Israel Defense Forces paratroopers caught a Palestinian boy aged 14 wearing an explosive belt at the Hawara roadblock, south of Nablus, in the West Bank on Wednesday afternoon.

. . . The family of the boy said that he was gullible. "He doesn't know anything," his brother, Hosni, said.

In a statement, the Israel branch of Physicians for Human Rights condemned the Palestinian militants for sending the teenager on a bombing mission.

The statement said, "Adults should cease to exploit children by making them take part in such acts." The Israeli branch of the physicans group often issues protests about Israel's practices in the territories.

Panel member Tim Roemer, a former Democrat congressman, told the Daily News that the U.S. should not have waited to make war on Al Qaeda [after the Cole bombing].

"Why do you need Bin Laden's fingerprints when his footprints are running you over? You don't need to trace this back to a cave," Roemer said.

Whether it be due to fear, indifference or disaffection, it's notable how few of today's popular entertainers ever make a political stand. Award wins are taken as an opportunity to thank their manager and the studio/record company, those who've made them rich and will hopefully continue to do so. It seems the spirit of the Sixties, where art went hand-in-hand with revolution and artists believed they could use their talent and status to change the world for the better, is dying.

Yet in some quarters it's dying hard. Some artists still believe, still mouth off, still endanger their careers in the name of human decency. And surely close to the top of this hallowed league is Tim Robbins. . . .

The son of an acutal folksinger, Gil Robbins of The Highwaymen, Tim Robbins was raised in an atmosphere of leftist protest in Greenwich Village, where his family moved when he was two so that his parents could be more involved in the antiwar movement. . . . He studied theater at SUNY and UCLA and has spent his adult life working in the movie business. It seems unlikely that Robbins has had significant contact with conservatives or conservative thought except through the medium of an ideology acquired in childhood and unchallenged through an intellectually cocooned adulthood.

. . . Unlike his ancestors on the left who believed in the inevitable final triumph of socialism, Robbins has absorbed the pessimism and paranoia of latter-day leftism, in its long convalescence from the rise of Reaganism and the fall of Communism. . . .

In Cradle Will Rock, not only is the plug pulled on Marc Blitzstein's proletarian musical (which actually happened, sort of), but Robbins fabricates a subplot that culminates in a young Nelson Rockefeller conspiring with the famously lowbrow William Randolph Hearst to manipulate the course of art history. The plan? Smother the politically dangerous social-realist art of the '30s by showering money and prestige on politically innocuous formalists. . . .

The utopian hopes and unquestioned faith of the insular political communities that molded Robbins may be appropriate sources of inspiration for folk anthems, academic conferences, and Ralph Nader stump speeches. But for satire? Effective satire is more likely to emerge from experience, bitter knowledge, and disillusionment, as it does, for example, in The Player. In Bob Roberts, the underlying experience is unlived, and as a result the satire is unearned, unknowing, and mostly unfunny. With a box office gross of $4.3 million, its returns were likewise unremunerative.

Indeed, when it comes to peddling the noble lie, no one outdoes Robbins himself. About Embedded, Robbins has this to say: "I'm not interested in any polemic. I'm not interested in any lecture." But Embedded is all polemic--a talking political pamphlet that doesn't even aspire to be aesthetic. If it's true that all art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art, then Robbins has produced a masterpiece of artless propaganda. Nowhere is this truer than in his depiction of the everyday soldiers whose dignity he pretends to champion. Rather than give us human beings, Robbins gives us socialist realism: cardboard cut-outs who, when not being victimized by the cabal, do little but lament the number of welfare mothers in their ranks and the unpaid bills they have left behind. Even in the hands of socialist artists whose adolescent romanticism about their own everymen was considerably more sophisticated than this, the idealization of such characters was always something of a lie; in the much less capable hands of Robbins, the lie has only become more obvious. Embedded's treatment of its soldiers is dilettantism masquerading as solidarity, contempt pretending to be sympathy. Contempt not only for the soldiers themselves, but for the audience, too--which Embedded hectors in precisely the same manner that Robbins accuses the U.S. government of doing.

I always love it when some record from the "Sixties folk music boom" comes on the radio, and one can wallow for three minutes in comically twee clean-cut earnestness: the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Brothers Four and all the other college boys pretending to be field-hands. As for the songs, I cannot improve on this trenchant analysis of Pete Seeger's lyric style by Minnesota's real funny man, James Lileks:

'If I Had A Hammer'? Well, what's stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they're about a buck-ninety, tops.

Just so. Anyhone can have a hammer, and hammer in the morning, hammer in the evening, hammer out danger, hammer out a warning, hammer out love between one's brothers and one's sisters all over the land. In fact, for the cost of a restricted-view seat at a Peter, Paul and Mary revival, you could buy half-a-dozen top-of-the-line hammers and have a lot more fun, even if you used them on yourself.

But I think the fact that the thought is idiotic is the point. If it made sense, it would sound too polished, too written, too Tin Pan Alley. It can't be easy sitting in your study and writing brand-new "folk" songs when you're a long way from the cotton fields, and somehow these guys got it into their heads that, if you sounded like a simpleton, it would come over as raw and authentic. I once spoke to a Vegas pal of Bobby Darin's, who gave an hilarious account of Darin, coming out of his finger-snappy tuxedo phase, and re-writing and re-re-writing his "folk anthem" "A Simple Song Of Freedom" because he was worried it was insufficiently simple.

The legacy of this period is less musical than political: forty years ago, the self-consciously childlike "folk song" met the civil rights movement and helped permanently infantilise the left. I caught an anti-war protest in Vermont last year and the entire repertoire was from the Sixties, starting with "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?", which as a poignant comment on soldiering was relevant in the Great War but has no useful contribution to make in a discussion on Iraq.

And that's where Christoper Guest and his team seem to have bottled out in their latest mockumentary, A Mighty Wind. Guest has carved himself a nice niche as an observer of the dorkier corners of showbusiness - the past-it rock group (This Is Spinal Tap), am dram (Waiting For Guffman), pedigree dogs (Best In Show). He's not a satirist; he loves his characters in all their doomed pretensions. But he did capture their worlds completely - the absurd pompousness of rock, the upper-middle-class manager, the divisive bird, etc. When A Mighty Wind opens, it looks as if Guest and his co-writer Eugene Levy are once again on note-perfect form: a legendary folk impresario, Iriving Steinbloom, has died, and his son decides to get together all the old acts for a tribute concert live on public television: the New Main Street Singers, a "neuftet" that's more like a cult than a vocal group; the Folksmen, a grizzled old trio played by Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean; and a once fey, now deeply damaged duo called Mitch and Mickey, played by Levy and Catherine O'Hara. The specially written numbers include "Old Joe's Diner", for the Folksmen, and "A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow", for Mitch and Mickey, and they're not so much parodies as songs exquisitely poised at the same exact point of awfulness as the real thing. The Folksmen, who met up at the University of Vermont, sing lyrics about how "my daddy was the son of a railroad man" while wearing "dickie bows" - though, as they point out, "It wasn't retro then, but it's retro now. Then it was nowtro, if you will." If Spinal Tap was laugh-out-loud funny, this film is mellow enough to mooch along on wry chuckles.

But for once Guest's faithful recreation is oddly selective. In The New York Times Michael Hadju bemoaned the film's evasion of the politics of these performers. And, even if he sounded like a parody critic, he's still right. Guest simply eliminates the politics - no civil rights, no Vietnam, just an intro to a number about the Spanish Civil War ("In the late 1930s of the last century, Spain was racked by civil war..."). As if in acknowledgment that something's been left out, Guest and Levy cast their joke net so wide the focus sometimes gets lost: the New Main Street Singers are managed by a coarse bruiser from a forgotten sitcom trying to live off a catchphrase no-one remembers; Mickey has a new husband in the "bladder management business"; Laurie, a breezy good-time blonde of a certain age beautifully played by Jayne Lynch, used to work in porno flicks... These are very general jokes.

Aside from Miss Lynch, there are two very sweet performances, by Levy and O'Hara as Mitch and Mickey. Poor old Mitch, gulping up each word as if it's physically painful, is a walking testament of how you can OD on the relentless perkiness of faux folk. Incidentally, the best song to emerge from this period was Ervin Drake's "(When I Was Seventeen) It Was A Very Good Year", originally recorded by the Kingston Trio, though it only sounded good after Sinatra did it with a big dramatic Gordon Jenkins arrangement heavy on the plaintive oboe. Sinatra sounded as if he'd actually had some very good years. When the Kingston Trio did it in their usual upbeat jingle style, they sounded like eunuchs who wouldn't know a good year if it fell on their heads.

What exactly are those theories [of Professor Leo Strauss's]? The cabal, despite its repeated shouts of "hail Leo Strauss!" (this, to a Jewish refugee from Nazism), doesn't give us much insight. Fortunately, the program for Embedded, which contains an essay by someone named Kitty Clark, does. (For the New York production at least, someone in Robbins's orbit had the good sense to expunge from the original essay, which I found on the Internet, several pointed references to the Jewishness of Strauss and his supposed adherents.) In the program's telling, Strauss believed that democracy "was best defended by an ignorant public pumped up on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression."

Hannah Arendt

If the brilliant and beautiful Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish intellectual who famously described the "banality of evil" at work in Nazi Germany, had not spurned a young suitor named Leo Strauss, would Americans be killing and dying in Iraq? Not only did Arendt reject Strauss' affections, she panned his ideas. According to Arendt's biographer, she told the embittered Strauss that a political party advocating his views could have no place for a Jew like him. Strauss bore the wound of her words for decades. Even today, his followers, the Straussians, despise Arendt. Could her rejection have been the stirring of a butterfly's wings that led to the inevitable desert storm?

Convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal, Abrams holds the Middle East portfolio at the National Security Council. An unequivocal supporter of Israel, he is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, editor of the Jewish journal Commentary.

'PLOT TO KILL' LEADER

German President Johannes Rau has cancelled a visit to the tiny east African state of Djibouti after German security services warned of the "concrete threat" of an assassination plot.

His office said the German intelligence service had received information that an Islamic group was preparing an attack.

He was due to have made a stop on Wednesday to visit a German frigate moored in Djibouti's port.

It is one of several warships monitoring the Gulf of Aden as part of Enduring Freedom - an international anti-terrorism programme launched by the US in the wake of September 11.

The German president was now set to return directly to Berlin from Tanzania, where he has been on a visit.

It would have been the first visit to Djibouti by a German head of state.

Thousands protest in Madrid against Socialists

Several thousand protesters have taken to the streets of Madrid to back outgoing Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and accuse the Socialists of exploiting the train bombings to win power.

"The elections were a robbery," said high school student Maria Garcia, wearing stickers of Aznar's Popular Party (PP) on her jacket, at the protest outside party headquarters on Wednesday.

"The Socialist party has exploited the subject of terrorism so that the PP would lose, after saying throughout the campaign that we shouldn't use terrorism for political purposes."

. . . At Wednesday's protest, banners read "Zapatero: president ...of al Qaeda" and some protesters shouted "Zapatero is Terrorism," reflecting a view among many PP supporters that Zapatero would be too soft.

"All of us in the PP want to support Aznar after the totally unjustified insults he has received," said estate agency owner Cristina Maestre, 58, at the protest.

"They've even called him a killer when he's done more than anyone to fight terrorists. In his eight years in power, more terrorists than ever have been arrested. It's very sad. I hope we can sort it out in four years."

The reality is more certainly that of a world with no counterbalance, physically destabilized, and thus more dangerous since there is no multipolar balance. And America, in the solitude of its power, in its status as the sole superpower, now in the absence of a Soviet counter-model, has ceased to draw other nations to itself; or more precisely, in certain parts of the globe, it seems to draw nothing but hate. In the regulated world of the Cold War, where the various kinds of terrorism were more or less aided by Moscow, a certain degree of control was still possible, and the dialogue between Moscow and Washington never stopped. In today's monopolistic world, it is a new barbarism, apparently with no control, which seems to want to set itself up as a counter-power. Perhaps, even in Europe, from the Gulf War to the use of F-16s by the Israeli army against the Palestinians, we have underestimated the intensity of the hate, which, from the outskirts of Jakarta to those of Durban, among the rejoicing crowds in Nablus and Cairo, is focused against the United States.

But the reality is perhaps also that of an America whose own cynicism has caught up with. [sic] If Bin Laden, as the American authorities seem to think, really is the one who ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, how can we fail to recall that he was trained by the CIA and that he was an element of a policy, directed against the Soviets, that the Americans considered to be wise? Might it not then have been America itself that created this demon?

On 10 February 2004, a new height was reached in the war being waged against Islam by the Coalition with the passage of a law barring the hijab from grammar and high schools and public places by the Assembee [sic] nationale. . . . We had excluded you from a certain category among your infidel brethren because of your opposition to the unjust aggression of the Crusaders in Iraq but you yourselves have taken the decision to put your names on the list of the most dogged enemies of Islam. . . .

We take France for an avowed enemy of Islam along with the rest of the Coalition and the Maghregan and Arab governments that collaborate with you and we intend to retaliate. With this hateful, discriminatory and anti-Muslim law, you have shown the whole world and all Muslims that you were well and truly on the side of the devil and we shall treat you as such until the Final Day unless you reverse your decision and comply with the will of Allah who is also your God.

Although many commentators have excoriated the Spanish electorate for its capitulation to terror, we must never forget that the slightly smaller half decisively rejected it. These we honor and the rest we pity.

U.S. woman charged with spying for Iraq

NEW YORK (AP) -- An American woman was arrested Thursday on charges that she acted as an Iraqi spy before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, accepting $10,000 for her work, prosecutors said Thursday.

Susan Lindauer, 41, was arrested in her hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland, and was to appear in court later in the day in Baltimore, authorities in New York said.

She was accused of conspiring to act as a spy for the Iraqi Intelligence Service and with engaging in prohibited financial transactions involving the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein.

According to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Lindauer made multiple visits from October 1999 through March 2002 to the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations in New York.

There, she met with several members of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the foreign intelligence arm of the Iraqi government that allegedly has played a role in terrorist operations, including an attempted assassination of former President George H.W. Bush, the indictment alleged.

The government said she accepted payments from the Iraqis for her services and expenses amounting to a total of $10,000, including $5,000 she received during a trip to Baghdad in February and March 2002, where she allegedly met with Iraqi intelligence officers.

Her acceptance of the money and her willingness to bring it home from Iraq violated a law prohibiting transactions with a government that sponsors international terrorism, the government said. The indictment did not specify a motive.

The charges against Lindauer were included in an expanded indictment in the case against Raed Rokan Al-Anbuge, 28, and Wisam Noman Al-Anbuke, the sons of Iraq's former liaison with United Nations weapons inspectors.

The brothers were charged last year with acting as Iraqi government agents and conspiring to do so, prosecutors said. The indictment said Lindauer conspired with the brothers.

On January 8, 2003, prosecutors said, Lindauer tried to influence U.S. foreign policy by delivering to the home of a U.S. government official a letter in which she conveyed her access to and contacts with members of Saddam's regime. The official was not identified in the indictment.

The United States invaded Iraq last March, and the government fell the following month.

The indictment said Lindauer met on two occasions in Baltimore in June and July with an undercover FBI agent who posed as a Libyan intelligence representative who was seeking to support resistance groups in postwar Iraq. It said she discussed the need for plans and foreign resources to support these groups.

According to the indictment, she continued to correspond with the undercover agent until last month and followed the agent's instructions to leave packages on two occasions in August in "dead drop" operations.

Lindauer, who has not yet been assigned a defense lawyer, faces up to 10 years in prison on the most serious charge and five years on the lesser charge if she is convicted, prosecutors say.

American Arrested as Iraqi Spy

Thursday, March 11, 2004
Associated Press

NEW YORK -- A former journalist and one-time press secretary for four members of Congress was arrested Thursday on charges she served as a paid agent for the Iraqi intelligence service before and after the U.S. invasion.

Susan Lindauer, 41, was arrested in her hometown of Takoma Park, Md., and was to appear in court later in the day in Baltimore, authorities in New York said.

She was accused of conspiring to act as a spy for the Iraqi Intelligence Service and engaging in prohibited financial transactions involving the government of Iraq under dictator Saddam Hussein. Prosecutors say she accepted $10,000 for he [sic] work.

"I'm an anti-war activist and I'm innocent," Lindauer told WBAL-TV as she was led to a car outside the Baltimore FBI office. "I did more to stop terrorism in this country than anybody else. I have done good things for this country. I worked to get weapons inspectors back to Iraq when everyone else said it was impossible. I'm very proud and I'll stand by my achievements."

Lindauer worked at Fortune, U.S. News & World Report and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer before beginning her career as a political publicist.

She worked for Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. in 1993 and then Rep. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in 1994 before joining the office of former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun as press secretary in 1996. From March to May 2002, she worked for Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.

"Her position was eliminated in the downsizing following the 1994 elections," said Josh Kardon, chief of staff for now-Sen. Wyden. "She worked for us a short period of time."

Braun's current spokesperson, Loretta Kane, said the former senator does not remember Lindauer.

According to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Lindauer made multiple visits from October 1999 through March 2002 to the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. The indictment makes no mention of her congressional staff work.

There, she met with several members of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the foreign intelligence arm of the government of Iraq that allegedly has played a role in terrorist operations, including an attempted assassination of former President George H.W. Bush, the indictment alleged.

The government said she accepted payments from the Iraqis for her services and expenses amounting to a total of $10,000, including $5,000 she received during a trip to Baghdad in February and March 2002.

Her acceptance of the money and her willingness to bring it home from Iraq violated a law prohibiting transactions with a government that sponsors international terrorism, the government said. The indictment did not specify a motive.

The charges against Lindauer were included in an expanded indictment in the case against Raed Rokan Al-Anbuge, 28, and Wisam Noman Al-Anbuke, the sons of Iraq's former liaison with United Nations weapons inspectors.

The brothers were charged last year with acting as Iraqi government agents and conspiring to do so, prosecutors said. The indictment said Lindauer conspired with the brothers.

On Jan. 8, 2003, prosecutors said, Lindauer tried to influence U.S. foreign policy by delivering to the home of a U.S. government official a letter in which she conveyed her access to and contacts with members of Saddam's regime. The official was not identified in the indictment.

The United States invaded Iraq in March of last year, and the government fell the following month.

The indictment said she met on two occasions in Baltimore in June and July with an undercover FBI agent who posed as a Libyan intelligence representative who was seeking to support resistance groups in postwar Iraq. It said she discussed the need for plans and foreign resources to support these groups.

According to the indictment, she continued to correspond with the undercover agent until last month and followed the agent's instructions to leave packages on two occasions in August in "dead drop" operations.

Lindauer, who was not immediately assigned a defense lawyer, faces up to 10 years in prison on the most serious charge and five years on the lesser charge if she is convicted, prosecutors said.

More than a half dozen FBI agents could be seen searching Lindauer's residence in Takoma Park, a city known for its liberal views. Her neighbors recalled her as friendly.

Joao Luiz Vieire de Castro, 39, described Lindauer as "a regular American who walks her dog in the mornings and the afternoon."

"It's a big surprise. Who would think that it's (espionage) in your neighborhood?" said Dean Paris, 45, who sometimes greeted Lindauer on the street, which is less than a mile from the District of Columbia line. Paris said he never saw anything suspicious.

But Malvina Lacey, who lives next door to Lindauer, added, "She lives in a fantasy world."