Word: desertion
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...oversees 5,900 inmates in the county jail, he might better be thought of as the headmaster of his own school of hard knocks. Since he came to the job early in 1993, Arpaio has organized his prisoners into chain gangs, housed them in tents in the scorching desert and made baloney a staple of their diet. Skin magazines and all broadcast TV stations have been banned. ("Too much violence,'' he says.) For free-time diversions, they get CNN, old Disney films and reruns of Newt Gingrich's 10-part course on revitalizing American civilization. "I want to make this...
...military commanders (and sons-in-law) suggest that Saddam's army is a threat mainly to other Iraqis. Amatzia Baram, chairman of the department of Middle Eastern history at Haifa University, calculates that up to 30% of Saddam's fighting troops, unable to subsist on meager army rations, have deserted, and many now roam the country as armed bandits. The rest are hardly in top shape. According to diplomatic and academic sources in Britain, when Saddam massed troops near the Kuwaiti border last summer, the maneuvers flopped. Trucks broke down, and when the Iraqis retreated, valuable equipment was left...
...announce last week that it was starting a new buildup of military equipment and supplies in the Persian Gulf, as well as dispatching 1,400 troops to the Kuwaiti desert for war games? Largely, it would seem, to tout the Clinton Administration's alertness to any new military threat from Iraq--a threat that Iraq's neighbors, including Kuwait, could discern no sign of. Moreover, if Saddam Hussein did order any menacing maneuvers, he might only dramatize the last thing he wants to point out: the rapid decline of his strength as an international bogeyman...
Shorn of its outward trappings, the adventure might have been woven a thousand years ago under the caliphate of Baghdad: back-corridors palace intrigue; the mysterious wounding at a festival; a headlong flight across the desert by the ruler's beloved daughters and his sons-in-law, one of them the land's chief armorer; their reception by a friendly monarch who shelters them in a palace. Finally, the betrayed ruler's son, who has wormed his way to grand vizier, leads a pursuit attempting to retrieve the fugitives. In a fury he denounces them before the neighboring king...
...hegira unfolded was high drama in itself. Around nightfall last Tuesday, a dusty convoy of military Land Rovers bounced over an unfenced sector of Jordan's border escorting Mercedes-borne worthies who turned out to be the presidential kinsmen. Exhausted and parched, the travelers had made a 14-hour desert trek to evade detection. Water was their first request. "They drank tens of bottles," related a high Jordanian security official. Though the inadequately provisioned party had seemingly departed on the run, the journey was not quite spontaneous. The Jordanian official said Hussein Kamel had visited Amman 10 days earlier...