The American people need to prepare for a long-duration war against radical Muslims who are set to fight for 50 to 100 years to create an Islamist state in the region, a top Pentagon strategist in the war on terror says.  

"We're in a generational war. You can try and fight the enemy where they are and where they're attacking you, or prevent them and defend your own homeland," said Gen. Schissler, deputy director for the war on terrorism within the strategic plans office of the Pentagon's Joint Staff.     

"But that's not enough to stop it. We've got to break the chain, and that's ... the ideology. We really need to show the errors in Islamist extremist thinking."     

Gen. Schissler said he is concerned that Washington politics is weakening the will of the nation.
    
"I don't care about the politics. I care about people understanding the facts of what's our enemy is thinking about, what's our strategy to defeat them, and for [Americans] to understand that it will take a long fight, mostly because our enemy is committed to the long fight," he said. "They're absolutely committed to the 50-, 100-year plan."     

"One of my concerns is how to maintain the American will, the public will over that duration," he said.  

Al Qaeda's ultimate goal, the general said, is to set up an extremist "caliphate" stretching from western North Africa through southern Europe and along a path through the Middle East to Central and Southeast Asia.  

"We're pretty convinced that the extremists are not ever going to give up the fight," Gen. Schissler said, noting that they are driven by the concept of jihad that makes it a religious duty to wage terrorist war. 

The current war on terrorism requires fighting with ideas. In the Cold War, "we didn't beat ...the communists by militarily taking them to the battlefield," he said. "We took them to the intellectual battlefield and beat them against their ideas, the ideology of communism."  

One goal is to disrupt al Qaeda efforts to "radicalize" young people ages 19 to 25 through educational efforts. Another objective is to assist moderate Muslims who see extremism as unacceptable.  

Ultimately, Muslim scholars, clerics and other religious and government leaders will have to "take a stand," albeit one that carries grave risks because of the extremists' harsh methods, Gen. Schissler said.

A federal climate scientist in Boulder says his boss told him never to utter the word Kyoto and tried to bar him from using the phrase climate change at a conference.  . . .  

Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Boulder laboratory, said the ban on using the word Kyoto was issued about four years ago.  

"We were under instructions not to use the word Kyoto, which of course is absurd," said Tans, who measures levels of carbon dioxide at NOAA's Global Monitoring Division. He has worked for the agency since 1990.  

Tans said the order was issued verbally by his boss, David Hofmann, the division director. Another senior researcher at the Boulder laboratory, NOAA physicist James Elkins, said Hofmann told him the same thing.  . . .  

"When I asked why we weren't supposed to use Kyoto, I was told that we're not supposed to use it in the policy context," Elkins said. "I'm not supposed to be talking about policy."  . . .  

"There is suspicion at the moment," Tans said. "And that detracts from my credibility as a scientist because people might now think, well, can we trust this guy or is he just saying things that are officially approved?"  . . .  

But besides the use of the word Kyoto, there was a second incident with Hofmann, he said. It occurred in late 2005, while Tans was organizing the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference in Broomfield.  

Hofmann called Tans into his office before the September conference and told him the words climate change could not appear in the titles of any of the presentations, Tans said. The incident was reported by The Washington Post in April.

The US Republican party is changing tactics on the environment, avoiding ‘frightening’ phrases such as global warming, after a confidential party memo warned that it is the domestic issue on which George Bush is most vulnerable.  The memo, by the leading Republican consultant Frank Luntz, concedes the party has ‘lost the environmental communications battle’ and urges its politicians to encourage the public in the view that there is no scientific consensus on the dangers of greenhouse gases. ‘The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science,’ Mr Luntz writes in the memo, obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based campaigning organization. ‘Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.  The phrase ‘global warming’ should be abandoned in favor of ‘climate change’, Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as ‘conservationist’ instead of ‘environmentalist’, because ‘most people’ think environmentalists are ‘extremists’ who indulge in "some pretty bizarre behavior... that turns off many voters’.”  -- Guardian Unlimited      

In February [2006], there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he'd been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.  

At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters. . . .  

The e-mails also show that after Hurricane Katrina, NOAA press officers had to get clearance from the Department of Commerce for scientists to discuss global warming and hurricanes with the press. (NOAA is part of Commerce.) Regarding the request for a particular interview, Commerce press officer Catherine Trinh wrote, "Let's pass on this one." The response from a NOAA official reads, "Can I please have a reason?"  

Former White House advisers to George H.W. Bush are keenly disappointed and concerned about the current President Bush's initial reaction to the report by theIraq Study Group.  . . .  

Adding to the unease were President Bush's comments at his Thursday news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Top of Form

in which he avoided commenting on specifics in the ISG report. 

"We have a classic case of circling the wagons," says a former adviser to Bush the elder. "If President Bush changes his policy in Iraq in a fundamental way, it undermines the whole premise of his presidency. I just don't believe he will ever do that." 

White House advisers say Bush won't react in detail to the ISG report for several weeks, while he assesses it and awaits various internal government reports on the situation from his own advisers. Bush tells aides he doesn't want to "outsource" his role as commander in chief. Some Bush allies say this is a way to buy some time as the president tries to decide how to deal with rising pressure to alter his strategy in Iraq and hopes the critical media focus on the Iraq war will soften.

Sen. Gordon Smith's sudden about-face on the Iraq war -- in a Senate speech, he said the war was "absurd" and "may even be criminal" -- reverberated throughout Washington and across Oregon on Friday.  

The Oregon lawmaker, who had been a largely quiet supporter of President Bush's war policies until his floor speech Thursday night, became the first Republican senator to suggest that the United States quickly pull out many of its troops from the violence-racked country.

"I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way being blown up by the same bombs day after day," said Smith. "That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore."

A new study by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes concludes that the total costs of the Iraq war could top the $2 trillion mark. Reuters reports this total, which is far above the US administration's prewar projections, takes into account the long term healthcare costs for the 16,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq so far.  

The higher $2 trillion amount takes a 'moderate' approach. Both figures are based on the projection that US troops will remain in Iraq until 2010, with steadily decreasing numbers each year. The economists also used government data from past wars, and included such costs as the rise in the price of oil, a larger US deficit and greater global insecurity caused by the war, the loss to the economy from injured veterans who cannot contribute as productively as they would have done if not injured, and the increased costs of recruiting to replenish a military drained by repeated tours of duty in Iraq. These are items which are almost never included by the US government when determining the cost of the war.

The No Child Left Behind education act, which requires the states to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students in exchange for federal aid, has been under heavy fire since it was passed five years ago. Critics, some of whom never wanted accountability in the first place, have ratcheted up their attacks in anticipation of Congressional hearings and a reauthorization process that could get under way soon after the new Congress convenes in January.  

Those critics were empowered by a spate of recent studies showing that the nation has made slight overall progress in closing the achievement gap since the law went into effect. (A handful, including New York and New Jersey, are said to have made moderate progress.) The data has been seized upon as evidence that Congress set the bar too high.  . . .  

And the country can’t afford that. Unless we improve schools — especially for minority children who will make up the work force of the future — we will fall behind our competitors abroad who are doing a better job of educating the next generation.  

It’s impossible to brand No Child Left Behind as a failure, because its agenda has never been carried out. The law was supposed to remake schools that serve poor and minority students by breaking with the age-old practice of staffing those schools with poorly trained and poorly educated teachers. States were supposed to provide students with highly qualified teachers in all core courses by the beginning of the current academic year. That didn’t happen. 

The country would be much further down the road toward complying with No Child Left Behind if the Department of Education had given the states clear direction and the technical assistance they needed. Instead, the department simply ignored the provision until recently and allowed states to behave as though the teacher quality problem did not exist. Thanks to this approach, the country must now start from scratch on what is far and away the most crucial provision of the law.  . . .  

The battle for teacher quality is just getting under way. The country can either win that battle or watch its fortunes fade as the national work force becomes less and less competitive. Given what’s at stake, the teacher quality provision of No Child Left Behind deserves to be at the very top of the list when Congress revisits the law.