Zen Moment of the Day

BOY, it stinks to be Bernie Madoff's sons.

Andrew and Mark Madoff -- who claim to know nothing of their dad's Ponzi scheme despite having made millions working in the family business -- are portrayed in a new Vanity Fair piece as feeling deeply betrayed by Bernie, whom "they were always trying to please, but never could."

David Margolick, who spoke to people close to the brothers Madoff, writes:

* Andrew recently "lamented" to an African-American friend, "I'm unemployed, I don't have any money, and I'm just trying to stay out of jail -- my name is mud," to which the friend replied, "Well, now you're just like every black man in America."

* Andrew's fiancée, Catherine Hooper, gave him a card on his birthday in April that said, "Hope you have a fun day doing all the things people in prison wish they could do." Andrew told her, "I wish I had my parents back," and she retorted, "Yeah, they were a really nice idea."

* When Andrew's estranged wife, Deborah, orders groceries from FreshDirect, she uses her maiden name. For the same reason, Andrew and Hooper use her last name when they make restaurant reservations.

* Parents of classmates of Andrew's daughters, who attend Dalton, are worried about letting their kids attend parties at his house because they are "evidently fearful of assassins crouching in vestibules."

* Although the Wilpon family, which owns the Mets, lost hundreds of millions on Bernie Madoff's schemes, Jeff Wilpon has maintained his long-standing ties to Mark Madoff. But a Wilpon-family friend says "Jeff has tired of Mark's excessive self-pity."

* Andrew and Mark don't speak to their mom, Ruth, "not because they think she was involved [they don't] but because they believe her tendency to side with [Bernie], no matter what, when they complained to her about him, enabled his dirty deeds."

- June 3, 2009 - New York Post

Tillman's Mother Says General Lied Again About His Death

Pat Tillman died in Afghanistan in 2004 after giving up a lucrative NFL career to serve in the Army.

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June 3, 2009 - CNN

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The latest explanation for why Pat Tillman's Silver Star citation failed to mention that friendly fire killed the former NFL star in Afghanistan is another lie by the U.S. military, Tillman's mother said Tuesday.

Mary Tillman was responding to remarks made Tuesday by the general nominated to lead Allied forces in Afghanistan, who apologized before a Senate committee for his role in the matter.

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he helped expedite the Silver Star award for Tillman before confirming that the Army corporal was killed by friendly fire in 2004.

Tillman's family has long complained that the memorial service, which included the Silver Star presentation, deliberately avoided mention of fratricide.

McChrystal acknowledged the problem Tuesday, calling it a mistake. He said the Silver Star citation was "not well-written" but denied any intent to mislead.

"I didn't see any activity by anyone to deceive," he said.

Mary Tillman said McChrystal knew at the memorial service that her son died from friendly fire.

"McChrystal was lying," she said of his comments Tuesday. "He said he didn't know for certain Pat was killed by fratricide. That isn't true in and of itself, but the fact is, it doesn't matter whether he knew it for certain."

Army protocol at the time required families to be told of possible fratricide, whether or not it had been confirmed, she said.

She also criticized Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the committee, who questioned McChrystal on Tuesday, for "playing dumb" by not following up on McChrystal's explanation.
Don't Miss

* McChrystal says minimizing casualties is crucial
* McChrystal's covert career could be questioned

"If the Army chain of command didn't know what happened to Pat, why did it present us with a false story" at the memorial service? Tillman asked. "That is not an error; that is not a misstep; that is deliberate deception. McCain was at Pat's service. He was read a false narrative like the rest of us. Where is his outrage? Did he know all along?"

Investigations by the Army's Criminal Investigations Division and the Defense Department's inspector general concluded that officers in Tillman's chain of command knew almost immediately that he had been killed by fire from his own platoon. That information, however, was withheld from his family for more than a month, in violation of Army regulations.

McChrystal, one of four generals identified in the report, was later cleared in the investigation but was faulted for not immediately notifying Tillman's family of suspicions that it was a friendly fire incident.

On Tuesday, McChrystal said the mistake in the Tillman situation involved attempts to simultaneously support the awarding of a Silver Star while investigating the reports that he died from friendly fire.

A policy to have awards approved in time to present them to families at memorial ceremonies should be changed to prevent competing pressures, McChrystal said.

"I would do this differently if I had the chance again," he said.

Asked whether he believed that Tillman earned the Silver Star before his death, McChrystal said: "I did then; I do now. ... I don't believe that the circumstance of death detracts from the courage and commitment of his contribution."

Later, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, pressed McChrystal harder on the issue, prompting the general to agree that the Army had failed the Tillman family.

"I was a part of that, and I apologize for it," McChrystal said.

Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?

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There's been talk that George W. Bush was so inept that he should trademark the phrase "Worst President Ever," though some historians would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan. Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the competition.

Robert Parry
June 3, 2009 - Consortiumnews.com

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Granted, the very idea of rating Reagan as one of the worst presidents ever will infuriate his many right-wing acolytes and offend Washington insiders who have made a cottage industry out of buying some protection from Republicans by lauding the 40th President.

But there's a growing realization that the starting point for many of the catastrophes confronting the United States today can be traced to Reagan's presidency. There's also a grudging reassessment that the "failed" presidents of the 1970s – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter – may deserve more credit for trying to grapple with the problems that now beset the country.

Nixon, Ford and Carter won scant praise for addressing the systemic challenges of America's oil dependence, environmental degradation, the arms race, and nuclear proliferation – all issues that Reagan essentially ignored and that now threaten the America's future.

Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency; he imposed energy-conservation measures; he opened the diplomatic door to communist China. Nixon's administration also detected the growing weakness in the Soviet Union and advocated a policy of détente (a plan for bringing the Cold War to an end or at least curbing its most dangerous excesses).

After Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal, Ford continued many of Nixon's policies, particularly trying to wind down the Cold War with Moscow. However, confronting a rebellion from Reagan's Republican Right in 1976, Ford abandoned "détente."

Ford also let hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young intellectuals who became known as neoconservatives) pressure the CIA's analytical division, and he brought in a new generation of hard-liners, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

After defeating Ford in 1976, Carter injected more respect for human rights into U.S. foreign policy, a move some scholars believe put an important nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leaving it hard-pressed to justify the repressive internal practices of the East Bloc. Carter also emphasized the need to contain the spread of nuclear weapons, especially in unstable countries like Pakistan.

Domestically, Carter pushed a comprehensive energy policy and warned Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil represented a national security threat, what he famously called "the moral equivalent of war."

However, powerful vested interests – both domestic and foreign – managed to exploit the shortcomings of these three presidents to sabotage any sustained progress. By 1980, Reagan had become a pied piper luring the American people away from the tough choices that Nixon, Ford and Carter had defined.

Cruelty with a Smile

With his superficially sunny disposition – and a ruthless political strategy of exploiting white-male resentments – Reagan convinced millions of Americans that the threats they faced were: African-American welfare queens, Central American leftists, a rapidly expanding Evil Empire based in Moscow, and the do-good federal government.

In his First Inaugural Address in 1981, Reagan declared that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

When it came to cutting back on America's energy use, Reagan's message could be boiled down to the old Bob Marley lyric, "Don't worry, be happy." Rather than pressing Detroit to build smaller, fuel-efficient cars, Reagan made clear that the auto industry could manufacture gas-guzzlers without much nagging from Washington.

The same with the environment. Reagan intentionally staffed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department with officials who were hostile toward regulation aimed at protecting the environment. George W. Bush didn't invent Republican hostility toward scientific warnings of environmental calamities; he was just picking up where Reagan left off.

Reagan pushed for deregulation of industries, including banking; he slashed income taxes for the wealthiest Americans in an experiment known as "supply side" economics, which held falsely that cutting rates for the rich would increase revenues and eliminate the federal deficit.

Over the years, "supply side" would evolve into a secular religion for many on the Right, but Reagan's budget director David Stockman once blurted out the truth, that it would lead to red ink "as far as the eye could see."

While conceding that some of Reagan's economic plans did not work out as intended, his defenders – including many mainstream journalists – still argue that Reagan should be hailed as a great President because he "won the Cold War," a short-hand phrase that they like to attach to his historical biography.

However, a strong case can be made that the Cold War was won well before Reagan arrived in the White House. Indeed, in the 1970s, it was a common perception in the U.S. intelligence community that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was winding down, in large part because the Soviet economic model had failed in the technological race with the West.

That was the view of many Kremlinologists in the CIA's analytical division. Also, I I was told by a senior CIA's operations official that some of the CIA's best spies inside the Soviet hierarchy supported the view that the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse, not surging toward world supremacy, as Reagan and his foreign policy team insisted in the early 1980s.

The CIA analysis was the basis for the détente that was launched by Nixon and Ford, essentially seeking a negotiated solution to the most dangerous remaining aspects of the Cold War.

The Afghan Debacle

In that view, Soviet military operations, including sending troops into Afghanistan in 1979, were mostly defensive in nature. In Afghanistan, the Soviets hoped to prop up a pro-communist government that was seeking to modernize the country but was beset by opposition from Islamic fundamentalists who were getting covert support from the U.S. government.

Though the Afghan covert operation originated with Cold Warriors in the Carter administration, especially national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan, who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan's nuclear bomb for its help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists (including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).

While Reagan's acolytes cite the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as decisive in "winning the Cold War," the counter-argument is that Moscow was already in disarray – and while failure in Afghanistan may have sped the Soviet Union's final collapse – it also created twin dangers for the future of the world: the rise of al-Qaeda terrorism and the nuclear bomb in the hands of Pakistan's unstable Islamic Republic.

Trade-offs elsewhere in the world also damaged long-term U.S. interests. In Latin America, for instance, Reagan's brutal strategy of arming right-wing militaries to crush peasant, student and labor uprisings left the region with a legacy of anti-Americanism that is now resurfacing in the emergence of populist leftist governments.

In Nicaragua, for instance, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega (whom Reagan once denounced as a "dictator in designer glasses") is now back in power. In El Salvador, the leftist FMLN won the latest elections. Indeed, across the region, hostility to Washington is now the rule, creating openings for China, Iran, Cuba and other American rivals.

In the early 1980s, Reagan also credentialed a young generation of neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called "perception management," the shaping of how Americans saw, understood and were frightened by threats from abroad.

Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, U.S. intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the propaganda demands from above.

To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward anyone who challenged the era's feel-good optimism. Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or – in Jeane Kirkpatrick's memorable attack line – they would "blame America first."

Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with well-financed think tanks that churned out endless op-eds and research papers. Plus, there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan's propaganda themes.

In effect, Reagan's team created a faux reality for the American public. Civil wars in Central America between impoverished peasants and wealthy oligarchs became East-West showdowns. U.S.-backed insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan were transformed from corrupt, brutal (often drug-tainted) thugs into noble "freedom-fighters."

With the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan also revived Richard Nixon's theory of an imperial presidency that could ignore the nation's laws and evade accountability through criminal cover-ups. That behavior also would rear its head again in the war crimes of George W. Bush. [For details on Reagan's abuses, see Robert Parry's Lost History and Secrecy & Privilege.]

Wall Street Greed

The American Dream also dimmed during Reagan's tenure.

While he played the role of the nation's kindly grandfather, his operatives divided the American people, using "wedge issues" to deepen grievances especially of white men who were encouraged to see themselves as victims of "reverse discrimination" and "political correctness."

Yet even as working-class white men were rallying to the Republican banner (as so-called "Reagan Democrats"), their economic interests were being savaged. Unions were broken and marginalized; "free trade" policies shipped manufacturing jobs abroad; old neighborhoods were decaying; drug use among the young was soaring.

Meanwhile, unprecedented greed was unleashed on Wall Street, fraying old-fashioned bonds between company owners and employees.

Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned less than 50 times the salary of an average worker. By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations in 1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times that of a typical worker. (At the end of the Bush-II administration, that CEO-salary figure was more than 250 times that of an average worker.)

Many other trends set during the Reagan era continued to corrode the U.S. political process in the years after Reagan left office. After 9/11, for instance, the neocons reemerged as a dominant force, reprising their "perception management" tactics, depicting the "war on terror" – like the last days of the Cold War – as a terrifying conflict between good and evil.

The hyping of the Islamic threat mirrored the neocons' exaggerated depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s – and again the propaganda strategy worked. Many Americans let their emotions run wild, from the hunger for revenge after 9/11 to the war fever over invading Iraq.

Arguably, the descent into this dark fantasyland – that Ronald Reagan began in the early 1980s – reached its nadir in the flag-waving early days of the Iraq War. Only gradually did reality begin to reassert itself as the death toll mounted in Iraq and the Katrina disaster reminded Americans why they needed an effective government.

Still, the disasters – set in motion by Ronald Reagan – continued to roll in. Bush's Reagan-esque tax cuts for the rich blew another huge hole in the federal budget and the Reagan-esque anti-regulatory fervor led to a massive financial meltdown that threw the nation into economic chaos.

Love Reagan; Hate Bush

Ironically, George W. Bush has come in for savage criticism, but the Republican leader who inspired Bush's presidency – Ronald Reagan – remained an honored figure, his name attached to scores of national landmarks including Washington's National Airport.

Even leading Democrats genuflect to Reagan. Early in Campaign 2008, when Barack Obama was positioning himself as a bipartisan political figure who could appeal to Republicans, he bowed to the Reagan mystique, hailing the GOP icon as a leader who "changed the trajectory of America."

Though Obama's chief point was that Reagan in 1980 "put us on a fundamentally different path" – a point which may be historically undeniable – Obama went further, justifying Reagan's course correction because of "all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability."

While Obama later clarified his point to say he didn't mean to endorse Reagan's conservative policies, Obama seemed to suggest that Reagan's 1980 election administered a needed dose of accountability to the United States when Reagan actually did the opposite. Reagan's presidency represented a dangerous escape from accountability – and reality.

Still, Obama and congressional Democrats continue to pander to the Reagan myth. On Tuesday, as the nation approached the fifth anniversary of Reagan's death, Obama welcomed Nancy Reagan to the White House and signed a law creating a panel to plan and carry out events to honor Reagan's 100th birthday in 2011.

Obama hailed the right-wing icon. "President Reagan helped as much as any President to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics — that transcended even the most heated arguments of the day," Obama said. [For more on Obama's earlier pandering about Reagan, see Consortiumnews.com's "Obama's Dubious Praise for Reagan."]

It's a sure thing that the Reagan Centennial Committee won't do much more than add to the hagiography surrounding the 40th President.

Despite the grievous harm that Reagan's presidency inflicted on the American Republic and the American people, it may take many more years before a historian has the guts to put this deformed era into a truthful perspective and rate Reagan where he belongs -- near the bottom of the presidential list.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.

Controversial Coal Mining Method Gets Obama's OK

Singer-Actress Ashley Judd speaks during a rally in Frankfort, Ky. on Feb. 17, 2009 calling for an end to mountaintop coal mining. (AP Photo/Roger Alford)

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Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
June 2, 2009 - Chicago Tribune

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With the election of Barack Obama, environmentalists expected to see the end of the "Appalachian apocalypse" -- their name for exposing coal deposits by blowing the tops off of whole mountains.

But in recent weeks, the Obama administration has quietly decided to open the way for at least two dozen more "mountaintop removal" projects.

The decision to clear a path for the controversial projects was never officially announced, but instead conveyed in a letter this month to a West Virginia congressman and coal ally, Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall. The letter said that the Environmental Protection Agency would not block 42 of 48 mine projects that it had reviewed so far, including some of the most controversial mountaintop mines.

In mountaintop removal, explosives blast away a peak and expose coal seams. Coal companies say the practice is safer and more efficient than traditional shaft mining. Critics say the process scars the landscape and dumps tons of waste, some of it toxic, into streams and valleys.

The administration's decisions are not the final word on the projects -- or on the future of mountaintop removal -- but it removes a major obstacle. And the decision, coupled with the light it sheds on relations between the mining industry and the Obama White House, has disappointed environmentalists. Some say they feel betrayed by a president they thought would end or sharply limit the practice.

What makes the issue politically sensitive is the fact that environmentalists were an active force behind Obama's election, while his standing among Democratic voters in coal states is tenuous. Halting mountaintop removal could eliminate jobs in those states and put upward pressure on energy prices.

Coal advocates have solicited help from officials as high as White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and the issue sparked contentious debates among administration officials, including one shouting match in which top officials of two government agencies were heard pounding their fists on the table.

The White House is "searching for a way to walk this tightrope," said Phil Smith, a spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America, whose president, Cecil Roberts, has urged administration officials to allow the procedure. "They have a large constituency of people who want to see an immediate end to mountaintop removal, and an equally large constituency -- many of them Democrats, I might add -- whose communities depend on those jobs."

Earlier, Obama had won praise from the green lobby for taking a skeptical view of the procedure. And the EPA announced in March that it would review mountaintop projects.

The EPA has the authority to review and ultimately block mountaintop removal under the Clean Water Act, but if the agency raises no objections, the final decision is made by the Army Corps of Engineers. The corps previously indicated its intention to approve the 48 permits.

A review of Obama campaign statements showed the presidential candidate expressing concern about the practice without specifically promising to end it. On a West Virginia visit, he said he wanted "strong enforcement of the Clean Water Act" and added, "I will make sure the head of the Environmental Protection Agency believes in the environment."

And EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said this year that the agency had "considerable concern" about the projects. She pledged that her agency would "use the best science and follow the letter of the law in ensuring we are protecting our environment."

Soon afterward, the agency blocked six major mountaintop projects in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio.

But this month, after White House meetings with coal companies and advocates such as Rahall and West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, the EPA gave the green light to at least two dozen projects.

"It was a big disappointment," said Joan Mulhern, a lawyer for Earthjustice, an environmental law firm that has led court challenges to mountaintop removal.

Mulhern charged that the EPA "blew off" Jackson's earlier promises that the agency would adhere to science and conduct an open process.

Ed Hopkins, a top Sierra Club official, said that some of the projects that obtained the EPA's blessing "are as large and potentially destructive as the ones they objected to.

"It makes us wonder what standards -- if any -- the administration is using."

Economic Recovery is Wishful Thinking

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The media has been touting whatever good economic news it can find. But the truth is economic recovery is nowhere in sight

Dean Baker
June 2, 2009 - The Guardian/UK

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Last week we got a whole series of bad reports on the state of the economy. New and existing home sales both remain near their lowest level for the downturn, as house prices continue to drop at the rate of 2% a month. New orders for capital goods, a key measure of investment demand, fell by 2% in April. Excluding the volatile transportation sector, new orders were still down by 1.5%.

On Friday, the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index fell by more than 5 percentage points from its April level, approaching its low for the downturn. The employment component of the index did hit a new low.

These reports might have led to gloomy news stories, but not in the US media. The folks who could not see an $8tn housing bubble are still determined to find the silver lining in even the worst economic news.

For example, National Public Radio told listeners that the new home sales figure reported for April was up from the March level. While this was true, the April figure was only 1,000 higher than a March level that had just been revised down by 5,000. April new home sales were 4,000 below the sales level that had originally been reported for March. USA Today touted a "surge" in durable goods orders, which was also based on a sharp downward revision to the prior month's data.

The media have obviously abandoned economic reporting and instead have adopted the role of cheerleader, touting whatever good news it can find and inventing good news when none can be found. This leaves the responsibility of reporting on the economy to others.

Any serious examination of the data shows that recovery is nowhere in sight. The basic story of the downturn is painfully simple. We have seen a collapse of a housing bubble which has devastated the construction sector and also caused consumption to plunge.

The construction sector is suffering from the enormous overbuilding during the bubble years. Measured in months of sales, the inventories of both new and existing homes are close to double their normal levels. This inventory will ensure that construction remains badly depressed at least through 2010, if not much longer.

The plunge in house prices has sent consumption plummeting. The problem is not consumer attitudes, as many commentators seem to believe. Rather, the reason that most homeowners aren't buying a lot right now is the same reason that homeless people don't buy a lot of things: they don't have the money.

The decline in house prices since the peak in 2006 has cost homeowners close to $6tn in lost housing equity. In 2009 alone, falling house prices have destroyed almost $2tn in equity. People were spending at an incredible rate in 2004-2007 based on the wealth they had in their homes. This wealth has now vanished.

Housing is weak and falling. Consumption is weak and falling. New orders for capital goods in April, the main measure for investment demand, is down 35.6% from its level a year ago. And, state and local governments across the country, led by California, are laying off workers and cutting back services.

If there is evidence of a recovery in this story, it is very hard to find. The more obvious story is one of a downward spiral, as more layoffs and further cuts in hours continue to reduce workers' purchasing power. Furthermore, the weakness in the labour market is putting downward pressure on wages, reducing workers' purchasing power through a second channel.

Happy talk will not turn this economy around. The economy needs more demand, which can only be provided by another larger dose of stimulus from the federal government. There are easy, quick and effective ways to boost the economy with additional stimulus.

First, let's give more money to state and local governments so that they don't have to lay off workers, cut back services and raise taxes. This should be a complete no-brainer since this spending will immediately boost the economy.

The government could also provide a large boost to the economy by jump-starting healthcare reform with an employer tax credit (e.g. $2,500 per worker) for firms who do not currently provide coverage. This could quickly get us to near universal coverage as Congress works to restructure the system to contain costs.

It could also provide a $2,500 tax credit to employers for giving workers paid time off. This should both increase demand in the economy and provide workers with more leisure and flexibility at the workplace.

There are other ways in which the government could quickly generate new demand, but these will not be seriously discussed until there is more general recognition that additional stimulus is needed. At some point it will be impossible to conceal the bad news and Congress' attention will return to stimulus. But the media's reality defying happy talk on the economy is delaying this moment.

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Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.

U.S. Report Finds Airstrike Errors in Afghan Deaths

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Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker
June 2, 2009 - The New York Times

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A military investigation has concluded that American personnel made significant errors in carrying out some of the airstrikes in western Afghanistan on May 4 that killed dozens of Afghan civilians, according to a senior American military official.

The official said the civilian death toll would probably have been reduced if American air crews and forces on the ground had followed strict rules devised to prevent civilian casualties. Had the rules been followed, at least some of the strikes by American warplanes against half a dozen targets over seven hours would have been aborted.

The report represents the clearest American acknowledgment of fault in connection with the attacks. It will give new ammunition to critics, including many Afghans, who complain that American forces too often act indiscriminately in calling in airstrikes, jeopardizing the United States mission by turning the civilian population against American forces and their ally, the Afghan government.

Since the raid, American military commanders have promised to address the problem. On Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, nominated to be the American commander in Afghanistan, vowed that reducing civilian casualties was "essential to our credibility."

Any American victory would be "hollow and unsustainable" if it led to popular resentment among Afghanistan's citizens, General McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a confirmation hearing.

According to the senior military official, the report on the May 4 raids found that one plane was cleared to attack Taliban fighters, but then had to circle back and did not reconfirm the target before dropping bombs, leaving open the possibility that the militants had fled the site or that civilians had entered the target area in the intervening few minutes.

In another case, a compound of buildings where militants were massing for a possible counterattack against American and Afghan troops was struck in violation of rules that required a more imminent threat to justify putting high-density village dwellings at risk, the official said.

"In several instances where there was a legitimate threat, the choice of how to deal with that threat did not comply with the standing rules of engagement," said the military official, who provided a broad summary of the report's initial findings on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry was not yet complete.

Before being chosen as the new commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal spent five years as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing commandos in Iraq and Afghanistan. Special Operations forces have been sharply criticized by Afghans for aggressive tactics that have contributed to civilian casualties.

During his testimony, General McChrystal said that strikes by warplanes and Special Operations ground units would remain an essential part of combat in Afghanistan. But he promised to make sure that these attacks were based on solid intelligence and that they were as precise as possible. American success in Afghanistan should be measured by "the number of Afghans shielded from violence," not the number of enemy fighters killed, he said.

The inquiry into the May 4 strikes in the western province of Farah illustrated the difficult, split-second decisions facing young officers in the heat of combat as they balance using lethal force to protect their troops under fire with detailed rules restricting the use of firepower to prevent civilian deaths.

In the report, the investigating officer, Brig. Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, analyzed each of the airstrikes carried out by three aircraft-carrier-based Navy F/A-18 strike aircraft and an Air Force B-1 bomber against targets in the village of Granai, in a battle that lasted more than seven hours.

In each case, the senior military official said, General Thomas determined that the targets that had been struck posed legitimate threats to Afghan or American forces, which included one group of Marines assigned to train the Afghans and another assigned to a Special Operations task force.

But in "several cases," the official said, General Thomas determined either that the airstrikes had not been the appropriate response to the threat because of the potential risk to civilians, or that American forces had failed to follow their own tactical rules in conducting the bombing runs.

The Afghan government concluded that about 140 civilians had been killed in the attacks. An earlier American military inquiry said last month that 20 to 30 civilians had been killed. That inquiry also concluded that 60 to 65 Taliban militants had been killed in the fight. American military officials say their two investigations show that Taliban fighters had deliberately fired on American forces and aircraft from compounds and other places where they knew Afghan civilians had sought shelter, in order to draw an American response that would kill civilians, including women and children.

The firefight began, the military said, when Afghan soldiers and police officers went to several villages in response to reports that three Afghan government officials had been killed by the Taliban. The police were quickly overwhelmed and asked for backup from American forces.

American officials have said that a review of videos from aircraft weapon sights and exchanges between air crew members and a ground commander established that Taliban fighters had taken refuge in "buildings which were then targeted in the final strikes of the fight," which went well into the night.

American troop levels in Afghanistan are expected to double, to about 68,000, under President Obama's new Afghan strategy.

In his previous job as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, General McChrystal oversaw units assigned to capture or kill senior militants. In his appearance before Congress on Tuesday, he was questioned on reports of abuses of detainees held by his commandos.

Under questioning by Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is the committee chairman, General McChrystal said he was uncomfortable with some of the harsh techniques that were officially approved for interrogation. At the time, such approved techniques included stress positions, sleep deprivation and the use of attack dogs for intimidation.

He said that all reports of abuse during his command were investigated, and that all substantiated cases of abuse resulted in disciplinary action. And he pledged to "strictly enforce" American and international standards for the treatment of battlefield detainees if confirmed to the post in Afghanistan.

Under questioning, General McChrystal also acknowledged that the Army had "failed the family" in its mishandling of the friendly-fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the professional football star who enlisted in the Army after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

A final review by a four-star Army general cleared General McChrystal of any wrongdoing, but punished a number of senior officers who were responsible for administrative mistakes in the days after Corporal Tillman's death. Initially, Army officials said the corporal had been killed by an insurgent ambush, when in fact he had been shot by members of his own Ranger team.