Sunday, December 04, 2005
Details Emerge on a Brazen Escape in Afghanistan - New York Times
Details Emerge on a Brazen Escape in Afghanistan - New York Times
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December 4, 2005
Details Emerge on a Brazen Escape in Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - The prisoners were considered some of the most dangerous men among the hundreds of terror suspects locked behind the walls of a secretive and secure American military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan.
Their escape, however, might as well have been a breakout from the county jail.
According to military officials familiar with the episode, the suspects are believed to have picked the lock on their cell, changed out of their bright orange uniforms and made their way through a heavily guarded military base under the cover of night. They then crawled over a faulty wall where a getaway vehicle was apparently waiting for them, the officials said.
"It is embarrassing and amazing at the same time," an American defense official said. "It was a disaster."
The fact of the escape was disclosed by the American authorities shortly after it set off an intense manhunt at Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul, on the morning of July 11. But internal military documents and interviews with military and intelligence officials indicate it was a far more serious breach than the Defense Department has acknowledged.
One of the four suspects was identified as Al Qaeda's highest-ranking operative in Southeast Asia when he was captured in 2002, a fact that emerged only during an unrelated military trial last month. Another, a Saudi, was also described by intelligence officials as an important Qaeda operative in Afghanistan.
The detainees planned their breakout meticulously, United States officials said, apparently studying the guards' routines, getting themselves moved into a cell that was less visible to the guards and taking advantage of construction work that was intended to expand and improve security at the prison.
"Based upon the findings of the investigation, it appears that the detainees had a clear understanding of the operating procedures of the guards inside the facility," said the chief spokesman for United States military forces in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts.
One American intelligence official said the prisoners also took advantage of "a perfect storm" of mistakes by the military guards. The escape is believed to have been the first from one of the detention centers established by the United States for people suspected of being terrorists after 9/11. Military officials, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the incident are classified, said there was still much they did not know about how the men escaped.
Although an American military police guard was initially suspected of having helped the prisoners, he was eventually cleared. Half a dozen other soldiers, including officers and sergeants, have received administrative punishments, a senior military official in Afghanistan said.
"It was bizarre to me," said Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist of Britain, who served at the time as the deputy commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan in Kabul. "I don't understand how it could happen."
Military officials have often cited the danger posed by the prisoners at Bagram and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a reason for the extreme security measures and harsh conditions there. Prisoners are typically shackled by their hands and feet when outside their cells and rarely move without an escort of at least two guards. During interrogations, they have often been forced into uncomfortable "safety positions" or chained to a bolt on the floor.
The two prisoners believed to have led the escape, Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti who was the former Qaeda operative in Southeast Asia, and Muhammad Jafar Jamal al-Kahtani, the Saudi, had for months been awaiting transfer to Guantánamo Bay, officials said. For reasons they have not explained, the military authorities gave different names for both men in announcing the escape last summer.
At the time of Mr. Faruq's arrest in Jakarta, Indonesia, in early June 2002, he was considered one of the most important Qaeda figures ever captured by the United States. Three months later, he told C.I.A. interrogators at Bagram that he had been sent to the region to plan large-scale attacks against American Embassies and other targets there.
Intelligence officials gave differing views on the importance of Mr. Kahtani. One official described him as having been responsible at one point for maintaining Al Qaeda's operational support structure in Afghanistan; another said he was an important Qaeda fighter, but not a senior-level operative.
According to a classified, one-page military report on the escape that was reviewed by The New York Times, those two detainees - along with a Syrian prisoner identified as Abdullah Hashimi and a Kuwaiti named Mahmoud Ahmad Muhammad - were being held with four other men in Cell 119, on the ground floor of the Bagram prison.
A senior military official said each of the prisoners who escaped was moved into the cell in the days before his escape after causing problems with other detainees. The main cells at Bagram are large wire cages that can be easily surveyed by guards patrolling the catwalks above them. Cell 119, by contrast, was somewhat apart and out of the way, officials said. Asked whether the prisoners might have fabricated the disturbances to be moved together into Cell 119, the senior official said, "The investigation revealed credible factors that support this theory."
After a head count of prisoners at 1:50 a.m. on July 11, the military report states, the sergeant of the guard on duty at the detention center, now called the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, reported all of them accounted for, the report states.
About two hours later, at 3:45 a.m., as the detainees were being roused for the morning prayer, the four detainees were discovered missing from their cell. The military police battalion on duty at the prison, Task Force Cerberus, immediately locked down the prison and began a search, the report said.
How the men got out of their cell remains a mystery, officials said. Two senior military officials said some equipment was temporarily moved beside the cell, partly obstructing the guards' view. One senior military official said investigators believe the prisoners managed to pick the lock with implements they had fashioned while detained.
There were also suspicions that one of the American military guards, who had had disciplinary problems, might have deliberately left the door open, two senior officials said. But those suspicions were eventually discounted and the guard was never charged, they said.
The four men escaped out the southeast door of the main prison building, the report said. Military and intelligence officials said the detainees left behind their bright orange prison uniforms, apparently changing into less conspicuous blue prison garb that they might have somehow hidden in their cells or knew where to find elsewhere.
At the time, several officials said, construction crews had been working to expand and reinforce the prison, a cavernous aircraft machine-shop built by the Soviet military during its occupation of Afghanistan and converted by the American military into its primary screening center for terror suspects captured overseas. The breakout took place only days before a series of tougher security measures, including surveillance cameras and brighter lighting, were to be put in place.
The American forces have released more than 250 Taliban and other prisoners from Bagram this year as part of an Afghan national reconciliation program. Still, they have had to refurbish the prison to hold the roughly 500 detainees who remain.
The escapees also appear to have taken advantage of the construction work to move through an exercise yard and out of the prison compound. Another indication that the four men might have received help in their escape, officials said, was the apparent speed with which they found their way through a maze of buildings and roads to a small, damaged section of the perimeter wall surrounding the vast Bagram Air Base.
Once they found the faulty section of the packed-dirt wall, officials said, the detainees were able to crawl beneath the concertina wire that topped the barrier and drop down on the other side in an area of agricultural fields and abandoned homes.
"There were three or four points where they could have been caught," one American intelligence official said. "The escapees got very lucky." Within minutes of the escape, American forces began fanning out across and outside the prison, concentrating on the area near the faulty section of the wall. As the base sirens blared an alert and Cobra and Black Hawk helicopters hovered overhead, American soldiers and Afghan policemen scoured fields and homes in the area.
The district police chief, Colonel Assadullah, said in an interview in Bagram that he was asked to have his men search for a yellow pickup truck, which was apparently seen leaving the area. The district governor, Kabir Ahmad, said the Afghan authorities set up checkpoints on the highway leading to Kabul and other roads in the area, but turned up nothing suspicious.
Military officials said American soldiers questioned laborers who had been working at the prison, as well as local Afghan officials. But no arrests were made, and neither Afghans working at the base nor American officials said they knew of any laborers fired as a result of the inquiry.
In a recent interview, a former Bagram prisoner, Moazzam Begg, said he had heard during his detention there that American intelligence officers had once proposed staging an escape to release a detainee whom they wanted to act as a double agent against Al Qaeda. He said he had no knowledge that any such scheme had been carried out, and several American officials strongly dismissed the idea that that had happened with Mr. Faruq and the others.
In a videotape delivered to the Pakistan bureau of the Arab-language satellite television station Al Arabiya, Mr. Kahtani boasted about the preparations for the escape, suggesting that they had been painstaking.
"We decided to escape on Sunday because that is the day off for the nonbelievers," he said on the tape, which was broadcast Oct. 18. "To escape we studied the plan very carefully."
Sultan M. Munadi and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Bagram, Afghanistan for this article.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 4, 2005
Details Emerge on a Brazen Escape in Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - The prisoners were considered some of the most dangerous men among the hundreds of terror suspects locked behind the walls of a secretive and secure American military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan.
Their escape, however, might as well have been a breakout from the county jail.
According to military officials familiar with the episode, the suspects are believed to have picked the lock on their cell, changed out of their bright orange uniforms and made their way through a heavily guarded military base under the cover of night. They then crawled over a faulty wall where a getaway vehicle was apparently waiting for them, the officials said.
"It is embarrassing and amazing at the same time," an American defense official said. "It was a disaster."
The fact of the escape was disclosed by the American authorities shortly after it set off an intense manhunt at Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul, on the morning of July 11. But internal military documents and interviews with military and intelligence officials indicate it was a far more serious breach than the Defense Department has acknowledged.
One of the four suspects was identified as Al Qaeda's highest-ranking operative in Southeast Asia when he was captured in 2002, a fact that emerged only during an unrelated military trial last month. Another, a Saudi, was also described by intelligence officials as an important Qaeda operative in Afghanistan.
The detainees planned their breakout meticulously, United States officials said, apparently studying the guards' routines, getting themselves moved into a cell that was less visible to the guards and taking advantage of construction work that was intended to expand and improve security at the prison.
"Based upon the findings of the investigation, it appears that the detainees had a clear understanding of the operating procedures of the guards inside the facility," said the chief spokesman for United States military forces in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts.
One American intelligence official said the prisoners also took advantage of "a perfect storm" of mistakes by the military guards. The escape is believed to have been the first from one of the detention centers established by the United States for people suspected of being terrorists after 9/11. Military officials, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the incident are classified, said there was still much they did not know about how the men escaped.
Although an American military police guard was initially suspected of having helped the prisoners, he was eventually cleared. Half a dozen other soldiers, including officers and sergeants, have received administrative punishments, a senior military official in Afghanistan said.
"It was bizarre to me," said Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist of Britain, who served at the time as the deputy commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan in Kabul. "I don't understand how it could happen."
Military officials have often cited the danger posed by the prisoners at Bagram and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a reason for the extreme security measures and harsh conditions there. Prisoners are typically shackled by their hands and feet when outside their cells and rarely move without an escort of at least two guards. During interrogations, they have often been forced into uncomfortable "safety positions" or chained to a bolt on the floor.
The two prisoners believed to have led the escape, Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti who was the former Qaeda operative in Southeast Asia, and Muhammad Jafar Jamal al-Kahtani, the Saudi, had for months been awaiting transfer to Guantánamo Bay, officials said. For reasons they have not explained, the military authorities gave different names for both men in announcing the escape last summer.
At the time of Mr. Faruq's arrest in Jakarta, Indonesia, in early June 2002, he was considered one of the most important Qaeda figures ever captured by the United States. Three months later, he told C.I.A. interrogators at Bagram that he had been sent to the region to plan large-scale attacks against American Embassies and other targets there.
Intelligence officials gave differing views on the importance of Mr. Kahtani. One official described him as having been responsible at one point for maintaining Al Qaeda's operational support structure in Afghanistan; another said he was an important Qaeda fighter, but not a senior-level operative.
According to a classified, one-page military report on the escape that was reviewed by The New York Times, those two detainees - along with a Syrian prisoner identified as Abdullah Hashimi and a Kuwaiti named Mahmoud Ahmad Muhammad - were being held with four other men in Cell 119, on the ground floor of the Bagram prison.
A senior military official said each of the prisoners who escaped was moved into the cell in the days before his escape after causing problems with other detainees. The main cells at Bagram are large wire cages that can be easily surveyed by guards patrolling the catwalks above them. Cell 119, by contrast, was somewhat apart and out of the way, officials said. Asked whether the prisoners might have fabricated the disturbances to be moved together into Cell 119, the senior official said, "The investigation revealed credible factors that support this theory."
After a head count of prisoners at 1:50 a.m. on July 11, the military report states, the sergeant of the guard on duty at the detention center, now called the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, reported all of them accounted for, the report states.
About two hours later, at 3:45 a.m., as the detainees were being roused for the morning prayer, the four detainees were discovered missing from their cell. The military police battalion on duty at the prison, Task Force Cerberus, immediately locked down the prison and began a search, the report said.
How the men got out of their cell remains a mystery, officials said. Two senior military officials said some equipment was temporarily moved beside the cell, partly obstructing the guards' view. One senior military official said investigators believe the prisoners managed to pick the lock with implements they had fashioned while detained.
There were also suspicions that one of the American military guards, who had had disciplinary problems, might have deliberately left the door open, two senior officials said. But those suspicions were eventually discounted and the guard was never charged, they said.
The four men escaped out the southeast door of the main prison building, the report said. Military and intelligence officials said the detainees left behind their bright orange prison uniforms, apparently changing into less conspicuous blue prison garb that they might have somehow hidden in their cells or knew where to find elsewhere.
At the time, several officials said, construction crews had been working to expand and reinforce the prison, a cavernous aircraft machine-shop built by the Soviet military during its occupation of Afghanistan and converted by the American military into its primary screening center for terror suspects captured overseas. The breakout took place only days before a series of tougher security measures, including surveillance cameras and brighter lighting, were to be put in place.
The American forces have released more than 250 Taliban and other prisoners from Bagram this year as part of an Afghan national reconciliation program. Still, they have had to refurbish the prison to hold the roughly 500 detainees who remain.
The escapees also appear to have taken advantage of the construction work to move through an exercise yard and out of the prison compound. Another indication that the four men might have received help in their escape, officials said, was the apparent speed with which they found their way through a maze of buildings and roads to a small, damaged section of the perimeter wall surrounding the vast Bagram Air Base.
Once they found the faulty section of the packed-dirt wall, officials said, the detainees were able to crawl beneath the concertina wire that topped the barrier and drop down on the other side in an area of agricultural fields and abandoned homes.
"There were three or four points where they could have been caught," one American intelligence official said. "The escapees got very lucky." Within minutes of the escape, American forces began fanning out across and outside the prison, concentrating on the area near the faulty section of the wall. As the base sirens blared an alert and Cobra and Black Hawk helicopters hovered overhead, American soldiers and Afghan policemen scoured fields and homes in the area.
The district police chief, Colonel Assadullah, said in an interview in Bagram that he was asked to have his men search for a yellow pickup truck, which was apparently seen leaving the area. The district governor, Kabir Ahmad, said the Afghan authorities set up checkpoints on the highway leading to Kabul and other roads in the area, but turned up nothing suspicious.
Military officials said American soldiers questioned laborers who had been working at the prison, as well as local Afghan officials. But no arrests were made, and neither Afghans working at the base nor American officials said they knew of any laborers fired as a result of the inquiry.
In a recent interview, a former Bagram prisoner, Moazzam Begg, said he had heard during his detention there that American intelligence officers had once proposed staging an escape to release a detainee whom they wanted to act as a double agent against Al Qaeda. He said he had no knowledge that any such scheme had been carried out, and several American officials strongly dismissed the idea that that had happened with Mr. Faruq and the others.
In a videotape delivered to the Pakistan bureau of the Arab-language satellite television station Al Arabiya, Mr. Kahtani boasted about the preparations for the escape, suggesting that they had been painstaking.
"We decided to escape on Sunday because that is the day off for the nonbelievers," he said on the tape, which was broadcast Oct. 18. "To escape we studied the plan very carefully."
Sultan M. Munadi and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Bagram, Afghanistan for this article.
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Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst - New York Times
Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst - New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 4, 2005
Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - There could be no doubt about the theme of President Bush's Iraq war strategy speech on Wednesday at the Naval Academy. He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."
Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.
Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polls, Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.
That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory is Clear."
"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."
Dr. Gelpi said he had not discussed the document with Dr. Feaver, who declined to be interviewed.
Dr. Feaver, 43, who is also a lieutenant commander in the United States Naval Reserve, wrote three books on civilian-military relations. He worked on military issues on President Clinton's National Security Council staff in 1993 and 1994, but he has written critically of Mr. Clinton and other Democrats and sympathetically of President Bush in The New York Times and other publications.
Last year in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, noting Mr. Bush's determination to invade Iraq in 2003 in the face of doubts, Dr. Feaver wrote, "Determined commanders in chief have the mind-set and the resolve to act in spite of the political climate and military resistance."
He was recruited by the White House this year as public support for the war declined steadily in the face of mounting casualties and costs. A Newsweek poll this month showed that just 30 percent of those interviewed said they approved of the president's handling of the war, while 65 percent disapproved - an almost exact reversal of the numbers in May 2003, shortly after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Wednesday underscored the need for a clear, straightforward summary of the administration's Iraq policy. Asked whether they thought President Bush had a plan to achieve victory in Iraq, 55 percent said no and 41 percent said yes.
Based on their study of poll results from the first two years of the war, Dr. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver and Jason Reifler, then a Duke graduate student, took issue with what they described as the conventional wisdom since the Vietnam War - that Americans will support military operations only if American casualties are few.
They found that public tolerance for the human cost of combat depended on two factors: a belief that the war was a worthy cause, and even more important, a belief that the war was likely to be successful.
In their paper, "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," which is to be published soon in the journal International Security, Dr. Feaver and his colleagues wrote: "Mounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."
The role of Dr. Feaver in preparing the strategy document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view but accessible with a few keystrokes, the plan posted on the White House Web site showed the document's originator, or "author" in the software's designation, to be "feaver-p."
According to Matt Rozen, a spokesman for Adobe Systems, which makes the Acrobat software used to prepare the document, that entry indicated that Dr. Feaver created the original document that, with additions and editing, was posted on the Web. There is no way to know from the text how much he wrote.
Asked about who wrote the document, a White House official said Dr. Feaver had helped conceive and draft the plan, though the official said a larger role belonged to another N.S.C. staff member, Meghan L. O'Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and her staff. The official would describe the individual roles only on condition of anonymity because his superiors wanted the strategy portrayed as a unified administration position.
Frederick Jones, an N.S.C. spokesman, said the document "reflects the broad interagency effort under way in Iraq" and "incorporates all aspects of American power," including political and economic as well as military efforts. He said major contributions to the plan came from the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury and Homeland Security, as well as the director of National Intelligence. In his news briefing on Wednesday, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, characterized the document as an unclassified, publicly accessible explanation of strategies that the administration has been pursuing in Iraq since 2003.
In a news briefing from Iraq on Friday, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the top American military official in charge of training Iraqi troops, surprised some reporters by saying he first saw "Our Strategy for Victory in Iraq" when it was released to the public on Wednesday.
The White House official said that while not all top officers in Iraq had necessarily seen the strategy document, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday, "I have had multiple opportunities to read this document, to critique it, to send it back," with the goal of making "sure that what it says is a) accurate, and b) executable."
The Feaver-Gelpi hypothesis on public opinion about the war is the subject of serious debate among political scientists. John Mueller, of Ohio State University, said he did not believe that the president's speech or the victory plan - which he described as "very Feaverish, or Feaveresque" - could produce more than a fleeting improvement in public support for the war, because it was likely to erode further as casualties accumulated.
"As the costs go up, support goes down," he said, citing patterns from the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Dr. Gelpi, of Duke, said approval of the president's handling of the war was probably close to being as low as it could go, because his core supporters were unlikely ever to abandon him. But he said the poll numbers were likely to improve only if enough Americans saw evidence that the Iraq strategy was succeeding.
Dr. Gelpi added, however, that the speech and the strategy document "hit exactly on the themes our research said they should."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 4, 2005
Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - There could be no doubt about the theme of President Bush's Iraq war strategy speech on Wednesday at the Naval Academy. He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."
Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.
Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polls, Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.
That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory is Clear."
"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."
Dr. Gelpi said he had not discussed the document with Dr. Feaver, who declined to be interviewed.
Dr. Feaver, 43, who is also a lieutenant commander in the United States Naval Reserve, wrote three books on civilian-military relations. He worked on military issues on President Clinton's National Security Council staff in 1993 and 1994, but he has written critically of Mr. Clinton and other Democrats and sympathetically of President Bush in The New York Times and other publications.
Last year in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, noting Mr. Bush's determination to invade Iraq in 2003 in the face of doubts, Dr. Feaver wrote, "Determined commanders in chief have the mind-set and the resolve to act in spite of the political climate and military resistance."
He was recruited by the White House this year as public support for the war declined steadily in the face of mounting casualties and costs. A Newsweek poll this month showed that just 30 percent of those interviewed said they approved of the president's handling of the war, while 65 percent disapproved - an almost exact reversal of the numbers in May 2003, shortly after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Wednesday underscored the need for a clear, straightforward summary of the administration's Iraq policy. Asked whether they thought President Bush had a plan to achieve victory in Iraq, 55 percent said no and 41 percent said yes.
Based on their study of poll results from the first two years of the war, Dr. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver and Jason Reifler, then a Duke graduate student, took issue with what they described as the conventional wisdom since the Vietnam War - that Americans will support military operations only if American casualties are few.
They found that public tolerance for the human cost of combat depended on two factors: a belief that the war was a worthy cause, and even more important, a belief that the war was likely to be successful.
In their paper, "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," which is to be published soon in the journal International Security, Dr. Feaver and his colleagues wrote: "Mounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."
The role of Dr. Feaver in preparing the strategy document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view but accessible with a few keystrokes, the plan posted on the White House Web site showed the document's originator, or "author" in the software's designation, to be "feaver-p."
According to Matt Rozen, a spokesman for Adobe Systems, which makes the Acrobat software used to prepare the document, that entry indicated that Dr. Feaver created the original document that, with additions and editing, was posted on the Web. There is no way to know from the text how much he wrote.
Asked about who wrote the document, a White House official said Dr. Feaver had helped conceive and draft the plan, though the official said a larger role belonged to another N.S.C. staff member, Meghan L. O'Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and her staff. The official would describe the individual roles only on condition of anonymity because his superiors wanted the strategy portrayed as a unified administration position.
Frederick Jones, an N.S.C. spokesman, said the document "reflects the broad interagency effort under way in Iraq" and "incorporates all aspects of American power," including political and economic as well as military efforts. He said major contributions to the plan came from the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury and Homeland Security, as well as the director of National Intelligence. In his news briefing on Wednesday, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, characterized the document as an unclassified, publicly accessible explanation of strategies that the administration has been pursuing in Iraq since 2003.
In a news briefing from Iraq on Friday, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the top American military official in charge of training Iraqi troops, surprised some reporters by saying he first saw "Our Strategy for Victory in Iraq" when it was released to the public on Wednesday.
The White House official said that while not all top officers in Iraq had necessarily seen the strategy document, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday, "I have had multiple opportunities to read this document, to critique it, to send it back," with the goal of making "sure that what it says is a) accurate, and b) executable."
The Feaver-Gelpi hypothesis on public opinion about the war is the subject of serious debate among political scientists. John Mueller, of Ohio State University, said he did not believe that the president's speech or the victory plan - which he described as "very Feaverish, or Feaveresque" - could produce more than a fleeting improvement in public support for the war, because it was likely to erode further as casualties accumulated.
"As the costs go up, support goes down," he said, citing patterns from the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Dr. Gelpi, of Duke, said approval of the president's handling of the war was probably close to being as low as it could go, because his core supporters were unlikely ever to abandon him. But he said the poll numbers were likely to improve only if enough Americans saw evidence that the Iraq strategy was succeeding.
Dr. Gelpi added, however, that the speech and the strategy document "hit exactly on the themes our research said they should."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Darkness Dispelled
Darkness Dispelled
Late day sunburst through the clouds over Lake Massabesic in Auburn, NH
Late day sunburst through the clouds over Lake Massabesic in Auburn, NH
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