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NUCLEAR
Cameco sees two-month delay at uranium mine
Soldiers stressed by fighting outgunned Iraqis
CIA report lists Iraqi violations of U.N.-banned arms
Japan nuclear scandals stymie Kyoto pact goals
N. Korea's Kim Says Air Force Ready to Beat 'Enemy'
Russian defence chief urges North Korea to take back nuclear inspectors
Pelosi stands by vote against Iraq war
Too Soon to Declare Victory in Iraq, White House Says
R. James Woolsey: War-hungry non-combatant
MILITARY
Oklahoma factory turns out US bombs used in Iraq
Ricin Scare in Paris Is False Alarm
New DynCorp Contract Draws Scrutiny
Pay Dirt or Payola?
US threatens to use biggest bomb as hunt switches north
Looting Spreads Throughout Mosul and Other Iraqi Cities
Opposition Unable to Mount Conventional Attacks, U.S. Says
Convoy of reporters crosses Jordan border
Heavy Fighting for Desert Base at Syria Border
Biggest mass grave of dictatorship era found - ARGENTINA
Bush says Syria must expel Saddam backers
Syria Warned Again Not to 'Meddle' in Iraq
For Military Intelligence, a New Favorite Commando
Ex - FBI Agents Suspected Woman of Spying
F.B.I. Never Gave Agent in Spy Case a Polygraph
U.S. 'Winging' War Plan in Northern Iraq
105 U.S. dead in Iraq war
Dull Television
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
GOP calls for wider powers to track citizens
Suspects in Cole Attack Escape Prison in Yemen
ENERGY AND OTHER
Automakers Roll Out Liquid Hydrogen Refueling Program
US Senate panel approves renewable fuels earmark
California Sues Restaurants for Not Warning of Mercury
U.S. Won't Reproach China on Human Rights
IMF: Rebuilding Iraq must be global effort
ACTIVISTS
Anti - War Groups Fear Loss of Momentum
Anti-war protesters sue Chicago
Maintaining A Presence For Peace
Protest Street Closures Expected to Cause Delays
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- canada
Cameco sees two-month delay at uranium mine
REUTERS CANADA:
April 11, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20440/story.htm
TORONTO - Cameco Corp. (CCO.TO) said this week production at the world's largest high-grade uranium mine may be delayed by at least two months after it was shut down when excess water flowed into a development area.
Earlier in the week, Cameco said it had suspended operations at the McArthur River mine in northern Saskatchewan after part of the mine collapsed, prompting a temporary evacuation of all mine workers.
It had said operations could be halted for two weeks.
"Although events are still unfolding, Cameco now anticipates production restart will be delayed by at least two months. Consequently, annual mine and mill production will be less than full capacity of 18.7 million pounds of uranium," the company said in a release.
Cameco, the largest supplier of uranium to the western world's nuclear power plants, said it had "significant inventory to mitigate the effect of any shortfall."
It said workers had increased the mine's pumping capacity but the volume of water was still accumulating. The most critical area of the mine was unaffected. ($1=$1.47 Canadian).
-------- iraq
Soldiers stressed by fighting outgunned Iraqis
By ANN SCOTT TYSON,
Christian Science Monitor,
April 11th, 2003
http://www.tribnet.com/24hour/iraq/story/851167p-5967316c.html
OUTSKIRTS OF BAGHDAD, Iraq (CSM) - Like blinding orange and white stars, U.S. rockets and missiles filled with deadly cluster bombs arced skyward, lending the evening clouds an unnatural glow. Moments later, the munitions exploded on targets around Baghdad, wiping out Iraqi artillery and killing scores of Iraqi soldiers.
So lethal was the past week's barrage of artillery - using rockets and missiles designed to demolish everything within a "grid square" (one square kilometer) - that it left Lt. John Harrell of the 3rd Infantry Division's 1-39 Artillery Battalion with virtually nothing else to attack.
"We don't have many targets left," said the lieutenant, whose multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) battery is positioned near Baghdad's southern edge. His battalion has shot 350 rockets, including 72 in a single onslaught on Baghdad International Airport a week ago.
Yet even as U.S. commanders cite dramatic success in the three-week-old war, many look upon the wholesale destruction of Iraq's military and the killing of thousands of Iraqi fighters with a sense of regret. They voice frustration at the number of Iraqis who stood their ground against overwhelming U.S. firepower, wasting their lives and equipment rather than capitulating as expected.
"They have no command and control, no organization. They're just dying," says Brig. Gen. Louis Weber, an assistant commander of the 3rd Infantry Division. This week, the division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team killed at least 1,000 Iraqis by direct fire alone on a single raid into Baghdad, he said.
The decimation of the Iraqi military - once among the Middle East's most formidable armed forces - exacerbates the power void that occupying troops must fill to stabilize the nation, Army officers say. The combat strength of most regular Iraqi Army and elite Republican Guard units has dwindled to below 20 percent, according to U.S. military estimates. Some 70 percent of Iraq's artillery has been knocked out, along with hundreds of tanks and other armored vehicles.
"We've destroyed a large majority of their military and they still need to secure their country," says Lt. Col. Woody Radcliffe, who heads a 3rd Infantry Division operations center. "It's an absolute shame. We didn't want to do this. Even a brain-dead moron can understand we are so vastly superior militarily that there is no hope. You would think they would see that and give up."
Again and again, as battles raged in recent days and weeks, U.S. officers expressed puzzlement over Iraqi fighters' tactical ineptitude and seemingly reckless disregard for their own lives.
"What are these guys thinking? It's suicide!" said Capt. David Roberts, a military intelligence officer, monitoring a massing of Iraqi forces outside Baghdad while the 3rd Infantry's combat brigades rolled in to cordon off the city. "The sad thing is these guys are being led by people who don't know what they are doing."
For example, Iraqis repeatedly attempted to block roads using vehicles buttressed with loose sand. U.S. forces either blew up the vehicles or drove around them. "They're getting ... spanked again and it seems like they haven't learned anything," says Capt. Kathy Cage, a signals officer with the 3rd Infantry.
As the 3rd Infantry quickly advanced north along the Euphrates and west toward the capital, some soldiers began to describe the battles as almost disturbingly unfair.
"At the Karbala Gap the Iraqis put up a good fight, but to no avail because we had the firepower. It was way too easy," says Staff Sgt. Ira Mack, who serves at the headquarters of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team. U.S. commanders had expected heavier fighting and the possible use of Iraqi chemical weapons as the 3rd Infantry traversed the narrow gap, a stretch of land between the Euphrates River and the Razzaza Lake.
Earlier, in a battle to isolate Najaf, U.S. commanders called for air strikes partly out of an aversion to mowing down Iraqis with direct fire.
"There were waves and waves of people coming at them, with AK-47s, out of this factory, and they were killing everyone," says Radcliffe. "The commander called and said, 'This is not right. This is insane. Let's hit the factory with close air support and take them out all at once.'"
For some soldiers, trauma is already sinking in. "For lack of a better word, I feel almost guilty about the massacre," says one soldier privately. "We wasted a lot of people. It makes you wonder how many were innocent. It takes away some of the pride. We won, but at what cost?"
Adding to the potential for postwar trauma, some officers suggest, is the fact that many of the 3rd Infantry Division's troops are barely 20 years old.
"The average soldier now is 19 to 21 years old," Mack says. "You have 21-year-old sergeants. They're not experienced enough to maintain control over themselves or their soldiers in the heat of the battle. They're just two years off the streets. We have WIAs (Wounded In Action) wearing Purple Hearts who are 20 years old."
As the longest-deployed Army division in the region and the one that provided the bulk of the Army's combat power, the 3rd Infantry Division is not likely to serve as an occupying force in Iraq. Instead, it should be one of the first arriving home.
But before that, officers stress, the soldiers must have time to decompress.
"The reality is, we've got a bunch of steely-eyed killers that have destroyed all the enemy forces they've come into contact with," worries Radcliffe. "The switch is on right now, and you can't just turn it off."
----
CIA report lists Iraqi violations of U.N.-banned arms
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 11, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030411-27279566.htm
President Saddam Hussein's Iraq had expanded work on long-range missiles banned under United Nations sanctions and continued last year to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the CIA stated in a report made public yesterday.
"Iraq has managed to rebuild and expand its missile development infrastructure under sanctions," said the CIA's semiannual report to Congress on international arms proliferation covering the first six months of 2002.
"Iraqi intermediaries have sought production technology, machine tools, and raw materials in violation of the arms embargo," said the report, which was written before military operations began in Iraq last month.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday that a key mission of U.S. forces in Iraq will be to find out how Saddam obtained banned weapons, material and expertise. U.S. forces have found some banned missiles but so far no chemical, biological or nuclear arms.
The report also said Iraq rebuilt key chemical weapons facilities and, during the first half of 2002, continued to develop biological weapons.
As for conventional weapons, the CIA said Iraq in 2002 continued to buy advanced conventional arms, equipment and technology, despite the decade-old U.N. arms embargo.
"A thriving gray arms market and porous borders have allowed Baghdad to acquire smaller arms and components for larger arms, such as spare parts for aircraft, air defense systems, and armored vehicles," the report said.
The Iraqis also were able to buy dual commercial and military products through the U.N.-sponsored oil-for-food program, the report said.
"In light of Iraq's growing industrial self-sufficiency and the availability of mobile or possible covert facilities, we are concerned that Iraq is again producing [biological warfare] agents," the report said.
New missile-production facilities include plants for missiles and components, including a solid-propellant plant at al-Mamoun.
"Baghdad would not have been able to complete this facility without help from abroad," the report said, without identifying which countries were involved.
However, the report noted that in August 1995, Iraq attempted to buy missile-guidance systems originally made for Russian submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The effort showed "Baghdad has been pursuing proscribed, advanced, long-range missile technology for some time," the report said.
The report also said Iraq is developing a multistage medium-range missile with a range of up to 1,860 miles and a Badr-2000 missile with a range of up to 620 miles.
As for its short-range al-Samoud 2 missiles and the al-Fatah missile, the report said both missiles were flight-tested to ranges beyond those permitted under U.N. sanctions, which limited Iraq from building missiles with ranges of more than 93 miles.
Iraq fired at least 15 missiles at Kuwait since March 20, but all but three were knocked out by U.S. Patriot antimissile systems. One missile was an antiship cruise missile that landed near a shopping center but caused no injuries. Two others were allowed to fall harmlessly in unpopulated areas.
Also, work carried out at Iraq's al-Rafah-North Liquid Propellant Engine Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation Facility revealed that a new test stand was built.
"The only plausible explanation for this test facility is that Iraq intends to test engines for longer-range missiles prohibited under U.N. [Security Council Resolution] 687," the report said.
Iraq also has expanded and rebuilt its Al-Mutasim Solid Rocket Motor and Test Facility, which was used in the past to develop the Badr-2000 solid-propellant missile, the report said.
A third site, the Al-Mutasim missile plant, is working on rocket motors "but the size of certain facilities there, particularly those newly constructed between the assembly rework and static test areas, suggests that Baghdad is preparing to develop systems that are prohibited by the U.N." sanctions.
As for nuclear development, the report said Iraq has maintained a "cadre of nuclear scientists and technicians, its program documentation, and sufficient dual-use manufacturing capabilities to support a reconstituted nuclear weapons program."
Iraq expanded its international trade in recent years and was able to gain "growing access to nuclear-related technology and materials and potential access to foreign nuclear expertise," the report stated.
The report noted worries about Iraq's recent attempt to buy thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.
"All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program," the report said.
-------- japan
Japan nuclear scandals stymie Kyoto pact goals
Story by Miho Yoshikawa
REUTERS JAPAN:
April 11, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20439/story.htm
TOKYO - Japan's plans to meet its obligations under the Kyoto accord on global warming could be in jeopardy as public safety concerns hinder the construction of new nuclear reactors low in greenhouse gas emissions.
A string of safety scandals has shattered public faith in the nation's nuclear industry, pushing back deadlines for rolling out a dozen or so reactors in a country that relies on nuclear energy for about a third of its power.
The delay, analysts say, could thwart Japan's aim of cutting greenhouse gases, which many scientists believe could cause disastrous climatic changes, by six percent from 1990 levels by 2008-2012.
"I think it has become quite clear that domestic policy (promoting nuclear energy) alone will not be enough if Japan is to meet its Kyoto Protocol target," Kazuya Fujime, managing director at the Institute of Energy Economics Japan (IEEJ) said.
The Kyoto Protocol treaty was drawn up in 1997 and requires signatories to reduce gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2012.
Emissions in Japan of some 90 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main gas concerned, derives from energy consumption and Tokyo sees nuclear power, which generates no CO2, as key to meeting its global pledge. But the latest long-term business plans by the nation's power utilities show that only eight nuclear reactors are due to begin operating by fiscal 2010/11.
That's down from last year's forecast for 12 units and also far short of the roughly 10-13 new nuclear reactors that the government sees as necessary for it to achieve its goal of cutting the harmful gases by 2010.
Analysts see even fewer reactors being built.
"(The number of) new nuclear reactors is a very optimistic outlook...the IEEJ's forecast is for five new units," Fujime says.
He adds that there are other experts who believe the three nuclear reactors that are already under construction will be the only new units in operation by 2010.
Spokesmen at power firms that have delayed reactor construction say they are behind schedule because of recent industry safety troubles.
Analysts say the power industry is getting more cautious about building new reactors because power demand is expected to grow at a slower pace, while ongoing industry deregulation is expected to lead to increased competition.
OTHER OPTIONS
Some analysts say Japan should review its Kyoto policy goals, which lean too heavily on the use of nuclear power to cut CO2 emissions, saying other measures should also be encouraged.
Britain, which launched a voluntary CO2 emissions trading scheme in April 2002, said last month that it was on track to meet its Kyoto Protocol targets.
Japan, on the other hand, is trailing.
CO2 emissions resulting from energy consumption in the fiscal year ended March 2002 amounted to 1.13 billion tonnes in Japan, down 2.7 percent from a year earlier but up 6.3 percent from 1990/91 levels.
A Trade Ministry official attributed the year-on-year decline to Japan's prolonged economic slump.
"By far the main reason for the decline is the deterioration in the economy...which meant less energy consumption," he said.
OUTPUT KEY?
The government target for launching 10-13 nuclear reactors is based on the goal for Japan's nuclear output to be 418.6 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in fiscal 2010/11, accounting for some 40.7-42.0 percent of total power output.
This compares with 2002/03 when nuclear power accounted for roughly 31.4 percent of total power output.
Officials at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) said they believe that the output targets can still be reached - even without all the planned new reactors coming online.
"It is not just a case of counting how many nuclear reactors are needed...but it is a matter of reaching our target in terms of nuclear power generation," one METI official said.
METI officials say raising the operating rate of current nuclear power plants is one way of increasing supply if opposition to building new nuclear facilities continues.
That opposition, particularly from local communities around the plants, shows no sign of abating after a string of scandals fanned safety concerns.
In the latest incident, Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (9501.T) - Japan's largest utility - was forced to successively close down its nuclear reactors after it admitted in August last year that it had falsified data during safety checks.
It has already closed down all but one of its 17 nuclear reactors, while no timetable has been set for their restart.
-------- korea
N. Korea's Kim Says Air Force Ready to Beat 'Enemy'
April 11, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il visited an air base just hours after Iraq's leadership crumbled and told pilots he was confident they could ``beat back the enemy,'' the North's media reported on Friday.
North Korean television showed photographs of Kim touring Flying Unit 887 on Thursday, a day after U.S.-led forces unseated Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, whose country Washington has labeled part of an ``axis of evil'' with North Korea and Iran.
Pyongyang says it will be Washington's next target once the war in Iraq is over, something the United States denies.
Either way, foreign investors are jittery about the drawn-out crisis over North Korea's suspected nuclear arms ambitions.
``Virtually all possible outcomes -- even short of catastrophic war or large-scale military confrontation -- carry significant added security and economic risk,'' said Bank of America in a research report.
In the South's port of Ulsan, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun attended the launching of the second of six planned radar-evading stealth destroyers able to carry out anti-ship and anti-submarine missions as well as eavesdropping.
In the United States, North Korea's deputy ambassador to the United Nations gave the North's first reaction to Saddam's fall.
``The result of the Iraq war gives the DPRK a kind of determination and the will to take assured measures to defend its territory against possible U.S. attacks,'' Radio Free Asia quoted Han Song-ryul as saying on Thursday at a seminar in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
North Korea's official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Han did not specifically refer to nuclear weapons, which Washington says North Korea is trying to make.
The radio station, which is funded by the U.S. Congress but not government-run, said Han had also told the seminar that, if Washington accepted its call for bilateral talks on its suspected nuclear weapons program, it could expect ``many positive steps.''
REVOLUTIONARY VIGILANCE
Back in North Korea, it was unclear what kind of planes were at the unit Kim visited. The choice of base was no coincidence. The Iraqi air force has played no role in the war in Iraq.
``Seeing the pilots fully ready to cope with the moves of the enemy for aggression, he noted with great satisfaction that they are always maintaining a high degree of revolutionary vigilance and fully prepared to courageously beat back the enemy any time if he comes in attack,'' the official KCNA news agency said.
North Korean television showed still pictures of Kim in a gray winter coat and his trademark outsized sunglasses talking to fighter pilots at the air base.
The media made no mention of the United States by name, but North Korea routinely refers to it as the enemy.
There are 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea alongside 690,000 South Korean military. North Korea has 1.1 million troops, many deployed near the Demilitarized Zone frontier that has bisected the peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean War.
South Korea's National Intelligence Service says the North has about 1,710 aircraft, including 60 modern MiG-23 and MiG-29 fighters. Many aircraft are older models, defense experts say.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said in a report North Korea appeared last year to have the goal of building a plant to produce enough uranium for two or more nuclear weapons a year.
``Even if Pyongyang has nuclear development programs, North Korea is a small country which cannot be a U.S. competitor in terms of nuclear weapons,'' Han said.
Han was speaking at a seminar organized by Harvard University and the New York-based Korea Society. The report was posted on the station's Web site (www.rfa.org) in Korean and English.
``If the United States accepts our offer for direct talks, Washington can expect many positive steps from North Korea in resolving nuclear problems,'' the radio quoted Han as saying.
Washington favors multilateral talks that also include China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.
``We need to seek a solution which is satisfying to both North Korea and the United States,'' Han said when asked whether Pyongyang would accept bilateral talks in a multilateral setting. ``We need to turn impossibility into possibility.''
His remarks suggested a softening of North Korea's stance that only bilateral talks would do, but it was not immediately clear whether his comments carried Pyongyang's full weight.
North Korea's Radio Pyongyang, aimed at a domestic audience, unlike Han's comments, kept up its rhetoric against the United States, saying it ``would not hesitate to push the entire Korean peninsula to nuclear disaster,'' Yonhap news agency reported.
----
Russian defence chief urges North Korea to take back nuclear inspectors
AFP
Friday April 11
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030411/1/3a0er.html
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov made a fresh plea that North Korea allow international nuclear inspectors back into its territory as part of diplomatic efforts to solve the Korean nuclear crisis.
The suggestion was made Friday when Ivanov called on Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on the first day of his three-day visit here, the Japanese foreign ministry said.
Ivanov and Koizumi agreed that the Korean nuclear stand-off should be solved only by "diplomatic and political means," ministry officials said, amid international worries that North Korea could become the focus of armed conflict after Iraq.
"The situation in North Korea is causing security concerns to the United States, Japan, South Korean and Russia," Ivanov was quoted as telling Koizumi in the 35-minute meeting at the prime minister's official residence.
He said that it would be important for a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to return to "control North Korea's (nuclear) programme," according to the officials.
"The North Korean problem can be solved through diplomatic and political means and Russia is prepared to inform North Korea of this position," Ivanov was quoted as saying.
Russia, one of the few countries to have regular contact with the leadership in Pyongyang, has been attempting to mediate in the crisis which flared up last October.
Pyongyang reportedly admitted to Washington in October that it was running a secret uranium enrichment programme, in violation of a 1994 nuclear deal between the two countries.
The United States has since stopped fuel aid to the North while the Stalinist state threatened to restart a program which produces weapons-grade plutonium, kicked out IAEA inspectors and quit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Premier Koizumi told Ivanov that Japan intends to normalise diplomatic relations with North Korea based on the Pyongyang Declaration which he signed with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il last September at a summit in Pyongyang, the officials said.
In the declaration, Koizumi and Kim confirmed they would comply with international laws and not engage in conduct threatening each other's security.
-------- us politics
Pelosi stands by vote against Iraq war
By Stephen Dinan and Amy Fagan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 11, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030411-94012.htm
Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are rallying around military successes in Iraq and supporting the troops, but House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said it was still right to oppose granting the president the authority to use force to disarm Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
"I have absolutely no regret about my vote on this war," she told reporters at her weekly briefing yesterday, saying the same questions still remain: "The cost in human lives. The cost to our budget, probably $100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less. The cost to our economy. But the most important question at this time, now that we're toward the end of it, is what is the cost to the war on terrorism?"
She and a majority of House Democrats last October voted against authorizing the president to use force to disarm Saddam's regime. In the Senate, a majority of Democrats voted for the war resolution. The measure passed both chambers comfortably, with almost every Republican supporting it.
But Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, has said she worries the Iraq campaign would divert attention from the broader war on terror and could spawn new terrorist attacks.
On the Senate side, Minority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, praised U.S. troops and declined to second-guess the Bush administration on a series of questions, including whether Iraqi opposition figure Ahmad Chalabi should be the country's next interim leader. He is being promoted for the position by some in the administration.
"I want to vet it a little bit more before I come to any conclusions," Mr. Daschle said.
The ongoing war continues to dominate much of the action on Capitol Hill.
A handful of protesters disrupted a Senate vote last night when they stood in the visitors' gallery, held up red flags and chanted antiwar slogans like "No money for war" and "Our taxes are not for bombing nations."
The five were grabbed and pushed one by one out by guards, but not before they brought the entire chamber, which was full of senators and staffers for the vote, to its feet.
Meanwhile, House Republicans and Democrats held a rally to support the troops yesterday, and leaders of both parties praised the military's efficiency and professionalism.
"Today in Iraq, tens of millions are free," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. "This is a regime that needed change."
Mr. DeLay, Texas Republican, said the war is not over yet, "but make no mistake ... our army of virtue is beating back the tide of terror."
Mrs. Pelosi also praised the troops at the rally. But she didn't address the war itself at the event. Later, in her news conference, she told reporters she is not convinced the war in Iraq has made Americans safer.
"That remains to be seen," she said. "I certainly would hope so, and I think we have to think in a very positive way about it, but we don't know."
That put her at odds with House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, who said to some U.S. troops present at the rally: "Your cause is noble and just. You are disarming a dangerous despot and ending his ruthless regime."
He also said he believed the war was "strengthening the security of our nation, as well as the nations of the Middle East and the nations of the world."
As Mrs. Pelosi praised the troops, she also said their success was owed "in large measure" to former President Bill Clinton.
"This best-trained, best-equipped, best-led force for peace in the history of the world was not invented in the last two years. This had a strong influence and strong support during the Clinton years," she said.
Mrs. Pelosi did give President Bush credit for saying the United Nations should have a role in rebuilding a postwar Iraq, but she said the administration must make sure that it involves the international community.
----
Too Soon to Declare Victory in Iraq, White House Says
April 11, 2003
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/international/worldspecial/11CND-PREXY.html
WASHINGTON, April 11 - As fires and looting in Iraq followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the White House said today that it was far too early to declare complete victory.
"It's much too soon in the day to discuss it," President Bush's chief spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said at a midday news briefing. "We remain in the midst of a conflict."
Mr. Fleischer noted, as have military commanders, that pockets of fighters loyal to the Iraqi dictator are still resisting. "We're still in the midst of a shooting war," the White House spokesman said.
Beyond that, the midweek scenes of joyful Iraqi citizens toppling statues of Saddam Hussein have given way to uglier sights. As Mr. Fleischer addressed reporters, there were split-screen television images of Baghdad buildings in flames and of wholesale looting in the streets.
"Nobody likes to see looting," Mr. Fleischer said, emphasizing that United States military units that specialize in restoring civil order are deploying quickly. But Mr. Fleischer said that, despite the chaos, "Nobody should miss the larger picture."
That larger picture, he said, is one of oppressed people throwing off their shackles at long last. Mr. Fleischer said that President Bush was confident that civil unrest would subside relatively quickly, as lawful civilian authority was imposed.
Even though all the reports from Iraq indicate that Mr. Hussein and his coterie are out of power - if not dead, then fleeing or hiding - Mr. Fleischer declined to speculate when the word "victory" might be appropriately used.
"Yes, indeed, the regime has ended," Mr. Fleischer said. "But yes, indeed, fighting remains. It is still a battlefield. While the central command and control elements of the regime have been collapsed, there remain pockets of loyalists who continue to fight and present harm for our armed forces."
In response to a question, Mr. Fleischer said the president has always viewed "the mission" in Iraq as disarming the regime and liberating the Iraqi people. "But I'm not going to define for you what the president will later define as victory," he said.
If the Iraqi dictator is not found, dead or alive, before the shooting stops, the hunt for him will probably go on, Mr. Fleischer said.
"And certainly we want to make certain that those who are responsible for war crimes are brought to justice," Mr. Fleischer said. "And so no matter what period of time is, if there are people who emerge alive, wherever they are, if a determination is made that that individual is a war criminal, that's a matter for the international community to take up."
----
R. James Woolsey: War-hungry non-combatant
Former CIA Director beats the drums for World War IV
Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
04.11.03
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=14826
The concluding days of the military invasion of Iraq -- which some have called a "demonstration project" -- is at hand. So what's next on the agenda for the muscular foreign policy folks at the Defense Department?
If it's up to former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, a longtime advocate for the invasion of Iraq and just about anywhere else in the Middle East (except Israel), there could be a series of "demonstration projects" coming down the pike. Welcome to the biggest "demonstration project" of them all -- World War IV.
(By his calculation, the Cold War was World War III.)
Woolsey's name has been bandied about by the Pentagon as someone who might play a key role in a postwar interim administration in Iraq -- perhaps taking charge of reconstituting the country's intelligence services or heading up the information ministry. But that may seem like small potatoes for the war-happy non-combatant.
At a "teach-in" at UCLA, sponsored by William Bennett's Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, Woolsey assured a sympathetic audience of close to 300 that "This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War." Woolsey said that the religious rulers of Iran, the "fascists" of Iraq and Syria, and terrorist groups like al Qaeda were the main targets of the new war.
But no country in the Middle East, or for that matter, anywhere else in the world should feel safe from future U.S. military action. "As we move toward a new Middle East," Woolsey pledged to "make a lot of people very nervous," in "the years and, I think, over the decades to come."
Woolsey also mentioned Egypt and Saudi Arabia as potential targets: "We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you -- the Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family -- most fear: We're on the side of your own people."
Woolsey is a member of the Defense Policy Board, a group of military and business officials that are selected by and report to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, currently Douglas Feith, a former Reagan administration official. The Secretary of Defense must approve all members. In an April 10 New York Times column, Bob Herbert wrote that several Bush Administration advisors stand to benefit financially from the rebuilding of Iraq. Woolsey was one of those mentioned.
According to Herbert, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) has documented that 9 out of the DPB's 30 person membership "are linked to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002." The CPI says that "members of the board disclose their business interests annually to the Pentagon, but the disclosures are not available to the public."
Woolsey's got a number of irons in this fire: he is a principal in the Paladin Capital Group, described by CPI as a venture capital firm that solicits investments for companies specializing in domestic security. According to CPI, Woolsey joined Booz Allen Hamilton as vice president in July 2002, a consulting firm that "had contracts worth more than $680 million" that year. According to Information Week's Eric Chabrow, Woolsey is one of 1,000 former intelligence and military officers working at the firm.
CPI reported that Woolsey told the Wall Street Journal "that he does no lobbying and that none of the companies he has ties to have been discussed during a Defense Policy Board meeting." Woolsey is a member of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, which is described by Herbert as "a fiercely pro-war group with close ties to the White House." Woolsey also has his eye on North Korea. According to The Nation's David Corn, Woolsey recently told him that war with North Korea was more or less inevitable.
And in a connection that I can't quite figure out -- but I thought I'd report anyway -- Woolsey also sits on the Board of Directors of the North American Industrial Hemp Association, which describes its vision as attempting "to reestablish and expand the use of industrial hemp." He obviously hasn't been inhaling.
Seeding an invasion of Iran With the Invasion of Iraq winding down, and Woolsey seeding the universe for World War IV, UPI, the news service owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, reported on April 3 that a U.S. intelligence agency had issued a "spot report" to a number of senior U.S. officials providing details of conversations from a meeting of Iran's top leadership. The UPI report said: "Iran's senior leadership decided last month to send irregular paramilitary units across their border with Iraq to harass American soldiers once Saddam Hussein's regime fell."
"This confirmed all of our suspicions that the Iranians are not our friends and not for peace in the region. They are in fact for a piece of the region," one U.S. intelligence official told UPI. From this report, you'd get the distinct impression that Iran, having witnessed how capably Iraq's military machine was able to handle U.S. forces, decided to challenge the U.S. as well.
And, recycling a phony-baloney story from the first days of the invasion of Iraq, UPI says: "Adding to American concerns, previous CIA reports on Iran claim that the country's Revolutionary Guard has procured several Saudi and Kuwaiti military uniforms, a tactic another intelligence official said was meant to cause confusion on the battlefield."
The so-called intelligence revelations come on the heels of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's March 28th warning to the Baddr Brigades, the military wing of an Iranian opposition group that he said was "equipped and directed" by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, to stay out of the conflict with Iraq. "The entrance into Iraq by military forces, intelligence personnel, or proxies not under the direct operational control of [Central Command Chairman] Gen. Franks will be taken as a potential threat to coalition forces," Rumsfeld said.
Seeding an invasion of Syria
Just about every day, the administration issues another not so subtle warning to Syria. According to Newsday, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has "ordered the drawing up of contingency plans for a possible invasion of Syria and that Pentagon Undersecretary Douglas Feith is working on a policy paper highlighting how Syria's support of terrorist groups is a threat to the region."
In late March, Rumsfeld huffed and puffed about reports that Syria was supplying military equipment to Iraq. At the time, Newsday reported that Rumsfeld charged Syria with being "responsible for the shipment to Iraq of defense-related goods, including the goggles, and warned that the United States considered 'such trafficking as hostile acts and would hold the Syrian government accountable.'"
Secretary of State Colin Powell followed on the heels of Rumsfeld, warning Damascus that it was facing a critical choice and should not support Iraq.
Although Syria denied the charge, the story was planted for all news agencies to pick up.
A week later, Newsday reported that U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that they have no evidence that the Syrian government knew about or was responsible for military equipment crossing the border into Iraq. Despite this new intelligence assessment, a spokesman in Rumsfeld's office said "I'm going to leave his comments stand where they are."
On Thursday, April 10, USA Today reported that "U.S. forces bombed Iraqi positions near Syria... and special operations forces monitored the border to try to prevent Saddam supporters from escaping or new fighters from entering Iraq." The same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "The Syrians are behaving badly, they need to be reminded of that, and if they continue ... we need to think about what our policy is."
The Washington Speakers Bureau lists R. James Woolsey as one of its featured speakers who regales audiences with talks on: "The War on Terror: Why We Are In It and How We Should Fight It," "American Energy Strategy for WWIV," and "The U.S. & Israel: Allies in WWIV." According to the Speakers Bureau bio of Woolsey, "his message is clear and doesn't delve into exaggerated scenarios. Audiences leave feeling empowered -- not cowering."
Unless you are living in Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea; all budding targets for R. James Woolsey's war-mongering. What could be more sickening than a war-hungry non-combatant?
A war-hungry non-combatant reaping profit from the blood of slaughtered women, children and men of Iraq.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Oklahoma factory turns out US bombs used in Iraq
Story by Ben Fenwick
REUTERS USA:
April 11, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20441/story.htm
MCALESTER, Oklahoma - As U.S. bombs fall on Iraq, workers at America's pre-eminent bomb factory half a world away in the rolling hills of Oklahoma watch a TV set during their lunch break to see the results of their handiwork.
Run by the U.S. federal government, the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant (MCAAP) has been in operation since World War Two and has produced almost all of the estimated 13,000 bombs that have pounded Iraq.
In January, the plant became busier than it has been in some 30 years as it added round-the-clock shifts for the first time since the Vietnam War.
"I saw some of the bombs on TV falling and I wondered," said Loretta, a 56-year-old grandmother who works on the bomb line. "I wondered if my hands had touched those bombs. I just hope they hit the bad guys and not the good guys."
For security reasons, most workers at the country's premier, non-nuclear bomb facility ask to be identified only by their first names.
At 70 square miles (180 square km), the plant is three times the size of Manhattan. It functions like a small, but highly secure independent entity, crisscrossed by 200 miles (320 km) of its own railway, surrounded by a fence and dotted with some 2,000 igloo-shaped bunkers that hold thousands and thousands of bombs.
MCAAP officials would not say how many bombs were in storage but said the bunkers are far enough apart that a chain-reaction explosion was almost impossible.
Aside from obvious precautions such as concrete road barriers and security fences, the base looks less like a bomb factory and more like a nature reserve, filled with trees, flowers, wildlife and its own lakes.
BOMBS MEAN JOBS
Because of limited human activity at most of the facility, the grounds have become a refuge for several species seldom seen in Oklahoma, such as bobcats and red foxes.
The facility has been an open secret in eastern Oklahoma because it is one of the biggest employers in the region. MCAAP opened its doors to the media only recently.
The facility employees a little over 1,000 people, who receive between $11 to $25 an hour and a host of U.S. government benefits. The other big employer in McAlester is a maximum security prison that is also home to the state's execution chamber for prisoners on death row.
But building bombs is what the MCAAP has been about since 1943 when the U.S. Navy opened the then-secret facility because it wanted an inland factory tucked in the heartland to produce explosives.
And certain aspects of building bombs have remained constant for the 60 years the facility has been in operation. Building bombs is hard, dirty and dangerous.
Since it opened, 25 workers at the facility have died. The last explosion at the plant was in 1971, which killed three people, and the last fatality occurred a few years ago when a worker was crushed by a bomb casing.
Almost all of the work is done by hand, except for moving the huge casings that will be turned into items such as 5,000 lb (2,268 kg) "bunker-buster" bombs.
The casings are lined with tar, and bombs for the U.S. Navy are sprayed with a thermal coating. The casings are then taken to another facility where they will be packed with explosives, but not fuses, and then taken to storage bunkers.
MCAAP's job is to fill all orders from the U.S. armed forces and to have enough bombs on hand to make sure there is never a shortage.
FROM OKLAHOMA TO IRAQ
When the bombs arrive at their destination, whether the belly of a B-2 stealth Bomber or the coffers of a U.S. Navy carrier, satellite guidance systems are added in the form of fin attachments and other equipment. The enhancements turn the munitions into "smart" bombs that are intended to hit their targets with a high degree of accuracy.
According to information supplied by MCAAP, the 2,000 lb) (907 kg) bombs dropped by U.S. stealth fighters to start the attack on Iraq were built in the McAlester plant.
Base Commander Colonel Jyuji Hewitt said advances in "smart" technology make it much more likely that bombs fall on intended military targets, rather than civilian ones.
"I've been to Leipzig and Dresden. It's easy to see how bombing is equated with death and destruction. But I see that now bombing is equated with surgical strikes that take out military targets. It does not have to be death and destruction to everybody," he said.
During the 1991 war against Iraq, only about 10 percent of the bombs used were precision guided, but statistics provided by the U.S. military say that more than 80 percent of the bombs falling in this war in Iraq are of the "smart" variety.
Hewitt said it may be difficult to understand how the smart technology works, but it is easy to understand what they do at the McAlester facility.
"We make the thing that goes boom," he said.
-------- biological weapons
Ricin Scare in Paris Is False Alarm
By Associated Press
April 11, 2003
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-france-ricin,0,4619013.story?coll=sns%2Dap%2Dnationworld%2Dheadlines
PARIS -- Vials of what was suspected as the poison ricin found in train station locker last month turned out to be wheat germ and barley, officials said Friday.
The discovery of the suspicious substance at the Gare de Lyon in central Paris on March 17 set off widespread terrorism concerns just two days before the start of the Iraq war.
The deadly poison has in the past been linked to al-Qaida and Iraq.
France at the time doubled the number of soldiers in the streets to 800 and ordered increased surveillance in train stations and ports. Flights were temporarily banned over nuclear power plants, chemical, petrochemical and other facilities deemed sensitive.
Announcing the laboratory test results Friday, the judicial officials said the ground up bits of wheat germ and barley have certain chemical similarities to ricin and initially produced misleading findings.
Ricin, derived from the castor bean plant, can kill within days. There is no antidote. Twice as deadly as cobra venom, ricin is relatively easily made. It may be inhaled, ingested or injected.
In the locker, agents found two vials of powder, a bottle of liquid and two other vials also with liquid.
The Interior Ministry initially said the contents were "traces of ricin in a mixture which has proven to be a very toxic poison."
The next day the ministry downgraded the assessment, saying the traces of suspected ricin were too minute to be lethal.
U.S. officials said in August that the Islamic extremist group Ansar al-Islam tested ricin along with other chemical and biological agents in northern Iraq, territory controlled by Kurds, not Saddam Hussein. The group is allegedly linked to al-Qaida.
U.N. weapons inspectors, who left Iraq in 1998 after a first round of inspections, listed ricin among the poisons they believed Saddam produced and later failed to account for.
-------- business
New DynCorp Contract Draws Scrutiny
April 11, 2003
By Kelly Patricia O Meara
http://www.insightmag.com/news/415933.html
With the liberation of Iraq nearly complete, private contractors are falling over themselves to get their share of the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government intends on spending to bring democracy to the long-oppressed and abused Iraqi people.
While there is little debate that many if not most of these contracts will go to U.S. companies, the question is how sincere is the U.S. government's promise of liberation when Washington bureaucrats dole out contracts to corporations that are alleged and suspected of wrongdoing and/or ethical lapses?
Insight has learned that the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has issued a $22 million contract to DynCorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd., a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), to "re-establish police, justice and prison functions in postconflict Iraq." "The contract," according to one congressional aide who asked not to be identified, "was sole-sourced for one year. But this contract could come to $500 million before it's through."
"There are some strange things about how this contract was issued," the aide continues, "because why would CSC use an offshore subsidiary. Is it so they won't have to pay taxes on this money? Also, why wasn't this contract put up for bid? Why was DynCorp the chosen recipient?"
Indeed, DynCorp has many federal contracts. But sole-sourcing of this contract has raised eyebrows for some at the State Department and in Congress where aides want answers about this deal and others coming down the pike.
And concerning DynCorp's contract, some in Congress are wondering why State would issue a sole-source bid to a company that has had some "recent" problems overseas in similiar roles. For example, last year alone was not only sued but paid large settlements to two former employees who blew the whistle on corporate managers and employees who engaged in sex trafficking in Bosnia?
Recall that former DynCorp employee Ben Johnston described one of his DynCorp colleagues as a 45-year old man who "owned a girl who couldn't have been more than 14 years old." Johnston also recalled the machinations he went through to enlighten his DynCorp superiors: "At first I just told the guys it was wrong, then I went to my supervisors, including John Hirtz, although at the time I didn't realize how deep into it he was."
Johnston finally took his complaints to the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division in Bosnia, which investigated his allegations and confiscated a videotape of Johnston's DynCorp supervisor having sex with two girls. Supervisor Hirtz was later fired by DynCorp and, despite his own admission that one of the girls on the tape had said "no" to his sexual advances, no rape charges were ever brought against him.
Kathryn Bolkovac, a former U.N. International Police Force monitor under contract to DynCorp, also brought charges against the corporation for wrongful termination after she blew the whistle on police officers who were participating in sex trafficking. DynCorp settled with Johnston just hours after a London court ruled on Bolkovac's behalf.
Such issues are being recalled again and questions have begun to be asked about safeguards to prevent further allegations of abuse.
Kelly Patricia O'Meara is an investigative reporter for Insight.
--------
Pay Dirt or Payola? How Halliburton Strikes it Rich
by William Baue
April 11, 2003
SocialFunds.com
http://www.socialfunds.com/news/article.cgi/article1087.html
A number of practices have generated profits as well as controversy for Halliburton, the company where Vice President Dick Cheney served six years as CEO. SocialFunds.com -- Halliburton (ticker: HAL), the oilfield-services and construction company where Vice President Dick Cheney served as CEO from 1995 to 2000, has an uncanny penchant for landing lucrative but controversial government contracts. A broad survey of Halliburton's questionable practices, which includes operating in states that sponsor terrorism, artificially inflating its stock price, purchasing a company with huge asbestos lawsuits pending, and selling detonators for weapons of mass destruction to terrorist states, dates back to at least 1987 and continues into the present.
Free SRI Mutual Funds KitAn April 8, 2003 letter from Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) reveals that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) has scored a major contract to extinguish oil-well fires in Iraq. The two-year contract has a ceiling of $7 billion, with additional fees of up to seven percent, or $490 million.
That same day, Mr. Waxman fired off two letters asking the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate whether the awarding of contracts like this one results from ongoing connections between Mr. Cheney and Halliburton. One letter cites a statement in the current issue of Fortune that claims Halliburton still pays Mr. Cheney "up to $1 million a year in deferred compensation." This is on top of the $33 million he received in stock upon stepping down when he was appointed Vice President.
"These ties between the Vice President and Halliburton have raised concerns about whether the company has received favorable treatment from the Administration," writes Mr. Waxman.
Halliburton rejects this contention.
"The Vice President has absolutely nothing to do with the awarding of defense contracts, the bidding process, or the current work orders," said Wendy Hall, Halliburton's public relations manager.
"KBR was selected to extinguish the oil-well fires based on the fact that KBR is the only contractor that could commence implementing the plan on extremely short notice," Ms. Hall told SocialFunds.com, echoing precisely Lt. Gen. Flowers's letter.
Halliburton is also contending with shareowner action related to the company's operations in Iran. On November 12, 2002, the New York City Police and Fire Department Pension Funds submitted a shareowner resolution regarding the company's office in Iran, which is run by its Cayman Islands subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services. The resolution points out that U.S. law restricts trade by American companies in states, such as Iran, that are designated by the U.S. State Department as "sponsors of terrorism."
"The company believes that the operations of its subsidiaries in Iran are in compliance with U.S. laws," Ms. Hall told SocialFunds.com. In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rejected Halliburton's appeal to omit the resolution from its proxy. Immediately thereafter, the company agreed to fulfill the terms of the resolution by establishing a Board committee to review the potential financial and reputational risks of its Iranian operations. New York City Comptroller William Thompson, the fiduciary for the pension funds that own $18 million in Halliburton stock, withdrew the resolution.
Whereas some investors choose to use their position as shareowners to encourage Halliburton to adopt more responsible corporate policies and practices, other investors choose to avoid ownership in the company.
"The company generally has a good environmental and safety record, but there have been problems in these areas as well," said Julie Gorte, director of social research at the Calvert Group. "Corporate governance, business ethics, nuclear power, weapons contracting, and defense projects are all problems from Calvert's standpoint; we do not invest in the company." Calvert manages 20 socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds.
The Domini 400 Social Index (DSI), which is managed by KLD Research & Analytics, Inc., also excludes Halliburton. Research provided by KLD and Calvert identifies a number of specific problems at Halliburton.
For example, in 1998 Mr. Cheney negotiated for Halliburton the $7.7 billion acquisition of Dresser Industries, a rival company that was saddled with numerous asbestos-related lawsuits. In December 2002, Halliburton agreed to settle more than $4 billion in claims against Dresser and KBR.
There is also a class action lawsuit against Halliburton that alleges the company artificially inflated its stock price between June 1999 and May 2002 by having its then-accountant Arthur Andersen booking uncollected cost overruns on construction projects as revenues. The SEC had been gathering information on this issue and formalized its investigation into the matter in December 2002.
In a final note of irony, Halliburton pleaded guilty in 1995 to criminal charges of violating a U.S. ban on exports to Libya by selling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi six pulse neutron generators between 1987 and 1989. These devices fall into the dual use category: in addition to functioning as oil- and gas-well survey tools, they can be used to detonate nuclear weapons.
-------- iraq
US threatens to use biggest bomb as hunt switches north
By Donald Macintyre at US Central Command Qatar
11 April 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=396042
The United States stepped up the military and psychological pressure on the Baathist stronghold of Tikrit yesterday as the hunt for Saddam Hussein and leading members of his regime began to focus on areas to the north and west of Baghdad.
In what looked to be a calculated propaganda move, the Pentagon issued a thinly disguised threat to deploy - for the first time in the war - the biggest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal, the 21,000lb massive ordnance air burst. The warning came as Allied forces continued the aerial bombardment of Tikrit and the Republican Guards protecting the town.
American commanders believe that some of the regime's members may have fled north to Tikrit or west to Syria. US intelligence - using human sources and surveillance devices - was said to be reporting that the leadership had virtually disappeared. Even the hitherto relentlessly visible Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, has vanished.
Military sources at Central Command have suggested that the uniformity of the withdrawal, which extended even to the minders for foreign journalists in the Iraqi capital, implied that some form of central command and control was still operating. CIA analysts in Qatar and Langley, Virginia, are said to believe the likeliest explanation was an order issued in President Saddam's name.
The sources suggested that this was a more probable explanation than the death of the Iraqi dictator when the US dropped four 2,000lb bombs on a restaurant in Baghdad's Mansur district on Monday. Although President Saddam was reported to have entered the building shortly before the bombing, British intelligence sources have said that he escaped by minutes.
The mystery over President Saddam's whereabouts deepened when the Iraqi National Congress leader, Ahmed Chalabi, told CNN of unconfirmed reports indicating that the Iraqi President had taken refuge in the city of Baqubah, north-east of Baghdad. He said that his son Qusay had survived and "is occupying some houses in the Diyala area".
But US commanders have made clear throughout this week their close interest in Tikrit, President Saddam's birthplace and a town on the Tigris 90 miles north of Baghdad. On Wednesday Brigadier General Vince Brooks showed reporters video shots of the bombing of command and control facilities in the area. US special forces have also set up checkpoints on the main roads between Baghdad and Tikrit to prevent movement between the two cities.
Big Gen Brooks went on to say that Iraqi troops had been deployed to reinforce defences around the town, including the Adnan Mechanised Division of the Republican Guard.
General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said ten or more Iraqi army divisions - as many as 80,000 troops - were between Baghdad and Kurdish- controlled northern Iraq.
By contrast, Major-General Gene Renuart, director of operations at US Central Command, acknowledged that there were no "substantial" ground forces in the area. The US Fourth Infantry Division, which is disembarking in Kuwait, is known to be preparing to deploy there and forward units could arrive in the area as early as next week.
Meanwhile, US operations increased around al-Quaim, a town on the Euphrates close to the Syrian border and a likely crossing point for regime members seeking to flee Iraq. General Renuart saidSpecial Republican Guard units, paramilitary forces and some regular army units were still fighting in the area but had been weakened by air strikes and attacks by special forces aimed at stopping al-Quaim from being used to launch missiles on "Iraq's neighbours".
While the general mentioned only Saudi Arabia and Jordan he is assumed to have been also referring to Israel. On Wednesday Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, suggested that "senior regime people are moving out of Iraq into Syria". He later qualified the remark to imply that these did not include leading figures.
But Tikrit, whose symbolism for the regime is enhanced by the fact that it was the 12th- century birthplace of Saladin, the legendary Muslim leader who defeated the Crusaders, is thought to by some experts to be the likeliest redoubt for a last stand by President Saddam. A stronghold of pro-regime loyalists, it is thought by some experts to be perhaps the one part of Iraq where there could be enough military and paramilitary forces to mount a sustained fight.
The former CIA analyst and adviser to Bill Clinton on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack, told The Washington Post that President Saddam was highly conscious of how he would be perceived by history. Therefore, he would be unlikely to leave Iraq, and would probably prefer to fight to the end in Tikrit.
--------
Looting Spreads Throughout Mosul and Other Iraqi Cities
April 11, 2003
The New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE with JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/international/worldspecial/11WEB-MOSU.html
MOSUL, Iraq, April 11 - American forces entered this northern Iraqi oil city this afternoon after it fell without a fight as the last of Saddam Hussein's loyalists vanished during the night.
In Mosul, as in other urban areas captured by the coalition, chaos spread through the city. After a day of systematic looting of offices, shops, banks, universities, and hospitals, the few people on the streets when the Americans arrived to claim the city gave the troops a lukewarm reception.
The capture of Mosul left Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad and the home town of Saddam Hussein, the remaining major target for the United States military. Fragmented reports said that senior members of the Saddam Hussein family may be hiding there, perhaps in preparation for a last stand.
At the White House, the chief spokesman said that while the administration was still not ready to declare victory in Iraq and that tough fighting lay ahead for the American troops, it was clear that Saddam Hussein's rule was at an end.
``There is no question the regime has lost control, and that represents a great turning point for the people of Iraq as the regime is gone,'' the spokesman, Ari Fleischer told reporters.
American commanders had expected a hard fight to win control of Mosul, but as their forces positioned themselves for an attack, the commander of the Iraqi 5th Army Corps, a regular army unit, sent word that he wanted to surrender. A formal ceasefire was signed today, according to officials at the United States military's Central Command in Doha, Qatar.
Despite the formal surrender, there were still pockets of resistance across the sprawling, modern city, and after spending about 30 minutes in the city the American-led force - composed of a dozen United States special forces members and several hundred Kurd allies - was forced to retreat this afternoon, at least temporarily, after they came under sustained fire when they tried to secure the central government buildings.
Residents said that it appeared that most of the Iraqi fighters had fled by 7 p.m. Thursday. With their departure, the city fell into a frenzy of looting and lawlessness.
With the breakdown in authority, the American forces and their Kurdish allies at first hesitated outside the town - for about eight hours - but by midafternoon, they and the Kurd fighters came in to claim control of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.
Although some residents flashed thumbs up signs to the small convoy of Americans, most of the residents stood with their arms crossed and stared blankly.
Angry residents blamed the Americans for the anarchy in the city, saying that they had needlessly delayed their arrival for hours after the Iraqi army fled and allowed order in the city to crumble.
Adding to the disorder was the rising tension between Arab and Kurdish communities in the city. Arabs make up 65 percent of the city's population and minority Kurds have accused them of benefiting under Mr. Hussein's rule or standing by as Kurds were persecuted.
The rampant theft in the city appeared to be carried out mostly by young men from all ethic groups, but many Arab residents blamed Kurds for the looting.
At the central bank, fights broke out among looters trying to snatch stolen money from each other. The main vaults were smashed open, and bank notes poured out.
The Associated Press reported that at Saddam General Hospital, three of the five ambulances were stolen, and armed men, described as Kurds, tried to enter the hospital, but the staff managed to hold them off. Some doctors said that their cars were stolen at gunpoint. Officials at Jumhuriya Hospital said all eight of its ambulances were stolen at gunpoint.
``The doctors ran away because they even looted their offices,'' Haleema Hanzad Abbas, a worker at Saddam General, told a New York Times reporter that accompanied American troops into the city. ``We see injured people and we cannot do anything.''
As the American convoy pulled into the center of the city, they passed a burning military hospital and the central bank building was also aflame. Across the city, at least six other large fires could be seen.
As the convoy arrived within blocks of the abandoned governor's office, five or six shots rang out, fired by a suspected sniper or snipers.
``It came from inside a building,'' a special forces soldier said. ``He was hiding in the shadows.''
The Americans then parked their half dozen vehicles in front of the building and moved inside to sweep the building, which was stripped of furniture and any valuables and was littered with paper.
Back outside, the officer leading the group had spread out a map on the hood of a land cruiser and was talking to his aides when more shots rang out. Special forces members moved back into the complex to try to pinpoint where the gunfire was coming from.
Minutes later, shots were fired at them from three different directions.
Someone barked the order, ``Mount up!'' With that, the Americans and the Kurdish fighters drove out of the city.
Elsewhere on the battle front, the American forces were consolidating their hold today on Kirkuk, the north oil city captured on Thursday.
The anxieties of Turkey hang over the situation in Kirkuk as well as Mosul. Turkey is concerned that the northern portion of Iraq, which has prospered under the protection of American and British warplanes, since the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, will break away, setting an example for the Kurdish populated areas of their own country.
The Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, said on Thursday that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had promised him that the Kurdish fighters would be moved from Kirkuk and that American troops would take control of the town.
A leader of one of the main Kurdish political groups, Jalal Talabni, who heads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said that Kurdish forces entered Kirkuk on Thursday to secure the oil fields from retreating Iraqi troops. He said that the American forces would replace them shortly.
Reuters reported that American troops started securing the airport and oilfields in and around Kirkuk today.
Some reports said that the inner circle of the Saddam Hussein family were using Mosul as a way to get to Syria, but by today that escape route was probably closed off.
At the daily media briefing at Central Command today, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks told reporters that an Iraqi colonel responsible for controlling the main roads at the Syrian border had surrendered to American special forces troops.
``He turned over the keys to the border control point at Highway 11,'' General Brooks said. ``The coalition now controls that border crossing point.''
The general said said that cards with the names and faces of 55 major regime leaders who must be captured or killed are being distributed to allied troops. He said that the list also is being publicized around Iraq on posters and handbills.
General Brooks would not identify figures on the list, but he had it clear that it included Mr. Hussein; his sons, Uday and Qusay; and key military and government officials, among them the Iraqi information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, who defiantly insisted that invading American troops had been crushed even as they were moving in on his ministry.
General Brooks said that some of the Iraqi leaders on the list may already be dead, like Ali Hassan al-Majid, Mr. Hussein's notorious cousin and southern military commander. Mr. al-Majid, known as ``Chemical Ali'' for his role in using chemical weapons to suppress the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq, is believed to have been killed earlier in the week during a bombing raid against a compound in Basra.
--------
Opposition Unable to Mount Conventional Attacks, U.S. Says
April 11, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-US-Military.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Friday characterized widespread looting in Iraq as a period of ``untidiness'' and suggested it was only a transitional phase on the way to freedom from Saddam Hussein's rule.
``We do feel an obligation to assist in providing security, and coalition forces are doing that,'' Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference. ``Where they see looting, they are stopping it.''
``While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression,'' he said.
``If you go from a repressive regime...in that transition period, there is untidiness,'' the secretary said.
Rumsfeld suggested that many of the television images beamed around the world showing acts of looting were being shown repeatedly, exaggerating the effect. Even so, he said, looting is common problem worldwide at times and in places where law enforcement has broken down.
``Stuff happens,'' he said.
``This is a transition period between war and what we hope will be a much more peaceful time,'' said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Both Rumsfeld and Myers expressed satisfaction with the progress of the war, but cautioned anew that much work remained to be done.
Rumsfeld said that as Iraqis' fear of Saddam subsides, ``the true sentiments of a large majority, I believe, of the Iraqi people are surfacing. And I think it's increasingly clear that most welcome coalition forces and see them not as invaders or occupiers, but as liberators.''
Myers said fighting in the west of Iraq continues, but more and more Iraqis have either surrendered or indicated a willingness to give up.
Giving a progress report on the war, Rumsfeld said that U.S. forces were moving to restore Iraq's radio and television equipment and moving some of their own broadcasting equipment into the capital as well.
``We're doing this because access to free information is critical to building of a free society,'' he said.
Myers expressed regrets to the families of two Iraqi children killed by Marines when the van the families were riding in didn't stop at a checkpoint in the southern city of Nasiriyah. Nine adults were also injured in the incident.
He called it a reminder to the Iraqi people ``to please stop for our check points. We do not wish to harm innocent people.''
----
Convoy of reporters crosses Jordan border
World Scene
April 11, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20030411-27590876.htm
KARMADA - Streams of journalists entered Iraq from Jordan yesterday as the Iraqi border post that barred anyone from entering the country until Wednesday night was abandoned yesterday afternoon after the fall of Baghdad.
The border post, duty-free shop, restaurant and waiting station had been heavily looted and vandalized. Seat cushions were ripped out and paintings of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein were defaced and slashed, United Press International's Nicholas M. Horrock reported.
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DIE-HARDS
Heavy Fighting for Desert Base at Syria Border
April 11, 2003
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/international/worldspecial/11TOWN.html
WASHINGTON, April 10 - Out of sight of television cameras, some of the heaviest fighting in Iraq has been raging for nearly three weeks near the town of Qaim on the Syrian border, where American Green Berets and British commandos have been attacking units of Iraq's Special Republican Guard and Special Security Services, according to senior military and defense officials.
The Iraqi forces in the area, near the Euphrates River and alongside a rail line, have been defending a large compound that includes phosphate fertilizer and water treatment plants. American officials say the sheer tenacity of the Iraqi fighters has led them to suspect that they may be defending Scud missiles or other illicit weapons.
The Qaim area, nearly 200 miles northwest of Baghdad along the most direct route from the Iraqi capital to Syria, was a launching point for Iraqi ballistic missile attacks during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It was also home to a plant used by Iraq in 1980's for uranium processing, and it has been identified since by American officials as a possible site for any effort to revive Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
The reported doggedness of the Iraqi resistance has prompted some speculation within the Bush administration that the Iraqi forces might be defending members of the Iraqi leadership trying to flee to Syria. But defense officials said it was more likely they were trying to shield weapons or weapons programs.
"They're protecting something, that's for sure," one senior American military official said. For now, he said, the main objective of the United States is "to keep their head down so they can't fire anything off."
Despite many days of attacks by the Army's Special Forces, including what one general called "unconventional warfare direct-action missions," along with repeated airstrikes, the Iraqi forces have not given up.
Pentagon officials said that contact had been made with one Iraqi commander in the Qaim area in an effort to negotiate a surrender, but that that attempt had broken down.
With ground access limited, the American command has made the compound the target of heavy air attacks but has refrained from destroying the buildings altogether, apparently out of concern about causing wider harm if the area was being used to house chemical or biological weapons or material for nuclear weapons.
The mystery of the fierceness of armed Iraqi resistance in the remote border town is among many uncertainties that senior American officials are weighing as they survey the battlefield in Iraq, where about one-third of the country still lies outside American control, according to senior Pentagon officials.
Perhaps chief among those worries, officials said today, is the location and intentions of Iraqi militias and security forces who were battling the United States in Baghdad and other cities but have now mostly fled.
"Have they run away for good, or are they operating more like the Al Qaeda model, to go away for awhile and then come back?" a senior defense official said.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cited intelligence reports saying that some officials of the Iraqi government had fled to Syria and, in some cases, onward to third countries. Today, defense officials said there was no evidence that those believed to have fled included any senior Iraqi leaders.
At the Pentagon, officials would not say how many American and British soldiers had been involved in the battle in the Qaim area, and they declined to estimate the size of the Iraqi resistance.
But they described the fighting as an example of what they called the significant amount of unfinished business in the war. The American task in seizing the area is complicated by the fact that there remains no easy way soon to bring American armor or other heavy fighting forces to places like Qaim.
Allied forces to date have not pushed forcefully west of Baghdad, with only Special Operations units deployed in areas like Qaim and near the point in western Iraq known as H3, which is a base for American, British and Australian forces along the route in from Jordan.
Perhaps chief among the remaining challenges, officials say, may be the effort to oust members of the Iraqi regime from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, seen as the most worrying remaining base for armed Iraqi opposition. Iraqi positions in and around Tikrit have been bombed heavily in recent days, but it is believed to be defended by the Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi security forces who are a more difficult target from the air.
"I think we are prepared to be very very wary of what they might have, and we are prepared for a big fight," Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of Tikrit at a Pentagon briefing today.
Asked about the fighting in the Qaim area, Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart, director of operations for the Central Command, described the Iraqi defenders as including "a substantial presence of Iraqi Special Republican Guards paramilitary forces."
"We believe that those forces have been significantly reduced over the last week or two, and we believe we're in a position where we can begin to control that area more freely," General Renuart told reporters at the Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar.
But, he cautioned: "I can't put a time on that to you. We'll continue to work that. We continue to have some discussions with leaders in that area, and we believe we're making good progress."
The Qaim compound includes the site where Iraq extracted uranium for its nuclear weapons program in the 1980's, but it was destroyed by bombing during the 1991 war.
More recently, however, American intelligence officials and other experts have pointed to satellite photographs showing activity at the compound that raised questions about whether Iraq might have rebuilt a uranium extraction plant at the site, possibly even underground.
In an effort to repudiate American claims that it was stockpiling nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, Iraqi officials allowed Western reporters to visit one building in Qaim last September. Reporters were flown by helicopter to the site, and were accompanied by Hussam Muhammad Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, the office used for liaison with United Nations inspectors.
The inspectors searched a site in Qaim December, scouring a uranium mine that yielded the "yellowcake" uranium dioxide that Iraq tried to enrich in the 1980's and early 1990's for nuclear weapons. As with other searches by the United Nations teams in the months before the American invasion, that investigation uncovered no evidence of any banned weapons.
-------- latin america
Biggest mass grave of dictatorship era found - ARGENTINA
World Scene
April 11, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20030411-27590876.htm
BUENOS AIRES - Forensic specialists said yesterday that they have unearthed the biggest mass grave, among those found so far, dating from Argentina's brutal 1976-83 dictatorship.
The team, which helped find the body of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia six years ago, found what appeared to be the remains of 40 persons in a mass grave at a cemetery in Cordoba, 500 miles west of the capital, Buenos Aires.
-------- mideast
Bush says Syria must expel Saddam backers
Fri Apr 11
Mideast - AFP
BETHESDA, Maryland (AFP) - US President George W. Bush urged Syria to shut its borders to fleeing followers of Saddam Hussein and turn over any who have already found "safe haven" in Iraq's western neighbor.
"We expect them to do everything they can to prevent people who should be held to account from escaping in their country," he said after meeting for the first time at two area military hospitals with US soldiers wounded in Iraq.
"And it they are in their country, we expect the Syrian authorities to turn them over to the proper folks," said Bush, who met privately with some 75 hurt soldiers and their families accompanied by First Lady Laura Bush.
"We strongly urge them (Syrian leaders) not to allow for Baath party members, or Saddam's families, or generals on the run, to seek safe haven and find safe haven there," said Bush.
Syria "just needs to know we expect full cooperation," he said.
Syria has told the United States it has closed its border with Iraq to all but humanitarian traffic, US officials said Thursday, as they stepped up warnings to Damascus not to assist the remnants of Saddam's collapsed regime.
"We certainly hope that proves to be true," US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
The US ambassador to Syria, Theodore Khattouf, had been told of the closure in meetings with Syrian officials in Damascus, but stressed that Washington would be watching the border closely to see if the move was enforced, the State Department said. Boucher said the US military and intelligence agencies would be monitoring the frontier "quite closely," and he repeated warnings issued over the past few days by senior US officials that Syria faced a critical choice in its dealings with Iraq.
"Syria has choice to make and we hope Syria makes the right one," Boucher told reporters.
A senior State Department official said later it was possible that Damascus's definition of "humanitarian traffic" might well be different than Washington's.
Meanwhile, Syria's ambassador to Washington said the accusations amounted to a US-Israeli campaign against Damascus.
Rostom Zohbi told Arab satellite television Al-Jazeera that US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had accused Syria on March 28 of sending military aid to Iraq in its war with the US-led coalition, notably night-vision goggles.
"This came as no surprise. On the same day, I read the same accusations in (the Israeli newspaper) Haaretz, just hours before Mr. Rumsfeld made his statement," Zohbi noted.
----
Syria Warned Again Not to 'Meddle' in Iraq
Wolfowitz Says U.S. May Rethink Policy If Damascus Harbors Iraqi Officials
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 11, 2003; Page A36
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6173-2003Apr11?language=printer
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz issued a new warning to Syria yesterday, telling Congress that the United States might adopt a tougher policy toward Damascus if it continues to harbor terrorists and provides a haven for Iraqi war criminals.
In some of the toughest language used by the administration against the Syrians so far, Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Damascus was "behaving badly" in allowing hundreds of Islamic fighters to take buses over the border into Iraq and supplying night vision goggles to soldiers in the Iraqi army.
"In recent days, the Syrians have been shipping killers into Iraq to try to kill Americans," he said. "We don't welcome that. We've stopped it when we've found those people. So, it is a problem. I think it is important that Iraq's neighbors not meddle with Iraq."
He added: "If they continue, then we need to think about what our policy is with respect to a country that harbors terrorists or harbors war criminals, or was in recent times shipping things to Iraq."
The Bush administration has listed countries that harbor terrorists as potential targets in its war on terrorism. Syria has given sanctuary to groups such as the Islamic Resistance Movement (or Hamas), Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and has been listed in CIA reports as a country developing weapons of mass destruction. This week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld voiced a new complaint, that Syria was giving entry to the families of leading Iraqis fleeing the war.
Asked yesterday by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) if "the Defense Department intend[s] to take any action against Syria to stop the movement of goods and people across the border with Iraq," Wolfowitz replied: "Taking action against Syria . . . would be a decision for the president and the Congress. We are taking action inside Iraq to stop both the exit and the entry of dangerous people and dangerous goods."
For now, Wolfowitz said, "by calling attention to it, we hope that in fact that may be enough to get them to stop."
Administration attention has been focused this week on Qaim, a key town on the Iraqi-Syrian border near an area from which missiles were fired at Israel during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Iraq's Special Republican Guard units and paramilitary forces were fighting to defend the town against U.S. forces. Late yesterday, Rumsfeld told reporters after a congressional briefing that control of the area was still in doubt.
To some degree, the Syria discussion has taken on the same internal Bush administration lineup that existed in the run-up to the Iraq war. In that situation, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their associates put forward the aggressive positions that hinged on the threat of taking military action, while Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, with support from the British government, pressed for a diplomatic solution.
Yesterday, Powell told Pakistan television that the United States "does not have . . . some list with nations on the list that we're going to attack one after another." With regard to Syria, he said, the hope is that "as a result of what's happened in Iraq . . . some of the nations that we have been in touch with and speaking to . . . [including Syria] will move in a new direction."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told Parliament yesterday that a dialogue has to be continued with Syria and Iran, another country that Rumsfeld cited for criticism last week. Straw said a senior British foreign officer will soon visit both countries, adding, "Syria and Iran now have the chance to play their part in building a better future for Iraq."
Former assistant secretary of state Richard W. Murphy, who specialized in Middle East affairs and now is a senior associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, said yesterday that "the Syrians loathe threats," and the latest from the United States "are as bold as they have ever faced."
Murphy described as "intolerable" to Pentagon officials that Syria continued sending aid to Iraq after the war started. "They erupted in public after diplomatic efforts failed, but I don't think it means military action."
-------- spies
For Military Intelligence, a New Favorite Commando
April 11, 2003
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/international/worldspecial/11COMM.html
WASHINGTON, April 10 - Although hardly a household name from a Pentagon filled with vivid and public personalities, Dr. Stephen A. Cambone, the first under secretary of defense for intelligence, has become a favored bureaucratic commando for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Dr. Cambone, 51, has held the portfolios for such contentious issues as whether the nation had too much strategy but not the military to match, and he has guided Pentagon leaders in some of their most hard-fought battles short of war: deciding which weapons systems to buy and which to trim or cancel.
When the Senate confirmed his appointment on March 7, he took on his third senior policy position in slightly more than two years, one that has taken on new and significant interest to a nation at war and is of long interest to his boss, Mr. Rumsfeld.
The invasion of Iraq proved that the United States can dispatch military force more rapidly than ever to capitalize on short-lived intelligence reports, whether in reaiming missiles to strike a bunker where Saddam Hussein is believed to be sleeping or in rushing Special Operations forces to a hospital where a soldier is being held prisoner.
The challenge over the horizon, Dr. Cambone said, is for the United States "to recover the lost art of strategic warning," and give policy makers the information they need to buy weapons, organize forces and counter emerging threats over the next 5, 10 or even 15 years.
Strategic warning, Dr. Cambone said in an interview, requires "spotting and identifying and articulating trends - geopolitical, technical, demographic - which in combination will create for the United States either opportunities or hazards in some period of years in the future."
With that information, the Pentagon leadership "can begin to adjust the disposition of U.S. forces, the arrangement of our basing structures, identify weapons systems in which we ought to invest and those in which we should begin to disinvest and take out of the inventory," he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld and Dr. Cambone share a vision of the importance of - and weaknesses in - United States intelligence, which was part of the unclassified side letter for the final report to Congress of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat in 1999. Two years before he returned to public service as defense secretary, Mr. Rumsfeld was the commission chairman, and Dr. Cambone was his staff director.
Mr. Rumsfeld, who is known as anything but a passive consumer of intelligence at the Pentagon, foreshadowed in the ballistic missile report his current working view that senior policy makers must "engage analysts, question their assumptions and methods, seek from them what they know, what they don't know and ask them their opinions."
Now as defense secretary, Mr. Rumsfeld has appointed Dr. Cambone to do just that, overseeing a huge Defense Department intelligence bureaucracy, evaluating the quality of intelligence and making sure that the analysis and inquiries are responsive to the policy makers' needs.
The Pentagon's assets include the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Although the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, is responsible for the entire intelligence community, the Pentagon's intelligence agencies consume nearly 80 percent of the overall intelligence budget.
Some members of intelligence agencies, in particular at the C.I.A., question whether the new defense under secretary's position sets up a potential turf war for dominance, something Dr. Cambone says he rejects.
Dr. Cambone, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from Claremont Graduate School, envisions a give-and-take where senior policy makers are briefs in a manner that can only be described as interactive, allowing them to reach deeply into the intelligence community for raw data and full-score analysis for nuance beyond the summaries they receive.
"When it's written down in black and white it tends to take on a reality that is oftentimes in excess of the confidence felt by the people who were writing it," Dr. Cambone said of the manner in which intelligence reports are sometimes transmitted.
With current technology, he said, intelligence reports can "bring into one place all of the relevant information" and "compile it and display it in a way that allows the recipient to share in the learning process that took place in the building of that product," he said. "You can layer information, you can make sure, electronically for example, that there are imagery and signals and all the various disciplines are properly embedded into the document so that when you get to a place, you can pull it up."
Asked whether hard-liners in the Pentagon had politicized intelligence to support arguments for war with Iraq, Dr. Cambone said: "Any policy maker has certain views. Policy makers are where they are and doing what they do because they have a view."
When his staff is at full strength, with about 100 people, its mission will not be as a competing agency "for collection, analysis and production" of intelligence, Dr. Cambone said. And his role is "not to shape the answer" from intelligence officials, but to "inform the analyst of the interest" of senior decision makers so they can direct their work, he added.
"The politicization of intelligence, I think, happens when intelligence is thought to be more than it is," Dr. Cambone said. "And what it can be, at best, is a summary judgment at a given moment in time based on the information that one has been able to glean."
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Ex - FBI Agents Suspected Woman of Spying
April 11, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-FBI-Agent-Charged.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two former FBI counterintelligence agents suspected in 1991 that the woman with whom both were having an affair was passing sensitive information to the Chinese, but neither told a superior, according to government documents.
Former agent James J. Smith and former FBI supervisor William Cleveland Jr. kept under wraps their knowledge that Katrina Leung, an FBI intelligence ``asset'' for two decades, had contacts with intelligence services of the Chinese government.
Cleveland, who retired from the FBI in 1993, resigned from his counterintelligence position at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The lab develops nuclear weapons and possesses some of the nation's most sensitive scientific secrets.
``While the employee in question has not been charged with any wrongdoing, due to the seriousness of the situation, a thorough review of his work is now under way,'' Livermore spokeswoman Susan Houghton said Friday.
Attempts to reach Cleveland for comment Friday were unsuccessful.
The case marks another embarrassing episode for the FBI, which is trying to demonstrate to critics that it can police itself in the aftermath of the highly damaging Robert Hanssen spy case and the intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Cleveland was an FBI counterintelligence supervisor in San Francisco when his affair with Leung began in 1988, according to court documents filed when Smith was charged Wednesday with gross negligence. Cleveland is not referred to by name in the court documents but several law enforcement officials confirmed his identity.
Cleveland recognized Leung's voice on a 1991 tape provided by a source in which she was overheard discussing classified U.S. defense information with a Chinese contact known only as ``Mao.''
Cleveland immediately called Smith, based in the FBI's Los Angeles office, who became ``visibly upset at the news of Leung's unauthorized communication'' with China's Ministry of State Security intelligence services, according to the documents. Smith, who served as the FBI's ``handler'' for Leung, also was having a sexual relationship with her that dated to the early 1980s, the documents said.
It's unclear whether the two men knew about each other' affair. Neither took the issue to a superior or to FBI headquarters as required in such sensitive cases, which probably would have resulted in a polygraph test for Leung. The court documents say Cleveland relied on Smith to address the situation, and Smith later told Cleveland that he had.
In fact, both men's relationships with Leung continued, with Smith inviting her to his retirement party in 2000 and allowing her to videotape it even though FBI and CIA officers were present, court documents show. She also continued to have access to classified material Smith carried with him when he visited her.
FBI Director Robert Mueller took over the agency in September 2001 and five months later was tipped off about Smith, Cleveland and Leung. He ordered an investigation and transferred and demoted Sheila Horan, then acting director of the FBI's national security division, which oversees spy investigations.
The 13-month probe by a 30-member task force resulted this week in federal charges alleging Smith allowed Leung access to classified information that she later passed on to the Chinese.
Leung, a 49-year-old Los Angeles socialite and Republican Party activist, appeared in court Friday and waived her right to a preliminary hearing within 10 days.
``She did nothing to violate her duty, allegiance and oath to this country,'' said Leung's attorney, Janet Levine.
Mueller called the Leung case ``an isolated event'' and said an overhaul of how intelligence assets are handled would prevent such occurrences in the future. This will include far greater headquarters oversight and less independence by FBI field offices, which once operated as individual fiefdoms. He also assigned an inspection team to review the management of the China counterintelligence program.
One unresolved issue in the investigation is whether Leung provided information regarding China's alleged attempt to influence the 1996 congressional elections through campaign contributions. Smith was the main FBI contact for Johnny Chung, a key figure in the fund-raising scandal who cooperated in the federal probe after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations.
Neither Smith nor Cleveland was ever given a polygraph test, which did not become routine practice for agents in sensitive jobs until after Hanssen, a top counterespionage official, was charged with passing secrets to the Soviet Union. Hanssen was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The Leung investigation so far has not disclosed any security breach as damaging as that in the Hanssen case, which resulted in the deaths of at least three U.S. spies. And no evidence has surfaced yet to indicate that Cleveland allowed Leung access to any classified material, either from the FBI or the Livermore lab.
The items that she allegedly obtained from Smith include lists of FBI agents' names, a memo about Chinese fugitives and a telephone list involving an investigation into Peter Lee, an employee at defense contractor TRW Inc. who pleaded guilty in 1997 to passing secret information to China.
Part of the investigation involves the information provided by Leung to the FBI to determine whether it was faulty or fabricated. Although officials declined to discuss what she provided over 20 years, they said that payment of $1.7 million indicates that FBI officials believed it was of high quality.
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F.B.I. Never Gave Agent in Spy Case a Polygraph
April 11, 2003
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/politics/11SPY.html
WASHINGTON, April 10 - A former F.B.I. agent arrested on Wednesday in an espionage case had not been given a polygraph test in his nearly 30 years with the bureau, and lax oversight of his relationship with an informer now accused of being a Chinese double-agent appears to have violated numerous policies, bureau officials said today.
The officials added that the informer, Katrina Leung, a Los Angeles political fund-raiser who was paid $1.7 million by the F.B.I. for information on her native China over the last two decades, had not been asked to take a polygraph test since the 1980's.
Ms. Leung and the former agent, James J. Smith, were arrested at their homes. Mr. Smith, was charged with gross negligence in his handling of national military documents. Ms. Leung, who officials said was Mr. Smith's longtime lover, was charged with the unauthorized copying of national military information with the intent to injure the United States or benefit a foreign nation, in this case, China.
Historically, the F.B.I. has resisted the use of polygraph, or lie detector, tests for its employees, in part because many agents have viewed the procedure as a sign of distrust. In the mid-1990's, the bureau began broadening its use of polygraph tests for employees with access to secret intelligence after the espionage arrest of a C.I.A. official, Aldrich H. Ames, and it significantly increased their use again after the 2001 arrest of an F.B.I agent, Robert P. Hanssen, on charges of spying for Moscow.
An F.B.I. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that because polygraph tests were not routinely used in the 1980's and 1990's, it appeared that Mr. Smith had never been asked to take one, while Ms. Leung had not taken one for many years.
"We just didn't really do it much back then," the official said. "It wasn't a focus."
Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, has requested internal reviews to determine what went wrong.
Officials outside the F.B.I. questioned whether more aggressive use of polygraph tests by the bureau might have raised questions much earlier about whether Mr. Smith and Ms. Leung were having an affair and whether she was improperly gaining access to secret intelligence that could do damage to American national security interests in the hands of the Chinese.
Questions about her contacts with the Chinese authorities were raised as far back as 1991. But those suspicions were apparently never followed up on after Mr. Smith assured an F.B.I. agent in San Francisco, who investigators said was also having an affair with Ms. Leung, that he would take care of the problem, officials said.
Lawyers for Mr. Smith and Ms. Leung defended their clients' character and promised vindication.
Prosecutors said in filings in United States District Court that Ms. Leung had admitted passing sensitive intelligence that she received from the agent to a handler in the Chinese government.
Among the material, officials said, were secret documents on pending investigations involving Chinese fugitives, a military espionage case and sensitive log books and rosters with the names and phone numbers of F.B.I. agents involved in Chinese investigations.
Officials said that when Mr. Smith visited Ms. Leung at her home, he brought classified documents and left them unattended, while she surreptitiously photocopied them.
In addition to the issue of polygraph tests, officials said the case raised a host of questions about why irregularities took so long to be detected and whether the bureau had adequate safeguards in place to detect moles in its own camp.
"There were a lot of bureau policies that were violated or not followed in this case," said a Senate intelligence committee aide who has been briefed by the F.B.I. on the case but demanded anonymity.
An F.B.I official said that while paid informers, or "assets," who work for the bureau are generally required to have two "handlers" to avoid the potential for personal attachments and abuses, Mr. Smith appears to have been Ms. Leung's only handler after he recruited her in the early 1980's.
In addition, the official said, supervisors are supposed to require reviews of informer contacts every 90 days and should closely monitor all payments to informers, but "whether that was done adequately or not here is an issue."
Taking classified information to a nonsecure location is also a clear violation of policy, as is having a sexual relationship with an informer, the official said.
The arrests confront the F.B.I. with some of the same problems it has faced in the case of James Bulger, a Boston mobster and F.B.I. informer who was protected for years by his friends and handlers at the bureau. He disappeared in 1995 after an F.B.I. agent tipped him off to a secret indictment handed down against him, and a Congressional committee is investigating the F.B.I.'s mishandling of the case.
Government officials said they were concerned that the arrests could signal a breach of security involving secret military, nuclear, political and criminal issues.
While the F.B.I. said its analysis of the damage to national security is still likely months away from completion, some bureau officials acknowledged that there could be evidence of widespread security breaches.
Mr. Smith, as a supervisor who ran the China intelligence squad in the late 1990's in Los Angeles, "certainly had access to sensitive information, but it's too early to characterize the gravity of it," the F.B.I. official said. "It's not going to be the extent of damage we had with Hanssen, but it has the potential to be serious."
Raising particular concern is the fact that Mr. Smith had access to sensitive information on allegations that the Chinese tried to infiltrate the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996 through illegal campaign contributions. Mr. Smith was the F.B.I.'s point man in debriefing one of the major players in that investigation, Johnny Chung.
Mr. Smith would also have had access to secret military and nuclear intelligence regarding the Chinese, and one of the classified documents that the authorities believe Ms. Leung copied from Mr. Smith related to the investigation into an American scientist, Peter Lee, who was accused of passing advanced radar technology to the Chinese.
"The information he was privy to was very sensitive," said the Senate intelligence committee aide. "When an F.B.I. agent is involved in something like this, there's always a great deal of concern."
The accusations could also hinder the F.B.I.'s ability to retain authority over intelligence issues in the face of nagging criticism of its performance after the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said. Some critics in Congress have suggested that a wholly new agency should be created to handle domestic intelligence and terrorism issues. Mr. Mueller told a Senate panel today that he saw no need for such a step, but other officials said this week's case could provide further fuel for those arguments.
"This raises real questions about the F.B.I.'s ability to police itself," said Representative Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat who prosecuted a similar espionage case in 1990 in Los Angeles involving an F.B.I. agent who had an affair with a Russian spy.
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U.S. 'Winging' War Plan in Northern Iraq
After Fall of Baghdad, Small Force Makes Good on Strategic Bluff in Push Toward South
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 11, 2003; Page A36
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5679-2003Apr10?language=printer
When Turkey's reluctant parliament ruled out a true northern front for the war in Iraq, Pentagon war planners turned to a small, lightly armed U.S. force for the largely Kurdish north, hoping the bluff could pin down Iraqi troops and keep the hostile Turks away from the Kurds while the real fighting force pushed toward Baghdad from Kuwait.
But even that modest plan has been overtaken by the rapid collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. Now, defense officials say, war planners are more or less "winging it."
Two battalions of the 173rd Airborne Division hustled out of positions inside the Kurdish autonomous zone and into the strategic city of Kirkuk yesterday, after Kurdish pesh merga fighters and a few U.S. Special Operations soldiers rolled into the city virtually unopposed, said Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That wasn't according to plan, a defense official said afterward -- but in the last few days, not much has been.
"Any time things start falling apart fast, you wing it," the official said. "This is all going faster than the plan."
War planners originally hoped to squeeze Baghdad in a vise, with the 4th Infantry Division rolling south from bases in Turkey and the 3rd Infantry Division and Marines pushing north from Kuwait. After Turkey blocked any troops from attacking from Turkish soil, Pentagon officials repeatedly boasted that there would be a northern front.
But that was more bluff than threat, defense officials say. The idea was to field as many as 2,000 Special Operations forces to bolster Kurdish fighters and call in airstrikes on Iraqi positions. The 173rd Airborne would make a grand entrance from Italy, parachuting onto a friendly airfield in the Kurdish autonomous zone. Those 2,000 troops would be bolstered by a small armored contingent. That all happened, and this week, about 300 soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division arrived with six M1-A1 Abrams tanks, six M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and an assortment of Humvees and trucks aboard 20 to 25 C-17s, a defense official said.
But even that reinforced deployment was never meant to seriously challenge the Iraqi armored divisions defending Kirkuk, Hussein's power base in Tikrit or the northern approaches to Baghdad, defense officials say. Instead, they were supposed to present just enough of a fighting force to keep Iraqi troops in the north from falling back to reinforce Baghdad, while standing between the independence-minded Kurds and a Turkish army determined to thwart an independent Kurdistan.
Even a small force could dissuade Turkey from attacking, officials believed, if Americans could potentially be caught in the crossfire. "The politics of having U.S. forces caught in the middle of those two forces would have been too much," a Pentagon official said.
To a large extent, it worked, Pentagon officials said. The 11 regular Iraqi army divisions that once lined the so-called green line separating Hussein's Iraq from the Kurdish-controlled north, stayed put, even as they were decimated by airstrikes directed by Special Operations forces. Those 11 divisions have been reduced to "elements of eight," a defense official said. The combat readiness of that force -- which was questionable even before the war -- has been degraded significantly, McChrystal said.
The two northern Republican Guard divisions did retreat to Baghdad to reinforce Republican Guard troops defending the capital from the south, but that reinforcement proved ineffectual against U.S. air power and artillery.
And so far, the Turkish army has stayed out of the Kurdish-controlled area.
With Iraq now descending into anarchy and the war effort moving toward Hussein's home town of Tikrit, defense officials say they are having to become more flexible with their northern Iraq war plan. Special Forces units yesterday moved on the city of Mosul and have sealed off routes in and out of Tikrit. The 173rd Airborne's move into Kirkuk yesterday was aimed at reassuring Turkey that the United States does have some semblance of control and will not allow Kurdish forces to make the city their de facto capital.
But a senior defense official made it clear that U.S. forces in the north would not be leading the charge on Tikrit in the coming days, at least not as long as pockets of resistance in Baghdad continue to exact U.S. casualties in the capital.
"We'll let the north work itself out a little, pick at it as we can," the official said. "But there's still a lot of fighting to be done in Baghdad."
When the final push on Tikrit comes, it is likely to be spearheaded by the 4th Infantry Division, which has finally arrived in force in Kuwait after its equipment was diverted from Turkey, defense officials said. One official said a brigade-sized task force of around 5,000 would be ready to roll north in two days. A final decision on whether that task force reinforces troops in Baghdad or presses on to Tikrit may not be made until it reaches the capital. But one defense official said the 4th Infantry Division vanguard likely would blast past Baghdad toward Tikrit if resistance continues to dissipate. The 101st Airborne Division, now reinforced by a 500-man task force from the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, faces the same options.
Meantime, McChrystal said, U.S. air power will continue to pound command-and-control facilities and the remnants of Hussein loyalists in Tikrit. Air Force Secretary James G. Roche told CNN yesterday, "We've done a lot in Tikrit, but there's no reason to reduce every building to rubble."
By the time U.S. forces reach Tikrit, there may be little left to fight, one defense official said, concluding, "It's going to be 'Shock and Awe, Part Deux.'"
----
105 U.S. dead in Iraq war
By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
April 10, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030410-103630-5605r.htm
WASHINGTON, April 10 (UPI) -- The Pentagon late Wednesday identified six more deaths associated with the war in Iraq.
Staff Sgt. Robert A Stever, 36, of Pendleton, Ore., was killed in action by enemy fire April 8. He was assigned the Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Pfc. Jason M. Meyer, 23, of Swartz Creek, Mich., was killed in action on April 8 in Iraq. Meyer was assigned to B Company, 11th Engineer Battalion, Fort Stewart, Ga. The circumstances surrounding his death are under investigation.
Pvt. Kelley S. Prewitt, 24, of Alabama, was killed in action by enemy fire on April 6. Prewitt was assigned to Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, Fort Benning, Ga.
Two Army soldiers died of wounds received in an enemy rocket attack south of Baghdad April 7.
Spc. George A. Mitchell, 35, of Rawlings, Md., was assigned to Headquarters Company, 3rd Infantry Division, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Cpl. Henry L. Brown, 22, of Natchez, Miss., died April 8. He was assigned to Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 64th Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Air Force Staff Sgt. Scott D. Sather, 29, of Clio, Mich., was killed in action April 8. Sather was assigned to the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, Pope Air Force Base, N.C.
Also Wednesday, the Pentagon released the identity of another Marine killed and one declared missing-in-action in the U.S.-led war on Iraq.
Pfc. Juan Guadalupe Garza Jr., 20, of Temperance, Mich., was killed in action on April 8 in central Iraq. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Sgt. Brendon C. Reiss, 23, of Natrona, Wyo., has been listed as missing in action. He is assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. Reiss was last seen when his unit was engaged in combat operations on March 23 in the vicinity of An Nasiriyah, Iraq. A search of the area is continuing.
The Pentagon said Thursday 105 American service members have died in the war, at least 15 of them from non-hostile actions like accidents. Not all of the families of the dead have been notified so some names have yet to be released.
Eight remain missing in action and seven are still considered prisoners of war.
Previously announced deaths:
Navy Lt. Thomas Mullen Adams, 27, of La Mesa, Calif., was killed when two Royal Navy Sea King helicopters collided over international waters March 22.
Capt. James F. Adamouski, 29, of Springfield, Va., was killed when his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed in central Iraq April 2. He was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Ga.
Spc. Jamaal R. Addison, 22, of Roswell, Ga. He was killed in an ambush of the 507th maintenance company on March 23.
Capt. Tristan N. Aitken, 31, of State College, Pa., was killed in action Friday in Iraq. Aitken was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 41st Field Artillery, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Lance Cpl. Brian E. Anderson, 26, of Durham, N.C., was killed April 2 in a non-hostile accident west of An Nasiriyah, Iraq. Anderson was manning a .50 caliber rifle on top of a 7-ton truck when the vehicle passed under and apparently snagged low-hanging power lines.
Maj. Jay Thomas Aubin, 36, of Waterville, Maine. Aubin was assigned to the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron 1, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz. Aubin died in a CH-46E helicopter crash on March 20 in Kuwait.
Pfc. Chad E. Bales, 20, of Coahoma, Texas, was killed on April 3 in a non-hostile vehicle accident during convoy operations east of Ash Shahin, Iraq. He was assigned to 1st Transportation Support Battalion, 1st Force Service Support Group, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Capt. Ryan Anthony Beaupre, 30, of Bloomington, Ill., who was assigned to the Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 268, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton, Calif. Beaupre died in a CH-46E helicopter crash on March 20 in Kuwait.
Pfc. Wilfred D. Bellard, 20, of Lake Charles, La., died when his vehicle fell into a ravine April 4. He was a member of the 41st Artillery Regiment, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Sgt. Michael E. Bitz, 31, Ventura, Calif. He was assigned to the 2nd Assault Amphibious Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was killed in action March 23 near An Nasiriyah, Iraq.
Lance Cpl. Thomas A. Blair, 24, of Wagoner, Okla. He was assigned to the 2nd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion, Marine Air Control Group-28, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, Cherry Point, N.C. His unit was engaged in operations on March 24 on the outskirts of An Nasiriyah in Iraq. His remains were recovered on March 28.
Spc. Mathew G. Boule, 22, of Dracut, Mass., was killed when his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed in central Iraq April 2. He was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Ga.
Spc. Larry K. Brown, 22, of Jackson, Miss., was killed in action on April 5, 2003, in Iraq. Brown was assigned to C Company, 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, Fort Riley, Kan.
Lance Cpl. Brian Rory Buesing, 20, Cedar Key, Fla. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Sgt. George E. Buggs, 31, of Barnwell, S.C., was killed on or about March 23 when the convoy he was traveling in was ambushed in southern Iraq. Buggs was with the 3rd Division Support Battalion, Fort Stewart, Ga., the 507th Maintenance Company, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Sgt. Jacob L. Butler, 24, of Wellsville, Kan., was killed in action April 1, in As Samawah, Iraq, when a rocket-propelled grenade hit his vehicle. Butler was assigned to Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, Fort Riley, Kan.
Staff Sgt. James W. Cawley, 41, of Roy, Utah, was killed on March 29 during a firefight with enemy forces. He was hit by a U.S. humvee. He was assigned to F Company, 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, in Salt Lake City, Utah.
2nd Lt. Therrel S. Childers, 30, Harrison County, Miss., killed in action on March 21 in a firefight in the oil field in southern Iraq. Childers was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Marine Capt. Aaron J. Contreras, 31, of Sherwood, Ore., was killed on March 30 in a UH-1N Huey helicopter crash in southern Iraq. He was assigned to Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron-169, Marine Aircraft Group-39, Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Spc. Daniel Francis J. Cunningham, 33, Lewiston, Maine, died when his vehicle fell into a ravine April 4. He was a member of the 41st Artillery Regiment, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Spc. Michael Edward Curtin, 23, of South Plains, N.J. He was assigned to the 2-7th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. Curtin was killed at a checkpoint by a car bomb on March 29.
Staff Sgt Wilbert Davis, 40, of Alaska, died April 3 when his vehicle ran off the road into a canal in Iraq. Davis was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Lance Cpl. Jesus A. Suarez Del Solar, 20, of Escondido, Calif. He was assigned to the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Camp Pendleton, Calif. He was killed when a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint near An Najaf March 29.
Master Sgt. Robert J. Dowdy, 38, of Cleveland, Ohio. Dowdy was killed on or about March 23 when the convoy he was traveling in was ambushed in southern Iraq. He was with the 507th Maintenance Company, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Pvt. Ruben Estrella-Soto, 18, of El Paso, Texas. Estrella-Soto was killed on or about March 23 when the convoy he was traveling in was ambushed in southern Iraq. He was with the 507th Maintenance Company, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Cpl. Mark A. Evnin, 21, Burlington, Vt., was killed in action April 3 during a firefight in central Iraq. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Master Sgt. George A. Fernandez, 36, El Paso, Texas, was killed in action April 2. He was assigned to Headquarters, U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, N.C.
Lance Cpl. David K. Fribley, 26, Lee, Fla. He was one of nine Marines killed when a group of Iraqis pretended to surrender but then opened fire on Marines near An Nasiriyah. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Cpl. Jose A. Garibay, 21, Orange, Calif. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was killed on March 23 in An Nasiriyah firefight.
Cpl. Jorge A. Gonzalez, 20, Los Angeles. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was one of nine Marines killed March 23 near An Nasiriyah when Iraqi troops faked surrender but then opened fire on the Americans.
Cpl. Bernard G. Gooden, 22, of Mt. Vernon, N.Y., was killed April 4 during a firefight in central Iraq. He was assigned to the 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Pfc. Christian D. Gurtner, 19, of Ohio City, Ohio, died April 2 from a non-combat weapons discharge in southern Iraq. He was assigned to the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, 22, Los Angeles, killed in action March 21 in southern Iraq. Gutierrez was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Chief Warrant Officer Erik A. Halvorsen, 40, of Bennington, Vt., was killed when his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed in central Iraq April 2. He was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Ga.
Sgt. Nicolas M. Hodson, 22, of Smithville, Mo., who died in a vehicle accident in Iraq. Hodson was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Chief Warrant Officer Scott Jamar, 32, of Granbury, Texas. He was killed when his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed in central Iraq April 2. He was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Ga.
Marine Cpl. Evan T. James, 20, of Hancock, Ill. James had been declared missing in action on March 24, near Saddam Canal; his remains were recovered on March 25.
Army Spc. William A. Jeffries, 39, died in a hospital in Spain March 26 from a sudden illness that came on when he was in Kuwait. He was assigned to D Company, 1st Battalion, 152nd Infantry Regiment of the Illinois Army National Guard.
Pfc. Howard Johnson II, 21, of Mobile, Ala. He was killed March 23 when his 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company was ambushed.
Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class (Fleet Marine Force) Michael Vann Johnson Jr., 25, of Little Rock, Ark. Johnson was killed in action March 25 in Iraq. He was assigned to Naval Medical Center San Diego, 3rd Marine Division Detachment, San Diego.
Pvt. Devon D. Jones, 19, of San Diego, Calif., died when his vehicle fell into a ravine April 4. He was a member of the 41st Artillery Regiment, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Jordan, 42, Brazoria, Texas. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was killed March 23 near An Nasiriyah. He was among the nine Marines killed in Iraq Sunday when enemy troops pretending to surrender opened fire.
2nd Lt. Jeffrey J. Kaylor, 24, of Clifton, Va., who was killed in action in Iraq on April 7. Kaylor was assigned to C Battery, 39th Field Artillery Battalion, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Spc. James M. Kiehl, 22, of Comfort, Texas. Kiehl was killed on or about March 23 when the convoy he was traveling in was ambushed in southern Iraq. He was with the 507th Maintenance Company, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Capt. Edward J. Korn, 31, of Savannah, Ga., was killed while he investigated the wreckage of a T-72 tank destroyed by his unit in central Iraq. Korn was assigned to the 64th Armor, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Sgt. Brad Korthaus, 28, Davenport, Iowa, drowned in canal March 24. He was assigned to Engineering Company C, 6th Engineer Support Battalion, 4th Force Service Support Group, based in Peoria, Ill. His remains were found on March 25.
Cpl. Brian Matthew Kennedy, 25, of Houston, was assigned to the Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 268, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton, Calif. Kennedy died in a CH-46E helicopter crash on March 20 in Kuwait.
Sgt. Michael V. Lalush, 23, of Troutville, Va., was killed on March 30 in a UH-1N Huey helicopter crash in southern Iraq. He was assigned to Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron-169, Marine Air Craft Group-39, Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Staff Sgt. Nino D. Livaudais, 23, of Utah, died April 3 from injuries sustained in combat. He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Benning, Ga.
Spc. Ryan P. Long, 21, died April 3 from injuries sustained in combat. He was assigned to A Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Benning, Ga.
Marine Lance Cpl. Joseph B. Maglione, 22, of Lansdale, Pa., died from a non-combat weapons discharge April 1 in Kuwait. Maglione was assigned to Bridge Company B, 6th Engineer Support Battalion, 4th Force Service Support Group, based in Folsom, Pa.
Chief Warrant Officer Johnny Villareal Mata, 35, of Amarillo, Texas. Villareal Mata was killed on or about March 23 when the convoy he was traveling in was ambushed in southern Iraq. He was with the 507th Maintenance Company, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Staff Sgt. Donald C. May, Jr., 31, of Richmond, Va., of the 1st Tank Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Pfc. Francisco A. Martinez-Flores, 21, of Los Angeles. Martinez-Florez was assigned to the 1st Tank Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Marine Sgt. Brian D. McGinnis, 23, of St. George, Del., died March 30 in a UH-1N Huey helicopter crash in southern Iraq. He was assigned to Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron-169, Marine Air Craft Group-39, Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton, Calif.
1st Lt. Brian M. McPhillips, 25, of Pembroke, Mass., was killed April 4 during a firefight in central Iraq. He was assigned to the 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Menusa, 33, of San Jose, Calif. He was assigned to the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Pfc. Anthony S. Miller, 19, of San Antonio, Texas, who was killed April 7 by enemy indirect fire in Iraq. Miller was assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 3rd Infantry Division, 2nd Brigade, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Marine Lance Cpl. Patrick R. Nixon, 21, of Nashville, has been reclassified as killed in action from missing. Nixon was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C. His unit was engaged in operations March 23 on the outskirts of An Nasiriyah in Iraq. His remains were recovered March 30.
Spc. Donald S. Oaks Jr., 20, of Erie, Pa., was killed in action in Iraq on April 3. He was assigned to C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 13th Field Artillery Regiment (Multiple-Launch Rocket System), Fort Sill, Okla.
Lance Cpl. Patrick T. O'Day, 20, of Sonoma, Calif., of the 1st Tank Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Lance Cpl. Eric J. Orlowski, 26, of Buffalo, N.Y., who was killed by an accidental discharge of a .50 caliber machine gun in Iraq. He was assigned to the 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Sgt. Michael F. Pedersen, 26, of Flint, Mich. He was killed when his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed in central Iraq April 2. He was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Ga.
Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa, 23, Tuba City, Ariz. Piestewa was killed on or about March 23 when the convoy he was traveling in was ambushed in southern Iraq. She was with the 507th Maintenance Company, Fort Bliss, Texas.
2nd Lt. Frederick E. Pokorney Jr., 31, Nye, Nev. He was assigned to the Headquarters Battery, 1st Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Sgt. 1st Class Randall S. Rehn, 36, Longmont, Colo., was killed in action April 3. He was assigned to C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 13th Field Artillery Regiment (Multiple-Launch Rocket System), Fort Sill, Okla.
Pfc. Diego Fernando Rincon, 19, of Conyers, Ga. He was assigned to the 2-7th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. Rincon killed at a checkpoint by a car bomb on March 29.
Sgt. Duane R. Rios, 25, of Hammond, Ind., was killed April 4 during a firefight in central Iraq. He was assigned to the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion, 1st Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Capt. Russell B. Rippetoe, 27, died April 3 from injuries sustained in combat. He was assigned to A Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Benning, Ga. He was from Colorado.
Sgt. Todd J. Robbins, 33, Pentwater, Mich., was killed in action April 3. He was assigned to C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 13th Field Artillery Regiment (Multiple-Launch Rocket System), Fort Sill, Okla.
Marine Cpl. Robert M. Rodriguez, 21, of Queens, N.Y., was killed in action March 27 when the tank he was riding in fell into the Euphrates River during combat operations northwest of An Nasiriyah. His remains were recovered March 30. He was assigned to the 1st Tank Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Cpl. Randal Kent Rosacker, 21, San Diego, Calif. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was killed March 23 near An Nasiriyah.
Spc. Brandon J. Rowe, 20, of Roscoe, Ill., was killed in action March 31 in Ayyub, Iraq, by enemy artillery. He was assigned to the C Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
Capt. Benjamin W. Sammis, 29, of Rehobeth, Mass., was killed in action April 4 when his AH-1W Super Cobra helicopter crashed during combat operations near Ali Aziziyal, Iraq. He was assigned to the Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron-267, Marine Aircraft Group 39, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Army Spc. Gregory P. Sanders, 19, of Indiana. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armore, Fort Stewart, Ga. He died March 24.
Army Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert, 27, who was killed by a grenade when he was sleeping in a tent at Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait, March 22. Seifert was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, Fort Campbell, Ky.
Cpl. Erik H. Silva, 22, of Chula Vista, Calif., was killed in action in Iraq April 3. Silva was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Pvt. Brandon U. Sloan, 19, of Cleveland, Ohio. Sloan was killed on or about March 23 when the convoy he was traveling in was ambushed in southern Iraq. He was with the 507th Maintenance Company, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Lance Cpl. Thomas J. Slocum, age unknown, Adams, Colo. Slocum was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was killed near An Nasiriyah.
Chief Warrant Officer Eric A. Smith, 41, of Calif. He was killed when his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed in central Iraq April 2. He was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Ga.
Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, 33, of Tampa, Fl., was killed in action April 4. Smith was assigned to the 11th Engineer Battalion, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Sgt. Roderic A. Solomon, 32, from Fayetteville, N.C., died March 28 when his Bradley Fighting Vehicle rolled off a cliff in a non-hostile accident in Iraq. Solomon was assigned to the 2-7th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, out of Fort Stewart, Ga.
Air National Guard Maj. Gregory Stone, 40, of Boise, Idaho, died March 25, from wounds sustained when an American soldier allegedly threw a hand grenade into his tent. Stone was assigned to the 124th Air Support Operations Squadron.
Army Reserve Spc. Brandon S. Tobler, 19. His hometown was not available. Tobler died in a vehicle accident March 22 in Iraq. Tobler was assigned to the 671st Engineer Brigade, Portland, Ore.
Sgt. Donald R. Walters, 33, of Kansas City, Mo. Walters was killed on or about March 23 when the convoy he was traveling in was ambushed in southern Iraq. He was with the 507th Maintenance Company, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Staff Sgt. Kendall Damon Watersbey, 29, of Baltimore, who was assigned to the Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 268, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton, Calif. Watersbey died in a CH-46E helicopter crash March 20 in Kuwait.
Pfc. Michael Russell Creighton Weldon, 20, of Conyers, Ga. He was assigned to the 2-7th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. Weldon was on of four Americans killed at a checkpoint near An Najaf by a car bomb on March 29.
Sgt. Eugene Williams, 24, of Highland, N.Y. He was assigned to the 2-7th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. Williams was killed at a checkpoint by a car bomb on March 29.
Lance Cpl. Michael J. Williams, 31, of Yuma, Ariz. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, N.C. His unit was engaged in operations March 23 on the outskirts of An Nasiriyah in Iraq. His remains were recovered March 28.
Previously confirmed as missing in action:
Sgt. Edward J. Anguiano, 24, of Brownsville, Texas;
Pfc. Tamario D. Burkett, 21, of Erie, N.Y.;
Cpl. Kemaphoom A. Chanawongse, 22, of Waterford, Conn.;
Lance Cpl. Donald J. Cline Jr., 21, of Washoe, Nev.;
Pvt. Jonathan L. Gifford, 20, of Macon, Ill.; and
Pvt. Nolen R. Hutchings, 19, of Boiling Springs, S.C.
Previously confirmed prisoners-of-war:
Chief Warrant Officer David S. Williams, 30, of Florida;
Chief Warrant Officer Ronald D. Young Jr., 26, of Georgia;
Spc. Edgar Adan Hernandez, 21, of Mission, Texas;
Spc. Joseph Neal Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, N.M.;
Spc. Shoshana Nyree Johnson, 30, of El Paso, Texas;
Pfc. Patrick Wayne Miller, 23, of Walter, Kan.; and
Sgt. James Joseph Riley, 31, of Pennsauken, N.J.
(Source: U.S. Department of Defense.)
-------- propaganda wars
Dull Television
April 11, 2003
by Charley Reese
King Features Syndicate
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030411/index.php
Who would have thought it? American cable television can actually make live coverage of a real war dull. The networks are talking it to death, not to mention censoring it right and left.
It's pretty clear that the main reason for sending a photographer with the "embedded" American reporters is to photograph the reporter. Rarely do we see any photography of what's going on. You can see a decided contrast if a network happens to go to a British reporter, who usually does a voice-over while showing scenes his cameraman has photographed.
Your best bet for keeping up with the war is to catch a British Broadcasting Corporation news show on public television, since most of us can't get Al- Jazeera or the other Arab stations, which are doing a much better job of covering the war. CNN, MSNBC and, of course, the joke of the lot, Fox, are just talk radio with a few pictures. Most of the talk by their on-camera talent and their horde of retirees amounts to speculation. The Pentagon, in the meantime, has destroyed its credibility by denying the obvious. The generals in the briefing room say Iraqi resistance did not surprise them. American officers in the field and wounded American soldiers are saying they were surprised. Why do these political generals lie when the truth would serve them better? What's wrong with saying, "Yes, we have been surprised by the resistance, but we've adapted and will overcome it"? No, they have to insist they weren't surprised when everybody knows they were. Then they have to claim that they haven't paused, when it's obvious the advance on Baghdad did pause. If your troops are 50 miles south of Baghdad on Thursday and 50 miles south of Baghdad on the following Tuesday, then, by God, you haven't been advancing.
There are sound reasons for pausing the advance, so why not admit it? Why do a Bill Clinton and play semantic word games? Why keep denying Iraqi patriotism by insisting that every single Iraqi who is fighting is either a Saddam thug or has a gun pointed to his head? Even Iraqis who hate Saddam Hussein don't like their country being invaded by a foreign power. And, by the way, if some American soldiers threw down their rifles and said they were going to surrender, their own officers would pull their guns and, if necessary, shoot them. The penalty for cowardice in the face of the enemy is death - in the American as well as in the Iraqi army.
Scott Ritter, the outspoken former arms inspector, is right. We've already lost the war. The talk-radio-with-pictures gang quoted him out of context to make him seem silly. Ritter did not say we would lose the military part of the war. He said that since the Bush administration defines victory as winning the support of the Iraqi people, bringing democracy to the Middle East and lessening the threat of terror, then by that definition we have already lost the war.
What is happening is exactly what opponents of the war said would happen. We are not being greeted as liberators, but as an invading colonialist force. The Arab and Muslim world is at a boil. King Abdullah of Jordan, normally one of the most popular leaders in the Arab world, has a 2 percent approval rating in Jordan as a result of his cooperation with the United States. The very regimes that support the United States are increasingly at risk. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is quite right. Instead of one Osama bin Laden, this war will produce 100 Osamas. Our young president, to use one of his daddy's favorite phrases, has gotten himself into deep doo-doo, the camel variety. Enjoy the military phase of this war, because after we've "won," our troubles will really start.
It's a very bad omen that the 2lst century is starting just like the 20th, with an American imperialist war and, perhaps, a pandemic of lethal flu. Repeating history is worse than watching cable news.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
GOP calls for wider powers to track citizens
Critics rip bid to make Patriot Act permanent
By CHARLES POPE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
Friday, April 11, 2003
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/117060_patriot11.html
WASHINGTON -- With the war on terrorism lagging behind the war in Iraq, Republicans in Congress and the White House are pushing legislation that would give federal authorities sweeping new powers to monitor, track, profile, and even revoke citizenship of U.S. citizens.
The effort is being directed along two controversial fronts, involving current law as well as new proposals. Both have generated fierce resistance on Capitol Hill and from civil liberties groups.
On one track, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, with the backing of the White House, wants to make permanent the provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the sprawling 2001 law hastily passed only weeks after the Sept. 11 attack.
The law greatly expanded the government's ability to search records and monitor people and their property.
It gave the government new authority to conduct telephone and Internet surveillance with minimal judicial oversight and created a broad new definition of "domestic terrorism" that could lead to the investigation and prosecution of people engaged in acts of political protest.
It also gave federal agents the power to survey all book and computer records at libraries, and permitted non-citizens to be jailed without formal charges for up to six months.
Because of concerns that the law might go too far and harbor unintended consequences, Congress stipulated that the Patriot Act dissolve in 2005.
But Hatch, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said this week that he wants to make the law permanent.
At the same time, the Bush administration is drafting new legislation, dubbed Patriot II, that would provide federal agents even more authority to issue wiretaps, conduct "data mining" and monitor people presumed or known to have terrorist connections.
Although the bill is still being drafted, those with knowledge of it say it would, among other things, allow federal authorities to make secret arrests and to "infiltrate and monitor" worship services.
Critics say the proposals are troubling.
"We know the government has used some of these laws incorrectly, and we know that this has been the least cooperative Justice Department in anyone's memory," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in response to Hatch's plan to strip the "sunset provision" from the Patriot Act.
"History shows that a government that doesn't want oversight often is a government that has something to hide."
The Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote a letter to the state's two senators Wednesday urging them to oppose Hatch.
Other groups also are mobilizing to fight the proposal.
"After a mere 18 months since the enactment of the legislation, it is simply too soon to measure the impact of these provisions and move to make them permanent," said the letter to Sens. Dick Durbin and Peter Fitzgerald.
Hatch declined to comment, but Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said the law has been crucial in the fight against terrorism. "It has been an invaluable tool in our efforts to prevent terrorist activity," Corallo said.
"The Patriot Act gives us the tools we need to better protect the American public while also protecting civil liberties."
Corallo declined to comment on Hatch's proposal, but a Justice Department official who asked to remain nameless said Hatch has the support of the department. Republican aides believe Hatch's amendment could pass the Senate. It could run into trouble in the House, however, where Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., has stressed the importance of congressional oversight. Sensenbrenner was instrumental in inserting the sunset provisions in the Patriot Act.
Opposition also is coming from a more surprising direction -- mainstream conservative organizations that usually count Attorney General John Ashcroft among their heroes.
"Already, government investigative powers have been dramatically expanded," said former Rep. Bob Barr, a well-known conservative who once was a close ally of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "Already, intelligence is working under the flawed premise that to get the bad guys you need to spy unmercifully on the good guys."
Barr appeared at a forum yesterday with three other influential conservatives, who have banded together with, improbably, the American Civil Liberties Union to try to defeat the initiatives.
"We hope that the White House will take notice from the shared concern expressed today that Americans of all political stripes want leaders who strive to make us all both safe and free," said Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington office. She joined Barr and David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform; and Lori Waters, executive director of the Eagle Forum.
Murphy said the draft bill would, if passed in its current form, represent a big shift away from America's long-standing commitment to the right 'to be left alone,' " she said.
Among other powers, Murphy said the bill would "give the government the unprecedented authority to revoke Americans' citizenship and open the door to government suppression of lawful protest activities."
Waters said passage of the two measures would edge the country closer to a philosophy "where there are two types of people: the caught and the uncaught. .... We see a growing effort of the government to tag and track everything we do," she said. "We don't think these are the most effective way of preventing terrorists from getting on planes and blowing them up."
A Justice Department official who didn't want his name used said the initial criticisms would be moot because many of the objectionable provisions will not be included in the final bill. Some of the ideas, the official said, were proposed only to get discussions started within the department and were never intended for inclusion. He wouldn't say which provisions fit in that category.
Civil libertarians and conservatives alike are still unnerved by an earlier proposal by the Justice Department called Operation TIPS that would encourage citizens to watch and report strange behavior. That proposal died last year in Congress.
Another worrisome idea, critics say, is a plan by the government to develop a system to "profile" all airline passengers to gauge their risk. Critics also worry that federal officials might try again to win approval for a national ID card. Congress has rejected that idea.
P-I Washington correspondent Charles Pope can be reached at 202-943-9229 or charliepope@seattlepi.com
-------- terrorism
Suspects in Cole Attack Escape Prison in Yemen
April 11, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Yemen-Cole-Escapes.html
SAN`A, Yemen (AP) -- Yemeni authorities were hunting for 10 of the main suspects in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole after they escaped from prison Friday, officials said.
The fugitives, including chief suspect Jamal al-Badawi, were jailed in the tightly guarded intelligence building in the port city of Aden since shortly after the destroyer was bombed, killing 17 American sailors.
Officials close to the investigation said the men fled through a window they smashed inside the building.
The officials said on condition of anonymity that prison officers gave the men permission to go to the prison courtyard for their daily morning break before they escaped.
It was unclear whether the escapees received any assistance from people inside or outside the prison.
Photographs of the men were distributed to police and houses of the escaped men's relatives were searched, the officials said on condition of anonymity.
The Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the Cole was blamed on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
Al-Badawi allegedly helped buy the dinghy used by the two suicide bombers, who rammed the destroyer as it was refueling in Aden.
The 10 men, some of whom are believed to be linked to al-Qaida, were part of a 17-man group arrested after the Cole bombing.
Officials said that the men might have left Aden and headed to al-Qaida strongholds in the northern province of Shabwah.
Last July, Walid Abdullah Habib, a Yemeni member of al-Qaida who was arrested while trying to enter the country illegally, escaped from prison.
Habib was arrested this year in a desert area near the Oman-Yemen border and handed over to Yemeni authorities. Habib is from Shabwah.
Yemen, the ancestral home of bin Laden, has been a hotbed of terrorist activity. Islamic militants from here have fought in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Supporters of al-Qaida have claimed responsibility for several bombings targeting security officials and government offices in the past few months.
Yemen committed itself to joining the war on terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks in America and has allowed U.S. forces to enter the country and train its military.
Friday's escape was not the first time a top terrorism suspect has busted out of a Yemeni prison.
Last July, Walid Abdullah Habib, a Yemeni from Shabwah belonging to al-Qaida, escaped from prison after being initially arrested while trying to enter the country illegally.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Automakers Roll Out Liquid Hydrogen Refueling Program
April 11, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2003/2003-04-11-09.asp#anchor8
DETROIT, Michigan, American automaker General Motors (GM)and German automaker BMW announced this week that they will jointly develop refueling devices for liquid hydrogen vehicles. The automakers said they hope others will join the initiative, which will center on setting global standards, setting supply specifications and creating the best technical and cost effective solutions.
"We want to accelerate the progress being made on the distribution and onboard storage of liquid hydrogen as the future fuel," said Lawrence Burns, GM's vice president of research and development. "Both compressed and liquid hydrogen hold promise to be used in hydrogen vehicles.
"The density of hydrogen in a liquid state is especially attractive with respect to fuel distribution and vehicle range."
The goal of the collaboration is to have affordable and compelling hydrogen vehicles for sale by 2010 and the companies need to concentrate on the storage and handling technology to achieve this goal, according to Christoph Huss, BMW's head of science and traffic policy.
"We have to start working on a standard so that customers will not be confronted with various systems," Huss explained. "Standardizing the refueling coupler is a must."
Liquid hydrogen provides the most convenient way in transporting hydrogen fuel before a hydrogen pipeline infrastructure is in place, he said, and teaming together will allow GM and BMW to help bring about the liquid hydrogen infrastructure faster.
The automakers say they will follow draft specifications for liquid hydrogen coupling units that have been developed by the European Integrated Hydrogen Project, which are the basis for current negotiations by the United Nations' Economic Commission of Europe (ECE) over a standard for hydrogen-powered vehicles.
"BMW and GM want this refueling system - with the coupler as a core component - to become a global standard," Huss said.
----
US Senate panel approves renewable fuels earmark
REUTERS USA:
April 11, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20450/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate Environment Committee approved a bill this week that guarantees renewable fuels, such as ethanol, a 5 billion-gallon share of the U.S. fuel market in 2012.
The so-called renewable fuels standard opens the way for a doubling in sales of ethanol, distilled mostly from corn. About 2.13 billion gallons of ethanol were produced last year.
Senators plan to fold the RFS into a comprehensive energy bill being drafted by the Senate Energy Committee. The House of Representatives was scheduled to vote Thursday on its version, which includes a 5 billion-gallon RFS target for 2015.
"We urge Congress to quickly adopt the RFS in order to address pressing environmental, energy security and economic development concerns," said Bob Dineen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol trade group.
As part of the RFS bill, the Environment Committee voted for a four-year phase-out of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). The House bill would not ban MTBE.
MTBE and ethanol are rivals as oxygen-adding agents for cleaner-burning fuels.
"Obviously, we don't support an MTBE phase-down in any manner," said Frank Maisano, spokesman for MTBE makers. The industry also sought an exemption from product-defect lawsuits.
The Bush administration supports creation of the RFS.
First popularized in the 1970s as a home-grown alternative to oil imports, ethanol has gained prominence as an additive for cleaner-burning fuels. Thanks to a building boom, ethanol capacity was expected to reach 3 billion ballons this year.
"Increasing the use of clean-burning ethanol will help reduce air emissions from cars and also reduce our reliance on foreign oil," said Sen. George Voinovich, Ohio Republican, a sponsor of the RFS bill.
This year's RFS bill was nearly identical to last year's Senate-passed energy bill, Along with banning MTBE and setting the 5 billion-gallon target for renewable fuels, it would eliminate the current requirement for reformulated gasoline.
-------- health
California Sues Restaurants for Not Warning of Mercury
April 11, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2003/2003-04-11-09.asp#anchor7
SACRAMENTO, California, The California state attorney general filed lawsuits Thursday against 18 California restaurants for not warning customers about the risks from mercury in seafood. A similar lawsuit prompted changes by grocery store chains in California, who in February agreed to warn customers of mercury risks.
The complaint alleges that restaurants have violated the "disclosure before exposure" provisions of Proposition 65 to known reproductive toxins like mercury.
Scientific studies have shown that mercury can cause brain and nerve damage, and a recent report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found eight percent of women of childbearing age have unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies.
Seafood is a particular concern because when mercury accumulates in water it is transformed into methylmercury, which fish absorb when they eat aquatic organisms. The element bonds with proteins in fish tissue and accumulates. Humans absorb it when they consume contaminated fish.
Filed in Superior Courts in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the lawsuits seeks to force restaurants to warn customers that of possible mercury in swordfish, Ahi (Yellowfin) tuna, Albacore tuna and shark. These predatory fish are found to have higher mercury levels than other species.
In addition, the suit aims to prohibit sales of seafood until they post warnings.
"Mercury in seafood presents an exposure risk, especially to pregnant women, the fetus and young children," said Michael Bender of the Mercury Policy Project. "Consumers need information about mercury in seafood in order to make informed choices."
The lawsuit was filed against Benihana, Brinker International, Darden Restaurants, Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group, McCormick & Schmick Management Group, Morton's Restaurant Group, Outback Steakhouse, Porterhouse of Los Angeles, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, Bennigans, Cheesecake Factory, Claim Jumper Restaurants, Hof's Huts, Landry's Restaurants, Metromedia Restaurant Group, P.F. Chang's China Bistro, TS Restaurants and Yard House Restaurants.
-------- human rights
U.S. Won't Reproach China on Human Rights
April 11, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two weeks after declaring that China had a poor human rights record, the State Department said Friday it will not seek a resolution criticizing China in the top United Nations rights forum.
Spokesman Richard Boucher credited China with ``some limited but significant progress'' in protection of human rights, including the release of a number of political prisoners.
He said much remains to be done, adding that the administration will continue to press China's new government to improve its human rights record.
Since China's crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tienenman Square in 1989, the United States has introduced China resolutions almost every year at the annual meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
Because of effective Chinese diplomacy, no such resolution has ever been approved in the 53-member commission.
Besides this year, no China resolutions were introduced in 1998 or 2002.
The State Department report issued on March 31 cited a number of rights abuses, including ``instances of extrajudicial killings, torture and mistreatment of prisoners, forced confessions, arbitrary arrest and detention, lengthy incommunicado detention and denial of due process.''
Days after the report was released, China's State Council Information office dismissed the report as an amateurish collection of distortions and rumors.
It said the report was driven by ``anti-China forces who don't want to see the existence of an increasingly wealthy and developed socialist state.''
The State Department report took into account China's rights record for 2002. The decision on the China resolution reflected an assessment of China's rights performance to date. Officials said they detected several improvements this year, including loosened controls over the media.
Boucher said that, despite recent advances, the State Department believes that China's record remains poor, consistent with the conclusion of the March 12 report.
He said the decision on the Geneva resolution ``was based on what we believe will best advance the cause of human rights in China with the new government in Beijing.''
Sun Weide, a Chinese Embassy official, said the U.S. decision was wise. He said the differences between the two countries on rights matters ``should act as a stimulus for communications and learning'' between the two countries.
Diplomatically, the United States has been eager for China to pressure North Korea to curb its nuclear weapons program. The officials said the U.S. decision on the Geneva resolution was not in any significant way part of an attempt to earn Beijing's cooperation on the nuclear issue.
Mike Jendrzejczyk, Asia expert at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the refusal of either the United States or the European Union to criticize China at the Geneva conference ``undermines those trying to bring about change inside China.''
William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said, ``By failing to sponsor a resolution, the U.S. is aiding China's evasion of scrutiny of its human rights record.''
China, apparently weary of U.S. criticisms of its rights record, issued a report of its own recently on the rights situation in the United States.
Issued days after the release of the State Department human rights report, the Chinese study accused the United States of turning a ``blind eye to its serious violations of human rights on its own soil.''
As problem areas, it identified high crime rates, infringements on constitutional rights, the dominant role of money in American politics, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and racial discrimination.
-------- imf / world bank /wto
IMF: Rebuilding Iraq must be global effort
By Shihoko Goto
UPI Senior Business Correspondent
April 10, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030410-125249-6979r.htm
WASHINGTON, April 10 (UPI) -- The international community must work closely together to rebuild Iraq and not leave it solely up to the United States and Britain, the head of the International Monetary Fund said Thursday.
Speaking ahead of the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank this weekend, IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler said it was in the interest of global security to ensure the prosperity of Iraq as it emerges from decades of a dictatorship. At the same time, he acknowledged that reconstruction would not be easy.
For one thing, little is known about Iraq's financial status.
"There needs to be stock-taking ... what are its debts, what are its assets, what are its liabilities," Koehler said.
Indeed, the IMF has not had the opportunity to conduct a full review of the country's financial situation since 1980, and no staff economist has been to Iraq since 1983. Thus, it's near impossible to assess Iraq's financial condition and the new government will struggle to manage the budget, set up a viable currency system and create a fair, effective tax system.
Although Iraq has remained an IMF and World Bank member, it's failed to repay debts to these institutions. It has also racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign debt over the years. That debt could hamper any efforts by a new government to gain credit from the international community, since countries need to show a solid plan to handle their debts before they can get more loans from the IMF and World Bank.
"We have to lend to somebody who is willing to repay," World Bank President James Wolfensohn told reporters.
There is already speculation that some of the world's richest countries might be prepared to forgive at least some of Iraq's debt accumulated under Saddam Hussein.
U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said Thursday that the Group of Seven industrialized nations (France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada, Japan and the United States) that Iraqis should not be responsible for the debts incurred by Saddam's regime.
"Certainly the people of Iraq shouldn't be saddled with those debts incurred through the regime of the dictator who's now gone," Snow said in a television interview, adding that the G7- should consider offering some debt relief to the country.
G-7 finance ministers and central bankers meet Friday evening and Saturday morning, ahead of the IMF conference.
The Bush administration has made clear that Iraqis would by and large be financially responsible for their reconstruction, namely through sales of their oil. The country's natural resources would make the process of rebuilding considerably different from other post-conflict nations such as Afghanistan, which has depended solely on international financial contributions to get back on its feet after the retreat of the Taliban.
There's no consensus yet on how Iraq's oil reserves, the second-largest in the world after Saudi Arabia, will be controlled and distributed.
But it's clear that the new government must have full support from the United Nations before international financial agencies resume lending to the country.
"We are limited to dealing with recognized governments and that is a decision for the United Nations to take," Wolfensohn said.
Koehler suggested that diplomatic disputes such as the U.S.-led war on Iraq and how best to help the Iraqi economy recover could be resolved.
"The spirit of cooperation (among nations) is intact and strong," he said, adding given the urgency of the situation, it would be necessary for the international community to work together closely and quickly.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Anti - War Groups Fear Loss of Momentum
April 11, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Changing-Protests.html
Anti-war groups are quickly reshaping their tactics for a postwar era, but they fear the huge movement they forged over the last several months will inevitably lose steam as the fighting winds down in Iraq.
``Everybody has paused for a moment,'' said Mary Ellen McNish, head of the American Friends Service Committee, a branch of the pacifist Quaker church. ``We're trying to make sure we're doing the right thing at the right time.''
With near unanimity, anti-war organizers say they will carry through with demonstrations already arranged for the next few weeks, including a march to the White House and a rally in San Francisco on Saturday.
International Answer, which is organizing the events, will retool its message as ``occupation isn't liberation,'' said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a member of the group's steering committee.
``We believe that the U.S. must withdraw from the Middle East,'' she said. The group draws support from the Free Palestine Alliance, some communists and socialists, as well as clergy, unions, academics and others.
Backers of the war haven't fallen silent yet either. On Saturday, conservative groups expect to mount their own rally on the National Mall near the U.S. Capitol, once the scene of many Vietnam War protests.
As U.S. forces took control of Baghdad this week, anti-war activists said they were pleased the war they couldn't stop may be nearing its end. Privately, they also began a heavy round of e-mails, phone calls and meetings to take stock of their own strategy to preserve at least some of the momentum of the largest peace movement since Vietnam.
The Rev. Bob Edgar, co-chairman of Win Without War and general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said organizers were hashing out ``whether Win Without War should continue and what it should do.''
Tom Andrews, Win Without War's national director, said he believes the large coalition, which formed last fall to stop the war on Iraq, will survive with a wider agenda.
United for Peace and Justice, another big newcomer to the peace movement, may start focusing more heavily on smaller regional events than on mass protests, spokesman Jason Kafoury said.
Sociologist Eric Swank of Morehead State University in Kentucky, who is studying the peace movement, said it has already begun to ebb.
``There's a perception that the war has been fast in the last week or so, and that Baghdad has been conquered, and the American public can move on to another issue,'' he said.
``It's just a basic reality,'' acknowledged Gordon Clark, national coordinator of the Iraq Pledge of Resistance. ``When there's a crisis in front of them, people react more.''
For now, anti-war leaders say they will refocus on supporting a dominant U.N. role in rebuilding Iraq and greater American cooperation with that body. Many groups say they must stay active to guard against any Bush administration plan to attack Syria or Iran next, though Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted as saying that won't happen.
``The message that we're concentrating on now is that Iraq needs to be for the Iraqis and, as soon as possible, the United States should withdraw,'' said Sister Alice Gerdeman, a Roman Catholic nun who coordinates the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center in Cincinnati.
Edgar suggested that perhaps his group should rename itself Win Without Wars.
``It's easier to organize people to stop a war than it is once the war is winding down. The good thing is you have a base,'' he said. ``Even if the base shrinks a bit, we believe there's a good opportunity to use the leverage we have.''
Some groups are retooling their messages to denounce what they view as excessive American militarism and to push for U.S. nuclear disarmament, promote domestic issues like better schools and health care, and organize to expel Bush and war-backing congressmen in next year's elections.
Peace Action expects to place newspaper ads this month with two other groups encouraging sympathizers to vote their convictions next year. ``It may not be 100,000 people in the streets, but it's necessary to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again,'' said Peace Action spokesman Scott Lynch.
Many organizers claim credit for delaying the war and forcing Bush to consult with Congress and the United Nations. However, they said their most abiding accomplishment could be a much broader base of support for peace and social justice causes -- if they can rechannel the anti-war energy of recent months.
The broader agendas could make it harder to work together in a movement that has embraced pacifists and veterans, radicals and middle Americans, with only occasional bickering.
Will it unravel without an American war as a unifying target?
``I think if we don't pay careful attention and listen to each other, that might happen, but my experience with the coalition is that won't happen,'' said McNish, of American Friends Service Committee.
On the Net:
http://www.winwithoutwarus.org
http://www.unitedforpeace.org
----
Anti-war protesters sue Chicago
By Al Swanson
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
April 10, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030410-013211-9278r.htm
CHICAGO, April 10 (UPI) -- Attorneys for the National Lawyers Guild Thursday filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of people arrested or allegedly roughed up by police during mass anti-war protests last month.
More than 560 people were detained, some for up to 36 hours, after thousands of demonstrators took to the streets following a rally at Federal Plaza, blocking traffic on Lake Shore Drive and on Michigan Avenue in the first peace demonstration following the start of hostilities in Iraq.
"We're filing this suit on behalf of eight people in their 20s to 58 years old," attorney Jim Fennerty, president of the Chicago Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild told UPI. "By the filing of this class action we are demanding that the city of Chicago and Department of Police take responsibility for their actions on March 20, and be held accountable for their systematic and widespread deprivation of the civil rights of those citizens who exercised their First Amendment freedoms."
Finnerty said two plaintiffs said they were beaten by officers in riot gear and a woman claimed she suffered wrist injuries when plastic handcuffs were left on too tight. Some protesters were held in lockups for up to 36 hours before being released. Others were charged with mob action or reckless conduct and released on $100 bond.
One plaintiff was arrested after getting off a bus and spontaneously deciding to join the marchers.
"You can't just sweep people off the street," Finnerty said.
He said police had orders to halt the protesters and refused to allow the marchers to disperse after they were corralled at Michigan Avenue and Chicago Avenue.
Virtually all organized anti-war protests in Chicago have been non-violent civil disobedience.
Police brought in buses to take the protesters to jail. Finnerty said demonstrators were arrested without probable cause, confined in overcrowded cells, and denied food, toiletries, medical attention and a phone call.
On Wednesday, Alderman Joseph Moore demanded the City Council hold a hearing on police misconduct and alleged abuse of protesters. Moore said reckless conduct charges against the anti-war demonstrators should be dropped.
"Most folks don't know why they were arrested," he told the Daily Defender. "People were not able to leave the scene. They were surrounded by officers in riot gear and suddenly without notice, without warning, officers started making arrests."
Police officials have said they will not drop the charges.
-------
Maintaining A Presence For Peace
GU Protest Survives U.S. Victories in Iraq
By Amy Argetsinger
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 11, 2003; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5157-2003Apr10?language=printer
Their tents went up as the first tanks rolled into Iraq last month. And even after the statues started falling in Baghdad, the camp held its ground yesterday -- for now, anyway.
It was never supposed to last this long, this ad lib protest. Originally, the students only meant to stake their turf on the redbrick plaza in the heart of Georgetown University for a round-the-clock vigil of three days. But after three days, the loose-knit group of 40 or so decided to stick it out a week. Then after a week, when the wrap-up rally had everyone's spirits running high, a bushy-haired sophomore stood up and told his friends: "No -- we can't stop this now."
For the fledgling group known as Peace Action, whose members had been grappling for a foothold amid the bustle of undergraduate political activity at Georgetown, it was a defining moment. They would stay until the end of the school year, they declared. Perhaps even through the summer.
But just three weeks into their vigil, the citizens of Baghdad were suddenly cheering the U.S. military action that the Georgetown group so abhorred. No one dared suggest the war was over, but everyone who stopped by had to ask -- what did this mean for Peace Camp?
"That's a very popular question today," Mary Nagle, a sophomore at the tents yesterday, said with an exhausted laugh and a shrug. "That's what everyone wants to know."
Formed last fall, Peace Action drew many of its members from the hodgepodge of other so-called progressive causes on campus -- Eco Action, Students for a Living Wage, Georgetown Solidarity Committee, Georgetown Students for Fair Trade Coffee. At first, that made it difficult for the new group to gain much credence for its antiwar stance.
"We kind of get a lot of crap for being involved in so many things," said Sasha Kinney, 19, a freshman from Drexel Hill, Pa. "People are like, 'Oh, you'll protest anything.' "
Indeed, the "die-ins" that were among the group's first public protest activities last semester -- everyone dropping to the ground in a pantomime of battlefield carnage -- quickly lost their impact. Yet while they knew they could join the larger antiwar protests on the Mall or on the streets of downtown Washington, the students wanted to direct their message to their classmates.
"A lot of students are continuing their lives as if there's nothing going on," said Patricia Stumpf, a senior from Charlotte. "We can't change the current administration's policies, we can't end the war, but we can remind people of what's going on."
By day, they were handing out literature to passersby or hosting the occasional "teach-in." But there was no shortage of such activity on the student free-for-all zone known as Red Square. Other groups were leafleting there, too, or hanging banners for Asia Fest, for Habitat for Humanity, for a production of "Twelfth Night."
Even with its four ragtag tents and its rainbow pace flag (Italian for "peace") and its chaos of dorm-room detritus -- a pile of shoes, a tangle of blankets, an open box of unwrapped muffins -- after several days, Peace Camp barely drew a notice from many of the students rushing by on their way to and from class.
It was at night, when the other groups had gone home, that the tent city came alive.
Three to 15 people were sleeping there on any given evening in a loose rotation that seemingly operated without a schedule. On a recent Friday night, about a half-dozen were wrapped in blankets in a semicircle illuminated by a single desk lamp.
"If you're here and you want to leave and no one's here, you have to call someone," Kinney said, as an old Smashing Pumpkins CD played softly on the boom box.
"It's a non-hierarchical group," said Emil Totonchi, a freshman from Chicago. "Everyone is responsible."
In a private conversation later, Totonchi explained why he opposed the war. "I don't believe democracy can be forced on a people," he said. "There are so many factions of Iraqi people. . . . We went in on the assumption they would greet us as liberators. But there's a lack of self-determination." On a darker note, he added: "I just don't believe you can liberate corpses."
But there was no talk of corpses that night, the mood light, even giddy, around the cold glow of the desk lamp. Sometimes people will bring guitars or drums, and they'll just sit around and play music, said Anders Fremstad, a freshman from South Dakota. "When the weather's nice, it's wonderful," he said. "It's preferable to staying in my dorm room."
"It's fun," said Hollie Blake, a freshman from Rock Hill, S.C. "A lot of us didn't know each other before."
A bag of groceries mysteriously appeared -- cookie dough, lemonade, coffeecake, sushi. "Where did it come from?" asked Blake, with a shriek of delight.
"Some high school girls from down the street," responded Joe Sciarrillo, a freshman from California with a slightly flustered look. "I don't know, they said they didn't want it."
On its nightly vigils, the Peace Camp has endured catcalls and the occasional thrown eggs. Mostly, though, the campers have been surprised to find themselves in lively conversations with their fellow students, whose daytime hesitance seems to evaporate on the way back from the bars.
Administrators haven't said much of anything. "It's unsaid support," Blake asserted. "Even the highest administrators just walk by and say hi."
Two tall young women who declined to give their names smirked at mention of the camp. "It definitely spurs conversation," one said dryly. "Now it's getting to the point where it's too much."
As the sun finally broke onto Georgetown yesterday afternoon, the fate of Peace Camp remained unclear.
"We're glad Saddam Hussein is gone," junior Noah Riseman said. "I just don't think this was the way to go about it."
He complained that the U.S. media were showing only one side of the Baghdad story: "They're not showing stuff in the hospitals, where they're still overflowing with people with bomb injuries."
Still, it was widely acknowledged that things had changed. Peace Action had scheduled an emergency meeting for late last night to weigh its next step.
"The reason we were out here initially hasn't changed -- we're still against what we see as U.S. imperialism in Iraq," Nagle said defiantly. "We might decide a camp-out is no longer the right tactic, but some kind of banner or something needs to be maintained to show our dissent."
A few Peace Action members stopped by the camp on their way to a puppet show and lecture about the plight of unemployed Argentine workers. Would Nagle join them?
She shook her head regretfully. "I have to stay," she said. "No one else is here."
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Protest Street Closures Expected to Cause Delays
By Christina Pino-Marina
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, April 11, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6404-2003Apr11?language=printer
Street closures in downtown Washington are expected to cause some inconveniences for area drivers this morning and through the weekend as District police prepare for a series of scheduled street demonstrations.
In anticipation of protest against this weekend's International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings, District police in Northwest closed 19th Street between G Street and Pennsylvania Avenue and H Street between 18th and 20th streets at 6 a.m. Police have not said when those roads will be opened again.
Anti-war group marches on Saturday will prompt street closures from Freedom Plaza to Farragut Square, by way of Pennsylvania Avenue, 9th, 15th, 16th, 18th, H, K, M and Eye streets, and Connecticut Avenue. On Sunday, protesters plan to march from 16th and Euclid Streets, Northwest, to the World Bank - a demonstration that could cause traffic congestion on 13th, 14th, 15th, 18th, H and Eye streets. New York and Connecticut avenues could also be affected.
In addition to protests against the IMF and World Bank, anti-war and pro-troop demonstrations are also scheduled to take place. District police said they would announce additional street closures if they are necessary.
Newspaper vending machines and garbage cans have been removed near the World Bank offices. Mary Myers with the D.C. Department of Public Works says crews began removing newspaper racks and garbage cans from the area around the Bank at 18th and Pennsylvania.
Myers said crews will be on standby today, tomorrow and Sunday with extra staff and equipment to clean the streets if necessary.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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