“For the last five years my whole life has been dedicated to Pat and our Cause,” Muller wrote. “I still love Pat and I’ll always love him. I’m just so sorry that Bay feels I’m no longer needed.”

Contacted by Salon News, the Buchanan campaign refused to comment on what it termed a “personnel matter.”

According to Muller, Bay Buchanan has hired “a team of Web professionals” to take over Muller’s responsibilities at the Web sites for both the campaign and the American Cause.

The campaign’s quarterly Federal Election Commission report indicates that a firm called the Hathaway Group received more than $20,000 in the last quarter for computer consulting services, more than double Muller’s salary during the same period.

Tim Hathaway, of the Hathaway Group, told Salon that while he remains under contract to the American Cause, his work for the campaign ended last month. Hathaway also disclosed that the new Buchanan webmaster is a former Hathaway Group employee, though he declined to name him.

Muller is considered one of the pioneers in the development of the political Web. Years before she became a Buchanan employee, Muller had designed unofficial Web sites devoted to Buchanan.

She also marshaled tens of thousands of supporters online for the “Buchanan Brigade,” a grass-roots volunteer army assembled for the 1996 Buchanan presidential effort and reactivated for his campaign this year.

Muller also maintains her own personal site devoted to Buchanan. As of Thursday morning, Muller’s site only served as a link to the official campaign Web site.

Muller’s management of the Buchanan site has been controversial. In a recent review, Plugged-In Politics columnist David Haase said that, though he found it lacking technically, the site “screams energy and enthusiasm.”

But that enthusiasm sometimes resulted in questionable judgment calls. In February 1995, the site’s “Buchanan News Room” linked to a Media Bypass article that accused Hillary Rodham Clinton and the late Vince Foster of spying for the Mossad. The link was soon pulled, but not before the incident was covered on ABC’s Nightline.

In another misstep just last month, Muller was ordered to pull down an article in which Bay Buchanan advised her brother to “bolt the GOP.” This occurred at a time when sensitive negotiations were being conducted between Buchanan and the Republican Party.

Muller’s departure is bound to shake the close-knit Buchanan Brigade family. At Free Republic, a conservative Web site and informal gathering place for the Brigadiers, several avowed Buchanan supporters have been debating the implications of Muller’s dismissal. Muller said she plans to participate in that discussion herself, and has posted on the site both her original e-mail and a follow-up message she sent out Thursday morning.

“Now that I’m unemployed,” Muller said in her second e-mail, “I’ll have time to hang out!”

Experts discussed the political consequences of the treaty vote with Salon News.

Rich Galen is a Republican strategist and publisher of Mullings, an Internet political column.

The Senate leadership’s position was that the president hadn’t exactly beaten anybody over the head with this treaty. He never said “we need to get this done now.” The Republicans were talking to the guys they trust on this issue, like James Schlesinger, who said that it was a bad treaty. Clinton was going around saying that nobody in America opposed this treaty except for 50 Republicans in the Senate. Lott got wind of this plot to attempt to embarrass the Republicans and said, “there’s no need to do that. We’ll just bring it up for a vote.” There wasn’t any urgency to this vote. It didn’t need to happen now. Clinton threw down the gauntlet on this one and said, “I bet you can’t beat me on this one,” and Trent Lott said, “Watch me.”

For the Republicans running for reelection in the Senate, there should be no problem from this vote. They have better information than the press does, so if they go home and get a Democrat opponent who says “you were against this treaty,” they’ll be able to give their voters good reasons.

It does mean that Al Gore has something to talk about on foreign policy that’s not Bosnia, Haiti or Somalia. But for Bill Clinton to stand there at his press conference this afternoon and say “I didn’t know they were going to bring it to the floor, so I couldn’t get prepared for it” is so hypocritical.

Clinton did use the term “new isolationism” to talk about the Republicans who voted against it, which in my mind is an implication of creeping Buchananism among the Republicans. That is a phrase they must have tested with focus groups and found that works for them. What I don’t understand is how accusing the Republicans of the kind of isolationism that the labor unions — who just endorsed Gore — is going to help. I think the congressional Democrats are saying they’ll keep fighting for this thing because that’s what the president is saying.

The real question is how do you undo a bad treaty. The answer is you don’t, unless there is specific language in the treaty that lets you out. The only answer would be to violate the treaty.

No one really wanted to take this vote in the first place.

Joseph Cirincione is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Non-proliferation Project.

The politics overwhelmed this treaty. The talk of concerns about verification were a smoke screen. Those concerns were answered by Bill Clinton and the treaty itself. The Supreme National Interest clause says that, if there is any doubt at any time that the treaty is in our national interest, the United States can withdraw. The Senate Republicans hate Bill Clinton and were not about approve his treaty. They’ve missed so many other chances to get him. Impeachment, though it seems like such a long time ago, was just this year. They wanted to hang this man and he slipped the noose. So this was their chance.

People underestimate how profoundly conservative and isolationist this Senate is. To find one comparable, you have to go back to the Senate that voted down the Treaty of Versailles, keeping us out of the League of Nations. There was a determined hard-right effort from senators like John Kyl and Jesse Helms to vote this down. This group has a deep and profound mistrust and hatred for the existing international non-proliferation regime. They believe it offers a false sense of security and lulls America into complacency. They want to take apart this international non-proliferation regime across the board. They want to take down the ABM treaty, they oppose our non-proliferation policy in North Korea and the Cooperative Threat Reduction program that’s dismantling the nuclear weapons program in Russia.

There’s almost no chance for the treaty to come up again. It’s very difficult to change a senator’s vote. There would have to be an extraordinary international event to make someone like Sen. Pete Domenici or Sen. Dick Lugar come to the floor of the Senate and say, “I was wrong about this treaty.”

Our allies look at us like we’re nuts. Every single American ally is committed to this treaty. Fifteen of 19 NATO countries have approved it. To our allies, the defeat of this treaty is part of a pattern that has caused them to question America’s ability to lead on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation.

Some people in the defense department objected to this treaty because it would stop the U.S. from doing new designs for weapons. But it’s also partially a personnel issue. Eliminating testing makes the department less attractive to scientists who want to work on their designs and have them tested. Of course the military wants to retain its options. But the military would give up new designs to ratify this treaty that all the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported.

Frank Gaffney is director of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.

[The treaty vote] has reestablished the principle under our Constitution that the Senate is a co-equal institution of the White House in making our treaties. It is an important check-and-balance.

I hope the Democrats fight for this treaty again. I hope they make as big an issue as they possibly can because a vast majority of our countrymen have been deluded into thinking that we don’t have to worry about these issues any more. But we live in a more dangerous world now than during the Cold War. Unfortunately, there has been a really troubling trend toward adopting some of these wooly-headed ideas like adopting the nuclear test ban.

There are lots of bad ideas that the present administration has embraced. The idea of perpetuating American vulnerability to missile attack, or normalizing relations with North Korea and Cuba, or allowing the Chinese to take over our sector in the Panama Canal, or sending Bill Clinton to visit Vietnam. How about the notion that, if we put teeth in the bio-weapons conventions, it will do anything but lead to a wholesale transfer of our biotechnology to the most dangerous countries on the planet?

Very few people can impugn Sen. Lugar’s dedication, his resistance to partisanship and his commitment to an America that is engaged in the world and leading the world in non-proliferation issues. His was concerned that the treaty is unverifiable, unenforceable, that it would undermine our nuclear deterrence capabilities and that it’s harmful to more sound arms control initiatives.

Our allies support this treaty because, well, none of those other countries are the United States. That may seem self-evident , but it’s relevant. Those other governments in NATO felt it was important to ban land mines. But this government didn’t because we have global responsibilities that they don’t have, and we have troops all over the world that are in harms way.

Unlike those other countries, we have a responsibility to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent, and we have to make independent decisions about how to maintain that it.

William C. Potter is director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

The outcome really was disgraceful. It’s scandalous how the parties could claim that this was not politically motivated when so little time was given to debate and consideration of the treaty. Both parties had strong views on the substance of the treaty, but I think the votes and the maneuvering were largely about politics. At the upcoming 2000 nuclear non-proliferation treaty conference, it will be difficult for the U.S. to condemn any nation that doesn’t follow multilateral non-proliferation agreements when the Senate so overwhelming rejected this treaty. It sends the wrong political signal.

We are much better off with the treaty than without it, even though there were some legitimate concerns. But regardless of what one thinks of the treaty, it shouldn’t have been defeated in the manner that it was yesterday. The blame can be spread on both sides of the aisle. I don’t think the administration had pursued this the way it should have. Sen. Lugar has, more than any senator, guided treaties toward ratification. The administration didn’t make it a priority to bring him on board early, and he voted against it.

Unless there are international developments which appear to be linked to the vote, it won’t be easy to get this back on the floor. I’m not optimistic in the short-term that we will see a reconsideration of the treaty. We’re witnessing an erosion of support for arms control policy in Congress, and a lack of interest in key international issues. In this climate, it would be difficult to find majority support for any conceivable multi-lateral treaty.

Leaders in the Senate were very anxious to embarrass the president. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, and maybe it was deserved. But what they have accomplished is to damage American diplomacy in the paramount security challenge of today, which is to prevent the spread of tools of nuclear destruction.

There is a strong mood in Russia especially, and also in China, to reconsider nuclear non-proliferation agreements. The Russians have been debating whether to resume building nuclear weapons and tactical arms. The defeat of this treaty reinforces the position of those in Russia who support this. If the Russians resume testing, the Chinese would follow suit almost immediately.

Appearing on state television, Musharraf stated: “Despite all my advice, they tried to interfere with the armed forces, the last remaining viable institution in which all of you take so much pride and look up to at all times for stability, unity and integrity of our beloved country.”

For the past 10 years, the country has been ineptly ruled by an alternating team of prime ministers — Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, the latter awaiting trial on corruption charges. During this time, Pakistan’s economy has declined drastically.

The downward spiral went out of control last year, after Sharif ordered nuclear weapons testing in what was widely interpreted as a challenge to neighboring India. Serious border disputes between the two countries have flared up anew in recent months, leading to the imposition of sanctions against Pakistan by Western governments. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have temporarily stalled loans that had been keeping Pakistan’s sinking economy afloat.

Sharif initially supported a move by Pakistani infiltrators (now widely believed to have been Pakistani soldiers) into the disputed Kargil region of Kashmir last year, then ordered them back to Pakistan under pressure from the White House. The retreat outraged Pakistani military leaders and provided the context for Tuesday’s coup.

A number of experts discussed the coup in Pakistan and its implications for regional stability with Salon News.

Howard B. Schaffer is director of studies at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh.

The overthrow of Sharif by the military did not come as a surprise.

There [was] an awareness on the part of the army that Sharif had failed in many primary areas of governance and had become unpopular, setting the stage for it to intervene without serious concern about adverse public reaction. Its hand was forced by Sharif himself, who sought to dismiss the army chief — a move which he had been successful at a year earlier when he dismissed Musharraf’s predecessor — which led to this army reaction. The most serious failure has been on the economic front.

Another failure has been on the law-and-order front. There’s been increasing sectarian violence between extreme shia and sunni groups. There have been allegations, which I fully credit, of considerable corruption. There has been tension between the majority state [the Punjab province and home of Sharif] and the four smaller provinces. This is a laundry list of failures.

There has been very little hope that there could be substantial change in any of these areas. Sharif has been unwilling to crack down on those of his supporters who have had their hand in the cookie jar. He’s been unwilling to take politically risky measures to improve the revenue situation. He failed at Kargil and he created a foreign policy situation where Pakistan has very few friends in the world.

We don’t know much about Musharraf except that he’s a professional military officer … He is considered a secular person — I’m sure he’s a faithful Muslim — but he is not seen [as some other generals have been] to be inclined to an Islamic view of things. Allegations that he may lead Pakistan to take a more Islamic-oriented policy, especially vis-a-vis the Afghanistan situation, seem ironic when you consider that the guy whom Sharif proposed to replace him [Gen. Khawaja Ziauddin, head of the military intelligence] has been seen to have strong Islamic ties.

It’s a blow to U.S. foreign policy. The attitude of the U.S. government toward the Pakistani regime is going to depend on what kind of polity emerges in the next day or so. The Pakistani generals are still consulting among themselves to decide what to do next. The [option] favored by Washington would keep the present parliament in place but remove Sharif and a few figures associated with him. And then create a new, duly elected government comprising parliament but excluding these figures. The second approach, most favored by Pakistani elites, would create a substitute government of technocrats — senior officials and retired figures — and have them serve as a caretaker government to clean up the messier elements in the three months leading up to elections. This follows the pattern used earlier in the decade.

Robert Hathaway is director of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The real triggering event was Sharif’s decision in July to withdraw the Pakistani troops who had infiltrated Indian territory in Kashmir. What happened was Sharif saw Pakistan was taking a military beating in Kashmir, and an economic beating at home and in the international community. But the roots of the problem go back further than this summer.

The last military dictator of Pakistan was killed in 1988 in an as-yet-unexplained plane crash. Since then, Pakistan has had a succession of weak administrations, none of which finished out their constitutional lives.

The Pakistani military had become increasingly disillusioned … By any measure, the economy is going down the tubes. The social indicators are terrible. Whether you talk about literacy, infant mortality, people who live without electricity or health care, it’s staggering.

What Pakistan has had since 1988 is poor leaders. Sharif was prime minister twice, [Benazir] Bhutto twice. But neither demonstrated any real ability to govern or meet the needs of the people. Both surrounded themselves with corrupt officials.

I don’t want to overemphasis it, but another factor is the role that Islamic radicals have played or might play in the takeover. To many Islamic radicals, Kashmir was a holy war, and the pullout by Sharif was not only a betrayal of the nation, but a betrayal of a solemn religious obligation to help their Muslim brothers.

There are things the U.S. can do, has already done, and should do in the future. First, we need to recognize that our influence is limited … We should send a message that we have no intention of conducting business as usual with Pakistan. This means that we will vote in the World Bank against loans to Pakistan. It means we will use the United Nations and other international forums to highlight what has transpired. It means that we will not give them diplomatic support in the disputes with India or other countries. Not so long as the military is in power.

Marshall Bouton is executive vice president of the Asia Society.

A lot of attention has been paid to differences that emerged between the military and Sharif. There was growing tension between the military and the prime minister. The prime minister was looking to contain the influence of the military. He dismissed the previous military authority for remarks that were taken as a suggestion that the military should have more power. There was growing concern among the military about the stability of the government and economy in the country. Ultimately the army considers itself the guardian of the country’s stability and integrity.

The political institutions in Pakistan did not acquire the roots in the national body politic that would help them over time. There was always this tension and between the government and the military. You had a relationship of distrust that in turn undermined the development of a political elite.

Success of military coups in the history of Pakistan varies widely. There is a widespread expectation that this new regime will lay out some kind of phased plan that will go from something short of martial law to technocratic, non-elected civilian government to full democratic control.

It will be difficult because the political institutions and the elite are not strong enough to sustain such a plan, so there’s no one whom the military can look to, to carry out this plan.

The United States has to send a three-layered message to the new military leaders:

1. We don’t approve of extra-constitutional changes of government, period.

2. We expect them to lay out a plan for return to civilian authority and eventually some legitimate democratic process.

3. This is a message best sent privately: We would be strongly opposed to any steps that would raise tensions with India. We expect the new government to not do anything to raise tensions and actually to find a way to reduce them.

They must recognize — if their purpose is to safeguard the integrity of Pakistan — that the path to that does not run through conflict with India.

Stephen Solarz is a senior advisor on South Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Considerable thought had been given to this [coup] for some time.

From the inception of Pakistan, the military assumed the dominant role in the affairs of the nation because the nation’s founder died not long after Pakistan became independent. In India, [Jawaharlal] Nehru served as prime minister for close to 20 years, and he was very committed to the principle of parliamentary democracy, and civilian supremacy played a critical role in institutionalizing these principles.

There was no comparably legitimizing figure in Pakistan.

Civilian lack of reaction to the coup has largely to do with the fact that the economy is in a shambles, and the regime was inept at dealing with the problems of the country. It was mired in corruption, as were previous administrations. Also, the decision of Sharif to pull troops out of Kargil was seen as humiliating.

It doesn’t have any profound implications for nuclear proliferation because Pakistan already had nuclear weapons under the control of the military and still has nuclear weapons under the control of the military. It does have profound implications for the future of democracy in Pakistan, for Pakistani relations with the United States, and for relations with India.

Andrew Koch is a reporter at Jane’s Defence Weekly and an expert in South Asian nuclear proliferation.

The coup came as a surprise to Sharif. He clearly thought he could get rid of Musharraf. But when he tried to fire him, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sharif was immensely unpopular. There have been signs for weeks that something might happen. The United States warned the Pakistani military recently not to do something like this, and Sharif expected the United States to save him. But in the end what could we do?

It’s too early to say what’s going to happen to the long-term government. Everybody’s in a wait-and-see mode to see what the army’s going to do. It doesn’t really affect their nuclear stockpile — it was already under the control of the military and now remains that way.

Musharraf might be a bit [hawkish] compared to past Pakistani generals, but typically it’s the political leadership that’s been causing the biggest problems. They tend to go for the demagogue rhetoric in Pakistan to whip up political support. Both Sharif and Bhutto have been guilty of lambasting India as a huge threat and said that their opposition hasn’t been doing anything to safeguard against that threat. A lot more so than the military. People are saying that Musharraf is hawkish because he was the guy behind the Kargil [Kashmir] attack this summer. But I would caution that he is not whipping up, nor has he ever to my knowledge, Pakistani concerns vis-a-vis India like the political leadership has.

In terms of security in the region, if Pakistan could return to democracy in a solid form, that would be an immense help in stabilizing relations. But that’s predicated on the economy. [The economy in Pakistan] is a disaster. It was in very bad shape before the nuclear tests, but sanctions really hurt them. The country has suffered through many years of very poor governance. Bhutto was incredibly corrupt, and now she’s under indictment. Sharif is by many accounts just as corrupt. The level of his corruption hasn’t come fully into light because he jailed journalists and successfully ousted judges and put them under his control. With him out, it will be revealed how corrupt his regime was. These two leaders have traded off — one had led and then the other and back and forth for at least 10 disastrous years. Pakistan went on a more precipitous slide after the nuclear tests with the international sanctions and the temporary withholding of World Bank and IMF loans.

The Associated Press account was the first most Americans had heard of No Gun Ri. Even many experts on Korean history had never heard of it, despite a dogged campaign for redress conducted by apparent survivors. For 50 years, it seemed, No Gun Ri had been forgotten.

Salon News spoke to stunned Korea experts about their reaction to the No Gun Ri report.

Kim Choe, correspondent with the Korea Central Daily in Los Angeles:

Korean Americans are stunned those things took place during the war. Historically, the Korean government has not been willing to take any initiative to investigate these matters. The current government, even if it has had some limitations, is more open to exposing these stories to the general public. But until now most of the people haven’t heard anything like this.

Mark L. Keam, attorney, Korean American Coalition board member:

It’s shocking. If it did happen, it would be outrageous. But I understand that in the reality of being in a warlike situation there could be another explanation. The older generation of Korean Americans and the survivors of the war knew about this, but many of them feel that this is water under the bridge. Many didn’t talk about it. But a lot of the younger generation feels that, even if this happened 50 years ago or 100 years ago, a human rights violation is still a human rights violation. I think we owe it to history to get to the bottom of this.

Lt. Col. Russ Oaks, Army spokesman:

There is nothing in the official record that substantiates the claim.

Bob Manning, Council on Foreign Relations fellow:

Remember, this was at the beginning of the Korean War. The war took everybody by surprise. Among the troops, there is a certain lack of familiarity with the culture and the people. And you have this dilemma where [the Americans] were worried about North Korean infiltrators. As horrible as it sounds, it’s the kind of catastrophe that happens in the fog of war.

Don Oberdorfer, Korean War veteran and author of “The Two Koreas”:

In my time as a correspondent, I never came across information about this. But I was a war correspondent for many years, and I can tell that this story is well-researched and probably true. If it did happen, it’s a blot on American history.

I served in Korea as a lieutenant for eight months. I was on a troop ship going to Korea as the armistice was being signed. Our instructions at the time were to be very protective of the citizens. At the beginning of the war, it was a much more fluid situation, like Vietnam. That’s when civilians get most endangered because, in a war of movement, troops are moving back in forth through civilian areas.

I was at a meeting this afternoon with a bunch of Korean scholars and nobody even mentioned it. So I brought it up and said I deeply regret it.