Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?
- T.S. Eliot, "What the Thunder Said"

I resist the notion, now so popular among segments of our desperately flailing human intelligentsia, that beings from other worlds seeded our planet with life, or that these ETs abduct people for demonic Freudian experiments, or that mysterious dark forces, be they angels or aliens, control human destiny for their own petulant purposes.

It's all just too complicated, and it smacks of copping a plea, grasping for some lame excuse, or refusing to take responsibility for one's own actions. I mean, why ascribe evil to some esoteric mystical force when mindless savagery has always been a hallmark of typical human behavior? We need no additional motivation for depravity beyond the inner pit of our own personal darkness.

All these fantastic mythologies are clearly a case of trying to blame others for guilt that is our own.

Yet humanity continues to be imprisoned in the thrall of these supernatural shibboleths, whether the principal objects of our groveling fear reside in the cathedral or the cosmos.

The more conscious among us have always downgraded these sensationalized spirits - whether inspirational or injurious - into mere metaphors for life's natural processes.

But beyond trying to classify imaginary creations that are exclusively based on the unanswered questions about our own mortality looms an even more dangerous question: Why is it so popular to conclude that there appear to be two types of humans on this planet? I'm talking about the basic good and evil split: those who live by lies and relish war versus those who speak forthrightly and covet peace.

I was recently reminded of this dangerous classification trend during a small waterfall of hundred dollar bills that filled my mailbox with many unsigned letters (by readers who strive to keep me afloat for a few more months), by one reader who noted that my willingness to consider the possibility that there were people without souls, called by some "organic portals," was really no different from other discriminatory schemes concocted by the world's worst despots, whether it was - to cite two well known examples - the way Adolf Hitler regarded Jews or Ariel Sharon regards Arabs. (Two peas in a pod, you might say.)

Assigning fundamental differences to various perceived groups was really no different, he asserted. And no less toxic. After all, most of the world's wars have been waged on the claims of one group being somehow less human than another. And most of these slanderous campaigns have been staged as a cynical excuse to steal something valuable from the supposedly evil group. (As is so obvious today in what we call the Middle East.)

So I had to admit the validity of his point. It's simply damaging and potentially tragic to arbitrarily classify any group as somehow morally inferior or intrinisically more sinister than another, even though that's what every religion in the world does to every other group all the time.

But the big problem for me in accepting his routinely moral assertion was that decades of evidence - hey, just read the newspapers! - clearly shows that some hard-to-identify group was provoking all these conflicts throughout history for the express purpose of making large amounts of money from instigating wars.

When you really read the real history of the 20th century, you come to understand that one small group of very rich men has controlled both sides in all the major wars. And controls them still, always counting the cash, but never the bodies.

I don't know about you, but this is not the way my parents taught me to be. Hence, the temptation to contemplate theories that explain heartless avarice and mass murder without a second thought. I tell myself that this is something that I and my friends would not do. So, is there actually a different breed of cat, a darker pigmentation in some human hearts, that rules people differently from those I know and love? Are some people missing some essential biological ingredient of humanity?

The question is .... are there really shadow people? Judging by the behavior of American troops in Iraq, who murder innocent families as if they are only electronic silhouettes in some video game, or of Israeli soldiers, who make sport out of shooting Palestinian children for no reason other than their own Talmud-induced pathology of superiority, it appears that there really are.

I mean, what part of "Thou shalt not kill" - the central thesis of all religious thought - don't they understand? Everyone agrees there are no caveats to this. But in the space between agreement and practice lies the shadow. And tragedy. And very possibly the end of all life on this planet.

Let me take great care to define what I mean by shadow people.

I'm not talking about Art Bell's shadow people, which apparently are visual apparitions that appear when your eyes are focused in another direction, and are never there in the spot you thought you saw them when you actually fix your gaze on that spot. Nor am I talking about Carlos Castaneda's brujos, who apparently are people you talk to who later are proven not to really exist, which may actually have been a private joke about don Juan Matus himself.

I'm not talking about ghosts, spirits, time travelers, ectoplasmic wraiths, interdimensional beings, or people who reside in other physical realities like supposedly Nick Herbert.

I'm talking about people who say one thing and do another, people like George Bush and Dick Cheney (and Bill Clinton and Al Gore), people who mouth pleasant platitudes and then thoughtlessly commit atrocities, which they then spin as heroic deeds essential to your well-being (which presumably is why they always cost so much money).

Could it be true, as many people believe, that these belligerent cads were born without souls? Not likely, I suspect.

And I'm talking about Mr. Ordinary American, too, who, when you tell him that 9/11 was an inside job, his face goes slack and his mind goes blank. And when you present him with the mountains of evidence indicating the undeniability of your statement, he just quivers and turns away, muttering "our government would never do something like that" without daring to contemplate the reality that our leaders "do something like that" every day.

Yes, the fabled Mr. Ordinary American, who, when you tell him the 2004 election was fixed and that Kerry actually won it with a large margin of electoral votes except for the computer shenanigans that reversed the decision, accuses you being some kind of liberal delusionary, even when you explain you have utter contempt for both major candidates, and don't believe a thing either of them ever said.

Mr. Ordinary American, who can't hear a word when you say he threw away the lives of his own children on a war that was lie because he actually believed what he heard on television.

And beyond that, Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Human Being, residing anywhere on the planet, who believe that some venerated superbeing, usually named God, controls their every movement, and that the God of their neighborhood is most definitely better than and superior to any other God that has ever been invented anywhere else.

What is wrong with all these people? And why are they in such a preponderant majority, so that the wars never cease, and lying for profit has always been the dominant way of life?

Well, I'm going to tell you now. I'm going to make it perfectly clear. I'm going to lay it all out in excruciating detail for you. And if you turn away and say, "That guy's wacked!", that means you're one of the shadow people, still controlled by a demon you dare not confront. But if you understand what I'm saying, well, that means there's still a faint ray of hope for this planet, dim though it may be.

We all carry with us the shadow of death. It is, as the natural scientists have said for a long time, what distinguishes humans from all of our fellow animal species. Foreknowledge of death. It rules every move we make.

To deny that we die, and invent some strategy that when our mortal bodies expire we either go to some cool place - to go bowling with the angels, just as an example - or get sucked into some ephemeral process that some people call the bardo (which is like some dark carnival funhouse where all these scary faces pop out at you, reminding you of every nasty thing you've done in your entire life) and therein choose the time and place (and parents) of your next incarnation - all these mental machinations are constructed to deny the obvious. That when our hearts stop and our brains cease all functions a few minutes later, that's the end of us as individuals. After that, we're mulch. Our contributions to the universe end there, and what we have done is all we will ever possess for all of eternity.

I know that this will come as a shock to many of you, and you will squirm and wriggle and deny with every fiber of your being that this is the case. Why? Simple. Our brains absolutely refuse to contemplate our own nonexistence. They fight with every fact at their disposal to create a scenario where this is not the case, because they are wired to survive, not to cease functioning. And yet they do.

Numerous philosophers have reflected that the human curse is having an infinite imagination trapped in a finite body. Based on the primary instinct to survive, the body's mind rejects the notion of a limited amount of life in time and finds a way to transcend it by any means possible. Logic, reality and reason become nonfactors and spirit is born. And the entire populace commits to the conspiracy, because it gives them the answer they sought. Spirit is born, and the soul is its offspring. And along with them form parasitic religions, which trade on and profit from the desire of people to avoid death by providing concocted formulas to do just that. None of these formulas actually work, but no one in the conspiracy will admit it, because that result is not desired. This is a clear case of reality is not desired. The illusion is more comfortable. Insecurity is eliminated by eternal life.

But because it is not real, the fear remains. The purpose of religion cannot be proven, it can only be believed. And since it is such an obvious lie, the honest mind eventually comes to know it is a lie, and begins to hate itself for lying, for being afraid of the ultimate truth, which is that we don't live forever, and have but a little time to make the most of what we have been given.

Given by whom? We can only guess. We call it God. But even the lamest cleric will admit we cannot know God in its entirety. God is only a word, after all. Some unfathomable process that we call God invented man, but man invented the word and concept of God in a feeble attempt to explain the unexplainable.

And what have we been given? Well, if you're lucky like me (and who knows why?), we have been given a slice of paradise, a sensual experience so astonishingly beautiful that we can make no other sense of it that to eventually believe that a seemingly omnipotent force has created the very conditions of heaven right on this little blue and green spheroid. That's why I always say, heaven is not something somewhere else to be sought, it is right here, and we're put here to make it what it is supposed to be - heaven!

But we - each of us - only get a little time to do it. And none of us every really succeeds, except in small ways, for the benefit of only a few people. But that in itself is exquisite proof that this really is heaven, if only we make it so.

For sure, thinking heaven is somewhere else and yearning for it is the surest way to make this place hell, which is exactly what we've done for the last 5,000 years, thanks in large part to believing that God is somewhere else and we want to go there rather than realizing God is right here, helping us all the time to make the Earth heaven. This has happened in large part BECAUSE religions have told us that heaven was somewhere else, instead of right here.

The only real fruits of religions can be seen flashing from the barrel of a gun, and heard in the moans of the innocent wailing for their unjustly murdered loved ones. This is what religions seek to accomplish, and they succeed, because people have decided not to understand what life is really about, or the true nature of the gift we have been given.

In being greedy and expecting to find a magic formula that will insulate us from the inevitability of death (can't you see it's the way the system works?), we trash the very things that give us life in the first place. And thanks to psychotic marching orders like the Book of Revelation, we are very likely to destroy the conditions that allow us this great gift of life simply because we refuse to accept the condition of our gift, that it does not last forever, that nothing lasts forever, not even our great and wild universe.

That's why I always say, without death, the possibility of goodness would not exist. When you have to sacrifice everything to achieve the right thing, that is love. If we lived forever, none of these things would matter, since we would have everything we wanted, and nothing would mean anything to us.

Therefore, believing that we have everything in the security of an eternal life is precisely what is causing us to trash our planet and murder innocent people with impunity, because the lies our minds know are lies but our mouths nevertheless say in order to vainly attempt to convince ourselves that we don't die are lashing out in unexpected ways.

We are blinded by this false light of our own creation, an inauthentic abomination that deep in our hearts and minds we know is a lie. Yet we are transfixed by this artificial light, because it keeps us from realizing our clock is ever ticking and our lease will be soon be up. (Any resemblance of this light to a TV screen is not purely coincidental.)

To really see, and to really know why we are here, we may not keep insisting that we will live forever by the power of magic incantations and formulas, but we must screw up our courage and wander into the darkness of our own shadows, and begin to understand how the seepage from this gigantic ontological lie is causing all this unnecessary death and destruction. We delude ourselves into thinking that killing enemies prolongs our own life, but that is only a fearful illusion.

Once upon a time I said, true warmth is found in the coldest dream. Now I would suggest that the brightest light is found confronting the deepest darkness.

It is not an exaggeration to say that everything depends on you understanding this. It will not take many more days of ignoring this problem for all of us to perish permanently in the abyss of our own self-deception, with no one left to say this was the epitaph of the shadow people, destroyed by their own fearful religions.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives near the eternal ocean in a fading paradise called Florida. His numerous Internet essays are for sale in anthologies at http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Soldiers in Uzbekistan have surrounded a crowd of 2,000 protesters in eastern Andijan's main square, following an overnight jailbreak.

President Islam Karimov is flying to the city to handle the protest.

Earlier, shots were fired into the crowd. Nine people were killed and 34 injured, according to government officials. The scene is now calmer.

The protest's apparent trigger was the trial of 23 local businessmen on charges of Islamic extremism.

Protesters are calling for "justice" and "freedom".

The BBC's correspondent in Tashkent, Monica Whitlock, says the unrest feeds on long pent-up anger in Andijan regarding the treatment of prisoners, poverty, unemployment and other social problems.

Media clampdown stifles news

Overnight, a group of unidentified armed men broke open Andijan jail, freeing everyone inside - perhaps as many as 4,000 inmates, both political prisoners and ordinary criminals.

They poured out into the city, some of them carrying guns.

"The people have risen," AP news agency quoted Valijon Atakhonjonov, the brother of a defendant in the long-running trial.

Negotiations

Some protesters have occupied the mayor's office in Andijan, while the majority are in the main square.

Earlier, three snipers were reportedly pulled down from a roof by protesters.

An official in Uzbekistan's foreign ministry, who described the protesters as "armed criminals", said negotiations with them were under way.

All foreign news broadcasts, including those of the BBC, have been blocked.

In the capital Tashkent, 300 km away, a man was shot dead outside the Israeli embassy, upon suspicion he was a suicide bomber.

Our correspondent says the incident, while apparently unrelated to the protests, shows how tense the situation has become.

Barometer of feeling

Andijan is one of the main cities in the most politically sensitive part of this country, our correspondent says.

It is the barometer of feeling for a long, densely populated valley called Ferghana with a long tradition of independent thought, and the authoritarian government in Tashkent has always eyed the valley with suspicion, she says.

The government has locked up probably thousands of local young men, many of them prominent members of the community, accusing them of Islamic extremism.

Neighbouring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have shut their borders with Uzbekistan. Protests in Kyrgyzstan in March resulted in the overthrow of its then President, Askar Akayev.

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly, "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in fighting global terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terrorism suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States' criticism.

Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens.

There is other evidence of the United States' reliance on Uzbekistan in the program. On Sept. 21, 2003, two American-registered airplanes - a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737 - landed at the international airport in Tashkent, according to flight logs obtained by The New York Times.

Although the precise purpose of those flights is not known, over a span of about three years, from late 2001 until early this year, the C.I.A. used those two planes to ferry terror suspects in American custody to countries around the world for questioning, according to interviews with former and current intelligence officials and flight logs showing the movements of the planes. On the day the planes landed in Tashkent, the Gulfstream had taken off from Baghdad, while the 737 had departed from the Czech Republic, the logs show.

The logs show at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan by those planes from early 2002 to late 2003, but the records are incomplete.

Details of the C.I.A.'s prisoner transfer program have emerged in recent months from a handful of former detainees who have been released, primarily from prisons in Egypt and Afghanistan, and in some cases have alleged they were beaten and tortured while being held.

The program was created in the mid-1980's as a way for the C.I.A. to transfer crime suspects arrested abroad to their home countries. After Sept. 11, the C.I.A. used it to send prisoners suspected of being senior leaders of Al Qaeda to a half-dozen countries for detention. American intelligence officials estimate that the United States has transferred 100 to 150 suspects to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

The Russian security service claimed yesterday to have discovered spies working for the British, US, Saudi and Kuwaiti governments who were operating under the cover of non-governmental organisations.

Nikolai Patrushev, the director of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, told parliament that his agency had "prevented a series of espionage operations carried out through foreign non-governmental organisations".

Among those he named was the British medical charity Merlin, which denied the allegation last night.

The FSB comments, an unusually detailed reiteration of suspicions it has often voiced, came days after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, hosted George Bush and other world leaders for the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow. The visit of Mr Bush, who described the Soviet occupation of Europe as one of the great wrongs of the 20th century, underlined growing mistrust of the west among Kremlin hardliners.

A year ago, Mr Putin attacked NGOs for pursuing "dubious group and commercial interests" and for taking foreign money.

Mr Patrushev did not specify how many spies were found or what they were accused of doing, except "pursuing the interests" of other states.

In a broad reference to the supporting role that Washington and EU member states played in three protest-led regime changes in the former Soviet Union during the past 19 months, Mr Patrushev added: "Our opponents are steadily and persistently trying to weaken Russian influence in the commonwealth of independent states and the international arena as a whole. The latest events in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan unambiguously confirm this."

He also accused an American NGO of organising a meeting in Slovakia last month at which further "velvet revolutions were discussed".

The US and EU have each condemned the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, the president of the former Soviet republic of Belarus, as the "last dictatorship in Europe". Mr Lukashenko retains a brittle alliance with Mr Putin, with both leaders facing calls for greater democracy.

The British charity Merlin "categorically denied" the spying allegation.

A spokeswoman said the group had been working in Russia in 1996 and never experienced visa problems. "All of Merlin's programmes have been approved by the relevant authorities." She said it was funded by the EU.

Mr Patrushev, a close ally of Mr Putin, also named as spies the US Peace Corps, thrown out of Russia amid spying allegations in 2002, the Saudi Red Crescent, and the Society for Social Reform, a Kuwait group.

According to Interfax, Mr Patrushev said most industrialised states did not want "a powerful economic competitor like Russia", adding that Russia had lost £2bn a year via "trade discrimination" with the US, EU and Canada.

Nongovernmental organizations--the notionally independent, reputedly humanitarian groups known as NGOs--are now being openly integrated into Washington's overall strategy for consolidating global supremacy.

Events surrounding last month's coup in post-Soviet Georgia, read in light of recent State Department documents, suggest that seemingly innocuous NGOs now play a central role in the policy of US-engineered "regime change" set forth in the notorious National Security Strategy of the United States.

The November 24 Wall Street Journal explicitly credited the toppling of Eduard Shevardnadze's regime to the operations of "a raft of non-governmental organizations . . . supported by American and other Western foundations." These NGOs, said the Journal, had "spawned a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms" who were instrumental laying the groundwork for a bloodless coup.

Astute commentators have correctly noted connections between these provocateur NGOs and mega-philanthropist George Soros, but the billionaire speculator did not act independently. Georgia's so-called "Velvet Revolution" appears to have been a textbook case of regime change by stealth, carefully planned and centrally coordinated by the US government.

Thanks to first-rate reporting by Mark McKinnon in the Toronto Globe & Mail and Mark Ames in the Moscow-based online journal The Exile <www.exile.ru>, the Georgian coup can be understood as a virtual scene-for-scene rerun of the overthrow of Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic--right down to the role of US Ambassador, played in both cases by spooky career diplomat Richard Miles.

But while foreign-funded NGOs played a significant minor part in the Yugoslavian operation, in Georgia they were granted star billing. This bold, all but overt, deployment of NGOs in service of US imperialism represents a new wrinkle in regime change, reflecting adjusted post-9/11 priorities at State and in the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Illuminating background is available in a watershed USAID report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest: Promoting Freedom, Security and Opportunity, released in January 2003 but ignored by a press swept up in pre-invasion hysteria. In the report, USAID vows that development programs will no longer be directed primarily toward alleviating human misery, but will be committed to "encouraging democratic [i.e., US-friendly] reforms." This policy shift is explicitly linked to the National Security Strategy of the United States, the 2002 White House blueprint for a new, openly aggressive phase of US imperialism.

Henceforward, the report promises, only friendly regimes will be rewarded with development money, while hostile (or merely independent) states will be punished by NGO-driven "reform" programs that sound suspiciously like old-fashioned destabilization ops.

The document notes with approval the explosive growth of NGOs worldwide and points to the NGO network as an attractive conduit for the strategic distribution of dollars. Of course, not every NGO is controlled by the US foreign policy establishment, and many rank-and-file aid workers continue to perform thankless but essential relief work in countries decimated by capitalism and war. But there's no mistaking which way the wind is blowing in the development community: "NGOs used to work at arm's length from donor governments," the USAID report smugly observes, "but over time the relationship has become more intimate."

To be sure, the vast global network of privately-funded foundations and NGOs has done enormous damage in its own right over the past two decades. With or without direct US assistance, NGOs continue to prop up immiserating neoliberal reforms, abet the schemes of transnational finance and agribusiness, and thwart the struggles of Third World people to claim better lives as of right. (The broader case against NGOs has been exhaustively set forth by James Petras, among others, and is powerfully advanced in the current issue of Aspects of India's Economy.)

But USAID's new emphasis on "building strategic partnerships" with humanitarian groups promises far worse to come. In thinly coded language, Foreign Aid in the National Interest touts NGOs and other private donors for their ability to lay groundwork for coups d' état: "Assistance can be provided to reformers to help identify key winners and losers, develop coalition building and mobilization strategies, and design publicity campaigns. . . . Such assistance may represent an investment in the future, when a political shift gives reformers real power."

As summarized by Hoover Institute fellow Larry Diamond, a self-described "specialist on democratic development and regime change" who contributed to the report: "Where governments are truly rotten, the report suggests channeling assistance primarily through nongovernmental sources, working with other bilateral aid donors and multilateral aid agencies to . . . coordinat[e] pressure on bad, recalcitrant governments."

Shevardnadze, for many years a reliable US client, seems to have become truly rotten at around the time of his perceived tilt toward Russia, a development which potentially threatened US military access to the region and control of the $2.7 billion Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.

Per script, coordinated pressure began immediately. An interlocking network of development-oriented foundations, think tanks, and NGOs was mobilized to disseminate propaganda, recruit opposition leaders, and fund an ex nihilo "student resistance movement" modeled on Yugoslavia's CIA-connected Otpor. Meanwhile, NGOs like the Liberty Institute--a USAID subcontractor managed by Mikhail Saakashvili, the US-approved candidate for Georgian leadership--worked hand-in-glove with the US Embassy (and presumably the CIA) to destabilize civil society.

Even the coup's immediate pretext--allegations of electoral fraud -- conveniently emerged from an "election support" operation run by USAID in consort with a Soros-connected NGO, Open Society Georgia Foundation. TV-friendly street demos and orchestrated international outcry followed in due course. Shevardnadze accepted the inevitable and agreed to go quietly. Within two weeks, Donald Rumsfeld was in Tbilsi as guest of the coup leaders, discussing a timetable for Russian troop withdrawals.

In the near future, the smashing success of the Georgia operation may be expected to lead to similarly coordinated attempts on independent-minded governments worldwide--Cuba, now doing its best to cope with an invasion of foreign-sponsored "reform" organizations, is an especially likely candidate.

Meanwhile, as the US continues to assimilate worldwide humanitarian endeavors to its imperial ambitions, the heavy hitters of the NGO establishment are preening for another round of mediagenic self-celebration at the upcoming World Social Forum. Suggested new slogan: "Another Coup is Possible."

Just joking around

Spc. Sabrina Harman, who pleaded innocent to charges of conspiracy, dereliction of duty and maltreatment of subordinates, also photographed abuses because she wanted to document what she felt was wrongful behavior, attorney Frank Spinner said.

"She was upset as early as 20 October, 2003, at some of the things she was seeing. She was offended by what she saw and she hoped at some point that she could prove it," Spinner told a military jury at the start of her trial.

The former pizza restaurant worker, who joined the Army reserves after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is linked to several of the most notorious Iraqi prisoner abuse photos.

She appears in a photo near naked Iraqi prisoners and is charged with photographing as they were forced to masturbate. She is also charged with placing wires on a detainee dubbed Gilligan and telling him he would be electrocuted if he stepped off a box in a picture seen worldwide.

"This was a joke. Gilligan understood it to be a joke. It was all part of their relationship," Spinner said. "It was a relationship beyond what the pictures showed."

Another Iraqi prisoner joined in on the "joke" with his US military friends by very convincingly "playing dead", which included beating himself with an iron bar and permanently stopping his heart and brain functions.

Later, military investigator Warren Worth said Harman testified in January 2004 that abuse ringleader Charles Graner told her military intelligence wanted Gilligan deprived of sleep for interrogation purposes.

Spinner also said other notorious pictures did not constitute abuse as the prisoners were hooded and thus did not know they were being photographed.

The prison abuse scandal has highlighted the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some criticize the focus on low-ranking soldiers rather than their superiors.

"Where are all the higher-ups who were supposed to be supporting us? Why aren't they in this courtroom?" Matthew Bolinger, England's supervisor, said last week at Fort Hood.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - American fighter jets flattened a suspected insurgent safe house near the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Friday, and hundreds of U.S. troops conducted house-to-house searches in remote desert villages for followers of Iraq's most-wanted militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

American forces have met little resistance since the first two days of Operation Matador, which began Saturday, aimed at clearing a region believed to be a haven for foreign fighters slipping into Iraq from Syria, the military said. American intelligence indicates the insurgents are either in hiding or have fled, U.S. Capt. Jeffrey Pool said.

Villagers reached by telephone said gunmen still roamed some areas and they continued to be hit by U.S. shelling.

The U.S. offensive - one of the largest since militants were forced from Fallujah six months ago - came amid a surge of militant attacks that have killed more than 420 people in just over two weeks since Iraq's first democratically elected government was announced.

Snipers opened fire on the motorcade of Interior Ministry undersecretary Maj. Gen. Hikmat Moussa Hussein in western Baghdad on Friday, killing one of his guards and wounding three, police Maj. Moussa Abdul Karim said. Hussein escaped unharmed.

Elsewhere in western Baghdad, insurgents fired on Iraqi soldiers who were searching the area, prompting a 30-minute gunbattle, said police Maj. Abdul Karim. There was no immediate word on casualties.

North of the capital, a car bomb exploded as an Iraqi army patrol was moving through Baqouba, killing three people and wounding six, police Col. Mudhafar Mohammed said. The dead included two soldiers and a civilian, he said.

In Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, mortar rounds slammed into an Iraqi army checkpoint, killing three soldiers and wounding three others, police said.

Two more explosions rocked the capital Friday. A roadside bomb hit an American convoy on a highway to the airport, police said. No casualties were reported, but Associated Press Television News video showed a U.S. Humvee, its hood open, consumed by flames. The cause of the second blast was not immediately known.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated Thursday that the insurgency could last for many more years. [...]

Residents reached by telephone in Saadah and Karabilah said American forces were periodically shelling their villages Friday.

"The situation is very bad. ... Most of the people have fled to the desert," said Samran Mukhlef Abed, a tribal leader in Saadah. "The Americans are all around ... and medical services do not exist here. If someone is hurt, we have to take him to cities that are far way from here, and that is impossible with the situation."

The U.S. military denied residents' reports that some areas have been without electricity and running water since the offensive began late Saturday, but said regional hospital services were disrupted when a suicide car bomber attacked the hospital in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, on Saturday. [...]

The U.S. military said it was receiving intelligence from residents who are fed up with the presence of foreign fighters. But residents voiced equal frustration with U.S. forces, who pounded the area with airstrikes, artillery barrages and gunfire.

"They destroyed our city, killed our children, destroyed our houses. We have nothing left," one man told APTN in Qaim. He did not give his name and hid his face with a scarf to address the camera. [...]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A senior Chinese diplomat on Thursday accused the Bush administration of undermining efforts to revive negotiations with North Korea and said there was "no solid evidence" that Pyongyang was preparing to test a nuclear weapon, the New York Times reported.

The comments by Yang Xiyu, a senior Foreign Ministry official and China's top official on the North Korean nuclear problem, reflect growing frustration in Beijing with the Bush administration, the newspaper said in a report from Beijing.

Even as the White House presses China to find a solution to the nuclear issue, Chinese officials say, it has hurled insults at North Korea and given its leaders excuses to stay away from the bargaining table, according to the Times.

"It is true that we do not yet have tangible achievements" in ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program, Yang said in an interview with the newspaper. "But a basic reason for the unsuccessful effort lies in the lack of cooperation from the U.S. side."

Yang said that when President Bush called North Korea leader Kim Jong-il a "tyrant" last month, Bush "destroyed the atmosphere" for negotiations. [...]

The U.S. Army will allow recruits to sign up for just 15 months of active-duty service, rather than the typical four-year enlistment, as it struggles to lure new soldiers amid the Iraq war, a general said on Thursday.

Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, U.S. Army Recruiting Command head, also said this was "the toughest recruiting climate ever faced by the all-volunteer Army," with the war causing concern among potential recruits and their families and the economy offering civilian job prospects.

America abolished the draft in 1973 during the tumult of the Vietnam War era and has since relied on a military made up exclusively of volunteers.

Rochelle said the Army this week expanded nationwide a pilot program in place since October 2003 in 10 cities offering recruits the option of a 15-month active-duty enlistment.

In a conference call with reporters, Rochelle expressed concern about a recent spike in recruiting improprieties. The Army said this week it will suspend recruiting on May 20 to counsel its 7,545 recruiters on ethics.

The Army is examining allegations recruiters offered to help people cheat on drug tests or get phony diplomas. In a recent incident in Texas, a recruiter threatened a 20-year-old man with arrest if he did not get to an interview at a recruiting station by a given time.

"Some of the incidents were flying just below my radar," said Rochelle, who acknowledged the stress experienced by recruiters who work nearly 80 hours per week to attract new soldiers.

Army Recruiting Command spokesman Douglas Smith said as of April 29, the Army had fielded 480 allegations of improper conduct by recruiters in fiscal 2005 beginning Oct. 1. So far, there have been 91 substantiated improprieties, with eight recruiters relieved and 98 recruiters admonished, Smith said. [...]

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon will propose shutting more than 150 military installations from Maine to Hawaii, including 33 major bases, The Associated Press learned Friday, triggering the first round of base closures in a decade and an intense struggle by communities to save their facilities.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld will also recommend a list of scores of other domestic bases from which thousands of troops would be withdrawn, or in some cases added from other installations in the United States or overseas. He has said the move would save $48.8 billion over 20 years while making the military more mobile and better suited for the global effort against terrorism.

Rumsfeld's plan calls for a massive shift of U.S. forces that would result in a net loss of 29,005 military and civilian jobs at domestic installations. Overall, he proposes pulling 218,570 military and civilian positions out of some U.S. bases while adding 189,565 positions to others, according to documents obtained by The AP.

The closures and downsizings would occur over six years starting in 2006.

"Our current arrangements, designed for the Cold War, must give way to the new demands of the war against extremism and other evolving 21st Century challenges," Rumsfeld said in a written statement.

Among the major closures were Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, which would lose more than 2,700 jobs, the Naval Station in Ingleside, Texas, costing more than 2,100 jobs, and Fort McPherson in Georgia, costing nearly 4,200 jobs.

Other major bases - including the Army's Fort Bliss in Texas, the Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Va., and Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland - would see gains, as they absorb troops whose current home bases are slated for closure.

Before closures or downsizings can take effect, the Defense Department's proposal must be approved or changed by a federal base closing commission by Sept. 8, and then agreed to by Congress and President Bush, in a process that will run into the fall. [...]

Lawmakers say it is unwise to close bases while U.S. troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Pentagon argues that the timing is perfect to enlist cost-cutting measures given pressures from the ballooning federal deficit and to reshuffle the stateside network of bases while it reshapes the entire military. [...]

WASHINGTON (AP) - FBI agents posing as cocaine traffickers in Arizona caught 16 current and former U.S. soldiers and law enforcement personnel who took payoffs to help move the drugs through checkpoints, Justice Department officials said Thursday.

Those charged include a former Immigration and Naturalization Service inspector, a former Army sergeant, a former federal prison guard, current and former members of the Arizona Air National Guard and the state corrections department, and a Nogales, Ariz., police officer, officials said.

All 16 have agreed to plead guilty to being part of a bribery and extortion conspiracy, the result of the nearly 4 1/2-year FBI sting, acting assistant attorney general John C. Richter and FBI agent Jana D. Monroe said.

The FBI set up the phony trafficking organization in December 2001, then lured military and police personnel with money to help distribute the cocaine or allow it to pass through checkpoints they were guarding, officials said.

(AP) - BOGOTA, Colombia-Two U.S. soldiers detained for allegedly attempting to sell ammunition to Colombian right-wing paramilitary groups have been quietly flown to the United States, where they were placed in custody, officials said Tuesday.

Warrant Officer Allan N. Tanquary and Sgt. Jesus Hernandez, who have diplomatic immunity status within Colombia, were flown to the United States on Friday and placed in custody of the U.S. Defense Department, a U.S. Embassy spokesman said after a reporter asked about the pair's whereabouts.

The case and other allegations of wrongdoing by U.S. troops in Colombia have sparked ire in the country which is battling a long-running insurgency fueled by drug trafficking.

"OUT OF CONTROL," the newsmagazine Semana said on its cover this week, referring to the American soldiers, who are supposed to be helping Colombia's effort.

U.S. Ambassador William Wood said Friday that he would allow local investigators to question Tanquary and Hernandez, but hours later they were flown out of the country, granted diplomatic immunity under a 1974 treaty. It was not immediately clear whether such questioning took place before they boarded the plane.

The pair were arrested May 3 at a luxury estate near a military base southwest of Bogota and accused of plotting to deliver 40,000 rounds of ammunition to a paramilitary group. The outlawed paramilitary factions have been waging a dirty war of assassinations and massacres against leftist rebels and their suspected collaborators.

Their departure for the United States came despite widespread calls from lawmakers and senior officials for them to face trial in Colombia. The case has embarrassed Washington, coming less than two months after five U.S. service members were detained for allegedly smuggling cocaine aboard a military aircraft to the United States.

The United States has denied secretly helping the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, which is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.

Tanquary and Hernandez were among hundreds of U.S. servicemen and contractors stationed in Colombia as part of a multi-billion-dollar program funded by U.S. taxpayers.