We all know what happened on September 11, 2001 - Osama bin Laden inspired 19 Muslim extremists to hijack commercial airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But what if it didn't happen that way at all?

David Ray Griffin is a professor of theology, a well-respected scholar and author of more than 20 books, including The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions and The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. Griffin maintains that the evidence contradicts the government's official story and that, so far, nobody's come up with a theory that can account for all of the facts.

At HUSTLER we believe the murder of 2,986 innocent people demands hard questions and digging deeper. We're especially troubled by the collapse of Building 7, but we're determined to keep an open mind. As such, we sit down with Griffin to discuss what appear to be disturbing inconsistencies with the government's story.

HUSTLER: You've compiled a record of the facts-but are they beyond dispute?

DAVID RAY GRIFFIN: I simply gather research that has been done by others, a lot of it based on mainline stories from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Guardian and so on. These reports tend to, more or less, contradict the official theory.

You say there's reason to question the government's official position on Osama bin Laden.

One problem with the official theory of the attacks being pulled off entirely by the 19 men named as al Qaeda terrorists is that six of them have, subsequently, shown up very much alive. This has been reported in the BBC, but not in the American mainstream press. One guy even walked into the U.S. Embassy and asked what was this nonsense about his having died on 9/11?

What are some other problems with the official story?

The government had every reason to know this was going to happen. There were some 52 warnings of the attack, many of which the Bush Administration didn't see fit to have released until after the inauguration. A little bit came out during the 9/1 1 hearings. For example, Condoleezza Rice-who had been describing the famous August 6, 2001, memo from British intelligence as merely historical in nature-was forced to admit that the title of it was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike within the United States." Many people have thought that was the strongest evidence of foreknowledge-but not at all.

Another example involves David Schippers, the attorney who prosecuted Bill Clinton and is highly thought of in Republican circles. Schippers says he called up Attorney General John Ashcroft repeatedly to tell him that FBI agents were warning of an attack, that they knew the date and said it was going to be in Lower Manhattan. Schippers couldn't get the Attorney General's office to call him back. The New American, a conservative political magazine, interviewed these FBI agents and confirmed their story.

Further evidence of foreknowledge involves the Secret Service's seeming to not only know the attacks were coming, but know who was targeted and who was not. That morning [of September 11], Bush was in a classroom in Sarasota, Florida, publicizing his education program. After the second building was struck, there could be no doubt the country was under attack. Yet Bush just sat there for about ten minutes.

Many people have criticized the President for not getting up immediately and going into commander-in-chief mode, but really, the Pentagon handles these things. Standard operating procedure dictates the Secret Service should have sprung into action and whisked Bush out of the classroom, into a car and away to some secure location.

The Secret Service should have assumed that the President would be the next target and at least take action as if that might be the case. The head of the FAA had just reported that there were 11 planes unaccounted for; and so there might have been 11 hijacked planes at that time. Yet the Secret Service did nothing. Bush went on national TV at about 9:30 for a prescheduled talk, and then they got in the limousine and went in the caravan on the normally scheduled route to the airport. When they got to the airport, they hadn't even called ahead to make sure there was jet fighter cover for Air Force One.

What are some of the contradictions involving the attacks?

One involves the story about the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. We had three buildings collapse there, the North Tower [WTC I], the South Tower [WTC 2] and Building 7 [WTC 71. Each was a high-rise steel-frame building. Now, steel-frame high-rise buildings have never in the history of the universe been brought down by fire. And yet on this day, three of them were allegedly brought down by fire. There have been experiments with buildings raging with fire. In the experiments, fire made them sag a little, but never caused them to collapse. [See Madrid high-rise fire, page 34.] And yet on 9/11 these three buildings, which had relatively small fires in them, collapsed.

People have the image of the South Tower in their minds, and they think, Oh, these were towering infernos. But most of the jet fuel exploded outside of the South Tower, which produced the really dramatic effect. But you have to remember, that effect only lasted for a few seconds, and the fuel burned up very quickly. In the South Tower there was relatively little fuel to feed the fire inside; so it would have had to be feeding on carpets, on desks and things like that. And yet the South Tower collapsed in less than an hour after it was hit.

The collapse of Building 7 is particularly unusual, and yet the 9/11 Commission never mentions it once in their report. Somehow fire got started in Building 7, which is two blocks away and was never hit by a plane. There was no jet fuel inside to feed the fire. There are photographs that show only small fires on floors 7 and 12 of this 47-story building. And yet at 5:20 in the afternoon it comes collapsing down in exactly the same way as the other buildings.

Now I stress in the same way because they all came straight down into their own footprint for the most part. They collapsed very quickly, within about ten seconds. That's amazing when you think about it, that fire could produce that kind of effect, just like controlled demolition. In fact, on that very night, Dan Rather-viewing the collapse of Building 7-blurted out, "It looked just like one of those controlled demolitions."

Further evidence of Building 7 being brought down by controlled demolition came from Larry Silverstein, the man who had recently taken a lease on the entire complex. In a PBS documentary from September 2002, Silverstein said he told the fire commander that the smartest thing to do was "pull it." Next, he says, they "made that decision to pull" and watched the building collapse. Pull is a term commonly used to describe using explosives to demolish a building. Silverstein allegedly made almost $500 million in profit from the collapse of Building 7.

If the Twin Towers did come down by controlled demolition, wouldn't they have to be wired for the event well in advance of the attack?

They would have had to be wired, and then closer to the time [of the attack] the explosives would actually have to be placed. Several people who worked in the towers reported that there were times [shortly before the attack] when a certain part of one tower or the other was sectioned off for several days, and no one could go there except these special workers who were called "engineers." So it does appear that there could have been this kind of advance planning and that there would have been time to do this.

Also, because of terrorist alerts, they had been taking bomb-sniffing dogs through the buildings, checking for explosives. There is a report that the bomb-sniffing dogs were called off the weekend prior to 9/11.

Are there also inconsistencies involving the hijacked aircraft?

Let's start with Flight 77, which is credited with crashing into the Pentagon. There are many problems with the official story, which is that it took off from Washington, D.C., went west, then got hijacked, then turned around and came hack. Somehow it flew through American airspace, toward the Pentagon for about 40 minutes, without being detected.

Our multi-trillion-dollar defense system proved to be worthless. Even more striking, whatever hit the Pentagon hit the West Wing. These terrorists are supposedly so brilliant that they defeat this trillion-dollar system, and yet they didn't know that the West Wing was the worst part of the Pentagon to hit because all the top brass and Rumsfeld, whom you would presume they would want to kill, were in the East Wing.

Secondly, the West Wing was being renovated. It had been reinforced; so fire would not spread from the West Wing to the other parts, causing much less damage. Furthermore, very few regular workers were there because of the renovation. Most of the people killed were civilian workers, not Pentagon employees. We were told that the facade of the West Wing was hit by this Boeing 757, which weighs 100 tons and was going 300 miles per hour. Yet the facade of the West Wing didn't collapse until a half hour later. Photographs taken by a Marine and an AP photographer show there was a relatively small hole in the facade. And we're supposed to believe the 757, with a 120-foot wingspan and 40-foot-high tail, went through there. The wreckage should he out on the yard, but the photographs show no Boeing visible.

Were aircraft parts ever found in the Pentagon wreckage?

'There is clearly good evidence that plane parts were photographed in the Pentagon. But that they were parts from a Boeing 757 is highly and vigorously contested by many students of 'this event. What passes for the official story is that somehow this airplane hit the building, went into this tiny hole, which forced the wings back, and so they folded up and slipped inside the building.

The fire chief in charge of putting out the fire was asked if he saw any plane parts inside. He said no big pieces, no fuselage, no engine, nothing like that. So the people who try to defend this story respond by saying the fire was so hot it vaporized the plane. It not only melted the steel and the aluminum, but it vaporized them; and that's why they disappeared.

We've since learned that a lot of the bodies in the WTC were so destroyed that they were not able to identify them using any modern techniques. Yet this fire in the Pentagon that was hot enough to vaporize steel and aluminum left the bodies so they could be identified.

If the government did allow or enable the 9/11 attacks, what is the motivation?

The September 11 attacks are being used as the excuse for virtually everything the Bush/Cheney Administration is doing. Although Iraq had nothing to do with it-everybody agrees on that now-9/11 was used as the basis for this war. These guys had been champing at the bit to attack Iraq since 1992.

In 1997 some of them formed The Project for the New American Century, a think tank that claims to promote American global leadership. This organization involved Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and many others who became central members and ideologues of the Bush Administration. In 2000 the group produced a report titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" that outlines transforming the military and points out that this will be very expensive.

Since the Cold War is over, the report said, we don't have that excuse to keep military spending up. Many were talking about cutbacks on defense, i.e. military spending. Americans won't be willing to pony up money for defense unless there's an event that makes them feel insecure and threatened by external forces. Therefore, according to the report, any transformation of military affairs will go rather slowly, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor."

You've suggested that we will know what happened on 9/11 when those in power are arrested or forced to give sworn testimony. Who should that be?

Cumulative evidence would seem to suggest that it was people such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Meyers who probably would have led the activities. Somebody had to give stand-down orders. Standard FAA operating procedures involve contacting the military if there's any sign a plane may have been hijacked, if a plane goes radically off course and they can't call it back, or if it loses radio contact or the transponder's turned off.

The FAA calls the military, which calls the nearest Air Force base, which sends out jet fighters. They typically scramble a couple of fighters; and they have a regular routine where they tell the pilots you've been intercepted, follow me. If they won't comply, then the military pilot requests permission to take more drastic action. None of that happened on September 11. Not a single plane was intercepted. Normally, this occurs within about 15 minutes after signs of problems. In the case of Flight 77, after almost 40 minutes, there's no jet fighter on the scene.

But it gets more problematic. In the-first few days we got three different stories about why there were no interceptions. The first story Meyers and NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] told was that we didn't send planes up until after the Pentagon was hit. In other words, an hour and a half went by before any planes were scrambled. That story created lots of questions, and so they immediately changed it. On September 18, NORAD came out and said we did send up fighters, but the FAA was slow in contacting us, and we tried to get there in time, but didn't make it.

Then researchers examined the timelines. Those jets can go from scramble order to 29,000 feet in 2.5 minutes and fly 1,850 miles an hour, which means they should have arrived in time, even if the FAA was late.

With the 9/11 Commission, we get a third story from the military, which is the FAA didn't notify us late; they didn't notify us at all. More precisely, they had only nine minutes notice with Flight 11, the first flight, and no notice about the other three flights until after they had crashed. Of course, this ignores the fact that the military has a radar system by their own account that is far superior to that of the FAA. But for now this is the official story.

Are there also inconsistencies regarding Flight 93, the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania?

With the first three flights the question is, why weren't they intercepted or possibly shot down? With Flight 93 the question is, why does it seem the government shot this plane down after it appeared the passengers were about to wrest control of it? There was a certified pilot aboard as a passenger who would have been able to bring the plane down safely. You would have had live people, presumably live hijackers, to interrogate.

There's an enormous amount of evidence that Flight 93 was shot down. The government denied it. It's strange that they did, because they could have said, "This plane was heading toward the Pentagon or the White House, and we were protecting Washington, doing our job." For some reason they chose to deny that they had shot it down; and that became the official story. In the 9/11 Commission Report they do big-time damage control and remove the possibility that it could have been shot down by changing the timelines rather drastically.

Everybody knows and agrees that Cheney gave the shoot-down order. Prior to the 9/11 Commission Report, we were led to believe that permission was given at about 9:45. Many news reports suggest that the shoot-down order was given before 10 a.m. By his own testimony, Cheney was in charge, down in the underground bunker-the emergency operation center.

Norman Mineta, Secretary of Transportation, testified that when he got down to the underground bunker at about 9:20, Cheney was already there and had been there for some time. That supports the view that he got down there at least by 9:15. The 9/11 Commission ignores that evidence and says Cheney didn't get there until almost 10 a.m. and issued the order after 10:lO a.m. They conclude the military couldn't possibly have shot down Flight 93 because it went down at 10:03 or 10:06.

Standard operating procedures don't require a call from the President; the Pentagon chain of command can do it. So Rumsfeld, Meyers or a subordinate could have done it. In any case, they created the idea that only the President or the Vice President could order it. This is one of the biggest lies in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Do you think the truth will ever come out?

It is extremely difficult to get the truth to come out in America because the mainstream media are not only co-opted, but accomplices in these matters. This is understandable because we have a corporate-owned media.

Take NBC, for example, which is owned by General Electric, one of the major producers of military equipment in the world. It's very unlikely you're going to get some reporter on NBC to expose this stuff. Thus far we've seen nothing about this in any mainstream magazine, newspaper or television show in this country.

An international commission with prestigious people would be able to command attention-so much so that even the American press would be unable to ignore it.

Among the many Web sites devoted to this topic are 911Research.com, WTC7.net and 911Truth.org.

A fictional crime drama based on the premise that the Bush administration ordered the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington aired this week on German state television, prompting the Green Party chairman to call for an investigation.

"I think absolutely nothing of the conspiracy theory that has been hawked in this series. I hope this particular TV movie will be discussed very critically at the next supervisory board meeting of ARD [state television]," said Green Party Chairman Reinhard Buetikofer, who acknowledged that he had not seen the show.

Sunday night's episode of "Tatort," a popular murder mystery that has been running on state-run ARD-German television for 35 years, revolved around a German woman and a man who was killed in her apartment.

According to the plot, which was seen by approximately 7 million Germans, the dead man had been trained to be one of the September 11 pilots but was left behind, only to be tracked down and killed by CIA or FBI assassins.

The woman, who says in the program that the September 11 attacks were instigated by the Bush family for oil and power, then is targeted, presumably to silence her. The drama concludes with the German detectives accepting the truth of her story as she eludes the U.S. government hit men and escapes to safety in an unnamed Arab country.

As ludicrous as it may sound to most Americans, the tale has resonance in Germany, where fantastic conspiracy theories often are taken as fact.

Comment: We do not doubt that the story sounds ludicrous to some Americans. Yet it seems that there are many Americans who are able to see the lies, but with Bush and Gang having control of the media and judiciary, they know that they risk their lives and their families' safety if they speak out...

Many Germans think, for example, that the 1969 moon landing was faked, and a poll published in the weekly Die Zeit showed that 31 percent of Germans younger than 30 "think that there is a certain possibility that the U.S. government ordered the attacks of 9/11."

Comment: Many Americans also theorize that the moon landing was faked and that the Bush government had a significant role in 9/11. In both cases, Germans are not alone in their suspicions since there is a great deal of evidence that contradicts the official versions of events. Regarding 9/11, watch the Pentagon Strike for starters.

In fact, three of the hijackers who seized control of commercial airlines on September 11, 2001, including the ringleader, Mohamed Atta, purportedly had ties to a Hamburg, Germany-based al Qaeda cell.

Comment: And yet, strangely enough, all the German trials of 9/11 "terrorists" seem to end in acquittal due to a rather conspicuous lack of evidence... In contrast, the trials of suspected terrorists in the US don't - oh wait, we forgot: The US doesn't give accused terrorists a fair trial; it throws them to the wolves of Guantanamo, Syria, Egypt, or Uzbekistan to be tortured and/or killed.

ARD, and ARD-produced television shows, are funded by a monthly tax on German televisions. The network plays a role similar to the British Broadcasting Corp., or the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, which is nominally independent but funded by taxpayers.

"Tatort," which translates to "Crime Scene," is a drama with a rotating cast of actors solving mysteries in weekly episodes set throughout Germany.

The U.S. Embassy in Berlin was not impressed with the latest episode, which seemed to use haunting Arabic music to portray Arabs and Muslims as innocent victims of American aggression.

"Any claim or suggestion that the United States government was behind the 9/11 disaster is absolutely absurd and not worthy of further comment," said Robert A. Wood, spokesman for the embassy.

A German diplomat in Washington said no one in Germany took the plot seriously because it was "pure fiction."

"It was so out of line with what people really think," the diplomat said, adding that the episode does not deserve further comment.

Small town America is seeing a new front in the historical struggle for equality. Civil rights leaders say it's a form of residual segregation and it's showing up in places like California, Ohio and North Carolina.

Many towns are becoming ever more prosperous, while their original minority neighborhoods are still kept outside city limits. In some cases the black and Latino neighborhoods are all but encircled by big homes, but left without sewer pipes, police and fire protection.

In places like Pinehurst NC, long-time residents have septic tanks leaking up through their lawns while they live next door to a golf course so pristine it hosts the U.S. Open. Some local elected officials argue the disparity is not deliberate. It just reflects the natural course of development and they can't afford the bill.

Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.

But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists.

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.

Why is this happening? I'll have more to say on that another day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970's, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.

It's not a pretty picture - which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public what's going on.

These partisans rely in part on obfuscation: shaping, slicing and selectively presenting data in an attempt to mislead. For example, it's a plain fact that the Bush tax cuts heavily favor the rich, especially those who derive most of their income from inherited wealth. Yet this year's Economic Report of the President, in a bravura demonstration of how to lie with statistics, claimed that the cuts "increased the overall progressivity of the federal tax system."

The partisans also rely in part on scare tactics, insisting that any attempt to limit inequality would undermine economic incentives and reduce all of us to shared misery. That claim ignores the fact of U.S. economic success after World War II. It also ignores the lesson we should have learned from recent corporate scandals: sometimes the prospect of great wealth for those who succeed provides an incentive not for high performance, but for fraud.

Above all, the partisans engage in name-calling. To suggest that sustaining programs like Social Security, which protects working Americans from economic risk, should have priority over tax cuts for the rich is to practice "class warfare." To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the "politics of envy."

But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970's have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren't sharing in the economy's growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there's good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society - and more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won't be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let's try to do something about the politics of greed.

WASHINGTON -- The Republican chairman walked off with the gavel, leaving Democrats shouting into turned-off microphones at a raucous hearing Friday on the Patriot Act.

The House Judiciary Committee hearing, with the two sides accusing each other of being irresponsible and undemocratic, came as President Bush was urging Congress to renew those sections of the post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism law set to expire in September.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the panel, abruptly gaveled the meeting to an end and walked out, followed by other Republicans. Sensenbrenner declared that much of the testimony, which veered into debate over the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, was irrelevant.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., protested, raising his voice as his microphone went off, came back on, and went off again.

"We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it," he said.

Democrats asked for the hearing, the 11th the committee has held on the act since April, saying past hearings had been too slanted toward witnesses who supported the law. The four witnesses were from groups, including Amnesty International USA and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, that have questioned the constitutionality of some aspects of the act, which allows law enforcement greater authority to investigate suspected terrorists.

Nadler said Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, was "rather rude, cutting everybody off in mid-sentence with an attitude of total hostility."

Tempers flared when Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., accused Amnesty International of endangering the lives of Americans in uniform by referring to the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a "gulag." Sensenbrenner didn't allow the Amnesty representative, Chip Pitts, to respond until Nadler raised a "point of decency."

Sensenbrenner's spokesman, Jeff Lungren, said the hearing had lasted two hours and "the chairman was very accommodating, giving members extra time."

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, speaking immediately after Sensenbrenner left, voiced dismay over the proceedings. "I'm troubled about what kind of lesson this gives" to the rest of the world, he told the Democrats remaining in the room.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, in a statement, said the hearing was an example of Republican abuse of power and she would ask House Speaker Dennis Hastert to order an apology from Sensenbrenner.

WASHINGTON - When Howard Dean was chosen to head their party, Democrats looked forward to the benefits of his bristling energy and zest for political combat.

But at a private meeting Thursday on Capitol Hill, a number of worried Senate Democrats warned Dean that he had been going overboard and needed to choose his words more carefully.

The former Vermont governor and unsuccessful presidential candidate recently referred to the GOP as "pretty much a white, Christian party" and declared that a lot of Republicans have "never made an honest living in their lives."

Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) said that at the Capitol Hill meeting, "there couldn't be any doubt that there was some concern, even by Dean himself," about how his comments had been received.

The meeting had been scheduled to discuss party strategy before Dean's controversial comments.

Also Thursday, two Democrats seen as rising stars - Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee and Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner - made a point of distancing themselves from Dean's remarks.

Ford, who plans a Senate run next year, said on the Don Imus radio show that if Dean could not "temper his comments, it may get to the point where the party may need to look elsewhere for leadership, because he does not speak for me."

Ford later told The Times that Dean was "leading us in a direction that makes it difficult to win…. His leadership right now is not serving any of us very well." [...]

Dean, in a speech Monday in San Francisco, said Republicans were "not very friendly to different kinds of people. They are a pretty monolithic party…. It's pretty much a white, Christian party."

A recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 82% of Republicans identified themselves as white Christians. For Democrats, the figure was 57%. Given those findings, some people defended Dean's comment. But many criticized it as divisive. [...]

Political analysts agreed that Dean's recent comments could hurt Democrats. "Every time he makes an outrageous remark, other Democratic leaders have to answer questions about it," said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. "So instead of talking about their best issues, they're talking about their loose cannon."

"He's throwing them off message." [...]

RENO - Security contractors were heckled, humiliated and physically abused by U.S. Marines in Iraq while jailed for 72 hours with insurgents, one of the detainees said Friday.

"We were being held with terrorists," says Mat Raiche, an ex-Marine detained by current Marines in Iraq as a contractor.

"It was disbelief the whole time. I couldn't believe what was happening," said Matt Raiche, 34, an ex-Marine who was one of 16 American and three Iraqi contractors detained at Camp Fallujah last month.

"I just found it crazy that we were being held with terrorists, that we were put in the same facility with them," he told The Associated Press in an interview at his lawyer's office. "They were calling us a rogue mercenary team."

Defense officials disclosed on Thursday that the security guards for Charlotte, N.C.-based Zapata Engineering were detained for three days after they fired from trucks and SUVs on Iraqi civilian cars and U.S. forces in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.

The military has denied the contractors were abused. No charges have been filed against any of the contractors, who the military said were separated from suspected insurgents.

Company president Manuel Zapata said the only shot fired by his workers was a warning blast after they noticed a vehicle following them.

Raiche, of Dayton, Nev., said the contractors were stopped and taken into custody on May 28. He said a Marine told him that shots had been fired, and Raiche told him, "It wasn't us."

Raiche said several of the contractors were interrogated before they were released June 1 with no official explanation for their detention.

Raiche said guards intimidated the detainees with dogs, made them strip and told them to wear towels over their heads when they went to the restroom so insurgents in the facility would not recognize and harm them, Raiche said.

One of his colleagues was slammed to the ground by a guard, he said.

"His head bounced off the asphalt." Raiche said. "He told me he heard one guard say to another, 'If he moves, let the dog loose.'"

Raiche said his colleague told him that a guard then reached down and "squeezed his testicles so hard he could barely move."

When Raiche first arrived at the facility, he said a guard ordered him to the ground and put a knee in his back. He said he heard one Marine say, "How does it feel now making that big contractor money?"

Raiche said the Marines handcuffed them with "zip lock ties." When the detainees complained they were so tight they were losing circulation in their hands, they were cursed at and told to shut up, Raiche said.

Raiche returned to Reno on Thursday night. He said he had been in Iraq for about two years before returning to Nevada earlier this spring, then headed back to Iraq on May 2.

An estimated 20,000 Americans, many of them former military personnel, are believed to be working in Iraq for contractors. More than 200 private workers have died in Iraq.

Zapata Engineering contracts frequently with the Defense Department and Zapata said he was waiting for completion of the investigation before he draws conclusions about how the military treated his workers.

BAGHDAD - At least 12 people were killed in two Baghdad bombings that shattered the relative calm in the capital since US and Iraqi forces launched a joint sweep for insurgents three weeks ago.

In the countryside just to the south, dubbed the Triangle of Death for its insurgent violence, 11 Iraqi construction workers were killed when gunmen attacked their minibus, police said.

Ten people died when the first Baghdad blast tore through a Shiite neighbourhood, shortly before a night-time curfew came into effect and as US and Iraqi officials warned against complacency despite counter-insurgency successes.

A pregnant woman, her unborn child and husband were reportedly among the dead.

In the second blast, at least two members of the elite Wolf Brigades died and 21 were wounded when a suicide bomber walked into their central Baghdad barracks, striking the vanguard of those trying to bring peace to the capital.

A patriotic song regularly broadcast on Iraqi television says that members of the fearless brigade "disarm bombs with their teeth".

The police commando unit had come to the capital as part of Operation Lightning, a major offensive launched amid fanfare in May and reportedly involving 40,000 Iraqis forces.

Even before the fresh blasts, a US commander had warned of the likelihood of renewed violence despite the arrest of 1,000 suspected insurgents in the massive sweep.

"The enemy is pretty frustrated and looking for the opportunity to have large-scale coordinated attacks. That could happen within the week, but it won't last weeks or even days," he said, because "they don't have public support."

"The insurgency is weaker than it was last year, weaker than a few months ago, but it's not about to wither up and die. By the nature of insurgency, it takes a long time."

The bullet-riddled corpses of two brothers and a cousin were found on a main road in south Baghdad, after they were lured from their homes by men in police uniforms the night before, an interior ministry official said.

Three police commandos were killed in a drive-by shooting, while a US patrol killed two insurgents after they also came under fire from a passing car. [...]

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said Thursday that Operation Lightning would soon be expanded to other cities and justified it by the "exceptional circumstances" facing the country.

"All countries facing the same exceptional circumstances as
Iraq will resort to similar measures," Jaafari told reporters.

His spokesman, Leith Kubba, warned earlier this week that Iraqis had to bear the cost of the operation to root out insurgents from the capital, involving stepped-up checkpoints, raids, searches and arrests.

"It's not an easy thing and there is a price to be paid," said Kubba.

"Fighting these criminal networks ... and eradicating them will not happen with a knockout blow, but rather it will be a slow death and it will happen with continuous efforts to isolate them."

Almost 700 people died in a frenzy of car bombings and other attacks in May, one of the bloodiest months since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

BAIJI, Iraq -- An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army's Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. "We have lived in humiliation since you left," one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. "We had hoped to spend our life with you."

But the Iraqi soldiers had no clue where they were going. They shrugged their shoulders when asked what they would do. The U.S. military had billed the mission as pivotal in the Iraqis' progress as a fighting force but had kept the destination and objectives secret out of fear the Iraqis would leak the information to insurgents.

"We can't tell these guys about a lot of this stuff, because we're not really sure who's good and who isn't," said Rick McGovern, a tough-talking 37-year-old platoon sergeant from Hershey, Pa., who heads the military training for Charlie Company.

The reconstruction of Iraq's security forces is the prerequisite for an American withdrawal from Iraq. But as the Bush administration extols the continuing progress of the new Iraqi army, the project in Baiji, a desolate oil town at a strategic crossroads in northern Iraq, demonstrates the immense challenges of building an army from scratch in the middle of a bloody insurgency.

Charlie Company disintegrated once after its commander was killed by a car bomb in December. And members of the unit were threatening to quit en masse this week over complaints that ranged from dismal living conditions to insurgent threats. Across a vast cultural divide, language is just one impediment. Young Iraqi soldiers, ill-equipped and drawn from a disenchanted Sunni Arab minority, say they are not even sure what they are fighting for. They complain bitterly that their American mentors don't respect them.

In fact, the Americans don't: Frustrated U.S. soldiers question the Iraqis' courage, discipline and dedication and wonder whether they will ever be able to fight on their own, much less reach the U.S. military's goal of operating independently by the fall.

"I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period," said 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long Island, N.Y., the executive officer of McGovern's company, who sold his share in a database firm to join the military full time after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won't be ready before I leave. And I know I'll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don't think they'll be ready then."

"We don't want to take responsibility; we don't want it," said Amar Mana, 27, an Iraqi private whose forehead was grazed by a bullet during an insurgent attack in November. "Here, no way. The way the situation is, we wouldn't be ready to take responsibility for a thousand years."

Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Taluto, commander of the 42nd Infantry Division, which oversees an area of north-central Iraq that includes Baiji and is the size of West Virginia, called the Iraqi forces "improved and improving." He acknowledged that the Iraqis suffered from a lack of equipment and manpower but predicted that, at least in his area of operation, the U.S. military would meet its goal of having battalion-level units operating independently by the fall.

"I can tell you, making assessments, I think we're on target," he said in an interview.

U.S. officers said the Iraqis had been particularly instrumental in obtaining intelligence that led to the detention of several suspected insurgent leaders in the region. They said it was unfair to evaluate the Iraqi forces by U.S. standards.

"We're not trying to make the 82nd Airborne here," Taluto said.

Overall, the number of Iraqi military and police trained and equipped is more than 169,000, according to the U.S. military, which has also said there are 107 operational military and special police battalions. As of last month, however, U.S. and Iraqi commanders had rated only three battalions capable of operating independently.

Two Washington Post reporters spent three days traveling with the Americans and the Iraqis, respectively. The unit was selected by the U.S. military. The journey revealed fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable differences over everything from the reluctance of Muslim soldiers to search mosques and homes to basic questions of lifestyle. Earlier this year, for instance, the Americans imported Western-style portable toilets that the Iraqis, accustomed to another style, found objectionable. In an attempt to bridge the difference, the U.S. military installed diagrams depicting proper use of the "port-a-johns."

The differences clash across a landscape that has grown increasingly violent since Iraq's Jan. 30 parliamentary elections, when U.S. commanders made the training of the Iraqi forces their top priority. In Taluto's region, insurgents set off five car bombs in February; there were 35 in May. Over that period, 1,150 roadside bombs were planted, according to division statistics.

Last week, U.S soldiers from 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, and Iraqis from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, clambered into their vehicles to patrol the streets of Baiji. The Americans drove fully enclosed armored Humvees, the Iraqis open-backed Humvees with benches, the sides of which were protected by plating the equivalent of a flak jacket. The Americans were part of 1st Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.

As an American reporter climbed in with the Iraqis, the U.S. soldiers watched in bemused horror.

"You might be riding home alone," one soldier said to the other reporter.

"Is he riding in the back of that?" asked another. "I'll be over here praying."

'Preschoolers With Guns'

The Iraqi soldiers were a grim lot, patrolling streets where they lived and mosques where they worshiped. As they entered their neighborhoods, some of them donned black balaclavas and green scarves to mask their identities. They passed graffiti on walls that, like the town, were colored in shades of brown. "Yes to the leader Saddam," one slogan read. "Long live the mujaheddin," said another. Nearly all the men had received leaflets warning them to quit; the houses of several had been attacked by insurgents.

"Don't you dare move!" shouted Cpl. Ahmed Zwayid, 26, pointing his gun at an approaching car.

The men spoke of the insurgents with a hint of awe, saying the fighters were willing to die and outgunned them with rocket-propelled grenades and, more fearsome, car bombs. Zwayid, a father of three, looked in disgust at his own AK-47 assault rifle, with a green shoelace for a strap.

"We fire 10 bullets and it falls apart," he said. Zwayid patted a heavy machine gun mounted in the bed of the Humvee. "This jams," he said. "Are these the weapons worthy of a soldier?" He and others said it was a sign of the Americans' lack of confidence in them.

"We trust the Americans. We go everywhere with them, we do what they ask," he said. "But they don't trust us."

Up ahead, McGovern conducted his own tour of Baiji's panorama of violence. He pointed out "dead man's grove," a stand of trees the Americans recently bulldozed because it was used to conceal bombs, and "dead man's road," a dangerous stretch of highway. A nearby lot was strewn with jagged pieces of car bomb.

"Honestly, I don't think people in America understand how touchy the situation really is right now," McGovern said. "We have the military power, the military might, but we're handling everything with kid gloves because we're hoping the Iraqis are going to step up and start taking things on themselves. But they don't have a clue how to do it."

Asked when he thought the Iraqi soldiers might be ready to operate independently, McGovern said: "Honestly, there's part of me that says never. There's some cultural issues that I don't think they'll ever get through."

McGovern added that the Iraqis had "come a long way in a very short period of time" and predicted they would ultimately succeed. But he said the effort was still in its infancy.

"We like to refer to the Iraqi army as preschoolers with guns," he said.

An hour later, the men returned to Forward Operating Base Summerall, a sandy expanse behind concrete barricades and concertina wire a few miles outside town. They followed U.S. military protocol: Each soldier dismounted from the vehicle and cleared his weapon. Zwayid stayed in the truck, handed his gun to a friend and asked him to clear it.

"Get down and clear your own weapon!" Cpl. William Kozlowski shouted to Zwayid in English.

Zwayid answered in Arabic. "That's my weapon," he explained, pointing to his friend.

"Corporal, you're a leader!" Kozlowski shouted back. "Take charge!"

Zwayid smiled at him. "What's he saying to me?" he whispered.
Searching for Respect

Charlie Company collapsed at 9:15 a.m. on Dec. 5. A gray Chevrolet Caprice packed with explosives detonated among a crowd of Iraqi soldiers during a shift change. Among the five dead was Capt. Mohammed Jassim Rumayidh, the company commander. His death prompted all but 30 of the company's 250 soldiers to quit; many took their weapons with them.

The bombing coincided with the arrival of a battalion of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. The unit began rebuilding the Iraqi company from scratch. The Americans initially sent a small group of soldiers to work with the Iraqis. That changed after the Jan. 30 elections. Cato said the unit received a flurry of orders from commanders to make the training of Iraqi security forces "our main effort."

The battalion dispatched McGovern's platoon, about 35 soldiers, to work exclusively with the Iraqis. But the effort was immediately beset by problems. Due to a mixup in paperwork, dozens of Iraqi soldiers went without pay for three months. Many lacked proper uniforms, body armor and weapons. To meet the shortfall, U.S. forces gave the Iraqis rifles and ammunition confiscated during raids in Baiji. Of six interpreters assigned to the company, two quit and two others said they were preparing to.

"They've come a long way in a short period of time," Cato, the Alpha Company executive officer, said of the Iraqi soldiers. "When we first got here, soldiers were going to sleep on the objective. Soldiers were selling their weapons when they went out on patrol. I was on missions when soldiers would get tired, and they would just start dragging their weapons or using them as walking sticks."

The men are housed at what they call simply "the base," a place as sparse as the name. Most of the Iraqis sleep in two tents and a shed with a concrete floor and corrugated tin roof that is bereft of walls. Some have cots; others sleep on cardboard or pieces of plywood stacked with tattered and torn blankets. The air conditioners are broken. There is no electricity.

Drinking water comes from a sun-soaked camouflage tanker whose meager faucet also provides water for bathing.

"This is the shower of the National Guard, Baiji Division," said Tala Izba, 23, a corporal, as others laughed.

"Mines, car bombs and our duties, and then we have to come back to this?" said another soldier, Kamil Khalaf.

Pvt. Aziz Nawaf, 23, shook his head. "At night, I'm so hot I feel like my skin is going to peel off," he said.

Almost to a man, the soldiers said they joined for the money -- a relatively munificent $300 to $400 a month. The military and police forces offered some of the few job opportunities in town. Even then, the soldiers were irate: They wanted more time off, air-conditioned quarters like their American counterparts and, most important, respect. Most frustrating, they said, was the two- or three-hour wait to be searched at the base's gate when they returned from leave.

The soldiers said 17 colleagues had quit in the past few days.

"In 15 days, we're all going to leave," Nawaf declared.

The two-dozen soldiers gathered nodded their heads.

"All of us," Khalaf said. "We'll live by God, but we'll have our respect."

But the Americans said the Iraqis hadn't earned respect. "As Arab men, they want for us to think that they're just the same as us as soldiers, that they're just as brave," Cato said. "But they show cowardice. They'll say to me, 'I wasn't afraid.' But if you're running, then you were obviously not just afraid, you were running away."

Divided by Culture

Last month, three trucks filled with two dozen soldiers from Charlie Company were ambushed near a Tigris River bridge. Instead of meeting the attack, the Iraqis fled and radioed for help. The Americans said the Iraqis told them they had lost 20 men, had run out of ammunition and were completely surrounded.

When a U.S. quick reaction force arrived, the area was quiet and the Iraqi soldiers were huddled around their trucks. Four were missing; it was later learned that they had hailed taxis, gone home and changed into civilian clothes. One soldier, the company's senior noncommissioned officer, refused to come out for several hours, saying he continued to be surrounded by insurgents.

After the incident, McGovern said he summoned an interpreter, asked him to translate the soldier's words verbatim and "disgraced" the Iraqi soldiers.

"You are all cowards," he began. "My soldiers are over here, away from our families for a year. We are willing to die for you to have freedom. You should be willing to die for your own freedom. If you continue to run away from the enemy, the enemy will continue to chase you. You will never win."

McGovern asked the interpreter, Nabras Mohammed, if he had gone too far.

"Well, you shouldn't have called them women, and you shouldn't have called them" wimps, Mohammed told him.

"Of course they were scared," said Cpl. Idris Dhanoun, 30, a native of Baiji with two years in the security forces, who defended his colleagues. "The majority of them haven't seen fighting, they haven't seen war, they haven't been soldiers. The terrorists want to die. A hundred percent, they want to die. It's jihad. They want to kill themselves in the path of God."

Shortly after the ambush, a sniper shot a U.S. soldier standing on the roof of a police station, inflicting a severe head wound. The Americans suspected that the fire had come from the nearby Rahma mosque. American and Iraqi troops surrounded the building. Fearful of inflaming resentment, U.S. soldiers ordered their Iraqi counterparts to search the mosque. They initially refused, entering only after McGovern berated them.

"But I don't know if they searched it that well. They were still tip-toeing when they were in there," said Sgt. Cary Conner, 25, of Newport News, Va., who was among the first soldiers on the scene.

U.S. forces then ordered the Iraqis to arrest everyone inside the mosque, including the respected elderly prayer leader. The Iraqi platoon leader refused, U.S. soldiers recalled. The platoon leader and his men then sat down next to the mosque in protest.

"We wanted to tell the Americans they couldn't do this again," Dhanoun said.

In a measure of the shame they felt, the men insisted they had not entered the mosque.

"You can't enter the mosque with weapons. We have traditions, we have honor, and we're Muslims," Dhanoun said. "You enter the mosque to pray, you don't enter the mosque with guns."

At 4:30 a.m. Monday, the men of Charlie Company and the entire U.S. battalion -- some 800 soldiers -- set out in a convoy for west Baiji. The Americans used night-vision goggles to see in the dark. The Iraqis had glow sticks. Before the troops had left the base, an Iraqi driver plowed into a concrete barrier, momentarily delaying the convoy.

U.S. commanders said the involvement of the Iraqis on the mission -- a series of raids to crack a bomb-making cell -- was critical to its success. But the Americans clearly have lowered their expectations for the Iraqis' progress.

"Things are going to change according to their schedule, not our politics back home," said Sgt. Jonathan Flynn, 36, of Star Lake, N.Y. "You can't just put an artificial timetable on that."

Along dirt roads bisected by sewage canals, the men of Charlie Company crouched, their weapons ready. Before them was their home town, dilapidated and neglected. Cpl. Amir Omar, 19, gazed ahead.

"Look at the homes of the Iraqis," he said, a handkerchief concealing his face. "The people have been destroyed."

By whom? he was asked.

"Them," Omar said, pointing at the U.S. Humvees leading the patrol.