaced by the 1948 war to return to Israel. Instead, he said, they could return to the Palestinian state which he insisted could still emerge from a revived peace process. . . .

The US President was careful to make it clear that the exact borders between a Palestinian and an Israeli state were a matter for "final status" negotiations. But in a clear sign that he did not expect the borders to conform exactly with those that existed between 1949 and 1967, he said that "realities on the ground and in the region have changed greatly" in recent decades, and that would have to be recognised in any peace deal.

This goes a long way to meeting Mr Sharon's desire for an acknowledgement that the five biggest settlements on the Palestinian side of the 1967 border would remain in Israeli hands in perpetuity. In an implicit reference to a similar - but private - endorsement offered by the former US president Bill Clinton to Mr Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak, in abortive negotiations in 2000, Mr Bush said that had been recognised in previous peace negotiations.

Even moderate Palestinian leaders are likely to argue that was part of a proposal the Palestinians had rejected and that Mr Bush's endorsement pre-empts an important bargaining element in any future talks. Before the Sharon-Bush talks got under way, the Palestinian leadership denounced the concessions. A statement from Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, said the agreement between the Mr Bush and Mr Sharon on the border issue would "lead to the destruction of the chances for the peace process and security and stability in the region. It will also restart the vicious cycle of violence in the region and end all the agreements and commitments that have been signed."

Mr Arafat's statement was sharply negative about the Gaza withdrawal plan, dismissing it as little more than a project to turn the territory into a "big prison" because Israel aims to control borders as well as air and sea access. He added: "This deal which Sharon is seeking will take place at the expense of the Palestinian people and without the knowledge of the Palestinian people's legitimate leadership."

An apparently well-satisfied Mr Sharon said at the White House last night that his disengagement plan would create "a new and better reality for the state of Israel" and emphasised it would improve the country's security and economy.

Mr Sharon is now expected to launch his campaign to win support for the disengagement plan in a referendum of 200,000 Likud Party members. The date for the referendum had been set for 29 April but it has now been deferred to 2 May because it would have coincided with the national basketball finals. A low turnout could favour opponents - backed by the main settlers' organisation.

Assuming that the referendum approves the strategy, the two extreme-right coalition partners in the government, the National Union and the National Religious Party, are expected to walk out, leaving the way clear for the Labour Party under Shimon Peres to join a new national unity government under Mr Sharon.

Some more left-wing Labour Knesset members are resisting such a move, but Mr Sharon is confident enough of them will back a new administration.

The Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization yesterday suffered one of their greatest political defeats in years. All Palestinian spokesmen last night reacted with surprise and disappointment to the statements made by U.S. president George Bush, which they viewed as a dramatic and historic shift in American policy. They referred to the two important issues mentioned by the president - recognition of settler blocs in the West Bank, and rejecting the Palestinians' right of return to inside the state of Israel.

The Palestinians are worried about a number of matters of principle. The first is that an American president has for the first time given recognition of some sort to Israeli settlements established in the territories conquered in 1967. The traditional American stance was always that all the settlements were illegal and the American administration used to deduct the sum of Israeli investments in the settlements from the aid money sent to Israel.

PA cabinet member Rassan al-Hatib said last night there was a distinct contradiction between the "road map" and the remarks made by the American president. While the road map demanded that the settlements be frozen and the issues that remained undecided - Jerusalem, the refugees and the final borders - be left for negotiations between the two sides, Bush's remarks yesterday indicated an "irresponsible" change in Washington's positions that, from now on, encourage the Israeli settlement policy which creates facts in the field.

"What is still left to negotiate between us and Israel if President Bush has already made a decision on two key issues, settlements and refugees?" a member of the Palestinian parliament, Ziyad Abu-Amar asked.

Another important matter of principle worrying the Palestinian leadership is the disregard for the Palestinians in the negotiations about their future. The traditional PLO position was that only the Palestinians could determine their own future. This position found expression in the slogan, "We have independence of decision," which was the Fatah's slogan from day one.

The Palestinians who formulated this approach wanted to establish that there would be no intervention on the part of an Arab country, or any other foreign sources, in deciding the interests of the Palestinian people and that it alone would decide its future.

What has happened now is that others - Israel and the Americans, and perhaps even the Likud Party members - will be the ones to decide on the fate of the Palestinian people.

Members of the Palestinian leadership last night were of the opinion that they had suffered a serious blow also because of the tremendously important political undertakings of the Americans toward the Sharon government, even before one Israeli step had been made toward moving out of the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian media frequently call the Sharon plan "the mock withdrawal," because many of them believe he will not carry it out. Therefore what happened yesterday is seen as top-level American support for the positions of the Israeli right even while it is totally unclear how or when the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank will be dismantled.

Even before Bush made his remarks, Yasser Arafat had announced that if the Americans recognized the settlements and negated the right of return, this would be tantamount to putting an end to the peace process. Over the past few years, Arafat has many times warned that there was a danger the peace process would come to an end, and these statements had turned into routine cliches.

But after last night's news conference in Washington, all the Palestinian spokesmen agreed, this time Arafat was right. In view of the change in the American position, the end of the process that started in Oslo has indeed arrived.

Yasser Arafat today insisted that Palestinian refugees would never give up their right to return to their former homes in the West Bank, in defiance of a new US-Israeli initiative to resolve the Middle East conflict.

Mr Arafat spoke one day after President George Bush endorsed a plan that would see Israel retain part of the West Bank - ruling out the creation of a state based on 1967 borders - and block the return of Palestinians refugees there.

In a televised speech, an angry Mr Arafat refrained from mentioning the US directly but denounced the plan, saying: "The fanatical Israeli rulers are wrong and so are those who support them and you know who I mean."

He went on: "The Palestinian people will not give up seeking their freedom and independence and a state with Jerusalem as its capital whether they like it or not. Our fate is that we are the defenders of our land and our holy shrines and our rights and the right of the refugees to return to their homeland."

Earlier, the EU also dismissed the "disengagement plan", saying it would refuse to recognise changes to the Middle East peace plan unless they were agreed to by both sides.

"The European Union will not recognise any change to the pre-1967 borders other than those arrived at by agreement between the parties," Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen said in a statement on behalf of the EU presidency.

Mr Cowen said the 'roadmap' plan, drawn up in 2003 by an international 'quartet' comprising the US, the EU, Russia and the United Nations, stressed that any settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "must include an agreed, just, fair and realistic solution to the refugee issue".

However, Mr Cowen welcomed the emphasis placed by Mr Bush on the need for final negotiations between the parties in order to establish secure and recognised borders and on what he called the Washington's renewed commitment to the roadmap.

However, some analysts say that the shift in US policy will mean the end of the roadmap, which envisaged independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the two occupied territories, alongside Israel.

Mr Cowen said EU foreign ministers will discuss the outcome of yesterday's US-Israeli talks at a meeting tomorrow in Tullamore, Ireland.

The EU statement was in stark contrast to the response from Britain, one of its member states. Prime Minister Tony Blair - who is due to fly to Washington today for talks on Iraq and the Middle East - welcomed the announcement and called on the Palestinian authority to "show the political will to make the withdrawal from Gaza a success".

After White House talks with Sharon yesterday, Mr Bush said: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."

Mr Sharon has made clear that in return for its unilateral pullout from Gaza, Israel intends to keep major Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank indefinitely. Israel has set up about 120 settlements in the West Bank since it capture the area along with the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. It has ringed Jerusalem with large Jewish suburbs, some of which were partially built on occupied land.

The Palestinian Authority's official responses to the "dangerous turn" in American policy - calls for help from all elements involved in the conflict, first and foremost the UN, Russia, and the European countries, America's partners in the Quartet, as well as the the committee of Islamic countries and the Arab states - reveal helplessness. . . .

Rumors were rife in Ramallah yesterday that senior PA officials were discussing the possibility of dismantling the authority, since from a Palestinian perspective, the understandings between U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon meant the end of the political process. This process was the basis for establishing the Palestinian Authority: without it, there is no reason for its existence.

The idea of Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia resigning was also raised yesterday in light of what appears to be a dead end in the peace process. Qureia spent a great deal of time in discussions over the past few weeks in several Arab countries and in Europe, none of which bore fruit.

It was clear to the Palestinian leadership yesterday that Bush's support of Sharon's disengagement plan was the death knell for the road map and its heir. . . .

The only Palestinians who were "happy" with Bush's declaration yesterday were Hamas and Islamic Jihad. "The end has come to the illusion of a political solution under the patronage of the U.S.," said Khaled Mash'al, head of Hamas' political bureau.

Everybody in Falluja has lost someone. There is not a person here who doesn't have a close friend or relative who has been killed, and a lot of them have lost several. We are hearing that the death toll is around 880 civilians, and that within the first few days 86 children were killed.

People have been under bombardment for the last eight days. A lot of people are trapped in their houses still - despite the ceasefire - without food, without water and terrified to leave. Food and medical aid is now arriving but the problem is getting the aid around the city. A lot of it is delivered to the mosque, but then getting it to the hospitals, past the American snipers, is proving to be impossible.

The main hospital apparently has been destroyed by bombing and the second largest is covered by US snipers - the Iraqis call it sniper alley. So Iraqi people are not able to get to and from the hospitals. I was working from a private clinic that had been turned into a hospital, and there was also one other improvised hospital in a car garage. . . .

The times I have been shot at - once in an ambulance and once on foot trying to deliver medical supplies - it was US snipers in both cases. It is so unacceptable to stop medical aid getting through. They could have just asked to search us. . . .

There is nowhere in Falluja that is safe . The only place people can go is Baghdad. At the checkpoint leaving Falluja towards Baghdad, women and children have been trying to leave, but in cars driven by men (women don't drive here) so they weren't allowed out. They are not letting men aged 14 to 45 - of "fighting age" - leave the city.

We negotiated so that one male driver was allowed per car through the checkpoint. But people fear that once a large proportion of women and children leave, the Americans will destroy the city.

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - In Fallujah's darkened, empty streets, U.S. troops blast AC/DC's ``Hell's Bells'' and other rock music full volume from a huge speaker, hoping to grate on the nerves of this Sunni Muslim city's gunmen and give a laugh to Marines along the front line.

Unable to advance farther into the city, an Army psychological operations team hopes a mix of heavy metal and insults shouted in Arabic - including, ``You shoot like a goat herder'' - will draw gunmen to step forward and attack. But no luck Thursday night.

The loud music recalls the Army's use of rap and rock to help flush out Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega after the December 1989 invasion on his country, and the FBI's blaring progressively more irritating tunes in an attempt to end a standoff with armed members of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas in 1993. . . .

Along the front line, Marines have been firing warning shots to scare away dogs chewing on corpses. In some cases, the troops have wrapped bodies in blankets and buried them in shallow graves.

At night, the psychological operations unit attached to the Marine battalion here sends out messages from a loudspeaker mounted on an armored Humvee. On Thursday night, the crew and its Arabic-language interpreter taunted fighters, saying, ``May all the ambulances in Fallujah have enough fuel to pick up the bodies of the mujahadeen.''

The message was specially timed for an attack moments later by an AC-130 gunship that pounded targets in the city.

Later, the team blasted Jimi Hendrix and other rock music, and afterward some sound effects like babies crying, men screaming, a symphony of cats and barking dogs and piercing screeches. They were unable to draw any gunmen to fight, and seemed disappointed.

BAGHDAD, April 17 -- In the space of two weeks, a fierce insurgency in Iraq has isolated the U.S.-appointed civilian government and stopped the American-financed reconstruction effort, as contractors hunker down against waves of ambushes and kidnappings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

The events have also pressured U.S. forces to vastly expand their area of operations within Iraq, while triggering a partial collapse of the new Iraqi security services designed to gradually replace them.

The crisis, which has stirred support for the insurgents across both Sunni and Shiite communities, has also inflamed tensions between Arabs and Kurds.

U.S. officials said they are reconsidering initial assessments that the uprisings might be contained as essentially military confrontations in Fallujah, where Marines continue their siege of a chronically volatile city, and Najaf, where the militant Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr has taken refuge in the shadow of a shrine.

"The Fallujah problem and the Sadr problem are having a wider impact than we expected," a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy said. In Baghdad and Washington, officials had initially concluded that addressing those problems would not engender much anger among ordinary Iraqis. "Sadr's people and the people of Fallujah were seen as isolated and lacking broad support among Iraqis," the official added.

Instead, the official said, "The effect has been profound."

The violence has brought the U.S.-funded reconstruction of Iraq to a near-halt, according to U.S. officials and private contractors.

Thousands of workers for private contractors have been confined to their quarters in the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad that also houses the headquarters of the U.S. occupation authority. Routine trips outside the compound to repair power plants, water-treatment facilities and other parts of Iraq's crumbling infrastructure have been deemed too dangerous, even with armed escorts.

Compounding the problem is a growing fear that insurgents will seek retribution against Iraqis working for private contractors and the occupation authority. Scores of Iraqis have stopped showing up for their jobs as translators, support staff and maintenance personnel in the Green Zone, even though there is a lack of lucrative employment elsewhere.

The security situation "has dramatically affected reconstruction," said another U.S. official in Baghdad. "How can you rebuild the country when you're confined to quarters, when only small portions of your Iraqi staff are showing up for work on any given day?" . . .

The insurgency also appears to be generating new alliances -- and tensions -- among the major sectarian and ethnic groups in Iraq.

The most visible leader of the resistance is Sadr, a firebrand whose appeal long appeared to be limited to the young, unemployed Shiites who made up his militia, the Mahdi Army. However, in a surprising development, his poster began appearing this month at Sunni mosques that previously showed little interest in his activities.

Such displays of unity have dampened fears of a clash between the Sunni minority and Shiite majority communities. But worries about a different kind of civil war have been generated by reports that Iraq's ethnic Kurds are fighting alongside U.S. Marines and against the insurgency.

Guerrillas coming out of Fallujah have complained bitterly that Kurdish militiamen known as pesh merga are deployed against them. The Kurds are members of the 36th Battalion of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, built from several exile-based militias that supported the U.S.-led campaign against Saddam Hussein. Commanders of another, overwhelmingly Arab Iraqi army battalion refused to fight alongside the Marines.

"Worse than pigs, thieves and tramps," read lines in a poem circulating on fliers in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq where Kurds are accused of pushing Arab families off land claimed by both groups. The fliers condemned the leaders of Iraq's two Kurdish parties. It is not known who produced the fliers, which were also seen in Baghdad.

The Kurdish leaders were condemned in chanting that followed Friday prayers at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad.

"When the fighting is over in Fallujah, I will sell everything I have, even my home," said a resistance fighter who gave his name as Abu Taif Mashhadani. He wept as he recalled his 8-year-old daughter, who he said was killed by a U.S. sniper in Fallujah a week ago. "I will send my brothers north to kill the Kurds, and I will go to America and target the civilians. Only the civilians. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And the one who started it will be the one to be blamed."

The American confrontations with Sadr and in Fallujah also have roiled the political landscape by further isolating members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council from the Iraqi population.

In the first few days after Sadr's militiamen clashed with U.S. forces and the Marines surrounded Fallujah, council members -- usually a publicity-hungry lot -- had little to say in public. Although most of them regard the insurgents and militiamen as just as much of a threat as U.S. officials do, few wanted to risk the fallout from condemning a cleric or advocating tough counterinsurgency measures.

But on Baghdad's streets, many Iraqis said they equated the silence with tacit agreement with U.S. policies. In their sermons, clerics lambasted council members, many of whom the Bush administration had hoped would emerge as Iraq's new leaders. At one mosque in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, where streets run with wet garbage, council member Mowaffak Rubaie, a Shiite physician who was recently named national security adviser, was derided as a traitor and "the minister of sewers."

The crises have helped boost the standing of more radical Shiite and Sunni political leaders. Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, a Shiite tribal chief who led guerrilla attacks on Hussein's army in the 1980s and '90s in the southern marshes, gained stature in many Shiite neighborhoods after he suspended his membership in the council because of a disagreement with U.S. policy. Although U.S. officials selected Muhammadawi to sit on the council last summer, they have soured on him in recent months because of his support for an armed militia in southeastern Iraq.

Mohsen Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, has emerged as the council's most influential Sunni member because of his attempts to broker a peace deal in Fallujah. But Abdul Hamid had also been written off months ago by U.S. officials -- for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist Sunni movement that is banned in several Arab nations.

"The politicians the Americans wanted to become popular have lost out to the guys the Americans didn't want to become popular," said an Iraqi adviser to the occupation authority. "It was exactly the outcome they did not want."

One of our great legacies from the British parliamentary system was the use of the national legislature as "the grand inquest of the nation." No less a Founding Father than John Adams believed that Congress was both the first and last resort when the affairs of government went awry. It was natural, then, that only three years after the adoption of the Constitution, Congress held its very first investigation, an inquiry into Gen. Arthur St. Clair's disastrous campaign against rebellious Indians in Ohio, in which he lost half of his soldiers.

In a well-ordered world, Congress would still be playing the lead role in conducting the "grand inquest" into our most recent disaster, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Regrettably, Congress is merely the landlord for the independent commission on 9/11 now holding hearings at the Hart Senate Office Building. The very setting is a reproach to the institution that should have enjoyed exclusive rights to the probe.

Why is Congress losing its status as the definitive investigatory body of governmental conduct? One reason can be expressed as a kind of economic formula: As the frequency of congressional hearings increases, the value of any individual hearing diminishes. So many have occurred so often in recent years, that we tend to forget most of them. Can anyone, other than those directly involved, recall the 1997 Senate investigation of campaign fund-raising chaired by then-Sens. John Glenn and Fred Thompson? Does the public have any vivid recollections of the Senate Whitewater committee's 1995-96 inquiry into the Clintons' real estate dealings in Arkansas? Perhaps Richard Ben-Veniste (now a 9/11 commission member and then the Whitewater committee's chief minority counsel) recalls being accused by Chairman Al D'Amato of attempting to run the committee, but most people probably associate the Whitewater probe with Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, not the U.S. Senate.

In the case of 9/11, there has been no shortage of congressional interest, but for all of the activity on Capitol Hill, it seems to satisfy no one. In 2002, the Senate Judiciary Committee looked into FBI agent Coleen Rowley's allegations that her agency failed to follow up on information that an attack might be in the works. In a rare display of bipartisan collaboration, two of the committee's senior members, Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) requested money to conduct a more exhaustive oversight investigation into what the FBI knew and whether it could have helped prevent the attack. Their effort reportedly was scuttled by Senate Republican leader Trent Lott.

Capitol Hill's principal 9/11 examination was the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, which released its report in 2003. The panel, consisting of the House and Senate intelligence committees, first questioned many of the officials who have appeared before the 9/11 commission in the past two weeks and first raised the need to examine the President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001. The White House rebuffed the joint committee's formal request to see the classified document, invoking the now-familiar doctrine of executive privilege.

The executive privilege defense is highly effective against congressional inquiries because of the presumption that Congress can't probe endlessly into executive branch affairs without violating the Constitution's separation of powers clause. But when an independent commission is asking the questions, such a defense is much less compelling.

The commission has created the impression that it is ferreting out information that might lead to important recommendations about the nation's security. Even President Bush, at his news conference on Tuesday, gave the commission a boost by declaring that he was looking forward to its findings.

This, too, diminishes the authoritative role of Congress -- it appears that the independent commission is succeeding where Congress had failed. . . .

The origins of the decline in the confidence in congressional investigations might be traced to the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But a decade later, Congress was still trusted enough to act as a principal investigator of the Watergate burglary. Unlike special prosecutor Archibald Cox, senators and House members could not be fired by the man whose administration was under scrutiny: President Richard Nixon.

Congress's inadequacy as grand inquisitor was revealed dramatically in the 1980s. The year 1987, in particular, marks a major fault line in the history of congressional hearings. That was the year in which the last truly bipartisan hearings were held in Congress on a subject of major importance: the Iran-contra scandal. Signs were already emerging that congressional investigations no longer sufficed to get to the bottom of official wrongdoing. Unlike Watergate, the congressional investigators had to compete with an independent commission headed by former senator John Tower and appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

The downward spiral of congressional inquiries into partisan bitterness has undermined Congress's fitness to give the public the answers it needs in responding to the Sept. 11 attacks. More than any other factor, it is the mutual imputation of bad faith by Democrats and Republicans that has deposed Congress from its place as our lead investigator of official malfeasance. It is not that all investigations of the past have been free of hard-edged partisanship, but that partisan gain has now become the standard by which they are measured. . . .

It is a virtual certainty that the 9/11 commission's conclusions will be accorded greater legitimacy than anything that comes out of Congress. For one thing, the commission was successful in securing the closed-door appearances of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, testimony that Congress could not have engineered. In light of the president's rambling and opaque responses at his news conference on Tuesday, a private audience with the commission offers the hope that a more composed president will provide more clarity on 9/11 than he did on the war in Iraq.

The commission, to be sure, has not been free of partisanship (it is evenly divided between Democratic and Republican appointees). But the commission enjoys one unquestionable advantage over Congress: Its members are not elected officials. This alone tempers their partisanship, reduces somewhat the influence of political ambition, and reassures the American public and the harshest judges of all, the 9/11 families, that the chips can fall where they may. But even with such a satisfactory arrangement for this specific inquiry, Congress still stands accused of surrendering its constitutional birthright, a dismal prospect for the institution's future.

GAZA CITY -- In a fiery strike by helicopter gunships, Israel assassinated Hamas leader Abdulaziz Rantisi on Saturday night, less than a month after his predecessor, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, met the same fate.

The airstrike came four hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed an Israeli border police officer at the main crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. And it followed by only three days a triumphal visit to Washington by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, during which President Bush endorsed the Israeli leader's plan to withdraw troops and Jewish settlers from Gaza while laying claim to large settlement blocs in the West Bank.

As word of Saturday's attack spread through Gaza ? first the report that Rantisi had been seriously injured, then confirmation from hospital officials that he was dead ? Palestinians poured by the thousands into the darkened streets, crying out for vengeance.

Frenzied crowds of young men swarmed over the twisted, smoldering wreckage of Rantisi's car, which was struck just after 8:30 p.m. a block from his family home in the Sheik Radwan district of Gaza City. Two of Rantisi's bodyguards were killed and about a dozen onlookers were injured in the missile strike, which sent a thunderous boom echoing across this seaside city.

Rantisi, a 56-year-old pediatrician who was one of the founding fathers of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, was named head of the organization after the March 22 assassination ? also in an Israeli airstrike ? of Yassin, the group's spiritual leader. Rantisi was considered one of the most militant members of Hamas' leadership circle.

The Hamas leadership in Gaza has now lost its three most senior members in just eight months. Ismail abu Shanab was killed in August. Israel contends that the Palestinian militants it targets are "ticking bombs," either guilty of or poised to cause the deaths of innocents.

In Washington, the White House repeated the Bush administration's view that "Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorist attacks" but cautioned, "The United States strongly urges Israel to consider carefully the consequences of its actions, and we again urge all parties to exercise maximum restraint at this time."

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. government was not consulted or informed before the Israeli attack. . . .

The Rantisi assassination drew expressions of outrage from Palestinian leaders, including those considered moderate. Some blamed not only Israel but also, indirectly, the U.S.

Hanan Ashrawi, a former lawmaker who was involved in past peace efforts, said the United States' embrace of Sharon's policies had amounted to implicit approval of lawless behavior on Israel's part.

"You can see from behavior like this, barbaric behavior, that the Palestinians need the protection of the international community," Palestinian Authority Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat said.

Israel's strategy of assassinating key militants has waxed and waned. Last summer, Israel launched repeated strikes at Hamas' entire top echelon, but eventually eased off under U.S. pressure.