Articles to Use for News Story Identification Assignment

Articles to Use for News Story Identification Assignment

Article #1

September 10, 2007

Slow Progress Being Made in Iraq, Petraeus Tells Congress

By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq told Congress this afternoon that the United States by next summer should be able to reduce its troop strength there to about 130,000, or what it was before the recent increase.

Returning to the “pre-surge” strength by pulling out 30,000 troops could probably be done without jeopardizing the hard-won progress made in Iraq, General Petraeus told House members at an emotionally charged hearing that was in some ways reminiscent of the Vietnam era. He said no decision on further withdrawals should be made until next March.

The gradual pullback of American troops should begin this month with the withdrawal of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., General Petraeus said. He said he had recommended that move to President Bush.

The general, whose testimony today was the most eagerly awaited appearance in decades by a military leader on Capitol Hill, said he envisioned the United States achieving “success” in Iraq, “although doing so will be neither quick nor easy.”

The American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, offered a similar prognosis, saying that he “cannot guarantee success” in Iraq, but that he thinks it is attainable.

General Petraeus testified that Iraq continues to be torn by foreign and home-grown terrorists and plain thugs; that Syria and Iran continue to meddle in Iraq, and that continued competition among sectarian groups in Iraq is inevitable. The overriding question is whether that competition will continue to be violent, as it has been for many months, the general said.

General Petraeus, appearing before a joint session of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Armed Services Committee, delivered a report that mixed descriptions of slow, modest progress in pacifying Iraq with a prediction that many tough days lies ahead. And Mr. Crocker described Iraq as a “a traumatized society,” and said it will remain so for a long time.

The military objectives of the troop increase ordered by President Bush earlier this year, known as the surge, are “in large measure being met,” General Petraeus told the lawmakers, some of whom were openly skeptical. But while terrorists have been weakened, “Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq remain strong,” he said.

Feelings ran high, as some antiwar hecklers chanted “Generals lie, children die,” before Representative Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who heads the armed services panel, decreed, “Out they go!” and warned that anyone else who disrupted the hearing would be prosecuted. But there were further disruptions, with at least one screaming demonstrator hustled out of the room as General Petraeus praised the American troops in Iraq as “a new greatest generation.”

The essence of General Petraeus’s testimony had been forecast for days, so his projections on troop strength were no surprise. But his appearance with Mr. Crocker was nonetheless dramatic, as Democrats and Republicans alike praised the two men as outstanding public servants while differing sharply on the policy that they were to testify about.

Inevitably, General Petraeus has become a figure of controversy. His supporters have described him as a brilliant general who, literally, wrote the Army’s book on counterterrorism. His detractors have accused him of being little more than a shill for President Bush’s policies.

Democratic leaders on the panels described the general and the envoy as good people shackled to a bad policy, while Republicans said General Petraeus in particular had been subjected to insulting and unfair criticism by people unwilling to even hear his testimony before rushing to judgment.

“He’s the right person, three years too late and 250,000 troops short,” Mr. Skelton said of the general and the general’s predicament, as he sees it.

Representative Tom Lantos, the California Democrat who heads the foreign affairs panel, said that he thought General Petraeus had been sent to Capitol Hill “to restore credit to a discredited policy,” and that the Iraqi government had “utterly squandered” opportunities to achieve political reconciliation.

But Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, ranking Republican on the foreign affairs committee, said that the United States could not afford to yield to “radical Islamists” by conceding Iraq to them, and that they see Iraq as “a central front in their war on freedom.”

And Representative Duncan Hunter of California, the armed services panel’s ranking Republican, said it was “an outrage” and “against the traditions of this great House” that some lawmakers seemed to have made up their minds about the worth of General Petraeus’s testimony, and even his personal credibility, well before his appearance today.

Among the examples of progress that General Petraeus cited was a lessening of bloodshed in Anbar Province, not so long ago one of the most violence-torn regions of Iraq.

And Mr. Crocker said the continued meddling of Iran and Syria was offset by a bit of good diplomatic news: Saudi Arabia intended to open an embassy in Baghdad for the first time since the Saddam Hussein era.

Today’s appearance by General Petraeus had been described as the most anticipated by a military leader at the Capitol since Gen. William C. Westmoreland appeared before Congress in April 1967 to talk about the Vietnam War. David H. Petraeus was 14 years old at the time.

Article #2

September 10, 2007

Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group. “There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”

The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories — everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and there will be occasional updates, Ms. Billingsley said. Prayer books and other worship materials are not affected by this process.

The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions. There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.

The identities of the bureau’s experts have not been made public, Ms. Billingsley said, but they include chaplains and scholars in seminaries and at the American Academy of Religion. Academy staff members said their organization had met with prison chaplains in the past but was not consulted on this effort, though it is possible that scholars who are academy members were involved.

The bureau has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.

A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison system, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is a bureau employee, said: “At some of the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and now they are told that this material doesn’t meet some kind of criteria. It doesn’t make sense to them. They’re asking, ‘Why are our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?’ ”

Of the lists, he said, “Many of the chaplains I’ve spoken to say these are not the things they would have picked.”

The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because chaplains routinely reject any materials that incite violence or disparage, and donated materials already had to be approved by prison officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he added, but few have much money to spend.

Religious groups that work with prisoners have privately been writing letters about their concerns to bureau officials. Would it not be simpler, they asked the bureau, to produce a list of forbidden titles? But the bureau did that last year, when it instructed the prisons to remove all materials by nine publishers — some Muslim, some Christian.

The plan to standardize the libraries first became public in May when several inmates, including a Muslim convert, at the Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, N.Y., about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, filed a lawsuit acting as their own lawyers. Later, lawyers at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison took on the case pro bono. They refiled it on Aug. 21 in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish religious books, many of them donated,” said David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. “It was decimated. Three-quarters of the Jewish books were taken off the shelves.”

Mr. Zwiebel asked, “Since when does the government, even with the assistance of chaplains, decide which are the most basic books in terms of religious study and practice?”

The lawsuit raises serious First Amendment concerns, said Douglas Laycock, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, but he added that it was not a slam-dunk case.

“Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons,” Mr. Laycock said. “But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.”

The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were made available to The Times by a critic of the bureau’s project. In some cases, the lists indicate their authors’ preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house. A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who looked over some of the lists were baffled at the selections.

Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame (who edited “The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,” which did make the list), said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions, few spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.

“I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic chaplains in federal prisons if they’re complaining that this list is inhibiting,” he said, “because I know they have useful books that are not on this list.”

Article #3

September 8, 2007

Congress Passes Overhaul of Student Aid Programs

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — Congress gave final approval to a broad overhaul of federal student loan programs Friday, sharply cutting subsidies to lenders and increasing grants to needy students.

In quick succession, the Senate and the House approved the changes, allowing Democrats to say they had made good on one of their campaign promises last year, to ease the strain of rising college costs. In the Senate, the bill passed 79 to 12, reflecting broad bipartisan support, while the House approved it 292 to 97 .

The federal education secretary, Margaret Spellings, said she was recommending that President Bush sign the bill because it “answered the president’s call to significantly increase funding” for Pell grants for low-income students. The administration had issued a veto threat against an earlier House version of the legislation.

Republicans in the House expressed disappointment at the administration’s change of course, arguing that the cuts in lender subsidies went too far.

The final bill, hammered out this week in a House-Senate conference committee, alters many of the ground rules for financing higher education, offering forgiveness on student loans to graduates who work for 10 years or more in public service professions like teaching, firefighting and the police, and limiting monthly payments on federally backed loans to 15 percent of the borrower’s discretionary income.

It also raises the maximum Pell grant, the basic federal grant for middle- and low-income students, to $5,400 from the current $4,310 over the next five years. To pay for the changes, the bill reduces federal subsidies to lenders by roughly $20 billion over the same period.

Democrats likened the legislation to the G.I. Bill that sent millions of veterans to vocational training and college after World War II. “Today we’ll need a similar bold new commitment to enable the current generation of Americans to rise to the global challenges we face,” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the education committee. “Today we’ll help millions of students achieve the American dream.”

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House education committee, said that last year, Republicans took nearly $12 billion from federal student aid programs. “We took $11.39 billion and put it back into Pell grants,” Mr. Miller said. “That’s the difference that an election makes.”

Campaign promises aside, the changes reflect the steep and sudden decline in the fortunes of the $85 billion student loan industry after years of generous subsidies and support in Congress. Investigations by Congress and the New York attorney general revealed a series of potential conflicts of interest as lenders had provided free travel, gifts and financial incentives to colleges and college officials in the hope they would steer student borrowers their way.

Lenders, which had campaigned hard against the subsidy cuts, warned that the reductions would compromise the federal loan program, forcing some of them out of business and reducing competition and, inevitably, services to students.

Kevin Bruns, executive director of America’s Student Loan Providers, said the legislation “punishes the industry,” while Joe Belew, president of the Consumer Bankers Association, said it would “come to be viewed as irresponsible legislation that undermined rather than expanded college opportunity.”

Mr. Kennedy dismissed the complaints, saying, “The reality is that our bill restores the balance to this grossly unfair student loan system by directing funds to the students, not to the banks.”