Click here: Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question - NYTimes.com

Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question
TBILISI, Georgia — Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.

President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has characterized the attack as a precise and defensive act. But according to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack.

Senior Georgian officials contest these accounts, and have urged Western governments to discount them. “That information, I don’t know what it is and how it is confirmed,” said Giga Bokeria, Georgia’s deputy foreign minister. “There is such an amount of evidence of continuous attacks on Georgian-controlled villages and so much evidence of Russian military buildup, it doesn’t change in any case the general picture of events.”

He added: “Who was counting those explosions? It sounds a bit peculiar.”

The Kremlin has embraced the monitors’ observations, which, according to a written statement from Grigory Karasin, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, reflect “the actual course of events prior to Georgia’s aggression.” He added that the accounts “refute” allegations by Tbilisi of bombardments that he called mythical.

The monitors were members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or O.S.C.E. A multilateral organization with 56 member states, the group has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s.

The observations by the monitors, including a Finnish major, a Belarussian airborne captain and a Polish civilian, have been the subject of two confidential briefings to diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, one in August and the other in October. Summaries were shared with The New York Times by people in attendance at both.

Details were then confirmed by three Western diplomats and a Russian, and were not disputed by the O.S.C.E.’s mission in Tbilisi, which was provided with a written summary of the observations.

Mr. Saakashvili, who has compared Russia’s incursion into Georgia to the Nazi annexations in Europe in 1938 and the Soviet suppression of Prague in 1968, faces domestic unease with his leadership and skepticism about his judgment from Western governments.

The brief war was a disaster for Georgia. The attack backfired. Georgia’s army was humiliated as Russian forces overwhelmed its brigades, seized and looted their bases, captured their equipment and roamed the country’s roads at will. Villages that Georgia vowed to save were ransacked and cleared of their populations by irregular Ossetian, Chechen and Cossack forces, and several were burned to the ground.

Massing of Weapons

According to the monitors, an O.S.C.E. patrol at 3 p.m. on Aug. 7 saw large numbers of Georgian artillery and grad rocket launchers massing on roads north of Gori, just south of the enclave.

At 6:10 p.m., the monitors were told by Russian peacekeepers of suspected Georgian artillery fire on Khetagurovo, an Ossetian village; this report was not independently confirmed, and Georgia declared a unilateral cease-fire shortly thereafter, about 7 p.m.

During a news broadcast that began at 11 p.m., Georgia announced that Georgian villages were being shelled, and declared an operation “to restore constitutional order” in South Ossetia. The bombardment of Tskhinvali started soon after the broadcast.

According to the monitors, however, no shelling of Georgian villages could be heard in the hours before the Georgian bombardment. At least two of the four villages that Georgia has since said were under fire were near the observers’ office in Tskhinvali, and the monitors there likely would have heard artillery fire nearby.

Moreover, the observers made a record of the rounds exploding after Georgia’s bombardment began at 11:35 p.m. At 11:45 p.m., rounds were exploding at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between impacts, they noted.

At 12:15 a.m. on Aug. 8, Gen. Maj. Marat M. Kulakhmetov, commander of Russian peacekeepers in the enclave, reported to the monitors that his unit had casualties, indicating that Russian soldiers had come under fire.

By 12:35 a.m. the observers had recorded at least 100 heavy rounds exploding across Tskhinvali, including 48 close to the observers’ office, which is in a civilian area and was damaged.

Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said that by morning on Aug. 8 two Russian soldiers had been killed and five wounded. Two senior Western military officers stationed in Georgia, speaking on condition of anonymity because they work with Georgia’s military, said that whatever Russia’s behavior in or intentions for the enclave, once Georgia’s artillery or rockets struck Russian positions, conflict with Russia was all but inevitable. This clear risk, they said, made Georgia’s attack dangerous and unwise.

Senior Georgia officials, a group with scant military experience and personal loyalties to Mr. Saakashvili, have said that much of the damage to Tskhinvali was caused in combat between its soldiers and separatists, or by Russian airstrikes and bombardments in its counterattack the next day. As for its broader shelling of the city, Georgia has told Western diplomats that Ossetians hid weapons in civilian buildings, making them legitimate targets.

“The Georgians have been quite clear that they were shelling targets — the mayor’s office, police headquarters — that had been used for military purposes,” said Matthew J. Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of state and one of Mr. Saakashvili’s vocal supporters in Washington.

Those claims have not been independently verified, and Georgia’s account was disputed by Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain who was the senior O.S.C.E. representative in Georgia when the war broke out. Mr. Grist said that he was in constant contact that night with all sides, with the office in Tskhinvali and with Wing Commander Stephen Young, the retired British military officer who leads the monitoring team.

“It was clear to me that the attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation,” Mr. Grist said. “The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town.”

Mr. Grist has served as a military officer or diplomat in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kosovo and Yugoslavia. In August, after the Georgian foreign minister, Eka Tkeshelashvili, who has no military experience, assured diplomats in Tbilisi that the attack was measured and discriminate, Mr. Grist gave a briefing to diplomats from the European Union that drew from the monitors’ observations and included his assessments. He then soon resigned under unclear circumstances.

A second briefing was led by Commander Young in October for military attachés visiting Georgia. At the meeting, according to a person in attendance, Commander Young stood by the monitors’ assessment that Georgian villages had not been extensively shelled on the evening or night of Aug. 7. “If there had been heavy shelling in areas that Georgia claimed were shelled, then our people would have heard it, and they didn’t,” Commander Young said, according to the person who attended. “They heard only occasional small-arms fire.”

The O.S.C.E turned down a request by The Times to interview Commander Young and the monitors, saying they worked in sensitive jobs and would not be publicly engaged in this disagreement.

Grievances and Exaggeration

Disentangling the Russian and Georgian accounts has been complicated. The violence along the enclave’s boundaries that had occurred in recent summers was more widespread this year, and in the days before Aug. 7 there had been shelling of Georgian villages. Tensions had been soaring.

Each side has fresh lists of grievances about the other, which they insist are decisive. But both sides also have a record of misstatement and exaggeration, which includes circulating casualty estimates that have not withstood independent examination. With the international standing of both Russia and Georgia damaged, the public relations battle has been intensive.

Russian military units have been implicated in destruction of civilian property and accused by Georgia of participating with Ossetian militias in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Russia and South Ossetia have accused Georgia of attacking Ossetian civilians.

But a critical and as yet unanswered question has been what changed for Georgia between 7 p.m. on Aug 7, when Mr. Saakashvili declared a cease-fire, and 11:30 p.m., when he says he ordered the attack. The Russian and Ossetian governments have said the cease-fire was a ruse used to position rockets and artillery for the assault.

That view is widely held by Ossetians. Civilians repeatedly reported resting at home after the cease-fire broadcast by Mr. Saakashvili. Emeliya B. Dzhoyeva, 68, was home with her husband, Felix, 70, when the bombardment began. He lost his left arm below the elbow and suffered burns to his right arm and torso. “Saakashvili told us that nothing would happen,” she said. “So we all just went to bed.”

Neither Georgia nor its Western allies have as yet provided conclusive evidence that Russia was invading the country or that the situation for Georgians in the Ossetian zone was so dire that a large-scale military attack was necessary, as Mr. Saakashvili insists.

Georgia has released telephone intercepts indicating that a Russian armored column apparently entered the enclave from Russia early on the Aug. 7, which would be a violation of the peacekeeping rules. Georgia said the column marked the beginning of an invasion. But the intercepts did not show the column’s size, composition or mission, and there has not been evidence that it was engaged with Georgian forces until many hours after the Georgian bombardment; Russia insists it was simply a routine logistics train or troop rotation.

Unclear Accounts of Shelling

Interviews by The Times have found a mixed picture on the question of whether Georgian villages were shelled after Mr. Saakashvili declared the cease-fire. Residents of the village of Zemo Nigozi, one of the villages that Georgia has said was under heavy fire, said they were shelled from 6 p.m. on, supporting Georgian statements.

In two other villages, interviews did not support Georgian claims. In Avnevi, several residents said the shelling stopped before the cease-fire and did not resume until roughly the same time as the Georgian bombardment. In Tamarasheni, some residents said they were lightly shelled on the evening of Aug. 7, but felt safe enough not to retreat to their basements. Others said they were not shelled until Aug 9.

With a paucity of reliable and unbiased information available, the O.S.C.E. observations put the United States in a potentially difficult position. The United States, Mr. Saakashvili’s principal source of international support, has for years accepted the organization’s conclusions and praised its professionalism. Mr. Bryza refrained from passing judgment on the conflicting accounts.

“I wasn’t there,” he said, referring to the battle. “We didn’t have people there. But the O.S.C.E. really has been our benchmark on many things over the years.”

The O.S.C.E. itself, while refusing to discuss its internal findings, stood by the accuracy of its work but urged caution in interpreting it too broadly. “We are confident that all O.S.C.E. observations are expert, accurate and unbiased,” Martha Freeman, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. “However, monitoring activities in certain areas at certain times cannot be taken in isolation to provide a comprehensive account.”


NYTimes.com

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

In Afghanistan, the US has admitted to killing thirty-seven civilians and wounding dozens more in a military attack last week. The victims were bombed as they attended a wedding party outside the city of Kandahar. The Pentagon says the US bombed the area after coming under fire from nearby militants. It was the Pentagon’s quickest admission of a mass killing of Afghan civilians to date. It took nearly two months before the US admitted killing up to ninety civilians in a similar attack in August.

US to Expand Afghan Airfield
The Pentagon’s admission has come as the Bush administration has announced plans to go ahead with a major expansion to a key military base used as a staging ground for its air strikes around Afghanistan. The US plans to spend $100 million to add more space to Kandahar airfield.

Report: Bush Authorized US Attacks Anywhere in the World
The New York Times has revealed the US military has waged nearly a dozen secret attacks inside Syria, Pakistan and other countries since 2004. The assaults were approved under a classified order signed by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and authorized by President Bush. The order authorizes US military attacks anywhere in the world if they can be linked to targeting al-Qaeda. Last month’s US attack inside Syria appears to be the latest known instance under the policy. Syria says eight civilians were killed. The attacks have often been carried out in collaboration with the CIA.

28 Killed as Iraq Bombings Rise
In Iraq, at least twenty-eight people were killed today in a triple bombing on a crowded Baghdad market. Another sixty-eight people were wounded. Meanwhile, in Baquba, a female suicide bomber has killed six people in an attack near a US-allied militia checkpoint. Iraq has suffered some of its worst violence in months this past week. At least twelve people were killed in separate bombings this weekend, capping a week of daily attacks. On Sunday, at least ten people were killed when a female suicide bomber detonated explosives in a Fallujah hospital.

Report: Iraq, Shell Near 25-Year Deal
In other Iraq news, United Press International is reporting the Iraqi government has drafted a deal with that would give the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell the biggest foreign role in Iraqi petroleum in four decades. The twenty-five-year agreement would let Shell capture gas wasted during the extraction of oil in Basra.

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

Obama Won’t Commit to Bush Admin Missile Shield
Obama has also announced he won’t commit to continuing the Bush administration’s controversial missile shield in eastern Europe. A spokesperson clarified Obama’s stance after Polish President Lech Kaczynski said Obama had told him the program would continue under the new administration. The program has been widely derided as bellicose, expensive and useless to its stated goals of protecting national security. Poland would host ten ballistic missiles along with a radar site in the Czech Republic. The Bush administration says the missile system would protect Europe from Iranian missiles, but it’s widely seen as a first-strike weapon.

Monitors Cast Doubt on Georgia Claims in Russia Conflict
Newly disclosed accounts from international monitors have cast further doubt on Georgia’s motives for launching a US-backed armed conflict with Russia earlier this year. Georgia attacked two breakaway provinces after claiming its forces had come under Russian fire. But according to the New York Times, monitors with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said there was scant proof Russia attacked when Georgia claimed. Monitors stationed near the Georgian areas reported hearing no rounds fired from the Russian side. Instead, monitors recorded an intense Georgian attack on the separatist capital of Tskhinvali. At least forty-eight rounds were fired on a civilian area in the first hour of the Georgian attack. Russian forces stationed there also came under fire.


DemocracyNow.org.

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

Since the start of the presidential campaign, Michelle Obama has been more scrutinized than the spouse of any other presidential candidate. Scant attention has been paid to her personal history as the descendant of slaves, an upbringing in the South Side of Chicago, and work in community organizing. We speak to Washington Post writer Liza Mundy, author of the new unauthorized biography Michelle ..

AMY GOODMAN: In just over two months, this country will have its first African American First Lady. Since the start of the presidential campaign, Michelle Obama has been more scrutinized than the spouse of any presidential candidate.


But most accounts have either focused on her sense of fashion or tried to portray her as a caricature, as scant attention has been paid to Michelle Obama’s personal history. Her ancestors were slaves. Her grandfather was part of the Great Migration, out of the South, north. She herself grew up in the South Side of Chicago in the midst of the civil rights era, was closely involved in community organizing work.


I wanted to turn right now to Michelle Obama, during the Democratic National Convention, her address.


MICHELLE OBAMA: And Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about the world as it is and the world as it should be. And he said that, all too often, we accept the distance between the two, and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations.


But he reminded us that we also know what the world should look like. He said we know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. And he urged us to believe in ourselves, to find the strength within ourselves to strive for the world as it should be. And isn’t that the great American story?


It’s the story of men and women gathered in churches and union halls, in high school gyms, and people who stood up and marched and risked everything they had, refusing to settle, determined to mold our future into the shape of our ideals. And it’s because of their will and determination that this week we celebrate two anniversaries: the eighty-eighth anniversary of women winning the right to vote and the forty-fifth anniversary—and the forty-fifth anniversary of that hot summer day when Dr. King lifted our sights and our hearts with his dream for our nation.



AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Obama addressing the Democratic National Convention in Denver this past August.


We’re joined now here in Washington, D.C. by Washington Post staff writer Liza Mundy. She is the author of a new biography of Michelle Obama. It’s called Michelle: A Biography.


And we welcome you to Democracy Now!, Liza.


LIZA MUNDY: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.


AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, Monday was quite a scene at the White House, having Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, the President-elect and I guess the First-Lady-to-Be, walking into the White House, the White House built by slaves in this country. Now, Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas, is not the descendant of slaves, but Michelle Obama is. Can you, Liza, tell us her story? Tell us where her family comes from, and then talk about Michelle herself, when she was born, where she was born.


LIZA MUNDY: Yes, it is. I mean, she embodies an extraordinary American narrative. And her family’s story is a classic strand of African American history, and therefore of American history. Her father’s family is from Georgetown County, South Carolina, which at one point produced much of the country’s rice. And at one point, 85 percent of the population of Georgetown County was enslaved. Her great-great-grandfather would have been a slave at one point in his life. Her great-grandfather, Frasier Robinson, worked during Reconstruction. He was a kiln laborer for Atlantic Coast Lumber Company.


And then, her grandfather, who was also named Frasier Robinson, picked up and moved north, in his case to Chicago, with the Great Migration along with millions of other African Americans, and settled on the South Side of Chicago, which is a large portion of the city. And the reason that African Americans were attracted to that part of the city was because there were so many working class jobs. There were, of course, stockyards and steel mills and railroads and a lot of labor and, you know, certainly better opportunity for work than there was in the South. But the South Side of Chicago was a very, very segregated—the whole city of Chicago was very segregated. And there were serious racial hostilities there into the 1960s. Martin Luther King attempted to bring the civil rights movement north to Chicago and had a very hard time advocating for fair housing and to get rid of segregation, and the city did not receive him warmly. But—


AMY GOODMAN: On that note, Liza, I wanted to turn to August 1966—this would have been when Michelle Obama was just a couple years old—but the housing march in Chicago led by Dr. Martin Luther King, again, two years after Michelle Obama was born. This is Dr. King in Chicago.


REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: …and Chicago on the day that we marched through that narrow street, and we marched by four or five thousand people that day, but they were in trees. It was the most serious—I guess we marched about five miles then. But they had at least 10,000 whites assembled on us. And there must have been about 4,000 police trying to protect us. But every minute almost, somebody’s nose was getting broken. You look—everywhere you turn. And the policemen were going ahead, and they were finding people in these trees. The were ordering them, “Come out of the trees,” because they were in these trees to shoot or anything.


They were saying to us yesterday, “Don’t march.” I listened to them, but I said to myself, our marching feet have done too much now to give up. If you want us to end our moves into communities, open these communities. I don’t mind saying to you, I’m tired of the tensions surrounding our days. I don’t mind saying to you, I’m tired of living every day under the threat of death. I have no martyr complex; I want to live as long as anybody in this building. And sometimes I begin to doubt whether I’m going to make it through, I must confess. Yes, I’m tired of going to jail. I’m tired of all of the surging murmur of life’s restless sea. So I tell anybody, I’m willing to stop marching. I don’t march because I like it; I march because I must and because I’m a man and because I’m a child of God.


I just gave up. I wouldn’t say I was so afraid as that I had yielded to the real possibility of the inevitability of death. I mean, I had concluded.

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Martin Luther King in Chicago. This was the Chicago that Michelle LaVaughn Robinson grew up in, Liza Mundy.


LIZA MUNDY: That’s exactly right. She would have been two years old in 1966. And what is so interesting about her life is that she has traveled through these post-civil rights landscapes. And when she was a very young girl in sometime in the late ’60s, her family was able to move into a neighborhood that formerly had been available only to white people. And, you know, before that, it was so important, African American children were taught which neighborhoods were hospitable and safe to them and which were unsafe. And this previously would have been a neighborhood that probably would have been unsafe.


Her family was able to move into this neighborhood, and one of her first experiences as a girl would have been witnessing white flight, as African American families moved up socio-economically, were able to get out of the neighborhoods that they had been pretty much compelled to live in for decades. And she, as a child, would have witnessed—you know, would have witnessed the white neighbors moving away. And in a period of about ten years, this very nice neighborhood in South Side Chicago went from being all-white to being all-black.


AMY GOODMAN: And socio-economically, where did it stand, the South Side of Chicago, where Michelle grew up?


LIZA MUNDY: The South Side is—you know, it’s varied socio-economically. This neighborhood, South Shore, I think would be described as middle class. It has some working class parts. But Jesse Jackson, Sr. also lives in South Shore in a very nice part of that area. And Michelle, when she was in high school, was very close friends with his daughter Santita. So the interesting thing about South Side is, you know, it did suffer segregation and oppression, but it also produced artists, it produced Richard Wright, it produced any number of jazz artists and blues artists, and also, you know, developed its own political base, so—you know, and powerful local politicians. And so, growing up in that area, she was able to meet and become friends with people who would be allies for her husband later on.


AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Liza Mundy, the biographer of Michelle Obama. Her book is called Michelle. We’ll be back with her in a minute.


[break]


AMY GOODMAN: We’re here in Washington, D.C., speaking with Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy. She wrote a biography of Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama did not authorize the biography or participate in it. The biography is called Michelle.


So, she was born, just six months before the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, in the South Side of Chicago, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. Where did “LaVaughn” come from?


LIZA MUNDY: LaVaughn was a family name on her father’s side. It had been her father’s mother’s name.


AMY GOODMAN: And talk about her growing up, her going to schools in the South Side, and then being moved out, going to school for the gifted, and then what that moving out meant, ultimately, going to Princeton.


LIZA MUNDY: Yes, well, you know, her mother Marian was able to stay home, because her father had a job with the City of Chicago working in a water treatment plant tending boilers. And, you know, there’s not a long tradition in the African American community of mothers being able to stay home with their children, but her mother was able to do that and taught both Michelle and her older brother Craig. And so, they were both able to read when they went to kindergarten. And she attended a local elementary school, where she skipped the second grade and was a very high-performing student. And it was a good local elementary school.


And then, right when she was a young teenager, the City of Chicago opened some magnet high schools, in part as an effort to provide African American children with better school resources than they had had up to then, because along with segregated housing, segregated schools had been a major issue in Chicago, as well. And so, the city opened up magnet high schools, open to children from different parts of the city. And it was also an effort to stem white flight and to keep white students in the city and to get some integrated schools, because obviously cities were under—you know, were being watched by federal authorities to make sure that their school systems became integrated.

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

So, you know, at a very young age, she left every morning her house in South Side, and she took both a bus and a train to go to Whitney Young Magnet High School in a different part of the city. It took about an hour and a half to get there. I was thinking about this, because my daughter is thirteen, and I was thinking, you know, how adventurous and self-sufficient you need to be as a young teenager to make that trip by yourself every morning.


So, this was a high school that was for academically motivated students. It provided them with extra resources. And I think it must have been—I talked to a number of her classmates who remember her and described the school as having been a very inclusive and happy place, basically, in the sense that it was integrated. White students, for the most part, came from families that wanted them to be in a diverse environment. And in the mid-‘70s, that was more unusual than it is now. I think we now accept diversity as something desirable in a school population, but that was a little bit forward-thinking then.


And the African American students were in the majority at the school and held positions of leadership. Michelle was the school treasurer her last two years at the school, and she was also in the National Honor Society. And there’s a lovely photo in her school yearbook of her standing with the other National Honor Society students, and she’s standing beside a white girl named Kristy McNulty, who I tracked down in Phoenix. And she remembers the moment when the shutter of the camera went off, and Michelle Robinson reached out and put her arm around Kristy. And there’s a lovely photo of the two of them standing there—well, all of the National Honor Society students, but you can see Michelle Robinson’s arm around her white classmate. And she was described as being a very inclusive person who moved between different social groups and didn’t confine herself to any one clique. And it just seems to have been a very nice environment in which to learn and to learn about, you know, students of other races. And that really would’ve been her first opportunity, I think.


AMY GOODMAN: And, Liza Mundy, you write about how she ends up at Princeton, and you talk about her first year. She’s rooming with a white classmate, except the white classmate’s mother then intervenes.


LIZA MUNDY: Yes. This would have been in 1981, and she happened to draw a classmate from the South whose mother was unhappy to find that her daughter had been placed with a black student and petitioned the school and made phone calls to try and get her moved. And both the classmate and her mother have come forward, you know, in recent months to talk about this and to express their contrition, you know, and to say essentially they realize now that the joke was on them. They’re very sorry to recall that episode. And so, that, unfortunately, was sort of her introduction to the Princeton campus.


And I guess I was particularly interested in this part of her life because I was on the campus at about the same time. I started in 1978, and we would have overlapped by a year. And, you know, at that time, women had only been on the campus at Princeton for about a decade, and African Americans were just ten percent of the student body and had only been there in any numbers for about the same period of time.


And the president of Princeton, William Bowen, was in the vanguard of shaping a national policy on affirmative action and did believe and still does believe that it’s legitimate for universities to take race into consideration in college admissions as one criterion among many. And that policy was favored by many, but was opposed by some alumni and students, and there was a fair amount of crossfire on campus at the time.


You know, so once again, Michelle Robinson would have been experiencing the opening up of American landscapes that had been closed to African Americans, but, you know, not opening up easily. And, you know, it’s not like she was really welcomed with open arms. Certainly she was by many, but there was a fair amount of conversation going on, and I talked, again, to classmates who said, you know, that they did not feel completely welcome on campus at the time.

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the—well, it has become infamous—thesis of Michelle Obama, well, then Michelle Robinson, which I thought was very interesting, when you laid out exactly what she was trying to do in the survey that she conducted of black Princeton alumni.


LIZA MUNDY: Well, I think that every Princeton alumnus felt—you know, we all felt a collective shudder when we learned that her thesis had been posted online, because, you know, anybody who’s written a senior thesis would identify. You know, God forbid my thesis ever be posted online. I know the circumstances under which they’re written, and, you know, paragraphs written at the last minute at the suggestion of your adviser. And then twenty-five years later, somebody’s picking over the sentences, you know, to use them against your husband. It’s really just mindboggling.


But what she did in her thesis, I mean, she was exploring, I think, as many of us were, the extent to which she had been changed by Princeton. She was exploring, you know, the fact she had come from this large African American community in South Side Chicago, asking herself, “Do I still belong to that community? Am I still that person? Or, have I been changed by this very different environment that I find myself in?” And she surveyed African American alumni to find out whether they had felt the urge to assimilate into white society or to self-segregate before they were at Princeton, when they were at Princeton and after they were at Princeton. And she found that the majority of alumni did find that it was when they were at Princeton that they felt the urge more to stick together.


And there was a building on campus called the Third World Center that was available to students of color as, you know, a support, a place just to be together and seek mutual support. And she posited that one reason was because when they were in high school, students would have been able to go home at night to their families, and if they were in integrated high schools, they still would have had the support of their parents at the end of the day. And she posited that, perhaps, lacking that support network, students turned to each other more in the environment of college than either before or after.


And there were times, reading her thesis, when I just thought that she might have been a young person who missed her family. You get that sense, that she missed the support that her parents provided. And her brother Craig was at Princeton for two years when she was there—I mean, he was there for four years, but he would have graduated her sophomore year, and I think she must have missed him, as well.


AMY GOODMAN: You talk about how she moves on to Harvard Law School and how she actually ends up in the same building as Barack, though she wasn’t there at the same time. He was president of the Harvard Law Review, but she was working at Legal Aid, helping in the community.


LIZA MUNDY: Yes, I think this is such an interesting image. They both spent a lot of time in Gannett House, which, just as you say, the upper floors house the Harvard Law Review. And Barack Obama was the first African American president of the Law Review, and that was a major achievement and attracted national publicity and articles in The New York Times and the LA Times and really put him on the map at a young age and helped get him his first book contract, and he would use that to write Dreams from My Father. And so, he was on the upper floors, you know, rubbing shoulders with other editors and—you know, all of whom would go on to prestigious careers and be law clerks for Supreme Court justices.


But Michelle, when she was there, worked in the basement of Gannett House, and she was working for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. And that was also a prestigious position to hold, but she was working on behalf of poor people in Cambridge and surrounding counties, helping them with housing issues and child custody issues and, you know, pro se divorces and things like that.


And I think, somehow, that’s kind of a telling juxtaposition, because I do sometimes think that in her rhetoric, she—you know, he tends to be sort of loftier in his rhetoric, and she sometimes tends to be sort of more realistic and sometimes maybe a little bleaker. And I think that, you know, it just reminds us how in touch she is with people who have not fared as well as she has in the post-civil rights era.


AMY GOODMAN: So she goes home. She goes back to Chicago, after having graduated from Harvard Law School, and she makes this transition from—well, she goes into corporate law, but then she moves out. And this is also the time when she meets Barack Obama.


LIZA MUNDY: Yes, and I think she has always struggled with sort of the question of what success is for her, whether it lies in doing good or doing well, and I think, you know, spent a little bit of time in corporate law, in part to start paying off her student loans, but also—and she talks about this in her thesis—being attracted to some of the, you know, advantages of having an Ivy League education, the economic advantages.


So, yes, she does spend three years at Sidley Austin and was very well-liked by her associates there and was also a very ambitious person. Her supervisor described her as quite possibly the most ambitious associate he had ever seen, and this was someone who had supervised a lot of associates. And at times she became impatient with the low level of the work that falls to first- and second-year associates.


So, I think, you know, she left the firm, in part because she wanted, definitely, to do community work, but also I think she wanted work that would give her more authority, more executive authority, sooner, because, obviously, at a big law firm you have to wait usually seven years to make partner, and she had been marked out as a likely future partner.


So, she went to work for the City of Chicago in the economic planning division. This is when she met and was mentored by Valerie Jarrett, who is obviously a major player in the Obama campaign now. And I think there was sort of a lovely irony here, since for years and years and years, African Americans had been segregated and hemmed in by city planners in Chicago. Now, she and Valerie Jarrett were the city planners, and I think that’s, you know, just sort of one indication of how things were changing, because she has really lived this post-civil rights era life. And you can just—you can track the opening up of opportunities in the country by tracking her life.


AMY GOODMAN: Liza Mundy, I want to thank you very much for being with us. I hope to do part two with you. Michelle: A Biography is her book.


Tomorrow, we will have an exclusive hour, the first national broadcast hour with Bill Ayers and his wife and lawyer Bernardine Dohrn.

DemocracyNow.org.

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

Top Justice Department prosecutors are reportedly reviewing a draft indictment against six Blackwater security guards who opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square more than a year ago killing seventeen Iraqi civilians. The indictments would mark the first time armed private contractors from the United States face justice. We speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post correspondent Steve Fainaru about his new book Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq

Steve Fainaru, foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, where he covered the Iraq war from 2004 to 2007. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his stories on private military contractors. His new book is Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: The pact recently approved by the Iraqi cabinet that allows 150,000 US troops to stay in Iraq ’til 2011 could have a significant impact on the role of private military contractors deployed in the war. According to the Wall Street Journal, the draft Status of Forces Agreement, known as SOFA, appears to end immunity from local Iraqi law for private military contractors. If the pact is approved by the Iraqi parliament, contractors would fall under the jurisdiction of Iraqi courts and would be subject to prosecution.


This comes as top Justice Department prosecutors are reportedly reviewing a draft indictment against six Blackwater security guards who opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square more than a year ago, killing seventeen Iraqi civilians. The Associated Press reports senior Justice Department officials are said to be considering manslaughter and assault charges against the guards. The indictments would mark the first time armed private contractors from the United States face justice.


Meanwhile, the State Department is reportedly preparing to hit Blackwater with a multi-million-dollar fine for allegedly shipping as many as 900 automatic weapons to Iraq without the required permits.


President-elect Barack Obama has been a staunch critic of private military contractors operating in Iraq and is the sponsor of the leading Democratic legislation in the Senate to bring more effective regulation and oversight to the war industry. But he has stopped short of seeking an outright ban on using armed contractors in Iraq. In March, after he delivered a speech on the economy here in New York at Cooper Union, I asked, well, then-Senator Obama if he would call for a ban on private military contractors.


AMY GOODMAN: Would you call for a ban on the private military contractors like Blackwater?


SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I’ve actually—I’m the one who sponsored the bill that called for the investigation of Blackwater and those folks, so—


AMY GOODMAN: But would you support the Sanders one now?


SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Here’s the problem: we have 140,000 private contractors right there, so unless we want to replace all of or a big chunk of those with US troops, we can’t draw down the contractors faster than we can draw down our troops. So what I want to do is draw—I want them out in the same way that we make sure that we draw out our own combat troops. Alright? I mean, I—


AMY GOODMAN: Not a ban?


SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I don’t want to replace those contractors with more US troops, because we don’t have them, alright? But this was a speech about the economy.


AMY GOODMAN: The war is costing $3 trillion, according to Stiglitz.


SEN. BARACK OBAMA: That’s what—I know, which I made a speech about last week. Thank you.



AMY GOODMAN: Today, we’re joined by one of the leading journalists covering private military contractors in Iraq. Steve Fainaru, is a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, where he covered the Iraq war from 2004 to ’07. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his stories on private military contractors. His book is just out this week; it’s called Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq.


Steve Fainaru, welcome to Democracy Now!

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

STEVE FAINARU: Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.


AMY GOODMAN: What about this news coming out about the possibility of the indictments against Blackwater mercenaries and the fines against the company?


STEVE FAINARU: Well, to be honest with you, I’m quite skeptical about the indictments. You know, I want to see what they look like when they come out, exactly what—if in fact they are handed up, what do they say? What are these people being charged with? And then, how aggressively are these cases going to be pursued?


I think, from the beginning, this case has been extremely problematic. When the Nisour Square shootings occurred, the FBI took two weeks before it arrived in Iraq to investigate the case. There was limited immunity that was granted to some of the Blackwater contractors in the immediate aftermath by the State Department. And then, I think the larger question is, exactly how do you prosecute these cases? Under what law? It’s never been clear exactly what law applies to private security contractors in Iraq. And I think, frankly, that’s the biggest problem.


My understanding of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which I believe would be the law under which these guys would be prosecuted, requires the prosecution to take place in the state in which the person who’s accused resides. So, if in fact we’re talking about six separate indictments, we could be talking about six separate prosecutions occurring in six different states. And then, of course, there are issues with evidence. There are issues with exactly what the charges are going to be. There are questions of interviews and witnesses and how exactly do you do this. So I think it’s extremely problematic.


AMY GOODMAN: What are “big boy rules”?


STEVE FAINARU: Well, it’s a—“big boy rules” is an expression that I first heard when I was reporting on a story in which a private contractor who worked for a company called Triple Canopy, which shares a State Department contract with Blackwater, one of their contractors announced to three of his colleagues, who were traveling with him that day, that he really wanted to shoot someone. And that day, according to these three colleagues, they were traveling on the airport road in Baghdad, and while they were passing a civilian taxi, this contractor, according to these three guys, fired into the windshield of this passing civilian taxi. When that happened, there was no real legal mechanism by which to deal with the situation. And as I was reporting the case, I heard from other contractors that they used this expression “big boy rules.” And what it really meant was that there were no rules for private security contractors in Iraq, and they operated under basically their own system of justice.


AMY GOODMAN: Your shirt is actually hitting your mike. If you could pull it, that’s great. That’s good. I want to ask you about the group of contractors—and you made a decision to call them “mercenaries.” Do they call themselves mercenaries?


STEVE FAINARU: I did, I did. Some of them, of course, do; most of them don’t. For me, it was a very conscious decision to use the word “mercenaries,” because I feel like we should call this process exactly what it is, that when you look at the Geneva Conventions and the definition of “mercenaries,” we’re talking about people who are not part of the armed force that’s participating in the conflict. They are people who are—their primary motivation is money. They’re being paid to take place in—to take part in hostilities. And so, I think that the practice is clearly—it clearly falls under that definition. Now, many people don’t agree, but I feel strongly.


And I’ve also always felt that the term “private security contractors” never really has done justice to exactly what the scope of what’s going on in Iraq with these people. We’re talking about tens of thousands of hired guns who are running around Iraq in a war zone. They are being fired upon. They’re returning fire. They’re killing people, and they’re being killed. And the term "private security contractor,” it could apply to anybody. It could apply to a Brink’s guard. It could apply to somebody who’s standing in front of a 7-Eleven. And I never really—I felt like it obfuscated—I felt like it obscured the reality of what was happening.

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down

AMY GOODMAN: So, tell us about the group that you were embedded with and what happened to them. This was in 2006. You were the last reporter, one of the last people to see them alive.


STEVE FAINARU: Right. Well, while I was working for the Washington Post, we wanted to find out what this culture was and why these people were there, who they were. And so, I embedded with a private security company called Crescent Security Group that operated out of Kuwait City. I traveled into Iraq with these people. We were—their primary mission was to protect supply convoys on Iraq’s main highway. And so, I traveled into Iraq. We traveled up to Nasiriyah, and then we traveled back to the Iraq-Kuwait border. I interviewed them. I found out what they were about.


And one of the things that was most striking about this company was—you know, in the book, I call it basically the Kmart of private security, where, you know, if you have Blackwater sort of at the high end of the security spectrum—traveling in heavily armored vehicles, working for the State Department, paying their contractors $20,000 a month—you had companies like Crescent Security Group, who were paying their contractors $7,000 a month, they had a lot less experience, there were enormous problems with the company.


I came home. Before I had even written my story, the people that I had spent time with were kidnapped on the same highway where we had been traveling. They were missing for sixteen months, and last April their bodies turned up in southern Iraq.


AMY GOODMAN: First, their fingers cut off.


STEVE FAINARU: First, their fingers were delivered to the air base in Basra as evidence that—from an informant, that he knew where the bodies were. And then, about a month later, the bodies were delivered to the air base at Basra.


AMY GOODMAN: How did they get involved with these mercenary companies? You came to know these men well.


STEVE FAINARU: Right. Well, it’s interesting, because I really didn’t know what to expect when I got there. And one of the things that I found that was most striking—and this was striking throughout our time investigating these companies in Iraq—was that they were an incredibly diverse group, that everybody had their own sort of story about why they should be in Iraq. The primary motivation was money. Everybody was there—that was the number one reason for being there. But when you got sort of beyond that, there were all kinds of other—there were all kinds of other issues that were in play.


The main character of the book, Jon Cote, had been in the 82nd Airborne, and he had done a tour in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when he got out, he enrolled at the University of Florida to study accounting. He was like the least likely accounting major in the history of accounting. And what he found—when he got out, he found that he just simply could not cope, that his experience in the military had put him in a sort of a place in his life where he just couldn’t adapt to civilian life. He clearly had post-traumatic stress. And so, one of his—his scout leader from the Army offered him a job to make $7,000 a month driving supply convoys—guarding supply convoys in Iraq. And he took the job, just thinking that, you know, this was some way—this was a way for him to get more money for college. He had financial problems. And so, he went back.


AMY GOODMAN: And what happened afterwards? And their attitudes when they were there? And their feelings about what they were doing in Iraq?


STEVE FAINARU: Well, I think it was varied. In Jon’s case, I think he realized very quickly that he had gotten into a situation that he simply was not prepared for. The company that he was working for was corrupt. They were smuggling weapons and liquor back and forth across the Iraq-Kuwait border. They were fabricating military IDs that they were using on their—that they were giving to their Iraqi employees to get onto US military installations. They were traveling in these pickup trucks in, you know, an extremely dangerous environment. And he decided to go home, after a couple of—three months. He decided he had enough and had told his friends and his family that he was planning to go home. But before he could, it was too late.


Other guys, I found, simply thrived on the life. You know, they were adrenaline junkies. They lived for this stuff. There was another guy that I met, John Young, who—he had been in the—he was forty-four years old. He had been in the Army in the 1980s. When he got out of the Army, he sort of drifted around to different jobs, never really feeling like he was totally content. He tried to reenlist in the military and injured himself during basic training. And so, when this job came along, he did it. And even after nearly getting shot in Baghdad, he still felt like—he said, “This is me. You know, this is what I do.” And I think there were a lot of people like that in Iraq, you know, who were drawn by the opportunity. They were making maybe ten times as much money as they could have made in the United States. They were addicted to the action, and they took the job.

__________________
When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down