New York Times
Some Bush administration officials would like to clear the way for American military forces to play a larger role in protecting the home front from terror attacks. That's not a step to be taken lightly. The idea of military forces roaming the nation enforcing the laws sounds like a bad Hollywood script -- or life in a totalitarian society.
Since 1878 the Posse Comitatus Act has barred American military forces from civilian law enforcement duties at home. It is an important bulwark of civilian supremacy and a barrier to the erosion of basic civil liberties. Law enforcement at home is best carried out by civilian police forces and other criminal justice agencies that have been trained in the nuances of the rule of law, not by military units trained to fight foreign enemies.
The administration now calls for re-examining this and other laws restricting domestic use of the military. That view is shared by Gen. Ralph Eberhart, who will head the Pentagon's new command charged with defending American soil against enemy attack.
Past amendments have made Posse Comitatus flexible enough to meet the likely needs of the war on terrorism. The president already has constitutional authority to use troops in emergency situations where normal law enforcement has broken down or where America is under enemy attack. ...
Historically, the nation's military leaders have preferred to keep their troops out of civilian law enforcement.
America's military forces have some of the best field equipment available for detecting chemical, biological and radiological attack. They have stockpiles of vaccines and emergency antidotes, and the right skills for organizing emergency evacuation and temporary housing efforts. In the event of major terrorist attacks these resources need to be made available, under the firm control of civilian agencies and local governments. The armed forces should not be involved in domestic police tasks best left to law enforcement professionals.
Washington Post
President Bush claims to be compassionate, and he's declared that fighting global poverty is part of his struggle against terrorism. But the administration's decision on Monday to withhold funds for the United Nations family planning agency flies in the face of these positions. Depriving the U.N. Population Fund, or UNFPA, of $34 million, or 12 percent of its budget, will result in poor women getting fewer health services, which is hardly compassionate. It will also weaken efforts at population control, an important component of the broader fight against global poverty.
The circumstances of Mr. Bush's decision were especially distressing. Last year Secretary of State Colin Powell testified in the Senate that the UNFPA does "invaluable work," mentioning particularly its programs in voluntary family planning, breast-feeding promotion and AIDS prevention. When the administration nonetheless held up the UNFPA's money, it explained that this was because it wanted to check allegations that the organization was supporting coercive birth control in China. Three State Department investigators have duly been to China and spent 14 days there. They reported that "we find no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the People's Republic of China." But the administration chose to cancel the UNFPA's money anyway, because that's what antiabortion conservatives wanted. In so doing it disdained its own secretary of state and the findings of its own investigators. Mr. Powell, who has considerable leverage by virtue of his national stature, ought to use that leverage more forcefully.
The administration says that it will divert the $34 million to other worthwhile programs run by its own aid agency. But the fact that the Bush team suggests this might be a fair substitute points to a myopia that goes broader than family planning issues. In development assistance, bilateral programs are not a substitute for good multilateral ones because the effectiveness of aid depends to a significant extent on good donor coordination. The administration recently made the mistake of refusing to back a multilateral effort to fund education in poor countries. Now it has turned its back on a multilateral population program. If this unilateralism continues, the administration's promised efforts to make aid more effective will achieve little.
Boston Globe
Israel said it ''regrets the loss of innocent civilian lives'' yesterday when it conducted a missile attack from an F-16 on a house in Gaza City, one of the most densely crowded places in the world. Besides Salah Shehadeh, the leader of the military wing of Hamas, 14 other people were killed, nine of them children.
The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said it had received intelligence that Shehadeh was accompanied only by another Hamas terrorist. Israel would not have fired the missile if it had known that Shehadeh was surrounded by civilians, government spokesmen said, and they expressed regret for the deaths of the Palestinians killed along with Shehadeh. ...
The government's defense is that it had aborted a recent plan to assassinate Shehadeh because at the time he was among the civilian bystanders, and hence it would have aborted Tuesday's attack had it known that he was again surrounded by noncombatants; that Shehadeh was the mastermind of some of the worst terrorist atrocities; and that he was on the verge of commanding a terrible large-scale murder of Israelis.
This rationale ignores Sharon's evident willingness to disregard the danger of firing a missile at night into a house in Gaza City on the basis of shaky real-time intelligence. Even after the human toll of the attack was known, Sharon told his Cabinet ministers: ''This operation was in my view one of our biggest successes. We hit perhaps the most senior Hamas figure on the operational side.''
At best, this is the thinking of a tank commander with no grasp of the art of statecraft. At worst, it is the boasting of a hawk in power who deliberately launched his missile attack at a moment when high-level Israeli and Palestinian officials were meeting to discuss security cooperation and after Hamas leaders spoke publicly about stopping suicide bombings.
More than ever, American mediation is needed to rescue Israelis and Palestinians from their descent into pure vendetta.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Israel's assassination of a Hamas chieftain in Gaza was cheered by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as "one of our biggest successes" in the struggle against terrorism. In truth, however, it was an indefensible and indiscriminate attack by a government that seems to have run out of ideas.
Tuesday morning's missile attack killed its intended target, Salah Shehada, a founder and top commander of a Hamas group that has carried out more suicide bombings than any other Palestinian faction in the current Mideast conflict. But 14 other people were killed, most of them children, including five members of an extended family.
Unlike those who plant bombs at bus stops, marketplaces and cafes, Israel did not intend to kill children on Tuesday. But the officials who planned this strike knew that launching a powerful missile in the middle of the night at an apartment building in a densely populated area would probably kill innocent people. Their decision to proceed with the strike in spite of this knowledge evinces a callous disregard for human life. ...
Sharon and other Israeli leaders know -- because it has been said countless times -- that harsh reprisals only fuel the frustration and rage that terrorism feeds on. Yet the Israeli officials continue with assassinations such as the one Tuesday morning. ...
Israeli officials said they killed Shehada because Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat refused their repeated requests to arrest the Hamas leader. If that is so, why didn't the Israelis try to capture Shehada themselves?
A few days ago, Israel said it planned to put a prominent Palestinian, Marwan Barghouti, on trial in connection with deadly attacks on Israel. Similarly, if Shehada had been arrested and put on trial, a terrorist threat would have been neutralized, innocent people would now be alive and Israel would not be receiving the kind of worldwide scorn that its desperate and lethal attack has generated.
San Antonio Express-News
Using young people who are willing to explode and die to murder and mutilate Israeli men, women and children, while terrifying the populace at large, is utterly self-destructive.
The Palestinian terrorist groups who resort to this tactic not only nurture a baleful condition of collective insanity on the part of despairing young Palestinians, but they also undermine any hope the Palestinian people might have for an independent state.
At the same time, Israel's response to this outrage, however understandable, also makes the possibility for peace and security more elusive.
Collective punishment, home demolition, extended curfews and military raids into the West Bank by Israel sustain a cycle of hopelessness, both for Palestinians and the people of Israel.
This week's missile attack on the Gaza home of a top leader of the violent group Hamas was merely the latest episode in a depressing cycle of violence that seems to have no end. The attack killed the Hamas official, Sheik Salah Shedada, but it also took the lives of at least 14 others, including several children. The White House said the attack was "heavy-handed" and "does not contribute to peace."
The "road map" toward peace that President Bush mentioned after meeting with Arab ministers last week is once again thrown off course.
Sadly, it will never be on course without forceful intervention from the outside and radical change on the inside. ...
Radical change on the inside means that both Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have to go. Both are fatally compromised. The Palestinians and the Israelis must take this on themselves. ...
Although it's unlikely that Palestinians will vote Arafat out of office, a change in government structure could accomplish the same end. ...
Sharon's settlement strategy, essentially a thumb-your-nose insult to President Bush's two-state proposal, is one among numerous examples underscoring the fact that the Israeli prime minister is as much an obstacle to peace as his Palestinian counterpart.
(Compiled by United Press International.)
