American Forces Capture Top Aide to Saddam Hussein

American Forces Capture Top Aide to Saddam Hussein
By DAVID STOUT and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/international/worldspecial/18CND-CAPT.html

WASHINGTON, June 18 — Saddam Hussein's senior bodyguard, one of the few people the former Iraqi leader trusted completely and a witness of potentially enormous importance, has been captured in Iraq, American military officials said today.

The bodyguard, Gen. Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, ranked as the No. 4 most-wanted Iraqi and dubbed the "ace of diamonds" in the American military's playing card-style "top 55 list," was captured on Monday, the United States Central Command said.

The announcement by Central Command, which has overall charge of the military campaign in Iraq, gave no details of the capture. Nor did it say whether General Mahmud, whose official title was presidential secretary, was cooperating with interrogators.

The military also announced that American forces raided two farmhouses near Tikrit today, seizing about 50 former members of Iraq's Special Security Forces and Special Republican Guard and a stash of cash and jewels that a senior Army commander said was being used, at least in part, to pay for bounties to kill American soldiers.

In the early-morning raids, the American troops seized more than $8.5 million in American dollars, jewels valued at more than $1 million, and large amounts of euros, British pounds sterling and Iraqi dinars, officials said. Troops later seized a vehicle leaving the scene that was carrying more than $800,000 in cash.

The announcements came on the same day that an American soldier was killed and another was wounded in a drive-by shooting in central Baghdad, the latest in a series of assaults on the United States military.

General Mahmud's capture comes at a crucial time, as the war in Iraq and postwar reconstruction emerge as hot political issues on Capitol Hill.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are testifying today before the House Armed Services Committee on United States commitments in Iraq. And some Democratic lawmakers have continued to question whether the Bush administration made an adequate case for going to war, particularly in its citing of evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Some military and intelligence officials believe that if anyone knows the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein himself, and the whereabouts of any Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, it would be General Mahmud.

There have been no confirmed sightings of Mr. Hussein alive in many weeks. The American-led military tried at least twice to kill him by airstrikes during the Iraq invasion, and the rubble from those raids is still being sifted for evidence of his remains.

Although General Mahmud is No. 4 on the most-wanted list, he is thought to have been third in power in the Baghdad regime — behind only Mr. Hussein and his son Qusay.

One opinion of the general's stature was given by the onetime Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, who recently reflected on the hunt for Saddam Hussein and whether he might be in hiding with his sons.

"He is not traveling with Uday or Qusay," Mr. Chalabi said. Rather, Mr. Chalabi surmised, the deposed dictator — if still alive — would be traveling with General Mahmud.

Steven Emerson, an expert on Middle East terrorism, offered another perspective on the general in an April 24 interview on MSNBC, shortly after the attempts to kill Mr. Hussein.

"This is a guy that really knew exactly where entire operational secrecy was for Saddam Hussein, where the palaces were, where the bunkers were, where his hideouts were, where exactly he would go in case there was an attack," Mr. Emerson said. "He was the No. 1 bodyguard, if you so will, even though he didn't like that title, and he would be responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein 24 hours a day. If he got any word that there was going to be an attack, he would wake him up 15 minutes before, oust him and bring him to someplace else."

If the general can indeed provide intelligence on the status of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the lack of them, his words could have a huge impact in Washington, and perhaps on international opinion, since the Bush administration cited the presumed existence of such weapons as a central justification for going to war.

The chief White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, termed the arrest of General Mahmud a "significant capture." But when a reporter asked him if it was "a potential boon in your so far fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Fleischer dismissed the term "fruitless" as "a throwaway line" and said that the hunt for weapons had been "a very careful search." and that mobile laboratories found in Iraq could have been used to make biological weapons.

General Mahmud, whose name has been rendered from the Arabic in several ways, is a distant cousin of Saddam Hussein. The name Tikriti comes from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, near Baghdad. While Saddam Hussein was in power, he was a familiar, if somewhat bland, figure almost always seen standing to the rear of Mr. Hussein during the leader's orchestrated news appearances.

General Mahmud will probably face charges himself. United States officials have said they want to try him for war crimes or crimes against humanity for his activities within the Hussein leadership.

Discussing the seizure of money and gems today, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, told reporters at the Pentagon in a video conference from Baghdad that American forces continued to face resistance from former Baath Party loyalists, Islamic fundamentalists and "poor Iraqis" who are being paid bounties to kill American troops. "They're being paid by ex-Baath Party loyalists, who are paying people to kill Americans," he said.

But General Odierno repeatedly said that attacks on American forces in his sector, a swath of territory the size of West Virginia that stretches north of Baghdad to Kirkuk, and then east to the Iranian order, were uncoordinated strikes by groups of three to five fighters that he viewed as acts of increasing desperation.

In Baghdad today, a United States military spokesman said, attackers fired on soldiers from the First Armored Division from a passing vehicle, killing one soldier and injuring another. On Tuesday, a soldier from the same division died after being shot in the back by a sniper while on patrol in northern Baghdad.

Today's incident brings the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since major combat was declared over on May 1 to at least 42. It is also the 12th fatal attack on the American military in the last three weeks.

The attack came after an American soldier fired into a crowd of protesters at the gates of a palace in Baghdad this morning, killing two Iraqis. Americans from the First Armored Division fired warning shots after the protesters threw rocks at a convoy trying to enter the palace.

The convoy passed through the crowd, made up of former Iraqi Army officers and soldiers protesting their lack of pay since coalition forces disbanded the army.

General Odierno said he was not surprised by the recent attacks on American forces — many of them deadly — especially as the armed sweeps have increased. "We're dealing with people who have everything to lose and nothing to gain," he said.

But the general asserted that it was an overstatement to call the resistance guerrilla attacks.

"It is not close to guerrilla warfare because it's not coordinated, it's not organized, and it's not led," he said. "The soldiers that are conducting these operations don't even have the willpower. We find that a majority of the time they'll fire a shot, and they'll drop the weapon and they'll give up right away. They do not have the will."

General Odierno said there were some foreign fighters Syrians and Iranians among the prisoners taken recently, but that his cavalry forces had effectively sealed the Iraqi border with Iran to keep out any fighters from infiltrating from there.

"We have shut the border down and there is a lot less individuals being able to come into Iraq," he said.

Storm King, Dia Beacon, and Donald Judd

this weekend, went with MOMAJA to visit the Storm King Art Center and Dia Beacon in Orange and Dutchess Counties, 50-60 miles north of the city.

Storm King, which was founded in 1960, is a beautiful 500 acre park and open air museum that "celebrates the relationship between sculpture and nature" -- viewing oversized, man-made, and often hulking heaps of stone and metal by Mark di Suvero, Alexander Calder, Andrew Goldsworthy, and others among the carefully manicured landscape was more than beautiful. it made my conservative aesthetic wonder if all the more urban placement of oversized modern sculpture wouldn't all look better placed in the natural landscape instead.

Dia Beacon, in contrast and newly opened in an old Nabisco manufacturing complex, was more of a return for me to the more familiar post modern minimalist art in industrially bare context. however, with its 300,000 square feet of raw space, pieces by Walter de Maria, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, and others, for once seemed able to breathe in a relatively almost-equally spacious context.

last evening, it was fitting then, after our weekend field trip, to visit Donald Judd's prior home and studio in a 5 story cast iron loft building in Soho with Peter Ballantine, who was an assistant and fabricator for Donald Judd for over 25 years. in my eight years in soho, where i had lived just a few blocks away on West Broadway and was still pre-conscious and ignorant of contemporary art, i had always walked by and wondered why that first floor was so empty, except for a few colored flourescent lights (a sculpture by Dan Flavin).

what was most interesting about our visit was Peter's first hand view of what life had been like here just a few decades ago in Judd's existence, compartmentalized just like his art. we were introduced (at least i was) to concepts that i had never really associated with Judd before -- like how crucially important "authenticity" and "being" were to himself and his sculpture.

to him, the authentic, and already existing, was more important than the often tainted perspective of the artist. he used the raw dimensions of the building itself (windows, openings, etc.) to determine the dimensions of his work. he flew up mexican workers from his complex in Marfa, TX, rather than use urban artisan carpenters, to build a large imperfect slab table that became his table of "court" and official business. his kitchen was more than bare with no drawers and with everything (even the plumbing) left out in the open. he hated to see his sculptures in progress. he resisted drawing or making models, prefering his work to BE, rather than be imperfectly and artificially characterized, just as he despised the artificiality of anything but natural light, or the critic's minimalist label.

as Peter powerfully recounted his experiences and Judd's eccentric life, a friend, who herself is an accomplished performing artist, asked me tongue in cheek, "was he serious?" we both thought about it a second, and of course knew that he was. further, not only was he serious and passionate about his work for Judd, but he had lived it. it *was* his life. just as Judd's own work had been Judd's life. or any good artist for that matter.

there were so many moments of "truth" in that train of thought. the social legitimacy and accepted (or contested) merit of what we *do*. the existential and aesthetic choices we each make to *live* our own lives, and to shape our existence and environs. the effected decisions to make a living as a corporate banker, lawyer, doctor, or classical performer, film-maker, show-man, artist, etc. rich man poor man beggar man thief.

in the fading light of a cool early evening, we walked away from the visit with a new awareness for Judd. and ourselves...

10 Decisions Remain for Supreme Court

10 Decisions Remain for Supreme Court
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/politics/18MEMO.html

WASHINGTON, June 17 — This is tea-leaf reading time at the Supreme Court, and, no, the only subject is not whether any justices are planning to retire.

Inside the building, where the frenzy of retirement speculation is largely though not completely discounted, the current topic is when, and under what circumstances, the court plans to announce the remaining 10 decisions and conclude its current term.

If the recent past is any guide, the justices are planning no more than two more decision days: Monday and Thursday next week. That presents the distinct possibility that landmark rulings on affirmative action, gay rights and commercial speech could all be handed down on a single morning.

It has happened before: people still remember the nine decisions, totaling 446 pages, that the court issued on the last day of its 1987-88 term. Such an outpouring of important but often elusive and contested legal language washes over the nation like a tidal wave, leaving confusion in its wake and agenda-driven spin control to fill in the gaps in public understanding.

Many outside the court assume there is a fixed date for the end of the term that mirrors the statutory starting date of the first Monday in October. But that is not the case. The target for the end of the term has been set by a series of internal markers, officially unacknowledged but verified through long observation.

In the 1980's it was Justice William J. Brennan Jr.'s ferry reservation for his summer visits to Martha's Vineyard. Now it is the annual conference of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, for which Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist serves as the circuit justice. He never misses it, and is to go to the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Va., on June 26.

But the fact is that the end of the term is not really under the court's collective control, despite the best efforts of the chief justice, an exacting manager who has imposed a series of deadlines aimed at avoiding the end-of-term debacles that regularly occurred under his predecessor, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. In those days, there was often a case or two that the court simply could not manage to decide, meaning that the case had to be restored, embarrassingly, to the calendar for reargument during the next term.

Chief Justice Rehnquist requires all majority opinions to be in internal circulation by June 1. The deadline for circulating dissenting and concurring opinions was Monday of this week. Nonetheless, any justice can request a delay in issuing an opinion — to respond to someone else's recently added footnote, for example.

Justices accord such a courtesy to one another in the knowledge that in some future term, they might be the ones requesting more time. Justice Harry A. Blackmun's extended labor on a 1989 abortion case kept the court in session over an extra weekend, until Monday, July 3.

Such a scenario, which would extend the term into the week of June 30, may be the only prospect for avoiding an end-of-term pileup of legendary proportions next week. The superheated atmosphere was captured today by an announcement from the media relations office at the University of Michigan that if the decisions in the Michigan affirmative action cases come down on Monday, the university's president, Mary Sue Coleman, will be on the court's plaza beginning at 10:30 in the morning to discuss them.

The only problem is that with opinions being announced from the bench at 10 o'clock, in a process that often takes 15 minutes or more, there is almost no chance that either President Coleman or any of her questioners would have had the opportunity to read and absorb them. But she will undoubtedly have an eager audience of television news reporters grateful for a live picture.

Meanwhile, a favorite court-watchers' guessing game is under way — who is writing which opinions? This is a form of card-counting that starts from the premise that the two-week periods in which the court sits for arguments throughout the term result in a fairly even distribution of opinions within each sitting.

Of the 11 cases argued in February, only one is undecided and only Chief Justice Rehnquist has not written a majority opinion. The case, United States v. American Library Association, raises the First Amendment question of whether the government can require public libraries to install antipornography filters restricting Internet access.

If Chief Justice Rehnquist is in fact writing the majority opinion, there is little doubt that the court will uphold the law, the Children's Internet Protection Act. On the other hand, he is one of the court's fastest writers, raising the question of why the decision in what is now the term's oldest undecided case is taking so long. One possibility is that there are many separate opinions, both concurring and dissenting. Perhaps he started out writing a majority opinion but lost the majority along the way.

The justices turned briefly from their labors today to break ground for a major modernization project for the court that will move the police department to a two-story underground annex and upgrade all the building's internal systems. Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor turned ceremonial shovels on the lawn where the excavation will soon begin.

Both justices are the subjects of retirement rumors, and many in the small crowd of dignitaries, sheltered under a tent in the light rain, surely wondered: would either stay around to enjoy the fruits of the five-year $122 million project?

At 73, Justice O'Connor is five years older than the Supreme Court building. Her tone was light, but her words conveyed a certain poignancy when she remarked that when a building turns 70, "we can take the infrastructure and change it and make it like new again," adding, "I wish that were possible for individuals, but it isn't."

Bushworld and Hillaryland

Bushworld and Hillaryland
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/opinion/18DOWD.html

WASHINGTON -- Once toast in this town, Hillary Rodham Clinton is now the toast of the town. (Or at least the Venus part.)

At a Clintonista déjà vu party last night, Hillary was honored for her sensational debut as the fastest-selling nonfiction author ever. (More than Howard Stern even.)

Even with her "spouse problem," as she wryly refers to it in her book, Hillary's polls have shot up since the publication of her sisterhood-is-powerful political manifesto, cleverly masquerading as confessional victim and self-actualization literature.

The Mars brigade stormed a Bush-Cheney re-election fund-raising kick-off at the Washington Hilton — $2,000 a head for hot dogs, burgers and nachos. The White House wants fat cats to pony up $170 million for the run — a small price to pay for the cut in taxes on dividend income.

The 1,200 Bush donors and White House motorcades snarled evening traffic downtown, perhaps a Machiavellian attempt to prevent Hillary doters from making their way out to the Maryland manse of Lissa Muscatine for Hillary's party.

Ms. Muscatine was chief speechwriter for Hillary when she was first lady, and part of the team that toiled for two years helping the senator stitch together her own account of her own life. With le tout hacks, flacks and Hill pols eager to munch on miniature sirloin burgers and Champagne, many guests were discouraged from bringing spouses. (A celebration of a book about marital rifts should not cause them.)

Even with her "spouse problem," as she wryly refers to it in her book, Hillary's polls have shot up since the publication of her sisterhood-is-powerful political manifesto, cleverly masquerading as confessional victim and self-actualization literature.

Once Hillary was in the White House, besieged with questions about deception and secrecy, and beset by cascading investigations.

Now, George W. Bush is in the White House, besieged with questions about deception and secrecy, and beset by cascading investigations.

This president has weapons of mass destruction problems, whereas the last president had weapons of mass self-destruction problems.

W. must persuade doubters why he knew Saddam was an imminent threat before he made a pre-emptive move on Iraq, even as Hillary must persuade doubters why she did not know that Monica was an imminent threat who made a pre-emptive move on Bill. (If only a drum of chemicals were as easy to spot as a black thong.)

With her book, Senator Clinton is dropping a handkerchief in the 2008 race, signaling another amazing roundelay between the two first families of American politics, the fancy Republicans who strain to be common folk, and the Democratic common folk who strain to be fancy.

The Bushies dismissed the Clintons as "means justify the ends" types, who did as they liked and left a mess for others to clean up.

The Clintons saw themselves as audacious warriors for good, ingeniously grappling with intractable problems like health care.

Now the Democrats want to hold open hearings to see if the Bushies are "means justify the ends" types, who did as they liked and left a mess for others to clean up.

The Bushies see themselves as audacious warriors for good, ingeniously grappling with intractable problems like remaking the Arab world.

Just as the Bushies think Mr. Clinton dropped the ball on Osama and terrorism, the Clintons think the Bushies dropped it on the economy and the disenfranchised. And don't get either side started on Whitewater and Halliburton.

In her book, Hillary writes that the right wing considered her husband illegitimate, then goes on to imply that Mr. Bush is, saying of William Rehnquist: "As the country would later learn in the election-deciding case of Bush v. Gore, his lifetime tenure as a Supreme Court Justice did not inhibit his ideological or partisan zeal."

Just as Bushworld is a macho preserve with a tight über-loyal circle, so Hillaryland is a female preserve with a tight über-loyal circle.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Newt Gingrich and others have been trying to banish the if-it-feels-good-do-it, McGovernick, hippie ethos of the 60's. In her book, Hillary defends the era: "Some contemporary writers and politicians have tried to dismiss the anguish of those years as an embodiment of 1960s self-indulgence. In fact, there are some people who would like to rewrite history to erase the legacy of the war and the social upheaval it spawned. They would have us believe that the debate was frivolous, but that's not how I remember it."

Yup, she's running, and if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Microsoft Sues 15 Organizations in Broad Attack on Spam E-Mail

Microsoft Sues 15 Organizations in Broad Attack on Spam E-Mail
By SAUL HANSELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/technology/18SPAM.html

Microsoft, the world's largest provider of e-mail accounts, filed lawsuits yesterday against 15 groups of individuals and companies that it says collectively sent its clients more than two billion unwanted e-mail messages.

Unwanted e-mail, commonly called spam, has been a fast-growing problem for many e-mail users. The Hotmail service from Microsoft, with 140 million users, has been a fat target for spammers.

The company estimates that more than 80 percent of the more than 2.5 billion e-mail messages sent each day to Hotmail users are spam. It now blocks most of those spam messages.

All of the large Internet service providers, including America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo, have started filing lawsuits against e-mailers that they say are sending spam.

Microsoft's suits represent the largest number filed at one time, and reflect Microsoft's willingness to devote some of its considerable resources to fighting spam. It promised more such actions to come.

"We at Microsoft are ramping up our efforts to combat spam," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, at a news conference yesterday.

But many spam experts say that these suits do little to actually prevent spam.

"At the end of the day, this is a drop in the bucket," said Ray Everett-Church, the chief privacy officer of the ePrivacyGroup, a consulting company. He said that the several dozen suits against spammers so far have had no noticeable effect in deterring other spammers.

"Right now the big service providers see spam as a point of differentiation," Mr. Everett-Church said. "And these suits are much more of a marketing campaign than an anti-spam campaign."

Mr. Smith of Microsoft, however, argued that the lawsuits were an important part of a multipronged approach to fighting spam. In addition to lawsuits, Microsoft has introduced software to filter out spam for its MSN Internet access service and will include similar software in the next release of its Outlook e-mail program.

Twelve of the suits filed yesterday were in state court in Washington. They brought claims under both the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a Washington State anti-spam law. One suit was filed in California state court, and two were filed in Britain. The defendants include many different business involved in e-mail marketing.

Email Gold Inc. and NetGold, both of Dayton, Ohio, are accused of using spam to sell tools for other marketers to get into the spam business.

VMS Inc. and Proform4life Inc., both of Port Richey, Fla., are accused of trying to sell human growth hormone.

RHC Direct of Murray, Utah, is accused of selling videotapes to enhance job hunting skills using misleading subject headers.

VMS and Email Gold could not be reached for comment.

Robert Caldwell, the president of RHC, denied that his firm was sending spam. All of the recipients of the messages that it sends have requested marketing material, he said. Moreover, all of the messages identify the sender's address and phone number.

"They could have picked up the phone to call us rather than filing a lawsuit," Mr. Caldwell said, noting that he has not had any discussions about the offending e-mail with Microsoft. "All this will do is undermine the ability of legitimate marketers to stand up and say this is what we are doing."

In some cases, Microsoft was not able to identify the sender of the spam. It filed several suits against unnamed John Doe defendants. That tactic allows it to use subpoenas and other techniques to try to identify the senders.

Over the last nine months, Microsoft has diverted some of its investigators who normally track down software counterfeiters to tracking down spammers.

The spam lawsuits mainly challenge aspects of the e-mail messages that Microsoft contends are fraudulent, like deceptive return addresses and subject lines. Microsoft does not argue that sending mail that is unsolicited, but otherwise honest, should be banned.

David Sorkin, a professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, argues that focusing on fraud will not eliminate most of the messages that annoy e-mail users.

"As we clean up the spam, we will leave the door open to more and more nonfraudulent spam, and that will be much worse," he said, adding that a result will be much more unwanted e-mail than users now receive.

Making Trinkets in China, and a Deadly Dust

Making Trinkets in China, and a Deadly Dust
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/international/asia/18GEMS.html

SHUANG TU, China, June 15 — With his handsome smile and full head of black hair, Hu Zhiguo hardly looks 44, much less gravely ill. The giveaway is his wispy voice, faint from clotted lungs.

One doctor told him he had tuberculosis. Another guessed it was cancer. The final diagnosis, based on the cumulus of gray that clouds his chest X-rays, is a severe case of silicosis, a disease Chinese workers call dust lung.

Mr. Hu got the illness making cheap necklaces and bracelets from iridescent stones like opal, sold by the containerload to United States retailers. Working long days at a factory in booming Guangdong Province, he probably inhaled more quartz dust in 10 years than China's own safety standards would permit in a thousand.

Mr. Hu has now retreated to his hometown here in the rugged hills of Sichuan, where he tried, and failed, to help his wife run a dry-goods store.

"I cannot lift a bag of rice," Mr. Hu whispered one recent evening in the back of the family shop. "I am a wasted man, waiting for death."

China has emerged as Asia's leading exporter of manufactured goods to the United States, but the workers who produce those goods are victims of a surge in fatal respiratory, circulatory, neurological and digestive-tract diseases like those American and European workers suffered at the dawn of the industrial age.

China in that sense is not only recreating the industrial transformation that brought prosperity to Europe, the United States and some East Asian nations. It is also reliving its horrors.

Even by its official count, China already has more deaths from work-related illnesses than any other country or region, including the industrialized economies of the United States and Europe combined.

Last year, 386,645 Chinese workers died of occupational illnesses, according to government data compiled by the International Labor Organization.

The statistics may understate the situation in China's thriving east coast industrial centers, where tens of millions of migrant workers like Mr. Hu produce the bulk of China's exports for well under a dollar an hour without employment contracts, health care plans or union representation.

The company where Mr. Hu worked, called Lucky Gems and Jewelry, is now based at a multibuilding site in Huizhou, about two hours north of the mainland Chinese border with Hong Kong. It employs 3,000 workers, almost all of them from far away provinces, living in dormitories inside a gated campus or in the harsh residential community that lines the unpaved streets and construction sites surrounding the factory.

Its owner, a Hong Kong businessman named Wang Shenghua, was a pioneer in bringing jewelry manufacturing to southern China in the mid-1980's, when he opened his first factory in the mainland's experimental economic zone of Shenzhen.

With Lucky and hundreds of small-scale rival manufacturers, China dominates a labor-intensive industry once scattered widely around East Asia and the Middle East.

Lucky says it takes safety seriously. While the owner, Mr. Wang, declined a reporter's request to talk with him and visit the factory, he appointed a lawyer to answer questions about its safety record. The lawyer, Kang Ziying, said the company has always protected its workers and invested heavily in equipment to prevent workers from contracting silicosis, though he acknowledges there have been some cases of the disease among its employees.

"We have always met the government's standards for safety," Mr. Kang said. "Otherwise, they would not let us operate."

Mr. Hu was a 30-year-old peasant farmer eager to earn a worker's wage when he left his home in northern Sichuan in 1990. He traveled for four days, by train and bus, to Shenzhen. There, he landed a job at Lucky, introduced to the company by a distant relative.

He learned how to cut and sand semiprecious stones like opal, topaz and malachite into hearts, stars, pearls, and diamond shapes that are strung together to make rings, bracelets and necklaces.

Mr. Hu sat shoulder to shoulder with other cutters and polishers in confined workshops. Often working 12- and even 18-hours days, they generated clouds of dust that hung in the air even when windows were wide open and the fans were set to high.

"It was always like dusk inside the factory, no matter how much sunlight there was outside," he said. "It was like a heavy fog. We got used to it."

By the late 1990's, Mr. Hu began having trouble climbing stairs and lifting rocks. He came to dread winter, when a common head cold caused prolonged torment. "If I walked quickly, I would run out of breath right away. If I got a cold, I felt like I was suffocating," he said.

If anyone at Lucky was aware of the risks that workers might acquire diseases from exposure to quartz dust, Mr. Hu says that information was not shared with him. Local doctors first told him he might have tuberculosis, then lung cancer. By late 1999, he felt too weak to continue and took a low-paying job selling fruit on the muddy street in front of the factory.

A short time later, when numerous colleagues began developing similar symptoms, Mr. Hu joined them on bus trips to the provincial capital, Guangzhou, to seek a diagnosis. There, a doctor at a hospital that specializes in occupational diseases suspected that jewelry workers might be developing silicosis in large numbers.

The pulmonary ailment comes from overexposure to silicon dioxide trapped in quartz, minerals, rocks and sand. Though it is one of the oldest known occupational diseases, it has only recently become a priority for Chinese authorities, who now consider it a leading work-related illness.

Despite what Lucky workers described as a campaign by the company to deny the problem, provincial authorities eventually ordered all of Lucky's workers to undergo X-ray exams. How many workers showed signs of the disease is uncertain. At least 50 people claim to have fallen sick at Lucky. What is clear is that the company began battling dozens of workers over medical claims, while installing equipment to improve ventilation.

Mr. Kang, the lawyer, said some of the people seeking compensation were fakers and opportunists who either never worked there or who did not really have chronic illnesses. He acknowledged that the company invested $1 million to improve ventilation at the factory after 2001, but said those were not the first steps the company had taken to clean up the work environment.

Workers tell a different story. In the shadows of the Huizhou plant, where the ear-splitting whine of stonecutting machines pierces the air, about two dozen old friends and colleagues of Mr. Hu rent tiny rooms in restaurants, shops and private homes. They spend their days petitioning the government and gathering evidence to use against the company in court.

"Our boss cares only about the money in his pocket," said Liu Huaquan, a 39-year-old former craftsman at Lucky. In 2001, he was the first worker at the company to have silicosis formally diagnosed, but he is still fighting for compensation.

"You would think he could share a small part of his profits with the workers who got sick," Mr. Liu said. "But he uses his money to deny that we exist."

Two former Lucky managers, Chen Xingfu and Yuan Tianhui, say that shortly after they were told they had silicosis, Lucky demoted them, cut their salaries in half and assigned them to haul rocks to and from a warehouse. The demotions, both men said, were intended to force them to leave the company so it would not be obligated to pay their medical expenses.

They said they resigned because their silicosis made it impossible to do heavy manual labor. They are now suing. Mr. Kang, the company lawyer, said their demotions were performance related.

The company has denied compensation to others who worked for Lucky before 1997, the year the company opened its Huizhou plant. Lucky's old Shenzhen factory has no legal tie to Lucky even though it had the same owner and many of the same workers, the company argued in court.

The Huizhou factory does appear to have improved internal air quality, though workers said the main ventilation system was installed only after the first cases of silicosis were confirmed. Work stations now have vacuum tubes to suck up dust, which is spewed outside through exhaust valves. A light frost of silica crystals covers the factory grounds.

Even so, stonecutters and sanders can be easily spotted at the end of the work day because their company-issued navy blue crew shirts have turned gray from the dust.

The factory failed a safety inspection by the Huizhou Center for Disease Control as recently as last summer. The center's report shows that some work stations had ambient silica concentrations as high as 70 times the standard allowed by the Chinese safety code, which is less strict than related American and European standards by a factor of 20.

Lucky rejected the results of that inspection and arranged a new test by another safety agency last October, which it passed. Workers say the company, informed in advance of the inspection, shut down some work stations before inspectors arrived. The company denies that.

Any improvements came too late for Mr. Hu. Doctors eventually confirmed that he had third-degree silicosis, the most severe form, and he was told that the only way to extend his life was to stop working.

He stayed in Huizhou for two years, living on borrowed money, to force the company to pay his medical expenses. It refused, but eventually agreed to a one-time settlement proposed by the Huizhou government that gave Mr. Hu 200,000 yuan, about $25,000. He returned home.

Half a year later, most of the money is gone. Mr. Hu spent several thousand dollars to open a small grocery to generate income. But he found he could not even stock the shelves without collapsing from exhaustion. When he began coughing up blood this spring, he turned the store over to his wife.

Mr. Hu said he had spent most of the severance on hospital visits and intravenous injections of glucose and sodium chloride, which help relieve the pressure on his chest.

One day last week he called his 16-year-old son to his bedside and told the boy that he had to find a job instead of attending high school as planned.

"I am on the threshold of death and this family must have income," Mr. Hu said. "He cried when I told him and I cried, too. But we are going to run out of money in a few months. There is no other way."

Selling trauma

Selling trauma
by Annie Wang, SCMP PRD
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/anniewang/ZZZH0PH10HD.html

LULU'S DEBUT NOVEL Lover's Socks is finally published with a first print of 100,000 copies. Lulu goes on a 10-city book tour to promote it. In every city, with every journalist and interviewer, she repeats over and over again the tales of her sad love story with Ximu who cheated on her and only wanted to take her as a lover not a wife. She is heard on radio, seen on TV and written about in newspapers.

Although Lulu enjoys the attention afforded a rising author, she cannot help but feel a sense of irony about the whole thing. The six-year, on-off relationship with Ximu almost destroyed her confidence and made her look like a failure in the eyes of parents and relatives. But now she is achieving a measure of fame and fortune from the whole sorry story. She needs to smile at readers as she signs copies.

She calls her friend Niuniu. ''Believe it or not, I'm selling my trauma. I guess everything is commercialised. The market is what counts.''

Niuniu, who recently filed a story on the Chinese literary scene, comforts Lulu: ''Nothing is wrong with making a living off one's trauma. Mo Yan, the author of The Republic Of Wine always writes about hungry peasants in his stories. Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, tells the stories of three generations of women's suffering. Amy Tan is another who made a bundle by selling sorrowful stories to the West. Look at Hollywood; movies about the Holocaust always do well. Selling trauma has proven to be a good business model to follow.''

After talking to Niuniu, Lulu feels at ease. She thinks to herself, ''After all, everybody else is doing it. What the heck? It's karma perhaps. I was wronged and now I'm paid back.''

A few days later, Beibei, another of Lulu's girlfriends, brings along a Hollywood-based Chinese film agent who is looking for cross-cultural projects. They meet at the lavish St Regis Hotel.

The agent's name is Doug and he gets straight to the point. ''The storyline is great. A Chinese man is dumped in France by his Chinese wife and then he goes back to China and becomes a womaniser who takes revenge on Chinese women. You have done a great job exploring the psyche of Chinese women who abandon their Chinese husbands after moving to the West and the sense of defeat that Chinese men have in the West. But your story is not sad enough.''

''What do you mean?'' Lulu asks.

''From Hollywood's perspective, if a movie is about China and it is not about kung fu, it needs to have some cultural flavours. The sad cultural and political situations in other countries often make Americans feel better about themselves. As long as you can make them feel that way, it's entertaining. So I suggest you add in more about the low status of Chinese women. It's best to include the topics of prostitution and foot binding.''

''But my story is a modern-day story. How can I write about foot-binding, which is no longer being practiced in China?''

Doug laughs. ''What about creating an older woman whose feet were bound - the male character's grandmother or great grandmother, for example. The whole point is to show how backward China was.''

''What about prostitution? Why is it needed?'' Lulu asks.

''Nowadays, even a Nobel Laureate Prize winner has said that prostitutes have inspired him. You see, a lot of Western men come to Asia to get cheap sex. So create an intriguing Chinese prostitute.''

Lulu's anger is quite visible as she gets to her feet. ''Doug, Richard Mason wrote about The World Of Suzie Wong 50 years ago. You Hollywood dream merchants need to update your collections.''

Lulu then gives Beibei a broad wink as she says, ''Let's go girl, we have to meet Niuniu at the opium den.''

The two giggle as they walk off arm in arm.

More Americans Seeking Help for Depression

More Americans Seeking Help for Depression
By MARY DUENWALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/health/18DEPR.html

More than half of the Americans who suffer from depression now seek treatment, up from one-third 10 years ago, a new survey says. Yet nearly 60 percent of the people in treatment do not receive adequate care, the researchers found.

More than 16 percent of Americans — as many as 35 million people — suffer from depression severe enough to warrant treatment at some time in their lives, according to the National Comorbidity Study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and published today in a special issue on depression of The Journal of the American Medical Association. In any given one-year period, 13 million to 14 million people, about 6.6 percent of the nation, experience the illness.

The numbers are similar to those found in the first survey 10 years ago. At that time, the lifetime prevalence of depression was measured at nearly 15 percent and the one-year figure at 8.6 percent.

Depression costs employers $44 billion a year in lost productive time, according to a second survey reported in the same issue of the journal. That figure is $31 billion more than the amount lost because of illnesses in people who do not have depression. The participants were asked about their wages and lost hours.

Most of the lost time occurs while people are at work, said the lead researcher, Dr. Walter F. Stewart, an epidemiologist now at Geisinger Health Care Systems in Danville, Pa.

"People are making it to work," Dr. Stewart said. "They're just not engaged in work. They're getting to the door, but then closing it and just not functioning. People have called this `presenteeism,' and it is often invisible to employers."

An important reason that people with depression fail to receive proper care, said Dr. Ronald Kessler, the leader of the N.I.H. survey who is a professor of health care policy at Harvard, is that many people seek help from family doctors, who often do not treat depression aggressively.

"Family doctors are apparently not yet up to speed enough to give good quality care," Dr. Kessler said.

In the survey, which included interviews with more than 9,000 people, treatment was considered adequate if it consisted of at least eight half-hour sessions of counseling with a mental health professional or treatment with antidepressant drugs for at least 30 days, combined with four visits to a doctor.

In some cases, the researchers found, patients with depression were given just 5 milligrams of antidepressant, one-fourth the standard dose.

Dr. Kessler said family practitioners could easily learn to improve their treatments.

"The bigger nut to crack," he said, "has been getting people to come into treatment. And in that area, we've made significant progress."

The director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, said depressed people often discontinued their treatments.

"Depression," Dr. Insel said, "brings a tremendous sense of hopelessness. When you're in the middle of it, you can't remember that things were ever any better."

The illness displays sadness, hopelessness and difficulty concentrating.

The survey found that women continued to have a higher risk for depression than men, though the gap is narrowing. Women who have had at least one episode of depression outnumbered men 1.7 to 1. Forty to 50 years ago, the ratio was three to one, Dr. Kessler said, and 10 years ago, it was two to one.

Black people are 40 percent less likely to experience depression than Hispanic or white people, the survey said. On the other hand, blacks who develop the disorder are 30 percent more likely to suffer lasting or recurring depression.

People living in poverty are nearly four times as likely to suffer chronic depression as affluent people, the survey reported.

Younger people are also at risk. Among those experiencing depression in a one-year period, three times as many people were from 18 to 29 as were 60 and older.

That depression strikes so early in life is an important reason why it is such a significant health problem worldwide, Dr. Kessler said.

"Hypertension and arthritis start at age 55," he said. "Depression starts at 15 or 25. So the number of years of suffering in a person's life is much higher."

A third paper in the journal focuses on the high rate of doctors' suicides. Although no recent studies of suicide among doctors in the United States have been conducted, doctors in international studies have been found to be significantly more likely to commit suicide than other people of their sex and age.

Although in the general population men are more likely than women to commit suicide, among doctors, women and men are equally at risk.

Because so many American doctors have quit smoking, their health is generally better than that of other people their age.

"Doctors have lower heart disease rates and lower cancer rates," said Dr. Daniel E. Ford, of the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, an author of the study. "The suicide rate really sticks out there as the one rate that's different."

The numbers suggest that doctors are not as adept as they should be at recognizing and treating depression and mood disorders, said Dr. J. John Mann of the Columbia University Medical Center, president of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and another author of the study. "Physicians need to take better care of themselves and translate that into the way they care for their patients."

Dr. Insel, an author of an editorial in the journal on depression, noted that doctors were better at treating the disorder than at understanding it.

"We don't understand the pathophysiology," he said. "And there is no biomarker. We don't have a P.S.A. test for depression."

That was a reference to the blood test used to help diagnose prostate cancer.

A better understanding is crucial, Dr. Insel said, because depression affects the entire body.

"It's not just people feeling lousy," he said. "Depression affects the cardiovascular system, the endocrine system, even bone growth leading to osteoporosis."

Depression develops in one in four people who have had heart attacks. When it strikes, the risk of dying is three and a half times greater than if the victims were not depressed, studies show, making it as great a risk factor as smoking.

A study of nearly 2,500 people, also in the journal, looked at whether treating for depression after a heart attack would improve survival. Treatment, with antidepressants or counseling, was found to reduce depression and improve social functioning, but it did not influence survival.

Dr. Susan M. Czajkowski, a research psychologist at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute who is an author of the study, said future studies might find that stronger treatments or therapy at a different time, perhaps before the first heart attack, might make a difference in survival.

"We need another trial," Dr. Insel said. "We need a really serious large-scale study to see whether you're going to save lives in people who've had a heart attack by treating their depression."

At Nude Youth Camp, Skin Is Bare but Lust Is Verboten

At Nude Youth Camp, Skin Is Bare but Lust Is Verboten
By KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/national/18NUDE.html

LUTZ, Fla., June 12 — On the third-to-last day of summer camp, the temperature has risen to 98 degrees, and even the troupers have begun to whine.

"I don't want to play strip volleyball!" complained Jane Jeffries, 13, her sunburned shoulders sagging. "I want to play regular volleyball."

Halie Nelson, 14, agreed, "Yeah, I'd rather get all the clothes off, and keep all the clothes off."

Here at the Youth Leadership Camp run by the American Association for Nude Recreation, the dress code for regular volleyball — and for the pudding toss, mini-golf and campfire sing-alongs — is the same as it is for skinny dipping.

Basking in what nudist organizations say is a growing interest in nude recreation, the association has begun a nationwide expansion of summer camps for nudists age 11 to 18. The first began here 10 years ago, in a county north of Tampa known for its concentration of nudist resorts. In 2000, the association opened its second camp in Arizona.

A third is to open outside Richmond, Va., this month, and organizers in Texas are planning a fourth camp there for the summer of 2005.

Naked summer camp might strike non-nudists as illegal or prurient, or like striking a match to the gasoline of adolescent hormones.

Anti-nudity statutes in Florida and other states, however, say that nudity on private property is perfectly legal, even among minors, as long as there is no lewdness. And camp rules, drawn up by campers themselves a few years ago, guard against that. "Do not allow nudity and lust to mingle," they state. "No improper touch. Nudity must not be humiliating, degrading or promote ridicule." Even the occasional clothing, worn in the camp's shuttle van, must not be "sexually alluring."

Nude tourism has grown to a $400 million business this year from a $120 million business in 1992, reports the nudist association, with travel agencies noting a surge in nude cruises and, in May, the first nude charter flight. The association itself is growing, with 30 new clubs, for a total of 267, in the last two years.

There are still few places, however, for teenagers.

"I've spent my life around nudist resorts; this is the first time I've ever been around kids my own age," said Halie, who had been named Camper of the Day the previous night for participating fully despite a foot swollen by a bee sting. "It's either 45 and over or 10 and under."

The campers, many of them alumni of church or scout camps, say they like this better, but not for the reasons most people might expect.

"I learned to play tennis this morning," Amanda Williamson, 18, said. "I never did that at church camp. I'm getting better at volleyball, too."

Aside from the obvious, naked camp looks a lot like other camps: campers play Capture the Flag, catch frogs and leap up when the whistle blows signaling seconds for ice cream. They make s'mores and sing modified campfire songs ("This Land Is Your Land" ends, "This land was made nude and free.") Each camp team writes a song for the annual talent show, with hosts "Sunny and Bare."

Parents and campers say the camp promotes a healthy body image at an age when confidence can crumble, and better relations between the sexes when awkwardness normally prevails.

"In gym class, some of the girls will hide in their lockers to take off their shirts in front of other girls," Halie said. "Sometimes I'll say, `Why are you so insecure?' They all say, `I need to lose a few pounds.' I just don't care about that stuff. I accept my body the way it is."

The nudist association, the larger of two nationwide, sees this as a place to train "youth ambassadors" to what nudists call the "textile" world. (To the question posed by one after-dinner discussion, "I'm a Nudist; Am I a Nut?," the answer, not surprisingly, was no.)

There are things that set this camp apart. Mosquito bites are more irritating, the sunscreen police more vigilant. Campers pack lighter, but drag towels, Linus-like, because nudist etiquette dictates using one when sitting. And the discussion groups feature topics like "Is God Mad at Me Because I'm a Nudist?" (Again, no.)

And everyone is on guard against COG's — "creepy outside guys" — who try to sneak in past the tall fences and security gates, to peek. On Tuesday, when a suspicious-looking man arrived at the pool, counselors quickly herded campers away and guards escorted the unwelcome visitor from the premises.

"It makes me a bit freaked out that people would think of nudity as a sexual thing," said Michelle Jones, 15, a camper from Texas.

Pat Brown, president of the American Association for Nude Recreation, said the camps run extensive background and criminal checks on counselors, often college students who have been nude campers themselves.

Bernie McCabe, the state attorney for Pasco County, where the Lutz camp is, said he had never heard any complaints about it.

Parents seem to have no worries about pedophilia, speaking of nudist camps and resorts as safe, family-like environments.

"Everybody keeps an eye on the children," George Jeffries, Jane's father, said. "There are no transgressions by regular folks coming here, and newcomers are watched very closely."

Still, even parents who have sent their children here for several years do not necessarily tell their church friends or relatives about it.

"If I'm confronted I will not lie, but it's not something I want to have to explain," the father of two boys, an engineer for a telecommunications company, said. "I worry about my kids being ostracized. I believe in this, but a lot of people don't."

The father, like others, said the camp discourages some of the less attractive behavior of adolescents: "I don't have to worry about them sneaking around and seeing things their friends are, the girlie magazines and the porn movies."

Campers agree.

"It takes the mystery out of what the other person looks like, so sex becomes more something you know you're waiting to experience, rather than just a physical thing where you want to find out," said an 18-year-old who gave her name as Jeanene.

"At school, if you see a person, you just see their clothes," Jane said. "Here you have to actually get to know the people."

But some things about teenagers, nudist or not, remain true. Boys at 13 still find scatological humor far funnier than anyone else does. Eleven-year-old girls still fight about who gets to dance as J. Lo in the talent show. Even nudist campers coo at the "cute" swimsuits as they pull on clothing to get back in the van.

Pulling out of one resort during a field trip, a few campers ask the van driver to stop so they can check out the souvenirs. Inside, they finger sarongs and embroidered T-shirts. But they don't buy.

Too expensive.

Stores Fight Shoplifting With Private Security

Stores Fight Shoplifting With Private Security
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/nyregion/17MACY.html

Steps from the pantyhose section of Macy's Manhattan store sits a cool, halogen-lighted room containing two chain-link holding cells. People, some of them minors, are led to this room every day, where they are body-searched, photographed and then handcuffed to a long steel bench.

An interrogation occurs, and a verdict is made as to whether or not they tried to steal. Their Social Security numbers are punched into a national database, and they are turned over to the police or they are freed. Almost all of them sign confessions and are asked to pay private penalties — five times the amount of whatever they stole.

This private jail, and the policing system that governs it, is replicated to varying degrees in other department stores across the nation with a twofold purpose: to stop shoplifting and to recoup some of the billions of dollars lost to theft every year.

Last year, more than 12,000 people moved through detention rooms in 105 of Macy's stores, including more than 1,900 at the Manhattan store, in Herald Square. Only 56 percent of those people were sent to the police. The company, though, says that over 95 percent of those detained confess to shoplifting and quite a few pay the in-store penalty before leaving. The Manhattan store lost $15 million to theft last year.

The operation is legally authorized, and, retailers say, necessary: private police fill the void left by public police too burdened to chase small-time thieves. Private police also save retailers legal costs by helping them settle shoplifting cases directly with the perpetrators .

But the elaborate systems like the one at Macy's in Manhattan — which includes 100 security officers, four German shepherds, hundreds of cameras, and a closed-circuit television center reminiscent of a spaceship control room — have highlighted a concern shared by a range of people, from civil libertarians to individual shoppers who have been detained, and even to some law enforcement officials.

Whether guilty or innocent, these critics say, those accused of shoplifting are often deprived of some of the basic assurances usually provided in public law enforcement proceedings: the right to legal representation before questioning, rigorous safeguards against coercion, particularly in the case of juveniles, and the confidence that the officers in charge are adequately trained and meaningfully monitored.

Private security operations in the retail world, like those in gated communities, amusement parks and sports stadiums, have grown in number over the last three decades yet remain largely shrouded from public scrutiny.

"The issue of private security guards is a difficult one," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "On the one hand, stores have an interest in protecting their business. But on the other hand, security guards have neither the training nor the same legal obligations as police officers and the danger of interfering with individual rights is huge."

Some retail chains have less-elaborate detention areas, using storage rooms or offices instead of jails, and some stores have more direct and regular dealings with police. Wal-Mart's policy, for instance, is to always contact the police when its security guards detain a suspected shoplifter, a company spokesman said. But aggressive policing is a daily staple of the retail industry, with most major retail stores employing some version of the detention and civil recovery procedures used by Macy's.

"That's standard operating procedure in virtually every store in America," said Dr. Richard Hollinger, a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Florida who compiles information about theft-prevention tactics from stores nationwide for a yearly report.

Law enforcement officials in New York, including the state attorney general, said they knew very little about the details and scope of the kind of security operation being run at Macy's. Officials in Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office were not aware of any complaints against retail security operations, but have investigated other forms of private policing and said the practice can lead to serious problems.

The security operations in place at stores like Macy's have provoked litigation. Last month, Macy's was sued by a Bronx paralegal and other people with a range of claims about how Macy's polices shoplifting — from racial profiling to false imprisonment. They are represented by Kenneth P. Thompson, a former federal prosecutor.

In 1997, a jury awarded another shopper, Paula Hampton, $1.16 million for race discrimination when she was detained at a Kansas Dillard's store. That same year, a jury ordered Eddie Bauer to pay $1 million to three men in Maryland for false imprisonment and other charges.

A Look Behind the Scenes
Macy's officials said the recent charges against them were reckless, and they ardently defended their security practices as lawful, professional and exacting in their ability to weed out thieves among innocent shoppers. To counter allegations of unfairness, the store allowed a reporter wide behind-the-scenes access to its Manhattan store, the company's flagship.

To tour the store is to appreciate the immense security challenge faced by Macy's, as well as the potential for intimidation among those detained.

Plainclothes "detectives" roam the 10 selling floors, keeping in contact with uniformed guards by radio. The movement of shoppers is tracked by over 300 cameras, some controlled by joysticks, as security workers watch images on dozens of closed-circuit television monitors.

Those shoplifting suspects caught and detained are taken to "Room 140," which features a long steel bench bolted to the linoleum floor. A dozen handcuffs hang off the bench from chains. In two holding cells, roughly 5 feet long by 5 feet wide, wooden benches bear the etchings of former detainees. "Not worth it," reads one.

Macy's policy is to call the police if anyone requests legal representation or asks to be set free immediately, but most people prefer to settle the matter privately, officials said.

No department store is legally required to provide the same safeguards as are the police. Legal experts say that retailers are held to a standard somewhere in between that of the police and that of citizens making an arrest — a standard known as merchants' privileges, which allow stores around the nation to detain people on suspicion of shoplifting without police involvement.

"We at Macy's East are sensitive to the fact that we're not a police force operating in the criminal justice system," said Thomas Roan, group vice president for security at Macy's East. "Therefore we raise the standard for detention" above the one used by the police to detain and question people.

The jail is not excessive, Mr. Roan said, given the number of altercations with shoplifting suspects. In the last four months, 25 people have assaulted security officials, 10 of whom required medical attention, Mr. Roan said. In about half of all apprehensions, weapons are recovered, including knives and guns, he added.

But the main reason for such a sophisticated system is to fight the enemy of theft. Some 60,000 people pass through the flagship store every day — and on heavy shopping days, double or triple that number. About $100 million was lost last year to thieves in the 105 stores in the Eastern United States that make up Macy's East.

As a result, Macy's spends roughly $28 million a year on security — $4 million at the flagship store alone.

In an attempt to recover some of the loss, Macy's has a target of $1.4 million in civil penalties it expects to receive this year — the same amount received last year. To achieve that, it uses a formidable weapon used by stores around the nation: civil recovery statutes.

These laws allow retailers to hold shoplifters liable for the cost of catching them and for the losses they cause, charging penalties even if an item is recovered in perfect condition. In New York, the statute is especially powerful, allowing stores to demand five times the value of the item stolen, whether or not there is a confession, and to pursue that claim even if the case is tried criminally and thrown out.

"Retailers have abandoned the criminal justice system because they know the system is not interested in them as a victim," Dr. Hollinger said.

But it is the manner in which Macy's enforces its pursuit of shoplifters, backed by these statutes, that is at the heart of the dispute between Macy's and critics of private security.

A Five-Step Approach
The store has a program to train its guards to follow five steps before detaining a person: they must watch the person enter a department, select merchandise and conceal it; then maintain unbroken surveillance to establish that the item is concealed; and then watch the person attempt to leave the store without paying.

"Nonproductive detentions" — the company's phrase for innocent people wrongly detained — occur less than 1 percent of the time, and result in disciplinary action, store officials said. Thirty-two security guards were fired last year from Macy's East stores for wrongly detaining 66 people, and 43 other security associates were disciplined.

But the suit brought last month by Sharon Simmons-Thomas, and others, who are represented by Mr. Thompson, a partner at the Manhattan law firm of Thompson Wigdor & Gilly, paints a much more menacing picture.

The detention system is predatory and racially biased, Mr. Thompson claimed, with security guards using racial codes to alert one another that a minority shopper has entered an area.

The lawyers said that 13 current or former security officials at Macy's have assisted in the lawsuit. One former worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said he thought the store set quotas for how many people should be detained on a given day. "At one time they put the numbers on the walls," said the man, who worked at Herald Square and left in a dispute.

Macy's officials called the charges baseless: officials do use numbers of detentions from the previous year as a guide to what kind of activity to expect, they said, but not to pressure guards; security officials must sign a code of conduct that prohibits racial profiling; and race and gender codes are used only for description purposes when guards communicate among themselves.

But the question of what happens once people are detained has provoked the greatest concerns.

In the in-store jail, most people confess that they stole once presented with evidence, Macy's security officials said. If they sign a confession, the store gives them the option of paying their penalty right away. Those who confess also sign a notice that allows the police to charge them with a felony if they are caught shoplifting in the store again.

But because the confessions are won in secret, and by officials with far less experience than government police departments, many regard them as potentially suspect.

"If someone is arrested by police, they know they're going to court, they know they're going to get a lawyer, they know they're going to tell their story to a judge, they know if they're innocent that within a short period of time they're going to be talking to someone who can help them," said Susan Hendricks, deputy attorney in charge of the criminal defense division of the Legal Aid Society.

The former security official said people were given the impression that if they signed confessions, they would not be prosecuted.

Who Gets Prosecuted
"This is how they give them a light at the end of the tunnel that this might end at the store," he said.

Macy's security officials said they painstakingly trained their staff to first decide whether to prosecute a person before the issue of civil recovery is broached.

Discretion is used in whether to prosecute a shoplifter based on a range of "mercy" factors, including a person's age and health and whether the person has been cooperative. Sometimes, the local police tell Macy's security they are too overbooked to process any more cases, Macy's officials said.

New York police officials denied this. "When we are called, we respond," said Lt. Brian Burke, a department spokesman. But another police official acknowledged that if large department stores chose to call the police every time they caught someone shoplifting, the department would be swamped.

The current lawsuit against Macy's includes the kind of disputed account that many regard as unsurprising in the world of private security.

A Disputed Transaction
Two other plaintiffs, Barbie Sanchez, 16, and Jennifer Velez, 17, who are longtime friends, said they visited the flagship store last Oct. 5 to exchange a pink blouse for Miss Sanchez's mother, but were unable to because they lacked a receipt. When the girls tried to leave, they say, security guards stopped them, grabbed their shopping bags and led them to Room 140.

The girls said they were pressured to say they had stolen the blouse and other clothing. After two hours, the girls said, a man told them to sign some forms or they would be "in more trouble."

They signed the forms. Soon, they received letters from a Florida law firm, retained by Macy's to collect on its behalf, seeking more than $400.

"If we shoplifted," Miss Velez asked in an interview, "why didn't they send a cop to pick us up? They think you have no rights."

A lawyer for Macy's said he could not comment on the girls' specific claims because of the litigation.

He did say, though, "We are absolutely confident when all the evidence is in, it will be clear that we follow our policies and only detain people that we see stealing and attempting to leave the store."

Is Gotham Ready for Mayor Clinton?

Is Gotham Ready for Mayor Clinton?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2003; 8:31 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54151-2003Jun13.html

We are bringing you another Clinton rumor this morning.

Not about Hillary. She's gotten enough publicity this week.

Not about sex. We've all had enough of that.

About Bill.

That he just might, maybe, possibly, want to run for office again.

After musing about how that darn 22nd Amendment ought to be changed so young ex-presidents can run again, maybe he will just find a job for which there is no constitutional bar. Such as mayor of New York.

Instead of dealing with Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, he can grapple with Freddy Ferrer and Al Sharpton. Instead of nuclear missiles, he can deal with parking and potholes. The job doesn't have its own plane, but you do get police escorts and a nice white house, Gracie Mansion.

Clinton in '05? Why not? It beats sitting around waiting for his wife to reclaim his old job in '08. And membership in the Senate spouses club with Bob Dole doesn't sound too exciting.

Okay, there are a few holes in this scenario. Clinton now makes zillions of dollars, including big bucks on the lecture circuit. As mayor he'd have to give speeches for free – and settle for a $195,000 salary.

He'd occasionally have to ride the crowded and sweaty subway, like Mike Bloomberg, just to show he's in touch with da people.

He'd have to wolf down plenty of hot dogs and knishes on the campaign trail (okay, maybe not such a disadvantage).

And what if Mayor Bill demands more federal aid for the Apple and Hillary votes no? Will there be more shouting matches?

The latest buzz – and that's all it is – was started by an item in Washingtonian magazine. New York Times metro columnist Joyce Purnick picked up on it:

"You scoff. Well, of course, you scoff. There is plenty about which to scoff.

"Odds are it will not happen. But on the theory that New York is home of the improbable, that it is a place where a first lady can become a United States senator and a billionaire with political talents in inverse proportion to his wealth can become mayor, let us consider this latest bit of political gossip for a moment.

"It is too enticing to let go, especially since the former president hasn't rejected the idea. A New York Democrat who urged him to run this week reports that while he didn't say yes, he didn't say no. Being polite? Enjoying the attention? 'He's busy running his foundation, not running for office,' his spokesman, James E. Kennedy, said.

"The latest round of Clinton speculation surfaced in the June issue of Washingtonian magazine. The thinking: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is not popular, no compelling Democrats are lining up to challenge him, Mr. Clinton is in limbo, New York loves him and there is no other job large enough for his talents or ego...

"The mere idea of a Bill Clinton candidate really does fuel the image machine. Thoughts of fun again at City Hall. Of roiling neighborhood meetings where regular folks from Tottenville to Pelham Parkway could confront a former president about their corner traffic light. One would pay admission to watch him anticipate a transit strike or tangle with the State Legislature. If the economic slump continued, a Mayor Clinton would surely perpetuate the Bloomberg policies of keeping taxes high rather than decimating services."

Bloomberg, for his part, is suggesting that Clinton remain in the private sector. Or as the New York Daily News puts it:

"Mayor Moneybags to Bubba: Eat my dust!

"Responding to media speculation that former President Bill Clinton might run for mayor in 2005, Bloomberg declared, 'I will get reelected.'

"'I welcome lots of competition. If President Clinton wants to run for mayor, I can tell him it's a very challenging job. But it's a great job. And I would recommend it to anybody,' Bloomberg said.

"However, the mayor added, 'I sort of recommend that he thinks about it for the next six years, because he'd have a tough time winning before that.'"

But a New York Times poll this morning makes clear why there might be a job opening, with New Yorkers bummed about tax hikes and service cutbacks:

"Those negative feelings appear to have colored New Yorkers' views of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Only 24 percent of those polled said they approved of the job he was doing, the lowest approval rating for a mayor since The Times began taking polls on mayoral performance in 1978."

Dick Morris, continuing to slam Hillary, reminds us on National Review Online that politics is a contact sport:

"Dear Hillary, In your new book, Living History, you correctly note that when you asked me to help you and Bill avert defeat in the congressional election of 1994 I was reluctant to do so. But then you assert, incorrectly, that my reluctance stemmed from difficulties in working with your staff. You even misquote me as telling you: 'I don't like the way I was treated, Hillary. People were so mean to me.'

"As you know, I never said anything of the sort. I had, in fact, no experience in dealing with either your staff or the president's at that point, and had not yet met Leon Panetta or George Stephanopoulos. My prior dealing with Harold Ickes had been twenty five years earlier.

"The real reason I was reluctant was that Bill Clinton had tried to beat me up in May of 1990 as he, you, Gloria Cabe, and I were together in the Arkansas governor's mansion. At the time, Bill was worried that he was falling behind his democratic primary opponent and verbally assaulted me for not giving his campaign the time he felt it deserved. Offended by his harsh tone, I turned and stalked out of the room.

"Bill ran after me, tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me. You grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me. Then you walked me around the grounds of the mansion in the minutes after, with your arm around me, saying, 'He only does that to people he loves.'"

Salon's Joe Conason challenges Morris's account.

Slate's Chris Suellentrop finds the non-sex parts of the book a bit of a snooze:

"Even if you turned every page you wouldn't find a thing on Marc Rich, or the 1996 fund-raising scandals, or any indication at all of what kind of 'pain' Bill had caused in their marriage before the Lewinsky scandal. The book is as comprehensive as a hubristic family Christmas letter: 'I headed a panel on health care, and Chelsea and I traveled to India, and Bill went golfing with Greg Norman! Oh, and on a trip to Denver, two guys mooned us!' It's not much more than a timeline encrusted with uninteresting anecdotes.

"In part, it's the book you would expect from Hillary – on-message, with laundry lists of her husband's accomplishments and references to her own importance in the White House, plus tirades against the evil Republicans who plotted to stop them. It's part policy brief, part presidential-campaign biography (her potential future one, that is), and part chronicle of the obstacles that faced a smart, ambitious woman during her climb to the top. In many ways, the descriptions of her life before Bill Clinton are the most interesting, even if, as a child and a young woman, Hillary Rodham was exactly the type of kid you would have imagined her to be: safety monitor in grade school, selected to serve on school committees by her high-school administration, president of her college government. She never wanted to be just a girl.

"But she never got to be one, either. At least, not until she reached the White House. There, she finds that she's expected to embody the feminine ideal during a time when no one's quite sure what that ideal is. She complains about the 'pressures on me to conform' to gender stereotypes while she was first lady of Arkansas, and she approvingly quotes Martha Washington on the difficulties of being America's first lady."

Tom DeLay said it ain't gonna happen, but it happened yesterday, although it could always sink in the congressional bog:

"Bowing to political pressure," the Wall Street Journal reports, "the House approved additional tax breaks for low-income families with children, but strong opposition from conservative Republicans makes the outcome uncertain.

"The House bill, approved 224-201 mostly along party lines, would amend last month's tax-cut legislation so low-income families receive a boost in the child-tax credit to match roughly what families with higher incomes are getting. The $3.5 billion provision was dropped from the original bill by Republican negotiators, spurring a barrage of negative publicity."

But the House measure costs another $82 billion, which could be a way of ensuring it really ain't gonna happen.

The media are in full cry about the likelihood of two upcoming Supreme Court vacancies. But USA Today says one of the jurists looks like he's not going anywhere:

"Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 78, has hired a staff for the court's next annual term, which begins in the fall. He also has accepted speaking engagements into November. ...

"Perhaps most important, Rehnquist's court has scheduled a hearing on a key campaign-finance dispute for Sept. 8. ... Some legal analysts say the court's scheduling of such a sensitive, important case for early September is the clearest indication yet that Rehnquist does not plan to step down this year."

The press continues to chip away at Bush's WMD arguments, as in this Philadelphia Inquirer piece:

"Making his case for war with Iraq, President Bush in his State of the Union address this year accused Saddam Hussein of trying to buy uranium from Africa, even though the CIA had warned White House and other officials that the story did not check out.

"A senior CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 – 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech – that an agency source who had traveled to Niger could not confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country.

"Despite the CIA's misgivings, Bush said in his address: 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.'

"Three senior administration officials said Vice President Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Hussein. The claim later turned out to be based on crude forgeries that an African diplomat had sold to Italian intelligence officials."

Not pretty.

Andrew Sullivan hurls perhaps the ultimate insult at the GOP over WMD:

"The Republicans are dumb and paranoid to try and stop a full-fledged investigation into the intelligence findings that provided the basis for one of the main arguments for the war against Saddam. It's important that any flaws in intelligence are fully explored; and any hype that might have been added to the data should be fully exposed and examined. If the administration has nothing to hide – and I doubt it has – let the light in. These Republicans are acting like, er, well, the Clintons."

Sullivan links to a New York Observer piece in which Francine Prose wonders about a future memoir from this president:

"'I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at Donald and Dick and Condoleezza: 'What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? What do you mean, there were no weapons of mass destruction?'"

In Salon, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown blasts the press for its coverage of 43:

"Bush's responses are so programmed it's unbelievable the national media allows him to get away with it. You realize there's no time Bush has to face the people like Tony Blair does regularly? There's no prime minister's hour in this country? Now, in the past, it's been the press who's been the opposition, so to speak, questioning the president – but Bush has been careful not to present himself to the press in that fashion. [After that last scripted press conference] news organizations should have simply stopped covering him on such a programmed basis. But instead, they got programmed into the war – programmed into the tanks, which utterly ruined any objectivity. The press is gone. The free press in America has been compromised. But they loved being out with the generals. It became so apparent that they'd been pimped."

You can tell he's not running for reelection.

Speaking of mayors, you know who's REALLY enjoying the recent travails at the New York Times? Politicians!

"Mayor Richard Daley could barely contain his glee about the plagiarism scandal that touched off the journalistic equivalent of an earthquake," says a Chicago Sun-Times piece.

"For once, the shoe was on the other foot. The spotlight was on deception and fraud by those who cover the news--not on the politicians they love to put on the hot seat.

"Daley was loving it. Like Arizona Diamondback Mark Grace gloating about former teammate Sammy Sosa's corked bat, the mayor couldn't wipe the smile off his face.

"'When you question a politician, people are going to question your credibility in journalism--and they should. Why not? You question me. They should question you. You should not be separate or immune from this,' Daley said.

"'You question religious organizations on a lot of issues. When someone questions you--talk about the [code of silence by] the men in blue. The men and women in your industry just tie up together [saying], "You can't criticize us." You criticize everyone else, but you cannot take the heat. There's credibility in every profession. But when it comes to you, none of you can take the heat.'"

Whew! We're sweating.

American Prospect's Michael Tomasky examines the issue we explored yesterday: Why don't Bush's political problems resonate?

"The question for Democrats now: How to make Americans care?

"We're living in times that I don't even know how to describe. It's pretty hard to understand what's happening in this society when the majority leader of the House of Representatives makes use of a presidential agency for the nakedly political purpose of hunting down some home-state legislators. And when that agency complies with the request. And when it's a little two-day story, not a scandal at all. One doesn't even have to ask, in this case, the hypothetical that liberals are prone to present – to wit, imagine if the Clinton administration had been involved in something similar. No; this would have been a scandal, and properly so, if it involved a federal agency under any administration from Bill Clinton to Dwight Eisenhower. But not now. ... "

Bush "and his servants were out on the hustings selling the American people a story about an imminent threat that did not exist in order to gin up public support for sending young Americans off to risk death. Hey, why lose sleep over that?

"But again: How to make people care? Let's face it: It may be that they never will. For most Americans, the bottom line will be that we won. Even if no weapons of mass destruction are found, Bush will essentially say, as he has already, What the heck, the Iraqi people are free. And most Americans will probably accept that, especially with the media – including a few prominent liberal columnists – urging them to do so."

Rare Bosnia Success Story, Thanks to U.S. Viceroy

Rare Bosnia Success Story, Thanks to U.S. Viceroy
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/international/europe/17BOSN.html

BRCKO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 13 — A decade ago, Samira Hasanvasic said, her parents huddled in a nearby village as Bosnian Serbs hunted down Muslims, torching their houses and driving many into exile. Others they killed, dumping the bodies into the muddy shallows of the Sava River.

This week, Ms. Hasanvasic, 17, completed her second year in a high school that integrates Muslims, Serbs and Croats — children of the groups that fought so bitterly over the right to live apart. It is the only city in Bosnia where the three main ethnic groups are mandated to go to school together.

"At first, everyone was afraid because of what happened during the war," said Ms. Hasanvasic, gesturing to her friend, Romana Stjepic, a Croat. "But then we got to know each other, and the fear went away."

Ms. Hasanvasic still dreams of leaving her hometown behind, but not because it was a killing ground. For her, Brcko (pronounced BIRCH-ko) is just run-of-the-mill boring.

Brcko's transition from deadly to merely dull is a remarkable success story — one of the few in the years that foreigners have been trying to fix this broken land, and one that offers lessons for the United States as it embarks on its latest effort at nation-building in Iraq.

"This was a snake pit, the worst place you could imagine in Bosnia," said Mark Wheeler, director of the Bosnia Project at the International Crisis Group, a research group. "But the international community equipped people with enough authority to get their jobs done."

Today, this river port of 85,000 on the northeastern border of Bosnia has the highest per capita income in the country, a balanced budget and a skyline alive with construction cranes. Ethnic tensions, while not gone, seem to have been relegated to the status of a distraction for which the busy people have no time.

Some of Brcko's success is due to money. Treated as an international protectorate since the war, it has received $2 million a year in direct American aid, plus an estimated $65 million in other foreign aid.

Yet dollars alone do not explain the rebound. Bosnia as a whole has been flooded with anywhere from $5 billion to $15 billion — more precise estimates are hard to come by — and it still languishes.

The lesson of Brkco, Mr. Wheeler said, is that would-be nation-builders should install a powerful interim administrator, who is unafraid of defying the local political bosses. With a whip and some cash in hand, this proconsul can override ethnic loyalties and turn local attention to establishing the rule of law and business-friendly policies.

Henry L. Clarke, an American diplomat who became Brcko's third supervisor in April 2001, turned the tide. He has imposed one law — on integrating the schools — over the objections of the city council. He has annulled two others, dismissed local officials and business chiefs, and rammed through reforms.

"The powers are broad, I won't deny that," Mr. Clarke said over dinner. "But the way you get reforms done is with the cooperation of the people. You don't get it by acting like a little Tito."

As for elections — a perennial concern of American officials — they have simply not taken place for local posts here. The people of Brcko have voted, largely along ethnic lines, in the four national elections that have been held in Bosnia since 1996. But they have not elected a single city official; instead, the supervisor appoints the city council.

"Thankfully it didn't happen," Senad Pecanin, editor of the weekly magazine Dani, said of local elections.

"The worst mistake we made in Bosnia was insisting on early elections," he said. "They just confirmed the results of the war in political terms."

Brcko's progress has been so good that Paddy Ashdown, a British politician who last year became the latest European to take on the office of high representative of the international community, said, "I looked at Brcko and thought, `That's what we ought to be doing,' and I used my powers in a similar fashion."

Bosnia as a whole, however, remains a ruin. Dragged down by old Communist structures and largely destroyed by the war, the economy suffers from mountainous deficit. Elections entrenched corrupt leaders, who stymied economic reforms.

Ironically, Brcko has avoided that general fate precisely because it was so disputed between Muslims, Serbs and Croats that its fate could not be decided at peace talks in 1995.

Finally, an international tribunal ruled that Brcko would be run as a separate district, with an appointed local government and an outside American supervisor who would be fortified with broad powers.

"The U.S. reaction was: `Oops, we just took on one of the blackest holes in Bosnia. We can't let this fail,' " Mr. Clarke said.

The colony they took over was a shambles. More than 9,000 houses, a third of the total housing stock, had been destroyed during and after the war. The town's port was moribund, its food-processing plants were rusting hulks, and land mines lurked in the surrounding fields.

Perhaps because of his mild manner, Mr. Clarke has stirred little open resentment in Brcko. The Serbian mayor, Sinisa Kisic, describes him as an "adviser rather than one who orders." Only when he forcibly integrated the schools did he provoke a backlash among Serbs, some of whom dubbed the decision "Clarke's Law." Even then, they put up no violent resistance.

Mr. Clarke's latest project is the Arizona Market, a collection of sprawling, seedy stalls on the edge of town. When Arizona first sprouted after the peace accord was signed, it was hailed as hopeful because Serbs, Muslims and Croats met there for trade and business deals that had ceased during the war.

But now Brcko's city council has given control of the land to an Italian developer, who is investing more than $100 million to turn Arizona into a modern shopping center.

Critics have a cynical take on Mr. Clarke's activism: that he keeps inventing new jobs to avoid leaving. "The Americans don't want elections because they're afraid the bad guys will win," Mr. Wheeler said.

Mirsad Djapo, a local Muslim leader, noted that in the last national election, Brcko's citizens voted for the Serbian nationalist party in greater numbers than Serbs nationally. "We must have elections, but there is always a risk," he said.

And Brcko remains awash in guns. American soldiers go door to door these days, selling raffle tickets for the chance to win a Volkswagen car in return for residents' handing in their weapons. On a recent morning, they collected five hand grenades.

Mr. Clarke said he would not be rushed into packing his bags. But he agrees in principle with Mr. Wheeler's suggestion that Brcko hold elections in October 2004 to coincide with local elections throughout Bosnia.

The debate over democracy stirs little interest among young people here. When Brcko devised a new curriculum for its schools, it scaled back history in favor of subjects like mathematics and computers.

"We're young, and we don't know anything about the war," said Marko Jurocivic, a 17-year-old Serb. "Our history class ends with World War II."

Inmates Released from Guantánamo Tell Tales of Despair

Inmates Released from Guantánamo Tell Tales of Despair
By CARLOTTA GALL with NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/international/asia/17PRIS.html

KABUL, Afghanistan, June 16 — Afghans and Pakistanis who were detained for many months by the American military at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba before being released without charges are describing the conditions as so desperate that some captives tried to kill themselves.

According to accounts in the last three months from some of the 32 Afghans and three Pakistanis in the weeks since their release, it was above all the uncertainty of their fate, combined with confinement in very small cells, sometimes only with Arabic speakers, that caused inmates to attempt suicide. One Pakistani interviewed this month said he tried to kill himself four times in 18 months.

An Afghan prisoner who spent 14 months at the camp, at the American naval base at Guantánamo, described in April what he called the uncertainty and fear. "Some were saying this is a prison for 150 years," said Suleiman Shah, 30, a former Taliban fighter from Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan.

None of those interviewed complained of physical mistreatment. But the men said that for the first few months, they were kept in small wire-mesh cells, about 6 1/2 feet by 8 feet , in blocks of 10 or 20. The cells were covered by a wooden roof, but open at the sides to the elements.

"We slept, ate, prayed and went to the toilet in that small space," Mr. Shah said. Each man had two blankets and a prayer mat and slept and ate on the ground, he said.

The prisoners were taken out only once a week for a one-minute shower. "After four and a half months we complained and people stopped eating, so they said we could shower for five minutes and exercise once a week," Mr. Shah said. After that, he said, prisoners got to exercise for 10 minutes a week, walking around the inside of a cage 30 feet long.

In interviews at their homes, weeks after being released, he and the freed Pakistani detainee talked of what they said was the overwhelming feeling of injustice among the approximately 680 men detained indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay.

"I was trying to kill myself," said Shah Muhammad, 20, a Pakistani who was captured in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, handed over to American soldiers and flown to Guantánamo in January 2002. "I tried four times, because I was disgusted with my life.

"It is against Islam to commit suicide," he continued, "but it was very difficult to live there. A lot of people did it. They treated me as guilty, but I was innocent."

In the 18 months since the detention camp opened, there have been 28 suicide attempts by 18 individuals, with most of those attempts made this year, Capt. Warren Neary, a spokesman at the detention camp, said today. None of the prisoners have killed themselves, but one man has suffered severe brain damage, according to his lawyer.

The prisoners come from more than 40 countries, and include more than 50 Pakistanis, about 150 Saudis and three teenagers under 16, a majority of them captured in Afghanistan, said Dr. Najeef bin Mohamad Ahmed al-Nauimi, a former justice minister in Qatar, who is representing nearly 100 of the detainees.

Dr. Nauimi represents many of the Saudis, and American lawyers represent about 14 prisoners from Kuwait. There are also 83 Yemenis, he said, and a sprinkling of others, including Canadians, Britons, Algerians and Australians, and one Swede.

Since January 2002, at least 32 Afghan prisoners and three Pakistanis have been released from Guantánamo Bay. Five Saudis were recently handed over to the Saudi authorities. Yasser Esam Hamdi, an American-born Saudi, was moved from the camp to a military brig in Norfolk, Va., in April 2002. Captain Neary said 41 people had been released in all, but he could not give a more exact description.

At the same time, the military is preparing to place about 10 of the prisoners before a military tribunal soon, officials said this month.

Mr. Muhammad, who spent 18 months in Cuba before his release, said that "when they first took us there they would not let us talk, or stand or walk around the cell.

"At the beginning it was very hard to bear," he added. "There was no call to prayer, and there was no shade. In the afternoon the sun came in from the side."

Under the current routine, a majority of the prisoners remain in their cells but for two 15-minute periods a week, in which they walk around the cage and take a shower. In addition, the call to prayer is played over the prison's loudspeakers five times a day, according to Capt. Youseff Yee, the Muslim chaplain who oversees the religious needs of the Guantánamo prisoners.

Conditions improved after the first few months, and prisoners were moved to newly built cells with running water and a bed, Mr. Shah said. Interrogation was sporadic and it varied in length and intensity. Sometimes they were questioned after 10 days, or 20 days, and then not for several months, prisoners said.

But it was the uncertainty and fear that they would be there forever that drove many of them to despair, prisoners said.

"All of the people were worried about how long we would be there for," Mr. Shah said. "People were becoming mad because they were saying: `When will they release us? They should take us to the high court.' Many stopped eating."

One Taliban fighter from the southern province of Helmand, who only uses one name, Rustam, said in May that he was driven to trying to hang himself because he was in a block of Arabs and Uzbeks he described as "crazy."

"There were some very strange people, they were hitting their heads on the wall, insulting the soldiers, and that is why I hated it," said Rustam, who is 22, in an interview in an Afghan prison in Kabul. "I think they were really crazy people, and that's why I kept asking to be taken out for questioning."

When he tried to hang himself, Rustam said, the guards found him quickly. "They untied me and said `Don't do this,' " he said. "They gave me medicine, but it was no good. They put me under supervision and moved me to another place."

Mr. Muhammad, one of three Pakistani prisoners to be released at the end of April, said he first tried to hang himself because for months on end he was surrounded by Arabs and could not speak their language.

"It was difficult not talking to anyone for so long," he said. "It was because of the jail. They put me in a block full of Arabs, they were only letting us out for a very short time, and it was very difficult. I could feel myself going down."

After 11 months in the prison camp, he tied his bedsheet to a ceiling wire and hanged himself from it at 4 o'clock one afternoon. "I don't know what happened," he said. "They took me to the hospital. I was unconscious for two days."

Only after that suicide attempt, Mr. Muhammad said, did his American keepers tell him that he was only being held for questioning, and that one day he would go home. Tranquilizers were prescribed, he said, but he stopped taking the tablets after a while and attempted suicide again.

Then the doctors gave Mr. Muhammad a powerful injection that he said left him unable to control his head or his mouth or eat properly for weeks. Although he refused to have the injection, the military medical personnel gave it to him by force, he said. He made two further attempts to kill himself that he said were more protest actions at the conditions.

"We needed more blankets, but they would not listen," he said. "And I kept asking them to take me to the Afghan and Pakistani side. All the time I was with Arabs. I did not speak my own language for months." Mr. Muhammad also threatened to kill himself again if he was given another injection. He remained on tablets until his release, he said.

American officials have confirmed that one prisoner who tried to commit suicide remains in the prison hospital with severe brain damage. Dr. Nauimi said the prisoner was Mish al-Hahrbi, a Saudi schoolteacher. He said that the teacher became desperate over not knowing what his future held and that he tried to hang himself. The teacher was resuscitated but is unlikely to recover from a severe hemorrhage, the lawyer said.

Back home with time to ponder their ordeal, the former prisoners now want to demand compensation.

"The Americans said if anyone is innocent, they will get compensation," Mr. Muhammad said. "They held me for 18 months, and so they should give me compensation. They told me I was innocent, but they did not apologize."

Human rights organizations have raised concerns about the conditions at Guantánamo Bay and the unclear legal status of the detainees. The American military has refused to consider them prisoners of war, even though a majority were captured on the battlefield, and does not allow them access to lawyers. No charges have yet been brought against any of the detainees, some of whom have been there for 18 months.

Concerned about their prolonged detention without trial or clear legal status, the head of the International Red Cross, which visits the detainees, urged the Bush administration last month to start legal proceedings for the hundreds of detainees and to institute a number of changes in conditions at the camp.

Cmdr. Brian Grady, the staff psychiatrist at the camp's medical facility, said in a recent interview that most prisoners suffering from depression brought their symptoms with them to Cuba.

"I don't know what the effects of this particular confinement are," he said. "I'd be hesitant to comment." Officials at Guantánamo have generally dismissed the notion that the confinement and uncertainty about the future are specifically to blame.

"I would not particularly say these circumstances are a factor," Commander Grady said.

But Jamie Fellner, director of the United States program for Human Rights Watch, said in an interview that that was highly implausible.

"These conditions of confinement by themselves over a prolonged period are enormously psychologically stressful," she said. "Added to that is the uncertainty as to the future."

Ms. Fellner added that her group had not found any credible reports of physical abuse and that it had investigated several accounts of beatings and such that turned out to be unfounded.

Hospital officials said that about 5 percent of the inmates were suffering from depression and that they were being treated with antidepressants, typically Zoloft.

House Republicans Rewrite Head Start Provision