THE FULCRUM

U-S officials say they're offering low-profile help to Pakistani forces hunting militants by the border with Afghanistan.

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National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice tells Fox News the offensive "is a Pakistani fight."

Citing national security concerns, the Army on Friday dropped all charges against a Muslim chaplain accused of mishandling classified documents at Guantanamo Bay (search), which houses suspected terrorists.

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In dismissing the charges, Mac. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller (search), commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, which operates the detention center, cited "national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence" if the case proceeded.

John ‘J.J.’ Jackson, who in the 1980s helped usher in the music video era as one of the first MTV on-air personalities, has died. He was 62.

Jackson, a longtime radio station disc jockey, died of an apparent heart attack Wednesday while driving home from dinner in Los Angeles, friends and radio industry colleagues said Thursday.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Mike Leavitt is trying to mitigate political damage from revelations that EPA scientists were muzzled as utility lobbyists and White House appointees wrote a new regulation for toxic mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants.

[snip]

Utility industry lobbyists wrote key portions of the rule that would regulate pollution created by their clients, according to EPA staffers who claimed they were ordered not to conduct the normal scientific review of the proposal.

Worried that mercury in fish poses a hazard to youngsters — while still trying to stress the health benefits of seafood — the government issued new guidelines Friday for eating fish.

Women who are pregnant, nursing or may become pregnant, and young children should not eat certain kinds of fish that tend to be high in mercury, said Lester Crawford, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Eight days after the Madrid train bombings, European Union justice and interior ministers on Friday were set to approve an ``anti-terror czar'' to coordinate the EU's fight against terrorism.

At emergency talks, the ministers reviewed a lengthy ``action plan'' that calls for a pan-EU database of terrorist's criminal records and across-the-board closer cooperation against terrorism.

Poland (AP) Poland, which has about 2,400 troops in Iraq and was a strong supporter of the U.S.-led invasion, was ''misled'' about the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, its president said Thursday.

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''But naturally I also feel uncomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction,'' he said, according to a transcript released by the presidential press office.

The county that was the site of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" over the teaching of evolution is asking lawmakers to amend state law so the county can charge homosexuals with crimes against nature.

The Rhea County commissioners approved the request 8-0 Tuesday.

Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who introduced the measure, also asked the county attorney to find a way to enact an ordinance banning homosexuals from living in the county.

"We need to keep them out of here," Fugate said.

So, dressing gay marriage in a suit of civil rights has become the standard way of selling it to the broader public. Here is an extremely awkward issue having to do with the compatibility of homosexuality and the institution of marriage. But once this issue is buttoned into a suit of civil rights, neither homosexuality nor marriage need be discussed. Suddenly only equity and fairness matter. And this turns gay marriage into an ersatz civil rights struggle so that dissenters are seen as Neanderthals standing in the schoolhouse door, fighting off equality itself. Yet all this civil rights camouflage is, finally, a bait-and-switch: When you agree to support fairness, you end up supporting gay marriage.

But gay marriage is simply not a civil rights issue. It is not a struggle for freedom. It is a struggle of already free people for complete social acceptance and the sense of normalcy that follows thereof -- a struggle for the eradication of the homosexual stigma. Marriage is a goal because, once open to gays, it would establish the fundamental innocuousness of homosexuality itself. Marriage can say like nothing else that sexual orientation is an utterly neutral human characteristic, like eye-color. Thus, it can go far in diffusing the homosexual stigma.

The civil rights movement argued that it was precisely the utter innocuousness of racial difference that made segregation an injustice. Racism was evil because it projected a profound difference where there was none -- white supremacy, black inferiority -- for the sole purpose of exploiting blacks.

"We would call it using the sacred institution of marriage as a political tool," said Tim Nashif, spokesman for the Defense of Marriage Coalition, [homophobic bigots] which is suing Multnomah County and has submitted a proposed ballot initiative to ban gay marriage. "They're not making decisions just for Benton County, they are making it for the entire state."

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Mike Leavitt is trying to mitigate political damage from revelations that EPA scientists were muzzled as utility lobbyists and White House appointees wrote a new regulation for toxic mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants.

[snip]

Utility industry lobbyists wrote key portions of the rule that would regulate pollution created by their clients, according to EPA staffers who claimed they were ordered not to conduct the normal scientific review of the proposal.

"It's no wonder Gov. Leavitt is uncomfortable with this mercury rule because he's realized the agency didn't have any analysis to support what they proposed," said Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Air and Climate Center. "The question is whether he will be personally motivated to correct it and whether the administration will let him."

Polls suggest that a reputation for being tough on terror is just about the only remaining political strength George Bush has. Yet this reputation is based on image, not reality.

"Nipr.mil is not a single domain a but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for "actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare." "Uncontrolled Internet connections," the document says, "pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations."

The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.

A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.

The Information Collection Program was financed out of the at least $18 million that the U.S. Congress approved for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, from 1999 to 2003. The group remains on the Pentagon's payroll.

The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons.

Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.

In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, were not confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials and others who supported a pre-emptive invasion quoted the allegations in statements and interviews without running afoul of restrictions on classified information or doubts about the defectors' reliability.

The Iraqi National Congress letter said it fed information to Arab and Western news media and to two officials in the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the leading invasion advocates.

The articles made numerous assertions that so far have not been substantiated 11 months after Baghdad fell,...

According to the letter, publications in which the articles appeared included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic Monthly, the Times of London, the Sunday Times of London, the Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, and two Knight Ridder newspapers, the Kansas City Star and the Philadelphia Daily News. The Associated Press and others news services also wrote stories.

Other U.S. and international news media picked up some of the articles. By mid-January 2002, polls showed that a solid majority of Americans favored military force to oust Saddam.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is about taking the battle to the terrorists so that we have fewer attacks on our airlines and railways at home. In Iraq especially, Spanish soldiers are helping drain the terror swamp by building a democracy at its Middle East source. To his own and his country's great credit, Mr. Aznar was far-sighted enough to see that if this effort succeeds the entire world will benefit. The emotional wave that elected Mr. Zapatero will soon fade, but the wisdom about terrorism that motivated Mr. Aznar will remain.

The temptation will be to over-interpret all of this as a sign of general anti-terror fatigue in the West. Certainly the terrorists will see it that way, helped along by Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. In a radio interview yesterday, Mr. Zapatero declared that the 1,300 Spanish soldiers serving in Iraq will now "obviously" be called home. "The war in Iraq was a disaster, the occupation is a disaster," he said.

So the terrorists will conclude that, with an investment of only a dozen backpack bombs, they were able to rout a major power. They are sure to try the same thing elsewhere in Europe, and almost certainly between now and the November elections in the U.S. We doubt that an America that has already endured 9/11 would react as the Spanish have, but now is the time for President Bush to begin preparing the public for the worst.

Federal law prohibits the use of federal money for "publicity or propaganda purposes" not authorized by Congress. In the past, the General Accounting Office has found that federal agencies violated this restriction when they disseminated editorials and newspaper articles written by the government or its contractors without identifying the source.

"...about 600 demonstrators Sunday who marched to the gates of the base to protest the war and complain about restricted access to installations, like Dover, where the bodies of those killed in Iraq are returned.

The protest attracted various groups opposed to the war: veterans, pacifists and church groups that bused in from Philadelphia, Baltimore and other northeastern cities. But it was the military families - who traveled from around the country - who were the centerpiece of a 3.5-mile march from a local meeting house to the massive military base.

Forbidden from entering the complex, the marchers crammed themselves on a sliver of lawn at a busy intersection outside the base and listened as some members of Military Families Speak Out read the names of the more than 560 troops who have been killed since the war began last March.

"Bush lies and who dies?" said Fernando Suarez del Solar of San Diego. "My son, Jesus Suarez del Solar Navarro, March 27."

"I'm very disillusioned with the American government," del Solar said before the march. "For it to get involved in an illegal war and to play with the emotions of the American people with 9-11 (Sept. 11, 2001) for politics is wrong."

Several family members said it's also wrong for the Pentagon to prevent people from witnessing the return of the remains of soldiers killed in Iraq to American soil.