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Sunday, April 20, 2008

NEWSWEEK: Murdoch's Wall Street Journal Set to Challenge New York Times; Bloomberg Associates Encouraging Mayor to Buy the Times

When readers open their Wall Street Journals Monday morning, they will discover a newspaper fashioned to the tastes of the man who revolutionized media markets from Australia to North America. With its increased focus on politics, international news, culture and sports, Rupert Murdoch's reconceived Journal represents nothing short of a formal declaration of war on that most venerable of journalistic institutions, The New York Times, Newsweek reports in the current issue. The fight could escalate in unknown ways if billionaire New York Mayor
Michael Bloomberg ends up acquiring the Times. As Newsweek has learned, top associates of the onetime information executive are encouraging him to do just that.

In Newsweek interviews last week, a member of Bloomberg's inner circle confirmed that the mayor's confidants and closest associates are, in fact, encouraging him to explore the idea of a Bloomberg-New York Times merger, reports senior writer Johnnie Roberts in the April 28 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, April 21). The Bloomberg source wasn't authorized to
publicly discuss the matter and, as a result, insisted on anonymity.

Through a spokesman, Bloomberg declined to comment. According to the source, the proponents of the merger are appealing to the mayor's sense of "civic-mindedness," arguing that he is best suited to take the publishing company private to "help protect the brand" in the wake of relentless shareholder assaults. "It is clearly a brand that Bloomberg could help preserve and that he cares about immensely ... and could pay a competitive price" for, says this person.

Murdoch, for one, sees a natural fit between Bloomberg and the Journal's uptown rival. Bloomberg, he notes, has pledged to remain a force in national public life after leaving New York's city hall at the end of next year. To that end, owning the Times would help immensely, Murdoch reasons. Yet the prospect of competing against a Bloomberg-owned Times
appears to rattle him. "I wouldn't look forward to going up against him," Murdoch tells Newsweek, citing his "great respect for Bloomberg's business abilities."

Roberts also looks at whom Murdoch will support for president and whether The Wall Street Journal, which hasn't endorsed a candidate since Herbert Hoover, will do so now. Murdoch's New York Post not only endorsed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in New York's primary, but it also criticized Sen. Hillary Clinton, with whom it was assumed Murdoch was now friendly.

Why did Murdoch turn cold on Clinton? "She's been a good senator for New York," he told Newsweek recently. "It doesn't mean she'd make a good president." While he lauds Clinton's "terrific mastery of details and issues," Murdoch says, "I'm against a lot of her big national issues."

He says he's worried that the senator will make the United States more of "a dependency society" like the United Kingdom was before Margaret Thatcher, of whom he was an ardent supporter. "Government should not be too big," he says. Interpretation: Clinton, despite her centrist message, remains too liberal for Murdoch. Clinton's camp rejects the view. "I don't
know what evidence he has to that effect," Harold Ickes, a Clinton strategist, told Newsweek on Friday. "I don't know what he would look to in terms of her policies that she's proposing that he could draw that conclusion." As for the Post's nod to Obama, that appears to have been a
calculated attempt by Murdoch to do his part to prolong a great horse race. "I said, 'Let's make a race of it'," he said.

Many media-industry watchers, journalists and communications experts argue that the Journal will never pose much of a threat to the Times's franchise, Roberts reports. In fact, the changes could damage the Journal brand. "Turning a paper into an old-fashioned variety show -- we have a little of everything -- I don't think is the route to success," says a former senior Dow Jones executive. "The risk you run is that you are not best at anything." But the same critics also warn that "it's never a good time to have to confront someone like Murdoch, who doesn't care about making money on a particular product," says newspaper analyst John Morton.

New York Times CEO Janet Robinson says that the Times is prepared for the confrontation with Murdoch. "The New York Times," she told analysts, "has had broad coverage for 156 years now, and from that perspective we are far advanced in the type of journalism we create and the
type of advertising we bring into the paper."

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Sunday, February 24, 2008

NEWSWEEK Cover: The Hunt for an Addiction Vaccine

Although the American Medical Association recognized addiction as a disease back in 1956, only now are we beginning to see treatments that target the underlying biochemistry of that disease, Newsweek reports in the March 3 cover, "The Hunt for an Addiction Vaccine" (on newsstands Monday February 25).

Health reporter Jeneen Interlandi reports that this emerging paradigm treats addiction as a
chronic, relapsing brain disorder to be managed with all the tools at medicine's disposal. The addict's brain is malfunctioning, as surely as the pancreas in someone with diabetes. In both cases, "lifestyle choices" may be contributing factors, but no one regards that as a reason to withhold insulin from a diabetic.

"We are making unprecedented advances in understanding the biology of addiction," says David Rosenblum, a public-health professor and addiction expert at Boston University. "And
that is finally starting to push the thinking from 'moral failing' to 'legitimate illness'."

Interlandi examines the science that is helping to understand how the addicted brain functions and the compounds being developed or tested by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) that block the intoxicating effects of drugs, including vaccines that train the body's own immune system to bar them from the brain. To the extent that "willpower" is a meaningful concept
at all, the era of willpower-in-a-pill may be just over the horizon. "The future is clear," says Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA. "In 10 years we will be treating addiction as a disease, and that means with medicine."

Vaccines that would arm the immune system against addictive drugs and prevent them from making the user high are, potentially, the ultimate weapons against addiction, Interlandi explains. A cocaine vaccine is poised to enter its first large-scale clinical trial in humans this year, and vaccines against nicotine, heroin and methamphetamine are also in development.

Nabi Biopharmaceuticals, a small biotech company in Maryland, has engineered a nicotine vaccine that is in late-stage clinical trials. Earlier studies showed that it was twice as effective as a placebo in helping people quit smoking. The cocaine vaccine, developed by Thomas
Kosten of Baylor College of Medicine, could be on the market as early as 2010. It would have to be given three or four times a year, but presumably not for life, says Kosten. While the vaccine is being studied in people who are already addicted to cocaine, it could eventually be used on others.

"You could vaccinate high-risk teens until they matured to an age of better decision-making," Kosten says. He acknowledges the obvious civil-liberties issues this raises. "Lawyers certainly want to argue with us on the ethics of it," he says, "but parent groups and pediatricians have been receptive to the idea."

The revolution these new drugs promise will have a huge impact on the addiction-treatment industry (or, as it prefers to think of itself, the "recovery movement"), which runs the gamut from locked psychiatric wards in big-city hospitals to spalike mansions in the Malibu Hills of California. And the reaction there is guarded; the people who run them have seen panaceas come and go over the years, and the same addicts return with the same problems. They also, of course, have a large investment in their own programs, which typically rely on intensive therapy and counseling based on the 12-Step Model.

"We need four or five more years to see how [Vivitrol] does," says staff psychiatrist Garrett O'Conner at the Betty Ford Center, in Rancho Mirage, Calif., about the medication that prevents patients from drinking alcohol by obliterating its ability to intoxicate. "And we need to
be very cautious, because a failed treatment will set a person back." The Ford Center and the Hazelden Foundation, in Minnesota, use drugs sparingly, and mostly just in the first days or weeks of recovery, the "detox" phase.

"Hazelden will never turn its back on pharmaceutical solutions, but a pill all by itself is not the cure," says William Moyers, Hazelden's vice president of external affairs. "We're afraid that people are seeking a medical route that says treatment is the end, not the beginning."

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Newsweek: Alzheimer's and Caregivers


Newsweek Senior Editor Barbara Kantrowitz and Chicago correspondent Karen Springen report on the millions of baby boomers now caring for parents, and in some cases, spouses afflicted with Alzheimer's disease.

Of the 5 million Americans living with Alzheimer's, an estimated 70 percent of them live at home, cared for by family. But the financial and emotional toll on these family members can often become overwhelming. To combat the devastating disease, a growing number of boomers are taking action by increasing public awareness and campaigning for increased research funding. It's estimated that by 2030, Alzheimer's will cost Medicare $400 billion, almost as much as the entire current Medicare budget.

In "A Guide for Caregivers," correspondent Joan Raymond reports on ways to handle the difficult task of being a caregiver to ailing parents. A good place to start is by preparing documents such as a health-care proxy, also called a health-care power of attorney and an advance directive, or a living will. This allows a person to specify medical care and life-support procedures they want.

And in "Insuring Your Future Care," Contributing Editor Jane Bryant Quinn reports on the new ways many baby boomers are looking to prepare for their later years and the different long-term-care options available. Quinn also explores the ways insurers are targeting boomers who might be willingto buy new designer forms of TLC coverage at a younger age.


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Sunday, April 15, 2007

Duke Lacrosse Players, Their Families Talk to Newsweek About What Happened That Night


Duke lacrosse player Reade Seligmann tells Newsweek that last Christmas, when he heard the news that the rape charges against him and two of his teammates were being dropped, but the prosecutor Mike Nifong was going ahead with the charges of kidnapping and committing a sexual offense, "That was the most frustrating point in the case, because you're like, 'This man will not let it go, no matter what we do.'"

Last Wednesday, Seligmann and his teammates Collin Finnerty and David Evans were declared innocent of all charges in the case that had appalledand titillated the U.S. for more than a year.

After the attorney general's announcement that completely vindicated them, Finnerty and Seligmann, as well as their parents, some siblings and Finnerty's girlfriend, spoke to Newsweek about the experience. The magazine als oobtained the handwritten statements given by Evans and the other two team captains, Daniel Flannery and Matthew Zash, to the Durham police two days after the alleged rape. The statements, never before made public, and interviews with defense attorneys familiar with the evidence, tell the real story of what happened that night, reports senior writer Susannah Meadows and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas in the April 23 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, April 16).

As Newsweek reports, that night in March 2006, after the strippers arrived at the party, the accuser appeared to be intoxicated and had trouble standing up, much less dancing. Half-heartedly, she began kissing the other dancer. Later, when the night was played up as a violent bacchanal, a "Boys Gone Wild" situation, Seligmann would reflect thatanyone watching the real thing would have been bored. At the time, he says,"We didn't know how to react. It was disgusting. I was very uncomfortable and I wasn't the only one." Indeed, in a photo taken by one of the players and obtained by Newsweek, Seligmann appears to be recoiling as he watches the dancers. The performance lasted all of five minutes.

One night about a week after the incident, Finnerty and another player noticed a Take Back the Night rally as they walked to the library. Curious, they went over to hear the speakers decry sexual assault on campus. Activists were handing out wanted posters with pictures of the team. A student came up and began talking to Finnerty's teammate.

Before thestudent walked off, he pulled out a tape recorder and made a show of hitting the stop button, to make clear he had been recording the conversation. "You could see that something big was going on," recalls Finnerty, who wondered if he'd see the conversation in print.

Looking hugely relieved at a press conference last Wednesday, Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann expressed hope that the system would be reformed to stop runaway prosecutors.


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Sunday, February 25, 2007

Newsweek Cover: Failing Our Wounded


Recent revelations about the decay and mismanagement at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., were especially shocking because it is one of the most prestigious U.S. military hospitals. But a Newsweek investigation--which focused not on one facility but on the services of the Department of Veterans Affairs, a sprawling 235,000-person bureaucracy--found that the VA system is unprepared for the scope of the task at hand and ahead.

Around 50,000 service members so far have been banged up or burned, lost limbs or sacrificed something less tangible inside them in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And a new study projects that at least 700,000 moreveterans from the global war on terror will flood the system in the coming years. In the March 5 cover story, "Failing Our Wounded" (on newsstands Monday, February 26), national security correspondent Dan Ephron and Assistant Editor Sarah Childress paint a grim portrait of an overloaded bureaucracy cluttered with red tape; veterans having to wait weeks or months for mental-health care and other appointments; families sliding into debt as VA case managers study disability claims over many months, and the seriously wounded requiring help from outside experts just to understand the VA's arcane system of rights and benefits.

Tonia Sargent, whose husband, Kenneth--a Marine master sergeant who had been in the corps for nearly 18 years--nearly died in a sniper attack in Najaf in 2004, says no one ever sat her down and explained the benefits and how to access them. Her husband's brain injury made him often incapable of understanding his own care. Key decisions fell to her alone. It's a "don'task, don't tell system," she says. The Sargent's story, and the stories of many other veterans, is raising concerns that the United States is failing to meet its most basic obligations to those who fight its wars, Newsweek says.

"In no way do I diminish the fact that there are veterans out there who are coming in who require treatment and maybe are not getting the treatment they need," White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto tells Newsweek. "It's real and it exists."

Dr. Michael Kussman, the VA's acting under secretary for health tells Newsweek that the department is trying to reach veterans earlier, as they approach their date of discharge, and that he does not believe Iraq and Afghanistan are straining resources severely.

"The impact on the VA so far has been relatively small," Kussman says. "It has not kicked the system over in our budget and in our ability to absorb it."

But the number of veterans has to grow and critics worry the VA is in a state of denial. In a broad sense, Newsweek reports, the situation at the VA seems to mirror the overall lack of planning for the war. "We know the VA doesn't have the capacity to process a large number of disability claims at the same time," says Linda Bilmes, a Harvard public-finance professor who last month released a 34-page study on the long-term cost of caring for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Veterans' support groups and even some former and current VA insiders believe there's a reluctance in the Bush administration to deal openly with the long-term costs of the war, Newsweek says.


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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Television 'Running Circles' Around Movies, Newsweek Says


In the current issue of Newsweek, Senior Editor Devin Gordon writes that there is a new "golden age of television" right now that is running circles around Hollywood.

"For decades, if film was the Four Seasons, TV was a Motel 6," he writes. "You worked in television for the money, or to reboot your career, or just to hang on. Now actors like Alec Baldwin, Steve Carell and Salma Hayek go from hit movies to network-TV gigs, and no one thinks they're nuts."

Gordon writes that the difference now with this age is TV is challenging movies on their own turf -- narratively and visually -- and winning.

"The best shows tell their stories slowly, carefully and withexquisite detail, putting viewers inside the experience of another person with unparalleled intimacy. This is the grand achievement of 'The Sopranos,' and it's why the show's final season, which begins on April 8, is a safe bet to be the cultural happening of the year," Gordon writes inthe February 26 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, February 19).

Others weighed in on the debate:

* Actor Denis Leary tells Newsweek that it was an episode in the first season of "The Sopranos" that changed his notions about what television could be. It was the episode where Tony Soprano is driving Meadow to visit colleges and he runs into a snitch along the way and ends up brutally strangling him to death with a coil of wire.

"I remember watching that and thinking, 'Oh, my God ... '," Leary says. "I don't think I blinked that entire episode. The show ended at 10 o'clock, and at 10:05 the phone in my apartment started ringing off the hook. That's when I thought, 'If they can do this, you can do anything in this format'."

* Megamovie producer Brian Grazer, an Oscar winner for "A Beautiful Mind" whose company, Imagine Entertainment, also co-owns "24," says the economics of the movie business have created a climate of "paranoia" in Hollywood.

The average film budget, according to the latest Nielsen figures, is about $60 million, with an additional $36 million in marketing costs. That means the typical Hollywood film is a $100 million bet-with the money paid upfront, before anyone sees a penny in return. That kind of environment has a stultifying effect on artists. "They begin to worry that their movie will never get made, that they'll never hear 'yes' again," Grazer says, "so they end up being much more accommodating to an executive's opinions."

* Carlton Cuse, an executive producer on ABC's "Lost," says in television "the writer is king. We're at the top of the food chain." In the film world, the director is in charge, or the star. "It's almost impossible to write a movie with a big star and not have that person put his or her thumbprint on top of it," Cuse says.

* Last year, when Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana shared a screenwriting Oscar for "Brokeback Mountain," McMurtry thanked his typewriter. During an interview, he grumbles while Ossana sings the praises of modern TV.

"It's not a question of quality," McMurtry responds. "It just means the prestige is still with film, and I suspect it always will be. Put it this way: I'd rather have an Oscar than an Emmy."

* "The movie business is still caught up in how it's always been done," says Todd Wagner, co-president of 2929 Entertainment ("Good Night, and Good Luck"), which has been leaning on studios to release films on several platforms-in theaters, online and on DVD-at once. "Film is still built around a business model where they're trying to get as many people as possible to see something on the very first weekend, at very select locations, for months before it's available any other way. Television isn't doing that. The realization they've come to is, why wouldn't you put it out there?"

* Hollywood is determined to protect the "specialness" of movies, Gordon writes, and if you can get them any time, anywhere, how special can they be? "There's always going to be that excitement where you think, 'Oh, I made a movie! And it's gonna be at a theater! And people will be eating popcorn!'" says Tina Fey, who wrote the 2004 hit "Mean Girls" and created the NBC sitcom "30 Rock." "It's just different."

* "The people working in television right now are the Shakespeares of the medium," says Ira Glass, host of the public-radio program "This American Life," which has been turned into a jewel of a TV series on Showtime and will start airing on March 22. "That's probably a pretentious thing to say, but I also think it's true. It's true in the same way that Leonard Bernstein was figuring out what you could do with a Broadway show when he wrote 'West Side Story,' or in music when Sinatra recorded his Capitol albums."


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Monday, February 12, 2007

Newsweek: Bush Looking For An Excuse To Attack Iran


Some Bush admninistration advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran, at least one former White House official tells Newsweek.

"They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs, in the February 19 cover story,"The Hidden War With Iran" (on newsstands Monday, February 12).

Even if her fears are overwrought, the fact remains that thelong standing war of words between Washington and Tehran is edging toward something more dangerous. A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and Newsweek has learned that a third carrier will likely follow.

Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. On the chaotic battleground of Iraq, a hidden war between the United States and Iran is already unfolding. Iran has blamed the kidnapping of one of its diplomats on Feb. 4 on Iraqis linked to U.S. forces. Is conflict inevitable? U.S. officials insist they have no intention of provoking or otherwise starting a war with Iran. But former secretary of state Colin Powell tells Newsweek that he thinks President Bush never had any intention of negotiating with the mullahs.

"My position in the remaining year and half [of my term] was that we ought to find ways to restart talks with Iran," Powell tells Newsweek. "But there was a reluctance on the part of the president to do that."

He angrily rejects the administration's characterization of efforts by him and his top aides to deal with Tehran and Damascus as failures. "I don't like the administration saying, 'Powell went, [deputy Richard] Armitage went...and [they] got nothing.' We got plenty," he says. "You can't negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start'."


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Friday, February 09, 2007

O'Connor: Iraq Study Was 'So Out Of My Field'


Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor admits to initially feeling a little out of her element when she was invited to join the Iraq Study Group to offer new alternatives to U.S. involvement in Iraq.

"I wasn't sure I should do it,"she tells Newsweek in an exclusive interview in the current issue. "It was so out of my field of judging. I don't know anything about the military."

President Bush has all but rejected the study group's recommendations but O'Connor is unwilling to criticize Bush.

"There are probably no perfect answers," she tells Assistant Managing Editor Debra Rosenberg in the February 12 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, February 5).

O'Connor also talks about her decision to retire. In the spring of 2005, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist publicly battling thyroid cancer, the two justices discussed timing. "We talked a little bit,"O'Connor recalls. "I was concerned about whether he had an intention to step down since his plans might have altered my own. It's hard for the nation to grapple with two [retirements] at once," she says. "He indicated he didn't want to step down." So she realized she had to go first.

O'Connor retired so she could spend more time with husband John, battling Alzheimer's disease. O'Connor has had to place her husband at a care facility near their Arizona home.

"It's such a miserable disease. It's so sad. It's so hard. I did the best I could," O'Connor says. "He wants me there all the time."

It's been a difficult transition, says former Sen. Alan Simpson, a family friend. "It's tough to go home at night and no longer have this warm,witty guy there," he says of O'Connor.


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Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Newsweek Poll: Bush Standing Hits All-Time Low


U.S. approval for President Bush has hit a record low level despite pitching policies in his recent televised State of the Union address, according to a new Newsweek poll.

President Bush's job approval rating hit an all-time low in theNewsweek Poll at 30 percent. Sixty-one percent of all those polled says they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time; just 30 percent are satisfied.

Sixty-seven percent of those polled believe Bush's decisions about policy in Iraq and other major areas are influenced more by his personal beliefs regardless of the facts, while just 22 percent say his decisions are influenced more by the facts. And 71 percent say Bush will not have enough support over the next two years to make a difference in getting things done in Washington; just 21 percent say he will. The public is split on whether or not Congress is likely (42%) or not likely (48%) to give serious consideration to the proposals Bush made in the State of the Union address about energy, health and other domestic policy.

Fifty-three percent of all those polled say they think history will see Bush as a below average president; 30 percent say average and 14 percent say above average. And 58 percent of all those polled say at this point in time, they personally wish that Bush's presidency was over; 37 percent do not feel that way.

In deciding whether to vote Democratic or Republican in the 2008 presidential election, among registered voters, 31 percent say their view of Bush will be very important; 17 percent say it will be somewhat important and 15 percent say not too important.


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Monday, January 15, 2007

NEWSWEEK: Army Ex-Vice Chief Knew That 'We Were in Deep S---'


Gen. Jack Keane, former Army vice chief of staff, was stepping down just as the insurgency in Iraq started in late spring 2003.


"I went to Iraq in June, looked at it and I knew we werein deep s---," Keane tells Newsweek. "I was going out the door. I felt frustrated. Frustrated with the situation, frustrated with myself andeverything else. And somewhat guilty because I knew how ill prepared the Army was to deal with it."


But Keane gave no public warnings. In Newsweek's January 22 issue (on newsstands Monday, January 15), national security correspondent John Barry and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas report on why, to date, the military has received little criticism for its actions in Iraq despite all of the recriminations over the situation there--and why some in the armed forces now feel that the top brass should share the blame.


"Everyone recognizes that we made mistakes," says Keane. "The harder part is what to learn from them."


Now, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus has been chosen to find a better way in Iraq. For the past 14 months, Petraeus has supervised the writing of the Army's new field manual on counterinsurgency warfare, FM 3-24. Petraeus is a resourceful, imaginative commander who has shown an ability to adapt to rude surprises, write Barry and Thomas. But he will need to be creative, and he may need to do what generals do not like to do: tell the president that he's wrong, that Iraq cannot be won by more force, that the time has come to pull back. Even Petraeus's own strategy may have been overrun byevents.


"It's ironic," says one of the drafters of the new counterinsurgency manual. "We've finished the counterinsurgency manual just as Iraq looks like it's heading for civil war. We don't have a doctrine for that."


Part of the problem, report Barry and Thomas, was the lack of such a counterinsurgency plan after the invasion. When Gen. George Casey arrived at Baghdad headquarters as the commander of U.S.-led coalition forces, he asked his staff to set up a meeting with the HQ's counterinsurgency team. "His request was met with silence," reports retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, a gulf-war veteran and author of an admired study of combat organization. (There was no such staff or counterinsurgency plan.)


Army planners were not oblivious to the risks of a long occupation after a successful, lightning invasion. The pre-war chief of Central Command, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, says, "The thing that kept getting us was: if you go into Iraq you aregoing to inherit a broken society."


But his successor, Gen. Tommy Franks, concentrated almost entirely on the invasion--and essentially ignored postwar planning. Sens. John Warner and Carl Levin, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, respectivelym asked Franks why.


"He said hewas told to stay the hell out of it" by his civilian boss, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Levin recalls. (Franks denies this.)


Keane tells Newsweek that Franks believed that the postwar planning, known as Phase Four, was the responsibility of a different general, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the head of the tiny, understaffed Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (who in turn was soon replaced by a civilian, Ambassador Paul Bremer).


"Franks was dead wrong, and I don't believe he did this thing right, but he literally washed his hands of this Phase Four stuff," says Keane, speaking with unusual bluntness about a fellow officer. (Franks disagrees, pointing out that Garner served under him.)


In and around Baghdad, report Barry and Thomas, the Army's approach was"kinetic"; it would use firepower and brute force. Untrained incounterinsurgency, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, Lt. Gen.Ray Odierno, ordered his men to kick in doors and arrest any man who looked like an insurgent. Overflowing their cells at Abu Ghraib, the prisoners became targets of poorly trained, overwhelmed guards. The consequences toAmerica's image in Iraq--and in the Arab and Muslim worlds--were disastrous. (Odierno, who has recently gone back to Baghdad, insisted in an earlier interview with Newsweek that he had not been heavy-handed.)



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