ORLANDO, Fla. - The invasion of Iraq was an "enormous mistake," costing untold lives, strengthening al-Qaida and breeding a new generation of terrorists, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said Saturday.

"We did exactly what al Qaida said we would do - invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country that wasn't threatening us in any way," Clarke said before giving the keynote address at the American Library Association's annual convention in Orlando. "The hatred that has been engendered by this invasion will last for generations."

Clarke, who wrote "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" earlier this year, said the United States will lose the war on terrorism if it loses the battle of ideas against extremists in the Middle East. Clarke was a counterterrorism adviser to the past three presidents

"We won the Cold War by, yes, having good strong military forces but also by competing in the battle of ideas against the Communists," Clarke later told the librarians. "We have to do that with the jihadists."

But the United States' ideological credibility has been undermined by revelations of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison and the release of documents that showed U.S. government attorneys conducted a legal analysis of what constituted torture, Clarke said.

"What happened at that prison was legally a war crime," Clarke said. "It pains me to realize now as we read these documents that American government lawyers were writing opinions about what torture was."

BAGHDAD -- As this week's coordinated violence demonstrates, Iraq's insurgent movement is increasingly potent, riding a wave of anti-U.S. nationalism and religious extremism. Just days before an Iraqi government takes control of the country, experts and some commanders fear it may be too late to turn back the militant tide.

The much-anticipated wave of strikes preceding Wednesday's scheduled hand-over could intensify under the new interim government as Sunni Muslim insurgents seek to undermine it, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

"I think we're going to continue to see sensational attacks," said Army Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the 101st Airborne Division commander who will oversee the reshaping of Iraq's fledgling security forces.

Long gone are the days when the insurgents were dismissed as a finite force ticketed for high-tech annihilation by superior U.S. firepower.

Wreaking havoc and derailing plans for reconstruction of this battered nation, the dominant guerrilla movement -- an unlikely Sunni alliance of hard-liners from the former regime, Islamic militants and anti-U.S. nationalists -- has taken over towns, blocked highways, bombed police stations, assassinated lawmakers and other "collaborators," and abducted civilians.

Although Shiite Muslim fighters took U.S. forces by surprise in an April uprising, the Sunni insurgents represent a stronger, long-term threat, experts agree. The fighters, commanders say, are overwhelmingly Iraqis, with a small but important contingent of foreign fighters who specialize in carrying out suicide bombings and other spectacular attacks, possibly including this week's coordinated strikes that killed more than 100 people.

"They are effective," said Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, operational commander of U.S. troops here.

The insurgent force has picked up legions of part-time nationalist recruits enraged by the lengthy occupation and the mounting toll on civilians. Whether the result of U.S. or insurgent fire, the casualties are blamed on Americans.

The anti-U.S. momentum is evident in both the nation's urban centers and the palm-shrouded Sunni rural heartland, where resentment over military sweeps and the torturous pace of reconstruction is pervasive. Support for the insurgency ranges from quiet assent to participation in the fighting.

"We're talking about people who are the equivalent of the Minutemen," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who served as an advisor for the U.S.-led occupation here. "They pick up their weapons and join the fight and then go back to their homes and farms. It makes it so fluid. And the media functions as the town crier, like the calls from the minaret." . . .

The insurgents' decentralized command structure, Hoffman said in an interview, echoes the atomized nature of the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Thus, the arrest of deposed President Saddam Hussein in December was not nearly the intelligence windfall that U.S. authorities had predicted. Nor did his capture dry up funding for the insurgents.

Although U.S. officials have labeled Jordanian fugitive Abu Musab Zarqawi a mastermind in the wave of attacks that has shaken the country since last year, commanders say the insurgents' coordination is unclear.

"We can't find . . . a particular command and control structure that leads to one or two or three particular nodes," Metz said. "But I'm confident there are some leaders who have the wealth to continue . . . paying people to do business."

U.S. authorities have jailed dozens of cell chiefs but watched in frustration as the groups have regenerated and fought anew. "These kinds of networks, you chop off one part and the other part keeps on moving," Petraeus said.

The insurgents have other strengths: plentiful weapons (in many cases, looted from unguarded armories at the end of the invasion last year); easy mobility, in the form of a relatively modern highway system; and communications, in the form of cellphones and access to regional television channels such as Al Jazeera. . . .

The insurgents have time on their side: U.S. forces are already under pressure to leave. And the Sunni fighters are armed with another major advantage: They have no need to win, only to sow instability. Their goal is to stand in the way of the caretaker government as it navigates a difficult path toward elections scheduled for January. Whether the nation will be sufficiently secure for free elections in six months is in doubt.

The murky guerrilla movement first emerged in the spring of 2003 with sporadic attacks on troops after the ouster of Hussein's regime. U.S. forces were just consolidating their control of Iraq and basking in their relatively easy march to Baghdad.

At the time, U.S. officials -- notably L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator here -- dismissed the embryonic opposition as "dead-enders" who owed their allegiance to Hussein. Their initial attacks were amateurish, often involving kamikaze assaults on U.S. armored vehicles or crude roadside bombs jerry-built from stray munitions, wires and makeshift triggers.

Amid the triumphant declarations, it is now widely agreed, the U.S. leadership was disastrously slow to anticipate that this primitive enemy could grow into a formidable foe.

What Bremer and other officials failed to appreciate fully was postwar Iraq's combustible character: a nation brimming with arms, munitions and disenfranchised young men with military training, all primed to be stoked by ruthless and well-funded Baath Party operatives embittered in defeat.

"It's not clear to me that we ever developed a coherent campaign plan for conducting a counterinsurgency campaign," said Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. "We were unprepared for it [and] late to recognize it."

Perceived U.S. heavy-handedness in Sunni enclaves such as Fallouja, west of the capital, provided fuel for the movement, as did the mass roundups and sweeps of thousands of young Sunni men suspected of anti-coalition activity. The U.S. decisions to disband Iraq's armed forces and bar many former Baathists from government jobs fed the growing resentment -- and recruitment.

As disillusionment with the occupation grew, the armed resistance spread throughout the Sunni heartland, from greater Baghdad to the vast expanses to the west and north. Many young men flocked to the cause, whether out of principle or to earn some cash.

Hussein loyalists, including members of his secret police services, provided funds and logistics for the movement, officials say. Though themselves largely secular, they played on religious feelings and fears that Sunnis -- long the dominant group in Iraq -- faced marginalization in a U.S.-backed regime favoring the Shiite majority.

"They don't want this new government to come into power because they're fearful that the Sunni will be outvoted by the majority Shia," said Abrams of the 1st Cavalry Division. "They'll go from being the haves under Saddam to being the have-nots. They've got a lot to lose."

Some barn swallows apparently have figured out how to operate motion detector doors at the Home Depot store in Maplewood in order to nest indoors safe from weather and predators.

Wildlife biologists from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources are observing the birds as an unusual example of learned behavior and adaptation to the human environment.

"I thought this is so unusual that it needs to be recorded and put in the book of knowledge on barn swallows," said Keith Stomberg, the Home Depot employee who first noticed the phenomenon. "This takes deductive reasoning. The term 'bird brain' now has got to be modified."

Steve Kittelson, a DNR wildlife specialist, said it remains unclear to what degree the swallows have "learned" to trigger the motion sensors. Obviously, the birds have figured out that if they circle outside ? much as they would instinctively do in front of a closed barn door ? they will eventually get through. The question is whether they realize that their own presence actually triggers the door to open.

"It's very interesting and amazing to watch that they can make this work to their advantage," Kittelson said. "It certainly gives them a secure site for nesting. They've eliminated a lot of predators and weather elements. They even have air conditioning."

This year marks the fourth spring the swallows have taken up residence inside the giant home improvement retailer at 2360 White Bear Ave. Now there are at least a dozen nests inside various entrances, said store manager Gregg Barker.

"They'll operate all the doors," said Barker. "All of them do. To get inside, they'll flutter right underneath these sensors until it opens."

The cavernous store has become an attraction for birdwatchers.

"One lady, she stops in once a week just to check them out," said Barker. "I had a couple groups bird watching who come and set up videos to tape them."

Stomberg said he first noticed the unusual behavior about three years ago while working at the contractor's desk near a set of automatic doors.

He said the swallows would flutter by the motion detectors until the door opened and even would do so as a courtesy for birds on the other side who wanted to get through.

"One of the assistant managers locked the door early," Stomberg recalled. "The barn swallows weren't done yet. They actually picked him and harassed him until he unlocked the door like, 'Hey! Unlock the door dummy, I'm not done feeding my kids!' "

Stomberg said he called the Department of Natural Resources last year. The DNR officials who came to investigate last spring initially were skeptical, he said, but then "picked their jaws up off the floor" as they watched the birds.

One of the more nettlesome questions we kept hearing about [Michael] Moore's movie [Fahrenheit 9/11] was, "Is it balanced?" Puh-leeeezzz. This is a country in which The New York Times has apologized for leading the country down the garden path to war (giving itself too much credit, but we appreciate the groveling). A country in which Bill O'Reilly is considered a journalist. One in which CNN hasn't - but should have - apologized for its pro-administration cheerleading pre-Iraq invasion, and one in which the corporate ethos and shilling that informs even the most innocuous of pictures - "The Terminal," for instance, which contains more product placement than QVC - is greeted with little more than a yawn.

Total objectivity may be a pipe dream, but the idea that a documentary should have less subjectivity than any other form of expression is simply unrealistic. Even for Moore, who's done very well for himself (especially through book sales), making nonfiction films is a crapshoot. For most documentaries, the audience is meager, the payoff microscopic, the celebrity negligible. One has to have even more passion, not less, to make a doc. Keeping that passion out of the mix would be more than emotionally dishonest. It would be all but impossible.

And Moore doesn't try. Nor should he. At a time when Orwellian Newspeak is the government's lingua franca, why should Michael Moore be the only one in the mass media expected to cool his jets? He doesn't lie - far from it; members of his opposition haven't contradicted anything in the movie, they've merely complained about its disclosure. Granted, Moore makes the president look like a chimp, showing perhaps insufficient respect for the office. But he gets a lot of help.

Concurrent in the cinemas with "Fahrenheit 9/11" is "The Hunting of the President," a similarly inclined film that doesn't work as well as Moore's. Why? Not because it has any less of an agenda - Harry Thomason, one of Bill Clinton's closest friends, co-wrote and co-directed the film, which chronicles Clinton's travail over Whitewater, Monica, Paula, etc., ad nauseum. Based on the book by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, the film begins with the conclusion that a right-wing conspiracy was behind Clinton's persecution, and again, no one has disputed, or likely will dispute, what the film holds forth is true. But at the same time, the dramatic re-creations, newsreel footage and comedy film clips amount to a general smirk. To say that "Hunting" is preaching to the converted is to achieve maximum understatement.

Moore, on the other hand, always begins his little cinematic journeys with a sense of wonder: How could this be? he asks his audience about some outrage, and then proceeds to tell them. It's shtick, but it's workable shtick.

Fair and balanced reporting is an honorable thing, something to aspire to - sometimes. But when one side dictates what we see and hear on a day-to-day basis and operates with such an evident agenda, we need a Michael Moore, if only to retip the scales.

BAGHDAD, June 28 -- The United States transferred political authority to an interim Iraqi government in a five-minute surprise ceremony on Monday morning that was conducted two days before the planned June 30 handover date because of security concerns.

At the hastily arranged ceremony, held inside the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer handed over a blue portfolio containing a signed document conveying political authority to the chief judge of Iraq's highest court.

Several hours later, members of Iraq's new government took oaths of office, with each stepping forward to place a hand on the Koran.

"Before us is a challenge and a burden and we ask God almighty to give us the patience and guide us to take this country whose people deserves all goodness," said President Ghazi Yawar after taking his oath. "May God protect Iraq and its citizens."

The low-key transfer of power occurred in the office of Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, at 10:26 a.m. local time (2:26 a.m. EDT) before only a handful of Iraqi and U.S. officials and journalists. . . .

Bremer, who has served as America's viceroy in Iraq, flew out of Baghdad on a military transport plane two hours after the ceremony. The occupation administration he headed for the past 11 months was officially dissolved on Monday and will be replaced by a U.S. embassy.

Although a U.N. Security Council resolution passed earlier this month deems the interim government "fully sovereign," it will lack many hallmarks of a sovereign nation.

More than 130,000 U.S. troops will remain in the country with wide latitude to mount operations to combat an increasingly violent insurgency. A temporary constitution also limits the interim government's power to basic civil administration and preparations for national elections.

While ordinary Iraqis regard the handover as symbolically important, it will not result in many immediate changes for them. U.S. forces will continue to conduct raids and house searches. Iraqi government ministries will operate in much the same way they did while under occupation.

WASHINGTON, June 28 — The Supreme Court ruled today that people being held by the United States as enemy combatants can challenge their detention in American courts -- the court's most important statement in decades on the balance between personal liberties and national security.

The justices declared their findings in three rulings, two of them involving American citizens and the other addressing the status of foreigners being held at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Taken together, they were a significant setback for the Bush administration's approach to the campaign against terrorism that began on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker," an 8-to-1 majority held in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi-born United States citizen seized in Afghanistan in 2001. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the basic outlines of the decision.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the campaign against terrorism notwithstanding, "a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."

In the Guant&aaute;namo case, the court ruled, 6 to 3, that federal courts have the jurisdiction to consider challenges to the custody of foreigners. The finding repudiated a central argument of the administration.

"Aliens at the base, like American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal courts' authority," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. "United States courts have traditionally been open to nonresident aliens."

The dissenters were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia.

And in the other case involving an American citizen, José Padilla, the court ruled on what at first glance was a technical issue: that Mr. Padilla filed his habeas corpus petition in the wrong court. A 5-to-4 majority said he should have filed in federal court in South Carolina, since he has been held in a brig in Charleston, rather than in the Southern District of New York.

The majority said, too, that the proper target for his case is not Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld but, rather, Cmdr. Melanie Marr, who is in charge of the brig. "This rule serves the important purpose of prevent forum shopping by habeas petitioners," the majority held.

Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the opinion, joined by Justices O'Connor, Scalia, Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy. Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer dissented.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the rulings historic and said they embodied "a strong repudiation of the administration's arguments that its actions in the war on terrorism are beyond the rule of law and unreviewable by American courts."

The most intriguing story in Washington these days is a subterranean conflict that reporters cannot cover because some of them are involved. A potent guerrilla insurgency has formed in and around the Bush presidency -- a revolt of old pros in government who strike from the shadows with devastating effect. They tell the truth. They explode big lies. They provide documentary evidence that undermines popular confidence in the Commander in Chief. They prod the media and the political community to ask penetrating questions of the Bush regime. Doubtless, these anonymous sources act from a mixture of motives -- some noble, some self-interested -- but in present circumstances one might think of them as "embedded patriots."

The business of leaks is an everyday thing in Washington and, arguably, the government could not function without them. It is a way to communicate official and unofficial information in a tentative fashion -- nudging events in one direction or another without the need to take responsibility for what's communicated. Reporters participate enthusiastically in the traffic and call it "news." The process is sustained only because everyone can rely on the journalists' mock-heroic code of omertà: Never reveal the names of your secret sources -- never -- even if the revealed "information" turns out to be spurious.

But what has occurred during the past several months is not the normal commerce. A series of explosive leaks -- closely held documents and well-informed tips -- have altered the course of politics and might very well influence the outcome of this year's presidential election. Yet we don't know whom to thank. Who gave the Justice Department's "torture" memorandum to the Washington Post? Who provided the International Red Cross's letter of complaints on prisoner abuses to the Wall Street Journal? Who confirmed for the New York Times that Iyad Allawi, the newly appointed Prime Minister of Iraq, had supervised the CIA's terrorist bombing campaign in Baghdad a decade ago? Who informed U.S. News & World Report that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had authorized the holding of a "ghost prisoner" in violation of international law? Who -- someone close to the President? -- leaked the "torture" memo written by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales?

We don't need to know the identities to grasp that these and other over-the-transom "communications" provided forceful and well-timed contradictions to the White House line. It is also obvious that these leaks could not have come from the lower depths of the bureaucracy. The material is too sensitive for wide distribution. Not to take anything away from aggressive reporters, but the leakers clearly targeted the Post, Times and Journal to achieve maximum impact on Washington. The messages are not from some office crank at the Xerox machine but had to originate among sophisticated and highly placed officers of government. . . .

Cynical readers may resist this explanation, but the motivations within the permanent government are most likely grounded in principle and patriotism, not narrow partisanship. Among bureaucrats, there is always a current of low-level grumbling about the elected leadership, but career civil servants and military rarely take such provocative countermeasures. In this Administration, the level of disgust and alarm is more palpable because Bush has been willing to trash the accepted norms of behavior and to cross perilous thresholds, unaware of the dangers despite many warnings from the professionals. To people who will be in government long after Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld have departed, the Bush crowd looks like the worst possible combination of qualities--it is both incompetent and ruthless.

"It's a wonderful country in a way," Walter Pincus, the Post's veteran investigative reporter, observes. "People in the government community are really concerned about what can happen. They get upset with themselves when they see things going wrong. So they are willing to raise questions. But I also think for some the failure to stand up before the war started is emboldening them now." The concerns of these anonymous truth-tellers were confirmed in public by the powerful statement issued recently by retired diplomats and military leaders, virtually calling for Bush's defeat this fall. "We need a change," they declared. The list of signers was striking because it was top-heavy with Republican and conservative professionals: Reagan's ambassador to Moscow and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, George Bush Sr.'s ambassador to Israel and many others.

To conservative critics, the Clinton era was "a time of domesticity, triviality and self-absorption," as [Charles] Krauthammer wrote last week. Maybe it looked that way from the penthouse. But the Clinton years produced extraordinary gains in the communities that needed help most.

The benefits of the Clinton boom were dispersed far more broadly than the gains under Ronald Reagan, in part because Clinton systematically implemented policies that encouraged and rewarded work for those on the economy's bottom rungs.

Consider the scorecard. During Clinton's two terms, the median income for American families increased by a solid 15% after inflation, according to Census Bureau figures. But it rose even faster for African Americans (33%) and Hispanics (24%) than it did for whites (14%).

The growth was so widely shared that from 1993 through 1999, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution saw their incomes increase faster than those in the top 5%. By comparison, under President Reagan in the 1980s, those in the top 5% increased their income more than five times faster than the bottom 20%.

Likewise, the poverty rate under Clinton fell 25%, the biggest eight-year decline since the 1960s. It fell even faster for particularly vulnerable groups like blacks, Hispanics and children. Again the contrast with Reagan is striking. During Reagan's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty fell by just 77,000. During Clinton's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty plummeted by 8.1 million. The number of children in poverty fell by 50,000 under Reagan. Under Clinton the number was 4.1 million. That's a ratio of 80 to 1.

Leave aside the question of how much Clinton's drive to eliminate the federal deficit contributed to the economic boom that powered most of these gains. He also developed a comprehensive set of initiatives to spread the benefits of prosperity to more families by demanding and honoring work.

Welfare reform pushed more low-income families into the job market, where they could benefit from the rising tide. Then Clinton made work more rewarding with increases in the minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit, the creation of the Children's Health Insurance Program (to cover the children of working-poor families), and expanded funding for day care. He eliminated the deficit while cutting taxes for average families.

And while delivering all these benefits for traditionally Democratic constituencies, Clinton extended the party's appeal up the income ladder. By marrying government activism to fiscal discipline and demanding personal responsibility in social policy, he triggered a realignment of socially moderate Northern suburbs toward the Democrats, a change that remains central to his party's hopes in 2004.

The formal occupation of Iraq came to an ignominious end yesterday with a furtive ceremony, held two days early to foil insurgent attacks, and a swift airborne exit for the chief administrator. In reality, the occupation will continue under another name, most likely until a hostile Iraqi populace demands that we leave. But it's already worth asking why things went so wrong.

The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start — but we'll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country. . . .

The insurgency took root during the occupation's first few months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority seemed oddly disengaged from the problems of postwar anarchy. But what was Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., focused on? According to a Washington Post reporter who shared a flight with him last June, "Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold."

Plans for privatization were eventually put on hold. But as he prepared to leave Iraq, Mr. Bremer listed reduced tax rates, reduced tariffs and the liberalization of foreign-investment laws as among his major accomplishments. Insurgents are blowing up pipelines and police stations, geysers of sewage are erupting from the streets, and the electricity is off most of the time — but we've given Iraq the gift of supply-side economics.

If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections — people like Simone Ledeen, whose father, Michael Ledeen, a prominent neoconservative, told a forum that "the level of casualties is secondary" because "we are a warlike people" and "we love war."

Still, given Mr. Bremer's economic focus, you might at least have expected his top aide for private-sector development to be an expert on privatization and liberalization in such countries as Russia or Argentina. But the job initially went to Thomas Foley, a Connecticut businessman and Republican fund-raiser with no obviously relevant expertise. In March, Michael Fleischer, a New Jersey businessman, took over. Yes, he's Ari Fleischer's brother. Mr. Fleischer told The Chicago Tribune that part of his job was educating Iraqi businessmen: "The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review."

Checks and review? Yesterday a leading British charity, Christian Aid, released a scathing report, "Fueling Suspicion," on the use of Iraqi oil revenue. It points out that the May 2003 U.N. resolution giving the C.P.A. the right to spend that revenue required the creation of an international oversight board, which would appoint an auditor to ensure that the funds were spent to benefit the Iraqi people.

Instead, the U.S. stalled, and the auditor didn't begin work until April 2004. Even then, according to an interim report, it faced "resistance from C.P.A. staff." And now, with the audit still unpublished, the C.P.A. has been dissolved.

Defenders of the administration will no doubt say that Christian Aid and other critics have no proof that the unaccounted-for billions were ill spent. But think of it this way: given the Arab world's suspicion that we came to steal Iraq's oil, the occupation authorities had every incentive to expedite an independent audit that would clear Halliburton and other U.S. corporations of charges that they were profiteering at Iraq's expense. Unless, that is, the charges are true.

Let's say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor.

WASHINGTON - In a few key areas -- electricity, the judicial system and overall security -- the Iraq that America handed back to its residents Monday is worse off than before the war began last year, according to calculations in a new General Accounting Office report released Tuesday.

The 105-page report by Congress' investigative arm offers a bleak assessment of Iraq after 14 months of U.S. military occupation. Among its findings:

-- In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26 million people live in those provinces.

-- Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with another $10 billion about to be spent. The biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations.

-- The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges are frequent targets of assassination attempts.

-- The new Iraqi civil defense, police and overall security units are suffering from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped.

-- The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority called significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May.

The report was released on the same day that the CPA's inspector general issued three reports that highlighted serious management difficulties at the CPA. The reports found that the CPA wasted millions of dollars at a Hilton resort hotel in Kuwait because it didn't have guidelines for who could stay there, lost track of how many employees it had in Iraq and didn't track reconstruction projects funded by international donors to ensure they didn't duplicate U.S. projects.

Both the GAO report and the CPA report said that the CPA was seriously understaffed for the gargantuan task of rebuilding Iraq. The GAO report suggested the agency needed three times more employees than what it had. The CPA report said the agency believed it had 1,196 employees, when it was authorized to have 2,117. But the inspector general said CPA's records were so disorganized that it couldn't verify its actual number of employees.

[The cited GAO report is available here.