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Reuters

An Iraqi walking through the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Baghdad that killed seven people and wounded at least 90

August 9, 2005
A Violent Day in Baghdad Kills More Than 20
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:20 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A suicide car bomber struck a U.S. convoy waiting at an intersection Tuesday in Baghdad, killing seven people -- including one American soldier -- and wounding more than 90. More than a dozen others died in scattered attacks across the capital.

Also, a U.S. Marine assigned to the 2nd Marine Division was killed Monday by small-arms fire in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. The deaths brought the number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq this month to at least 32.

Violence raged as Iraqi political leaders showed little sign of compromise less than a week before a deadline for approving a new constitution. Faction leaders conferred for about four hours Tuesday night hoping to overcome their differences and produce a charter by Monday.

Participants said the talks focused on Kurdish demands for a federal state and although some progress was made, there was no final agreement on the issue. More talks were set for Wednesday.

The American convoy was stopped at a busy intersection when a driver detonated a vehicle packed with explosives, the U.S. Army said. Six Iraqi civilians also were killed; scores of Iraqis and two U.S. soldiers were wounded.

At least 1,836 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The United States hopes progress on the political front, including adoption of a democratic constitution, will help deflate the Sunni Arab-led rebellion and enable the Americans and their partners to begin withdrawing troops next year.

''It's important that they stay with their timetable'' on the constitution, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday. ''This will be a critical step in persuading the majority of the Iraqis that the new Iraq is worth fighting for, that they have a stake in it.''

Rumsfeld told Pentagon reporters that the constitution ''could well turn out to be one of the most powerful weapons to be deployed against the terrorists'' and the insurgents are ''determined to stop the constitutional process through terror and intimidation.''

Late Tuesday, representatives of political factions met for a second round of talks aimed at breaking the deadlock over the constitution, which the parliament must approve by Aug. 15. Talks were postponed Monday by a severe sandstorm.

The constitution also needs approval from voters in an Oct. 15 referendum. Passage would lead to elections in mid-December.

At the beginning of the meeting, presidential spokesman Kamran Qaradaghi told reporters the latest talks would focus on federalism, distribution of wealth and the elections law.

Kurds demand that Iraq be transformed into a federal state so they can continue to run their autonomous mini-state in the north. Sunni Arabs oppose federalism because they fear the Kurds want to secede and dismember Iraq.

Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani joined the talks Tuesday. Barzani, who was stranded in northern Iraq by the sandstorms, has vowed not to compromise on federalism.

A prominent Sunni Arab on the constitutional committee, Saleh al-Mutlaq, suggested that federalism be decided by the parliament to be elected in December.

''We will not accept federalism in these circumstances,'' al-Mutlaq told The Associated Press. He warned that if Kurdish demands are accepted, ''they will have grave consequences'' for the future of Iraq. He did not elaborate.

Kurdish parliament member Mahmoud Othman said that during the meeting, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad repeatedly called President Jalal Talabani and parliament speaker Hajim al-Hassani for updates -- a sign of U.S. pressure for a deal.

''The problem is that they started discussing the most difficult issue,'' Othman said, referring to federalism.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, hinted that political leaders might not resolve all issues before next week's deadline but said he remained hopeful the draft could be completed by then.

''But if some matters block us ... then it might take a little time'' after the Monday deadline, he told AP.

Al-Jaafari said Iraqi leaders have struggled against deadlines before -- including forming a new government after January elections -- and were able to meet them.

Asked if leaders would succeed this time, he said: ''We hope so, God willing. I see that most of the groups have a strong will, and, God willing, we will cooperate to finish it.''

In other developments:

--U.S. troops Tuesday killed four insurgents trying to plant a roadside bomb in the city of Ramadi, police Lt. Mohammed al-Obeidi said.

--Violence targeting Iraqi police left 10 officers dead, including five policemen slain while sleeping in their car. Lt. Col. Ahmed Aboud said the men had spent the night on patrol and were waiting for replacements.

--Late Tuesday, gunmen killed an Iraqi Cabinet employee, Abbas Ibrahim Mohammed, in Baghdad. In addition, three civilians were killed in a mortar attack, police said.

--U.S. and Iraqi forces killed two insurgents and arrested 22 others in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said Tuesday. Soldiers from the U.S. Army's 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment killed the insurgents, found setting up a mortar tube Monday in Mosul.

--The mayor of Baghdad, Alaa al-Timimi, was fired and responsibility for managing the city transferred to the provincial governor, government spokesman Laith Kubba said. He refused to say why the provincial council sacked the mayor.

--The mayor of Samawah, a southern Shiite city gripped by riots over lack of municipal services, resigned under pressure. The decision came Monday during a visit by delegates sent by the prime minister, according to Sheik Mohannad al-Gharrawi.

About 750 Japanese troops are based in Samawah, 230 miles southeast of Baghdad.


Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Omar Sinan and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 4:06 PM

 

August 9, 2005
Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 -
More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.

The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.

Mr. Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June, in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pa. The matter resurfaced on Monday in a report by GSN: Government Security News, which is published every two weeks and covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based on accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former intelligence official, who was interviewed on Monday by The New York Times in Mr. Weldon's office.

In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by at least three other former intelligence officers with direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had first called the episode to his attention shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was identified by any American government agency as a potential threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers, only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of 2001.

Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the Able Danger team.

The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999, under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.

"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former defense intelligence official said.

He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and said that it had been based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the former intelligence official said.

The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques, was modeled after those first established by Army intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.

Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently, when he contacted members of the military intelligence team as part of research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored It."

Mr. Weldon's book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source cited in the book, saying the Iranian "was a waste of my time and resources."

Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees were looking into the episode.

In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11 attack, when members of the team first brought it to his attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, about it in a conversation in September or October 2001, and had been surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the operation.

Col. Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the military's Special Operations Command, said no one at the command now had any knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its findings. If the program existed, Colonel Taylor said, it was probably a highly classified "special access program" on which only a few military personnel would have been briefed.

During the interview in Mr. Weldon's office, the former defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized chart depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said was a larger, more detailed version similar to the one prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.

He said the original chart, like the new one, had included the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who were identified as members of what was described as an American-based "Brooklyn" cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells around the world.

The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men had found that "the software put them all together in Brooklyn."

According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither man was put on a State Department watch list before they flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts to track them were made until August 2001.

Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.

The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn" cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States. The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.

Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former staff members who participated in the briefing.

"They all say that they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention."

As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff filed document requests with the Pentagon for information about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding that the staff had not hidden anything from the commissioners.

"The commissioners were certainly told of the document requests and what the findings were," Mr. Felzenberg said.

Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 3:57 PM

 

Courtesy of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the Aperture Foundation

When Old and New World Met in a Camera Flash
By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

If Peter Mesenh?ller expected to find the misery of the tired, the poor, the wretched emanating from a few photographs displayed in the Ellis Island Immigration Museum the day he first visited in 1996, he was in for a surprise. "I immediately got stunned by the dignity, the pride, the self-confidence," Mr. Mesenh?ller, a cultural anthropologist specializing in early still photography and immigration studies, said by phone from his home in Cologne, Germany. "It was totally different from the usual image we have of the huddled masses."

Mr. Mesenh?ller had alighted on the photography of Augustus Frederick Sherman, a registry clerk in Ellis Island's immigration division in the early 20th century. In the hours when he wasn't determining the fate of some of the thousands of immigrants disembarking daily in New York Harbor from foreign vessels, he was coaxing the hopeful to open their trunks, don their finest attire and level their gaze at his camera.

Some 75 photographs of these immigrants are on view at the Ellis Island museum in "Augustus Frederick Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920." Organized by Mr. Mesenh?ller and Diana Edkins, director of exhibitions and limited-edition prints for the Aperture Foundation, a nonprofit photography organization, the show coincides with the group's publication of a book of the same title with 40 more images. The show continues through Sept. 6 before traveling to 16 sites in the United States and abroad.

Understanding Mr. Mesenh?ller's fascination - obsession, really - requires no great stretch of the imagination. As they hover disconcertingly between art and artifact, Sherman's portraits are powerful in their directness yet almost antiseptic in their disaffection.

Dressed gallantly in their native costumes, solemn families and individuals announce themselves to their new world with no apologies. A Romanian shepherd sits with hand on hip, his decoratively embroidered sheepskin coat opened to reveal a lush pelt of curly wool. A Ruthenian, from Ukraine, stares out with pale eyes, her neck encircled by loops of iridescent beads above a peasant blouse and shearling vest. Two men from Borana, in Ethiopia, with sculptural hair ornaments sticking straight up from their heads display their shields; the woman between them hides her hair beneath a wrap.

Striking though they are, the portraits are only nominally personal, annotated occasionally by simple captions but mostly left unexplained: "Eleazar Kaminetzko - 26 - Russian Hebrew SS Hamburg June 23 - 1914. Vegetarian," Sherman wrote on the photograph of a young man with enormous eyes and long, glossy curls. Only a few details, like "Col. Helen R. Bastedo + Osman Lewis, 13, Belgian Stowaway," make up the 1921 caption for a boy with floppy hair and Sunday suit, his arm around the waist of an unrelated woman who protectively cups his hand. And then, with fedora, spectacles and pale smudge of mustache, there is Mary Johnson, 50, from Canada, who, Sherman wrote, "came as 'Frank Woodhull' " on Oct. 4, 1908, and "dressed 15 yrs in men's clothes."

Information on Sherman is nearly as scant. He was born on July 9, 1865, in Lynn, Pa., Mr. Mesenh?ller said, and was a member of the Episcopal Church; he was hired by the executive division of the Bureau of Immigration at Ellis Island in 1892, eight years after moving to New York, and moved up through the ranks.

"We've been looking for personnel files throughout the United States with all the official records and didn't find anything," Mr. Mesenh?ller said. "Up to now, Sherman is a question mark in a way."

Mr. Mesenh?ller speculates that as a higher-level officer, Sherman had unfettered access to the island's detention area, where immigrants were held for a day, a week or a few months after routine questioning raised doubts about whether they should be allowed in the country.

"The technical procedures in those days were very difficult," he said. "You had these huge tripod cameras and the exposure took how many seconds, and you had to get the lighting just right and have your subjects sit perfectly still. And with an average of about 5,000 people each day coming through Ellis Island at peak times, it must have been quite an undertaking."

In an essay in the book, Mr. Mesenh?ller writes that historians view these images as "one of the most substantial photographic records of that period of mass immigration."

Capturing his subjects against mostly plain backgrounds in the native finery they would soon discard for American clothing, Sherman simultaneously documented the richness of their heritage while labeling them specimens for anthropologic scrutiny. "Sherman considered these people as ethnic types, being representative of the new American species," said Mr. Mesenh?ller, who called on a broad swath of colleagues to help him identify the origins of various costumes and discern the differences in, say, the headdresses of Protestant and Catholic women from the Netherlands.

In addition to Sherman's Dutch, Italian, Romanian, Moroccan and Finnish prototypes, there are also the "oddities" - the giants and dwarves, the microcephalics, the physically deformed - he cataloged in later years.

Still, the Aperture Foundation's Ms. Edkins said, the photographer "didn't impose his own feeling on these people. He really showed it in a very stripped-down documentarylike way."

Such images may hold particular interest today "because immigration is so much in our mind," she said. "You know, we shed those things, those differences. We're all jeans and Gap and now there's a commonality."

Roy Glerum of Totowa, N.J., the son of one of those Ellis Island immigrants, said the reality of the melting pot hit him at the exhibition's opening in June. There he saw his father's 12-year-old eyes peering out at him from Sherman's 1907 portrait of his Dutch grandparents and their 11 children. Pinned to their chests was the number of the ship that would take them back to the Netherlands if they failed to pass inspection.

Mr. Glerum's grandfather, Dingenis, had sold his lobster boat to finance the family's journey. Growing up in New Jersey, Mr. Glerum's father, Fran?ois, soon known as Frank, took odd jobs running a bakery wagon before apprenticing as a shop boy at the Manhattan Rubber Company and working his way into an electrician's position, from which he retired 50 years later.

"My dad talked very, very little about earlier life," Mr. Glerum, 78, said. "He didn't want us to speak Dutch. He felt that being in America was the greatest thing and that we never needed to learn about the rest."

His recent museum visit was his first to Ellis Island, Mr. Glerum said. "I was really overwhelmed," he added. "Not knowing the language, giving up everything to come over here - I just thought they must have had great courage."

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 3:18 PM

 

Courtesy of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the Aperture Foundation
 
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 3:16 PM

 

Alexander Chadwick/Associated Press

July 17, 2005
Battlefields
By RICHARD A. CLARKE

The carnage in the London Underground follows an even more horrendous attack on Madrid commuters 16 months ago. When President Bush sought recently to reassure Americans about his Iraq policy, he emphasized that we are fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we do not have to fight them here at home. Unfortunately for Britain and Spain, fighting terrorists in Iraq did not immunize them from attacks at home.

Earlier this year the administration revealed that Osama bin Laden had communicated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of ''Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia,'' urging him to send some of his many fighters to the homelands of the United States and its coalition allies. Zarqawi's network has apparently been quite successful in recruiting new terrorists in Arab nations and in Islamic communities in Europe. Before the London attacks, the police arrested Zarqawi recruiters in Britain, Germany, Spain and elsewhere. (Among those arrested in Spain was a terrorist thought to be connected to the Madrid attacks.) Iraq acts both as a motivator for the new jihadis and as a training ground. It has replaced Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia. Now, Muslim radical youth go to Iraq to prove themselves and learn the trade of terror.

A recent C.I.A. analysis reportedly concluded that those being recruited by Zarqawi are receiving better training and preparation by fighting in Iraq than previous terrorists received from bin Laden in Afghanistan. The report went on to say that these new terrorists will probably leave Iraq and practice their skills elsewhere. A Canadian Intelligence Security Service analysis reportedly says that terrorists trained in Iraq are likely to be involved in attacks in other countries. Commenting on the report, a former Canadian security officer said that terrorists are ''still planning very imaginative actions like we saw on 9/11.''

Although the United States made legal entry into the country more difficult after 9/11, it is still possible for potential terrorists to come here. Many of the new jihadis are citizens of European nations to which we grant visa-free entry. A jihadi might also come illegally, as millions of people do each year. Thus many security experts believe that it is only a matter of time until another attack occurs in the United States.

Members of the 9/11 Commission recently warned that the absence of an attack here in the last four years has created an atmosphere of complacency in which needed security improvements are given inadequate attention. Their warning should be heeded. The London Underground bombings highlighted, for example, one of the many areas where we remain vulnerable. Although the federal government has spent approximately $18 billion since 9/11 upgrading airline security, it has spent only $250 million on passenger-rail security. Any regular traveler can see the results. While I have been unable to carry a small scissors onto an aircraft, I have successfully carried a gun onto a passenger train.

In the hours after the London attacks, police officers flooded subway systems in the United States to beef up security. The fact that they had to do so is further evidence that these systems lack adequate protection. Increased use of closed-circuit cameras, uniformed guards and undercover officers in stations and on trains would reduce the likelihood of a successful attack on commuter rail lines.

The best way, however, to stop such attacks is through intelligence penetrations of terrorist circles. Only last month, almost four years after 9/11, did the administration agree to create a National Security Service within the F.B.I. to enhance our ability to perform such penetrations. It will be more years before this service is fully operational.

Why do we still find ourselves with so many domestic vulnerabilities? One major reason is that we have not spent what is necessary. When the Department of Homeland Security was created, the White House said it should be ''revenue neutral,'' i.e., no new money. Since then, homeland security spending has grown very slowly. The amount budgeted has not been based on needs assessment but on arbitrary decisions in an overall fiscal environment made difficult by skyrocketing spending in Iraq. Unfortunately, spending in Iraq will not immunize America from terrorist attacks at home any more than it did Spain or Britain.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 12:49 PM

 
Heat Wave
Saturday will be the 5th (Sunday will be the 6th) straight day with a high of at least 110. Back in July, 1961 we had 10 consecutive 110 degree days... and that's the record. The slight bump in humidity Friday will dry out over the weekend. Here are the numbers (I hope you're still sitting down): 114 Saturday, with some neighborhoods near 120. 113 Sunday and some neighborhoods will be near 118. Lows in the upper 80's. But have a good weekend anyway,
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 11:19 AM

 

July 10, 2005
Will Any Organ Do?
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Last summer at one hospital in Dallas, four people died from rabies, an unheard-of level of incidence of this rare disease. As it turned out, each patient was infected by an organ or tissue -- a kidney, a liver, an artery -- that he or she received in a transplant several weeks earlier. Their shared donor, William Beed Jr., a young brain-dead man, had rabies, caught apparently through a bite from a rabid bat, something the surgeons never suspected. They all thought he had suffered a fatal crack-cocaine overdose, which can produce symptoms similar to those of rabies. ''We had an explanation for his condition,'' says Dr. Goran Klintmalm, a surgeon who oversees transplantation at Baylor University Medical Center, where the transplants occurred. ''He'd recently smoked crack cocaine. He'd hemorrhaged around the brain. He'd died. That was all we needed to know.''

Since the rabies deaths, recriminations have flown, procedural reviews have begun and sorrow and regret have dogged the families of the organ recipients. But the outbreak also exposed a controversy that until then was roiling only the rarefied world of transplant specialists. The issue, although freighted with monetary and bio-ethical complexities, can be boiled down to one deceptively simple question. Should transplant surgeons be using organs from nearly anyone?


Organ transplanting has become, in fundamental ways, a victim of its own success. Not long ago, transplant surgery was a dodgy, last-ditch response to end-stage kidney failure. But with the advent of better antirejection drugs and surgical techniques, transplantation has become the treatment of choice for a growing range of conditions, including chronic kidney failure, end-stage lung or liver disease and some congestive heart failure. Kidneys are implanted routinely, as are increasing numbers of livers, hearts and pancreases.

Fifteen years ago, about 20,000 people in the United States were on waiting lists for organs. Today, about 88,000 are. The number of donors has not come close to keeping pace. There were about 15,000 transplants completed with organs from cadavers in 1993 and about 20,000 last year. Patients used to wait weeks for an organ. Now they wait years. On average, 18 people on organ waiting lists die every day.

Doctors, patients and politicians concerned about transplantation have responded with proposals for increasing donations. In 2002, the American Medical Association voted to endorse pilot projects to give families financial incentives, like cash payments to help cover the costs of funerals, for donating their deceased loved ones' organs. The next year, Congress held hearings on the topic. Representative James Greenwood, Republican of Pennsylvania, introduced a bill that would have authorized demonstration projects to determine whether offering financial incentives to families of brain-dead patients would increase donation rates. There was a public outcry against ''buying'' organs and the bill died. (A few states offer tax incentives to families who donate relatives' organs.)

Increasingly desperate people in need of transplants have turned to highway billboards and Internet sites to solicit donors. Donations from living people have helped. Today the number of living kidney donors is greater than the number of dead donors. But living donations of other organs are rare because they can be dangerous or are impossible.

All of which has led transplant specialists to quietly begin to relax the standards of who can donate. As a result, according to surgeons I spoke with and reports in medical journals, the transplanting of what doctors refer to as ''marginal'' or ''extended criteria'' organs, organs that once would have been considered unusable, has increased considerably in the last several years. The definition of a marginal organ differs from transplant center to transplant center and also from one type of organ to another. This makes it difficult to quantify the increase in the use of these organs. But the expansion is undeniable and has become a much-discussed issue in the field, a topic of ethics papers, surgical conferences and soul-searching on the part of many of the surgeons involved.


Fifteen years ago, William Beed Jr. would not have qualified as an organ donor. When he died in May 2004, he was 20, unemployed and had been living with his mother and sister in a bat-infested apartment building in Texarkana, Ark. Throughout his life, Beed had been in and out of trouble, his mother acknowledged when I spoke to her recently. Marijuana and cocaine were found in his urine at the time of his death, according to a report in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Beed's drug use alone would have disqualified him as a donor. (It still would keep him from giving blood.) ''What people have to understand is that donors now, except for the 75-year-olds who die of intracranial bleeds, are not part of the church choir,'' Klintmalm told me when I met with him in Dallas earlier this year. ''The ones who die are the ones you don't want your daughter or your son to socialize with. They drink. They drive too fast. They use crack cocaine. They get caught up in drive-bys.''

The donor pool was different in the early days of transplantation. Beginning in the 60's and through the 80's, a majority of donors were head-trauma victims, people who had been involved in car accidents, botched suicides or tumbles off horses or ladders. These donors were almost all young, between 15 and 45. (In the 80's, few transplant surgeons would take a 50-year-old organ.) They were of average weight, with no history of diabetes, cancer, infectious disease, imprisonment, high blood pressure, cigarette-smoking habits, tattoos (which have been associated with blood-borne illnesses) or unsafe sexual behaviors. The chosen organs, said Klintmalm, who has been in practice for about 25 years, ''were pristine.''

It was easy to adhere to those standards at first. ''We didn't perceive any shortage of organs back in the day,'' says Dr. Nicholas Tilney, the Francis D. Moore professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and one of the nation's premier kidney-transplant surgeons. ''If a patient had to wait a few weeks for a kidney, that seemed long. We never foresaw the kind of situation we have today.''

Conditions began to change in the 90's. Seat-belt use was more common by then, and fewer Americans were dying of head injuries, depriving transplantation of its most reliable sources of pristine organs. At the same time, the demand for transplants was growing. Surgeons had little choice but to start looking to alternative sources for organs.


On April 28, 2004, William Beed Jr. complained to his mother that he was feeling sick. ''He couldn't swallow,'' his mother, Judy, a practical nurse, recalled when I spoke with her earlier this year. They decided he should go to an emergency room, she said, and the doctors there examined him and sent him home with medication, saying he was dehydrated. By that evening, he was drooling, throwing up, shaking and still having difficulty swallowing. His fever was rising. He started vomiting blood. His father drove him to another E.R.

Diagnosis is often a matter of context. Because of doctor-patient confidentiality rules, doctors involved with this case would not talk about it on the record, but a few did say that had Beed not had cocaine in his blood, the E.R. doctors might have investigated his symptoms more aggressively instead of assuming he had overdosed. (Because no autopsy was done, doctors have not been able to establish whether the rabies or the drugs actually killed him.)

Soon after, Beed fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator. After a few days, his mother said, the doctors told her and her family that their son was brain-dead. Transplant surgeons use organs from brain-dead patients because they still have a heartbeat, and if the patients are placed on a ventilator, their organs continue to get oxygen. Without oxygen, the organs degrade within minutes.

According to Judy Beed, a transplant coordinator approached her and asked whether she would be willing to donate her son's organs. She agreed, and in the middle of the night on May 4, the parents of Joshua Hightower received a phone call offering them William Beed's kidney.

Joshua Hightower, who lived in Gilmer, Tex., had had kidney problems since he was 2. They had grown progressively worse over the years. ''When he was 16, things got really bad,'' said his mother, Jennifer Hightower, a special education assistant in the public schools, when I met with her in February. ''He was pale and droopy. He weighed 112 pounds. He was sleeping all the time.'' His teachers at Gilmer High School walked him up and down the halls between classes to help him stay awake. A doctor urged his parents to get him on the waiting list for a kidney. In the meantime, Joshua began daily dialysis at home. The process, which purified his blood of toxins, required that he be home every evening by 10. Once there, he was tethered to the dialysis machine for between 9 and 16 hours. When the Hightowers received the call from the hospital, they jumped at the opportunity.


It is impossible to know now when the first less-than-pristine organ was retrieved and transplanted. But over the course of the 90's, according to surgeons I spoke with, many barriers fell. Age was almost certainly the first to go. Instead of accepting donors 45 and younger, some transplant centers began, gradually, to take those who were 48, 49, 50 and then up from there. ''I wrote a paper for The Journal of the American Medical Association back in 1989,'' Dr. Lewis Teperman, director of transplantation at New York University Medical Center, told me when I talked to him earlier in the spring. ''It was looking at the outcomes of using older donors. By older donors, we meant someone over 60. That was considered really, really old.'' Recently, N.Y.U. transplanted a liver from a deceased 80-year-old. A couple of years ago, a Canadian hospital used a 93-year-old liver from a deceased donor.

Almost imperceptibly, most of the other traditional prohibitions evaporated. Surgeons started accepting lungs from people who had smoked, sometimes for decades. They accepted hearts and kidneys from those who had had high blood pressure or had been obese. They took organs from alcoholics and drug users. (Because cocaine is flushed from the body relatively quickly, it is considered one of the least problematic drugs in donors.) Infectious disease was no longer an automatic disqualifier, either. Most surgeons would have once discarded organs from someone with hepatitis C, for instance, since it destroys the liver. But the virus, often spread by injected drug use, is now so common in urban areas that few transplant surgeons will immediately turn down an organ infected with it. Ideally the surgeons implant these infected organs into patients who already harbor hepatitis C. But lately there have been cases in which doctors, as a last resort, have transplanted infected livers into patients who don't have hepatitis C. There is little published data yet about the long-term outcomes for these patients.

The expansion into ''marginal'' or ''extended criteria'' organs has not been systematic. One transplant surgeon will use a marginal organ from, say, a morbidly obese donor or a drug user. His patient survives. Then he will repeat it again and again. At the next big transplant conference, he will talk to his colleagues about his success, and they will go back to their own transplant centers and accept, for the first time, an obese donor or a crack-cocaine user. ''You sometimes have to experiment,'' Klintmalm says.

Klintmalm and other surgeons I spoke with who work in urban areas say that marginal organs are well on their way to being the majority of organs they transplant. Klintmalm, though, takes issue with the very definition of marginal. ''Older organs should not be called 'marginal,''' Klintmalm maintains, referring to donors over age 55. ''They're standard for us.'' But two years ago, when the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the private organization that oversees organ transplantation in the United States, published its first definition of extended-criteria organs, age was prominent. The UNOS classification, which applies only to kidneys, defines a marginal kidney as one that comes from a deceased person over 60 or one over 50 with two of three characteristics: stroke, hypertension or abnormal kidney function. The definition does not mention smoking, diabetes, hepatitis, alcoholism, obesity or drug use.

No government agency sets standards for what makes an organ acceptable. The Department of Health and Human Services contracts with UNOS to handle the day-to-day logistics of the transplant system (getting organs to the next person on the list and so on). But the government's main concerns in policing transplants are that donors and recipients be matched for blood type and that organs be distributed primarily based on medical need, not the wealth, race or celebrity of the recipients. So decisions about whether organs are usable are made on the spot by individual surgeons.

To date, not many peer-reviewed studies have been published that examine the long-term outcomes of using marginal organs. The research that has been done mostly looks at kidneys.

Recent studies of older kidneys (usually defined as over 50), for instance, have shown that they can function almost as well as younger ones. They don't work for as long, however. In a report presented by UNOS, which adjusted for the health of the recipient, among other things, about a third of extended-criteria kidneys failed within three years. (About 20 percent of non-extended-criteria organs also failed within three years.) Transplantation, even under the best of circumstances, still involves risk. In assessing marginal organs, it is difficult to know whether a bad outcome -- the recipient's death or the organ's failure -- was caused by the organ, the surgery or the fragile health of the recipient.

Except for age-related research, few large-scale studies have yet investigated the effects of other extended-criteria kidneys. Do kidneys from diabetics, the obese, alcoholics, smokers or drug users generally work over the long term? Surgeons and scientists can't say for sure.

There is even less information about imperfect livers, hearts or lungs. Surgeons do know that livers, for some reason, don't age at the same rate as their original owners. Sixty- or 70-year-old livers can be in fine shape. Hearts and lungs aren't as durable and are more likely to fail as they get older. But surgeons are using them. A 2003 report by the UNOS-administered Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network stated: ''The need to more agressively utilize available organs for the candidate population as a whole competes with the expectation of each individual.''


And this is, ultimately, the crux of the matter. The marginality of any given organ is relative. It depends on how sick the waiting recipient is. There is a kind of mad, desperate arithmetic that goes into calculating whether to use a marginal organ and when. ''We're all trying to quantify the risks,'' Lewis Teperman, the N.Y.U. transplant director, says. ''If we know that there's a 0.7 increase in relative risk of an extended-criteria organ failing, which is about what we've seen in kidneys so far, you take that number, look at your patient's chances for survival, which might be 90 percent with a perfect organ and 80 percent with an extended-criteria one and. . . . '' He trails off. ''It sounds very clinical when I put it like that, which isn't what I want.'' He starts again. ''It's easy enough to come up with these kinds of calculations. But it's difficult for any of us to apply them in practice, when we're dealing with very sick people's lives.''

Dr. Marlon Levy, a liver-transplant surgeon in Fort Worth and the medical director for the Southwest Transplant Alliance, the group that unwittingly collected and distributed the rabid organs last year, told me: ''You have this immensely complex weighing of benefits and risks in each of these cases. Is the recipient sick enough to justify using any organ, even a really marginal one, to try and save his life and give him a few more years? Or say you have a slightly healthier patient, and you think he's doing well enough to pass on a marginal organ and wait for a better one. Then, suddenly, he develops complications and dies before another organ becomes available. Were these decisions wrong?''

It is extremely difficult to predict outcomes. ''The best thought-out decision doesn't work out all the time,'' Teperman says. ''I have put in extended-criteria organs that worked perfectly, and the person walked out the door a week later. Other times, a patient has gotten an extended-criteria organ and remained hospitalized for months. I've also waited, thinking a better organ would come along, and the patient has died in the meantime.''

To some extent, surgeons' hands are tied. In general, the current system requires that the most desperately ill patient must get the next organ that comes in, whether it is the best organ for that patient or not. ''Things would work best if we could put the most extended-criteria organs into the less critically ill patients and the healthiest organs into the sickest patients,'' Teperman says.

The calculus may be even more complex from the patient's perspective. Dr. Grant Campbell, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had a liver transplant in 1990. At that time, he was chronically ill and knowingly accepted an organ infected with cytomegalovirus, a common and usually mild disease but one that can be serious in immunosuppressed transplant patients. Fortunately, he didn't become sick.

Even the most rational attempts to weigh the risks and benefits of marginal organs tend to fall apart in the face of truly boundless human despair. ''We would have taken any lungs,'' said Harry Littlejohn, 59, of Lewisville, Tex., whose 28-year-old daughter, Carmen, died in 2001 of cystic fibrosis. She had been No. 1 on the state waiting list for new lungs for eight weeks by then. None became available. ''We would have done anything to save her,'' he said, ''anything. But there was nothing we could do.''


Joshua Hightower turned 18 on May 10, 2004, in the transplant recovery ward at Baylor University Medical Center. Photos from around that time show him propped up in bed, looking wan, but smiling.

Joshua had been added to the lengthy transplant waiting list the year before. The doctors said they could not estimate how long the wait would be, Jennifer Hightower, his mother, told me.

After the Hightowers received the call from the hospital, his mother recalled, she had wondered about the donor. Anonymity has been crucial to the workings of the organ-transplant system. Donation is supposed to be a blind act of altruism. Donor families aren't told at the time who will receive the organs, and recipients generally are told only the age and sex of the donor.

''You don't want people coming in and saying, 'I'll only donate to Italians.' Or 'I only want them to go to someone in the Ku Klux Klan,''' says Sheldon Zink, director of the program for transplant policy and ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. You also don't want recipients turning down organs because of their own biases.

But how much should a surgeon tell a patient who is about to receive a compromised organ? Should he explain that the new kidney comes from a retiree, a drug user or an alcoholic, a chain smoker or a member of a motorcycle gang? Does he have to tell a patient that the organ he is about to receive is considered marginal?


"I wish we had been told more,'' Jennifer Hightower says. Her son, she went on to say, would have declined the kidney had they known more about Beed's background and his death. Joshua, she says, was not so sick that he couldn't wait. ''I would have made him pass on it.''

Her attitude worries Zink, the ethicist. ''I would question anyone's motivation in refusing an organ from a drug user,'' she told me. ''They aren't responding to clinical information, because the available clinical data'' -- the anecdotal reports from doctors -- ''indicates that organs from crack-cocaine users are fine, in general. So they must be responding to preconceptions about that person's lifestyle. That's only one small step from declining an organ because the donor is black or Hispanic.''

At the moment, no formal national medical standards dictate what transplant surgeons should tell their patients about organs other than kidneys or what they can withhold. Each doctor makes that decision based on how he feels about the ethics of the situation.

''I believe in erring on the side of telling the patient as much as possible,'' Teperman says. ''We have a lengthy consent form here at N.Y.U., and it goes into the use of marginal organs. We ask patients if they will accept one. You don't want to be calling someone at 2 a.m. and saying: 'You can take this organ we just got in that may not be very good or you can wait and maybe die. What do you want to do?' That's an unrealistic burden to put on a patient. We try to have the conversation early on, when patients are a little more clearheaded. That's not always an easy conversation to have. Some patients would rather not think about it. They'd rather the doctor just make the decision for them.''

Some surgeons insist on making decisions about marginal organs unilaterally. ''There are transplant surgeons who think they absolutely know best,'' Zink says. ''They don't bother asking the patient if he wants a marginal organ because they don't want the patient having a choice. They make it for him.''

When Zink recently asked surgeons at a major transplant conference how many of them always tell their patients if they are about to implant a marginal organ, ''about half said they tell the patient,'' Zink told me. ''Half said they don't.''

Some surgeons withhold information because they are concerned about litigation (better to say nothing than to say that an organ might be compromised, have your judgment proved right and be sued for it). Others are prodded by compassion. ''There are doctors out there who think that a patient will recover better if he isn't worrying about the quality of the organ inside of him,'' Zink says.

Wry pragmatism also plays a role. ''At some large urban transplant centers, virtually all organs nowadays are extended-criteria organs,'' Zink points out. Why discuss the option of accepting or declining an imperfect organ? If a patient says he doesn't want one, he'll most likely never get an organ at all. ''I've had doctors tell me they don't even tell their patients that they're about to get an organ that might be infected with hepatitis C because so many of the donated organs may have it,'' Zink says.


On Friday, May 28, 24 days after his transplant, Joshua Hightower, who had been released from the hospital, graduated from high school. He clutched his diploma, climbed up into the stands and threw up, Jennifer Hightower said. He didn't stop vomiting all through the celebrations that followed. The next day, he was stumbling, and by the evening, he was having convulsions. Spit dribbled down his face. Doctors at the nearest emergency room hurriedly transferred him to the E.R. at Baylor.

Upstairs in the transplant wing, around the same time, three other patients who had received donations from William Beed Jr. lay dying, each with convulsions, delirium or pain. Within two weeks, all but Joshua were dead. Rabies was confirmed as the cause of death a few weeks later.

There is no formal system that tracks the short-term fate of individual organs from a particular donor. Surgeons report raw data about deaths and severe surgical complications to UNOS. Had all of the people who received an organ from William Beed Jr. not come back to the same hospital and died, one after another, their rabies may not have come to light.

In May, three people died who had received organs from the same donor in New England. As it turned out, the donor had passed along lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, a rare illness transmitted to humans from rodents like hamsters. Two of the recipients, after getting ill, went to the same hospital, which helped doctors there determine that the transplant was the cause.

''I doubt very much that this is the only time'' that rabies has killed transplant patients, says Charles Rupprecht, the C.D.C.'s rabies expert about the Beed case. ''And I doubt that it will be the last.'' In February, doctors in Germany announced that four patients there had been infected with rabies after receiving organs from a rabid young woman who had died, they had thought, of a heart attack associated with an overdose of cocaine and Ecstasy.

''Rabies is a sentinel disease,'' argues Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, the assistant director for blood safety at the C.D.C., who has studied outbreaks of disease in transplant recipients. ''It tells us we should be paying attention, that something needs to change.''

What, though? ''We cannot start testing every donor for rabies or any of the other once-in-a-lifetime diseases that might crop up,'' Klintmalm says. ''We don't have time. It would cost too much. You might as well shut down every transplant center. If another case came in today exactly like that one, a young man who used crack cocaine and died, I would not demand more explanation. Why? We'll never get the risk of transplants down to zero. It's stupid to pretend we can. That young man appeared to be a perfect donor. I wish we had more like him.''


The broader question is what, if anything, should change in transplantation as marginal organs become everyday organs? ''We at the C.D.C. wish that there were more formal disease surveillance and follow-up of transplant patients,'' Kuehnert said. ''We simply don't know the risks of using certain types of donors at this point.'' The C.D.C. has no authority to require such follow-up and study, though. Only other regulatory agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services or state agencies can set such mandates.

In June 2004, the New York State Department of Health became the first regulatory agency in the country to start formally looking into the growing use of marginal organs and to formulate recommendations about what patients should be told and what kinds of organs should be allowed. Its report is due soon.

In the meantime, the United Network for Organ Sharing has created a designation for patients who say they will accept a marginal kidney. At the end of February, 42 percent of the adults waiting for a kidney in the United States said they would take a marginal organ.


A year ago, while Joshua Hightower lay unconscious but alive, the doctors decided to surgically remove his transplanted kidney. But by then, rabies (not yet identified as the culprit) was everywhere in him. His condition worsened. On June 18, a Friday, doctors tested for brain activity. They found none and declared him brain dead. Stung with grief, Jennifer Hightower and the rest of her family sat with the boy through a wrenching weekend while he remained on a ventilator. On that Monday, his parents agreed to end life support. That afternoon, with his family watching, doctors turned off the ventilator. His mother held him as his heart stopped.

It will not be a simple matter in the years ahead to decide how best to save lives with transplants. At some point this year, the number of people on transplant waiting lists in the United States will very likely top 100,000. Unless there is an enormous effort, probably from the federal government, to increase organ donation, the shortage will only grow. ''All these kids we see with diabetes,'' Nicholas Tilney says, ''so many of them will need a new kidney in a few years. Where are those organs going to come from?''

Gretchen Reynolds frequently writes about medical topics. Her last article for the magazine was about epidemiologists tracking the avian flu.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 4:59 PM

 

Mr. Berinie Ecclestone. British Grand Prix, 2005.
All in all, this season has been gratifying since Fernando Alonso has been so incredibly quick and consistent. For his youth, he seems a very mature driver, and he appears to have the balance of his emotions and ego placed in proper perspective. In short, the guy is super talented and very cool. This is the best thing that could happen to Formula 1.


As far as Indianapolis is concerned, I believe there were unseen forces that may be quite pleased to see Formula 1 fall flat on its face here in America. Of course, when viewed from a strictly fan perspective, the entire episode was one giant farcical disappointment.


Several matters come to mind. Michelin, the internationally known and recognized tire company somehow did not do the necessary research and showed up in America without a tire that was capable of performing on the Indy track surface. Granted, Bridgestone had been at the 500, so they naturally would have had more data on the track surface and so were well advised in what compounds they had chosen prior to arriving at the Brickyard. It is astounding however, when you analyze the sequence of events. That first and foremost, a tire company participating in Motor racing at the highest level of international competition with billions of dollars involved throughout the entire enterprise, would be capable of going in blindly without having at least examined what options they might need to have or what kind of obstacles they might be expected to incur. It was not a secret that the race track had been resurfaced in some way or another which resulted in a grittier more abrasive characteristic.


Michelin shows up and discovers that the tires they have are relatively useless and worse yet they are dangerous. Ralf Schumacher goes off in a high speed shunt, and one other driver whose name escapes me now, goes out as well, and all the while Michel in have no clue. Except they do realize and admit that the safety of the drivers precludes them from simply pressing forward and acting as if everything would be alright. For this I give them a certain degree of respect.


So when the windup ensues you have the race itself, and all that it represents in terms of the perennial desire for Formula 1 to someday, somehow establish itself firmly and loyally in the minds and hearts of American racing fans.


And then you have the internecine intrigue between the intricately drawn factions of the International Grand Prix circus. Here we enter into cultural, financial, philosophical, and not the least, personal conflicts and long standing animosities.


From the Bridgestone perspective, why would they have wished to smooth over a gaffe that exposed their world's greatest rival as something of a complete incompetent?

From the FISA point of view, I suppose they felt they would open a Pandora's box of possibilities wherein which rules that are so incredibly complex, must be continuously revised and reformatted to account for so many variables within the sport and the technology that it draws from in large measure. These rules would perhaps then be the constant point of negotiation as other points of departure would come into question.

Finally, Scuderia Ferrari was showing as much compassion as the Italian Expeditionary Tank forces extended to Hailee Sallase and his vastly out numbered, camel bourne , sling shot bearing defense force in Ethiopia. Another less than memorable episode in 20th century Italian history.

FISA was in no way potent enough by way of silent persuasion to effectuate an ultimate compromise. Max Mosley would have been wise, in my opinion, to have made his way to the paddock and the negotiating table, because the entire BRAND of Formula 1 was suffer ring a devastating blow to its credibility, marketability, and general point of popular acceptance.

As it turns out, he remained somewhere in Europe, Paris I suppose, and from that distance felt safe enough while allowing Ecclestone to bear all of the justifiable ire and resentment from those fans who made their weekend around seeing a genuinely competitive International Grand Prix. They deserve, and I believe they eventually will receive, their money for admission refunded.

Furthermore, Mr. Ecclestone is one person who would have, if he were able, in and of his own will, put together a compromise solution so as to have the racing fans enjoy what they had come to see. There is no one that I know, in or out of Formula 1 who is more desirous of establishing a permanent presence and appreciation for Grand Prix racing in the U.S. than Bernie Ecclestone. He has made repeated attempts to educate, if you will, the civic leaders here in Las Vegas about the kind of product that Formula 1 confirms as unique and attended by a very high end marketing segment with disposable income far greater than what is demographically described by the NASCAR and other forms of all American motor racing.


The unfairness in regards to Ecclestone and the vents at the recent American Grand Prix, is that there are limits to what he personally can do without risking the opposite side of the critics corner wherein which he is accused of wielding totalitarian and dictatorial control over every aspect of the entire enterprise.


To my way of thinking, to the extent that in every instance where to a greater or lesser degree, "The Ecclestone as Czar model" is accurate, then the entire Formula 1 world and everyone involved in this endeavor in any way large or small, should be thankful for all of the years of incessant determination and unrelenting focus and vision with which Bernie Ecclestone has dedicated himself towards bringing together the very essence of what is accepted as the world?s premier Motor Racing series.


Most knowledgeable people with even the slightest awareness of Motor racing in general, will acknowledge that Grand Prix Formula 1 exists on a level of technical and physical challenge unlike any other form of entertainment in the world today. The very fact that Ecclestone has traveled from year to year from race to race, from airport to hotel to airplane to helicopter to jet to hotel and back around again is testimony to the superior discipline, motivation, intellect and abounding business genius that mark the achievements of this leader of the world of Grand Prix Motor Sport.


His comment about the women being advised to wear dresses the color of kitchen appliances was simply his "East End" London sense of humor flexing itself as a leit motif to a very stressful situation.


I know from first hand, personal experience that Bernie Ecclestone is a genuine humanitarian and extraordinarily generous to those he loves and cares about. He is unsparingly loyal to those loyal to him, and he is a person who has done innumerable acts of great kindness to help those less fortunate through times of overwhelming adversity.


His financial success should not be held against him, because every pound note Bernie may hold he well deserves because he has worked his butt off and taken many risks, suffered many personal setbacks and disappointments integral to the dangers of Formula 1 and survived it all to stand as the single most influential leader in the world of Motor Sport since the beginning of organized and sanctioned competition.


No one that I can identify comes even close to having been able to accomplish so much from every angle to see that so many people realized so much more as drivers, team owners, promoters, journalists, photographers, and accessory entrepreneurs of every ancillary stripe.


All persons related to this unique form of incredible excitement and test of competitive skill and technical expertise owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Mr. Ecclestone, and those persons who have character and real integrity within the sport itself realize this only too well.

Without him, Grand Prix Motor Racing as we know it today, would not exist. Case Closed
Michael P. Whelan Las Vegas, July 12, 2005.
 
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 1:51 PM

 

Write Line
FIA and Michelin Teams: A Letter of Concern
2005-06-24
Kaylie Broughton
The FIA have recently published their views on the USA Grand Prix and in general showed that they care little for their fans and that it is not important to please them, but let me take this opportunity to remind everyone of something. Without us, there are no viewing figures and money spent on race weekends, without that there are no sponsors willing to come into F1, with no sponsors there are no F1 teams, with no teams there is no F1. Perhaps you should sit down for awhile and look at it from someone else's perspective instead of just trying to cover your own portion of blame in the matter. Maybe you should try running a series without fans, go to races with no one watching in the stands or on the tv and see how far you get before you fail.
The events which I witnessed unfolding in the USA Grand Prix were totally disgusting for a global sport such as F1, but post race dealings have gone from disgusting to unacceptable and this is why you find me writing this letter.
I am in complete support of the Michelin teams who withdrew from the USA Grand Prix on the formation lap (note that they did start the race) and find it shocking that you blame the matter totally on these teams and come up with reasons which contradict your own rules. I am right in believing there is a rule which states at least 12 drivers should take part in a race otherwise it can be cancelled, so if you deem that the Michelin teams did not start then you should have also stuck to this rule.
I believe that Michelin are to fault for providing tyres that were unsafe for the grand prix in which they should have been used for, but instead of dragging the sport further through the mud perhaps you should be concentrating on how to ensure or decrease the chance of this happening again.
Michelin teams pulled out on grounds of safety and there are several team bosses out there that know all to well about fatalities and injuries that are possible in F1. Even the solutions that were offered did not guarantee anymore safety than just racing at full speeds, as the root cause of these problems had not been identified.
As one of the younger fans of the sport I know how unpopular the sport has become in recent years, but I have stuck through the less interesting seasons and intend to celebrate my 10th year of watching the sport by attending the Silverstone grand prix, however the last week has made me question the sport and indeed my support for it and if the teams are punished for their correct actions last weekend then come race weekends you can forget any viewing figures come from me.
I hope the hearing on the 29th June clears the Michelin teams of any part of bringing the sport into disrepute and I would like to emphasise that they have my full support on this matter.
Regards,
Kaylie Broughton
 

- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 6:12 PM

 

Paul Stoddart battles to get his cars in qualifying
F1 > Australian GP, 2005-03-04 (Albert Park Circuit): Friday practice 2

F1's voice of reason
2005-07-06
Anne Proffit

In a pack of incessantly howling wolves, Australian Paul Stoddart has become the voice of Formula One reason. The owner of an F1 team resigned to the rear of each F1 grid, Stoddart knows how to do more with less than any other team owner.

Each Sunday on a Grand Prix weekend Stoddart produces "Stoddy's Sunday Sermon," during which he pontificates on any number of interesting subjects having to do with the meeting's activities or news within the world of F1 racing.

During the United States Grand Prix, Stoddart was inclined to talk about the rules proposal publicly released by the FIA and its president Max Mosley two days prior. Some points Stoddart agrees with in principle; others he has no time for. Stoddart believes that slowing the F1 cars dramatically by following the proposed rules to the letter would make them "15 seconds slower than the GP2 cars." That solution doesn't sit well with him.

The idea of slowing cars isn't always workable. The clever minds of F1 engineers normally return the projectiles to ever-quicker laps within a few months. And slowing cars isn't about to result in lower costs, according to the Minardi chief. "Any change in F1 has always cost money," Stoddard reminds everyone. "Max Mosley should ask the people who pay the bills (what to do) before making his assumptions."

The FIA's nine-page document of proposed changes for the 2008 F1 championship (and presumably beyond) looks at all facets of cars and competition. Primarily it addresses the need to cut costs but, according to Stoddart, tackles the dilemma in the least effective manner.

"This was not a necessarily well informed document," he chides. "The entrants with the best budget, the best technology, the best team and drivers will still win," as they have since the start of competition in the 19th century.

In an effort to reach out to the teams, the FIA is proposing changes that focus on "decreasing the rate of car performance relative to protection for the public and all participants", whatever that means; clear rules enforcement "with some degree of flexibility" (a cynic could have a field day with this one); cost containment designed to keep independent teams such as Minardi in the fold -- but how?; getting rid of expensive materials; eliminating driver aids; and limiting downforce.

Stoddard has his own opinions on where this proposal should go. As an avowed opponent to Mosley's continuing reign atop the FIA his comments tend to be vitriolic.

For instance, Stoddart has no support for a common ECU as suggested by the FIA. While a common electronic control unit might be able to police traction control (a "driver aid" the FIA wants to see banned) Stoddart does not believe such a component would lower costs or enhance competition in F1.

"We need to contain costs without destroying the sport," he insists. "Traction control needs to go but I don't think dumbing down technology is the way."

The FIA would like to see a designated supplier of gearboxes as well, but Stoddart doesn't suppose that will relegate added costs to the dustbin. "My gearbox is less than one percent of my annual cost and it need not be targeted," he fumes. Stoddart thinks placing limits on gear ratios would be an obvious opportunity for cost cutting. As for placing the onus for changing gears on a driver's left foot, "pedal operation goes back to the Dark Ages."

On the touchy topic of downforce, Stoddart ruminates that a 30 percent reduction from 2004 levels will work just fine and still keep competition humming. "That is a sensible solution," but one he's sure the FIA will not like.

Like F1 fans Stoddart wants to see close, non-manipulated competition -- and a complete loss of downforce via bodywork adjustments just isn't going to work. "I have little resistance to cleaning up barge boards" and other chassis extremities, he says.

The FIA would like to ban tire warmers, but Stoddart thinks that's not an issue for 2008. "If they want to ban them, that's okay, but they must allow tire and fuel changes during the races again." The differences between the proposal and the current tire rules, which ban slicks but have near-slick grooved tires, are so minimal as to be laughable.

But, yes, Stoddart agrees, let's have a single tire supplier. "That is absolutely essential for cost containment and the single best way to reduce costs," he declares. The ongoing tire war between Bridgestone and Michelin has resulted in added costs and chaos, as witnessed during the USGP less than two weeks ago. "With a single tire maker you can test the limits of the car and that's valid."

Mosley and his cohorts have asked that an FIA-designated supplier produce all brake discs, pads and calipers to an agreed specification beginning in 2008. Stoddart thinks that idea is rubbish: "Brake specification changes put enormous costs to the teams," he counters. The rules Mosley suggests would do nothing to reduce those costs.

Banning expensive materials meets with Stoddart's approval. What is needed, though, is "a list of approved, not banned materials," as the elimination of exotic items like titanium simply opens the door to new, even more bizarre options.

But banning spare cars is a poor idea, because an accident in practice or qualifying can eliminate a team from competition. "It's better to see 20 cars on Sunday afternoon than 16," Stoddart explains, "So we should not ban spare cars. After an accident what do you do?" He feels that F1 definitely needs spare cars to keep competition levels at the agreed-upon mark.

If testing days decrease for the calendar year as proposed, the measure must not only meet with everyone's approval in the paddock but should be balanced by added track time during race weekends, when a test comes to fruition. "I say limit testing and make it (a test session) open to the public so they can get some value from Formula One," Stoddart suggests.

For the most part the Minardi chief is looking to enhance competitiveness and cooperation within the sport, instead of the current level of combativeness. "We need equal rules enforcement; that is what the teams have been crying out for forever and we need rules for unforeseen situations" like the tire debacle at Indianapolis. "We need to contain costs without destroying this sport," Stoddart maintains.

"Formula one doesn't need more problems; it needs solutions. Sensible governance between now and 2008," Stoddart declares, "is the only way this sport can continue."

Before F1 can address rules packages for 2008 and beyond, however, it must first look to solutions to today's problems and the trial of the Michelin Seven. "Criticism is essential to a healthy F1," Paul Stoddart believes.

That is why he is continuing dialog with the Michelin teams -- despite riding on Bridgestone rubber -- and trying to find a way to gain harmony within today's Formula One paddock. Stoddart's intent is pure but he speaks out in F1's wilderness. Paul Stoddart is the voice of reason
 
- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 4:17 PM