May 23: 2954

June 12 3195 11:45 p
June 13 3210 10:30p
June 14 3228 7:30p
June 15 3238
June 16 3249 11:45p
June 18 3274 8 a.m.
June 18 3288 10p.m
June 20 3350 11p.m
June 22 3371 8 a.m.
June 23 3381 10 a.m.
June 24 3408 10 p.m
June 26 3435 8 a,m.

June 27 3455 4p.m.
June 28 3465 9p.m.
June 29 3486 7p.m.
June 30 3501 11p.m.

Iranians Aren't About to Overthrow the Mullahs
Iranians may have lost faith in the mullahs, but they're not about to overthrow them.
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
July 2-9, 2007 issue - Where the heck are the mullahs? And what happened to all those angry young Revolutionary Guards eager to take you hostage—or, at the very least, spit in your face for personally representing the Great Satan? This is the most jarring impression an American caught in the time warp of 1979 has upon landing in today's Tehran, where Islamic fervor has been replaced by Islamic bling. Luxury stores are loaded with jewelry, leather handbags and knockoffs of Western designer brands, and coffee shops and restaurants are crowded late into the night. This is still the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course, so there are no bare shoulders or legs in sight, much less midriffs, even in the summer heat. But many Iranian women have long since cast off their chadors and gone defiantly chic, despite an abortive attempt by the government this past spring to reassert strictures on modesty, when it sent carloads of basij—or young paramilitaries—out to harass females who dared show too much skin or hair. The typical look around town consists of perfect makeup (spread over exquisitely straight noses; cosmetic surgery is a huge business here), faded jeans under form-fitting Islamic "manteaus"—a sort of truncated raincoat that comes to mid-thigh—and colorful silk higabs loosely arrayed over the backs of their heads.

Iranian males, meanwhile, are looking less and less menacing and more and more metrosexual. The younger ones often wear their hair long, which 10 years ago might have provoked a brutal barbering on the street by enraged Islamists. Some of these "Saturday Night Fever" types even sport facial powder and eyeliner (although the police, who are gingerly feeling their way through these changes, did recently issue a directive ordering men not to tweeze their eyebrows). The U.S. Embassy compound that seared itself into the memory of every American nearly 30 years ago—when it was surrounded by wild-eyed radicals—is a tatty relic, and the paint on the DEATH TO USA signs out front has faded. The brown-brick pile is simply ignored by most Iranians as they whiz by on the boulevard.

Beneath the surface, though, one finds that the Islamic revolution is still alive and well. Too well, in fact. Although the revolution has curbed many of its excesses, it's become institutionalized. It is an old, familiar umbrella of oppression that now stays just distant enough to be tolerated, even if it is little loved. The clerics who still control Iran can upset lives at any time, however, and without recourse to legal appeal. Parnaz Azima knows something about this. Azima is an Iranian-American newscaster for Radio Farda, a Persian-language station funded by U.S. government money. When she returned to Tehran a few months ago to visit her ailing 94-year-old mother, she suddenly had her passport seized. Her crime? "Propaganda against the regime," she was told by mysterious interrogators from the Ministry of Intelligence who accused her of being part of George W. Bush's $75 million program to promote democracy inside Iran.

The president's effort, launched more than a year ago, has so far had the opposite effect of what Bush intended. Even though it's made little headway in promoting discontent with the regime, the mullahs have used it to intimidate reformers by tainting them as U.S. collaborators. "All the local democracy [groups] are complaining about it," said Azima, a thin, frail woman wearing a beige manteau and paisley higab, in an interview at her lawyer's office. "They don't want to have contact with me." Azima (who's out on bail) and three other Iranian-Americans who have been detained at Tehran's Evin Prison on similar charges have become causes célèbres back in Washington. But in Tehran no one is rallying for their release.

Such is the paradox of Iran today. After years of turmoil, including mass street protests against the regime in the 1990s, the revolution has adapted. Among the public, political apathy now reigns. Active political opposition to Islamic rule is all but gone. And the current government, led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is adopting a rather savvy tactic of letting ordinary people enjoy themselves a bit and, above all, taste the fruits of prosperity. He can afford to do so, sitting on $70 billion to $80 billion in oil revenue a year, which he uses to subsidize Iran's isolated economy (though Ahmadinejad has become widely unpopular for reintroducing state control of private business and driving up inflation). At the same time, his government is permitting less and less political dissent. Radio and TV are totally controlled by the government, and newspapers—which remain quasi independent—were recently confronted with a new, stricter censorship code.

Young Iranians say it's still possible to have a life. As long as one doesn't cross certain known "red lines"—like openly criticizing the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the mullah state doesn't ruthlessly crush dissent. Instead, the government tries to nitpick and hound offenders out of the political arena. If your newspaper goes a bit over the line—which usually means questioning the clerics—the authorities will ban it for a few months. If you want to run for office but run afoul of the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Intelligence or Iran's all-powerful Guardian Council—which ensures Islamic fealty—you won't be arrested in the dead of night and taken to a secret prison. Instead, your application to get on the ballot will just be mysteriously denied.

The success of this oppressive but subtly effective system should give the regime-change advocates in Washington some pause. From the evidence in the streets of Tehran, there is no indication that this is a government or a political system that's ripe for overturning. In fact most Iranians—government officials and opposition figures alike—tend to poke fun at the Bush democracy program. "If the Americans are willing to spend their budget inside [Iran] for the purpose they are pursuing, they should just give the money to us directly," Ali Larijani, the chairman of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told NEWSWEEK with a laugh. "They are just distributing it through the wrong channels."

The sense one gets on the ground that the regime will endure is shared by experts at the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, according to U.S. officials who are familiar with current intelligence reporting and analysis but request anonymity because of the sensitive subject matter. In public testimony to Congress last year, John Negroponte, then the U.S. intelligence czar, noted that "hard-liners have control of all the major branches and institutions of government."

Iran's oil-fueled prosperity tends to undercut another still-prevalent idea in Washington and European capitals: that with yet one more set of U.N. sanctions Iran will give up its nuclear program. Even many reformers who despise Ahmadinejad and his clumsy defiance of international opinion say that's not going to happen. America's confrontational approach to Iran, says S.M.H. Adeli, Iran's former ambassador to London, "has already gone on for three decades, and it hasn't worked. Why should it work now?" U.N. sanctions are shrugged off by most Iranians as a cost of doing business, adding about 6 percent to prices in general.

As if to prove that it isn't about to be cast onto history's ash heap, the old Islamic Republic still reasserts itself spasmodically. Two weeks ago, the world was treated to the familiar images of black-clad religious protesters pelting guests at a British Embassy reception with paint bombs. The idea, again, was to intimidate the many upscale Iranian invitees from associating with the West (it worked: hundreds didn't show up). But Iranians say that what the TV cameras didn't show was the crowds of passersby who went about their daily business, ignoring the orchestrated event. "In other countries, theater is done indoors. Here we do it out on the streets," jokes Mohammadreza Behzadian, head of Tehran's Chamber of Commerce.

So where is Iran headed? Religious conservatives today openly invoke the "China model," whereby the mandarins in Beijing managed to quash political dissent after the Tiananmen Square democracy movement by redirecting the desire for more freedom into a booming economy. Here in Iran, the political ferment that appeared in the 1990s when the reformist President Mohammad Khatami took office has been tamped down with an analogous formula: Ahmadinejad and his "new right" have kept most of the Khatami-era social reforms and focused most of their ire on weeding out dissenters. Warning to Washington: it seems to be working.

With Babak Pirouz in Tehran and Mark Hosenball in Washington

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19392351/site/newsweek/page/0/

Iran scrambling to counter Western psychological operations

Iran is actively preparing countermeasures to what its military calls a psychological war being waged by the West over its nuclear program.

An Iranian man walks past a damaged petrol station in northwest Tehran, on June 27. AFP/Behrouz Mehri
Teheran’s military has been drafting measures to respond to Western propaganda broadcasts and other efforts intended to undermine the regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Officials said the measures included a crackdown on trade unions, students and other dissidents.
Iranian Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said the civilian sector must be prepared to counter the Western psychological warfare campaign. Firouzabadi said the government and military would make this a priority over the next year.

"Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has designated the current Iranian year as the year of economic progress, thwarting psychological war of the enemies and making progress in the field of science and technology," Firouzabadi said on June 23.

In an address to military commanders, Firouzabadi did not specify what measures would be used to counter Western psychological warfare tactics. The address came as the government has cracked down on dissidents throughout Iran.

The chief of staff said Iran must prepare for a Western onslaught in an effort to halt Teheran's nuclear program. Firouzabadi said the military was on the verge of unspecified breakthroughs in science and technology.

Bush May Be Out of Chances For a Lasting Domestic Victory
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 29, 2007; A01

NEWPORT, R.I., June 28 -- He looked uncharacteristically dejected as he approached the lectern, fiddling with papers as he talked and avoiding the sort of winking eye contact he often makes with reporters. And then President Bush did something he almost never does: He admitted defeat.

"A lot of us worked hard to see if we couldn't find a common ground," he said an hour after his immigration plan died on Capitol Hill. "It didn't work."

It was, in the end, simply a statement of reality after the Senate buried his proposal to overhaul immigration laws. But for a president who makes a point of never giving in, even when he loses, it was a striking moment, underscoring the depth of his political travails. It took almost two years before Bush acknowledged, just months ago, that his effort to reshape Social Security had failed. Now he has surrendered in what was probably his last chance of securing a legacy-making second-term domestic victory.

The desultory appearance in a college hallway here after a speech on Iraq may have marked the death of ambition in Bush's legislative agenda. The paradigm shift that senior adviser Karl Rove saw after the 2004 election has now proved illusory. The Ownership Society that Bush promised to build in 2005 is rarely mentioned these days. Even the hope-against-hope optimism of finding bipartisan common ground after the 2006 elections has officially evaporated.

"Sand is flowing out of the hourglass," said Fred I. Greenstein, a Princeton University scholar on the presidency, who was struck by the gloomy tone of Bush's televised statement. "He looked much less like the kid on the cover of Mad magazine without a care. . . . He looked very angry and almost having difficulty getting the sentences out. That seems to me to contrast with some of the early stages" of his presidency.

Bush emerged from reelection with four main domestic priorities for his second term, as identified by Rove and other aides: He planned to reinvent Social Security to allow investment of some funds in the stock market, overhaul the tax code from top to bottom, bring millions of illegal immigrants out of the shadows and impose tough new curbs on what he called excessive litigation. He is now almost zero-for-four.

The Social Security plan died when a Republican Congress decided not to take it up. Tax overhaul died when Bush took the report he commissioned and put it on a shelf because it would be too provocative. And though he pushed through limits on class-action lawsuits, the rest of his litigation program -- proposals to restrict medical malpractice awards and settle long-standing asbestos claims -- has been stalled for years.

Bush has lately sketched out a new agenda in areas such as energy and health care, and he may yet make progress on those in the 18 months he has left. But going forward, aides acknowledged, the once swaggering president will be in a defensive crouch. His immediate domestic plans include imploring lawmakers to reauthorize his No Child Left Behind education program, while trying to stop Congress from expanding a children's health insurance program and, with it, the federal deficit.

Although each fight has had its own dynamics, aides broadly blame the collapse of Bush's domestic agenda on the war in Iraq, which soured Congress and the public even before Democrats won control of the Hill last November. And yet, with his legislative prospects vanishing, the remainder of his presidency comes back again to Iraq, as demonstrated again Thursday when he tried to make the case for sticking to his current strategy during an address at the Naval War College.

Flanked by flat-panel televisions showing maps of Anbar province, photos of a blown-up mosque and charts of falling violence, Bush said he was "encouraged" by what he called "hopeful signs" since the extra troops he sent arrived in Iraq. Yet even in this military setting, the audience responded politely and without much enthusiasm, withholding applause except for introductions until deep into the speech and posing a couple of tough questions after it was over.

"At the beginning of your speech, you said that you consult with the military," said one woman. "With all due respect sir, how much do you really listen and follow them?"

"Yes," he answered. "A lot. I don't see how you can be the commander in chief of a well-motivated military without listening carefully to the advice of your commanders."

Aides tried to portray the defeat of the immigration legislation as a failure of Congress rather than of the president. "This is the kind of thing that frustrates the American people, that Congress was unable to come together and get something done on an issue that was clearly important to the public," said a senior official. "This is the reason why people are rejecting Washington."

White House aides bemoaned how little has been accomplished during the first six months of the Democratic Congress, noting that public approval of Congress has plummeted even lower than Bush's ratings. Unspoken in that critique was the fact that the immigration defeat was dealt largely by members of the president's party.

Still, Bush got a break from Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). When the immigration bill stalled several weeks ago, Reid blamed Bush. But on Thursday, he gave Bush credit for trying. "The president worked hard, and so did many senators," Reid said. "But the big winner today was obstruction. The big winner today was inaction."

Bush recognizes that his time is running short. In March, he told an audience in Guatemala that he had to get an immigration bill to his desk by August to have a chance of success. After that, he reasoned, the congressional budget calendar and the presidential election campaign would make it impossible. But he and Rove remained supremely confident that they would prevail. Just 17 days ago, while in Bulgaria, Bush brushed off pessimism about the legislation. "I'll see you at the bill-signing," he predicted.

By Thursday, his tone had changed. He made no pretense that the immigration initiative might still be revived before he leaves office. Instead, he indicated that he is moving on to other issues. He would probably not admit to being humbled, but he appeared at least chagrined.

At one point during his Iraq speech, Bush pleaded for patience with Iraqis trying to pass reconciliation legislation. "In a democracy," he said, "the head of government just can't decree the outcome."

The audience laughed. Bush smiled wanly and joked: "I'm not saying that's what I'd like to do."

Staff writers Michael A. Fletcher and Michael Abramowitz in Washington contributed to this report.

Costs Skyrocket As DHS Runs Up No-Bid Contracts
$2 Million Security Project Balloons to $124 Million
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 28, 2007; A01

The project started in 2003 with a $2 million contract to help the new Department of Homeland Security quickly get an intelligence operation up and running.

Over the next year, the cost of the no-bid arrangement with consultant Booz Allen Hamilton soared by millions of dollars per month, as the firm provided analysts, administrators and other contract employees to the department's Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection offices.

By December 2004, payments to Booz Allen had exceeded $30 million -- 15 times the contract's original value. When department lawyers examined the deal, they found it was "grossly beyond the scope" of the original contract, and they said the arrangement violated government procurement rules. The lawyers advised the department to immediately stop making payments through the contract and allow other companies to compete for the work.

But the competition did not take place for more than a year. During that time, the payments to Booz Allen more than doubled again under a second no-bid arrangement, to $73 million, according to internal documents, e-mail and interviews.

The arrangements with the McLean consulting firm, one of the nation's largest government contractors, illustrate a transformation in the way the federal government often gets its work done: by relying on private, sometimes costly consultants to fill staffing shortfalls in federal agencies.

Contracting specialists said companies are increasingly being called upon to handle duties once considered appropriate only for government workers. And because the number of federal procurement workers responsible for overseeing spending has not kept pace, the spending on such contracts often soars far beyond approved estimates, the specialists said.

Elaine C. Duke, the department's chief procurement officer, acknowledged the problems with the Booz Allen contract in a recent interview. She said that the "contracting officers were stretched thin" and that the managers running the program were unable to provide clear guidance about what they needed to buy. But Duke said those matters have been resolved. She defended a decision to issue a second no-bid contract in 2005 as necessary to keep an essential intelligence operation running until a competition could be held.

"It was the best out of the choices that we had on the table at the time," she said. "We couldn't have a gap in mission."

Booz Allen vice president Jack Mayer said his firm did quality work, followed federal rules and charged fair prices. Mayer said Booz Allen was prepared to compete with other companies for the work. He said the cost of the project ballooned because demands from the department's offices kept expanding.

"What happened was the hours that people were working," he said. "It wasn't Booz Allen's fault."

A review of memos, e-mail and other contracting documents obtained by The Washington Post show that in a rush to meet congressional mandates to establish the information analysis and infrastructure protection offices, agency officials routinely waived rules designed to protect taxpayer money. As the project progressed, the department became so dependent on Booz Allen that it lost the flexibility for a time to seek out other contractors or hire federal employees who might do the job for less.

The average annual cost of a contract employee is $250,000, almost twice that of a federal employee, according to an estimate recently cited by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

In May 2003, the Department of Homeland Security was trying to organize itself following the merger of 22 agencies. It immediately began to rely heavily on contractors to staff its operations and outfit offices with computer systems and other technology.

One of the core tasks it faced was the creation of operations that would analyze potential threats and protect government facilities, power plants and other parts of the nation's infrastructure. The department's offices were to be responsible for supporting the anti-terrorism efforts of other local, state and federal agencies, as well as the private sector, by sharing information about possible threats, government documents show.

The newly created department, however, had only a skeleton procurement staff. So it turned to the Department of Veterans Affairs to handle the contract award. Veterans Affairs officials in turn hired Booz Allen through the General Services Administration. Booz Allen is one of the government's biggest contractors, with about $2 billion in federal revenue, and had done extensive work for defense and intelligence agencies. The GSA had preapproved Booz Allen to provide engineering and professional services to federal agencies at set labor rates.

Such inter-agency arrangements offer flexibility to government agencies. But audits have found they can lead to diminished oversight and accountability. That's because responsibility for monitoring spending and work is divided among agencies.

Auditors at the Government Accountability Office said Homeland Security officials acknowledged that they often used such arrangements for the "speed and convenience -- not total value including cost." The GAO report last year cited the contract with Booz Allen as an example where there was insufficient planning and "no assurance of good value."

As the work at the Homeland Security offices grew, spending on labor costs quickly surpassed the original estimate and mounted throughout 2003 and 2004.

One indication of the minimal oversight:

In fall 2004, while the contract was administered by Veterans Affairs, Booz Allen took on a variety of tasks without government approval for as long as seven weeks, according to an e-mail by a Homeland Security procurement official. "VA never Oked the work, by an order or verbally," contracting officer Paul Attorri wrote.

A Booz Allen spokesman said details about the apparent lapse were unavailable. But he said the firm had a valid contract during the period in question.

On Dec. 21, 2004, the Homeland Security Department decided it was time to take back control of the contract's management from Veterans Affairs. Department lawyers and procurement officials soon discovered that the deal "had grown many magnitudes beyond its original $2M,"Attorri wrote in an e-mail.

The discovery put Homeland Security officials in a hard place. The department had become so reliant on Booz Allen for support that contracting officials said the information analysis office "would not be able to function, let alone attempt to carry out their missions" without the firm's employees, a contracting official later wrote.

That support work included intelligence analysis, preparation of congressional reports, budget activities and other tasks crucial to the operation of the office, documents show.

To buy themselves time to solicit bids, agency officials decided they should award Booz Allen a temporary "bridge" contract through the GSA to keep the infrastructure and intelligence analysis offices running. As part of that move, the department used its authority to dispense with federal acquisition procedures that would have brought extra delays -- and more scrutiny -- to the project, according to memos, e-mail and interviews with procurement officials.

Throughout the spring of 2005, for instance, Booz Allen worked for months with only "verbal authorization" from Homeland Security officials, rather than a written contract, as the department continued working on the bridge contract, according to Duke, the department's procurement chief.

In March 2005, a senior agency procurement official asked for approval in an e-mail to waive a requirement that the department draw up a plan for spending the money. The reason: The bridge contract was "contemplated only as a short-term sole-source" arrangement. Ashley J. Lewis, the department's director of acquisition policy and oversight at the time, approved the request less than a day after he received it: "You've got it," Lewis said in a brief response.

Contracting officials did not create a statement of the work that would "require measurable performance and quality standards" from Booz Allen. A contracting specialist wrote that "the massive effort . . . was not feasible in this situation" because the bridge contract was considered temporary.

Officials did not require Booz Allen to provide a fixed price for the work they would be doing -- a standard way of preventing cost overruns; the government agreed to pay the firm by the hour on an open-ended basis. Officials used that approach because they did not know how much the project would eventually cost. Booz Allen's labor rates ran $42 to $383 an hour.

On May 25, 2005, Homeland Security approved the temporary contract that would keep the offices operating. The deal was projected to be worth $18 million, a third more than previously estimated.

Because its approval took so long, the arrangement was technically slated to end less than a week later, when the department hoped to allow other companies to bid for the work. But the "bridge contract" did not end, and costs continued to rise.

On June 1, 2005, the temporary contract was extended, as the agency approved the first of multiple modifications to the work that would increase spending by at least $25 million more.

When Booz Allen finally faced competition last year, Homeland Security had broken the work into five contracts. In total, those contracts were worth more than $50 million over a year's time.

Booz Allen won them all.