Cheney's Daughter Joins Romney Camp

Jan 27 12:48 PM US/Eastern

MIAMI (AP) - Liz Cheney, one of Vice President Dick Cheney's daughters, has signed onto Mitt Romney's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.
Cheney most recently worked in the State Department handling Middle East affairs.

While her father and President Bush have both vowed to remain neutral as their fellow Republicans battle it out for the GOP nomination, the endorsement is likely to be well received among conservatives who comprise a critical primary voting bloc in both Florida, which votes Tuesday, and the 20-odd states voting Feb. 5.

Romney has also enjoyed the support of aides with ties to the Bush family, including top assistants to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former President George H.W. Bush.

Liz Cheney, 41, is the elder of Dick and Lynne Cheney's two daughters. Her younger sister, Mary, has been more prominently in the public eye after revealing she is a lesbian and having a son last year with her partner, Heather Poe, despite the administration's opposition to gay marriage.

Liz Cheney, the mother of five children, said in a statement: "Throughout his campaign, (Romney) has distinguished himself as a leader who can guide our country with a clear vision for overcoming the threats we face today. ... I look forward to working with Governor Romney because he is the leader our country needs."

Romney said Liz Cheney brings the campaign "years of experience helping to formulate America's foreign policy and to advance democracy and reform in the Middle East."

Liz Cheney previously supported former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, who dropped out of the race last week.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Barnett: War extends frontier on man-machine interface

By Thomas P.M. Barnett
Sunday, January 27, 2008

War, while horrifically cruel, does spur technological advance, and not just in killing people. Nowhere is that seen better than medical care of the wounded, especially those who've suffered amputations.

Recent breakthroughs suggest that scientists are on the verge of redefining the human-machine interface, with significant repercussions for an aging global population.

A bit of history first, then some sense of the current challenge.

Artificial body parts (e.g., noses, ears, eyes) began appearing more than 4,000 years ago, with history recording in 500 B.C. that the first artificial limb belonged to a Persian soldier whose wooden foot replaced one that he himself had hacked off to escape chained captivity.

Surgical amputation as a life-saving measure began to spread in 1500s, but the real inflection point came in the American Civil War, where the introduction of the anesthesia chloroform allowed doctors to better shape surviving limb tissue.

Not surprisingly, mass manufacturing of artificial limbs likewise took off in the Civil War.

Confederate soldier J.E. Hanger, an early amputee, went on to found the world's first great prosthesis factory. His namesake company remains a global industry leader to this day.

Along the same line, the world's single biggest consumer of artificial limbs is the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which dispenses thousands of new ones each year to its aging service population while replacing tens of thousands more.

Following our military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military hospitals have also cared for hundreds of soldiers who've lost limbs in combat, mostly from close explosions.

Casting our net more widely, we see that the vast majority of the roughly 2 million Americans who've suffered a loss of limb did so as a result of infections, circulatory diseases and cancer, causes often associated with relative affluence.

In the world's less developed regions, the main culprits are congenital defects, accidents (industrial and vehicular) and land mines. For example, there are an estimated 400,000 land-mine survivors spread across roughly 80 postwar countries.

Nonetheless, the future market for prosthetics is far more tied to global aging than to regional conflicts. As globalization raises incomes in emerging markets, a larger share of the world's population lives longer lives - the ultimate affluence.

Extended lives translate into far higher rates of cancer and heart disease. So, if one out of every 150 Americans today employs some form of prosthesis, by 2050, a world populated by 9 billion-plus humans could easily produce a pool of 50 million or more users.

Now let's switch over to modern science, where the U.S. Defense Department has recently pumped in tens of billions of research dollars in response to our first extended overseas conflicts since Vietnam.

Thanks to recent advances in material sciences, the construction of artificial limbs has improved dramatically in the last few years. That means not only heightened functionality but lower cost.

For example, the stunningly sturdy Jaipur foot, so named for the Indian town in which it was developed, combines advanced materials with elegant engineering at the affordable price of $40. But it's the interface of man and machinery to which I most want to draw your attention.

Up to now, about the best we've been able to accomplish is using healthy neighboring tissue to signal, through muscle contractions, desired motion in robotic limbs. While that gets you simple actions, like squeezing an object, a lot of desired articulation is clearly lost in that crude translation.

But here are two promising research efforts that suggest we're approaching far more profound capabilities.

The first involves MIT research into advanced computer algorithms that directly convert brain signals into actions by prosthetic devices - mental intention electronically recast as code. Huge translation challenges remain, especially at the exact point of tissue-machine interface.

That takes us to some exciting work being done at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where scientists have spent the last half decade coaxing manmade carbon nanofibers into integrating directly with cells.

These infinitesimally small spiked structures actually penetrate neural cells to the point where electrical signaling is possible in both directions, meaning we effectively tap into the body's internal communications network.

Darth Vader meets the Six Million Dollar Man? It's not at all fantastic.

But here's hoping it doesn't take too many more lengthy wars to keep this ball rolling. The quickest route to biological limb regeneration shouldn't run through a minefield.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a distinguished strategist at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies and senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

© 2008 Knoxville News Sentinel

By HAMID AHMED, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 43 minutes ago
Iraqi soldiers reached the northern city of Mosul on Sunday for an operation against al-Qaida in Iraq, days after some 40 people were killed in a house explosion followed by a suicide attack against a senior police official.

The American military, meanwhile, reported two soldiers killed in separate bombings in Baghdad — one on a foot patrol Saturday near the northwestern area of Kazimiyah and another whose vehicle was struck Sunday by a roadside bomb in the city's northeast.

The United States has said Iraqi security forces will take the lead in Mosul as a major test of Washington's long-range plans, which seek to keep a smaller American force in Iraq as backup for local soldiers and police.

Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said most army reinforcements have reached the city, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, although he declined to give a number.

"The operations against al-Qaida in Mosul will start soon," al-Askari said, adding that the operation would include armored vehicles, tanks and helicopters.

An Iraqi military officer in Mosul, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the operation, confirmed that some Iraqi units had arrived on the city's outskirts.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Abdul-Karim Khalaf, said separately that 3,000 residents in Mosul will be recruited to augment the city's police force.

The U.S. military did not indicate it had any plans to send additional forces to the city, which is believed to be the last urban safehaven for al-Qaida-led insurgents.

"Regarding Mosul, an area where we recognize is of strategic importance to al-Qaida, our operations will continue in that area again not in a new way but in a continued way," said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a military spokesman.

Smith said "tens of thousands of pounds of explosive material" were in the abandoned building that exploded Wednesday, devastating nearby houses and killing at least 34 people. But he declined to assign blame.

"We're still working with the Iraqi security forces to determine exactly what happened in terms of why it exploded or how it exploded," Smith said Sunday at a news conference.

The military has said al-Qaida was believed to be behind a suicide attack the next day that killed the Ninevah provincial police chief and two other officers as they toured the site of the blast.

In other violence, a former city official was stabbed to death along with his wife and daughter in their home in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad, officials said Sunday.

The knife-wielding attackers stormed the two-story house late Saturday, killing Ahmed Jwad Hashim, his wife and their daughter, and leaving a visiting nephew seriously wounded, according to police and hospital officials.

Neighbors gathered outside the white clapboard doors and trim bushes surrounding the house told AP Television News that Hashim, a Shiite engineer from Karbala, had been the director-general of the Baghdad municipality office until he retired about four months ago.

The slaughter occurred in Talbiyah, a middle-class neighborhood on the fringes of the Shiite militia stronghold of Sadr City.

Police and officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Overall violence has dropped dramatically in Baghdad and surrounding areas, a decline largely attributed to an influx of U.S. troops, a Sunni movement against al-Qaida in Iraq and a cease-fire order by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to his Mahdi Army militia.

But sporadic attacks continue and the U.S. military has warned that the reduced threat from al-Qaida has given way to nonsectarian crimes, including kidnapping, corruption and extortion.

___

Associated Press writer Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.

Ex-Indonesian dictator Suharto dies
By ANTHONY DEUTSCH, Associated Press Writer
54 minutes ago
Former Indonesian President Suharto, the U.S. Cold War ally who led one of the 20th century's most brutal dictatorships over 32 years that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died Sunday. He was 86.

Suharto had been ailing in a hospital in the capital, Jakarta, since Jan. 4 when he was admitted with failing kidneys, heart and lungs.

Finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998, Suharto's departure opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim nation of 235 million people and he withdrew from public life, rarely venturing from his comfortable villa on a leafy lane in the capital.

But Suharto also oversaw decades of economic expansion that made Indonesia the envy of the developing world. Today, nearly a quarter of Indonesians live in poverty, and many long for the Suharto era's stability, when fuel and rice were affordable.

In a televised address, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called on "the people of Indonesia to pay their last respects to one of Indonesia's best sons ... who has done very great service to his beloved nation."

Yudhoyono's office declared a week of national mourning and he was to oversee a state funeral Monday once Suharto's body had been flown by a fleet of 11 Air Force planes to be placed in the family mausoleum.

As is customary in Islamic tradition, Suharto's body was to be washed and joint prayers were held at the family home in the presence of his six children, Yudhoyono and dozens of the country's ruling elite.

"My father passed away peacefully," sobbed Suharto's eldest daughter, Tutut. "May God bless him and forgive all of his mistakes."

Suharto ruled with a totalitarian dominance that saw soldiers stationed in every village, instilling a deep fear of authority across this Southeast Asian nation of some 6,000 inhabited islands that stretch across more than 3,000 miles.

Jeffrey Winters, associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University, predicted a time when Indonesians would "realize that Suharto is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century."

Those who profited from Suharto's rule made sure he was never portrayed in a harsh light at home, Winters said, so even though he was an "iron-fisted, brutal, cold-blooded dictator," he was able to stay in his native country.

Since being forced from power, he had been in and out of hospitals after strokes caused brain damage and impaired his speech. Blood transfusions and a pacemaker prolonged his life, but he suffered from lung, kidney, liver and heart problems and slipped into a coma on Sunday.

Suharto was vilified by historians, rights groups and his critics as one of the world's most brutal rulers and was accused of overseeing a graft-ridden reign. But poor health — and continuing corruption, critics charge — kept him from court after he was chased from office by widespread unrest at the peak of the Asian financial crisis.

He was protected by influential loyalists in the military and government who feared they could be implicated if Suharto ever took the witness stand.

The bulk of political killings blamed on Suharto occurred in the 1960s, soon after he seized power. In later years, some 300,000 people were slain, disappeared or starved in the independence-minded regions of East Timor, Aceh and Papua, human rights groups and the United Nations say.

Suharto's successors as head of state — B.J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Yudhoyono — vowed to end graft that took root under Suharto, yet it remains endemic at all levels of Indonesian society.

With the court system paralyzed by corruption, the country has not confronted its bloody past. Rather than put on trial those accused of mass murder and multibillion-dollar theft, some members of the political elite consistently called for charges against Suharto to be dropped on humanitarian grounds.

On Sunday, hundreds of mourners — some weeping — flocked to the family home in downtown Jakarta.

"I felt crushed when I heard he had died. We have lost a great man," said Mamiarti, a 43-year-old housekeeper. "It used to be easy to find jobs. Now it is hard."

But critics say Suharto squandered Indonesia's vast natural resources of oil, timber and gold, siphoning the nation's wealth to benefit his cronies, foreign corporations, and family like a mafia don.

Winters said the graft effectively robbed "Indonesia of some of the most golden decades, and its best opportunity to move from a poor to a middle class country."

Like many Indonesians, Suharto used only one name. He was born on June 8, 1921, to a family of rice farmers in the village of Godean, in the dominant Indonesian province of Central Java.

When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch in 1949, Suharto quickly rose through the ranks of the military to become a staff officer.

His career nearly foundered in the late 1950s, when the army's then-commander, Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, accused him of corruption in awarding army contracts.

Absolute power came in September 1965 when the army's six top generals were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and their bodies dumped in an abandoned well in an apparent coup attempt against Sukarno, Indonesia's founding father who helped win independence from the Dutch.

Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces and promoted himself to four-star general.

Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists and trade unionists, a campaign that stood as the region's bloodiest event since World War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later. Experts put the number of deaths during the purge at between 500,000 and 1 million.

Over the next year, Suharto eased out Sukarno, who died under house arrest in 1970. The legislature rubber-stamped Suharto's presidency and he was re-elected unopposed six times.

During the Cold War, Suharto was considered a reliable friend of Washington, which didn't oppose his violent occupation of Papua in 1969 and the bloody 1974 invasion of East Timor. The latter, a former Portuguese colony, became Asia's youngest country with a U.N.-sponsored plebiscite in 1999.

Even Suharto's critics agree his hard-line policies kept a lid on Indonesia's extremists and held together the ethnically diverse and geographically vast nation. He locked up hundreds of suspected Islamic militants without trial, some of whom later carried out deadly suicide bombings with the al-Qaida-linked terror network Jemaah Islamiyah after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Meanwhile, the ruling clique that formed around Suharto — nicknamed the "Berkeley mafia" after their American university, the University of California, Berkeley — transformed Indonesia's economy and attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment.

By the late 1980s, Suharto was describing himself as Indonesia's "father of development," taking credit for slowly reducing the number of abjectly poor and modernizing parts of the nation.

But the government also became notorious for unfettered nepotism, and Indonesia was regularly ranked as one of the world's most corrupt nations as Suharto's inner circle amassed fabulous wealth. The World Bank estimates 20 percent to 30 percent of Indonesia's development budget was embezzled during his rule.

Even today, Suharto's children and aging associates have considerable sway over the country's business, politics and courts. Efforts to recover the money have been fruitless.

Suharto's youngest son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, was released from prison in 2006 after serving a third of a 15-year sentence for ordering the assassination of a Supreme Court judge. Another son, Bambang Trihatmodjo, joined the Forbes list of wealthiest Indonesians in 2007, with $200 million from his stake in the conglomerate Mediacom.

Suharto's economic policies, based on unsecured borrowing by his cronies, dramatically unraveled shortly before he was toppled in May 1998. Indonesia is still recovering from what economists called the worst economic meltdown anywhere in 50 years.

State prosecutors accused Suharto of embezzling about $600 million via a complex web of foundations under his control, but he never saw the inside of a courtroom. In September 2000, judges ruled he was too ill to stand trial, though many people believed the decision really stemmed from the lingering influence of the former dictator and his family.

In 2007, Suharto won a $106 million defamation lawsuit against Time magazine for accusing the family of acquiring $15 billion in stolen state funds.

The former dictator told the news magazine Gatra in a rare interview in November 2007 that he would donate the bulk of any legal windfall to the needy, while he dismissed corruption accusations as "empty talk."

Suharto's wife of 49 years, Indonesian royal Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. The couple had three sons and three daughters.

Top agents in secret trip to Pakistan
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer
5 minutes ago
The top two U.S. intelligence officials made a secret visit to Pakistan in early January to seek permission from President Pervez Musharraf for greater involvement of American forces in trying to ferret out al-Qaida and other militant groups active in the tribal regions along the Afghanistan border, a senior U.S. official said.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity given the secret nature of the talks, declined to disclose what was said, but Musharraf was quoted two days after the Jan. 9 meeting as saying U.S. troops would be regarded as invaders if they crossed into Pakistan to hunt al-Qaida militants.

The New York Times — which first reported on the secret visit by CIA Director Michael Hayden and Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence — said Musharraf rebuffed an expansion of an American presence in Pakistan at the meeting, either through overt CIA. missions or by joint operations with Pakistani security forces.

Pakistan has been under growing U.S. pressure to crack down on militants in its tribal regions close to the Afghan border, a rugged area long considered a likely hiding place for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, as well as an operating ground for Taliban militants planning attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Several U.S. presidential candidates have hinted they would support unilateral action in the area.

In a Jan. 11 interview, Musharraf told The Straits Times of Singapore that U.S. troops would "certainly" be considered invaders if they set foot in the tribal regions. "If they come without our permission, that's against the sovereignty of Pakistan," he said. "I challenge anybody coming into our mountains. They would regret that day."

South Waziristan is a semiautonomous region where the central government has never had much control. It is home to scores of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, many of whom fled there from neighboring Afghanistan after the U.S-led invasion in 2001.

The border region emerged as a front line in the war on extremist groups after Musharraf allied Pakistan with the U.S. following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Washington has given Pakistan billions of dollars in aid to help government forces battle militants.

Musharraf, who toured Europe last week seeking support for his embattled government, rejected claims that the violence was a sign of a resurgent Taliban. More than 150 rebels and soldiers are reported to have been killed in the region this month alone.

Musharraf in the past has credited cooperation between Pakistani intelligence services and the CIA, both of whom believe that Pakistani militant leader Baitullah Mehsud was the mastermind of the Dec. 27 gun and suicide bomb attack that killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

But the State Department's counterterrorism chief, Dell Dailey, said Tuesday that the Bush administration was displeased with "gaps in intelligence" received from Pakistan about the activities of extremist groups in the tribal regions.

"We don't have enough information about what's going on there. Not on al-Qaida. Not on foreign fighters. Not on the Taliban," he said.

Dailey, a retired Army lieutenant general with extensive background in special operations, said Pakistan needs to fix the problem. However, said the U.S. wasn't likely to conduct military strikes inside Pakistan on its own, saying that would anger many Pakistanis.

Rather than allow an increased U.S. presence, the Times reported that Pakistan and the United States are discussing other joint efforts, such as increased use of armed Predator surveillance aircraft over the tribal areas, and identifying ways the U.S. can speed intelligence information to Pakistani security forces.

The paper said the Jan. 9 trip by McConnell and Hayden came five days after senior administration officials debated new strategies for dealing with Pakistan. It had reported previously that no decisions were made at that meeting of the National Security Council, which included top administration officials, but not President Bush.

The times quoted a senior officials as saying "the purpose of the mission (by McConnell and Hayden) was to convince Musharraf that time is ticking away" and that the increased attacks on Pakistan would ultimately undermine his effort to stay in office.