The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON, June 6 (UPI) — On the third day of an oil strike in southern Iraq, the Iraqi military has surrounded oil workers and the prime minister has issued arrest warrants for the union leaders, sparking an outcry from supporters and international unions.

“This will not stop us because we are defending people’s rights,” said Hassan Jumaa Awad, president of IFOU. As of Wednesday morning, when United Press International spoke to Awad via mobile phone in Basra at the site of one of the strikes, no arrests had been made, “but regardless, the arrest warrant is still active.” He said the “Iraqi Security Forces,” who were present at the strike scenes, told him of the warrants and said they would be making any arrests.

The arrest warrant accuses the union leaders of “sabotaging the economy,” according a statement from British-based organization Naftana, and said Maliki warned his “iron fist” would be used against those who stopped the flow of oil.

IFOU called a strike early last month but put it on hold twice after overtures from the government. Awad said that at a May 16 meeting, Maliki agreed to set up a committee to address the unions’ demands.

The demands include union entry to negotiations over the oil law they fear will allow foreign oil companies too much access to Iraq’s oil, as well as a variety of improved working conditions.

“Apparently they promise but they never do anything,” Awad said, confirming reports the Iraqi Oil Ministry would send a delegation to Basra.

“One person from the Ministry of Oil accompanied by an Iraqi military figure came to negotiate the demands. Instead it was all about threats. It was all about trying to shut us up, to marginalize our actions,” Awad said. “The actions we are taking now are continuing with the strike until our demands are taken in concentration.”

The strike by the Iraq Pipelines Union in Basra started Monday, instigated by a decision by the Iraq Pipelines Company to stop regular bonuses to workers. It is part of a larger picture, however, of 17 different demands laid out — beginning last month — to the Iraq Oil Ministry and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by the Iraq Federation of Oil Unions.

Since the strike began, two small pipelines delivering oil products to Baghdad and other cities have been closed, as has a larger pipeline that sends gas and oil to major cities, including Baghdad, and utilities.

The strike started with domestic pipelines transporting oil and oil products, but Iraq’s top oil unionist says it will soon encapsulate the 1.6 million barrels per day of oil Iraq sends to the global market.

Basra, home to much of Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of oil — the third-largest reserves in the world — is also Iraq’s main port. Awad said the unions will continue to restrict all oil exports, which bring in 93 percent of Iraq’s federal budget funds. Such a move, combined with the choking off of much-needed supplies of transportation, cooking and heating fuels, is what the unions hopes to use as leverage against Maliki.

Awad said “the atmosphere here is full of tension,” and added that he wants to pressure the government to agree to their demands, not topple an already-weak Maliki government.

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Surging demand for “green” fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia’s population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world’s worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.

Several companies were collaborating by falsifying deeds to claim ownership of the land, said Andres Castro, the general secretary of Fedepalma, the national federation of palm oil producers.

“As a consequence of the development of palm by secretive business practices and the use of threats, people have been displaced and [the businesses] have claimed land for themselves,” he said. His claim was backed up by witnesses and groups such as Christian Aid and the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia.

The revelations tarnish what has been considered an economic and environmental success story. The fruit of the palm oil tree produces a vegetable oil also used in cooking, employs 80,000 people, and is increasingly being turned into biofuel.

“Four years ago Colombia had 172,000 hectares of palm oil,” President Alvaro Uribe told the Guardian. “This year we expect to finish with nearly 400,000.”

“Four years ago Colombia didn’t produce a litre of biofuel. Today, because of our administration, Colombia produces 1.2m litres per day.” Investment in new installations would continue to boost production, he added.

However the lawlessness created by four decades of insurgency in the countryside has enabled rightwing paramilitaries, and also possibly leftwing rebels, to join the boom. Unlike coca, the armed groups’ main income source, palm oil is a legal crop and therefore safe from state-backed eradication efforts.

Farmers who have been forced off their land at gunpoint say that in many cases their banana groves and cattle grazing fields were turned into palm oil plantations. Luis Hernandez (not his real name) fled his 170-hectare plot outside the town of Mutata in Antioquia province nine years ago after his father-in-law and several neighbours were gunned down. When he and other survivors were able to return recently, they found the land was in the hands of a local palm producer.

“The company tells me that it has legal papers for the land, but I don’t know how that can be, as I have land titles dating back 20 years,” said Mr Hernandez. He suspects palm companies collaborated with the paramilitaries. “I don’t know if there was an official agreement between them, but a relationship of some sort definitely exists.”

A government investigation reportedly found irregularities in 80% of palm oil land titles in some areas. “If there have been abuses and the titles are shown to be false, then the land needs to be returned and all the weight of the law needs to be brought down on those that are responsible,” said Dr Castro, of the producers’ association.

Christian Aid is funding an effort to protect peasants who are trying to reclaim land from the paramilitaries, said Dominic Nutt, who has visited the plantations. “It is the dark side of biofuel.”

The paramilitary groups, first formed in the 80s by businessmen, landowners and drug lords to fend off guerrillas, became a powerful illegal army which stole land, sold drugs and massacred civilians. Under a peace deal with the government they have officially disbanded but many observers say remnants remain active.

With blogging, an awkward term, we designate a fairly beautiful thing: the extension to many more people of a free press franchise and the right to publish your thoughts to the world.

When in the eighteenth century the press first appeared on the political stage the people on the other end of it were known as the public. Public opinion and the political press arose together. But in the age of the mass media the public got transformed into an audience.

This happened because the mass media were one way, one-to-many, and “read only.” When journalism emerged as a profession it reflected these properties of its underlying platform. But now we have the Web, which is two-way (rather than one) many-to-many (rather than one-to-many) and “read-write” rather than “read only.”

As it moves toward the Web, journalism will have to adjust to these conditions, but a professionalized press is having trouble with the shift because it still thinks of the people on the other end as an audience–an image very deeply ingrained in professional practice.

I’m going to tell you some stories that I think illustrate the disruptive effects that blogging has had, and the democratic potential it represents. But let me say at the outset that, though a blogger myself, I am not a triumphalist about blogging. I do not think that the age of fully democratic media is suddenly upon us because we have this new form. There is a long way to go if we are to make good on its potential.

Now to my five stories, which I offer more as parables, even though they are, of course, true to the facts.

Chris Allbritton: independent war correspondent.

In March of 2003, Chris Allbritton, a former AP and New York Daily News reporter, became what Wired magazine called “the Web’s first independent war correspondent.” He did it by asking readers of his blog to send him to Iraq at their expense. Allbritton raised $14,500 from 342 donors on a simple promise: that he would send back from the war original and honest reporting, free of commercial pressures, pack thinking, and patriotic hype.

He needed a plane ticket to Turkey (where he snuck over the border and found the war), a laptop, a Global Positioning Satellite unit, a rented satellite phone, a digital camera, and enough cash to move around, keep fed, and buy his way out of trouble. While some reporters were embedded with the American military, Allbritton sent himself on assignment. No one gave him permission to be in country.

The Internet did the rest. On March 27, his reporting drew 23,000 users to his site, www.back-to-iraq.com. So here you have a journalist collecting his own mini-public, a few thousand people on the Web. They then send him to report on events of interest to the entire world, via a medium that reaches the entire world.

This is journalism without the media. I leave you to contemplate the implications of that. But it was one of the events that caused me to start my own blog.

Trent Lott Speaks; bloggers listen.

On Dec. 5, 2002, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, leader of the Republican party in the Senate and probably the third most powerful person in Washington at the time, spoke at former Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party on Capital Hill.

“I want to say this about my state,” he said. “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.” He was referring to Thurmond’s 1948 third-party campaign for president, which was an explicitly racist campaign. So what was Trent Lott saying in 2002? That a segregationist president would have been good for America in 1948?

There were some reporters present, but they didn’t see much significance in it. Except for one young producer from ABC News, Ed O’Keefe, who managed to get a brief story read on the air at 4:30 am, which in turn led to a small item the next day at ABCNews.com. This in turn gave it to the bloggers, who began discussing what Lott had said, and digging into Strom Thurmond’s 1948 campaign so as to reveal what his comments really meant.

It turned out that bloggers from the left as well as the right were puzzled and disgusted by Lott’s comments, and they continued to discuss them. For three days the story was the talk of the blogosphere while the news cycle moved on to other things. But political reporters were reading the blogs, and by the fourth day they realized…. This was news! The story of what Lott had said re-broke in the major press–five days after it happened–and he began apologizing for it while major political figures reacted. Ten days later he resigned as majority leader; his power was gone.

War critics are rightly disappointed over the inability of congressional Democrats to mount an effective challenge to President Bush’s Iraq adventure. What began as a frontal assault on the war, with tough talk about deadlines and timetables, has settled into something like a guerrilla-style campaign to chip away at war policy until the edifice crumbles.

Still, Democratic criticism of administration policy in Iraq looks muscle-bound when compared with the party’s readiness to go along with the President’s massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign-policy realists and hard-line exponents of neoconservative-style empire-building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the budget of the Defense Department without end, while increasing the size of the U.S. Armed Forces. In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official U.S. “intelligence community” or IC—including the CIA—and on homeland security is going through the roof.

The numbers are astonishing and, except for a hardy band of progressives in the House of Representatives, Democrats willing to call for shrinking the bloated Pentagon or intelligence budgets are essentially nonexistent. Among presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson even mention the possibility of cutting the defense budget. Indeed, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)

How astonishing are the budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of U.S. defense spending over the last nearly two decades. From the end of the Cold War into the mid-1990s, defense spending actually fell significantly. In constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon’s budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares to post-World War II wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak of the War in Vietnam.) After the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline wasn’t exactly the hoped-for “peace dividend,” but it wasn’t peanuts either.

However, since September 12th, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded. For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing “Global War on Terrorism”—which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—for FY 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In other words, even without the President’s two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States has literally no significant enemy state to fight anywhere on the planet, this represents a remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous Democratic politician once asked: Where is the outrage?

Neocons, war profiteers, and hardliners of all stripes still argue that the “enemy” we face is a nonexistent bugaboo called “Islamofascism.” It’s easy to imagine them laughing into their sleeves while they continue to claim that the way to battle low-tech, rag-tag bands of leftover Al Qaeda crazies is by spending billions of dollars on massively expensive, massively powerful, futuristic weapons systems.

As always, a significant part of the defense bill is eaten up by these big-ticket items. According to the reputable Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, there are at least 28 pricey weapons systems that, just by themselves, will rack up a whopping $44 billion in 2008. The projected cost of these 28 systems—which include fighter jets, the B-2 bomber, the V-22 Osprey, various advanced naval vessels, cruise-missile systems, and the ultra-expensive aircraft carriers the Navy always demands—will, in the end, be more than $1 trillion. And that’s not even including the Star Wars missile-defense system, which at the moment soaks up about $11 billion a year.

By one count, U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. The United States accounts for almost half—approximately 48 percent—of the entire world’s spending on what we like to call “defense.” Again, according to the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, U.S. defense spending this year amounts to exactly twice the combined military spending of the next six biggest military powers: China, Russia, the U.K., France, Japan, and Germany.

Despite this, like presidential candidates Clinton and Obama, the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council is pushing hard to tie the party to increased military spending. Writes journalist Aaron Glantz:

“‘America needs a bigger and better military,’ reads an October report by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, the policy arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council that counts Senators Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Evan Bayh, D-Ind., among its members.

“‘Escalating conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the all-volunteer force to the breaking point,’ the report says. ‘Democrats should step forward with a plan to repair the damage, by adding more troops, replenishing depleted stocks of equipment, and reorganizing the force around the new missions of unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, and civil reconstruction.'”

So hostile is the atmosphere in Congress to cuts of any sort in military spending that even a recent effort by traditional defense critics to suggest ways to reorient the Pentagon’s budgetary priorities turned out to involve but the most modest of rebalancings. A coalition of these critics from organizations such as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for American Progress, and other left and left-center groups, including such experts as Larry Korb of CAP, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives, and William Hartung of the World Policy Institute, suggested cutting $56 billion from offensive weapons systems, but then proposed to shift fully $50 billion of it into areas such as homeland security, international peacekeeping, and “nation building.”

Why, exactly, we need to increase Pentagon spending even in those categories is mystifying, since no country is actually threatening us and—if the Iraqi and Afghani wars were settled—the problem of terrorism could be adequately dealt with by mobilizing relatively modest numbers of CIA officers and FBI and law enforcement agents. The fact that such respected defense critics feel compelled to put forward such a lame proposal is a sign of our crimped times; a sign that, pragmatically speaking, it is simply verboten to criticize Pentagon bloat, even given the current, Democrat-controlled Congress. It’s not that the public is pro-military spending either. Indeed, in a Gallup Poll conducted in February, fully 43 percent of Americans said they believed that the United States is spending “too much” on defense, while only 20 percent said “too little.” Rather, it’s a sign that the political class—perhaps swayed by the influence of the military-industrial complex and its army of lobbyists—hasn’t yet caught up to public opinion.

And it’s important to keep in mind that the official Pentagon budget doesn’t begin to tell the full story of American “defense” spending. In addition to the $650 billion that the Pentagon will get in 2008, huge additional sums will be spent on veterans care and interest on the national debt accumulated from previous DOD spending that ballooned the deficit. In all, those two accounts add $263 billion to the Pentagon budget, for a grand total of $913 billion.

Then there are the intelligence and homeland security budgets. Back in the 1990s, when I started reporting on the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community, its entire budget was about $27 billion. Last year, although the number is supposed to be top secret, the Bush administration revealed that intelligence spending had reached $44 billion. For 2008, according to media reports, Congress is working on an authorization of $48 billion for our spies.

Again, when I first wrote about “homeland security” in the late 1990s—it was then called “counterterrorism”—the Clinton administration was spending $17 billion in interagency budgets in this area. For 2008, the budget of the Department of Homeland Security—that mishmash, incompetent agency hurriedly assembled under pressure from uber-hawk Joe Lieberman (even the Bush administration was initially opposed to its creation)—will be $46.4 billion.

BAGHDAD – Four years into a war that opened with “shock and awe,” U.S. warplanes have stepped up attacks in Iraq, dropping bombs at more than twice the rate of a year ago.

The airpower escalation parallels a nearly four-month-old security crackdown that is bringing 30,000 additional U.S. troops into Baghdad and its surroundings, an urban campaign to restore order to an area riven with sectarian violence.

It also reflects increased availability of planes from U.S. aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, and it appears to be accompanied by an increase in Iraqi civilian casualties.

In the first 4 1/2 months of 2007, U.S. aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces in Iraq, already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006, according to Air Force figures obtained by The Associated Press.

“Air operations over Iraq have ratcheted up significantly in the number of sorties, the number of hours” in the air, said Col. Joe Guastella, Air Force operations chief for the region. “It has a lot to do with increased pressure on the enemy by [the Multinational Corps-Iraq] combined with more carriers.”

The Air Force report did not break down the locations in Iraq where bombings have been stepped up, but U.S.-led forces are locked in new and dangerous fronts against insurgents outside Baghdad in places such as Diyala, a province northeast of the capital.

A second aircraft carrier on station since February in the Persian Gulf has added about 80 warplanes to the U.S. air arsenal in the region.

At the same time, the number of civilian Iraqi casualties from U.S. airstrikes appears to have risen sharply, according to Iraq Body Count, a London-based antiwar research group that maintains a database compiling media reports on Iraq war deaths.

The rate of such reported civilian deaths appeared to climb steadily through 2006, the group reports, averaging a few a month in early 2006, hitting some 40 a month by year’s end and averaging more than 50 a month so far this year.

Those are maximum tolls based on news reports, and they count civilians killed by Army helicopter fire as well as by warplanes, said John Sloboda, of Iraq Body Count. The count is regarded as conservative, since it doesn’t include deaths missed by the international media.

The U.S. military says it doesn’t track civilian casualties.

“The reality of civilian deaths is a year-on-year increase,” said Sloboda,. “This particular part of it, airstrikes, have rocketed up more than any other.”

Examples of attacks, as reported in the Air Force’s daily summary:

•Friday, an Air Force F-16 dropped a guided 500-pound bomb near the northern city of Tal Afar that destroyed a vehicle laden with explosives to be used as a bomb.

•Thursday, an F-16 dropped a similar bomb on “an inaccessible building being used by insurgents” near Samarra, north of Baghdad, with “good effects.”

On one of the busiest days of the year at the state Capitol, 22 demonstrators were arrested Friday as they called for universal health care and a single-payer health system.

The activists were taken into custody at various locations throughout the building, prompting the heaviest police presence at the Capitol this year. Officers were stationed in the House and Senate galleries and outside the doors of the chambers to ensure order.

Nine protesters were arrested outside Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s office, after they staged a sit-in and refused to leave. Sixteen uniformed police officers moved in to make the arrests.

Capitol Police Chief Michael J. Fallon said that all 22 protesters were charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, for their actions at a time when both the House and Senate were in session. Some were arrested for blocking the stairways, and those outside the governor’s office were told in advance that they would be arrested if they did not leave.

“Although they were arrested, they were ladies and gentlemen,” said Fallon, a former Hartford Police Department veteran who joined the Capitol police in December. “Despite the initial interruption, things did go orderly. This type of behavior was disruptive to the legislative process.”

Robert Madore, director of Region 9A of the 67,000- member United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America union, said the activists showed up outside Rell’s office after she failed to respond to a written request for a meeting at 4 p.m. Friday.

“We’ve been trying to communicate with the governor since December,” Madore said as he sat on the floor outside Rell’s office. “She didn’t even have the courtesy to respond, nor did she call, nor did she fax. We prepared to be [arrested], and we’re going to wait as long as we have to. We think this issue needs to be brought to a head.”

The activists noted that Rell has not embraced universal health care as a way to provide coverage for an estimated 400,000 uninsured. Rell says the state has been making steady progress in signing up thousands of children in the popular HUSKY health insurance program in an effort to ensure that all children are covered.

Brian Petronella, president of Local 317 of the 11,000- member United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said he was fighting to get universal health care because many low-wage workers are forced to have their children on the state-operated HUSKY program. Petronella, a 51- year-old Norwalk resident, noted that he lost an election against Robert Genuario, a former Norwalk senator who is now Rell’s budget director. Despite that connection, Petronella said, he could not get a meeting with Rell and so he was sitting on the floor outside the office.

Given the centrality of oil not only to current geo-politics but also to the politics of global warming, it is interesting to recall that the G7 is a by-product of the 1973 oil crisis. Almost 35 years later, the now-G8 — Russia was formally admitted in 1998 — is again facing a crisis of global energy policies brought about by the increased public pressure for action to reduce carbon gas emissions, the looming fact of peak oil and, not least, the G8’s incapacity over the past three decades to think beyond their own interests. But in 2007, the situation is very different from the ‘unglobalised’ world of 1973 (although with some surprising similarities) and the G8 is not the only game in town.

FOCUS ON TRADE

Economically the G8 countries are still very significant: although they represent under 14 % of the world population, they account for nearly two-thirds of the world’s economic output measured by gross domestic product. In fact, Russia is the only G8 country not in the World Bank’s 2006 listing of the top ten economies, coming in at number 14. Significantly, the Peoples Republic of China and Brazil are in the top ten (numbers 4 and 10 respectively), and even India at number 12 outranks Russia.

THE G8 IN CRISIS

Politically, however, many of the G8 members are in some form of crisis, transition or stasis. In the US, Bush is facing the last 18 months of his presidency having lost control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Although the administration’s provocation of Iran is clearly a exercise in bravado designed to deter attention from the debacle in Iraq, it is a high risk strategy given the extreme volatility of the Middle East (one of the similarities with 1973) and the massive domestic opposition to the US’ continuing military presence in Iraq (another similarity to 1973 when the US’s war on Vietnam was becoming increasingly untenable, both politically and militarily). As one commentator remarked, this administration has “lost forever the capacity to set the terms of political debate”- and Bush’s colleagues in the G8 know it.

Britain’s Tony Blair is also at the end of his prime ministership, although when that might be is another matter. Having secured an inglorious place in history for promoting and participating in the invasion of Iraq, Blair is now trying to rewrite his legacy by setting in place the UK’s disengagement from Iraq and taking on climate change with the same quasi-religious zeal that he applied to his moral mission in Iraq. This G8 – almost certainly his last — offers Blair one last chance to be the visionary statesman that he imagines himself to be.

In Germany, Angela Merkel is struggling with a cumbersome “grand coalition” of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats so weighed down with compromises that it is virtually unable to move, let alone take the lead on any issues. And in France and Italy, presidential elections and volatile coalitions have disabled these governments while everyone waits to see which way the electorates blow. The more general problem, though, for the European members of the G8 is the palpable anti-US sentiment and the unabated public opposition to the invasion of Iraq – vindicated with every news report from Baghdad — which means that governments must tread carefully in their relations with Washington: being pro-Bush is definitely not a vote winner these days.

President Vladimir Putin – secure in the knowledge that he controls about as much oil and gas as anyone could need — is making up for Russia’s humiliation in the 1990s by aggressively re-negotiating relations with the West, most significantly with the US, while shoring up connections and influence in the East, and keeping everyone else on a short leash at home. On recent form, Putin is giving even the G8 a bad name. Japan and Canada – the other two members of the G8 – are irrelevant in this discussion.

All this adds up to a crisis for the G8 and its capacity to convey a convincing message of leadership, control, unity and vision. The US – the “natural leader” of the G8 – has lost its legitimacy (not least because it acts as the “G1” even in the G8) and there is no other country either with the credentials or (probably) the interest to “step up to the plate”. Yet as the G8’s power declines, other alliances and groupings based on geography or mutual interests are emerging. Some of these groupings may pose a challenge to the G8’s hegemony as the most significant “G” while others — such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) – are experimenting with new governance frameworks that may offer alternatives to the traditional elite politics.

THE G8 IN DECLINE

BAGHDAD: Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face “resistance,” according to the one-page assessment, which was provided to The New York Times and summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad.

The assessment offers the first comprehensive look at the progress of the effort to stabilize Baghdad with the heavy influx of additional troops. The last remaining American units in the troop increase are just now arriving.

Violence has diminished in many areas, but it is especially chronic in mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhoods in western Baghdad, several senior officers said. Over all, improvements have not yet been as widespread or lasting across Baghdad, they acknowledged.

CHICAGO — The American interrogator was afraid. Of what and why, he couldn’t say. He was riding the L train in Chicago, and his throat was closing.

In Iraq, when Tony Lagouranis interrogated suspects, fear was his friend, his weapon. He saw it seep, dark and shameful, through the crotch of a man’s pants as a dog closed in, barking. He smelled it in prisoners’ sweat, a smoky odor, like a pot of lentils burning. He had touched fear, too, felt it in their fingers, their chilled skin trembling.

But on this evening, Lagouranis was back in Illinois, taking the train to a bar. His girlfriend thought he was a hero. His best friend hung out with him, watching reruns of “Hawaii Five-O.” And yet he felt afraid.

“I tortured people,” said Lagouranis, 37, who was a military intelligence specialist in Iraq from January 2004 until January 2005. “You have to twist your mind up so much to justify doing that.”

Being an interrogator, Lagouranis discovered, can be torture. At first, he was eager to try coercive techniques. In training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., instructors stressed the Geneva Conventions, he recalled, while classmates privately admired Israeli and British methods. “The British were tough,” Lagouranis said. “They seemed like real interrogators.”

But interrogators for countries that pride themselves on adhering to the rule of law, such as Britain, the United States and Israel, operate in a moral war zone. They are on the front lines in fighting terrorism, crucial for intelligence-gathering. Yet they use methods that conflict with their societies’ values.

The border between coercion and torture is often in dispute, and the U.S. government is debating it now. The Bush administration is nearing completion of a new executive order setting secret rules for CIA interrogation that may ban waterboarding, a practice that simulates drowning. Last September, President Bush endorsed an “alternative set of procedures,” which he described as “tough,” for questioning high-level detainees. And in Iraq last month, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander, warned troops that the military does not sanction “torture or other expedient methods to obtain information.”

The world of the interrogator is largely closed. But three interrogators allowed a rare peek into their lives — an American rookie who served with the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion and two veteran interrogators from Britain and Israel. The veterans, whose wartime experiences stretch back decades, are more practiced at finding moral balance. They use denial, humor, indignation. Even so, these older men grapple with their own fears — and with a clash of values.

That clash, said Darius Rejali, a political scientist who has studied torture and democracy, can torment interrogators: “Nothing is more toxic than guilt, which is typical with democratic interrogators. Nazis, on the other hand, don’t have these problems.”

For Lagouranis, problems include “a creeping anxiety” on the train, he said. The 45-minute ride to Chicago’s O’Hare airport “kills me.” He feels as if he can’t get out “until they let me out.” Lagouranis’s voice was boyish, but his face was gray. The evening deepened his 5 o’clock shadow and the puffy smudges under his eyes.

Not long ago in Iraq, he felt “absolute power,” he said, over men kept in cages. Lagouranis had forced a grandfather to kneel all night in the cold and bombarded others in metal shipping containers with the tape of the self-help parody “Feel This Book: An Essential Guide to Self-Empowerment, Spiritual Supremacy, and Sexual Satisfaction,” by comedians Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo. (“They hated it,” Lagouranis recalled. “Like, ‘Please! Just stop that voice!’ “)

Now Lagouranis’s power had dissolved into a weakness so fearful it dampened his upper lip. Sometimes, on the train, he has to get up and pace. But he can’t escape.

An Island in the Mediterranean

James, an amiable man with a red-to-white beard, shook his head when told of Lagouranis: “He’s full of self-pity.”

James, 65, was one of Britain’s most experienced interrogators in Northern Ireland. Starting in 1971, James said, he worked for the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), interrogating Irish nationalists Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands and others whom the British government suspected of being terrorists. Peter Taylor, a leading historian of the conflict in Northern Ireland, said he believes that “James’s account is entirely credible.”

Late one night in 1993, three Irish Republican Army gunmen crept up to James’s door. “They came to get me,” James said. Given a 20-minute warning following a tip to the RUC, he and his wife escaped, ultimately to an island in the Mediterranean. James agreed to talk if his last name and location were withheld. “They haven’t a clue I’m here.”

Driving along winding, stony roads, past goats and grapevines, James had this advice for Lagouranis in Chicago: “You’ve got to get up and get on with it — that’s what we did.”

James had had no training, but the 18-hour days that made his neck ache taught him what he needed: good rapport, good intelligence, great fear. “Yes, a bloke would get a cuff in the ear or he might brace against the wall. Yes, they had sleep deprivation,” he said. “But we did not torture.”

Once, IRA leader Brendan Hughes claimed that James had cocked a gun to his head. James does not deny it. “You fight fire with fire,” he said, the memory igniting his blue eyes.

He noted that the sectarian killings dropped off: “If it’s going to save lives, you’re entitled to use whatever means you can.” How do you fight bad guys and stay good? “You don’t. You can’t.”

The only interrogation James regrets was of Patrick McGee, under arrest for IRA activity. McGee did not crack, which meant he would go free. As McGee walked out, “he just stared at you,” James recalled. “Evil was hanging out of him.” James spat in his face. “He never even blinked. It was not satisfying, it was humiliating. I lost my cool.”

James stopped his car at the edge of the ocean. According to Greek mythology, a god frolicked on this beach. Vacationers drank iced coffee and oiled the air with coconut lotion. But James seemed to be somewhere else, cloudy and turbulent, in his head.

“My friend once saw a guy planting a bomb,” he said. He laughed. “My friend tied a rope around the guy’s ankle, and made him defuse it. Now t hat’s how to deal with a ticking bomb.”
Chicago, 8 p.m.

“All of Iraq was a ticking time bomb,” Lagouranis said, downing his fourth of seven beers. He had joined the Army before 9/11 to learn Arabic. He didn’t expect to go to war.

He was sitting on a night off at the California Clipper bar, where he works as a bouncer. The bartender joked that Lagouranis should be tougher on customers: “You should ‘go Abu Ghraib.’ “

At Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the site of the 2003-04 abuse scandal, Lagouranis used to relax in the old execution chamber. He and a friend would sit near the trapdoor and read the Arabic scratched into the wall. They found a dirty brown rope. It was the hangman’s noose. “If there is an evil spot in the world, that was one of them,” Lagouranis said.

At Abu Ghraib and sometimes at the facilities in Mosul, north Babil province and other places where Lagouranis worked, the Americans were shot at and attacked with mortar fire. “Then I get a prisoner who may have done it,” he said. “What are you going to do? You just want to get back at somebody, so you bring this dog in. ‘Finally, I got you.’ “

Lagouranis’s tools included stress positions, a staged execution and hypothermia so extreme the detainees’ lips turned purple. He has written an account of his experiences in a book, “Fear Up Harsh,” which has been read by the Pentagon and will be published this week. Stephen Lewis, an interrogator who was deployed with Lagouranis, confirmed the account, and Staff Sgt. Shawn Campbell, who was Lagouranis’s team leader and direct supervisor, said Lagouranis’s assertions were “as true as true can get. It’s all verifiable.” John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the group investigated many of Lagouranis’s claims about abuses and independently corroborated them.

“At every point, there was part of me resisting, part of me enjoying,” Lagouranis said. “Using dogs on someone, there was a tingling throughout my body. If you saw the reaction in the prisoner, it’s thrilling.”

In Mosul, he took detainees outside the prison gate to a metal shipping container they called “the disco,” with blaring music and lights. Before and after questioning, military police officers stripped them and checked for injuries, noting cuts and bumps “like a car inspection at a parking garage.” Once a week, an Iraqi councilman and an American colonel visited. “We had to hide the tortured guys,” Lagouranis said.

Then a soldier’s aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel’s Holocaust memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far.