Iran Arrests Grandma

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: May 30, 2007

Man, was I wrong about Iran.

I thought this regime was powerful and self-confident, and actually felt strengthened since we destroyed its two main enemies — the Taliban and Saddam. That could not be further from the truth. This Iranian regime is afraid of its shadow. How do I know? It recently arrested a 67-year-old grandmother, whom it accused of trying to bring down the regime by organizing academic conferences!

Yes, big, tough President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the man who shows us how tough he is by declaring the Holocaust a myth — had his goons arrest Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old scholar, grandmother and dual Iranian-U.S. citizen, while she was visiting her 93-year-old mother in Tehran. Do you know how paranoid you have to be to think that a 67-year-old grandmother visiting her 93-year-old mother can bring down your regime? Now that is insecure.

It’s also shameful. Haleh directs the Middle East program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. She went to Iran in December to visit her aging mother — a trip she’s made regularly for the past decade. According to her husband, Shaul Bakhash, himself a renowned Iran expert in the U.S., while Haleh was traveling to the Tehran airport on Dec. 30, to return home, she was stopped by three masked, knife-wielding men — Iran’s Intelligence Ministry always needs three men and three knives when confronting a grandmother — and they stole her belongings and her U.S. and Iranian passports.

This was followed by six weeks of intermittent questioning by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. Then, on May 7, Haleh was arrested. Yesterday, she was formally charged with “endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners,” an Iranian spokesman said — apparently because of her work organizing academic conferences of Iranian and U.S. experts.

Why does Iran’s leadership do such a thing? Because its hard-liners fear relations with the U.S. and want to scuttle the Iran-U.S. dialogue that began this week in Baghdad. Just like Castro’s Cuba, Iran’s mullah dictators thrive on their clash with America. The conflict gives them status among anti-American countries, our sanctions allow them to explain away their poor economic performance, and U.S. “threats,” both real and imagined, allow them to crush all legitimate dissent by labeling it part of a U.S. conspiracy.

What to do? Obviously, one option is a military strike combined with fomenting revolution. But that could easily leave us with another unstable, failing state in the Middle East. I don’t want to create another boiling Iraq. A second option would be more economic sanctions to change the regime’s behavior. The third option is engagement aimed at restoring relations.

Alas, the Bush Iran policy has dabbled in all three, but never committed itself to one, and, as a result, Iran’s hard-liners have been strengthened. The only way out of our corner now is to get some leverage. And leverage can come only from stepped-up economic sanctions — particularly doing something to bring down the price of oil, Iran’s lifeblood — combined with aggressive engagement, like declaring that we don’t seek the toppling of the regime and that we are ready, if Iran curbs its nuclear program, to restore full diplomatic and economic ties the next day.

In other words, our only hope of either changing this Iranian regime or its behavior, without fracturing the country, is through a stronger Iranian middle class that demands a freer press, consensual politics and rule of law. That is our China strategy — and it could work even faster with Iran. The greatest periods of political change in modern Iran happened when the country was most intensely engaged with the West, beginning with the constitutional revolution in 1906.

Unfortunately, the Bush strategy — diplomatic/economic isolation plus high oil prices — has only frozen the regime in power and transformed it from mildly repressive to a K.G.B. state with a nuclear program. So now we face an Iranian regime that is both powerful and paranoid.

It has the resources to snub the world and its own people’s aspirations. Yet, no matter how much this regime tries to buy off its people with oil money, it knows that many despise it. It’s actually afraid of its own people more than anyone — so afraid it even criminalizes scholarly exchanges between Iranians and Americans that the regime can’t control.

That’s why a 67-year-old grandmother — whose only crime is getting people together in public to talk about building a better Iran — is such a threat.

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How We’re Animalistic — in Good Ways and Bad

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: May 30, 2007

The odd thing is that conservatives wear pinstriped suits. They love the ancients so much that they really should be walking around in togas. The main contribution of the Greeks to modern American politics may have been Michael Dukakis, who once climbed the Acropolis in wingtips.

But that doesn’t stop conservatives — especially the Straussians who pushed for going into Iraq — from being obsessed with ancient Greece, and from believing that they are the successors to Plato and Homer in terms of the lofty ideals and nobility and character in American politics — while Democrats merely muck about with policies for the needy.

Harvey Mansfield, a leading Straussian who taught political science at Harvard and who wrote a book called “Manliness” (he’s for it), gave the Jefferson lecture recently at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington.

It was an ode, as his book is, to “thumos,” the Greek word that means spiritedness, with flavors of ambition, pride and brute willfulness. Thumos, as Philip Kennicott wrote in The Washington Post, “is a word reinvented by conservative academics who need to put a fancy name on a political philosophy that boils down to ‘boys will be boys.’ ”

In his prepared remarks, Mr. Mansfield did not mention the war, which is a downer at conclaves of neocons and thumos worshippers. But he explained that thumos is “the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat.” In thumos, he added, “we see the animality of man, for men (and especially males) often behave like dogs barking, snakes hissing, birds flapping. But precisely here we also see the humanity of the human animal” because it is reacting for “a reason, even for a principle, a cause. Only human beings get angry.”

The professor used an example, naturally, from ancient Greece to explain why politics should be about revolution rather than equilibrium: “What did Achilles do when his ruler Agamemnon stole his slave girl? He raised the stakes. He asserted that the trouble was not in this loss alone but in the fact that the wrong sort of man was ruling the Greeks. Heroes, or at least he-men like Achilles, should be in charge rather than lesser beings like Agamemnon who have mainly their lineage to recommend them and who therefore do not give he-men the honors they deserve. Achilles elevated a civil complaint concerning a private wrong to a demand for a change of regime, a revolution in politics.” Mr. Mansfield concluded: “To complain of an injustice is an implicit claim to rule.”

The most recent example of the Hellenization of the Bush administration is the president’s choice for war czar, Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who says he loves the Greek military historian Thucydides.

Other Thucydides aficionados include Victor Davis Hanson, who was a war-guru to Dick Cheney when the vice president went into the bunker after 9/11 and got into his gloomy Hobbesian phase. (Hobbes’s biggest influence was also Thucydides.)

Donald Kagan, a respected Yale historian who has written authoritatively on the Peloponnesian War, is the father of Robert Kagan, a neocon who pushed for the Iraq invasion, and Frederick Kagan, a military historian who urged the surge.

I called Professor Kagan to ask him if Thucydides, the master at chronicling hubris and imperial overreaching, might provide the new war czar with any wisdom that can help America sort through the morass of Iraq.

Very much his sons’ father, the classicist said he was disgusted that the White House, after a fiasco of an occupation designed by Rummy, “is still doing one dumb thing after another” by appointing General Lute, a chief skeptic of the surge.

Professor Kagan said that one reason the Athenians ended up losing the war was because in the Battle of Mantinea in 418 B.C. against the Spartans, they sent “a very inferior force” and had a general in command who was associated with the faction that was against the aggressive policy against the Spartans.

“Kind of like President Bush appointing this guy to run the war whose strategy is opposed to the surge,” he said dryly.

With cold realism, Thucydides captured the Athenian philosophy in the 27-year war that led to its downfall as a golden democracy: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

What message can we take away from Thucydides for modern times?

“To me,” Professor Kagan said, “the deepest message, the most tragic, is his picture of civilization as a very thin veneer. When you punch a hole in it, what you find underneath is hollow, the precivilized characteristics of the human race — animalistic in the worst possible way.”

Compared to Iraq, the Peloponnesian War was a cakewalk.

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CAMPAIGNING FOR HISTORY Reflections on the American Presidency in a Political Season (a blog from the New York Times)

May 27, 2007, 7:57 pm

Stretching Executive Power in Wartime

By Jean Edward Smith

“The Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president,” wrote Francis Biddle, F.D.R.’s attorney general during World War II. Biddle was writing about Roosevelt’s shameful 1942 decision to evacuate Japanese-Americans from the Pacific Coast and place them in internment camps. But Biddle’s comment applies to all presidents in times of crisis. National survival or, perhaps more accurately, the president’s perception of national survival always takes precedence. George W. Bush has been no exception.

In 1798, during the undeclared war against France, President John Adams supported passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized political dissent and gave the president a free hand to deport any noncitizen he deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.”

Ten years later, President Thomas Jefferson sought to enforce the Embargo Act, which prohibited trade with Great Britain, by charging those who violated it with treason – an egregious example of executive overreach that the federal courts quickly rejected.

Andrew Jackson’s contempt for the treaty rights of the Cherokee Nation is a familiar story. Less well-known is Jackson’s attempt to halt the distribution of abolitionist literature in the South by censoring the mail.

Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and in several states he ordered the trial of civilians by military tribunals. Although Congress explicitly authorized Lincoln to suspend the writ, it was a draconian measure that the president believed essential to preserve the Union. “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” he asked.

Unlike Adams, Jefferson and Jackson, Lincoln was responding to an armed insurrection that threatened the nation’s survival. Most historians have judged his action as commensurate with the threat.

For more than 100 years, from the expiration of the Sedition Act of 1798 until America’s entry into World War I, the United States had no federal legislation banning rebellious expression. The War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War all were fought without criminalizing the right of dissent.

It was Woodrow Wilson, shortly after his re-election in 1916 but well before America’s entry into World War I, who sought legislation to suppress disloyalty. Wilson requested that Congress give the president absolute authority to censor the press in the event of war, to make it a federal crime to promote the success of America’s enemies and to close the mail to any material deemed “of a treasonable or anarchistic character.” Wilson insisted that the power he requested was “absolutely necessary to the public safety.” After America entered the war, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, which incorporated much of what Wilson asked for but not the authority to censor the press.

F.D.R. may be guilty of the most extreme disregard for civil liberty, although his action was endorsed by Congress and later upheld in two landmark Supreme Court decisions. Unlike Wilson and Adams, F.D.R. had no interest in launching a wartime crusade to promote ideological conformity. But he had been blindsided by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and he was unwilling to second-guess the War Department when it urged action in the interest of military security. The 1942 relocation of Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast was, in Roosevelt’s view, simply another act of wartime necessity dictated by the risk to America’s defenses.

But there was little justification for the action. Adm. Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations, and Gen. Mark Clark, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, had testified before Congress that the Pacific Coast was in no danger of invasion, and the possibility of Japanese-immigrant-inspired sabotage was no greater than that which might arise from German or Italian immigrants elsewhere in the country.

The initial agitation to remove the Japanese came from California civilians, and was tainted by long-standing racism and greed. The clamor was magnified by the state’s political leaders, including Earl Warren, then California’s attorney general, and was transmitted to Washington by Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, the overall Army commander on the West Coast.

When De Witt’s request arrived at the War Department, the Army general staff vigorously opposed the action. But the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, Secretary Henry L. Stimson and Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy, were convinced of the military necessity and transmitted that view to F.D.R. Roosevelt gave the matter too little attention; if Stimson and McCloy recommended that the Japanese be evacuated, he was not going to dispute them. On Feb. 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed the executive order that they had prepared, authorizing the forcible evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry from a designated war zone along the Pacific Coast.

By presidential directive, 120,000 Japanese residents, 80,000 of whom were American citizens by birth, were taken from their homes, farms and businesses and interned at relocation sites far inland. Roosevelt showed little remorse. In March of 1942, when Henry Morgenthau Jr., the treasury secretary, told F.D.R. about the financial losses the Japanese had suffered, the president said he was “not concerned about that.” History has judged Roosevelt harshly. There is little question that he had the authority to issue the order. Whether he should have done so is another matter.

In the Korean conflict, President Harry Truman stretched his commander-in-chief power to seize and operate the nation’s steel mills. During the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon sought to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, secret documents pertaining to American military strategy that Daniel Ellsberg had stolen from the Defense Department. In neither case was national survival at risk, and in both cases the Supreme Court struck down the president’s action.

There is an old legal maxim that in time of war the laws are silent: Inter arma silent leges. But the crucial issue is the extent to which the nation is threatened. In the cases of Lincoln and Roosevelt, the survival of the United States hung in the balance. A president will be forgiven by his contemporaries, though not necessarily by later generations, for acting outside the law when that is the case. As more than one Supreme Court justice has said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. When national survival is not threatened, however, it is essential for a chief executive to resist an unwarranted enlargement of his powers.

A national security concern does not become a war simply because it is baptized as such. President George W. Bush’s questionable use of the metaphor “war on terror” to justify indefinite detention of suspects, warrantless eavesdropping and spying on the reading habits of citizens could invite from historians even more opprobrium than they have cast on the repressive actions taken by other presidents when the survival of the United States was at risk.

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A New Silent Majority

Our Lives as Atoms
On the Physical Patters That Govern Our World

May 23, 2007, 6:11 pm

By Mark Buchanan

Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn’t attack President Bush personally, but said that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” which can’t really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.

In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken “an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president,” and portrayed Carter’s words — unfairly it seems — as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it “unprecedented.” Yet as an article in this newspaper on Tuesday pointed out, “presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones.”

The pattern is familiar. Polls show that most Americans want our government to stop its unilateral swaggering, and to try to solve our differences with other nations through diplomacy. In early April, for example, when the speaker of the House, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, visited Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, a poll had 64 percent of Americans in favor of negotiations with the Syrians. Yet this didn’t stop an outpouring of media alarm.

A number of CNN broadcasts — including one showing Pelosi with a head scarf beside the title “Talking with Terrorists?” — failed even to mention that several Republican congressmen had met with Assad two days before Pelosi did. The conventional wisdom on the principal television talk shows was that Pelosi had “messed up on this one” (in the words of NBC’s Matt Lauer), and that she and the Democrats would pay dearly for it.

So it must have been a great surprise when Pelosi’s approval ratings stayed basically the same after her visit, or actually went up a little.

Or take the matter of the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Most media figures seem to consider the very idea as issuing from the unhinged imaginations of a lunatic fringe. But according to a recent poll, 39 percent of Americans in fact support it, including 42 percent of independents.

A common explanation of this tendency toward distortion is that the beltway media has attended a few too many White House Correspondents’ Dinners and so cannot possibly cover the administration with anything approaching objectivity. No doubt the Republicans’ notoriously well-organized efforts in casting the media as having a “liberal bias” also have their intended effect in suppressing criticism.

But I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn’t meet with enough criticism, and if that’s partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think – when actually it often doesn’t.

Psychologists coined the term “pluralistic ignorance” in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception — more a social than an individual phenomenon — to which even smart people might fall victim. A study back then had surprisingly found that most kids in an all-white fraternity were privately in favor of admitting black members, though most assumed, wrongly, that their personal views were greatly in the minority. Natural temerity made each individual assume that he was the lone oddball.

A similar effect is common today on university campuses, where many students think that most other students are typically inclined to drink more than they themselves would wish to; researchers have found that many students indeed drink more to fit in with what they perceive to be the drinking norm, even though it really isn’t the norm. The result is an amplification of a minority view, which comes to seem like the majority view.

In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O’Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, “moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority.”

What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible. Psychologists have noted that students who are the heaviest drinkers, for example, tend to speak out most strongly against proposed measures to curb drinking, and act as “subculture custodians” in support of their own minority views. Their strong vocalization can produce “false consensus” against such measures, as others, who think they’re part of the minority, keep quiet. As a consequence, the extremists gain influence out of all proportion to their numbers, while the views of the silent majority end up being suppressed. (The United States Department of Education has a brief page on the main ideas here.)

Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans, but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill.

Over the past couple months, Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has done a superb job of documenting what certainly seems like it might be a case of pluralistic ignorance among the major political media, many (though certainly not all) of whom often seem to act as “subculture custodians” of their own amplified minority views. Routinely, it seems, views that get expressed and presented as majority views aren’t really that at all.

In a typical example in March, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that most Americans wanted to pardon Scooter Libby, saying that the polling “indicates that most people think, in fact, that he should be pardoned, Scooter Libby should be pardoned.” In fact, polls showed that only 18 percent then favored a pardon.

Mitchell committed a similar error in April, claiming that polling showed Nancy Pelosi to be unpopular with the American people, her approval rating being as low as the dismal numbers of former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert just before the 2006 November elections. But in fact the polls showed Pelosi’s approval standing at about 50 percent, while Hastert’s had been 22 percent.

As most people get their news from the major outlets, these distortions – however they occur, whether intentionally or through some more innocuous process of filtering – almost certainly translate into a strongly distorted image in peoples’ minds of what most people across the country think. They contribute to making mainstream Americans feel as if they’re probably not mainstream, which in turn may make them less likely to voice their opinions.

One of the most common examples of pluralistic ignorance, of course, takes place in the classroom, where a teacher has just finished a dull and completely incomprehensible lecture, and asks if there are any questions. No hands go up, as everyone feels like the lone fool, even though no student actually understood a single word. It takes guts, of course, to admit total ignorance when you might just be the only one.

Last year, author Kristina Borjesson interviewed 21 prominent journalists for her book “Feet to the Fire,” about the run-up to the Iraq War. Her most notable impression was this:

“The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation’s top messengers about why we went to war. [War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren’t clear about it, that means the public wasn’t necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don’t think the American people are clear about it.”

Yet in the classroom of our democracy, at least for many in the media, it still seems impolitic – or at least a little too risky – to raise one’s hand.

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The Vulcan Utopia

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: May 29, 2007

If you’re going to read Al Gore’s book, you’re going to have to steel yourself for a parade of sentences like the following:

“The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.”

But, hey, nobody ever died from contact with pomposity, and Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.

Gore is, for example, a radical technological determinist. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines, and in this book he lays out a theory of history entirely driven by them.

He writes that “the idea of self-government became feasible after the printing press.” With this machine, people suddenly had the ability to use the printed word to debate ideas and proceed logically to democratic conclusions. As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This Age of Reason produced the American Revolution. But in the 20th-century, television threatened it all. In Gore’s view, TV immobilizes the reasoning centers in the brain and stimulates the primitive, instinctive parts. TV creates a “visceral vividness” that is not “modulated by logic, reason and reflective thought.”

TV allows political demagogues to exaggerate dangers and stoke up fear. Furthermore, “conglomerates can dominate the expressions of opinion that flood the mind of the citizenry” and “the result is a de facto coup d’état overthrowing the rule of reason.”

Fortunately, another technology is here to save us. “The Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for re-establishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish,” he writes. The Internet will restore reason, logic and the pursuit of truth.

The first response to this argument is, Has Al Gore ever actually looked at the Internet? He spends much of this book praising cold, dispassionate logic, but is that really what he finds on most political blogs or in his e-mail folder?

But Gore’s imperviousness to reality is not the most striking feature of the book. It’s the chilliness and sterility of his worldview. Gore is laying out a comprehensive theory of social development, but it allows almost no role for family, friendship, neighborhood or just face-to-face contact. He sees society the way you might see it from a speaking podium — as a public mass exercise with little allowance for intimacy or private life. He envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions.

This in turn grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and should master, the primitive and more emotional mind below. He thinks this can be done through a technical process that minimizes information flow to the lower brain and maximizes information flow to the higher brain.

The reality, of course, is there is no neat distinction between the “higher” and “lower” parts of the brain. There are no neat distinctions between the “rational” mind and the “visceral” body. The mind is a much more complex network of feedback loops than accounted for in Gore’s simplistic pseudoscience.

Without emotions like fear, the “logical” mind can’t reach conclusions. On the other hand, many of the most vicious, genocidal acts are committed by people who are emotionally numb, not passionately out of control.

Some great philosopher should write a book about people — and there are many of them — who flee from discussions of substance and try to turn them into discussions of process. Utterly at a loss when asked to talk about virtue and justice, they try to shift attention to technology and methods of communication. They imagine that by altering machines they can alter the fundamentals of behavior, or at least avoid the dark thickets of human nature.

If a philosopher did write such a book, it would help us understand Al Gore, and it would, as he would say, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

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Small Incidents Are Creating a Big Problem With the N.Y.P.D.

By BOB HERBERT

Published: May 29, 2007

These are small incidents, but they are accumulating by the tens of thousands, and someday New Yorkers are going to be shocked by the power of the anger that these seemingly insignificant incidents have generated.

The principal of Bushwick Community High School in Brooklyn told me about a student who was gratuitously insulted by a police officer at a subway station the other day. The girl had lost her MetroCard and was carrying a note on the school’s letterhead asking that she be allowed to ride the train. This was fine with the token clerk, but the clerk told the girl to show the note to a cop on duty at the station.

The cop, in front of several onlookers, told the girl she was the oldest-looking high school student he had ever seen. He demanded that she tell him the square root of 12. He loudly declared that she was stupid and refused to let her board a train.

The girl left the station devastated and in tears. No big deal. Certainly not newsworthy. Just another case of cops being cops.

Several students from Bushwick Community High were among the three dozen or so who were swept up by the cops last week as they were walking toward a subway station, on their way to a wake for a teenage friend who had been murdered. For black and Hispanic youngsters, grieving can be a criminal offense.

One of those arrested was 16-year-old Lamel Carter, the son of a police detective. I interviewed him after he had spent a night in jail.

“It was pretty nasty,” he said. “There were five of us in each cell. One of my friends was throwing up, and another had an asthma attack. The police said they got us for unlawful assembly.”

[I asked the police captain who ordered the arrests, Scott Henderson, to explain the offense of unlawful assembly. He couldn’t. “If you would like the exact definition,” he said, “I would have to look that up.”]

Fifteen minutes after I interviewed Lamel, he was stopped again by two police officers. They asked him where he was going, ordered him to spread-eagle himself against a patrol car, searched him and then him let go.

He was just another black kid (now with a brand-new arrest record) on the streets of Brooklyn. No big deal. Just one of hundreds of similar stops each day.

One of the youngsters arrested while trying to attend the wake was Aliek Robinson, a 17-year-old who had come up from Baltimore. He had known the slain youth, Donnell McFarland, whose nickname was Freshh, since he was 6 years old. When I interviewed him, Aliek told me how one of the cops had gone out of his way to mock his dead friend.

“After we got arrested, the cops were questioning us one-by-one,” he said. “This one cop had a smile on his face and he said, ‘Your man, Freshh, he was babbling like a little girl when he died.’ And then he started giggling. I don’t know why he said that. He didn’t have to say that.”

Just cops being cops.

The important thing to remember here is that this behavior, in neighborhoods where the majority of the residents are black and Hispanic, is often the norm. This is not unusual police behavior. There is a huge percentage of cops on patrol whose knee-jerk approach to policing is to treat all young blacks and Hispanics as potential criminals.

All high-ranking public officials in the city are aware of what is going on. I asked a black official, who asked not to be identified, why more minority officeholders aren’t objecting publicly to the way minority youth are treated by the police. He said no one wants to be responsible for challenging the cops and then being blamed if crime statistics start to go back up.

The two individuals most responsible for this sorry state of affairs are Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. All it would take is a directive from them to bring the ugly harassment under control.

A big gang problem has quietly developed in New York, and there are fears in the neighborhoods of a troubled summer. The response to this very serious situation should not be to treat all kids like criminals, which is both wrong and self-defeating.

The police need the confidence and cooperation of law-abiding young people. Systematically demeaning them is hardly the way to achieve that.

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The Educated Giant

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: May 28, 2007

Taishan, China

With China’s trade surplus with the United States soaring, the tendency in the U.S. will be to react with tariffs and other barriers. But instead we should take a page from the Chinese book and respond by boosting education.

One reason China is likely to overtake the U.S. as the world’s most important country in this century is that China puts more effort into building human capital than we do.

This area in southern Guangdong Province is my wife’s ancestral hometown. Sheryl’s grandparents left villages here because they thought they could find better opportunities for their children in “Meiguo” — “Beautiful Country,” as the U.S. is called in Chinese. And they did. At Sheryl’s family reunions, you feel inadequate without a doctorate.

But that educational gap between China and America is shrinking rapidly. I visited several elementary and middle schools accompanied by two of my children. And in general, the level of math taught even in peasant schools is similar to that in my kids’ own excellent schools in the New York area.

My kids’ school system doesn’t offer foreign languages until the seventh grade. These Chinese peasants begin English studies in either first grade or third grade, depending on the school.

Frankly, my daughter got tired of being dragged around schools and having teachers look patronizingly at her schoolbooks and say, “Oh, we do that two grades younger.”

There are, I think, four reasons why Chinese students do so well.

First, Chinese students are hungry for education and advancement and work harder. In contrast, U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.

Here in Sheryl’s ancestral village, the students show up at school at about 6:30 a.m. to get extra tutoring before classes start at 7:30. They go home for a lunch break at 11:20 and then are back at school from 2 p.m. until 5. They do homework every night and weekend, and an hour or two of homework each day during their eight-week summer vacation.

The second reason is that China has an enormous cultural respect for education, part of its Confucian legacy, so governments and families alike pour resources into education. Teachers are respected and compensated far better, financially and emotionally, in China than in America.

In my last column, I wrote about the boomtown of Dongguan, which had no colleges when I first visited it 20 years ago. The town devotes 21 percent of its budget to education, and it now has four universities. An astonishing 58 percent of the residents age 18 to 22 are enrolled in a university.

A third reason is that Chinese believe that those who get the best grades are the hardest workers. In contrast, Americans say in polls that the best students are the ones who are innately the smartest. The upshot is that Chinese kids never have an excuse for mediocrity.

Chinese education has its own problems, including bribes and fees to get into good schools, huge classes of 50 or 60 students, second-rate equipment and lousy universities. But the progress in the last quarter-century is breathtaking.

It’s also encouraging that so many Chinese will shake their heads over this column and say it really isn’t so. They will complain that Chinese schools teach rote memorization but not creativity or love of learning. That kind of debate is good for the schools and has already led to improvements in English instruction, so that urban Chinese students can communicate better in English than Japanese or South Koreans.

After I visited Sheryl’s ancestral village, I posted a video of it on the Times Web site. Soon I was astonished to see an excited posting on my blog from a woman who used to live in that village.

Litao Mai, probably one of my distant in-laws, grew up in a house she could see on my video. Her parents had only a third grade education, but she became the first person in the village to go to college. She now works for Merrill Lynch in New York and describes herself as “a little peasant girl” transformed into “a capitalist on Wall Street.”

That is the magic of education, and there are 1.3 billion more behind Ms. Mai.

So let’s not respond to China’s surpluses by putting up trade barriers. Rather, let’s do as we did after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957: raise our own education standards to meet the competition.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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Trust and Betrayal

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 28, 2007

“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.” That’s what President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than any president in our nation’s history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness.

Now that war has turned into an epic disaster, in part because the war’s architects, whom we now know were warned about the risks, didn’t want to hear about them. Yet Congress seems powerless to stop it. How did it all go so wrong?

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was misled into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” people should have realized that he was going to use the terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

When he used his first post-attack State of the Union to denounce an “axis of evil” consisting of three countries that had nothing to do either with 9/11 or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.

But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over the attack, wanted to trust the man occupying the White House. And so it took a long time before Americans were willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly their trust had been betrayed.

It’s a terrible story, yet it’s also understandable. I wasn’t really surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war.

The question was whether the public would ever catch on. Well, to the immense relief of those who spent years trying to get the truth out, they did. Last November Americans voted overwhelmingly to bring an end to Mr. Bush’s war.

Yet the war goes on.

To keep the war going, the administration has brought the original bogyman back out of the closet. At first, Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin Laden in, dead or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he had lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure,” he said in March 2002. “I truly am not that concerned about him.”

In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to sell, made public mention of the man behind 9/11 only seven times.

But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name 11 times in a single speech, warning that if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when we went in — will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that they will end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave Mr. Bush another year’s war funding.

Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.

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Israel and the Price of Blindness

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: May 27, 2007

JERUSALEM

A three-minute Palestinian movie says what needs to be said about estrangement and violence in the Middle East. It features a woman driving around Jerusalem asking for directions to the adjacent West Bank town of Ramallah. She is met by dismay, irritation, blank stares and near panic from Israelis.

The documentary, called "A World Apart Within 15 Minutes" and directed by Enas Muthaffar, captures the psychological alienation that has intensified in recent years and left Israelis and Palestinians worlds apart, so alienated from each other that a major Palestinian city has vanished from Israelis' mental maps.

Never mind the latest flare-up in Gaza. What matters in the world's most intractable conflict is the way the personal narratives of Israelis and Palestinians, coaxed toward intersection by the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, have diverged to a point of mutual nonrecognition.

Ramallah is about 10 kilometers north of Jerusalem. For most Israelis, it might as well be on the moon. It is not just the fence, called the "separation barrier" by Israelis and the "racist separating wall" by Palestinians, that gets in the way. It is the death of the idea of peace and its replacement by the notion of security in detachment.

I can understand that notion's appeal. Israelis have had reason enough to throw up their hands since 2000 and say: To heck with suicide bombers, Gaza mayhem, inept Palestinian leadership and annihilationist Hamas. They would rather focus on their dot-com boom, high-speed trains and Goa vacations. They would rather be safe than worry about peace.

But detachment is an illusion. Life goes on behind the physical and mental barriers Israelis have erected. Or rather, it festers. As Itamar Rabinovich, the president of Tel Aviv University, remarked to me: "Palestine is a failed pre-state."

For that failure, Palestinians must take responsibility. But this aborted birth is also Israel's work. I drove recently from Jerusalem to the West Bank city of Nablus. A beautiful terrain of terraced olive groves is scarred by the cold imprint of Israeli occupation: shining garrison-like settlements on hilltops, fenced highways for settlers alone, watchtowers, check-points.

The West Bank, after 40 years under Israeli control, is a shameful place. If this is the price of Israeli security, it is unacceptable. Power corrupts; absolute power can corrupt absolutely. There are no meaningful checks and balances in this territory, none of the mechanisms of Israel's admirable democracy.

The result is what the World Bank this month called a "shattered economic space." If Israelis could be as inventive about seeking bridges to Palestinians as they are now in devising restrictions on their movement, the results could be startling. As it is, the bank noted, Israeli policy has produced "ever smaller and disconnected cantons."

This has been achieved through remorseless permit and ID checks, roadblocks, checkpoints and the creation of closed areas. Palestinians are caged in islets where doing business is near impossible.

More than 500 barriers hinder Palestinian movement. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers move freely; their number, outside East Jerusalem, has increased to about 250,000 from roughly 126,900 at the time of the Oslo Accords. These numbers alone make Palestinian political and religious radicalization less than entirely mysterious.

In his April 14, 2004, statement on a two-state solution, President George W. Bush offered concessions to Israel. He said it was "unrealistic" to expect "a full and complete return" to the Green Line. But he also urged "the establishment of a Palestinian state that is viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent."

More than three years later, there is no such state. What there is of a nascent Palestine is non-viable, non-contiguous, non-sovereign and dependent. While denouncing terrorism with appropriate vigor, Bush has an equal obligation to pressure Israel to accept that ruthless colonization is unworthy of it and no enduring recipe for security.

Israel has an obligation to open its eyes and do some wall-jumping. The country has just been shaken by the Winograd Report, a devastating look at last summer's war against the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah. It is now time for a report of similar scope on Israel's West Bank occupation.

I can see no better way to arrest the cycle of alienation. Time is not on the side of a two-state solution. A fast-growing Palestinian population inhabits a neighborhood where the Ahmadinejad-Hezbollah-Hamas school has leverage.

If Israelis do not rediscover where and what Ramallah is, they may one day be devoured by what they choose not to see.

E-mail: rocohen@nytimes.com

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Feeding Lawyers’ Souls, but Not Their Wallets

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: May 28, 2007

Last month, the federal appeals court in New York gave the civil rights bar a collective heart attack.

It ruled that there are cases in which lawyers may be paid not in dollars but in what it called “non-monetary returns.” Those include, the court said, “experience, reputation or achievement of the attorneys’ own interests and agendas.”

That standard is new, and it has teeth. The lawyers involved had won a significant voting rights case, and they sought $445,000. They got $133,000.

In a flurry of legal filings last week, the lawyers, supported by two bar associations and 29 public interest organizations — including the Urban Justice Center, Public Citizen, the Natural Resources Defense Council and several affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union — begged the court to reconsider.

“It really is a dangerous decision,” said David Udell, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which represents the public interest groups. “What the court does is say that legal work is less valuable when the lawyers’ hearts are in it.”

The case itself was a challenge to the way Albany County in New York reapportioned its voting districts after the 2000 census. It was filed by two organizations representing minorities, including the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., and three individuals.

In cases brought under the federal Voting Rights Act, the winning side is allowed to recover its legal fees from the losers. That is an exception to the conventional American practice of making each side bear its own legal fees, but it is not particularly unusual. Quite a few laws have similar fee-shifting provisions.

It is hard to be particularly sympathetic to the lawyers in the case, including several from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a fancy corporate firm. They claimed, for instance, that an appeal involving a single, simple issue required almost 300 hours of work by eight lawyers and a $107,000 bill, to be paid by the taxpayers of Albany County.

That kind of money is in line with what big law firms charge their corporate clients. On the other hand, the request was preposterous.

A different panel of the appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, was incredulous when it first saw the fee application in 2004.

“It is difficult to believe that a large amount of time was needed to prepare the brief’s description of the facts and procedural history; and the entire argument section of the brief on this single-issue appeal occupied barely six pages,” the appeals court said in an unsigned opinion. It sent the case back to the lower court with the strong suggestion that it slash the fee application.

It did — but for the usual reasons. Too many lawyers had billed too many hours at jaw-dropping hourly rates, two lower court judges found. The appeal, they said, was worth not $107,000 but $20,000.

So far so good. And in affirming those reductions last month, a three-judge panel of the court properly sought to bring some clarity and order to the question of how to treat fee applications, an area of the law that is without question a mess.

One of the judges on the panel was Sandra Day O’Connor, who has been sitting on quite a few appeals since her retirement from the Supreme Court last year. The solution she and the two other judges arrived at was at once eminently sensible and entirely impractical.

The court asked what a hypothetical, thrifty client would have paid a lawyer to litigate the case — that is, it asked what the market price in an arm’s-length transaction would have been. “Not incidentally,” Judge John M. Walker Jr. wrote for the panel, “a reasonable, paying client might consider whether a lawyer is willing to offer his services in whole or in part pro bono” — free — “or to promote the lawyer’s own reputational or societal goals.”

But there is a reason that client was hypothetical. The fee-shifting laws distort the marketplace in a way that makes it impossible to know what lawyers and clients would otherwise have done.

In an e-mail message, Mitchell A. Karlan, the Gibson, Dunn partner who argued the appeal, said he had taken the case without expecting to be paid — if he lost.

“My agreement with the plaintiffs,” Mr. Karlan continued, “was that I would apply for a fee on their behalf if I won, and that any fee the court awarded I and the other lawyers would keep.”

That is, for better or worse, how real-life pro bono works, and it is the system Congress had in mind in enacting fee-shifting statutes to encourage the private enforcement of civil rights laws.

Gibson, Dunn, which occasionally represents The New York Times Company, does not need the money. The average Gibson, Dunn partner makes $1.75 million a year, according to The American Lawyer.

But the new standard announced last month also applies to small firms and to advocacy groups, and it asks judges to inquire into lawyers’ motives in taking cases to decide how much their work was worth.

Lawyers who can prove they were in it only for the money will get paid in dollars. Others may have to make do with psychic income.

Online: Court documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles and columns: nytimes.com/adamliptak.

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Sometimes It’s Over Even When It Ain’t

By DAVE ANDERSON

Published: May 28, 2007

Without realizing it, about half a century ago Yogi Berra, baseball’s old philosopher, described the perilous situation of these Yankees. Asked about the shadows in left field at Yankee Stadium when all World Series games were played in the afternoon, he shrugged.

“It gets late early out there,” he grunted.

And as the Yankees struggle to qualify for the American League playoffs for the 13th consecutive year, it’s already late early. Maybe too late. With a 21-27 record, they are 12 ½ games behind the Red Sox in the East and the season isn’t even one-third over.

Optimists point out that there is still a lot of time left in the season, but realists counter that the Yankees have yet to show the overall consistency required to turn around what Joe Torre acknowledged to be “the toughest” slump of his 12 seasons as the Yankees’ manager.

In a semantic twist to Yogi’s line, after yesterday’s 4-3 loss to the Angels at the Stadium, Torre said, “We’ve been bad early in other years, but not this late.”

Not as late as Memorial Day and not only after having been swept by the Angels, but after having lost 7 of their past 10 games and 10 of their past 16.

As if that’s not bad enough and late early enough, the Yankees go on the road for 10 games beginning tonight in Toronto. After three games with the Blue Jays, they go to Boston for a three-game weekend series and then to Chicago for four games before returning to the Stadium for interleague games against the Pirates, the Diamondbacks and the Mets.

By then, maybe they’ll be on a roll. Then again, maybe not. They’ve won as many as three in a row only twice this season, series sweeps of the Indians and the Rangers.

“We’ve been spinning our wheels,” Torre said. “You spend your time wondering what piece of the puzzle to move around and what to say to the young players who have never been through something like this.”

Torre recalled going through something like this as manager of the Braves (and as the National League manager of the year) in 1982, when Atlanta finished first in the West.

“We won our first 13, then lost five in a row,” he said. “Later on we lost 19 of 21, then won 13 of 15. That 13 of 15 started the day I scratched Pascual Pérez as the starter because he couldn’t find the right exit for the ballpark off the interstate. He ran out of gas and had to borrow money for gas because he didn’t have his wallet. I started Phil Niekro instead, and he got us going on that 13 of 15.”

And if the Yankees are to make a run for even the wild card, they’re going to need winning streaks similar to what those Braves had.

Although the Cardinals salvaged the N.L. wild card last year with only 83 victories and went on to win the World Series, the A.L. wild card team in recent seasons has usually had victories in the low 90s — the number that Mike Mussina figured the Yankees would need to earn the wild card.

“To get there, we’d have to go, say, 72-42 from now, 30 games over .500,” Mussina said. “That’d make us 93-69, and that might make it.”

Mussina figured those numbers in his head so quickly, had he been a math major at Stanford? “No, economics,” he said. “That’s close.”

Mussina was close to improving his record to 3-3 this season when he departed in the seventh inning yesterday after a one-out walk to Casey Kotchman, but the right-hander Scott Proctor couldn’t protect a 2-1 lead.

After giving up a line-drive double to Howie Kendrick, Proctor walked three consecutive batters, forcing in two runs before Reggie Willits’s sacrifice fly against Brian Bruney produced the decisive run.

The Yankees rallied in the ninth on Bobby Abreu’s walk, Jorge Posada’s pinch-hit single, Johnny Damon’s pinch-hit groundout and Melky Cabrera’s sacrifice fly, but with Posada on third with the potential tying run, Angels reliever Francisco Rodríguez got Derek Jeter to fly out.

And so the Yankees, who had taken two of three from the Red Sox earlier in the week, were swept by the Angels, the West Division leaders.

Was Jeter, the captain, starting to worry that the Yankees were on a treadmill, or that it was already too late for them to make much of a move in the standings?

“I don’t sit around and worry,” Jeter said. “If you go into a game worried, that’s when you’re in trouble. Too late — that doesn’t enter your mind. It’s hard enough to play this game, much less think about that. You have to string together a few games. You can’t sprinkle one game here and there.”

But in only sprinkling one game here and there, it’s getting late early for these Yankees. Maybe too late.

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A Sport Can No Longer Peddle Denial

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: May 27, 2007

Sure, go ahead, enjoy the Tour de France this year. Stock up on the pâté and the baguette and the vin ordinaire, either in a beautiful corner of France or in front of the television. The Tour will still be a compelling sight.

Just don’t take it seriously. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t take the riders into your heart the way I once took the gritty Tyler Hamilton or the loopy Floyd Landis into my sentimental journalist’s notebook, my common sense suspended.

When a prominent rider and coach like Bjarne Riis offers to turn back his yellow 1996 championship jersey because he cheated, as he did Friday, cycling has officially become as bogus as pro wrestling. Companies are already dropping their sponsorships because of the gruesome publicity.

It was bad enough with two American stars, Hamilton and Landis, protesting their innocence despite laboratory tests to the contrary; it was bad enough when Frankie Andreu admitted he had used illegal drugs as a teammate of Lance Armstrong, the iconic seven-time champion and self-styled most-tested athlete in the world; and it was bad enough that European stars like Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso left the Tour recently because of a doping scandal.

The worst blow yet was the announcement Friday by Riis that he had used illegal drugs in 1996, when he suddenly conquered the mountains and Miguel Indurain. Multilingual, thoughtful and accessible, Riis has more recently been the coach of CSC, a Danish team representing an American technology company.

•

Take it from a journalist who has worked the scrum of a finish line: Riis is a welcome figure, standing outside the CSC bus, explaining the courage of Hamilton, who was riding with a cracked collarbone in 2003, or discussing the potential of Basso as a challenger to Armstrong in 2005.

Riis is a modern man who speaks in corporate phrases about holding team seminars to instill “values” like loyalty, respect, communication and commitment in his riders. But some cycling experts never quite understood how a support rider had suddenly bloomed in athletic middle age.

Now Riis has told the world that his conscience was troubled because he had used the blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin, or EPO, for which there was no test until 2000. On Friday, asked by a journalist if he was a “worthy” champion, Riis said, “No, I am not.”

In a statement, Riis said: “We all make mistakes, and I think my biggest mistake was to let my ambition get the better of me. That I have had to deal with a long time ago, and I am glad to say that I am a lot wiser now, both in my personal and in my professional life.”

If Pete Rose had made a statement like that when investigators documented his betting on baseball in 1989, he would have been rehabilitated and probably come back to manage. Repentant basketball players like Alex Groza and Floyd Lane, caught up in a gambling scandal half a century ago, came back to have admirable coaching careers.

Talk about comebacks: Silvio Berlusconi’s A.C. Milan soccer team won the European Cup on Wednesday only a year after being mildly penalized in a national match-rigging scandal. But Riis let nearly 11 years go by while he enjoyed the status and profits of being a Tour champion; he confessed only when former teammates began singing.

Riis is planning to continue as the coach of CSC. If he can stand the daily gaff from public and press, why shouldn’t he? At the rate cycling is going, nothing is believable, anyway. Riis can impart all his tactical skills and mental strengths, and it will be up to the cycling organization to catch the cheats, which it declined to do when cheating was an open joke.

At least American baseball officials can portray themselves as naifs who did not understand why sluggers and pitchers were suddenly bulked up in the late 1990s. Cycling, however, has a century of anthologized anecdotes about the use of stimulants:

Jacques Anquetil, the five-time champion, once asked, “Do they expect us to ride the Tour on Perrier water?” Fausto Coppi, another great rider, was once asked whether he used amphetamines and he replied, “Only when strictly necessary.” And how often was it necessary? “Most of the time,” Coppi replied.

There will be no wink-wink jokes about the past generation, when a few prominent cyclists died and many aspirants basically fell off their bicycles, their bodies mysteriously ruined. This was serious stuff, but the cycling establishment let it go.

•

On Friday, Pat McQuaid, the president of the international cycling union, said Riis would not forfeit his title because of the eight-year statute of limitations. But he also said Riis should give back his champion’s jersey.

The Tour de France, which profited from the drama of his improbable victory in 1996, has come down hard on Riis.

“Bjarne Riis said it himself,” Christian Prudhomme, the head of the Tour, told Agence France-Presse on Friday. “He does not deserve to have won the Tour de France, because he cheated. He has left a black mark on the Tour de France.”

Prudhomme added, “Is this someone who should be leading a cycling team?”

The way this spectacle is going, it may not matter. We could be watching a dying business.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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Remembering Soldiers, by Forgetting About Britney and Paris

Edwin L. Eaton says he wants more respect shown to soldiers.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: May 27, 2007

LONG BEACH, N.Y.

IT must have been the only city manager’s memorandum in history to address the war in Iraq, the American flag, Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears in three very short paragraphs.

But for a few days, at least, it made Edwin L. Eaton a minor folk hero — one small voice trying to remind the nation what matters and what doesn’t in the million-channel blabfest that is American life.

Mr. Eaton’s May 16 memo took notice of the attention given those three pillars of pop culture, cited a need to “in some small way place things in perspective,” and then went on: “While our society and media outlets appear to be consumed by the activities of the ‘glitterati,’ we tend to forget that each day Americans are anonymously dying in Iraq. I think it only fair that they be remembered and honored. To achieve that end, we hereby direct that American flags throughout the city be flown at half-mast.”

The six flags at city buildings in this Long Island community were then lowered, and will remain that way indefinitely.

Mr. Eaton’s little protest began in the same way as much of American life does: He was watching television. He and his wife were watching a program — he’s not sure which one — when finally he went over the edge. “It was a half-hour of talking about the pretty people, I think it was something about Anna Nicole Smith’s baby teething, and then Britney Spears with her shaved head and wig and then, oh, by the way, five men got killed in Iraq and three are missing and then back to Paris Hilton’s personal trainer,” he said.

The next day he told council members of his idea, and the day after that he sent out his memo. Reported by Newsday, picked up by the wires, Mr. Eaton’s small protest brought him calls, letters and e-mail messages of support from around the country. “What has happened to us?” read one. “I salute you sir and keep up the good work. Maybe with people like you we can regain some sense of what is important in this life.”

Most people who wrote him applauded his support for the military. Some saw an antiwar message. But Mr. Eaton said he didn’t feel it was the role of Long Beach to cast judgment on the war, and he wasn’t doing that. It was more a show of respect, he said, a request that attention be paid.

“It’s not supposed to set off a grass-roots movement,” he said. “It’s not an antiwar statement. It was just one small government’s collective irritation. It was more making the statement: ‘Someone’s thinking of you guys.’ ”

Monday, of course, is the day we collectively honor the dead, not just from this war but from the others as well. The man most involved with that in Long Beach is John R. Radin Sr., 71, an American Legion stalwart who’s in charge of this year’s parade here. His home two blocks from the beach was full of ribbons and flags and pins. In a cabinet he keeps a stack of blue star banners, which symbolize service in the military.

During World War I and World War II, he said, residents could walk through neighborhoods and see the blue star banners in the front windows of house after house. The American Legion, he said, is trying to revive that tradition. But if it does catch on, it might send a somewhat unsettling message — many banners in modest neighborhoods, next to none in those where the financial inducements for military service don’t outweigh the physical risks.

“That’s why I’m for a draft,” Mr. Radin said. “When I served, I had doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, guys who wanted to be priests, guys who wanted to be rabbis, college graduates, guys who quit high school. I think we’d have less problems if everyone served.”

But none of his seven children served in the military. And as for Mr. Eaton’s message, Mr. Radin appreciates the sentiment but has his qualms. One issue is with the parade.

The Memorial Day observance usually ends with the flag being raised from half-staff after the playing of taps. That won’t happen this time.

Instead it will remain lowered, raising a new question. There’s not likely to be a joyful Armistice Day ending this war. So having lowered the flag, when is it raised again?

Still, on a gorgeous day at the beach, with its Maginot line of volleyball nets, its signs promising new million-dollar condominiums in what has been a largely middle-class town, it’s a question that seems far, far away.

That seems especially true for the young who generally said they respected those who served but had no desire to join them. “I wouldn’t want to bring my mom the pain of being one of those bodies found floating in the river,” said Marciano Etienne, a senior at Valley Stream Central High School.

Even without Misses Hilton and Spears, we don’t lack for diversions, the war is distant and depressing, and even Mr. Eaton says his memo can only go so far. “It’s symptomatic of our species,” he said. “We don’t want to dwell on unpleasantness, you don’t want to talk about gore and the mayhem of war every day. You need to keep your sanity. We’re just saying let’s give a little more thought in the other direction.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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The Invitation That Isn’t in the Mail

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: May 27, 2007

INVESTORS who attend annual shareholder meetings — ritualistic though the gatherings usually are — often do so to catch a glimpse of management and directors and to hear how their companies are faring.

Shareholders of Sunrise Senior Living, a provider of housing and services for the elderly, may have been especially eager to hear from their company’s executives and board this year.

After all, the company is in the sixth month of an internal accounting review; is fielding questions from the Securities and Exchange Commission about well-timed insider stock sales and option grants; and has recently fired its chief financial officer, Bradley B. Rush. Mr. Rush’s exit, the company said, followed actions taken by him that were “not consistent with the document retention directives issued by the company.”

As interested as they may be in learning more about these matters, Sunrise shareholders have not been given the chance for the edification that an annual meeting might bring. Even though last year’s meeting took place on May 16, this year’s has not been scheduled.

Sunrise, which was founded by its chief executive, Paul J. Klaassen, is something of a throwback. Its seven-person board is clubby — the five outside directors have either had business dealings with the company over the years or serve on other boards with Sunrise’s chief executive — and “classified.” That’s corporate-speak for a board whose directors have staggered terms, a setup that prevents an ouster of the board en masse.

In addition to Mr. Klaassen, who is the chairman, the other inside director is Teresa M. Klaassen, his wife and the “chief cultural officer” at Sunrise. According to filings, her unusual job title means that she develops “programs that help the company remain focused on its commitment to core values and principles of service.”

Almost six months ago, Sunrise hired an outside law firm and tasked a “special independent committee” of the board to do two things: scrutinize questionable option grants and examine $32 million in insider stock sales that Mr. and Mrs. Klaassen (as well as three outside directors) made before Sunrise publicly disclosed an accounting change that trounced its shares. The company spokeswoman has said that the executives and directors could not have had knowledge of the accounting review when they sold their stock.

Sunrise decided to examine itself after an institutional shareholder, S.E.I.U. Master Trust, a pension fund that benefits members of the Service Employees International Union, pushed for the move.

Sunrise’s accounting change has prevented it from filing audited financial statements for 2006 and revised ones for several other years. It is waiting for the S.E.C. to comment on its accounting practices to file a restated 2005 annual report.

The company has estimated that its restatement will shave $100 million off of earnings for the years from 1999 through 2005 — equal to about 29 percent of total income for the period.

According to S.E.C. rules, a company cannot file a proxy unless it has produced audited financial statements for the previous year, and cannot hold an annual shareholder meeting without a proxy.

But under the laws of Delaware, where the company is incorporated, if a public company does not hold an annual meeting within 13 months of its last, its shareholders can petition the state’s Chancery Court to compel a meeting. Sunrise is less than a month away from the Delaware deadline.

It will be interesting to see whether a Sunrise shareholder invokes the Delaware rules and calls on the company to hold a meeting.

In the meantime, Sunrise owners remain in the dark not only about their company’s option grants and stock sales, but also about two other accounting problems that emerged in February. Those involve how the company books its contract services reimbursement revenues and costs, and how it capitalizes interest expenses. Because Sunrise has made no proxy filing, shareholders have no information about executive compensation for 2006, either.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the S.E.I.U. Master Trust has written another letter to the Sunrise board, asking that it replace its outside directors with “truly independent persons who have the range of abilities and experiences necessary to lead a company of Sunrise’s size and complexity.”

Stephen Abrecht, executive director of benefits funds at the S.E.I.U. Master Trust, said that his organization has waited for the company to answer the questions that it submitted months ago. None have come, he said.

“But the list of problems keeps getting longer — accounting troubles, questionable insider trading, possible options backdating, material weaknesses in internal controls, S.E.C. inquiries, and now, the dismissal of the C.F.O.,” Mr. Abrecht said. “There is a leadership problem that needs to be fixed. The board should step up and appoint new, truly independent outside directors and implement governance reforms.”

Adding to the urgency of the matter, significant merger and acquisition activity has occurred in Sunrise’s industry, making it a possible takeover target, Mr. Abrecht said. “The board’s conflicts of interest make it virtually impossible for shareholders to have confidence that the current group of outside directors will place shareholders’ interests before all others in assessing opportunities to enhance value,” the letter said.

Meghan Lublin, a spokeswoman for Sunrise, said that the company had referred the S.E.I.U. letter to the board’s nominating and corporate governance committee for consideration.

“Both the New York Stock Exchange listing standards and Sunrise’s corporate governance guideline require that a majority of the company’s directors be independent,” she said in a statement. “Sunrise’s board of directors is comprised of highly experienced individuals and each of the non-management directors comprising more than two-thirds of the board has been determined to be independent under these standards and guidelines as described in our 2006 annual meeting proxy statement.”

Among those outside directors are Thomas J. Donohue, the chief executive of the United States Chamber of Commerce, on whose board Mr. Klaassen serves, and Ronald V. Aprahamian, a private investor, who previously served as a consultant to the company while on its board.

Craig R. Callen, a senior executive at Aetna and a Sunrise director, invested in a company venture while he was on its board, and William G. Little is a director at the chamber and chairman of the National Chamber Foundation, its research group. J. Douglas Holladay was a director at CNL Hotels and Resorts, formerly an affiliate of the CNL Financial Group, which has owned assisted-living facilities that Sunrise managed.

Among the insider sales under scrutiny are $4.8 million worth made by Mr. Donohue, Mr. Aprahamian and Mr. Holladay. None of the five outside directors returned phone calls seeking comment.

Sunrise’s most recent unaudited results indicate that the company’s operations are growing. It opened four new communities in the quarter ended March 31 and started construction on five others, bringing the total communities it oversees to 444 in the United States, Britain, Canada and Germany. Same-community revenue increased 5.1 percent in the March quarter, but expenses at these operations rose more — 6.5 percent — during the period.

As is the case with many companies that have not filed audited financial statements — largely because of option backdating investigations — Sunrise shares have held up remarkably well. They closed on Friday at $38.84 a share, up 26 percent this year.

STILL, it will be interesting to see if a Sunrise shareholder tries to force the company to hold an annual meeting without a proxy on file.

Beth Young, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School, said that if a shareholder did so, owners could attend the meeting, nominate a slate of directors and force a vote of those in attendance, possibly winning.

“That scenario would worry companies,” she said. “People come to the meeting to cast their votes to elect a new board member — it’s something that an opportunistic shareholder could really take advantage of.”

Such is the law of unintended consequences.

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"The Invitation That Isn’t in the Mail" >>

Asked to Serve Again, a Soldier Goes Down Fighting

“IF THEY HAD JUST LEFT HIM ALONE.” Muriel Dean

By DAN BARRY

Published: May 27, 2007

HOLLYWOOD, Md.

The sniper fired. It was a clean shot, if there is such a thing. And down for good fell another American soldier.

His name was Sergeant James Dean, but everyone called him Jamie. He was the farm boy who fished, hunted and tossed a horseshoe like nobody else. He was the guy at the end of Toots Bar, nursing a Bud and talking Nascar. He was the driver of that blue Silverado at the red light, his hands on the wheel, his mind on combat horrors that made him moody, angry, withdrawn.

Now here he was, another American soldier, dead. Only Sergeant Dean was killed at the front door of his childhood home, the day after Christmas and three weeks before his redeployment, shot by a sniper representing the government for whom he had already risked his life in Afghanistan. His wife and parents received the news not by a knock on the door, but by gunfire in the neighborhood.

“If they had just left him alone,” says his wife, Muriel.

In the summer of 2001, weeks before Sept. 11, Jamie stunned his family by enlisting in the Army; he was 23. A woman had just broken his heart, yes, but he explained that he wanted to experience life beyond installing air conditioners in confining St. Mary’s County. And his younger sister, an Air Force medic, had been talking up the military.

From April 2004 to April 2005, Jamie served in Afghanistan, far from the Chesapeake Bay. Now and then he’d talk to family members by telephone. “Just, ‘Hi, I’m fine,’ ” his mother, Elaine, says. “Or, ‘It sucks here.’ ”

Jamie came back quieter in the summer of 2005, with “DEAN” tattooed on his upper back and a cobra tattooed on his muscle-defined arm. But he kept private any changes beneath the skin, his mother says. “ ‘You don’t want to know, Mom,’ he would always say.”

One night at Toots, while drinking a beer, he met a woman named Muriel whose bluish-green eyes entranced him. The couple became inseparable, cobbling together a family that included her two children, three dogs and a cat. Muriel’s good for Jamie, people said, even without knowing how she was nudging him to get counseling for nightmares so bad they would both wake up soaked in sweat.

“The patient states he feels very nervous, has a hard time sleeping, feels nauseous in the a.m., and loses his temper a lot, ‘real bad,’ ” reported a Veterans Affairs evaluation from December 2005. “Was nearby an explosion that destroyed an Humvee with four G.I.’s killed in front of his eyes.”

“The patient is tired of feeling bad,” it said.

Jamie was prescribed some medication that did not seem to work at first. (“Cries for no reason,” said a report in February 2006.) His doctor adjusted the prescription.

Things got better, it seemed. Jamie returned to air-conditioning work. He donned a white tuxedo and married Muriel in a summer ceremony at the Elks Lodge. He sang some country-western karaoke and talked about getting his wife to go deer hunting.

A few days after Thanksgiving, a FedEx truck delivered an envelope to the Dean farm just as Jamie was about to go hunting. It was a form letter of redeployment, as impersonal as a bank statement.

“It was downhill after that,” Muriel says.

He withdrew from the present, it seemed. He drank more, and took his medication less. Finally, on Christmas Day, he and Muriel returned from a family gathering with plans to watch his favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys, on television. He went out to buy some beer — but went to Toots Bar instead.

She called him, and he came home, livid. He smashed some glasses, said something about winding up in a body bag, and sped away in his Silverado. He wound up at the family home, alone, talking on a cellphone with his sister, Kelly, saying things like: “I just can’t do it anymore.”

When his sister heard a gunshot, she called 911. The deputy sheriffs arrived at the isolated farmhouse around 10 p.m. and quickly determined that Jamie was drunk, agitated and carrying a shotgun. He told the deputies to back off.

Based on something a family member had said, the police knew that Jamie had other shotguns in the house, but they mistakenly believed he was an Army Ranger. “Rambo,” his mother says ruefully.

At 4:19 in the morning, the police shot dozens of tear-gas canisters, smashing the windows in front of Jamie’s horseshoe trophies, piercing walls decorated with garland. Several minutes later, Jamie fired shotgun pellets in the general direction of a police car parked at least 50 yards away. Then he sat down on the back porch.

A situation in which an armed man was in his own house, alone and a threat to no one but himself, had now escalated into a military action. On the ground, men with guns; in the sky, the whop-whop of helicopters. Now and then, Jamie would respond to some movement or sound with a shot into the ground or into the air.

Around noon, two negotiators pulled up to a family friend’s garage, where Jamie’s loved ones were cloistered a half-mile away. His wife was pacing. His mother was bracing herself. His father, Joey, was staring into the woods.

The negotiators asked them to say gentle things to Jamie into a tape-recorder. Muriel remembers calling him baby, saying she loved him and asking him to come on out.

At 12:25, a negotiator talked briefly by telephone to Jamie, who indicated he might come out; “I’m going home,” he said. Then the police cellphone’s battery died.

At 12:34, Jamie was reached again by telephone, but the volume was low and the negotiator could not make out what was being said.

At 12:45, the police cut power to the house and began shooting more tear gas through the front and the back of the house.

At 12:47, an armored vehicle called a Peace Keeper pulled up to the house. Jamie opened the front door and, according to the police, pointed his 20-gauge shotgun at the vehicle. A state police sniper, positioned in a garage 70 yards away, took aim.

Later, a spokesman for the Maryland State Police would say the department was reviewing its actions, but would refer to a statement by its superintendent, Col. Thomas E. Hutchins, in which he said that Sergeant Dean bore “sole responsibility.” The police could not walk away, the colonel had said, because the soldier had the potential to do harm to himself or to others.

Later, Richard D. Fritz, the state’s attorney for St. Mary’s County, would criticize the state police as using tactics that were “progressively assaultive” and “most unfortunate.” In the end, he would say, this paramilitary operation was “directed at an individual down at the end of a dark road, holed up in his father’s house, with no hostages.”

And later, the Dean family would be left with the mess of absence. Jamie’s blood on the cream-colored carpet. The dozens of holes in the walls. The family photo albums that still carry the whiff of tear gas, burning the eyes.

But at that moment, in the early afternoon of the day after Christmas, they heard the gunfire in the distance, and they knew another American soldier had fallen.

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"Asked to Serve Again, a Soldier Goes Down Fighting" >>