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NUCLEAR
Nuclear Material in Transit Vulnerable to Attack
Niger upset by uranium slur
Pentagon fails to learn from Gulf War illnesses
Tehran's nuclear stonewalling
Iraq had no A-bomb capability, inspector says
Ex - UN Inspector Ritter: Bush Based War on 'A Lie'
200 N Korean missiles pointed at Japan, warns Washington
Pyongyang reprocessing nuclear fuel
Upping the ante for Kim Jong Il
N. Korea Complains About U.S. 'Hostile Acts'
Momentum Builds to End North Korea Nuclear Project
Quest for Firepower How to stop North Korea
Nuclear Fuel Company Virtually Banished from Tennessee County
Rice, Rumsfeld Defend Use of British Finding
Funding for TIA All But Dead
False in One, False in All
Who Is Buried in Bush's Speech?
Democrats Attack Credibility of Bush
Bush Forcefully Defends Intelligence on Iraqi Weapons
Bush Addresses Questions About Liberia and Iraq Intelligence
MILITARY
Africa Trip: Bush Was Shopping for Military Bases
Liberia Not Another Somalia, Citizens Stress
Indonesian parliament bombed
War possible to halt nuclear threat
Blair 'will back policy of armed invasion'
Iraq-Niger uranium claim came from third country: Britain
Political death of a usurper
Cost of restoring Iraq oil production $1.6 bln
Iran finds giant oil field
Body bag maker sues NY over September 11 order
U.S. Troops Make Use of Water Gear
U.S. Seeks Help With Iraq Costs, but Donors Want a Larger Say
Cyprus approves accession to European Union
India denies request for troops in Iraq
India Refuses U.S. Request for Troops
$1 Billion a Week
Iraq Cost Could Mount to $100 Billion
Appointed Iraqi Council Assumes Limited Role
Al-Qaeda not behind Iraq attacks - analysts
Who Is Governing Iraq?
U.S. Convoy Is Attacked in Iraq, Killing 1 Soldier and Wounding 6
Rumsfeld Says Iraq May Need a Larger Force
Syria staging P.R. offensive
U.S. Air Force Sees Quick and Frequent Launches in its Future
Withheld Iraq report blamed on French
A Spy Takes the Bullet
Shelby says Tenet should quit, cites 'failures' at CIA
Call for CIA chief to quit
Mission to Niger
Iraqi council votes to dispatch a delegation to the U.N.
UN Questions British Iraq Nuclear Proof - Diplomats
Rumsfeld's New Army Chief Unifies the Brass
Bush Aides Now Say Claim on Uranium Was Accurate
Bush Aide: Uranium Flap a 'Bunch of Bull'
Bush Defends Uranium Claim After Meeting With U.N. Chief
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Justice Dept. Refuses to Let Qaeda Member Testify
Cold War - Era Sirens Used As Terror Alerts
ENERGY AND OTHER
Windy Britain Powers Up More Offshore Windfarms
Critics Say E.P.A. Won't Analyze Some Clean Air Proposals
The Dangers of Trans Fats
ACTIVISTS
Thousands Rally in Hong Kong; the Answer Is a Rebuff
Uganda children march for peace
Forging The Case For War
Time to End the Dodginess
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear Material in Transit Vulnerable to Attack
Story by Louis Charbonneau
REUTERS AUSTRIA:
July 14, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21489/story.htm
VIENNA - Despite stepped-up security after September 11, 2001, countries remain ill prepared to deal with attacks on nuclear materials in transit, participants at a United Nations conference said.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says radioactive materials ranging from harmless medical supplies to weapons-grade plutonium account for less than two percent of all goods transported by land, 10 percent by air and one percent by sea.
But the volumes are still huge. The cargo carrier DHL boasts on a company brochure that it transports five tons of radioactive material per week on 113 aircraft to 40 destinations around the globe.
While acknowledging there was reason for some concern about the security risks of transporting nuclear materials, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told a week-long conference on the issue that international regulations and industry practice have "an excellent safety record."
"Over several decades of transporting radioactive material, there has not been an in-transit accident with serious human health, economic or environmental consequences," he said.
But John H. Large, a consultant on nuclear issues hired by the environmental group Greenpeace, said current emergency plans would only work for "unintelligent accidents."
"What they haven't prepared for is an intelligent terrorist attack where they know the vulnerabilities of your emergency plan," Large told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference.
For example, he said it would be easy to take a rocket-propelled grenade and shoot it at a standard transport vehicle loaded with radioactive fuel. The result could be disastrous for the local population. "If you're going to ship nuclear materials from one place to another, you have to go through populated areas," Large said. "You have to bring the risk to population."
IMPROVEMENT
An IAEA official told Reuters on condition of anonymity that the September 11 attacks on the United States made clear there was "room for improvement" in tackling the threat of an attack or hijacking of nuclear material in transit.
Despite the wake-up call on September 11, governments and the shipping industry have done little to improve the situation.
"There've been a lot of nice words, but not much has been done," said Large.
Coastal states such as Ireland, Peru and New Zealand are especially worried that countries like the United States and Britain do not inform them of all their nuclear shipments.
The coastal countries complain they cannot protect themselves against attacks or prepare for accidents involving ships carrying nuclear materials at sea.
But Peter Brazel of the Nuclear Safety Section of Ireland's Department of the Environment told Reuters that the United States and other shipping countries did not want to disclose all nuclear shipments because they see that as a security risk.
-------- africa
Niger upset by uranium slur
Niger's main export is uranium
BBC
Monday, 14 July, 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3065165.stm
In Niger, there is continuing anger and dismay at suggestions that it would consider selling uranium to Iraq.
Last week local newspapers were full of criticism of President George W Bush during his whistle-stop tour of Africa when allegations of contact with Iraq again became headline news.
Calls were made in Niger for President Bush to visit in person to apologise for raising the uranium issue during his State of the Union address last year.
The private weekly Le Democrate posed that very question in a headline: Should Niger make the US apologise?
Some radicals in the country even suggested that Niger should complain to the International Court of Justice over President Bush's comments.
Niger is the world's third largest exporter of uranium after Canada and Australia and it is vital to the country's economy. In 1997, Uranium accounted for 70% of export revenues.
Denials
Yet the authorities in Niamey have not gone on record this time.
The poor and sparsely populated nation is unused to Western attention and the government will be keen not to jeopardise the significant help it receives from the United States.
There are three times as many American as French aid workers in the former French colony, says the BBC's Idy Barou in the capital, Niamey.
Conveniently the mines minister has been out of contact in the United States during the past two weeks and is not expected back in Niger until the end of this week.
Whether he could add anything to what is already known about the source of the uranium reports is unclear.
There have already been several denials that the Iraqis had been seeking to buy uranium from Niger in the past few years.
Just two months ago the mines minister said the allegations were "pure invention" and "not true".
In December 2002, Prime Minister Hama Hamadou told the nation: "Iraq has never bought uranium from Niger, and the Niger Government has never discussed selling uranium to Iraq."
Mines
Niger produces almost 3,000 tons of uranium per year, which it sells mainly to France and Japan.
It has two northern mines within a few kilometres of each other. They are both operated by the French company Cogema - one in a joint venture with a local company and other with a state-owned concern.
The raw uranium is exported to France for processing via Cotonou, Benin's capital.
Niger's French-run mines come under the control of the French atomic energy commission.
Our correspondent says that the selling of uranium is basically determined by Cogema and the Niger authorities have no real role in making the deals or distributing the materials.
Mr Hamadou said as much in his a televised address: "Niger cannot sell its uranium to whoever it likes: it has neither the technological means, nor the military capability, nor the ability to do so."
Joseph Wilson, a former US diplomat who went to investigate the issue in Niger concluded as much, saying that controls on Niger's uranium mining were far too strict for any deal with Iraq to be credible.
-------- depleted uranium
Pentagon fails to learn from Gulf War illnesses
7/14/2003
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-07-14-ourview_x.htm
Across the USA, troops fresh from the Iraq war are learning another meaning for the U.S. doctrine of pre-emption. They're checking into medical facilities to follow new Pentagon orders: Give a blood sample and answer a long questionnaire on your health and Iraq service. The information is designed to speed the diagnosis and treatment of any new outbreaks of the mysterious symptoms still afflicting tens of thousands of Persian Gulf War veterans.
But the success of such pre-emptive actions, ordered by Congress, depends on aggressive Pentagon implementation. Already it has missed the chance to collect the best possible before-and-after health snapshots of troops by failing to carefully screen Iraq-bound soldiers.
The oversight - coupled with new evidence that the Pentagon continues to downplay exposure to dangerous chemicals in the first Iraq war - casts doubts on the military's promisesto learn from past blunders and make troops' health a top priority.
One of the most damaging legacies of the 1991 war was the Defense Department's cavalier dismissal of veterans' health complaints. Although nearly one-third of the Gulf War's 697,000 U.S. troops reported symptoms, from chronic fatigue to debilitating neurological problems, the military for years responded skeptically to suggestions that the conditions were related to service in the region. Only intense pressure from veterans, Congress and the media helped win some recognition and benefits.
With more than 250,000 troops returning from the second Iraq war, avoiding a repeat of those mistakes calls for a three-pronged approach. First, returning troops should receive careful and open medical monitoring. Next, the Pentagon needs to provide more forthright disclosure of what happened to Gulf War troops. Finally, Iraq war veterans deserve the comprehensive health and deployment records that can help them file successful claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
The military insists its current screening program, called Force Health Protection, does a better job of safeguarding troops' health. But to date, its actions fall short:
•Poor screening. A mandate from Congress in 1997 called for gathering troops' health information before and after deployment, along with detailed monitoring of battlefield conditions. Yet troops only filled out a cursory pre-war questionnaire. The Pentagon has yet to release the details of the battlefield conditions it monitored - from the quality of the air to troops' exposure to hazardous materials such as chemicals and depleted uranium. And it began the comprehensive screening of troops returning from Iraq only after veterans' groups complained.
•Playing down dangers. The Pentagon says about 100,000 U.S. troops were exposed to a cloud from the destruction of sarin nerve agents in Khamisiyah, Iraq, in March 1991. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, now says that the actual number may be as high as 350,000. It blames the lower figure on the Pentagon's failure to account for weather patterns and concentrations of sarin. The low estimate is part of a troubling pattern. Officials denied the destruction of any nerve agents until a veterans' group unearthed the information in 1995.
•Creating obstacles for benefits. Some 220 federal research projects, costing $224 million, have studied Gulf War illnesses over seven years, many with the Pentagon's participation. The government acknowledges that Gulf War veterans get sick at two to three times the rate of those who didn't deploy and that they have baffling symptoms.
But veterans still must furnish proof that their illnesses are connected to their service when they apply for compensation. The Pentagon has not been able to supply them with detailed records.
In spite of those shortcomings, the VA is taking positive steps to classify some medical symptoms as Gulf War-related. It already has done so with the early onset of Lou Gehrig's disease, which has been linked to nerve-agent exposure and is twice as common in Gulf War veterans as in others. That crucial move can cut through the red tape that keeps thousands of sick veterans from getting full benefits.
The VA also has set up a commission to assess research into Gulf War symptoms. Its head, James Binns, says new studies increasingly suggest links between veterans' ailments and exposure to chemical agents.
The Pentagon now can do its part to pre-empt a damaging repeat of the first Gulf War fiasco. Its health screenings still can protect troops' health if they become the foundation for a database available to researchers and veterans.
But only complete and accurate information can make the Pentagon's doctrine of pre-emption a reality when it comes to protecting troops' health.
-------- iran
Tehran's nuclear stonewalling
July 14, 2003
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030713-102225-5078r.htm
In yet the latest sign of Iran's refusal to come clean about its nuclear weapons program, the ruling mullahs last week stiffed International Atomic Energy Agency President Mohammed ElBaradei, who visited Tehran in an effort to persuade the regime to agree to tougher inspections. Currently, Iran is only required to accept prearranged IAEA inspections of nuclear sites that it chooses, giving it the ability to steer inspectors away from places where nuclear weapons are actually being developed. And that's the way things will stay for now, because Iran refuses to do anything beyond holding more talks with the United Nations-affiliated IAEA. This outcome will surely be unacceptable to the Bush administration.
Until last year, U.S. estimates were that Iran might produce a nuclear weapon in eight to 10 years. Now, Washington believes that Iran might be able to do so in the next few years. In December, Iran admitted that it is building two additional nuclear facilities - the Arak and Natanz sites - which could assist an atomic weapons development program. At the Natanz site, located approximately 200 miles south of Tehran, there is a uranium enrichment facility, which is expected to be ready by 2005. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Natanz could produce enough material for two weapons a year.
"It appears from the [commercial satellite] imagery that a service road, several small structures, and perhaps three large structures are being built below grade, and some of these are already being covered with earth. Iran clearly intended to harden and bury that facility," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters in December. "That facility was probably never intended by Iran to be a declared component of the peaceful program. Instead, Iran has been caught constructing a secret underground site where it could produce fissile material."
Moreover, according to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the regime has activated yet another nuclear development site in the past six months: the Kalahdouz complex, operated by the military's Defense Industry Organization and located just north of Tehran. Also, NCRI - which has provided accurate information about Iran's nuclear weapons programs in the past - says that Iran has hidden another uranium enrichment site close to that military complex.
Just last month, the IAEA itself issued a report that confirms Washington's longstanding charge: that Iran is attempting to deceive the international community about its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. And on Wednesday, Mr. ElBaradei met with Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and other senior officials, urging them to sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that would grant the IAEA the power to make surprise visits to suspected nuclear facilities in Iran. Their refusal - and the mounting evidence that Tehran continues to forge ahead with its weapons programs - mean the Bush administration should ratchet up the economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran to come clean about its nuclear development efforts.
-------- iraq / inspections
Iraq had no A-bomb capability, inspector says
Dug - Up Iraqi Parts' Potential Faces Doubt
July 14, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030714.wbagh714/BNStory/International/
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Backyard-Cache.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- A top U.N. weapons hunter says it would have been ``virtually impossible'' for Iraq to revive a nuclear bomb program with equipment recently dug up from a Baghdad backyard, as the Bush administration contends.
Jacques Baute said the long-term monitoring of Iraq's nuclear establishment planned by the U.N. Security Council would have stifled any attempt to build a huge uranium-enrichment plant for making bomb material.
``This is a mistake people are making,'' Baute said. Such contentions ignore the fact that Iraq would have operated for years under international controls had the U.N. plan not been aborted by war, he said.
Baute also said in an interview with The Associated Press that it appears the unearthed cache of uranium enrichment parts, surrendered by an Iraqi scientist last month, lacked critical components, and its accompanying blueprints were marred by errors.
Baute, a French nuclear physicist, led the International Atomic Energy Agency inspection teams that -- until the U.S.-British invasion in March -- crisscrossed Iraq in search of banned weapons.
His assessment of the hidden equipment came as a furor grew in Washington over President Bush's use of an earlier allegation -- that Baghdad sought uranium from Niger -- to bolster the White House case for war.
It was Baute's investigation last February that unmasked as forgeries the documents that underpinned the claims about Niger.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is holding to the Niger story, noting that the British government now says other, unspecified intelligence supports the uranium allegation. But London hasn't supplied Washington with any such information, Rice acknowledged.
Likewise, Baute's office has received nothing from the British three weeks after asking for the purported independent evidence, said sources at IAEA headquarters in Vienna, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The U.N. agency's experts believe all reports of a Niger connection stem from the same bogus documents.
Eliminating Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction was the main reason given by Bush for invading the Arab country. But three months of searching by the U.S. military has found no banned arms, just as some 700 inspections by U.N. teams from November to March also uncovered no signs of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs.
Before the war, Baghdad said all its chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed during U.N. inspections in the 1990s.
However, President Bush said Monday he remained convinced that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop a weapons program that threatened the world and justified the United States going to war. ``Our country made the right decision,'' Bush said.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher had no comment when asked about Baute's statements. But he told reporters: ``I think the findings in Iraq demonstrate that Iraq had not abandoned its intentions on nuclear programs. Just buried them. Maybe more. We'll see. We'll find the full extent of that as time goes on.''
Iraq never had nuclear arms but was making progress building sophisticated centrifuges to produce enriched uranium for bombs when the 1991 Gulf War intervened. Inspectors dismantled the program.
In early June, the centrifuge program chief, Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, turned over to U.S. authorities equipment and documents he said he buried in his garden in 1991, when he said Iraqi leaders told him to hold the parts to revive the program.
The IAEA notes that Obeidi's account tends to undercut one White House contention: that Saddam's government had secretly resumed its nuclear program in recent years.
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer has instead now focused on the Obeidi cache's potential, saying it would have allowed Iraq to rebuild weapons facilities ``once sanctions were ended.''
But Baute, in the interview Friday, pointed out that once U.N. economic sanctions were ended, after inspectors certified Baghdad's weapons work had ceased, the Security Council was to have imposed an Ongoing Monitoring and Verification regime on Iraq -- controls short-circuited by the U.S.-British invasion.
Inspectors, with unhindered access under U.N. resolutions, would have kept close watch on Iraq's military-industrial complex, aided by air and water sampling technology, satellite and aerial surveillance, and monitoring of Iraq's imports.
An enrichment plant, a vast array of thousands of centrifuges, would have been easily detected, said Baute, who once helped build French nuclear bombs.
``To have turned it into a full-blown enrichment program while OMV was in place would have been virtually impossible,'' he said of the Obeidi equipment.
Although U.S. officials have not shared their Obeidi data with the IAEA, Baute's experts closely examined available photos of the components and found they included one critical part, the bottom bearing assembly.
But other vital elements apparently are lacking, Baute said, including the advanced carbon-fiber rotor, the spinning tube in which uranium gas is separated.
``It is far, far from being a complete set,'' he said.
He also noted the Iraqis would have had to expose themselves by searching for foreign manufacturers to duplicate complex components.
As for Obeidi's documents, they appear to be copies of centrifuge drawings and papers seized by IAEA inspectors in 1995, Baute said.
``These Iraqi drawings seem to contain mistakes,'' he said. German engineers who secretly assisted the centrifuge program apparently didn't leave their hosts finished designs, and the Iraqis erred at times in filling in gaps.
--------
Ex - UN Inspector Ritter: Bush Based War on 'A Lie'
July 14, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-un-ritter.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Time has shown that the United Nations did a good job disarming Iraq while President Bush went to war based on ``a lie,'' former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter said on Monday.
``The inspectors went in, got good cooperation, got immediate access to the sites they needed to get to, and they found nothing -- nothing related to weapons of mass destruction programs,'' said Ritter, a former U.S. Marine and senior weapons inspector turned anti-war activist.
``And yet, we heard over and over again that 'The president knows that these weapons exist, the president knows that this is a threat that can only be responded to by the United States acting unilaterally,' because the United Nations was unable or unwilling to complete the (disarmament) task mandated by the Security Council,'' he told reporters at U.N. headquarters.
``The entire case the Bush administration made against Iraq is a lie,'' he said.
Ritter leveled his latest blast at the U.S. administration as Bush fended off critics' charges that he misled the American people by relying on faulty intelligence to justify the war.
A top inspector in Iraq for nearly seven years before resigning in 1998, Ritter was a vocal critic both before and after the war of U.S. claims that Iraq possessed illicit weapons of mass destruction. His latest book, ``Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America,'' was just published.
Ritter said Washington had never meant to let U.N. inspectors finish the task of disarming Iraq, as assigned to them by the 15-nation Security Council.
``The policy of the United States toward Iraq was not disarmament. It has always been regime removal -- eliminating Saddam Hussein from power. It's been the stated policy of the United States since 1991,'' he said.
Bush has come under fire for citing an allegation in his State of the Union speech in January that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa to make nuclear weapons. Administration officials now say they have doubts about the evidence the statement was true.
Bush told reporters on Monday his administration believed the claim was true at the time and only afterward learned there were doubts about it.
-------- japan
200 N Korean missiles pointed at Japan, warns Washington
Monday July 14, 2003
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jul2003-daily/14-07-2003/world/w2.htm
TOKYO: The US government has warned Japan that North Korea has positioned 200 medium-range Rodong missiles to target Japan, a report said on Sunday, quoting a foreign ministry official here.
Washington had earlier told Tokyo that Pyongyang already possessed small nuclear warheads that could be mounted in ballistic missiles, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
The Rodong has an estimated range of 1,300 kilometres (800 miles), which makes it capable of hitting anywhere in Japan.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported on Sunday that North Korea had told the United States it had completed reprocessing spent fuel rods to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday it was unclear whether North Korea's claim that it has completed the reprocessing of spent fuel rods to extract plutonium for nuclear weapon was true.
Asked about South Korean press reports that UN-based North Korean envoys told US officials last week in New York that the reprocessing operation was completed on June 30, Rumsfeld told NBC: "They have told us they have nuclear weapons, they have also made assertions with respect to the pace at which they're reprocessing."
"Some people believe what they are saying, other people don't believe what they are saying," the defence secretary added.
Rumsfeld reiterated that President George W. Bush's administration had been working with Japan, South Korea, China and Russia and "demonstrated deep concern about the fact that the North Korean nuclear program is progressing."
Earlier Sunday, South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted Chang Sung-Min, a former South Korean ruling party lawmaker, as saying the informal meeting in New York was attended by North Korea's UN Representative Park Gil-Yon and US State Department official Jack Pritchard.
Chang reportedly said North Korean envoys disclosed Pyongyang's plan to extract more plutonium from a five-megawatt reactor and to resume the construction of new reactors at its Yongbyon nuclear complex.
Earlier on Sunday, a South Korean news agency reported that North Korea had reprocessed all 8,000 spent fuel rods stored at its Yongbyong nuclear complex, giving the communist state the means to make more atomic weapons.
According to the Yonhap agency, Chang Sung-min, a top intelligence aide to former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, said UN-based North Korean diplomats had told US officials that the operation had just been completed.
North Korea's alleged nuclear threat will be top of the agenda during Australian Prime Minister John Howard's week-long trip to Japan, the Philippines and South Korea, which began on Sunday.
-------- korea
Pyongyang reprocessing nuclear fuel
July 14, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030714-103812-2530r.htm
PYONGYANG, North Korea, July 14 -- A U.S. government source confirmed North Korea has begun reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods.
The Kyodo news service said the evidence was obtained at the Yongbyon facilities, where monitors detected krypton 85, a reprocessing byproduct, in air samples.
It is almost certain that the new finding will heighten the already tense relationship between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program because the reprocessing will enable the North to make more nuclear arms.
The latest move will also make it difficult to resolve the nuclear standoff through U.S.-proposed five-way talks also involving Japan, China and South Korea.
This is the first physical evidence indicating North Korea has begun the reprocessing work.
Krypton 85 is released into the atmosphere when spent fuel rods are reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.
At China-brokered talks with the United States in Beijing in April, North Korea claimed to possess nuclear weapons and have reprocessed spent fuel rods.
----
Upping the ante for Kim Jong Il
Pentagon Plan 5030, a new blueprint for facing down North Korea
By Bruce B. Auster and Kevin Whitelaw
U.S. News
7/14/03
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030721/usnews/21korea.htm
Within the past two months, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has ordered U.S. military commanders to devise a new war plan for a possible conflict with North Korea. Elements of the draft, known as Operations Plan 5030, are so aggressive that they could provoke a war, some senior Bush administration officials tell U.S. News.
Adm. Thomas Fargo, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, and senior Pentagon planners are developing the highly classified plan. The administration insiders, who are critical of the plan, say it blurs the line between war and peace. The plan would give commanders in the region authority to conduct maneuvers--before a war has started--to drain North Korea's limited resources, strain its military, and perhaps sow enough confusion that North Korean generals might turn against the country's leader, Kim Jong Il. "Some of the things [Fargo] is being asked to do," says a senior U.S. official, "are, shall we say, provocative."
There are several war plans for Korea--Plans 5026 and 5027, as well as 5030--that outline the different phases of war and the specific provisions for movements of large numbers of troops, aircraft carriers, and other war-fighting requirements. U.S. News has learned details of the prewar phase of the newest version of Plan 5030. Some officials believe the draft plan amounts to a strategy to topple Kim's regime by destabilizing its military forces. The reason: It is being pushed by many of the same administration hard-liners who advocated regime change in Iraq. The Pentagon only recently began offering details of the plan to top officials at the White House, the State Department, and other agencies. It has not yet been approved. A Pentagon spokesman declined comment.
One scenario in the draft involves flying RC-135 surveillance flights even closer to North Korean airspace, forcing Pyongyang to scramble aircraft and burn scarce jet fuel. Another option: U.S. commanders might stage a weeks-long surprise military exercise, designed to force North Koreans to head for bunkers and deplete valuable stores of food, water, and other resources. The current draft of 5030 also calls for the Pentagon to pursue a range of tactical operations that are not traditionally included in war plans, such as disrupting financial networks and sowing disinformation.
Against the wall
Some administration officials and military experts say they consider these tactics dangerously provocative. What would happen, they ask, if North Korea shot down an RC-135 or lobbed artillery at South Korea? "What the Pentagon is trying to do is balance the risk between ceding the initiative to the enemy or taking steps to influence it," says Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "But does war become more likely?"
America's allies in the region--South Korea and Japan--think so. They, along with China, worry that if the Bush administration puts too much pressure on North Korea, Pyongyang could strike back in unpredictable ways. "Once we push them too hard against the wall," says a Japanese official, "we do not know what kind of reaction Kim Jong Il will have."
It is the Pentagon's job to be ready for war--and critics of this war plan admit as much. The Pentagon work on 5030 was triggered by Rumsfeld's desire to reinvent the military in the wake of lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq--and that includes the way the nation plans for war. Says one official, "The secretary wants to make how we plan for conflicts responsive to changing situations."
But if the Pentagon gives commanders more authority to take aggressive actions in peacetime, as contemplated in Plan 5030, it risks tripping over the president's--and Congress's--authority to commit the nation to war, says a senior official. "Who decides when to go to war?" the official asks. "Good question."
----
N. Korea Complains About U.S. 'Hostile Acts'
July 14, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-un.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - North Korea, locked in a nuclear stand-off with the United States, has complained to the Security Council that the United States was committing hostile acts against his country, Spain's U.N. ambassador said on Monday.
Inocencio Arias, who holds the council's rotating presidency for July, said North Korea's U.N. ambassador, Pak Gil Yon, delivered the message in a July 2 meeting.
``He said that the United States was committing unfriendly and hostile acts toward North Korea,'' Arias told reporters after briefing the council on their meeting.
``According to him, the situation is deteriorating and there should be no pressure on the Security Council about getting any statement or declaration,'' Arias said. ``He told me he believed the unfriendly acts by the United States should stop.''
The United States has been pressing the council since April to approve a statement condemning North Korea for reviving its nuclear weapons program, but China and Russia have so far blocked any action in the 15-nation body.
The issue emerged last October when U.S. officials said North Korea had acknowledged running a covert atomic program. The government in Pyongyang later kicked out U.N. nuclear inspectors, dropped out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and announced it had atomic weapons and would make more.
While the United States wants the council to take up the issue, Pyongyang has fought hard to prevent this, insisting instead on bilateral talks with Washington.
Arias quoted Pak as saying that among the hostile actions taken by Washington were including Pyongyang in President Bush's axis of evil along with Iraq and Iran, increasing military aid to South Korea and deploying more U.S. troops along North Korea's border with South Korea.
A U.S. official said the border zone was under U.N. rather than U.S. command.
Arias said no other council members had spoken during the closed-door briefing on his meeting with Pak. Asked what steps the council would take next on the North Korean crisis, he responded: ``For the time being, no steps.''
--------
Momentum Builds to End North Korea Nuclear Project
July 14, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-kedo.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Momentum is building to formally suspend a multibillion dollar nuclear power project under construction in North Korea by the United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union, U.S. and diplomatic sources said on Monday.
Members of the Korean Energy Development Organization, the project developer, began working-level talks in New York on Monday on the issue of what suspension would mean and its likely impact on Pyongyang, the sources told Reuters.
The meeting comes as Washington presses Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions by organizing an international crackdown on North Korean counterfeiting and trafficking in narcotics and missiles.
``If we're going to be ordered to suspend, we'd like to see it done in an orderly and safe manner and in a manner that doesn't make things worse,'' one diplomat said.
Some analysts say suspension would be seen as effective termination of the project and this could undermine any chance of a peaceful resolution of the North Korea nuclear crisis.
Others say it is a logical and overdue extension of U.S. policy since senior Bush administration officials have long made clear they have no intention of allowing the North to take control of a nuclear power reactor.
No formal decision on the $5 billion project is expected at this week's meetings, a State Department official said.
The ``consultations will identify only technical and legal aspects of the light water reactor project that require eventual consideration by the senior board with respect to the future of the project,'' he said.
JAPAN ROLE CITED
But the diplomat said ``there is momentum building toward a suspension'' of the project, which involves nearly 1000 workers at the North Korean site known as Kumho. Other U.S. sources echoed this assessment.
One sign was a report last week by Kyodo news agency that Japan had proposed a temporary suspension of the project as a way to bridge a gap between the United States and South Korea.
Under a 1994 deal, North Korea agreed to freeze a plutonium program to produce nuclear weapons fuel in return for a U.S. pledge to build two light-water nuclear reactors and annual deliveries of heavy fuel oil.
The light water reactors, considered less prone to diversion for nuclear weapons use, were intended to provide the impoverished North with desperately needed energy.
Most project costs are borne by South Korea and Japan.
The Bush administration never liked the 1994 agreement, which it felt rewarded an untrustworthy regime for doing things it should have been doing anyway. The deal fell apart last October after Washington said Pyongyang had acknowledged a second, covert, program to enrich uranium for bombmaking.
Pyongyang has since made a series of confusing comments about its nuclear activities, including that it had reprocessed 8,000 spent fuel rods that could fuel five or six bombs beyond the one or two Washington says it already possesses.
Under U.S. pressure, KEDO last fall suspended fuel oil deliveries to North Korea but continued building the reactors.
The United States is supposed to supply key nuclear components for the project and ``given North Korea's recent actions and statements on nuclear weapons, nobody should expect the U.S. to approve the transfer of sensitive nuclear technology to North Korea,'' a White House official said.
Critics say the project will not require transfer of the nuclear components until 2005 or 2006, so there is no need to suspend the work now and provoke Pyongyang while the U.S. and allies are trying to draw the North into negotiations.
--------
Quest for Firepower How to stop North Korea's drive for nukes.
By Fred Kaplan,
Slate
Monday, July 14, 2003
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085595/
Two developments over the weekend lend a new urgency to the nuclear crisis that has been brewing in North Korea, all but unattended, for the past nine months.
First, North Korean officials say they have reprocessed all 8,000 of their fuel rods at the Yongbyon nuclear complex, the first and crucial step in producing the plutonium needed to make atom bombs. While they may be exaggerating, reprocessing does seem to have begun (which seemed unclear just a few weeks ago), as indicated by traces of Krypton-85, a chemical byproduct of reprocessing, that U.S. intelligence has detected in the atmosphere nearby.
Second, while North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il may be the battiest leader on the planet, he has good reason to believe Bush wants to overthrow him-even to attack his country, if that's what it takes-and the latest U.S. News & World Report will only reinforce these fears.
The magazine details a draft of a new Pentagon war plan-Plan 5030-that gives American commanders the authority to take highly provocative actions against North Korea even before a war has started. For instance, they can conduct maneuvers or hold surprise military exercises, with the aim of flushing North Korean troops out of their barracks and onto heightened alert. Or they can order RC-135 spy planes to fly right up to the border, forcing the North to scramble jet fighters. The purpose of these actions would be to strain the North Korean military's scarce resources and to sow enough confusion among its officers that they might turn against Kim's regime.
Plan 5030 has not yet been approved, but its very disclosure deepens the crisis-and the opportunity for a settlement. (This may have been the intent of those who leaked the plan-"insiders," according to the story, who worry that the plan's authors are dangerously, and deliberately, blurring the line between war and peace.)
Well over a year ago, Bush famously placed North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, in the "axis of evil"; several high-ranking aides have since expressed desires for "regime change" in Pyongyang as well as Baghdad and Tehran. North Korean foreign ministry officials have been saying for months that they need a "nuclear deterrent" to hold Bush's "hostile" intentions at bay. The lesson they learned from the gulf wars-this year's and 1991's Desert Storm-was that not having nuclear weapons invites American attack.
The news story about Plan 5030-which also reports that the plan's most fervent advocates are the same Pentagon officials who pushed for invading Iraq-will only confirm the North Koreans' perceptions, and thus accelerate their drive for nukes.
Bush can now follow one of three paths. He can push ahead with Plan 5030, step up efforts to destabilize Kim Jong-il's regime, and-in line with the other publicly known U.S. war plan, OPLAN 5027-launch a pre-emptive strike against the Yongbyon nuclear complex and other military targets. This might be a good idea (the world would be a better place without a North Korean bomb and, for that matter, without the Kim Jong-il regime), if Bush's war planners could guarantee they can destroy the complex before any bombs are produced and destroy North Korea's 10,000 or so artillery guns-some of them buried in the sides of mountains (and therefore very hard to hit), several tipped with chemical warheads, and most within range of Seoul (and thus able to kill hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians, as well as tens of thousands of American soldiers).
The problem, of course, is that no war planner can guarantee such an attack, or even give it an acceptably high probability of success. The risks, and the costs of failure, are way too high. For better or for worse, there is no good military option.
That being the case, Bush has two choices. He can muddle through, as he has been doing-sending envoys to the occasional multilateral chat but otherwise refusing, on some misconceived notion of "principle," to do business with nasty characters-and hope that, not far down the road, Kim's regime collapses, whether from pressure, poverty, or entropy. This course, too, will not likely bear fruit, except for plutonium seedlings from Yongbyon.
So, unless Bush prefers a nuclear North Korea to the pangs of compromise, he is left with one course-a negotiated buy-out. Kim has been requesting such a buy-out ever since the crisis started last October, and if Bush can see beyond the cliché of tagging all such schemes as "blackmail" or "appeasement"-if his advisers could remind him that all diplomacy (especially nuclear diplomacy) involves a certain amount of bribery-there may be a chance to stop this wreck before it happens.
Essentially, Kim's minions say he will abandon his nuclear program and open up the reactors to inspection, in exchange for a U.S. non-aggression pact and the resumption of some economic assistance. This isn't a bad deal, really. A bipartisan group of congressmen who went to Pyongyang last month put a 10-point plan on the table, outlining a way to achieve these ends. The minions said they liked it. No one has explained why Bush shouldn't adopt the plan as his and start the talks.
Obviously, some administration officials think he should go for a negotiated solution. That's why they leaked Plan 5030-to highlight how closely this crisis might veer to war. Kim Jong-il thinks we're going to attack him, so he rushes his nuclear-weapons program to deter the onslaught-which incites Pentagon officials to drum up better plans to attack him. The alarming question before us all: Will Bush break this deadly circle, or complete it?
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- tennessee
Nuclear Fuel Company Virtually Banished from Tennessee County
July 14, 2003
From: Joseph Malherek - jmalherek@CITIZEN.ORG
Widespread Citizen Opposition Spurred Decision by Trousdale County Commission to Establish "Good Neighbor" Guidelines, Effectively Barring Uranium Enrichment Plant from County
Louisiana Energy Services (LES)-a multinational consortium of energy companies seeking to build and operate a uranium enrichment plant in the United States-may have been effectively booted out of yet another community, this time near the town of Hartsville, in Trousdale County, Tennessee. The Trousdale County Commission, which is responsible for zoning the site, voted unanimously (17-0) on July 3, 2003 to set strict guidelines for the plant that LES may not be willing or able meet, perhaps signaling the end of the project in middle Tennessee, and spelling a great victory for local citizens and county officials rightly concerned about the potential health hazard created by the release of radioactive and toxic contaminants from such a plant. A new uranium enrichment plant would supplement the country's sole operating plant in Paducah, Kentucky-which runs at only about fifty-percent capacity-to provide fuel for nuclear power reactors.
This is the third defeat for LES. After a decade of regulatory delays and fierce citizen opposition, LES was forced to abandon its initial plan to build a uranium enrichment plant near the small town of Homer, Louisiana. And last year in August, the company was considering a site in Unicoi County, in eastern Tennessee, for the plant, but jettisoned that idea when local residents began organizing and speaking out against the plant.
Now it seems virtually certain that LES will not be able to develop the plant at its chosen site near Hartsville on land previously owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The decision by the Trousdale County Commission to approve "good neighbor" guidelines for the plant includes a provision requiring its operator to store no more than 2,000 tons of radioactive waste on the site and also remove such waste from the site within ninety days of its creation. The type of plant proposed by LES could produce more than 2,800 tons of waste (in the form of depleted uranium) per year, and the company has yet to come up with a feasible way to dispose this waste. The waste-removal requirement has been considered a "deal-breaker" by LES officials; hence, the near certainty that LES will have to either look elsewhere or accept defeat. Furthermore, Michael Nesbitt-the recently-appointed chairperson of the Four Lake Regional Industrial Development Authority, which owns the land sought for the plant-is an outspoken opponent of the plant, making its sale to LES even more unlikely.
So what now for LES? Already the group, led by European uranium enrichment firm Urenco, is being courted by other counties and states, whose officials are driven by a desire for the jobs and taxes that such a plant would generate along with its dirty and dangerous waste. According to the Tennessean, a Nashville daily newspaper, another unspecified Tennessee county has already asked LES to consider it for the site of its plant. And U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), one of the leading proponents of nuclear energy in the Senate, formally invited LES to reconsider a site near Carlsbad, New Mexico for its proposed plant after hearing of the company's woes in Tennessee.
However, the track record of LES does not bode well for its future, and residents faced with the development of a radioactive waste-producing plant in their backyard may respond just as those residents of Hartsville and Homer have: by taking control of their destiny and working through democratic channels to ensure ecological integrity and good public health in their communities.
Find out more about LES and uranium enrichment here: http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_power_plants/uranium/articles.cfm?ID=8250
Go to this URL for an interactive on-line version of this update: http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_power_plants/uranium/articles.cfm?ID=10070
-------- us politics
Rice, Rumsfeld Defend Use of British Finding
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 14, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51632-2003Jul13?language=printer
Two top senior Bush administration officials yesterday defended the president's use of British intelligence about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa in his State of the Union address and said it may yet turn out to be true.
Appearing on Sunday television shows, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, both confirmed that the CIA had voiced its doubts about the allegation that was included in a September 2002 British dossier published on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. But they said the British had sources beyond those of the U.S. intelligence agency and that London continued to stand by its story.
On Friday, CIA Director George J. Tenet took responsibility for not seeking removal from the president's January address of the 16-word sentence: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Tenet's statement came just hours after Bush had appeared to blame the CIA, which the president said had cleared his remarks.
Rumsfeld, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," said that it was "technically correct, what the president said, that the [British government] did say that and still says that." But the defense secretary added that Bush and Tenet now believe "referencing another country's intelligence as opposed to your own" was probably the wrong thing to do in a speech as important as the State of the Union.
Rice and Rumsfeld also described the political storm the statement caused in Washington as overblown.
"End of story," Rumsfeld said on ABC's "This Week."
Rice said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that "it was a mistake about a single sentence, a single data point. And I frankly think it has been overblown." She described as "ludicrous" the "notion that the president of the United States took the country to war because he was concerned with one sentence about whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa." She said with regard to Iraq's nuclear program there was "a long story about acquisition programs, about illegal procurement programs, about keeping scientist networks together."
Beyond that, she said, "the president took the nation to war to depose a bloody tyrant who had defied the world for 12 years, who was building a weapons of mass destruction program."
Rice went on to say that the British had other documents and sources beyond those also possessed by U.S. intelligence that have since been found to have been forged. But Rice confirmed an earlier story in The Washington Post that the British have shared neither the intelligence underlying their statement nor its source.
"The British have reasons because of the arrangements that they made . . . that they cannot share them with us," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday."
Rice also confirmed that a reference to Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger was removed from Bush's October 2002 speech in Cincinnati on Hussein's threat to the United States after Tenet personally intervened. "There was a single report of a particular transaction. . .and there were questions about that," she said on CNN's "Late Edition."
Rice and Rumsfeld said they eventually expected weapons or evidence of those programs would be found.
Rumsfeld, on "This Week," said the new Iraq Survey Group, directed by David Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is now working for Tenet, is interrogating people rather than going from one suspected site to another. "We just have to be patient," Rumsfeld said. "There isn't anyone who's looked at all the intelligence that I know of who doesn't believe that the intelligence community was correct."
While the administration defended its position, Democrats and even one Republican voiced concern.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee and a longtime critic of Tenet, agreed there was "not enough substance to back up" the president's 16-word sentence. He said most of the blame should be placed on Tenet because a strong CIA director should have said: "Stop that. Don't say that." Shelby added that Bush "ought to be able to rely on the speechwriters who vet this stuff before he gives it."
Sen. Carl Levin (Mich.), who as ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee has been critical of the administration's handling of Iraq intelligence leading up to the war, said the sentence attributed to the British was "highly misleading" and was "intended to create a false impression."
He added that while Tenet had taken responsibility, "someone in the White House was pushing the CIA" to accept the language. He said it was important "to find out who was putting the pressure on the CIA to go along with something that the CIA did not believe in."
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee and a Democratic presidential contender, said on "Meet the Press," "This is not an issue of George Tenet. This is an issue of George Bush." He said he saw in the controversy over Bush's speech a pattern that runs through administration statements on energy policy, economic policy, Iraq and the war on terrorism. "The American people have not been let in to understand what is going on, what the basis of decisions will be."
On Iraq, Graham said he hoped Iraq's weapons are found "because if we don't find those weapons, the credibility of the United States around the world and inside the United States with its own citizens will be seriously eroded."
Another presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), picked up on Graham's theme in an appearance on CNN. He said, "What happens when they come to us and tell us, well now, this is what our intelligence tells us about Iran or this is what our intelligence tells us about Syria or North Korea?" Kerry said it was not a matter of politics but of need to focus on the "enormous, serious question about our protection and the judgments we must make in the future and the quality of our intelligence."
----
Funding for TIA All But Dead
By Ryan Singel,
Jul. 14, 2003
Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59606,00.html
The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would troll Americans' personal records to find terrorists before they strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies: death by legislation.
The Senate's $368 billion version of the 2004 defense appropriations bill, released from committee to the full Senate on Wednesday, contains a provision that would deny all funds to, and thus would effectively kill, the Terrorism Information Awareness program, formerly known as Total Information Awareness. TIA's projected budget for 2004 is $169 million.
TIA is the brainchild of John Poindexter, a key figure from the Iran-Contra scandal, who now heads the research effort at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Critics on the left and right have called TIA an attempt to impose Big Brother on Americans. The program would use advanced data-mining tools and a mammoth database to find patterns of terrorist activities in electronic data trails left behind by everyday life.
The Senate bill's language is simple but comprehensive: "No funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense ... or to any other department, agency or element of the Federal Government, may be obligated or expended on research and development on the Terrorism Information Awareness program."
The removal of funds from the program marks the strongest Congressional reaction to TIA since it first gained prominent media attention in November 2002.
The Senate likely will vote on and pass the bill early next week as lawmakers hope to send the spending bill to the White House before Congress recesses in August.
After the Senate votes, the provision's fate will be decided by a joint committee, which will reconcile the Senate's bill with the House version. The House version contains no explicit provision to deny funds to TIA. But Congress watchers say opponents of the TIA likely will succeed in killing it.
"The provision was added by the consensus of the committee," said David Carle, a spokesman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, a member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee.
Carle also said that the drive to include the provision denying funds was led by Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, who chairs both the defense subcommittee and the appropriations committee.
"The defunding has a chance of surviving committee," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "If Stevens is behind it, then it almost certainly will happen."
Both bills also seek to prevent the use of the data-mining system on American citizens without Congressional approval. That provision was included in the Senate version at the request of Sen. Ron Wyden.
Wyden, a prominent critic of the program, inserted a similar limitation on TIA in a bill passed in February. His amendment also required the Pentagon to submit a report to Congress or face loss of funds for the program.
Darpa submitted the 108-page report to Congress on May 19. The report detailed the program's many components and announced the renaming of the program.
Privacy advocates lambasted the name change as "cosmetic." The Electronic Frontier Foundation's analysis, which called the report a "major disappointment," noted that discussions of privacy or civil liberties issues were "conspicuously absent."
----
False in One, False in All
by Sheldon Richman,
July 14, 2003
Future of Freedom Foundatio
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0307i.asp
When I was a newspaper reporter covering the criminal courts in Pennsylvania, lawyers always told juries they were entitled to apply this old legal principle to any witness: falsis in unum, falsis in omnibus - false in one thing, false in all things. This means that if jurors determined that a witness was untruthful in one material statement, they were justified in dismissing the witness's entire testimony.
If juries are entitled to do this, so, I submit, are the American people with respect to presidents, even President Bush.
The one difference is that according to the evidence, Bush has not been false in only one thing. Two cases come to mind. (There are undoubtedly others.)
First is his statement in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had tried to buy significant quantities of uranium from an African nation (Niger). The White House position today is that this was a factually incorrect statement. But we know more than that. We know that long before the State of the Union speech was written Bush's government was warned not to trust the reports because they were based on fraudulent documents. In 2002 former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson had been asked by the CIA to investigate reports of the alleged attempted uranium buy and concluded they were bogus. The impetus for the request was Vice President Dick Cheney's interest in an intelligent report about Iraq's attempt to buy uranium.
As Wilson wrote in the New York Times recently, "Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.... I spent ... eight days [in Niger] drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." Wilson writes that U.S. Ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick was not surprised by his findings and believed her own earlier reports had put the rumor to rest.
In March 2002, 10 months before Bush's speech, Wilson relayed his findings to the CIA and the State Department's African Affairs Bureau. "There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip," he wrote in the Times. Thus he was surprised when he heard British Prime Minister Tony Blair refer to the alleged attempted buy six months later and President Bush do so ten months later. "If ... the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses," Wilson wrote.
Officials say Wilson's findings never reached the White House. How believable is that when it was the vice president's interest in the matter that set the Wilson mission in motion?
This is not the first such incident. On more than one occasion Bush said that the International Atomic Energy Agency had concluded that Saddam Hussein was six months away from having nuclear weapons. But the IAEA denied ever having made such an estimate. That never stopped Bush from repeating the false information. Could he have really been so ignorant? That strains credulity.
Bush's defenders, knowing that the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq is at least a major embarrassment, have pleaded that the president should be given more time and granted the benefit of the doubt. Any suggestion of bad faith is condemned as "politics," although defenses of Bush are as political as the attacks.
But why should the administration get any benefit of the doubt? It has been caught in two material misstatements of fact that cannot be explained away innocently, and no nasty weapons or even components have been found. Yet Hussein's supposed nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenal was used to spook the American people into supporting a war that killed at least 6,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.
I think the American jury is entitled to dismiss the president's entire testimony.
Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of Ideas on Liberty magazine. Send him email.
----
Who Is Buried in Bush's Speech?
The truth has been shot! Round up some unusual suspects.
By Michael Kinsley
Monday, July 14, 2003
Slate
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085612/
Once again a mysterious criminal stalks the nation's capital. First there was the mystery sniper. Then there was the mystery arsonist. Now there is the mystery ventriloquist. The media are in a frenzy of speculation and leakage. Senators are calling for hearings. All of Washington demands an answer: Who was the arch-fiend who told a lie in President Bush's State of the Union speech? No investigation has plumbed such depths of the unknown since O.J. Simpson's hunt for the real killer of his ex-wife. (Whatever happened to that, by the way?)
Whodunit? Was it Col. Mustard in the kitchen with a candlestick? Condoleezza Rice in the Situation Room with a bottle of wite-out and a felt-tipped pen?
Linguists note that the question, "Who lied in George Bush's State of the Union speech" bears a certain resemblance to the famous conundrum, "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" They speculate that the two questions may have parallel answers. But philosophers are still struggling to properly analyze the Grant's Tomb issue-let alone answer it. And experts say that even when this famous 19th-century presidential puzzle is solved, it could be many years before the findings can be applied with any confidence to presidents of more recent vintage.
Lacking a real-life analogy that sufficiently captures the complexity of the speech-gate puzzle and the challenge facing investigators dedicated to solving it, political scientists say the best comparison may be to the assassination of Maj. Strasser in the film Casablanca. If you recall, Humphrey Bogart is standing over the body, holding a smoking gun. Claude Rains says: "Maj. Strasser has been shot! Round up the usual suspects." And yet the mystery of who killed the general is never solved.
Ever since Watergate, a "smoking gun" has been the standard for judging any Washington scandal. Many a miscreant has escaped with his reputation undamaged-or even enhanced by the publicity and pseudovindication-because there was no "smoking gun" like the Watergate tapes. But now it seems that the standard has been lifted. You would think that on the question of who told a lie in a speech, evidence seen on television by millions of people around the world might count for something. Apparently not. The Bush administration borrows from Groucho: "Who are you going to believe-us or your own two eyes?
The case for the defense is a classic illustration of what lawyers call "arguing in the alternative." The Bushies say: 1) It wasn't really a lie; 2) someone else told the lie; and 3) the lie doesn't matter. All these defenses are invalid.
1) Bushies fanned out to the weekend talk shows to note, as if with one voice, that what Bush said was technically accurate. But it was not accurate, even technically. The words in question were: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush didn't say it was true, you see-he just said the Brits said it. This is a contemptible argument in any event. But to descend to the administration's level of nitpickery, the argument simply doesn't work. Bush didn't say that the Brits "said" this Africa business-he said they "learned" it. The difference between "said" and "learned" is that "learned" clearly means there is some pre-existing basis for believing whatever it is, apart from the fact that someone said it. Is it theoretically possible to "learn" something that is not true? I'm not sure (as Donald Rumsfeld would say). However, it certainly is not possible to say that someone has "learned" a piece of information without clearly intending to imply that you, the speaker, wish the listener to accept it as true. Bush expressed no skepticism or doubt, even though the Brits qualification was only added as protection because doubts had been expressed internally.
2) The Bush argument blaming the CIA for failing to remove this falsehood from the president's speech is based on the logic of "stop me before I lie again." Bush spoke the words, his staff wrote them, those involved carefully overlooked reasons for skepticism. It would have been nice if the CIA had caught this falsehood, but its failure to do so hardly exonerates others. Furthermore, the CIA is part of the executive branch, as is the White House staff. If the president-especially this president-can disown anything he says that he didn't actually find out or think up and write down all by himself, he is more or less beyond criticism. Which seems to be the idea here.
The president says he has not lost his confidence in CIA Director George Tenet. How sweet. If someone backed me up in a lie and then took the fall for me when it was exposed, I'd have confidence in him too.
3) The final argument: It was only 16 words! What's the big deal? The bulk of the case for war remains intact. Logically, of course, this argument will work for any single thread of the pro-war argument. Perhaps the president will tell us which particular points among those he and his administration have made are the ones we are supposed to take seriously. Or how many gimmes he feels entitled to take in the course of this game. Is it a matter of word count? When he hits 100 words, say, are we entitled to assume that he cares whether the words are true?
----
Democrats Attack Credibility of Bush
July 14, 2003
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/politics/campaigns/14DEMS.html
WASHINGTON, July 13 - Democratic presidential candidates offered a near-unified assault today on President Bush's credibility in his handling of the Iraq war, signaling a shift in the political winds by aggressively invoking arguments most had shunned since the fall of Baghdad.
In interviews, town hall meetings and television appearances, several Democratic presidential candidates, who had been sharply divided over whether to go war, declared that President Bush's credibility had been harmed because of his use of unsubstantiated evidence in supporting the looming invasion of Iraq in his State of the Union address in January.
They also criticized the administration for what has happened in postwar Iraq, especially the continued deaths of American military personnel, which many attributed to Mr. Bush's failure to enlist the help of the United Nations in conducting the war. They questioned the failure to uncover the nuclear, chemical or biological weapons Mr. Bush had cited in pressing for war.
"The most important attribute that any president has is his credibility - his credibility with the American people, with its allies and with the world," Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who voted for the war resolution last fall, said in a telephone interview today. "When the president's own statements are called into question, it's a very serious matter."
Mr. Edwards added, "It's important that we not lose sight of the bigger picture, which is the enormous failure that is looming in Iraq right now."
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who also supported Mr. Bush last fall, cited the intelligence failures in an interview today as he challenged Mr. Bush's ability to protect the nation from terrorism.
"Americans have a right to ask a question, `Are we safer today than we were three years ago?' " he said. And, criticizing Mr. Bush's failure to enlist international support before starting the war, he said: "It's obvious now with the lack of international support in Iraq that our troops are at risk because we don't have the kind of plan that would have come with adequate diplomacy."
The shift in the debate from the Democratic side reflected a sudden confluence of events: the administration's admission of error regarding the State of the Union speech, the continuing carnage in Iraq and the failure of the United States to find the weapons that it used as a justification for invading Iraq. Until now, most of the Democrats had been reluctant to criticize a war that had appeared successful and, polls suggested, was largely supported by the American public.
"It's the first time we've seen them sweat," Jennifer Palmieri, the spokeswoman for Mr. Edwards, said of the White House. "It's the first time anything has ever stuck."
There were signs today that the White House had put been on the defensive by the wave of criticism of the State of the Union speech and the deteriorating events in Iraq. It dispatched top administration officials to the television talk shows to explain what had happened with the speech and assure the American public that events in Iraq were under control.
While it remained too early to measure whether this has genuinely changed the political landscape more than a year before the presidential election, it clearly has altered the dynamics in the Democratic primary. The recent problems in Iraq have offered Democrats who supported the war a way to criticize Mr. Bush's war policy without appearing to be admitting any past error.
Among them are Mr. Kerry, Mr. Edwards, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, all of whom have been increasingly critical of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy.
And the changing sentiments about the war have provided a new affirmation for the position taken by Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor whose opposition to the war has helped power him into the front tier of the Democratic competition. Dr. Dean said today that he foresaw the shortfalls of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy from his perch in the Vermont Statehouse last fall - and mockingly questioned why his opponents in Congress had failed to do so.
"I think they bear some responsibility here," Dr. Dean said. "If I as governor of Vermont can figure out the case is not there to invade Iraq, how can three senators and a congressman who claim to have authority in public affairs manage to give the president unilateral authority to attack Iraq?"
"It looks like my analysis was the correct one and theirs was the incorrect one," he continued. "It's going to be hard for them to make the case that I don't have the credentials on foreign policy after this."
Dr. Dean also called today for the resignations of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, pointing to reports that both men knew in October that the disputed information - that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear information from Africa - was incorrect.
For all the flurry today, the situation could turn again if, for example, dangerous weapons are discovered, as Mr. Rumsfeld predicted in interviews on ABC's "This Week" and NBC's "Meet the Press."
Still, there was abundant evidence that there has been a broad change in the nature of the Democratic presidential campaign.
Mr. Kerry has scheduled a speech in New York City on Wednesday that will include what one aide described as a "blistering critique" of Mr. Bush's foreign policy, and Mr. Gephardt has scheduled a speech on the same subject for next week in San Francisco.
Last week, Mr. Lieberman wrote an Op-Ed column in The Washington Post asserting that the opportunity to build a stable Iraq "was now in jeopardy."
On "Meet the Press," Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who voted against the Iraq resolution and has long accused the administration of holding back critical intelligence data, suggested today that the White House had manipulated public opinion in making the case for war.
"There was a selective use of intelligence; that is, that information which was consistent with the administration's policy was given a front-row seat," Mr. Graham said. "Those questions that were not supported were either put in the closet or were certainly in the back rows."
At a town hall meeting today in Dubuque, Iowa, Mr. Gephardt repeatedly attacked Mr. Bush, even as he struggled at times to contend with catcalls from audience members critical of the central role he played as minority leader by supporting Mr. Bush's Iraq policy last fall.
"We had a president from Missouri named Harry Truman, and he had a sign on his desk that said, `The buck stops here,' " said Mr. Gephardt in the meeting, which was televised on C-Span. "I think the president has to get that sign back on the desk."
--------
Bush Forcefully Defends Intelligence on Iraqi Weapons
July 14, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Intelligence.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defending his credibility, President Bush said Monday the United States made the right decision to invade Iraq and the intelligence on which he relied was ``darn good'' -- even though some of it now is in question.
Bush said the United States was reviewing documents and interviewing Iraqis in an intensive effort to support the administration's still unproven claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
``When it's all said and done,'' Bush insisted, ``the people of the United States and the world will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program.''
Bush spoke in the Oval Office alongside U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who opposed the U.S.-led war. The two met to discuss Iraq, the Middle East and peacekeeping in Liberia.
Bush has been on the defensive since the administration acknowledged it could not document his State of the Union claim in January that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons. That claim was based on British intelligence that had been called into question by the CIA. Nevertheless, CIA Director George Tenet has accepted responsibility for not seeking removal of the statement from Bush's speech.
Amid the finger-pointing over blame, the embarrassing episode forced the administration to concede it did not know the source of the British intelligence -- and, in fact, was not trying to determine the source.
``We don't know if it's true but nobody -- but nobody -- can say it was wrong,'' White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. ``That is not known.'' Administration officials said Bush's statement was technically correct since he was simply saying that British intelligence said something was true.
Nevertheless, Bush is not pleased with the turn of events, Fleischer said, and the administration is tightening its scrutiny of material that goes into his speeches.
Democrats questioned the administration's explanation, and anti-war advocacy groups launched a television advertising campaign accusing Bush of misleading Americans about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The ad ends with the word ``leader'' superimposed on Bush's face -- and then the word changes to ``misleader.''
Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused Bush of deception. ``He deceived the American people by allowing into a State of the Union speech -- at a critical point when he was making the case for war with Iraq --a statement that he either knew was wrong or should have known was wrong.''
Dismissing administration claims, Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., said, ``These officials should be reminded that what is at stake is not just the credibility of one man or even the credibility of the office of the president of the United States. What we place in the balance is the credibility of the United States as a nation and as leader of the free world.''
Defending his administration, Bush said, ``I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence.
``And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction and that our country made the right decision.''
The administration said the questionable intelligence claim was simply one piece in a long, documented list of evidence showing that Iraq was trying to acquire material for nuclear weapons.
Said Fleischer: ``The fact of the matter is whether they sought it from Africa or didn't seek it from Africa doesn't change the fact that they were seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program.''
The White House also drew a distinction between the way Bush handled intelligence claims about Iraq in a speech he gave in Cincinnati last October compared with his State of the Union address in January.
In October, acting on Tenet's suggestion, Bush excised a sentence about Iraq seeking a specific quantity of uranium from Niger, Fleischer said. Yet, several months later, Bush went ahead and raised the claim about seeking uranium in Africa.
Fleischer said it was an apples-and-oranges difference because the Cincinnati speech mentioned Niger while the State of the Union speech talked about all of Africa, and that there was different reporting from the CIA. ``So it's an apple in Cincinnati and an orange in the State of the Union,'' he said. ``The two do not compare that directly.''
--------
Bush Addresses Questions About Liberia and Iraq Intelligence July 14, 2003
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/international/africa/14CND-POLI.html
WASHINGTON, July 14 - President George W. Bush met here today with the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, and indicated afterward that he was likely to grant Mr. Annan's requests that he send a limited peacekeeping contingent to Liberia.
The president announced "a meeting of minds" with Mr. Annan, who has been aggressively pressing the United States for a peacekeeping role in the torn country.
Mr. Bush indicated that he was open to a "limited" deployment of American troops, but again said that a final decision would depend on the findings of a United States survey team now in the country.
He also restated a condition for United States involvement: It would not happen until the Liberian president, Charles Taylor, left the country. Mr. Taylor has said he would accept an offer of exile in Nigeria, but has yet to leave.
The president did not say to what extent said an American presence would be a mix of military advisers, humanitarian experts or soldiers.
Mr. Bush, meeting with reporters after his session with Mr. Annan, again faced questions about the assertion in his State of the Union speech in January that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa as part of a weapons program.
The president vigorously defended the quality of intelligence he receives in general as "darn good." But he also reiterated that the allegation about uranium, which his aides now say lacked adequate substantiation and should have been dropped, had been cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency.
"The speech I gave was cleared by the C.I.A.," he told reporters after an hour-long meeting with Annan. "When they looked at the speech, it was cleared."
The political storm over the uranium claim missed the point, Mr. Bush said, and that was whether Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, had been attempting to develop banned weapons that could threaten the world. "Our country made the right decision," Bush said.
On Liberia, Mr. Bush said he wanted to help an African force - administered by the Economic Community of West African States, known as Ecowas - to ensure a Liberia ceasefire. This "may require troops," he said. "We don't know how many yet."
"Any commitment we have would be limited in size and limited in tenure," the president said. "Our job would be to help facilitate an Ecowas presence, which would then be converted into a U.N. peacekeeping mission." American troops would not be part of a United Nations mission, he said.
Mr. Annan described a more detailed sequence: Ecowas would deploy forces to Liberia; Mr. Taylor would leave. American forces would arrive to support Ecowas; the United States forces would leave. Then the operation would evolve into a United Nations peacekeeping mission.
African countries around Liberia have pleaded with the United States to take an active role there. Thousands have died in years of civil warfare, and refugees have poured into neighboring countries.
Mr. Bush, however, has been deliberate in deciding his response, surprising some by not making an announcement while still in Africa last week.
While an American contingent would be small, it would raise concerns in Washington about overextending the American military commitments abroad at a time they are hard-pressed by missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Today's meeting was the first in six months between Mr. Bush and Mr. Annan, and thus the first since the contentious debate that badly strained the United Nations Security Council over an ultimately frustrated American quest for United Nations authority for military action in Iraq.
Administration officials at the time said that a United Nations failure to support their course would prove the organization's irrelevance. The meeting today thus appeared to signal a readiness to mend relations.
The two men appeared comfortable with each other, and at one point Mr. Bush referred to his guest as "Kofi" before laughingly correcting himself to the more formal "Mr. Secretary-General." Mr. Annan, in turn, thanked Mr. Bush for his attention to Africa, where both men traveled last week, and particularly his promise of $15 billion to fight AIDS.
The Bush-Annan meeting came at the start of a week slated to see some fence-mending between allies alienated in the angry run-up to the United States-led war in Iraq.
Several high-ranking administration officials are to meet this week with the visiting foreign minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer, whose country strongly opposed the Iraq war but which has been working to end a nearly year-long estrangement and return to normalized relations with the Bush administration.
Mr. Fischer's planned meetings with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, may eventually lead to a Bush meeting between Mr. Bush and with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
The chancellor's outspoken opposition to an Iraq war, in the run-up to German elections in September, infuriated the White House. The two leaders have spoken by phone only a few times in the past year, and exchanged a reserved handshake at the Group of Eight meeting in Evian, France. Mr. Bush called Mr. Schroeder in early June to express condolences over the deaths of four German soldiers in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.
Germany, heavily involved in a stabilization force for Afghanistan, has expressed no enthusiasm for the idea of sending troops to Iraq to sort out the messy wind-down of a war it so fiercely opposed.
But like France, it has not entirely closed the door to that prospect. Officials said instead that Berlin could send troops only if the United Nations provided a clear mandate to do so, and an interim Iraqi government requested them.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Africa Trip: Bush Was Shopping for Military Bases
As many as 5,000 US troops could be stations at 'forward operating bases' in parts of the sub-Saharan region
The East African (Nairobi),
July 14, 2003
Kevin J. Kelley, New York
http://allafrica.com/stories/200307160078.html
PLANS FOR a strong but selective US military commitment in Africa comprised a key sub-theme of President George W. Bush's whirlwind tour of the continent last week.
Mr Bush's public comments on the military aspects of his Africa policy were largely confined to the question of US troop deployments in Liberia. Behind the scenes, however, members of the president's entourage assessed African governments' attitudes regarding Washington's aim of establishing a US military presence in several sub-Saharan nations.
The brief stopover at Entebbe, for example, likely included discussions on broader and ongoing US access to military facilities inside Uganda. Pentagon officials recently made clear that they want to expand existing agreements with Uganda and five other sub-Saharan nations that now allow refuelling of US military aircraft.
Uganda could become the second site of US troop concentrations in East Africa. Kampala's close ties with Washington may make Uganda a likelier choice than Kenya for hosting American forces on a semi-permanent basis. President Yoweri Museveni seems much more inclined than President Mwai Kibaki to welcome US troops onto his country's soil. Besides, Washington already has an agreement with Nairobi that allows US forces to make periodic use of air and sea bases in Kenya.
Some 1,800 American soldiers are now stationed in Djibouti at a rudimentary camp that may be seen as a prototype for the "family of bases" that Marine Corps General James Jones says the Pentagon plans to establish throughout Africa.
As many as 5,000 US troops could be stationed at "forward operating bases" in parts of the sub-Saharan region, The New York Times reported last week. US Special Forces may meanwhile be sent to more lightly equipped bases in Africa to carry out specific missions, the newspaper added. The Pentagon does not intend to build large new installations of its own in Africa, but would instead upgrade existing military facilities in perhaps half a dozen countries, potentially including Algeria, Mali, Ghana and Senegal as well as Uganda or Kenya.
The focus would be on preventing international terrorist networks from hitting US interests in Africa or using lawless territories, like southern Somalia, as training grounds.
The planned move into Africa highlights the historic shift in US military strategy occasioned by the September 2001 terrorist strikes on New York and Washington. Less emphasis is being placed on traditional defence arrangements in Europe, while more attention will go to counter-terrorism operations in what US military planners term an "arc of instability" stretching through the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa and into western and central Asia.
Ensuring greater access to West African oil is an important aim of the evolving shifts in US global power projection. Gen Jones has said that US Navy and Marine units will probably spend less time in the Mediterranean and more time patrolling West Africa's coast.
The intensified US military engagement with Africa signifies the dramatically different way in which Bush views Africa in the post-September 11 world. While Bush was campaigning for the White House more than a year prior to the destruction of the World Trade Centre, he declared, "While Africa may be important, it doesn't fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them."
But the president still wants the new US military commitment to Africa to be made squarely on American terms. In accordance with this vision, American troops will be stationed in Africa to reinforce US national security and to protect US investments in strategic resources, mainly oil. Washington does not intend to become heavily involved in efforts to quell local conflicts in Africa.
American strategic thinkers continue to be strongly influenced by the failure of the US-led intervention in Somalia a decade ago. President Bill Clinton quickly abandoned that military operation after 18 US soldiers were killed in an ambush in Mogadishu in 1993. Since then, the Pentagon has been firmly opposed to inserting US forces into chaotic situations in countries of little or no strategic importance to the United States.
----
Liberia Not Another Somalia, Citizens Stress
Despite U.S. Worries, 'We Are Tired of War'
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 14, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51677-2003Jul13?language=printer
MONROVIA, Liberia, July 13 -- Liberia is about as far as you can get from Somalia and still be in Africa. But mention peacekeeping, Americans and Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in the same sentence and ordinary Liberians smile ruefully.
Many Liberians say they understand why President Bush is taking so long to decide whether U.S. troops will referee another civil war on the continent.
"The 'Black Hawk Down' movie, I saw it," said Eric Dumma, 22, referring to the film about the gunfight in Mogadishu a decade ago that left 18 U.S. soldiers dead. "What the blacks did to the Americans makes you fearful."
But he declared: "It won't happen here. We are tired of war. We are really tired, man."
Dumma stood in all he owned: a Nike T-shirt, a pair of navy pants and open-toed slippers. Militia fighters made off with his other possessions in an orgy of looting last month that followed a rebel offensive, which government forces pushed back from the foot of a road. Liberians call that road the only legitimate local reminder of the notorious last U.S. effort in Africa: Somalia Drive.
Bush is scheduled to discuss Liberia on Monday with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.
"I know. I understand," said Mami Oldpe, a uniformed militiaman, who slowed the occasional minibus and battered sedan at the government checkpoint before Double Bridge. "The peacekeepers shouldn't be afraid of us. 'Black Hawk Down.' Somalia. We are different from them. Our conflict is different than theirs."
Settled by freed American slaves more than 150 years ago, Liberia is the closest thing to a former U.S. colony in Africa. But because it wasn't one, Liberian attitudes toward the United States contain none of the hate in the love-hate relationship between many former colonies and their former rulers.
"America is our father," said K.B. Jabateh, 52, standing beside the pavement with Mussa F. Donzo, who said: "How can you deceive your father?"
Somalis also welcomed U.S. troops when President George H.W. Bush sent peacekeepers to halt a famine aggravated by militias looting food aid. The troops saved countless lives, then stayed in a nation-building exercise that degenerated into urban warfare when the U.S. forces tried to capture a troublesome warlord.
The 1993 battle that cost 18 American lives so soured the White House on troop deployments to Africa that the United States deflected entreaties to intervene a year later in Rwanda, where more than 500,000 people were slaughtered in genocidal conflict.
Somali society is grounded in tribal laws that demand blood for blood, and perhaps because of that, the civil war that drew U.N. peacekeepers in has shown few signs of easing, 10 years after driving them out. The country, wrapped around the Horn of Africa, still has no central government and has been a transit point for Islamic extremists, including an al Qaeda lieutenant linked to attacks on Western targets in neighboring Kenya.
Some analysts argue that the prospect of failed states across the continent in West Africa, where al Qaeda has converted cash to diamonds, supports the case for Western intervention in Liberia.
"You know in Liberia we have brotherly feelings for America," said Jeremiah Varmie, owner of Uncle Sam's Tele Link, where most of the long-distance calls placed are to the United States. "I can't speak for the soldiers, but I don't think your people would be attacked."
The soldiers say the same. Young men carrying weapons -- in some cases since 1989, when warlord Charles Taylor began the rebellion that eventually made him president -- say they want only to put down their guns and go back to school.
"Excuse me, the militia are happy. They want peace," said a government commander who asked to be identified only by his war name, Nasty Plastic. "We are tired now. I've been fighting more than seven years now."
Liberians on Somalia Drive, like policymakers in Europe and in the United States, say the timing of any U.S. intervention must be carefully decided. Taylor, who is under indictment by a U.N.-backed court for war crimes in Sierra Leone, has promised to accept exile in Nigeria, but not before peacekeepers arrive. A rebel group has vowed to attack Monrovia a third time if Taylor does not go first.
Hawa Massaquor does not want that. In the last round of fighting, she shielded her nephew's face while rampaging militiamen killed his father and mother, then, while laughing, opened their bodies down the middle.
Taking shelter from the rain under the rusting tin roof of the Big Sister Help Yourself Food and Tea Shop, Massaquor recalled how the family's tormenters dared her to show any emotion.
"They say, 'How do you feel?' You say, 'All right.' You can't cry," she said. "They say, 'Dance.' You dance."
Liberians and outside analysts say that although the conflict has been horribly brutal, it appears to be driven chiefly by regional rivalries and the ambitions of warlords following Taylor's example, rather than by deep-seated tribal hostilities.
"Basically there's several guys who think they ought to be president and get a lot of money," an aid worker said.
Provided an atmosphere of security and sustained international attention, educated Liberians who fled abroad -- often to the United States -- could build their own nation, many Liberians say. They add that the physical presence of U.S. forces would add a measure of validation to the effort.
"Every Liberian will feel proud seeing Americans here," said Joseph Chea, in the American Car Washing Station, a wide spot off Somalia Drive, with ready access to river water.
"We don't have confidence in one another now," said Nathaniel Sayeh, 38. "We need someone to come and stand between us."
-------- asia
Indonesian parliament bombed
Associated Press
Monday July 14, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/indonesia/Story/0,2763,998051,00.html
A bomb rocked Indonesia's parliament today, shattering windows and damaging a wall, just days after police captured nine suspected Islamic militants and seized a huge quantity of explosives.
No one was injured in the early morning attack, which blasted nails and concrete over a wide area of the parliamentary complex in central Jakarta.
Parliament is on its summer break, but security at the sprawling complex is tight with police having recently started searching vehicles for explosives as they enter.
Makbul Padmanegara, the Jakarta police chief, said officers were investigating the type of explosive used in the blast.
"We know it caused quite a big explosion and was quite dangerous," he said.
Police said that Jemaah Islamiah, a south-east Asian Muslim network blamed for October's Bali bombings that killed 202 people, is one of two prime suspects in today's blast. The other is the Free Aceh Movement, a rebel group fighting for an independent state in the western province of Aceh.
The attack came after an announcement on Friday that police had arrested nine suspected militants from Jemaah Islamiah, who they said were planning more terror attacks.
Police also seized TNT and chemicals from a bomb-making factory in the central Javanese town of Semarang. The haul was said to have had an explosive power 10 times that of the bombs used in the Bali nightclub bombings, which killed mostly foreign tourists.
Meanwhile, one of the men accused of carrying out the Bali bombings told a court today that the attack had a positive outcome.
Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, dubbed the "smiling bomber" after being shown laughing and smiling with police after his arrest, was testifying in his own defence. Prosecutors have urged judges to sentence Mr Amrozi to death for allegedly helping to plan and carry out the blasts.
Mr Amrozi told the court: "Because of this incident, God willing, many people will realise that they have abandoned their God, neglected their prayers and deserted their places of worship, mosques, churches and turned to the places of sin."
He continued: "Often things we don't like are in fact good for us."
The 40-year-old mechanic read from a 15-page handwritten defence plea, and expressed remorse for the bombings' victims and their families.
"Your Honour, as a human being I mourn and feel regret for the unintended deaths of the victims," he said. "I pray that those families left behind can be resilient and receive God's blessing."
He denied taking part in any meetings to plan the attack, which his lawyers also argued.
Defence lawyer Admad Wirawan Adnan asked: "Amrozi has never assembled the bomb, never took part in meetings, so how can he stand accused of being a planner?"
Amrozi, one of more than 30 Islamic militants accused of the attack, has admitted buying the explosives and the minivan used in the blasts.
He said that he took part in the blasts to avenge the suffering of Muslims at the hands of the United States and its allies.
-------- australia
War possible to halt nuclear threat
By Political Reporter
SAMANTHA MAIDEN in Canberra
14jul03
The Advertiser (Australia)
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6748484%255E911,00.html
WAR remained an option to combat North Korea's nuclear threat, Prime Minister John Howard warned yesterday at the start of a seven-day Asian tour.
Playing down the controversy of a forged document that was used to justify the Iraq war, Mr Howard said that issue had been "blown out of all proportion".
Australia's warning to North Korea came as officials there warned the 11-nation naval blockade, proposed by the Proliferation Security Initiative summit in Brisbane last week to intercept pirate ships believed to be smuggling drugs and weapons to fund its nuclear program, could trigger a "new war". Mr Howard touched down last night in the Philippines capital of Manila.
He will arrive in South Korea on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the 1953 Armstice Agreement - a Korean peace deal the North recently has threatened to scrap.
"That is a big worry. No one should underestimate the seriousness of what is involved," he said. "North Korea is a rogue state."
Asked if Australia would join any future military action against North Korea, Mr Howard said: "We are at the moment going to take part in interdiction exercises.
"We obviously keep open what options we might pursue after that. We are engaged, we're concerned, we've been in the forefront of diplomatic efforts but it's important the world community speak with one voice and as many people as possible be part of that voice."
He said the proposed naval blockade could be valuable because "if some time down the track some other kind of action was required, people would be better prepared".
North Korea has threatened to unleash missiles aimed at South Korea and Japan if the US intervenes, describing the US-led blockade as a "grave criminal act", "unreasonable terrorism in the sea and a gross violation of international law".
"Such brigandish naval blockade of the US is as dangerous an act as as igniting a new war on the Korean peninsula," the DPRK official news agency warned. "In case the US conducts naval blockade against the DPRK and lays an 'international siege' to it, this may soon lead to the total abrogation of the armstice agreement. There is no need to explain what this means."
Labor spokesman Kevin Rudd said he wanted evidence the international maritime laws governing the proposal for blockade were sound and that "we are not simply inventing it as we go along".
"We've got to make sure the measures we implement here don't make the problem worse, but in fact reduce the threat from North Korea and the threat of proliferation," Mr Rudd told the Ten Network.
Before his departure for South Korea, the Philippines and Japan to discuss regional security, terrorism and trade, Mr Howard responded with "what's the next question ?", when asked if he should resign over the Iraqi intelligence issue.
Mr Howard's intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Defence Intelligence Organisation now have admitted they were warned of doubts about a document purporting to show Iraq had attempted to buy uranium from Africa.
ONA, DIO and DFAT, however, maintain they never told Mr Howard, Defence Minister Robert Hill or Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
Mr Howard denied suggestions there was a culture of "hear no evil, see no evil" in his government. "That's wrong. Worse than that, it's insulting and offensive to the professionalism of the men and women who work in the intelligence agencies," he said. "If I'd have known of this shock-horror revelation that's come out this week, it wouldn't have made one jot of difference to the decision my government took."
Mr Rudd said: "I think this says everything of John Howard's arrogance, as if to say that it was only a matter for him, the Australian people didn't need to know the full picture at the time as we're about to go off to war as a nation."
-------- britain
Blair 'will back policy of armed invasion'
By Andrew Sparrow, Political Correspondent
14/07/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$KBWBO3UR0S5EPQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/07/14/nleft14.xml/
Tony Blair is expected to put his name today to a declaration justifying armed intervention against failing states.
He and other Left-wing national leaders will expound the principle, which runs counter to traditional thinking about national sovereignty, at the end of a four-day conference on the subject of "progressive governance".
The participants will issue a joint communiqué and, according to a draft leaked over the weekend, it will claim that the international community has a right to intervene in the internal affairs of failing states.
The key section said: "Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect."
Another section justifies this stance on the grounds that, just as individuals have rights and responsibilities, nations do too.
"The right to sovereignty brings associated responsibilities to protect citizens," the draft said.
The document will have no legal standing and yesterday Downing Street stressed that it also stipulated that the international community should deal with humanitarian crises "in a manner consistent with the objectives and principles of the United Nations Charter".
But Mr Blair's critics might take the declaration as evidence that Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq have not diminished his appetite for military intervention against tyrannical regimes.
In a recent book about the Iraq war, he is quoted as saying in private: "They (critics of the war) ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot?
"Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can, you should."
Fourteen heads of government or heads of state have attended the conference and last night they had a working dinner together in Surrey.
Today, after another working session, all 14 will attend a joint news conference.
The participants include Jean Chrétien, the Canadian prime minister, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, and Helen Clark, prime minister of New Zealand.
Downing Street described the summit as an "important opportunity for those with similar political philosophies to address topics of shared interest".
Yesterday, at a conference event, Mr Blair said it would be "a terrible mistake" for centre-Left progressives to define themselves as antiAmerican when the basis for a successful global partnership was for Europe and the US to work together.
"There is absolutely no mileage, and I think it's a terrible mistake for the Left to define itself as anti-American," he said. "In fact that would play precisely into the hands of any forces in the United States that want to take America in the unilateralist direction."
Progressives should make it "very clear" that they understood America's security concerns post-9/11, he said.
"In turn we ask America, as our partner, to help on issues to do with global poverty, to do with developing markets and free trade, to do with the climate change that threatens our environment, and to make sure that in the Middle East we bring about a stable peace between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people."
----
Iraq-Niger uranium claim came from third country: Britain
LONDON (AFP)
Jul 14, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030714153446.bv55z3nm.html
Britain cannot tell the United States how it knew that Iraq tried to get uranium from Niger because the information originated from a third country, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Monday.
His statement seemed likely to add to an embarrassing rift between London and Washington -- allies in the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein -- over the way intelligence was used in the run-up to the conflict.
The issue is likely to cloud talks in Washington on Thursday when British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- en route to East Asia -- sees US President George W. Bush and makes a special address to Congress.
Straw, speaking on BBC radio, stood by Britain's claim, which was contained in a controversial 50-page dossier on Saddam's pursuit of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons issued last September.
"We believe in the intelligence which was behind the claims made in the September 24 dossier, yes," he said on the Today current affairs program when asked if the intelligence on Niger was still valid in British eyes.
He added, however, that Britain was not at liberty to tell the United States where it got the information, because it had come from "foreign intelligence sources".
"It just happens to be the rules of liaison with foreign intelligence sources that they own the intelligence. The second intelligence service does not and therefore is not able to pass it on to the third party."
The Italian government on Sunday denied reports that its intelligence services handed the United States and Britain documents indicating that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons programme.
The Financial Times reported Monday that Britain received information that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger from two sources, thought to be France and Italy, which explained why it was included in the September dossier despite being told the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had "reservations" about its inclusion.
Bush included the British reference to Niger, with attribution to British intelligence, in his State of the Union address last January in which he made his case for war on Iraq.
But last Saturday, CIA director George Tenet cast doubt on the accuracy of the claim, saying it should never have been included in Bush's speech.
Blair was Bush's staunchest ally on Iraq, but since combat was declared over on May 1 US and British forces have yet to unearth hard proof of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -- let alone the man himself.
On Monday Blair said Britons should be "proud" of having helped the United States overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.
"When we have over the past couple of days taken the first steps for Iraqi people actually to take control of their own lives, and we have the United Nations talking about 300,000 people and mass graves, then I believe we should be proud that Saddam has gone, glad that he has gone," he said.
"I have no doubt at all that in the future, whatever the differences have been in the past, we can reconstruct Iraq as a stable and prosperous country and the world will be a more secure place as a result," Blair told a gathering of fellow center-left world leaders.
"We should be proud as a country of what we have done."
Britain and the United States are also at odds over US plans to put two British citizens -- now held at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- on trial for terrorism before a military commission.
"It is not acceptable for them to be tried if they are not given basic principles of human rights and fair trial," Straw said. "So we are in a process of discussions with the US authorities about a range of options."
Those options range from trial in Britain through to trial by the US military commission so long as it is consistent with the "rules of justice and human rights", he said.
----
Political death of a usurper
An unwinnable war in Iraq and the deceit that led to it have destroyed the credibility of the prime minister
George Galloway
Monday July 14, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,997621,00.html
"Now does he feel/ his secret murders sticking on his hands;/ now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;/ those he commands move only in command,/ nothing in love: now does he feel his title/ hang loose about him, like a giant's robe/ upon a dwarfish thief."
Thus Angus spoke of the Scottish usurper Macbeth, whose ambition led him deep into a river of blood. Less poetically, Clare Short, Mo Mowlem and Robin Cook are saying much the same of their former cabinet colleague. I predicted before the war that Iraq would be the political death of Tony Blair, and it is now almost Shakespearean how the pain from his self-inflicted wounds is written across his face. It is as if he is physically diminishing before our eyes as his authority bleeds into the sands of Iraq.
Each new day brings another stab at Blair's credibility: former cabinet members in public, current ministers in private, using the round of summer parties to distance themselves from the fading king. From Hans Blix, the BBC and the press, from two former heads of the joint intelligence committee and now, perhaps fatally, from across the Atlantic, fall blow after hammer blow. Suddenly, comparing the two main war leaders to wolves - which has got me into such difficulty with the Labour hierarchy - seems very tame indeed.
Always travelling light on ideological baggage, never having won or wanted the affection of the Labour clan, Blair's main asset was his "Trust me, I'm a regular guy" reputation. Now it is gone and will never be recovered.
That Iraq was lynched by Bush and Blair has become plain as a pikestaff. Take the saving of Private Jessica. Said at first to have been shot and held hostage by Iraqi doctors, and now revealed to have been in their care after a road traffic accident, her story serves as a metaphor for the mendacity so deep and treacly-black it might be an oil sump: from the 45-minute warning to the banks of the Niger and the sweepings of the internet floor.
In their occupation of Iraq, the US and British armies have entered the gates of hell. Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour. In two weeks, armed attacks on coalition forces have nearly doubled to 25 per day. More than 200 have been wounded and over 40 killed in combat since "victory" was declared by President Bush. Morale among US forces is dropping towards Vietnam-type levels, with heavy drug consumption, and commanders turning a blind eye to the prostituting of Iraqi women. No doubt the spectre of troops "fragging" overly strict officers is on their minds.
So hot is the welcome to these "liberators" that the US has now evacuated its forces from both the vast campus of Baghdad University and from the hub of the sharpest armed action, in Fallujah. The latter gives the lie to the repeated calumny that those fighting the occupation are merely "Saddamist remnants". In truth, Fallujah is the heartland of the Jubbur tribe, arch-enemies of Saddam whose leaders were purged by the Takriti Ba'ath party bosses more than a decade ago.
No fighting in this area could take place without the Jubbur, so it must be more than nostalgia for the old regime that is fuelling it. Throughout the Calvary of Vietnam, resistance was routinely described as coming from unrepresentative "hardline elements" or outside the country's borders. The deeper Johnson and Nixon sank into the quagmire, the more they spread the war, to neighbouring Cambodia and new killing fields. Look out for "hot pursuit" operations in the months to come into Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
In Vietnam, the Americans installed a succession of puppet governments in whose name they could claim to be fighting. Though as bereft of electoral legitimacy as a Jeb Bush Floridian plebiscite, the Vietnamese juntas had a social base. Yesterday's jokers, the "Iraqi Governing Council" - handpicked by Iraq's US governor, Paul Bremer - make South Vietnam's General Thieu look like an authentic national leader. Without hundreds of thousands of foreign troops, they would be swept away in a gale of derision.
Iraqis want Britain and America out of their country, that much is abundantly clear. Only independently supervised elections to a constituent assembly can produce Iraqi leaders fit to face the outside world and rebuild their country.
Tony Blair can run around the world on grand diplomatic tours. He can bask in the adulation of the Republican right in the US Congress. But he cannot hide from the fact that he has lost the plot at home. He has entered that twilight which saw the departure in tears of Mrs Thatcher in a taxi from the Downing Street she once bestrode like a colossus.
The foreign affairs select committee was wrong when it said the jury was out on the Blair war. Both the public and the Labour movement jury has already returned its verdict of guilty. Mr Blair will soon exit the political stage; it would be better t'were done quickly.
· George Galloway is Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin and a columnist for the Scottish Mail on Sunday
-------- business
Cost of restoring Iraq oil production $1.6 bln
Reuters,
07.14.03
By Jon Herskovitz
http://www.forbes.com/home_asia/newswire/2003/07/14/rtr1024477.html
DALLAS, July 14 (Reuters) - The cost of restoring the flow of Iraqi oil to prewar levels is estimated at about $1.6 billion and bidding for up to $1 billion in U.S. contracts to rebuild Iraq's oil business is open to companies from a wide array of countries, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials said on Monday.
At a conference on the Corps of Engineers' "Operation Restore Iraqi Oil" attended by representatives from about 100 companies held in Dallas, officials said they are hoping to have an award on the U.S. government contracts by mid-October and people on the ground in Iraq in November or December.
Last week, the Corps of Engineers invited bids for two long-awaited oil contracts for the north and the south of Iraq, both which were set at a minimum of $500,000 but could grow to as much as $500 million each over time.
Representatives from several companies said that continuing violence in the country has tempered some of the interest in the contracts, but they expect there to be a long-term need for foreign help in bolstering Iraq's oil production.
Army Corps of Engineers officials said the U.S. Department of Defense will provide security to workers on the ground fixing damaged pipelines, repairing looted facilities or any of the other tasks involved in boosting Iraqi oil production to the prewar figure of 3 million barrels of oil a day.
"The minimum damage caused by the war and the mass looting and targeted sabotage from the war have caused varying levels of damage across the entire oil system," said Col. Michael Schultz, acting commander with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Southwestern Division.
U.S. construction giants Bechtel Corp -- already at work on a major rebuilding contract in Iraq -- and Fluor Corp. (nyse: FLR - news - people) have said they would most likely compete for a piece of the work, and sources at the Army Corps say more than 200 other firms have expressed interest as well.
RISKS AND REWARDS
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contract replaces a short-term contract that was awarded in March to Kellogg Brown & Root, a unit of Halliburton (nyse: HAL - news - people), the Texas oil company that was once led by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. KBR has completed about $285 million in work on restoring the flow of Iraqi oil as of the start of July, officials said.
Including the ongoing work, the total cost of returning to prewar production levels was estimated to reach a total of about $1.6 billion, but that figure could vary upward or downward by 40 percent, the officials said.
Back in March, when the Iraqi war started and U.S. government agencies began discussing plans to rebuild the country, there was a sense there would be a decisive victory followed by American companies moving into Iraq.
If the major battlefield victories were quick, localized skirmishes and continued sabotage by Saddam loyalists now offer a sobering view of the danger and the time involved in rebuilding Iraq.
Bidding on the contracts is open to companies from countries that participated in the war against Iraq as well as companies from those countries that stood opposed to the military action -- such as France. Criteria for consideration include a country's trading relations with the United States.
"We are looking for world-class teams, joint ventures, or companies," said Gordon Sumner, director of contracting for the US Army Corps of Engineers, Southwestern Division.
Jerry Holloway, a spokesman for Fluor, said he expects there to be larger, long-term contracts -- perhaps issued in the future by the Iraqi oil ministry -- likely coming later.
"You don't get this much interest in bidding on contracts in other parts of the world. This is a very visible and unique situation in many ways," Holloway said. (With additional reporting by Andrea Orr in San Francisco)
----
Iran finds giant oil field
By Andrew Walker BBC economics correspondent
Monday, 14 July, 2003
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3065913.stm
Iran has found new oilfields, with total reserves as high as 38 billion barrels.
Analysts say that only a small fraction of that may be commercially worthwhile, but it is nonetheless a very large find.
This discovery serves to reinforce an important feature of the long term outlook for oil supplies - that reserves available for future exploitation are dominated by the Middle East and Opec, the oil producers' cartel.
Much will depend on how quickly oil consumption increases.
But most analysts think that Opec is likely to account for an increasing share of world supplies.
Big slice of production
Saudi Arabia has the largest reserves, followed by Iraq.
The discovery underlines that Iran too is likely to play a major role in future energy markets.
The new oilfields have the advantage of being near the coast, which will help with transport costs.
But the crude oil they contain is heavy. It is more expensive to process and commands a lower price than the lighter oil which Iran produces at many other sites.
Much of the new oil will not be worth recovering. And it will take many years to come on stream.
Another recent discovery in Iran, made four years ago, has still not been developed and analysts say it is still years away.
----
[Well, New York, here's a clear solution: sell 'em to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan and to FEMA. It would be nice if you didn't make a profit from them, though. Taxpayers are getting burnt badly enough. et]
Body bag maker sues NY over September 11 order
July 14 2003
Reuters
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/13/1058034876397.html
A New Jersey plastic bag company has sued New York City for refusing to pay for 100,000 body bags it had ordered after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre.
Fordion Packaging of Hackensack, which filed suit in Manhattan federal court, is seeking payment of $US203,388 ($310,420) plus interest.
The suit said the company had received a written order on September 13, 2001, from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and signed by its director of purchasing.
Fordion said it had to put other clients' business on hold to meet the order and had produced the bags within seven days.
However, the city later told Fordion that it had only used a small portion of the bags and wanted to return the balance.
The company refused, saying the bags were not returnable because they were specially produced items.
"Defendant then belatedly attempted to reject the bags on the erroneous basis that they were not suitable for their intended purpose," the suit said.
Fordion said that, since some of the bags were used, they were acceptable by the city.
"The true reason the city belatedly attempted to reject the body bags was that there were far fewer bodies recovered from the World Trade Centre disaster site than the City had anticipated when it placed the order," the suit said.
The death toll from the attack on the World Trade Centre was 2795.
----
PATENTS
U.S. Troops Make Use of Water Gear
July 14, 2003
New York Times
By SABRA CHARTRAND
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/technology/14PATE.html
By noon in Baghdad, the summer temperatures can hit triple digits. For American troops serving in the Iraqi capital, the heat is merciless. Those soldiers already have to worry about snipers, rocket-propelled grenades and other guerrilla attacks. The uniforms, flak jackets, military gear and helmets they must wear only increase their physical misery in the hot weather.
Staying hydrated is crucial to their health, as well as their ability to do their jobs. Many troops have custom backpacks that serve as personal water-carrying and drinking systems.
The gear is made by a California company called CamelBak Products Inc., which holds seven patents for the system. It is popular among athletes, outdoor enthusiasts and even road crews. The gear is also standard issue for some military units.
Now the company says it has been receiving an increasing number of letters asking it to donate equipment to troops in the gulf who do not have the drinking pack.
"Our soldiers are wearing 50 pounds of body armor in the hot desert heat," a platoon leader from Texas wrote to the company in a letter that it made public. "As you may already know, your hydration system is the best tool to keep soldiers hydrated. Unfortunately, we are not issued your product, and as a result soldiers are carrying hot water in bulky canteens."
In another letter released by the company, the wife of a platoon leader from Louisiana asked for donations because "it is hot and miserable over there." She said her husband "has about 30 soldiers there right now and he says the No. 1 thing they have asked for is CamelBaks."
The military is already one of the company's biggest customers, but CamelBak did not set out to corner that market. Its patented "personal hydration system" was invented in 1988 by a Texas paramedic, Michael Edison. To prevent dehydration during a summer bike race, he fashioned a drinking system from surgical tubing and an IV bag that he sewed to his shirt.
"The CamelBak system started as a recreational product," explained Woody Scal, the company's vice president for marketing. "There was no bolt of strategic insight that said we needed to be in the military market. But we were selling to military exchange stores, and we started seeing a rise in sales. Originally we thought, well, there must be a lot of athletes in the military market.
"But we discovered that special forces were taking our basic black model and sneaking it into their equipment," he said. "Once we looked closer, we realized they were using it for active missions. Only then did we begin to address the military's needs." Now CamelBak puts out an catalog of models, called Maximum Gear, intended for military use. A photo on the catalog cover shows an Army sharpshooter aiming his rifle while drinking from the company's customized water tube. CamelBak Products says its sales figures over the last decade indicate that 80 percent of military personnel in the gulf have the backpacks.
The company's inventory offers accessories designed just for soldiers - drinking tubes and spouts that can be used with a gas mask, a chemical-resistant water reservoir, an in-line filter for cleaning water supplies as the users drink it. "Combat proven," one page declares above models offered in desert or jungle camouflage. The products have names like Ambush.
The system looks like a long, narrow backpack. A tube snakes over the shoulder and is positioned near the user's mouth. When users want a drink, they can bite or suck on the spout to release water from the backpack, keeping their hands free for other activities. Models vary in size and can carry from 70 to 102 ounces of water (two to three quarts).
CamelBak's most recent patent, No. 6,497,348, is for a mechanism that keeps water from leaking out of the drinking spout. A rotating barrel inside the drinking valve shuts off the flow of water when a user flicks a lever on the outside of the spout. The locking mechanism was developed partly because soldiers were sometimes using the backpack as a pillow, and water would leak from the spout if it was squashed or stepped on.
"In the Army or Marines, you might have the CamelBak system in a large pack, and you're throwing the pack onto a truck along with 25 other packs," Mr. Scal said. "Things press on it. The HydroLock valve prevents the bite valve from opening when you don't want it to."
He said the locking mouthpiece was the first example of how soldiers in the field prompted a new product.
"The original bite valve was developed in the recreational market and then went over to the military market," he said. "But the HydroLock valve was developed in the military market and has since gone over to the recreational side."
A spokeswoman said that CamelBak had received "many heartfelt letters" from military families requesting donations, but that "a small company like CamelBak is not able to support the need."
"We've heard family members are heading to local sport and recreational stores, or to the local PX, to buy it themselves and ship it over," the spokeswoman, Lea Morrison, said.
The company's three-liter desert camouflage military model costs $62 from one of its authorized online dealers.
----
U.S. Seeks Help With Iraq Costs, but Donors Want a Larger Say
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
July 14, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14REBU.html
WASHINGTON, July 12 - Faced with the huge cost of rebuilding Iraq, the United States has called for an international conference in October to be attended by dozens of nations - many of which opposed the war to oust Saddam Hussein - to raise billions of dollars to restore Iraq's economy.
But the Bush administration has run into a now familiar diplomatic problem. Potential donor nations say they are uneasy about financing a military occupation, and some American officials concede there will have to be more participation by other countries in deciding how money for Iraq is raised and spent.
"The donors want a say on the allocation of funds," said a Western diplomat involved in aiding Iraq. "They want credit for what they give, and they don't want to commingle their money with money for the occupation. The way things are set up now will have to be changed."
Among the nations that want a different structure for international aid to Iraq are Germany and France, two countries that opposed the war, although French and German officials emphasize that they are ready now to help rebuild Iraq.
In response to donor concerns, American officials are pressing for the creation of another element of the occupation bureaucracy, a trust fund for donations by other countries. But it is not clear whether the fund will be seen by donors as sufficiently independent.
"We've believed from the beginning that many donors would like to see a separate trust fund for donor contributions, possibly under the World Bank or the United Nations," said Alan Larson, the under secretary of state for economic affairs. "Now we are hard at work on it."
The call for aid comes at a time when the occupation of Iraq is costing the United States more money across the board. Last Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed that military operations in Iraq were costing $3.9 billion a month, nearly twice the estimate the administration issued in April.
The more the United States needs others to help run Iraq, the more likely it is to share power. Some experts say the same dynamic could unfold militarily.
"The administration faces a classic trade-off between keeping control and getting outside participation," said James Dobbins, who has run or helped run the reconstruction of Kosovo, Haiti, Afghanistan and other countries. "This administration does not want to lose control, but they'll have to take another look at that position."
Mr. Dobbins, who is currently director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation, said that providing security in Iraq would probably require twice the roughly 160,000 foreign troops who are there now, and that other countries that join the rebuilding effort might not want to serve under the command structure set up by the American military.
Similarly, he said, international aid to Iraq may have to be carried out under an entirely different structure than the one currently contemplated.
"The United States will have to share power to secure resources for Iraq and to establish an image of legitimacy," he added.
The donor conference for Iraq is to take place in New York City in October. A preliminary meeting last month in New York drew more than 50 interested nations as well as representatives of the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and several independent relief organizations.
The financial reserves being used to run civilian operations in Iraq are going to run out at the end of the year, or perhaps shortly thereafter, and it is far from clear how much oil revenue will be available for Iraq's reconstruction.
The current supply of about $7 billion for Iraqi nonmilitary operations came from several sources, administration officials say. These include $1.7 billion in Iraqi assets frozen in American banks since 1991, $900 million found in hiding places in Iraq and $1.6 billion from Iraqi oil sold before the war.
In addition, the United Nations has set aside $1 billion in development funds for Iraq, and Congress appropriated $2.4 billion for Iraqi reconstruction contracts by the Bechtel Group and other companies.
Administration officials say this money will be used up by the beginning of next year.
Meanwhile, L. Paul Bremer III, the occupation administrator, has submitted a budget of roughly $6 billion for the rest of this year, and it is expected that the amount for 2004 will be considerably higher.
Oil revenues for Iraq, if the country somehow manages to resume pumping two million to three million barrels a day, could bring in $15 billion to $22 billion per year at currently projected oil prices, administration officials say. But a considerable amount of this money will have to be used to pay for food, medicine and other basic needs.
The Bush administration is exploring a number of ideas about how to use oil revenue to pay for the reconstruction, according to John Taylor, the Treasury under secretary for international affairs.
One proposal would generate tens of billions of dollars by "securitizing" the oil revenues - borrowing large sums up front and having them repaid over several years. But Mr. Taylor said that this idea would run up against Iraq's tens of billions of dollars in debt to foreign countries and companies, which would almost certainly challenge the first claim of any Iraqi "oil bonds" to oil revenues.
Other ideas include setting up a fund like Alaska's and making payments to individual Iraqis, perhaps by establishing individual retirement accounts. Some officials want to privatize Iraq's oil industry and use revenues for a widely held private company. Still others say that the revenues could be managed by a development board for use in major projects.
Administration officials say there may be resistance if other countries want some say in how money is spent for Iraq. Many officials are adamant that it will be the Coalition Provisional Authority, or C.P.A. - the current name for the American and British led occupation - that decides.
"It still hasn't entirely sunk into the international community, but the C.P.A. is the government of Iraq," said a senior administration official. "There are already unfortunate misunderstandings on that. But I cannot underline that often enough. The C.P.A. is the government of Iraq."
-------- europe
Cyprus approves accession to European Union
7/14/2003
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-07-14-cyprus-eu_x.htm
NICOSIA, Cyprus - The Cyprus parliament voted unanimously Monday to approve the accession of the Mediterranean island to the European Union.
Other countries approved accession in national plebiscites, but there is no provision in Cyprus' constitution for a referendum.
War-divided Cyprus, along with Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, will join the currently 15-member EU in May, 2004.
The EU accepted the whole of Cyprus as a member in April, but with the provision that EU laws and benefits from membership - which apply to the Greek Cypriot south - will not be extended to the Turkish-controlled north until after reunification.
The east Mediterranean island has been split into a Greek Cypriot controlled south and a Turkish-occupied north since Turkey invaded in 1974 in the wake of an abortive coup by supporters of union with Greece. The breakaway Turkish Cypriot state is only recognized by Turkey, which maintains 40,000 troops there.
-------- india
India denies request for troops in Iraq
July 14, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030714-110732-5317r.htm
NEW DELHI, July 14 -- The Indian government Monday rejected a U.S. request to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq.
Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha said such a deployment could be considered only under a United Nations mandate.
The decision came after a meeting in Delhi Monday of the cabinet committee on security, headed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
There had been widespread opposition from political parties and the public to deploying peacekeepers without a U.N. mandate.
The BBC said the Indian parliament had previously passed a resolution condemning the war and any turnaround would have been hard to explain.
According to Sinha, Delhi's growing engagement with the United States was discussed at the Monday meeting, but other factors, such as other countries in the region, were also considered.
"India remains ready to respond to the urgent needs of the Iraqi people," Sinha said.
----
India Refuses U.S. Request for Troops
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 14, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52890-2003Jul14?language=printer
NEW DELHI, July 14 -- After weeks of high-level discussions with the United States, India today rejected an American request to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq, saying it would only consider doing so under an "explicit" U.N. mandate.
The announcement following a cabinet-level security meeting this afternoon was a setback to the Pentagon's efforts to bolster its forces in Iraq with contributions from allies. For the past several weeks, India has been seriously considering the deployment to Iraq of a full army division -- about 17,000 men -- which would have been the second-largest foreign contingent in the country after that of the United States.
Some senior ministers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had argued that such a contribution would advance India's economic and strategic interests both in the gulf and in terms of its relations with the United States.
But the proposal has generated intense opposition in India. Public opinion here was solidly against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and with national elections looming next year, ruling-party strategists feared the political consequences of sending troops to help occupy the country, particularly if they started dying in significant numbers.
In the end, Indian officials said, they could not afford to take such risks without the cover of authorization from the U.N. Security Council.
"Were there to be an explicit U.N. mandate for the purpose the government of India could consider the deployment of troops to Iraq," Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha told reporters after emerging from today's cabinet-level security meeting, which was chaired by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Sinha said that in the meantime, "India is ready to contribute to the restoration of" educational, communications and medical facilities, beginning with a hospital it is planning to set up in cooperation with Jordan in the city of Najaf.
David Kennedy, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy here, expressed disappointment at the announcement but said it would not harm relations between the two countries. "This was a decision for the government of India to make," he said. "While we had hoped India would take a different decision, the transformation of U.S.-India relations will continue as before."
U.S. officials have been eagerly seeking troop contributions from allies both to bestow international legitimacy on the occupation and also to relieve pressure on its own forces, which now number about 145,000. They have raised the issue with Indian officials on a number of occasions, including visits to Washington last month by Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani and Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal.
Under the U.S. proposal, an Indian army division would have occupied a sector of the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, and some senior Indian officials -- including National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra -- were said to be intrigued by the idea. India has longstanding economic and security interests in the Persian Gulf, where up to 4 million Indians earn their living, and the country has been eager to improve relations with the United States after decades of Cold War hostility.
"We didn't support the war, but in any case the war happened," said K. Subrahmanyam, a former senior defense official who has supported sending troops to Iraq in the column he writes for the Times of India. Contributing to the stabilization of the country, he said, "is good for Iraqis and good for the international community."
The discussions between the two countries were serious and detailed. Last month, a high-level Pentagon team came here to discuss the proposal, and when Indian official balked at some aspects of the plan, U.S. officials sought to accommodate their concerns, according to an Indian defense official with knowledge of the deliberations.
"The Americans said they would give representation to the Indians in the command and control structure, so it doesn't look like we're working for the Americans," the official said.
But Vajpayee and other leaders of his party had doubts about the proposal, in large part because of political concerns, the official said. India has a long tradition of independence in foreign policy and many Indians regarded the idea of sending troops to Iraq as a sellout.
"If Iraq's invasion [is] unjust immoral and illegal, how can its occupation, caused by the invasion, be just and acceptable?" columnist Praful Bidwai wrote in the latest issue of Frontline, a liberal newsmagazine here. "It is completely illogical to oppose the war on Iraq, as the Indian government and Parliament did, and then support its occupation and become part of it."
Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report.
-------- iraq
$1 Billion a Week
And that's on the low side. So much for a 'self-sustaining' reconstruction. Parsing the real cost for U.S. taxpayers
By Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
July 21 issue
http://www.msnbc.com/news/938233.asp
Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, came back from his recent trip to Iraq with some disturbing stories.
ONE AFTERNOON HE was headed out on the highway to the Baghdad airport in a heavily protected convoy. He'd already been warned that, on that road, "people get shot, there are fire fights." Then the general with him suddenly ordered a machine gunner on top of a Humvee to get down. The reason: Iraqi killers are good at blindsiding American troops. "From time to time," Lugar was told, "there are enemy, whoever they are, who sort of loop wires down from the bridges that might pluck somebody off at the neck as they go down the road."
By the time Lugar's trip to Iraq was over, the Indiana Republican worried the American people were being blindsided, too, by the true costs in blood and treasure of a war that has yet to end. "This idea that we will be in [Iraq] 'just as long as we need to and not a day more'," he said, paraphrasing the administration line, "is rubbish! We're going to be there a long time." Lugar said he kept demanding answers about the cost to American taxpayers and was not quite getting them. "Where does the money come from?" he asked. "How is it to be disbursed, and by whom?"
----
Iraq Cost Could Mount to $100 Billion
Impact on Other Programs Feared
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 13, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48747-2003Jul12?language=printer
The cost of the war and occupation of Iraq could reach $100 billion through next year, substantially higher than anticipated at the war's outset, according to defense and congressional aides. This is raising worries that other military needs will go unmet while the government is swamped in red ink.
The cost of the war so far, about $50 billion, already represents a 14 percent increase to military spending planned for this year. Even before the United States invaded Iraq in March, President Bush had proposed defense budgets through 2008 that would rise to $460 billion a year, up 74 percent from the $265 billion spent on defense in 1996, when the current buildup began.
At the same time, the federal budget deficit is exploding. This week, officials expect to announce that it will exceed $400 billion for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, the largest in U.S. history by a wide margin. Former White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said last month the deficit should be smaller next year, but economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. -- factoring rising war costs -- said Friday the deficit may climb even higher than their previous $475 billion estimate.
"It's already unclear whether [the Bush defense buildup] is sustainable," said Steven M. Kosiak, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Add another $50 billion, and it's doubly unclear."
Administration officials concede that spending levels in Iraq are considerably higher than anticipated. At the onset of war, Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's chief financial officer, said post-combat operations were expected to cost about $2.2 billion a month. By early June, he had adjusted that forecast to $3 billion. But with about 145,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq, some under fire, costs have continued to climb.
The average monthly "burn rate" from January to April, a span encompassing the "heavy combat" phase of the war, was $4.1 billion, Zakheim said. That is not much higher than current expenditure rate of $3.9 billion a month for the occupation, even though most of the Navy and Air Force contingents have been sent home.
"We've peaked out," Zakheim said, "but we are still there in a way that we perhaps didn't think we would be at this point."
Defense experts worry that the cost of actual operations in Iraq understates the impact of those operations on military and federal spending. Indirect costs of a protracted conflict could include new funding for military recruiting and the retention of exhausted troops ready to leave the services, Kosiak said.
If 100,000 or more troops remain in Iraq a year from now, there will be political pressure to increase the overall size of the Army. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said Friday he would seek to add two new heavy divisions to the existing 10, or as many as 32,000 troops. Hunter inserted language in the defense authorization bill pending in Congress to prohibit any base closings that would harm the Army's ability to field 12 divisions.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Republicans contended that President Clinton had stretched the military too thin with the deployment of 10,000 troops in the Balkans, Kosiak noted. Now, there are 16 times that many soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan alone, and the grumbling is beginning again. Sens. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) practically pleaded with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for a larger Army when he appeared last week before the Armed Services Committee.
"I know your close communications with the [Army] Reserve component will convince you, as it's convinced me and many of the members of this panel, that there's got to be relief," Inhofe told Rumsfeld.
Right now, the Army's 3rd and 4th Infantry divisions, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, 1st Armored Division and 173rd Airborne Brigade are all serving in Iraq, as are elements of the Army's V Corps, according to the Army. Nineteen of the Army's 33 brigades are deployed abroad. Only one division, the 1st Cavalry, is being held in reserve.
Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said the war will likely lead to delays in new weapons purchases and some weapons development.
Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the conservative Lexington Institute, said elements of Rumsfeld's "transformation" of the military into a smaller, quicker force will undoubtedly have to be put on hold.
"The big budgetary question is not what it's costing us today," Thompson said. "It's the costs of reservists not reenlisting. It's the cost of active-duty [troops] giving up on a career that proved just too difficult to sustain, and the costs of equipment that is not being maintained at any level that can be considered adequate."
Pentagon officials are not nearly so pessimistic. Although Zakheim refused to venture how many troops would be in Iraq in a year, Defense Department documents sent to Congress last week indicate the Pentagon "assumes that only a limited number of U.S. forces will remain" there by September 2004. However, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the retired commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told lawmakers last week that troops could be in Iraq as long as four years from now.
Zakheim strongly dismissed concerns over morale, troop retention and recruiting.
"The people on the ground really seem to want to stay there," said Zakheim, who recently returned from Baghdad. "Even the people I visited in hospital, their number one objective is to get back into theater. People sign up to do just what they're doing."
Such comments have fueled Democratic criticism that the administration is not facing up to the facts in Iraq, nor is it addressing the hard choices they present.
"It's been hide the ball every step of the way," said Sen. Kent Conrad (N.D.), ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee. "They've consistently understated the cost by a factor of several-fold, and they've done everything they can not to share information."
Said Spratt: "Fifty billion dollars to a $400 billion deficit -- that's a significant addition that should have some bearing on tax cuts and other spending decisions."
Two antiwar activists, Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, and Niko Matsakis of Boston, are keeping a running tally of the war costs on their www.costofwar.comWeb site. Among the site's assertions: the $67 billion spent this year on the war and Iraqi reconstruction could have put 9.5 million more children in Head Start, financed the hiring of 1.3 million schoolteachers, or covered the health insurance costs of 29 million children.
Next year's costs are more difficult to discern. Although the administration has "a pretty good sense of what's going to be on the ground" Sept. 30, Zakheim said, it will not request funding now for Iraqi operations in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The defense spending bills for fiscal 2004 pending in Congress do not provide money for the occupation.
"We at least need to have some good estimates," Spratt said. "This is a big footnote to the budget. The budget does not adequately reflect all the costs that we know are going to be incurred in the coming fiscal year."
Even Republican aides on Capitol Hill complain that the Defense Department has been far too reluctant to own up to the budgetary costs of the war.
Zakheim defended the administration's budget policymaking as "open" and "above board," saying that ongoing military operations have traditionally been funded through emergency budget requests, not the base Pentagon budget.
"It is far more responsible to the taxpayer for us to get a better fix on what the costs are going be, then come in" with a request, he said. "Maybe in two months' time, things will be so different that everything we're talking about now will be seriously OBE'd" -- overtaken by events.
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Appointed Iraqi Council Assumes Limited Role
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 14, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51738-2003Jul13?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 13 -- A group of 25 Iraqis from diverse political, ethnic and religious backgrounds stepped onto a stage and declared themselves a "governing council" today, taking the first step to define the country's political future by accepting an offer of limited power-sharing from the U.S.-led occupation authority.
The members -- who include former exiles, politicians, Muslim clerics, tribal leaders, social activists, physicians and lawyers -- were selected by the occupation authority to help run this country of 24 million people until sovereignty is handed over to an elected government. The council's responsibilities will include the operation of ministries, the appointment of diplomats, the approval of next year's budget and preliminary work to form a commission to draft a constitution. Final control over those issues will still rest with the U.S. administrator here, L. Paul Bremer, but he has said he will follow the council's decisions in all but the most extraordinary circumstances.
"The establishment of this council is an expression of the national Iraqi will in the wake of the collapse of the former oppressive regime," intoned Muhammed Bahr Uloum, an elderly, bespectacled Shiite Muslim cleric in gauzy black robes who was selected leader of today's ceremonies.
"The people have won," said Ibrahim Jafari, a leader of the Dawa party, a Shiite political organization that opposed Saddam Hussein's government. Thousands of its members were executed under Hussein's rule. "After all of these years and all of the sacrifices we have made, we have taken the first step toward democracy," Jafari said.
Bremer and other U.S. officials here hope that the council, which was assembled over the past six weeks in a process that culminated in a frantic series of meetings over the past few days, will play a key role in tempering public disenchantment and restoring stability.
They expect the council to appease Iraqi political leaders, who have been clamoring for a chance to govern, as well as citizens, who have called for a greater role for Iraqis in the postwar transition. U.S. officials also say they believe that putting responsibility for government operations on the council could help deflect public anger over the tardy resumption of basic services from the occupation authority.
Although Bremer and his top political aides contend that the council's members represent a cross-section of the country and will have wide public support, it is not clear how Iraqis will react to a group that was handpicked by the occupation authority. While some Baghdad residents said they would adopt a wait-and-see attitude, others dismissed the group as American lackeys. "We cannot trust them," said Mohammed Abbas, an Oil Ministry employee who joined legions of Iraqis in watching the announcement of the council on live satellite television.
The members, 22 men and three women, held a two-hour, closed-door meeting this afternoon before walking onto the stage in a large conference hall to reveal themselves to their country and the world. They sat in a semicircle of chairs to deliver a statement and answer questions from the news media as Bremer and other officials looked on from the front row.
Bremer, a former U.S. ambassador and crisis manager who was sent to Baghdad to turn around the faltering reconstruction effort, did not speak at the ceremony. That fell to Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special representative for Iraq, who was asked by the members to make a statement.
"There are defining moments in history," he said. "For Iraq, today is definitely one of those."
He said Iraq was "moving back to where it rightfully belongs: at peace with itself and as a full participant in the community of nations."
Thirteen of the council members are Shiites, a group that makes up about 60 percent of Iraq's population, while 11 are Sunnis and one is an Assyrian Christian. Among the Sunnis, five are ethnic Kurds, five are Arab and one is an ethnic Turkmen.
The council includes several prominent Iraqis, such as Uloum and Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, a legendary guerrilla fighter in the southern marshes, as well as the leaders of seven leading political organizations, such as Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who has close ties to the Pentagon. But many others are relative unknowns on the streets of Baghdad.
Seated in front of a large banner depicting the shape of Iraq with the red, black and white colors of its flag, the members appeared to reflect the diversity of the country with their attire. Two men wore the black turbans of Shiite clerics, two others were draped in gold-fringed tribal robes, two women were clad in colorful head scarves and the rest of the men wore business suits.
"I helped deliver thousands of Iraqi babies, and now I am taking part in the birth of a new country and a new rule based on women's rights, humanity, unity and freedom," said Rajaa Habib Khuzai, one of the women on the council and the director of a maternity hospital in southern Iraq.
Sixteen of the members had lived outside the reach of Hussein's government before the war -- in a swath of northern Iraq controlled by Kurds or outside the country.
The issue of whether the council would be dominated by exiles had been a point of controversy among some Iraqis, who argued that the people who lived outside the country -- in some cases for decades -- should not get a majority of the council seats. U.S. and British officials involved in the selection of the group stressed today that they did not regard the seven members who lived in Kurdish-controlled Iraq as exiles. As a consequence, the officials said, they counted only nine members as former exiles.
Even so, the former exiles and Kurds, whose freedom from Hussein's lockstep politics allowed them to become skilled in the ways of news conferences and public speaking, dominated the question-and-answer session. All but one of the questions were answered by them, while the other members sat impassively.
After today's two-hour meeting, the members had lunch with Bremer, Vieira de Mello and John Sawers, the top British diplomat in Iraq.
Although members said they would wait until a second meeting on Monday to choose the council leadership, they did agree on one highly symbolic first public action: The council set April 9, the day Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, as a national holiday, and it rescinded six public holidays connected to Hussein and his Baath Party. They will have immediate effect because Monday is the anniversary of the 1958 military overthrow of the former ruling monarchy, and Thursday is the anniversary of the 1968 coup that brought the Baath Party to power.
Members said they hoped to begin tackling a raft of complex issues over the coming days and weeks. "Looking at the challenges of today, we believe the most important priority of the council is to direct all of its efforts to achieving security and stability in the country, revitalizing the national economy, and providing public services," Uloum said.
Some of the members said they hoped that the council's tenure would be limited and that elections would be held soon. "We hope that this council will work for a very short time," said Abdul Aziz Hakim, a cleric who represents the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shiite political party. "We should have a constitutional government and we should get rid of the occupation."
During today's news conference, some of the members bristled at the questions posed by Arab satellite news channels, which they accused of being too deferential to Hussein when he was in power -- and now. "The satellite channels expect Saddam to come back, but he is in the trash can of history. He is not coming back," Uloum said after a question from an al-Jazeera reporter.
The meeting took place under extraordinary security, with Army helicopters buzzing overhead and extra soldiers patrolling nearby streets. Insurgents opposed to the U.S. presence in Iraq have targeted Iraqis working with the occupation authority in recent weeks, prompting concern that council members could be the focus of attacks.
Chalabi was the only council member to express public gratitude to the United States and Britain for removing Hussein's government. He also condemned attacks on U.S. troops in the country. "The Iraqi people consider them forces of liberation," he said. "They don't consider these attacks as acts of resistance."
Correspondent Molly Moore and special correspondent Jill Carroll contributed to this report.
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Al-Qaeda not behind Iraq attacks - analysts
July 14 2003
Reuters
By Andrew Hammond
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=qw1058196962972B262&set_id=1
Dubai - A tape claiming responsibility for attacks on United States forces in Iraq was unlikely to have been made by al-Qaeda. What's more, its purported link with the group was just meant to scare the Americans, Arab analysts said on Monday.
The videotape broadcast on Sunday by Dubai-based al-Arabiya television said the "Armed Islamic Movement for al-Qaeda, the Falluja Branch", with members all over Iraq, was behind the attacks, some of them launched in Falluja, west of Baghdad.
But Arab experts said the tape bore none of the hallmarks of messages from Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network already aired on Arab channels. It was not peppered with Koranic sayings and mentioned the Western calendar before the Islamic one.
'It will frighten the Americans because they think al-Qaeda is strong' Some commentators suggested the rhetoric on the tape matched the Baath Party style of loyalists of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Earlier this month, a tape said to be made by Saddam urged Iraqis to fight the US-British occupation.
Khaled al-Dakheel, a Saudi columnist for the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, said it was plausible that Baathists made the latest tape despite its denial that Saddam followers had carried out the attacks.
"I swear by God no one from his (Saddam Hussein's) followers carried out any jihad (holy struggle) operations like he claims... they are a result of our brothers in jihad," said the unidentified voice on the tape.
"They know what saying it's al-Qaeda means for the Americans. It's a public relations game," Dakheel told Reuters. Al-Qaeda is seen as behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States
"There has been resistance for a long time, but that's different from saying al-Qaeda is involved," he said.
Dakheel and others said there was no shortage of groups hostile to the Americans, from Baathists to Arab Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish Islamists, to ordinary people seeking revenge for US treatment of Iraqis, which is seen as heavy-handed.
US forces have blamed Saddam's loyalists for most of the attacks that have killed 32 US soldiers since US President George Bush declared major combat over in Iraq on May 1.
Calling on US forces to leave Iraq, the taped voice warned that "the end of America will be at the hands of Islam" and threatened an attack in coming days that would "break the back of America completely".
It was not clear if the tape, which stated the date as July 10, 2003, meant an attack in Iraq, where 148 000 US troops are stationed, or elsewhere.
The only image on the tape was a still of an unidentified white-bearded man in a turban. A spokesperson for al-Arabiya said the channel had received an anonymous call asking it to collect the tape from a location in Baghdad.
Diaa Rashwan of the al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo said it was probably a freelance Islamist group drawing inspiration from al-Qaeda.
"The Iraqi group thought the connection with al-Qaeda would be good for them because it will frighten the Americans because they think al-Qaeda is strong," he said.
Prominent Saudi Islamist Mohsen al-Awajy said the occupation of Iraq was becoming a rallying call for Islamists of all persuasions, inside and outside Iraq.
"I don't think al-Qaeda is significantly functioning in Iraq at present. Al-Qaeda is fighting for its survival," he said. "But resistance groups are now dominated by Islamists and there is a young home-grown generation developing in Iraq."
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Who Is Governing Iraq?
Iraqi Council 'Advising' U.S. Authorities in Charge of Military Occupation
By Jefferson Morley washingtonpost.com
Monday, July 14, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15601-2003May20?language=printer
Who is governing Iraq?
L. Paul Bremer III, a former State Department official, is chief administrator of the U.S. occupation. As head of the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), his mission is to administer the country on an interim basis and to provide humanitarian aid, rebuild damaged infrastructure and help establish a representative government.
Do Iraqis have a role?
On July 13, Bremer appointed a group of 25 Iraqis from diverse political, ethnic and religious backgrounds as a "governing council." The council's responsibilities will include the operation of ministries, the appointment of diplomats, the approval of next year's budget and preliminary work to form a commission to draft a constitution. Final control over those issues will still rest with Bremer.
Responsibilities of Iraqi 'Governing Council'
Who are these Iraqis?
Thirteen of the council members are Shiites, a group that makes up about 60 percent of Iraq's population, while 11 are Sunnis and one is an Assyrian Christian. Among the Sunnis, five are ethnic Kurds, five are Arab and one is an ethnic Turkmen.
The council includes several prominent Iraqis, such as Uloum and Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, a legendary guerrilla fighter in the southern marshes, as well as the leaders of seven leading political organizations, such as Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who has close ties to the Pentagon. But many others are relative unknowns.
Biographies of Council Members
Who does Bremer report to in Washington?
Bremer reports to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his top aides, Deputy Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Under Secretary for Policy Douglas J. Feith. As The Post reported in early May, "control of the reconstruction agency remains firmly with a tight-knit group of Pentagon officials and handpicked former generals."
What do Iraqis think of this arrangement?
Bremer and other U.S. officials expect the council to appease Iraqi political leaders, who have been clamoring for a chance to govern, as well as citizens, who have called for a greater role for Iraqis in the postwar transition. Although Bremer and his aides contend that the council's members will have wide public support, it is not clear how Iraqis will react to a group that was handpicked by the occupation authority. While some Baghdad residents said they would adopt a wait-and-see attitude, others dismissed the group as American lackeys.
What is the role of the U.S. military?
The post-combat force is big and growing. As a result, commanders of the 160,000 U.S. soldiers in the country are playing a leading role in governing the country.
In June, the U.S. military began an aggressive campaign against Iraqis mounting sniper shootings, hit-and-run attacks and ambushes against U.S. forces. One part of the campaign targeted the cities of Fallujah and Khaldiyah north and west of Baghdad where armed resistance to the U.S. occupation has been fiercest. In an operation dubbed Desert Scorpion, U.S. troops swarmed over trouble spots, rounded up suspected "subversives" and collected weapons.
Who controls Iraq's oil?
On May 22, the United States and Great Britain secured a United Nations resolution granting them broad control over the country's oil industry and revenue until a permanent, representative Iraqi government is in place. Philip J. Carroll, a former executive of Shell Oil Co., has been selected to lead the rebuilding of Iraq's petroleum industry.
How long will the U.S. occupation last?
Unknown. Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz has said it may take longer than six months to hand over power to the Iraqis. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said recently that "anyone who thinks they know how long it's going to take is fooling themselves."
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U.S. Convoy Is Attacked in Iraq, Killing 1 Soldier and Wounding 6
July 14, 2003
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14CND-IRAQ.html?hp
An American soldier was killed and six others were wounded in Baghdad early today when a military convoy was ambushed by attackers firing rocket-propelled grenades, the American military said.
The attack came a day after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the United States might need to send more troops to Iraq to counter an increasingly coordinated Iraqi resistance movement.
Thirty-two American soldiers have been reported killed by hostile fire since May 1, when President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Since the start of the war on March 20, a total of 177 coalition troops have been killed by hostile fire and 872 have been wounded, an American military spokesman said. The vast majority of the casualties have involved American troops.
Coalition troops are bracing for a surge in attacks this week to coincide with two anniversaries associated with Saddam Hussein, the ousted Iraqi leader, and his Baath Party. The holidays were abolished by the interim Iraqi Governing Council that was formed on Sunday.
In another incident today, a grenade was tossed into a parked car belonging to the Tunisian Embassy, destroying the vehicle but inflicting no casualties, the authorities said. The car was a few hundred yards away from the compound housing the new Governing Council in Baghdad and from other buildings used by the occupying authorities.
The 25-member council, which coalition leaders hope will help reduce resentment toward the occupation, said today that it would send a delegation to the United Nations Security Council "to strengthen and consolidate the Governing Council's role as the legitimate Iraqi authority during this transitional period," according to Reuters.
American forces have blamed Hussein and Baath Party loyalists for the guerrilla attacks.
Over the weekend, coalition forces launched a fourth major offensive intended to flush out anticoalition insurgents. In 27 raids around Iraq, at least 226 people have been detained and numerous weapons confiscated - including 800 820-millimeter mortar rounds, 50 AK-47's, 26 rocket-propelled grenades and three hand grenades, the American military said today.
The operation "will sweep the task force's area and root out elements that have attacked coalition forces," a statement from the military said.
An American military spokesman in Baghdad provided no further details on the latest fatal attack against coalition forces.
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Rumsfeld Says Iraq May Need a Larger Force
July 14, 2003
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14TROO.html
WASHINGTON, July 13 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that the United States might need to send additional troops to Iraq to quell an increasingly well-organized guerrilla resistance, and warned that more American soldiers would die in attacks this summer.
Mr. Rumsfeld also said for the first time that the attacks against American troops by remnants of Saddam Hussein's security forces, fedayeen fighters and Iraqi prisoners released before the war, were being coordinated at least regionally and possibly nationally.
Mr. Rumsfeld and his top aides had expressed optimism in recent weeks that American troop levels in Iraq could begin to decline as additional allied ground forces arrived later this summer and more newly trained Iraqi police officers took up positions around the country.
But the increasing frequency and sophistication of the attacks against American forces and Iraqis helping them have stirred alarm among American officials and caused commanders and Mr. Rumsfeld to rethink force levels.
"It seems to me that the numbers of U.S. forces are unlikely to go up," he said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press." "Now, could they? You bet. If they're needed, they will be there."
There are 148,000 American and 13,000 non-American troops in Iraq now, with 17,000 more allied soldiers pledged to arrive over the summer. Mr. Rumsfeld said 28,000 of the 60,000 Iraqi police officers needed were now on the job. American occupation leaders also plan to train a new Iraqi army of 12,000 soldiers within one year, expanding it to 40,000 within three years.
As recently as Wednesday, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Rumsfeld had agreed with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who recently stepped down as the commander of troops in the region, that the overall number of foreign troops in Iraq would stay about where it is for the foreseeable future. At the same time, he suggested that some troops from other nations would replace United States soldiers, reducing the American presence somewhat.
"It would be incorrect to say that we expect that international forces will replace all of U.S. forces," Mr. Rumsfeld said under intense questioning by senators. "We don't anticipate that."
In his testimony, he also said that if the strains of American deployments of ground troops around the world forced the Pentagon to seek to increase the size of the Army and the Marines, "clearly, we will come to Congress and ask for an increase," adding, "But at the moment, we do not see that that's the case."
Mr. Rumsfeld is to be briefed this week by military commanders on how long troops now in Iraq ought to be kept there, and on which units might leave. They would be replaced by other American forces as part of a rotation that changes the mixture of troops from those specialized in intense combat to those better suited for keeping the uneasy peace and sporadic hostilities.
Today, Mr. Rumsfeld confirmed that American officials were bracing for a possible new wave of attacks against United States forces during the next week to coincide with anniversaries tied to Mr. Hussein and the Baath Party.
The anniversaries include July 14, the date of the 1958 coup against the British-backed monarchy, which under Mr. Hussein was celebrated as Iraq's National Day; July 16, the date that Mr. Hussein took power in 1979; and July 17, the date of the Baath Party revolution in 1968.
"We expect that the summer is not going to be a peaceful summer," Mr. Rumsfeld said on the ABC News program "This Week," noting the increased resistance. "It's pretty clear that in a city or an area, there is coordination. We don't have any good evidence that it's nationwide or even a large region, but it's possible."
On "Meet the Press," Mr. Rumsfeld warned of more American casualties, saying: "Are people being shot at? Yes. Is it a difficult situation? You bet. Are more people going to be killed? I'm afraid that's true."
Speaking with more urgency than in the past, Mr. Rumsfeld said capturing or killing Mr. Hussein was paramount so as to deny guerrillas a rallying figure and to ease the fears of other Iraqis that the former president could somehow return to power.
"The fact that Saddam Hussein has not been found does cause a problem," he said on "This Week." "We do need to find him. We do need to get closure."
When asked about the cost of the Iraq mission, Mr. Rumsfeld said on "Meet the Press" that the $2 billion-a-month price tag in April was an estimate by The New York Times. But in fact, the Pentagon comptroller, Dov S. Zakheim, was quoted in The Times on Friday as the source of that figure. Appearing 30 minutes later on "This Week," Mr. Rumsfeld cited the April figure as the Pentagon's and acknowledged that the postwar costs had roughly doubled, to about $4 billion a month.
In discussing the attacks on American forces, Mr. Rumsfeld said on "Meet the Press" that many of them seemed directed at stalling efforts to establish a new Iraqi government and to rebuild the economy.
"The leftovers, the dead-enders from that regime, are targeting our successes," he said. "I'm afraid we are going to have to expect this to go on."
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Syria staging P.R. offensive
July 14, 2003
By Farid N. Ghadry
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030713-102225-3342r.htm
Fresh from the bruising it received for aiding senior Iraqis seeking refuge in Syria in the early parts of the war, the Ba'ath Party is launching a public relations campaign to persuade the U.S. public that Syria's Ba'athists are not the same as Saddam's Ba'athists.
Reports from Syria confirm that the leadership believes that the bad-cop-good-cop policy instituted by the United States has but one aim only - to weaken Syria from within. The good cop is represented by the State Department and affiliated efforts to regain the trust of the Syrians, including efforts to post a positive note on the bilateral relations between both countries. The bad cop is represented by the Pentagon and some of the high-ranking military personnel very much aware of intelligence that has caught the Ba'athists with their hands in the cookie jar.
Syria's Ba'athists have been struggling to recuperate from the stench of vulnerability that has weakened them from within without the firing of one bullet. So much so that no amount of good-cop policy will ever place Syria back on the pedestal that the Ba'athists built for themselves during the era of Hafez Assad.
The Ba'ath party is torn from within. There are those who are demanding a violent answer to the situation they find themselves in by supporting Saddam's resurgence, betting that the United States does not have the latitude or the will to wage another military campaign on the heels of one that, in the minds of many Syrians, has not been won yet. There are also those who are trying to hide as much as possible, hoping that the storm will simply blow over and Syria will return to the normalcy of yesterday. That struggle is ongoing as this article is written, with the violent side mostly supported by the likes of Assef Shawkat, President Bashar Assad's brother-in-law, and some high-ranking generals in the air force and army.
But Mr. Assad is not listening to Mr. Shawkat for once and instead has ordered, at a high cost, the implementation of a two-pronged public relations campaign. One is being coordinated regionally with Iran and Lebanon for the purpose of creating a counteroffensive to Washington's own campaign in the region, and the other is yet to start, but will be directed at the epicenter of power in Washington D.C.; its aim is to soften the image of Syria in the American public eye and to reverse the almost imminent vote in Congress in favor of the Syria Accountability Act, a piece of legislation that will paralyze Syria economically and punish the government for its 27-year occupation of Lebanon. Both campaigns' intentions are to turn the tables against Syria's accusers on subjects such as weapons of mass destruction, and to show a noble image of Syria, hoping it will resonate with the kind-hearted Americans. It is too early to tell whether this effort will succeed, but the Europeans are more prone to that Napsterite music. That should be a source of worry for any democracy in the world.
In the United States, Syria has been shopping for a public relations firm to handle the rebuilding of its image. Damascus is finding it hard to contract with any reputable firm, because most of the companies who have turned them down have done so out of concern that their more stable customers will find it offensive to be part of that club. Syria is still shopping but may end up building its own firm from hired guns. Although many believe it will be an uphill battle, and the Ba'athists will confirm this, their purpose is to resonate well with the voters most likely to vote for presidential candidate Howard Dean in order to soften the punch if things ever get to that point.
It is our belief that this concerted effort by the Ba'athists will backfire, since they still do not understand the effect of September 11 on the American psyche. They do not realize that no dose of public relations will ever convince the United States to drop its guard and go back to sleep, trusting that extremism in the Arab world is a harmless phenomena that will blow over one day if Washington persists in its foreign policy of yesteryear.
Farid N. Ghadry is co-founder of the Reform Party of Syria.
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U.S. Air Force Sees Quick and Frequent Launches in its Future
By: Jeremy Singer
Space News Staff Writer
Monday , July 14, 2003
http://www.space.com/spacenews/spacenews_businessmonday_030714a.html
The U.S. Air Force is moving forward with plans to develop new space vehicles that can launch quickly and frequently, but spaceflight is not expected to become as routine or as pervasive as military air power in the century to come.
Space launches will likely continue to be reserved for special purposes, said Col. Henry Baird, deputy director for requirements at Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs, Colo. Their flight rate may be more similar to the service's use of B-2 stealth bombers than its use of fighter jets, he said.
The Air Force began a program this year called the Operationally Responsive Spacelift initiative. The goal of that program is to pave the way for reusable rockets that could be launched at a low cost on short notice. But while military space vehicles are unlikely to replace combat aircraft in the next century they could be the driver of substantial new technology.
Brig. Gen. Simon (Pete) Worden, who leads the Operationally Responsive Spacelift initiative, noted that the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., led directly to unprecedented advancements in weapon systems.
"This development has continued to the present, yet we have not seen the large jump in system development that we saw back in the initial stages of flight development," Worden said in a written response to questions earlier this year. "Space is our opportunity to mirror that transformational change."
The Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have started a joint effort called the Force Application and Launch from CONUS (Continental United States) technology demonstration, referred to as Falcon, which is also intended to contribute to the Air Force's effort to field quick-reaction reusable rockets.
These efforts are intended to lead to improved methods of launching satellites and using vehicles that can travel in space to attack targets on the ground. A draft Falcon solicitation document issued June 17 said the ability to launch from the United States to strike targets within two hours "would free the U.S. military from reliance on forward basing to enable it to react promptly and decisively to ... threatening actions by hostile countries and terrorist organizations."
While the Pentagon has missiles today that can launch from the United States to strike targets around the world in less than an hour, the new systems are envisioned as vehicles that could verify their targets from space before striking, conduct other reconnaissance, and abort missions if necessary, according to experts.
The future of military spaceflight could also involve new missions such as placing military personnel in orbit, Baird said. Military officers have flown to space to take part in NASA missions, but the Air Force has yet to conduct its own manned spaceflight operations. The first program designed to place military personnel in space - the Manned Orbiting Laboratory - was canceled in the 1960s.
While satellite builders have made enormous advancements in spacecraft technology over the past several decades, and are likely to continue to do so, even the most sophisticated on-board sensors and computers cannot replicate some of the abilities of the human brain, Baird said. Baird said that he has had conversations with astronauts who have said they could make observations of the Earth that could not be gleaned from data collected by satellite computers.
The Air Force may want to keep officers in space for long periods in a space station to make continuous observations of the Earth and objects in space that could threaten U.S. assets, or launch manned spacecraft for quick observations in a crisis situation, Baird said.
As the U.S. Air Force pushes forward with new space programs in the years to come, its strategic planners will need to be mindful that other countries may make great strides as well, said Deborah Westphal, a partner in the Manchester, Mass.-based consulting firm Toeffler Associates.
"I think right now we are the one and only superpower and I don't think that will continue," Westphal said. "I think we will move toward having another superpower out there. Whoever that is will have to share in the control of space or control it."
War in space is not likely to resemble fighting on the ground and in the air, but it is more likely to involve targeted attacks on U.S. satellites. An early indicator, Baird said, was the Iraqi military's unsuccessful attempts to deny U.S. forces in the recent war there access to satellite navigation signals from the Pentagon's Global Positioning System.
The Pentagon may be able to avoid attacks on its satellites if it stays away from the development of anti-satellite weapons, said Joseph Cirincione, director of non-proliferation projects at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here. Other countries are not likely to move forward aggressively with anti-satellite weapons unless they see the United States doing so, Cirincione said.
The Air Force recently began development of systems intended to temporarily disable enemy communications and reconnaissance satellites, and has not ruled out the development of systems to destroy spacecraft used by the enemy.
However, the missile defense interceptors under development at the Pentagon could be easily reconfigured to strike satellites, and may also encourage other countries to develop capabilities to strike satellites.
"The ground-based missile defense interceptors will be a lousy missile defense system, but a great anti-satellite system," Cirincione said, pointing to the relative ease of targeting satellites in predictable orbits versus unanticipated ballistic missile launches.
However, some defense experts believe that countries like Russia and China are already developing anti-satellite weapons, and the United States must do the same in order to protect its own assets.
"It's tremendously naïve to suggest that if the United States does not develop these capabilities, no one else will," said Jack Spencer, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank here. "It's the lack of developing the ability to protect our space assets that gives rise to other countries developing anti-satellite capabilities."
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Withheld Iraq report blamed on French
July 14, 2003
By Michael Smith
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030713-114149-3172r.htm
LONDON - The French secret service is believed to have refused to allow Britain's MI6 to give the United States "credible" intelligence showing that Iraq was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger, U.S. intelligence sources said yesterday.
Britain's Secret Intelligence Service had more than one "different and credible" piece of intelligence to show that Iraq was attempting to buy the ore, known as yellowcake, British officials insisted. But it was given to them by at least one and possibly two intelligence services and, under the rules governing cooperation, it could not be shared with anyone else without the originator's permission.
U.S. intelligence sources believe the most likely source of the MI6 intelligence was the French secret service, the DGSE. Niger is a former French colony, and its uranium mines are run by a French company that comes under the control of the French Atomic Energy Commission.
A factor in the refusal to hand over the information might have been concern that the U.S. administration's willingness to publicize intelligence would lead to sources being inadvertently disclosed.
U.S. sources also point out that the French government was vehemently opposed to the war with Iraq and suggest that it would have been instinctively against the idea of passing on the intelligence.
British sources yesterday dismissed suggestions of a dispute between MI6 and the CIA on the issue. But they acknowledged to being surprised that George J. Tenet, the CIA director, had apologized to President Bush for allowing him to cite the British government and its claim that Saddam had sought to acquire uranium from Africa in his State of the Union speech in January.
The apology follows the International Atomic Energy Agency's dismissal of documents given to it by the CIA, which purported to prove the link, as forgeries.
Those documents have been widely identified with September's British dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium ore from an unnamed country in Africa.
British officials acknowledged that the country was Niger, but insisted that the intelligence behind it was genuine and had nothing to do with the fake documents. It was convincing and they were sticking with it, the officials said.
They dismissed a report from a former U.S. diplomat who was sent to Niger to investigate the claims and rejected them.
"He seems to have asked a few people if it was true, and when they said 'no' he accepted it all," one official said. "We see no reason at all to change our assessment."
The fake documents were not behind that assessment and were not seen by MI6 until after they were denounced by the IAEA. If MI6 had seen them earlier, it would have immediately advised the Americans that they were fakes, these officials said.
There had been a number of reports, in the United States in particular, suggesting that the fake documents - which came from another intelligence source - were passed on via MI6, the officials said. But this was not true.
"What they can't accuse MI6 of doing is passing anything on this to the CIA because it didn't have the fake documents and it was not allowed to pass on the intelligence it did have to anyone else."
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A Spy Takes the Bullet
The Bushies blamed CIA Director George Tenet for the faulty-Iraq-intel firestorm. Now his career is on the line
By Michael Isikoff And Tamara Lipper
NEWSWEEK
7/14/03
http://www.msnbc.com/news/938245.asp?0cl=cR
Easygoing and engaging, CIA Director George Tenet has long been known as an accomplished Washington schmoozer with a knack for ingratiating himself with his political bosses.
A VETERAN CAPITOL HILL aide picked by Bill Clinton six years ago to be the country's top spy, Tenet presciently earned the gratitude of George W. Bush even before he was elected president. In 1999, Tenet presided over an emotional ceremony renaming the CIA's Virginia headquarters after Bush's father. When W was elected, he let Tenet keep his job. Bush was impressed with his gung-ho attitude. They swapped baseball stories and capital gossip. After September 11, Bush depended on Tenet to translate the barrage of murky intelligence.
But last week Tenet abruptly discovered the limits of his political skills, and of his friendship with Bush. After weeks of ducking uncomfortable questions about the administration's mishandling of intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq war-did the president and his advisers hype the danger and mislead the country? Bush issued a terse response: it was the CIA's fault.
In the State of the Union address last January, Bush said that Iraq was seeking to buy large quantities of uranium from Africa, an assertion based on what turned out to be crudely forged documents from Niger that had been questioned by the CIA months before. How did such a dubious claim make its way into the president's most heavily edited speech? That's where the finger-pointing begins. Anonymous CIA officials complained to reporters that Tenet had tried to warn the White House the Niger claims were bogus. The president, whose Africa trip was marred by the controversy, struck back hard, pushing the blame back on the CIA. "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services," Bush said. National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice took it one step further, saying Tenet himself was responsible. "I can tell you, if the CIA, the director of Central Intelligence, had said 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone, without question," Rice told reporters.
In fact, the CIA had objected to an earlier draft of the line, and had kept references to the false Niger deal out of a speech last October in Cincinnati. But after the White House removed specific references to Niger from the State of the Union Message, and changed the line to say that the information came from the British government, not U.S. intelligence agencies, CIA officials signed off. Suddenly, Tenet found himself playing an unfamiliar role: fall guy. On Friday he issued a statement officially taking the blame, saying the intel "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed."
CIA officials insisted that Tenet had made the decision to step forward on his own. But White House officials, who worked with Tenet for days drafting the statement, left the impression that Tenet was told he had to do it. "The discussion was, the CIA needs to explain what its role was in this," said Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer. Either way, NEWSWEEK has learned, Tenet may not be in the job much longer. Sources close to Tenet say he is pondering his exit strategy. He had already been thinking about calling it quits, they maintain. At six years, he has served longer than all but two of the agency's past directors. But the timing is tricky: go now, and it looks like he was forced out. Wait too long, and he risks becoming an issue in the 2004 campaign. Bush voiced confidence in Tenet on Saturday, but, as one official says, "he's not going to stay forever." The knives are out: Pat Roberts, the Senate Intelligence chairman, scolded Tenet for his "extremely sloppy handling" of Iraqi intelligence and denounced agency leaks "to discredit the president."
Some Bush aides worry that pushing Tenet out could backfire with the press, an increasingly skeptical public and Bush's potential rivals in 2004. Democrats are piling on. "Mr. President, stop trying to pass the buck," Florida Sen. Bob Graham commented Friday. "You made the baseless claim, you should take responsibility." Meantime, midlevel staffers are still squabbling over who knew what. The White House had hoped that Tenet's official admission would put an end to the questions about Iraq intelligence and take the heat off Bush. If anything, it may only turn up the flame.
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Shelby says Tenet should quit, cites 'failures' at CIA
July 14, 2003
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030713-114117-5179r.htm
A Senate Republican yesterday said CIA director George J. Tenet should resign for failing to identify erroneous intelligence when the agency vetted President Bush's State of the Union address.
"If I were the president, he wouldn't be there," said Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, who was ranking member of the intelligence committee when Democrats last ran the Senate.
"There have been more failures of intelligence on the watch of George Tenet than anybody in recent history as director of the CIA," Mr. Shelby said on CNN's "Late Edition."
Both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice yesterday said the British intelligence that said Iraq was trying to purchase nuclear-weapons material in Africa was accurate, but should not have been used in a presidential address.
"It is ludicrous to suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa," Miss Rice said on "Fox News Sunday."
The British stand by their information, which also was repeated by the National Intelligence Estimate in a U.S. classified document, administration officials said.
Democratic presidential hopefuls Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and John Kerry of Massachusetts both said yesterday that questions still needed to be answered.
Mr. Graham, senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that it was "a selective use of intelligence."
Mr. Kerry said Mr. Tenet's acceptance of responsibility does not end the question of who is ultimately responsible, particularly given that Mr. Bush made a similar assertion during a speech in Cincinnati three months earlier.
"I believe there is an enormous, serious question about our protection and the judgments we must make in the future and the quality of our intelligence - this is not a matter of politics," Mr. Kerry said on CNN.
Mr. Graham agreed: "This is not an issue of George Tenet. This is an issue of George Bush."
In his Jan. 20 address, Mr. Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The British documents turned out to have been forged. The White House admitted the error last week.
On Friday, Mr. Tenet took responsibility.
"These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president," Mr. Tenet said.
Mr. Shelby said the statement "is more than just a little flap. There is substance behind that. And somebody ought to be accountable."
But Mr. Bush is defending the agency and its director. "I've got confidence in George Tenet. I've got confidence in the men and women who work at the CIA," the president said Saturday.
Mr. Tenet, who was appointed by President Clinton in 1997, should "absolutely not" resign, said Miss Rice.
"The president has confidence in George Tenet. He has fought the war on terrorism well," Miss Rice said on CNN.
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Call for CIA chief to quit
Associated Press
July 14, 2003
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6749017%255E1702,00.html
A LEADING Republican has called for the sacking of CIA director George Tenet after Tenet took responsibility for a now-discredited allegation in the President's State of the Union speech in January.
Mr Bush claimed in the speech that Iraq tried to acquire uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons program. It emerged this month that the allegation was based on a forged document.
"Somebody ought to be accountable," Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee told CNN. "If I were the president, he wouldn't be there."
The White House admitted last Tuesday that the remark by Bush, stating that Baghdad had sought "significant quantities of uranium from Africa," overstated Saddam's alleged efforts to obtain uranium for nuclear arms.
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN the issue had been " enormously overblown".
"The president of the United States did not go to war because of the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein sought the uranium in Africa," she said. Earlier, on "Fox News Sunday", she dismissed the notion as "ludicrous."
"The president of the United States did not go to war because of the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein sought the uranium in Africa," she said. Earlier, on "Fox News Sunday", she dismissed the notion as "ludicrous."
Other congressional lawmakers meanwhile said they would await the findings of an investigation into the matter before taking a position on Tenet's future. The Senate, by voice vote, has approved a probe into the matter.
"Well, I would like to wait for the end of the investigation to reach a conclusion as to whether Tenet should go. I'm obviously dissatisfied with him in this regard, but also in other aspects as well," Senator Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN.
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Mission to Niger
Robert Novak (archive)
July 14, 2003
Creators Syndicate
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20030714.shtml
WASHINGTON -- The CIA's decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet's knowledge. Remarkably, this produced a political firestorm that has not yet subsided.
Wilson's report that an Iraqi purchase of uranium yellowcake from Niger was highly unlikely was regarded by the CIA as less than definitive, and it is doubtful Tenet ever saw it. Certainly, President Bush did not, prior to his 2003 State of the Union address, when he attributed reports of attempted uranium purchases to the British government. That the British relied on forged documents made Wilson's mission, nearly a year earlier, the basis of furious Democratic accusations of burying intelligence though the report was forgotten by the time the president spoke.
Reluctance at the White House to admit a mistake has led Democrats ever closer to saying the president lied the country into war. Even after a belated admission of error last Monday, finger-pointing between Bush administration agencies continued. Messages between Washington and the presidential entourage traveling in Africa hashed over the mission to Niger.
Wilson's mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a "con man." This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.
That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.
After eight days in the Niger capital of Niamey (where he once served), Wilson made an oral report in Langley that an Iraqi uranium purchase was "highly unlikely," though he also mentioned in passing that a 1988 Iraqi delegation tried to establish commercial contacts. CIA officials did not regard Wilson's intelligence as definitive, being based primarily on what the Niger officials told him and probably would have claimed under any circumstances. The CIA report of Wilson's briefing remains classified.
All this was forgotten until reporter Walter Pincus revealed in the Washington Post June 12 that an unnamed retired diplomat had given the CIA a negative report. Not until Wilson went public on July 6, however, did his finding ignite the firestorm.
During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wilson had taken a measured public position -- viewing weapons of mass destruction as a danger but considering military action as a last resort. He has seemed much more critical of the administration since revealing his role in Niger. In the Washington Post July 6, he talked about the Bush team "misrepresenting the facts," asking: "What else are they lying about?"
After the White House admitted error, Wilson declined all television and radio interviews. "The story was never me," he told me, "it was always the statement in (Bush's) speech." The story, actually, is whether the administration deliberately ignored Wilson's advice, and that requires scrutinizing the CIA summary of what their envoy reported. The Agency never before has declassified that kind of information, but the White House would like it to do just that now -- in its and in the public's interest.
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Iraqi council votes to dispatch a delegation to the U.N.
7/14/2003
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-07-14-iraq-casulties_x.htm
BAGHDAD - Iraq's new governing council, acting confidently in its first full day on the job, voted Monday to send a delegation to the U.N. Security Council and assert its right to represent Baghdad on the world stage. U.S. soldiers inspect the damage to a U.S. truck after attackers blasted it with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) north of Baghdad. By Marwan Naamani, AFP
But in a reminder of the challenges faced by the new council as it takes its initial steps toward what is hoped to be a transition to democracy, violence erupted again in the capital. An explosion wrecked a car near the council's meeting site and yet another U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush.
In a statement, President Bush called the establishment of the council "an important step forward in the ongoing transition from ruthless dictatorship to a free and democratic Iraq with Iraqis determining their own future."
As the U.S.-backed council met, governments in Europe and Asia - even those critical of the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein - welcomed the body as a first step in returning political power to the Iraqis.
Both supporters and opponents of the conflict believe formation of an Iraqi administration could make it easier for them to contribute to the reconstruction of the shattered country - a crucial way of improving their ties with Washington.
"I welcome the setting up of the governing council in Iraq ... as a first important step toward a genuine and representative Iraqi administration," the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in a statement.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said the council "is seen as the first major step toward the transfer of official power in the country from the coalition forces and into the hands of Iraqis" and a "model" for addressing the problems of security and reconstruction.
The council, announced Sunday, will have real political muscle with the power to name ministers and approve the 2004 budget. But final control of Iraq rests with L. Paul Bremer - the U.S. administrator of Iraq and a major architect of the council.
That, and the fact the council was selected rather than elected, led to criticism at an Arab League meeting in Cairo, where Secretary-General Amr Moussa showed little eagerness to embrace the new Iraqi political body.
If the new council had been elected, Moussa said in a statement released Sunday night, "it would have gained much power and credibility." However, most Arab leaders, like Saddam, gained power by brutal force or right of birth, not through elections.
The 25-member body - comprised of prominent Iraqis from all walks of political and religious life - announced the delegation it was sending to the United Nations would "assert and emphasize the role of the governing council as a legitimate Iraqi body during this transitional period."
Ever since Saddam's U.N. Ambassador, Mohammed Al-Douri, left New York on April 11, Iraqi diplomats have kept a very low profile at the United Nations. Al-Douri did not resign and Iraq's U.N. Mission remains open, with the former third-ranking diplomat, Said Shihab Ahmad, in charge.
On Monday, the Iraqi governing council also formed three committees to outline an order of business for the coming weeks and work out organizational issues, said Hoshyar Zebari, a spokesman for the council. The council had planned to select a leader, but Zebari said that would be done later.
After the meeting had broken up, an explosion about a quarter-mile from the compound turned a black four-wheel drive vehicle owned by the Tunisian Embassy into a burned-out metal hulk. The site of the blast was a parking lot where journalists leave cars ahead of news conferences.
"I think it was a bomb," said Iraqi policeman Qasim Mohammed. "The explosion was very loud, and had it been a grenade, it wouldn't have been that powerful."
Mohammed said he believed the explosive device was thrown under the car shortly before it exploded.
The target of the blast was not clear.
Mouwafak al-Rabii, a Shiite member of the governing council and a human rights activist, condemned the explosion.
"These are being carried out by the Taliban of Iraq," he said at the bomb site. It is "a backward ideology. A very regressive ideology, it depicts Islam in a very unacceptable way."
Speaking about the American-British occupation, al-Rabii said "nobody wants the Americans to stay one day longer than what they have to stay." He added that when Iraq has a government, an elected parliament and the security is under control, then "the American and British troops should leave immediately."
In west Baghdad, one American soldier was killed and six wounded in an early morning attack by insurgents who fired several rocket-propelled grenades at the military convoy, said Spc. Giovanni Llorente, a military spokesman.
The death brought to 32 the number of American soldiers killed in hostile action since Bush declared an end to major fighting. Also Monday, the military said a Marine in southern Iraq died in a non-hostile incident.
On Sunday, one Iraqi died in an apparent failed car bombing.
A white Volkswagen was destroyed and a badly mangled and headless body lay nearby, said police Sgt. Adel Shakir. He said the body was thought to have been one of two men who were attempting to get the explosive-packed car near a police station filled with U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police.
Also Sunday, at least one Iraqi was killed and five wounded in a shooting incident involving U.S. troops in Baqouba, 45 miles northeast of the capital. The U.S. military said Monday that American soldiers opened fire after the car turned off its headlights and tried to run a checkpoint at about 11:20 p.m.
However, the Arabic-language Al-Jazeera television network quoted witnesses as saying the car was filled with a family on its way to a hospital. It said one child and an adult were killed in the shooting, and several others were wounded.
Meanwhile, several thousand people - including Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds - attended a ceremony in honor of the possible successor to the long-vacant Iraqi royal throne, Sharif Ali bin Hussein, who greeted well-wishers at his palatial headquarters.
The occasion was Revolution Day, the 45th anniversary of a bloody coup in 1958 when nationalists killed King Faisal II, Iraq's last monarch, provoking years of political unrest. The day had been celebrated under Saddam Hussein, but Monday was the first time monarchists in Baghdad were able to gather to mourn the king's assassination.
Six Iraqi holidays marked by Saddam's Baath party were wiped away in the governing council's first and highly symbolic act Sunday, but the July 14 holiday predates Saddam's rule.
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UN Questions British Iraq Nuclear Proof - Diplomats
July 14, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-britain-nuclear.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The United Nations nuclear watchdog believes Britain's evidence on Iraq trying to import uranium from Africa may all be based on forged documents, a diplomat close to the agency said Monday.
A spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that all evidence London had provided to the Vienna-based agency had been based on fakes. But she could not rule out that Britain had other proof which it had chosen not to make available to the U.N. body.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said last year intelligence showed Iraq had banned weapons of mass destruction and was trying to import uranium from Niger to support its nuclear arms program.
President Bush included the allegation in his State of the Union address in January, citing the British findings. But the White House said last week the claim was based on forged documents and should have been left out of the speech.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw Monday said its evidence was not linked to the forged documents. It came from a third country and the Americans had not seen it.
``This information on which we relied, which was completely separate from the now notorious forged documents, came from foreign intelligence sources,'' Straw told BBC Radio.
A Western diplomat close to the IAEA said the agency had the impression the evidence that Britain said was genuine was ultimately referring to the same alleged transaction described in a series of fake documents.
IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told Reuters she could not rule out that Britain did have other evidence which, despite requests, it had not provided to the United Nations. ``We can't judge evidence that we haven't seen,'' she said.
In London, Blair's government stuck to its guns.
``As we have made clear before, we had other information available to us, which was drawn from intelligence reporting from foreign intelligence,'' a Downing Street spokesman said in response to the diplomat's allegation.
BRIEFINGS
Blair, who meets Bush in Washington Thursday, is facing mounting accusations that he overplayed the intelligence findings, knowingly or unknowingly, to justify going to war with Iraq.
The IAEA's impression arose from briefings on intelligence about Iraq gathered by national intelligence agencies.
Most of these briefings took place between November and March while the IAEA was hunting for signs Baghdad had secretly renewed its nuclear weapons program.
IAEA officials never saw Britain's so-called genuine evidence, despite the fact that U.N. member countries were expected to provide all relevant intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction to the U.N. inspection teams.
The IAEA had been briefed about British intelligence on the Niger claim and concluded in March that everything said referred to the same transaction the agency believes was never attempted.
In a July 1 letter to U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, the IAEA's director of external relations wrote that it was clear that Iraq would never have been able to buy uranium from Niger.
``The alleged contract could not have been honored, as the export of uranium from Niger is fully controlled by international companies,'' IAEA's Piet de Klerk wrote.
After determining it would have been impossible for Iraq to import uranium from the world's No. 3 uranium producer, the IAEA looked more closely at the six letters submitted as evidence that Iraq tried to buy two 500-ton shipments of uranium and concluded that all were fakes. -- Additional reporting by Catherine Bremer in Paris and Gideon Long in London
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Rumsfeld's New Army Chief Unifies the Brass
Plus: Strategic Strikes Pondered ... Summer Reading at the Pentagon
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 14, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43252-2003Jul11?language=printer
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's recent nomination of Peter J. Schoomaker as chief of staff of the Army hasn't caused the kind of angst inside the service that many Army officers and analysts had foreseen.
Rumsfeld's pick was audacious, indeed. In selecting Schoomaker, he passed over all of the Army's three- and four-star generals to tap a retired general thought of primarily as a special operator, having retired three years ago as head of the U.S. Special Operations Command.
But Schoomaker's Army pedigree goes well beyond special operations, and his force of personality have led many insiders to believe he can be Rumsfeld's man without being his hatchet man.
Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, no Rumsfeld cheerleader, ranks Schoomaker right up there with retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni when it comes to command presence. "He and Zinni, if you lined up 1,000 generals, they'd be in the top three on sheer talent, they're just unusual people," McCaffrey says.
"So Schoomaker is getting very positive reviews inside the Army from the serving three- and four-stars. They know this guy, they know he's got tremendous moral integrity," according to McCaffrey. "He's got Rumsfeld's confidence, but it's hard to imagine that he's not going to think first of his oath to the constitution, more than that he's a made man. Nobody believes that about Schoomaker."
One retired four-star, no particular fan of Rumsfeld's, credits the secretary for having made an inspired choice in picking Schoomaker. "He affects this kind of cowboy exterior, [but] he is a brilliant guy," the retiree says. "He's very good at inter-personal situations, and he can be tough as nails when he has to be. And he's been involved in more firefights than just about anybody, because of his special operations background. He's a charismatic leader, and he can carry the four-stars with him."
Retired Army Lt. Col. Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center For Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, a Washington think tank, says Schoomaker and Air Force Secretary James Roche, Rumsfeld's pick to be the next Army secretary, could be an incredibly dynamic duo.
"I think Roche can do a lot to identify what this new sweet spot or optimal mix is between air power and ground power. He was fond of saying as Air Force secretary that the Army was our customer," Krepinevich says. "Schoomaker would know just how far the Army can and should adapt itself to take on some of the qualities that are exhibited by Special Forces. It may look like lemons, but I think the Army has a great chance to make lemonade." Blair Studies Strategic Strikes
The Defense Science Board is now conducting one of its intensive summer studies on "strategic strike," trying to figure out how best to give the President an array of options for deterring potential adversaries' use of weapons of mass destruction.
In 2002, the the Bush administration published a Nuclear Posture Review, which triggered considerable controversy by seeming to leave the door open to using nuclear weapons for a preemptive attack on a threatening foreign country or terrorist organization. At the Pentagon's request, the 2004 Defense authorization bills now before Congress contain funding for research on new, low-yield nuclear weapons that could be used in a strategic strike against deeply buried targets.
The summer study is considering a broad range of strategic strike options, including the use of information operations, conventional precision munitions and nuclear weapons. Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, former head of the U.S. Pacific Command, is directing the study, along with Vince Vitto, president of Draper Laboratory.
The study will amplify and focus the issues addressed in the Nuclear Posture Review by examining options in a new strategic environment defined by rogue states, terrorist organizations and proliferating nuclear, chemical and biological technology.
The strategic environment, says one Pentgon insider, has changed dramatically since the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union had thousands of warheads aimed at each other as part of a doctrine called Mutual Assured Destruction.
In the 21st century, he says, "how do you deter? How do you dissuade? How do you do preemption? What do all these words mean in this environment? The most important thing is sensibly thinking about these issues." Cebrowski's Summer Reading
Over at Rumsfeld's Office of Force Transformation in Roslyn, retired Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski is recommending three recent articles as interesting summer reading. All define the military's new role as that of globocop for an American empire whose security is inextricably tied to the maintenance of order in a globalized world. In the March edition of Esquire, Thomas P.M. Barnett writes in "The Pentagon's New Map" that the world is divided between the functioning core of globalization and the non-functioning gap.
"In many ways, the September 11 attacks did the U.S. national-security establishment a huge favor by pulling us back from the abstract planning of future high-tech wars against 'near peers' into the here-and-now threats to global order," Barnett says. "Think about it: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are pure products of the gap--in effect, its most violent feedback to the core."
Michael Vlahos refers to the United States "gathering the world together" in "Military Identity in the Age of Empire" on the Tech Central Station website.
"We are told the positive side of American world management will be a democratic, free-market and a secure world environment. Yet this has been America's goal since World War II," Vlahos says. "The 9/11 attacks only accelerated the course of empire, they did not create it. American Empire is some sixty years old. This is an important benchmark for military identity, because it tells us that the American Military has had sixty years to get used to an identity not part of its original job description as 'Shield of the Republic.' Now it has a world empire to run."
Robert D. Kaplan, in "Supremacy By Stealth" on the cover of the current Atlantic Monthly, cites "the imperial reality of America's global situation."
"The purpose of power is not power itself; it is the fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world," Kaplan says. "...the United States has acquired this responsibility at a dangerous and chaotic moment in world history."
All three--like Rumsfeld--seem to see Special Operations forces are critical to success in this new environment, where wars will be fought against small bands of elusive terrorists, not large, plodding armies.
"If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-Empowered Individuals, we field a military of Super-Empowered Individuals," Barnett says.
Vlahos sees "jointness" between the military services, another key Rumsfeld virtue, as "a path for sub-cultures inside of traditional military institutions to leave old identities behind and invent new identities better suited to new military conditions," the most obvious being the U.S. Special Operations Command.
And Kaplan says "relatively small numbers of Special Forces and Marines can maximize U.S. influence in a large number of countries without risking what the Yale historian Paul Kennedy has called imperial 'overstretch.'"
Vernon Loeb covers the U.S. military for The Washington Post. His email address is loebv@washpost.com.
-------- propaganda wars
[it depends on what the definition of the work 'is' is...]
Bush Aides Now Say Claim on Uranium Was Accurate
July 14, 2003
New York Times
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14INTE.html
WASHINGTON, July 13 - Senior Bush administration officials today adjusted their defense of President Bush's claim in his State of the Union Address that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa, insisting that the phrasing was accurate even if some of the underlying evidence was unsubstantiated.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in separate appearances on Sunday television talk programs that the disputed sentence in Mr. Bush's January speech was carefully hedged, enough that it could still be considered accurate today.
While continuing to acknowledge, as the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency did last week, that the phrase should not have been uttered, they emphasized today that the British had indeed, as Mr. Bush said, reported Iraq's interest in acquiring African uranium.
In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush contended that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop a nuclear bomb. Among elements he cited to make his case was a statement that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Ms. Rice, in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," said that "the statement that he made was indeed accurate. The British government did say that."
And Mr. Rumsfeld said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that "it turns out that it's technically correct what the president said, that the U.K. does - did say that - and still says that. They haven't changed their mind, the United Kingdom intelligence people."
On the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Rumsfeld added that "it didn't rise to the standard of a presidential speech, but it's not known, for example, that it was inaccurate. In fact, people think it was technically accurate."
The legalistic defense of the phrasing seemed to signal a shift in the White House's strategy in dealing with the political fallout over Mr. Bush's public use of evidence that was based in part on fabricated documents and in part on uncorroborated reports from abroad.
It came after a week in which the White House first repudiated the statement and then blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for allowing Mr. Bush to make it. On Friday, George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence, accepted responsibility, saying "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."
But the bout of finger-pointing between the White House and the agency concerning the African uranium only served to intensify the criticism of the administration for its handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Rather than quelling the controversy, the White House stoked it through official statements, providing an opening for Democratic leaders to attack the administration's handling of the intelligence. So Sunday's effort by Ms. Rice and Mr. Rumsfeld appeared to be a response by the White House to turn down the flame on a hot story that the White House itself had helped ignite just days earlier.
Some White House officials suggested that the public was less interested in the story's ins and outs than the news media and the political opposition, and that this was why the administration chose this approach.
In the months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his advisers frequently cited classified intelligence reports that they said provided proof that Iraq was developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and had links to Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. Mr. Bush and his advisers said the threat posed by Iraq's development of those weapons and the possibility that Mr. Hussein might share them with terrorists made it necessary to overthrow the Iraqi government.
Since American forces occupied the country, however, they have not discovered conclusive evidence of the existence of such weapons in Iraq's possession, and have also failed to discover conclusive proof that Iraq had forged a terrorist alliance with Al Qaeda.
The failure to find unconventional weapons has led to intense scrutiny of the administration's approach before the war. A group of retired C.I.A. officers has conducted an internal review at the agency of the prewar intelligence reports on Iraq, and Congress has also begun to investigate the handling of the evidence.
In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush cited several reports in arguing that Mr. Hussein was trying to develop a nuclear bomb.
"The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990's that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon, and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb," Mr. Bush stated. "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide."
Since the speech, the evidence concerning both the uranium purchases and the aluminum tubes has come into question. In March, the I.A.E.A. reported that documents that formed the basis for reports that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger were forgeries, though the C.I.A. had doubts about the claims of the African uranium shipments long before that. Intelligence officials say the C.I.A. told British officials last fall that they doubted the evidence on the matter, which London was including in a publicly released white paper.
And in the days before Mr. Bush's address, government officials say, a proliferation expert from the C.I.A. discussed the evidence on Niger with a proliferation expert from the National Security Council at the White House. The two men now have different recollections of their conversations on the matter, government officials say. Still, the result was that the phrase in the speech did not refer specifically to Niger, but rather more generally to African uranium. Now, Ms. Rice and other American officials contend that other information about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from African countries has not been discredited, so that Mr. Bush's statement should be considered accurate.
On Sunday, Ms. Rice sought to play down the significance of the reference in the speech and at the same time defend its use.
"It is ludicrous to suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa," Ms. Rice said on Fox. "This was part of a very broad case that the president laid out in the State of the Union and other places."
But she added that "not only was the statement accurate, there were statements of this kind in the National Intelligence Estimate. And the British themselves stand by that statement to this very day."
----
Bush Aide: Uranium Flap a 'Bunch of Bull'
Mon Jul 14,
By WILLIAM C. MANN,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030714/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_intelligence_25
WASHINGTON - The White House sought to put to rest questions over President Bush's disputed claim that Iraq sought African uranium, saying Monday that such fears were not a major component in Bush's case for war.
"This revisionist notion that somehow this is now the core of why we went to war, a central issue of why we went to war, a fundamental underpinning of the president's decisions, is a bunch of bull," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. The alleged attempt by Iraq was "a component," Fleischer said.
CIA Director George Tenet said last week his agency was responsible for allowing the claim into Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union address, and Fleischer indicated the White House had no interest in digging deeper into an incident that has embarrassed the administration.
"I think the bottom has been gotten to," he said. At the same time, Fleischer said, "No one can accurately tell you it was wrong. That is not known."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, said the United States and Britain have intelligence that supports Bush's contention that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in from Africa nuclear weapons.
At the same time, both also said the intelligence falls short of the elevated standards necessary for a presidential address. They said Tenet had deleted a similar but more narrowly focused assertion from a Bush speech in Cincinnati three months earlier.
According to Fleischer, the reference to uranium in the Cincinnati speech was "very specific to Niger, (while) the language in the State of the Union was very different. ... there was other reporting about other countries beyond Niger."
Rumsfeld and Rice took identical messages to Sunday's television talk shows: The statement was and remains accurate; it was cleared for delivery by all necessary agencies; it was a minor part of Bush's State of the Union; it is supported by more evidence than documents revealed earlier that were proved to have been forged.
Democrats jumped into the fray, with two presidential contenders questioning the administration's explanation. Sen. Bob Graham (news, bio, voting record), D-Fla., said the suggestion that no one in the White House was aware of the weakness of the intelligence claim before the speech "stretches belief."
Forged documents purported to confirm approaches by Iraq to the West African nation of Niger, the world's third-largest producer of mined uranium. In the address, Bush said "the British government has learned" of the Iraqi approach, but he did not mention that U.S. agencies had questioned the validity of that intelligence.
Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" to explain why the statement should have been dumped, Rumsfeld said: "Referencing another country's intelligence, as opposed to your own, probably - according to George Tenet and the president ... it would have been better not to include it."
Still, "The British stand by their statement," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday." "They have told us that despite the fact that we had apparently some concerns about that report, that they had other sources, and that they stand by the statement." U.S. officials have been denied access to the additional evidence, she said.
A former U.S. ambassador, Joseph Wilson, said a week ago that his CIA-sponsored trip to Niger in February 2002 determined the intelligence could not be verified. A furor then arose in Washington, and Tenet assumed responsibility Friday for not having insisted the statement be removed.
Sen. Evan Bayh (news, bio, voting record), D-Ind., a member of the Intelligence Committee, said Monday, "I don't think this was an intentional falsehood, but we have to get to the bottom of how this happened to make sure it never happens again." Bayh appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Bush affirmed his support for Tenet on Saturday and declared the controversy over. But the administration still sent Rice and Rumsfeld to the Sunday news shows to defend the speech.
"The statement that (Bush) made was indeed accurate," Rice told "Fox News Sunday." "The British government did say that. Not only was the statement accurate, there were statements of this kind in the National Intelligence Estimate," a classified document compiled by U.S. agencies, she said.
Speaking of the clamor over the statement, Rice said: "It is ludicrous to suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa. This was a part of a very broad case that the president laid out in the State of the Union and other places."
In the four months since the war in Iraq began, U.S. forces have found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Rumsfeld said Sunday he remains confident such weapons will be found.
Graham said on NBC that Vice President Dick Cheney personally had asked for a CIA review of the Iraq-Niger link. That he got no response, he said, "I will have to say that stretches belief ...."
Another Democratic presidential aspirant, Massachusetts. Sen. John Kerry (news, bio, voting record), challenged Bush's contention that the episode is over.
Instead, he told CNN's "Late Edition, there remain "enormous questions still about the overall intelligence given to the Congress, the quality of that intelligence and even about the politics that entered into the judgment of taking that famous phrase out of one speech (in Cincinnati) but leaving it in another."
----
Bush Defends Uranium Claim After Meeting With U.N. Chief
July 14, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush.html?hp
WASHINGTON -- President Bush defended the quality of intelligence he receives as "darn good" despite an uproar over disputed reports that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons.
Bush said Monday he remained convinced that Saddam Hussein was attempting to develop a weapons program that threatened the world and justified the United States going to war against Iraq.
"Our country made the right decision," Bush said.
Bush spoke with reporters at the end of an Oval Office meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
"When all is said and done the people of the United States will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program," Bush said.
"I think I get is darn good intelligence and the speeches I have given are backed by good intelligence," Bush said. However, the administration has acknowledged the uncertainty of remarks Bush made in his January State of the Union address about Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium in Iraq.
Administration officials say the remark should not have been included in Bush's speech because it was based on British intelligence that was not confirmed by the United States.
"When I gave the speech the line was relevant," the president said. He noted that it was cleared by the CIA at the time, although doubts were subsequently raised.
CIA Director George Tenet said last week his agency was responsible for allowing the claim into Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union address, and Fleischer indicated the White House had no interest in digging deeper into an incident that has embarrassed the administration.
"I think the bottom has been gotten to," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said earlier Monday. "No one can accurately tell you it was wrong. That is not known," he said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
-------- prisons / prisoners
Justice Dept. Refuses to Let Qaeda Member Testify
By PHILIP SHENON
July 14, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/national/14WIRE-MOUSS.html?ei=1&en=f075ece710df9ac6&ex=1059233999&pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON, July 14 - The Justice Department said today that it would defy a court order and refuse to make a captured member of Al Qaeda available for testimony in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui.
The department acknowledged that its decision could force a federal judge to dismiss the indictment against Mr. Moussaoui, the only person facing trial in the United States in connection with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In papers filed in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., the department said Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined that testimony from the accused terrorist Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a confessed participant in the Sept. 11 attacks, ``would necessarily result in the unauthorized disclosure of classified information'' and that ``such a scenario is unacceptable to the government.''
Bush administration officials have said for months that if Mr. Moussaoui's indictment were dismissed, his prosecution would almost certainly be moved to a military tribunal, where Mr. Moussaoui would be expected to have fewer rights to gather testimony from witnesses like Mr. bin al-Shibh.
The department's decision had been expected and came after courtroom battles before Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, the trial judge, in which the department insisted that testimony from Mr. bin al-Shibh would damage national security.
Mr. bin al-Shibh, of Yemen, was captured last year in Pakistan. He is identified in Mr. Moussaoui's indictment as the go-between for Mr. Moussaoui and the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Administration officials say they are worried that if Mr. Moussaoui is allowed to interview Mr. bin al-Shibh, it will open the door for other terrorist suspects to demand access to captured Qaeda members, undermining those prosecutions, as well.
Despite the government's objections, Judge Brinkema has ruled that Mr. Moussaoui, who has pleaded not guilty and is facing the death penalty, has a constitutional right to question Mr. bin al-Shibh, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., has declined to overrule her decision.
In its latest ruling, the appeals court said today that it had rejected a government motion that would have effectively frozen activities in Judge Brinkema's courtroom while the Justice Department pursued a new appeal. The appeals court said, however, that it would give ``expedited consideration'' to the department's appeals.
The department said that the decision to block Mr. bin al-Shibh's testimony had been made by Mr. Ashcroft, and that his reasoning was explained in a classified affidavit filed with with Judge Brinkema.
-------- terrorism
Cold War - Era Sirens Used As Terror Alerts
July 14, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Attacks-Sirens.html
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Cold War-era sirens may be revived as terrorism warnings. Cities including Oklahoma City, Chicago and Dallas have upgraded their outdoor warning systems with a type of siren that can carry voice announcements -- an idea that officials say took on added importance in the post-Sept. 11 world.
Sirens have long been used for storm disasters, but now the Federal Emergency Management Agency is studying whether they can warn people of biological, chemical or nuclear attack.
``You have all kinds of new systems,'' said Timothy Putprush, a telecommunications specialist with FEMA. ``You originate a message. You need to get it out to the population.''
Thousands of sirens were built across the country during the Cold War to warn citizens in case of nuclear attack, but the federal government stopped the program and the sirens fell silent in many of the nation's largest cities. Other cities put them to use to warn of tornadoes.
But terrorism warnings emerged as a new use for the sirens after Sept. 11. The federal government is currently updating the nation's civil preparedness guide to discuss improved ways of notifying the public of emergencies, and that includes the use of sirens.
In Oklahoma City, taxpayers agreed to spend $4.5 million several years ago to upgrade its Cold War-era warning system with 181 new sirens covering a 622-square-mile area in the city.
The sirens, together with news reports and special radios that emit a loud alarm in times of weather emergencies, helped prevent loss of life when tornadoes raked the Oklahoma City area on May 8 and 9. More than 300 homes were destroyed but only one person was killed, an elderly man who fell and hit his head while taking shelter.
The sirens can be particularly useful to people who are not listening to the radio or watching television.
``If you've got a weather radio in your house, it doesn't do much for you when you're at the ballpark,'' said Kerry Wagnon, director of public safety capital projects in Oklahoma City.
Wagnon also said the sirens could be used in the event of a terrorist attack like the one that killed 168 people in 1995.
Radio and television news reports are the warning method of choice in many large cities, where old civil defense sirens have fallen into disrepair.
``When the money dried up, the ability to maintain them, based on a perception of the threat, went away,'' said Bob Canfield, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Department.
Sirens would not be of much use in Los Angeles because the sprawling urban area does not face the kinds of natural disasters for which they are most useful, he said.
``They're no good for earthquakes, and tornadoes are not our thing,'' Canfield said.
Jarrod Bernstein, a spokesman in New York City's Office of Emergency Preparedness, says battery-operated radios make more sense than wailing sirens in his densely populated urban area of more than 8 million people.
``We just don't think it's a practical system for New York City,'' he said.
While not dismissing sirens, officials in Washington are looking at other options including electronic text messaging and a reverse 911 system that would telephone citizens in an emergency, said Jo'Ellen Countee of the District of Columbia Emergency Management Agency.
``A lot of people want sirens -- people who are old enough to remember sirens,'' Countee said.
Electronic messages might work for people with a cell phone, but Putprush said visitors at the district's many monuments or on the National Mall would need an outdoor warning.
``There are thousands and thousands of tourists there at any time of day,'' he said. ``That would be a great application for it.''
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Windy Britain Powers Up More Offshore Windfarms
LONDON, United Kingdom,
July 14, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2003/2003-07-14-01.asp
Offshore windfarms with the potential to power one in every six UK households were given the green light for development today by Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt.
The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) released proposals for the next generation of offshore windfarms to provide up to six gigawatts of new energy generation by 2010, enough to power 15 percent of all households in the United Kingdom.
Hewitt said, "This announcement is good for the environment, good for Britain's energy needs and good for jobs. The expansion will create around 20,000 new jobs in manufacturing, installing and maintaining the windfarms.
The energy produced will be enough to power more than 3.5 million households, or almost nine million people, more than the population of Greater London, twice that of Scotland and three times that of Wales.
Environmentalists were pleased with the announcement. Friends of the Earth's Energy spokesperson Bryony Worthington said, "We are delighted that the government has given the green light to this huge expansion in wind energy. It will create thousands of jobs and marks a sea change in UK energy policy."
A first round of offshore wind projects announced in late 2000 should result in about 500 turbines with generating capacity of 1,500 megawatts. Two of the projects are already under construction at North Hoyle near Rhyl, and at Scroby Sands near Great Yarmouth.
This more ambitious second round envisions windfarms in shallow waters of the Thames Estuary, the Greater Wash on the southeast coast, and the northwest coastal region. All are at least eight kilometers (five miles) from the shore. Some extend beyond the 12 mile zone of British territorial waters, so new legislation will be required before construction can start.
But the government is willing to do whatever it takes to facilitate the construction of the windfarms. "The Energy White Paper committed us to providing 10 percent of energy from renewable sources by the year 2010, and an aspiration to double that figure by the year 2020, said Hewitt. "This announcement represents a big step towards meeting our goals. Offshore wind has potential to provide a significant proportion of the UK's energy needs."
This second round of site leases for offshore wind farms will be informed by Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), the government said.
The SEA Environmental Report was published on May 1, along with a consultation on the Environmental Report and the government's plan for windfarm development in the three strategic areas.
The sites were originally identified in November in the DTI's Future Offshore consultation, but have since been subject to rigorous environmental assessment to assess the impact of proposed development before sites could be offered for leasing.
Today Hewitt asked The Crown Estate to invite windfarm developers to tender for sites in all the areas. The Crown Estate is an estate in land which belongs to the British Sovereign and is managed for the benefit of the British taxpayers.
Site leases for the second phase of windfarms will be awarded in the autumn and construction is expected to begin in the next few years.
Public support for renewable energy in the UK is strong. A British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) opinion poll released today shows that 74 percent of bill payers surveyed support the increased used of wind power. An equal number of respondents back the government's target of generating 20 percent of electricity from renewables by 2020.
Marcus Rand, chief executive of the BWEA said, "This is fantastic news. We have the best offshore wind resource in Europe and today's announcement signals that we are now on track to seriously develop it."
"What's more," said Rand, "our opinion poll results today shows that today's proposed expansion in the use of wind energy comes with the support of the vast majority of the population."
"Successful projects from this round could account for over half of the government's 10 percent target and could be supplying clean electricity to some four million households by 2010," Rand said. "This is a win-win for the environment and the economy as it represents a fantastic opportunity to generate clean electricity and thousands of new jobs."
Friends of the Earth's Worthington says today's announcement should be just the beginning of a shift to sustainable energy in Great Britain. "We now need a similar commitment to harnessing the energy potential of biomass, waves, tides and the sun to replace dirty nuclear and fossil fuel dinosaurs."
-------- environment
Critics Say E.P.A. Won't Analyze Some Clean Air Proposals
July 14, 2003
The New York Times
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/politics/14EPA.html
WASHINGTON, July 13 - In the last several months, the Environmental Protection Agency has delayed or refused to do analysis on proposals that conflict with the president's air pollution agenda, say members of Congress, their aides, environmental advocates and agency employees.
Agency employees say they have been told either not to analyze or not to release information about mercury, carbon dioxide and other air pollutants. This has prompted inquiries and complaints from environmental groups, as well as Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
"It's totally unacceptable," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. "This is an administration that lets its politics and ideology overwhelm and stifle scientific fact." Mr. Lieberman said the agency refused to analyze legislation that he and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, sponsored to limit emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas implicated in global warming.
Lisa Harrington, a spokeswoman for the agency, said, "These decisions were not motivated in any way by politics."
The agency routinely assesses important proposals for environmental laws and regulations, using computer modeling to predict their environmental and economic consequences and to calculate their risks and benefits. The results are often used to bolster or attack policy positions.
The question is whether the agency is deciding which analyses to release based on which side the studies favor in environmental debates.
"Whether or not analysis is released is based on at least two factors," said William D. Ruckelshaus, who was the first agency administrator under Nixon. "Is the analysis flawed? That is a legitimate reason for not releasing it. But if you don't like the outcome that might result from the analysis, that is not a legitimate reason."
Take the case of mercury. It is a leading pollutant from coal-burning power plants, but it has never been controlled under the Clean Air Act.
Because mercury lasts a long time in the environment and can harm people and animals, the agency is under a court order to propose regulations by the end of this year and to put them in force within five years.
The agency had set an interim deadline of Aug. 1 to have proposals ready for review by the White House Office of Management and Budget. Typically, such regulations require many rounds of modeling to compare costs and benefits.
A dozen staff members met with Jeffrey Holmstead, the assistant administrator for air programs, on March 27 to explain the options they planned to assess. Employees at the meeting set Mr. Holmstead said he had to consult the White House before they proceeded. Four days later, a meeting at which the staff members were to present results of their modeling to outside advisers was canceled. It has not been rescheduled.
Mr. Holmstead said he decided to postpone the modeling because the agency was not sure if some of the proposed regulations would be legal under the Clean Air Act. He said that even without the modeling, "we are on track" to produce regulations.
The administration has proposed its own standards for mercury emissions in draft legislation to update the Clean Air Act, a bill that it calls Clear Skies. Environmental groups and members of Congress say those regulations could be weaker than the ones being considered by the environmental agency. Recently 138 representatives, including 13 Republicans, sent a letter to the president urging him not to weaken the mercury proposal.
On another environmental front, Christie Whitman, then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, sent a letter in June to Senators McCain and Lieberman, refusing to do economic analysis on their bill to limit carbon dioxide emissions.
"I am disappointed that the E.P.A. declined to review the bill and do not feel it was normal procedure to refuse to analyze a bill that is under the agency's jurisdiction," Senator McCain said.
Mrs. Whitman, who has since resigned, wrote the senators that the Energy Department's statistical office, the Energy Information Agency, was already conducting an analysis and "based on past analyses, I would expect that E.I.A.'s cost estimates should not be significantly different from the estimates that E.P.A. would have produced."
The energy agency and the Environmental Protection Agency did do models on legislation to clean up power plants proposed by Senator James M. Jeffords, independent of Vermont; Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine; and Senator Lieberman. In that case, the two models differed significantly; the energy agency showed a greater decline in use of coal.
This is in part because the energy agency typically uses a more conservative model, experts said.
"It's not thought of as a model that captures the flexibility in the economy," said Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis at the Pew Center for Climate Change, one of the outside groups that the energy agency asked to review its analysis of the McCain-Lieberman proposal.
Mr. Lieberman said that the environmental agency's decision not to conduct an analysis "was an intervention from above that closed down an effective scientific inquiry for political and ideological reasons."
Staff members at the agency said it did compare the administration's environmental plan with one sponsored by Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, and Senator Lincoln Chaffee, Republican of Rhode Island. But the agency released only a raw data print-out of its findings. A summarized report, which indicated that the Carper-Chaffee proposal had some advantages, was not released.
At a meeting on May 2, employees who attended it said, Mr. Holmstead of the E.P.A. wondered out loud, "How can we justify Clear Skies if this gets out?"
When asked if he made that comment, Mr. Holmstead said he did not "recall making any specific remarks."
-------- health
The Dangers of Trans Fats
By Jabari Asim
Monday, July 14, 2003
Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53180-2003Jul14?language=printer
The next time you settle in for a quiet evening of TV watching, you may want to curl up with a nice bowl of lettuce. Most typical couch-potato fare is - to borrow a popular expression - little more than a heart attack on a plate. Blame it on trans fatty acids.
Created when vegetable oils are converted into solids, "trans fats" are added to food products to increase their shelf life. They can be found in many of those colorful packages we toss into our grocery carts as we zoom past the fresh fruits and vegetables. If you regularly devour stuff like chips, donuts, pudding and chicken nuggets, you're also munching trans fats by the mouthful.
Trans fats are killers, it turns out. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and elsewhere have linked consumption of them to heart disease, diabetes and obesity. This is perhaps the worst news for arteries and abdomens since the invention of deep-fried Twinkies.
The good news is the Food and Drug Administration will require food labels to disclose the amounts of trans fatty acid in products by 2006. While the FDA Web site declines to say just how much trans fat is too much, it does suggest that "the less saturated fat, trans fat and cholesterol consumed the better." That vague, ominous tidbit may be more sobering than enlightening for the average American. Consider that two Oreos contain about one gram of saturated fat and two grams of trans fats. Now consider that most of us need at least a half-dozen cookies - dipped in whole milk - before the buzz hits. Like tobacco, coffee and a host of other hazardous pleasures, these lethal lipids will be hard to kick.
Some companies, such as Frito-Lay, already provide trans fat information on their product labels. Other food manufacturers are following suit.
Kraft Foods, maker of Oreos, has announced plans to reduce the fat in some of its products and limit the portion size of its single-serving offerings. McDonald's promised last year to cut the fat content of the oil used to cook its famous fries. The changes reflect the federal government's concern over rising health-care costs, part of which can be blamed on our belt-busting appetites.
Supersize has long been the national obsession, pursued in a frenzy of Whoppers, triple-deckers and foot-long subs, all washed down with a Big Gulp. Any way you slice it, the huge portions we're consuming are sticking to our ribs - and our thighs and our jowls and our bellies. Any skeptics out there are invited to sit on the parking lot of just about any restaurant and watch us waddle out.
The numbers back me up: The surgeon general estimates that 61 percent of Americans are overweight, including 14 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 19. And it's costing us money too: The International Obesity Task Force estimates Americans spend nearly $70 billion annually on obesity-related problems. To make matters worse, 300,000 of us die each year from obesity-related ailments.
Steven Anderson, president of the National Restaurant Association, suggested that a general lack of dining-room discipline may be the cause of our scale-crushing weight. He told The New York Times, "There are not good foods or bad foods. There are good and bad diets. This comes down to personal responsibility." He said pretty much the same thing last fall, when several overeaters filed suit against McDonald's for allegedly making them fat. He was right then, and he's right now.
Detailed labels may give us pause before we dig into our favorite snacks, but our fast and furious noshing persists. I've no sympathy for greedy food companies that slip harmful additives into their products, but the uproar over their dirty dealings occasionally threatens to obscure our own inexcusable overindulgence.
Complaints have also been made about the advertising industry's catchy commercials aimed at our gullible - and overweight - children. But all of that protest is ultimately just so much noise, barely audible over the sound of our gobbling. Food manufacturers cannot force us to eat a product that isn't good for us, just as a few words of warning will not deter us from digging in. Some may see our lack of self-control in this area as part of a larger failure to account for our personal shortcomings. Maybe. All I know is no one's pointing a gun to Joan Q. Public to make her stuff herself. If she's anything like me, a Twinkie would be far more effective.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Thousands Rally in Hong Kong; the Answer Is a Rebuff
July 14, 2003
New York Times
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/international/asia/14HONG.html
HONG KONG, July 13 - Thousands of demonstrators occupied one of Hong Kong's most chic downtown avenues this evening to appeal for democracy, but the Hong Kong government responded less than two hours later by announcing that it would not accelerate its four-year plan to review possible constitutional changes.
The government statement tonight was the first official response to calls at a series of rallies that the general public be allowed to vote for Hong Kong's chief executive and all members of the legislature.
The statement was also the latest of several signs that Beijing and its appointees here are hardening their positions as attendance at recent rallies has fallen far below the 500,000 marchers who flooded Hong Kong's streets on July 1.
Last Monday, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa reluctantly postponed his plans to enact stringent internal-security laws, one target of the protests here. But tonight his administration took a more unyielding position on democratic reforms.
The statement issued tonight said the government would consult the public about constitutional changes in 2004 or 2005, and would pursue legislation in 2006. Changes will take effect after 2007, the statement also noted. This means that any changes that are made will not affect the selection of the next chief executive, who will be chosen in 2007 for a five-year term.
Yeung Sum, the chairman of the Democratic Party here, said he was disappointed that the government had not advanced its timetable.
"The message is loud and clear from the people of Hong Kong: they want a full democracy," he said in a telephone interview tonight.
Hong Kong's Basic Law, the closest thing the territory has to a constitution, vaguely calls for the government to pursue greater democracy by 2007, a schedule that in theory could allow changes that would affect how the next chief executive is selected. Currently, an 800-member Election Committee, dominated by pro-Beijing businesspeople and professionals, chooses the chief executive and 6 of the 60 members of the Legislative Council.
Industries and professions like insurance and the law select 30 more members of the legislature, while the general public is allowed to vote for only 24 members.
The security legislation has drawn the greatest attention here. But calls for a broader democracy have been important from the start and have been emphasized more in the days since Mr. Tung postponed the security bill.
Organizers estimated that this evening's protest drew 20,000 people. The police said that attendance peaked at 9,000, while adding that some people might have left early or arrived late. A pro-democracy demonstration on Wednesday attracted 30,000 to 50,000 people.
The Democratic Development Network, which organized today's rally, is a smaller coalition than the Human Civil Rights Front, which organized rallies on July 1 and last Wednesday.
A team of intelligence, security and diplomatic officials is visiting from Beijing to assess the mood here. Standing at the edge of the rally, Mr. Yeung, the chairman of the Democratic Party, said members of the team had interviewed at least two politicians in his party, while adding that he had not been personally contacted.
"They've asked us who organized the marches and why so many people showed up," he said in an interview at the rally.
In an editorial on Thursday, the official China Daily urged democracy advocates to go slow.
"It is high time for the `democrats' to cool down," the English-language newspaper said. "The rule of the game is to know where and when to stop. If they cling obstinately to their course of creating disturbance in Hong Kong, they will finally find themselves standing opposed to the people."
It is a measure of how peaceful the rallies have been that a Van Cleef & Arpels store displayed diamond jewelry today in its windows facing the rally on Chater Road, with the clerks making no move to pull down the store's protective steel shutters. A Rolls-Royce showroom behind the stage here was similarly unprotected.
The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Hong Kong, Bishop Joseph Zen, stepped up his activism today by briefly addressing the rally and endorsing the calls for greater democracy. Bishop Zen held a prayer vigil with Protestant leaders before the July 1 march but did not take part in the march itself; he missed last Wednesday's rally because of a trip to Rome.
In nine days, Hong Kong will receive its first visit by a head of state since the protests began. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain will be here July 22-24, after meetings with China's leaders in Beijing and Shanghai July 21-22, the British Consulate here announced on Friday. British officials have actively followed events in Hong Kong ever since Britain handed it over to China in 1997.
At this evening's rally, Wong Hui-yan, a 46-year-old teacher, said she had never been to a public demonstration until July 1 but had attended each one since then. Asked why, she responded, "To fight for freedom."
----
Uganda children march for peace
BBC
Monday, 14 July, 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3065579.stm
Up to 20,000 school children have marched through the northern Ugandan town of Kitgum, demanding an end to rebel abductions.
The demonstration was timed to coincide with a visit to the area by the Pope's special envoy, Archbishop Christophe Pierre.
Over the weekend, the army said it had rescued about 250 people - most of them children - who had been kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army rebels.
We cannot sleep at our homes because the rebels come and attack us Ananna Cinerela, 12 Last month, many children were abducted when their school was raided by rebels.
The LRA has been fighting government forces since the late 1980s to replace President Yoweri Museveni's secular government in a campaign marked by brutality against civilians.
'Peace-lovers'
"Defend us and talk peace," one placard read, while another called on the LRA to stop abductions.
One of the march organisers, Bishop Baker Ochola, told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme that the children were addressing their message to the Ugandan Government, the LRA, the international community and "all peace-loving people in the world".
"Give us a chance to gro, learn and develop our potentials. Give us opportunities to live as ordinary chidren in other parts of the world," the children chanted.
"We are suffering because our brothers and sisters who are in the bush are coming to us and abducting us," said Ananna Cinerela, 12.
"We cannot sleep at our homes because the rebels come and attack us.
"We feel sorry because it is our brothers who are in the bush who are participating (in the abduction) as if they are not from Uganda," she said.
Officials say the LRA has abducted hundreds of children in northern Uganda in recent years, forcing them to fight as child soldiers if they are boys, or to become sex slaves for rebel commanders if they are girls.
----
Forging The Case For War
Steven Rosenfeld is a commentary editor and audio producer for TomPaine.com.
Steven Rosenfeld produced this piece.
On Monday, July 14, "Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity," a group of retired senior CIA, FBI, State Department and Pentagon officials, released an open memorandum to President Bush detailing what they saw as the administration's effort last fall to fabricate a rationale for a pre-emptive war against Iraq. The group urged President Bush to seek Vice President Dick Cheney's resignation, to launch an independent investigation and to seek the return of U.N. weapons inspectors.
TomPaine.com's Steven Rosenfeld interviewed Raymond McGovern, one of three signatories to the memo, about the group, its analysis of the vice president's role in fabricating a case for war, and what prompted McGovern -- a career CIA officer who conducted the daily briefings of the top cabinet officers in the Reagan administration including then-Vice-President George Herbert Walker Bush -- to speak out against the case for war in Iraq.
TomPaine.com: Who are the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and are there more than the three of you who signed this open letter to the president on Iraq-related intelligence?
Raymond McGovern: Yes, there are about 30 of us now. This was a group that started out quite informally late last year. Many of us were writing op-eds for this or that newspaper. We knew each other from way back. When you're all alone writing these things, you really need a sanity check, so I, for example, would try to prepare something and try to analyze what I saw going on in the administration, and often it was so bizarre that I felt, 'Ray, you've gone off the deep end. You'd better check this out.' So I would check it out, not only with my fellow retired colleagues, but with the folks that I know from the inside.
It was very, very useful to do that -- a lot of value-added there. And in January, when we could see that intelligence would be playing an incredibly important role in what might be our first unprovoked war, we thought that we really ought to band together here and try and create something that was a little bit more than the sum of its parts, and speak out as a common voice for sanity, actually, because sanity is not in great supply here in Washington these days.
TP.c: You've described you and your colleagues as former intelligence and policy-level officials "from the most senior positions" in a number of agencies. That includes the CIA, the FBI and the State Department...
McGovern: And the Pentagon.
TP.c: What prompted you and your colleagues to write this particular letter, which not only calls on the president to seek the vice-president's resignation, but also the return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq and an independent investigation of this matter?
McGovern: Well, it's a very simple word, outrage. What we're seeing going on here is beyond the pale.
I did a lot of philosophy studying when I was in college and good old St. Thomas, eight centuries ago, talked about the virtue of anger, saying that if there is just cause to be angry and you are not angry, then you're sinning. I just felt -- and I think my colleagues did -- that we ought to quit sinning, we ought to start speaking out and being angry, because that's the appropriate reaction.
We had been issuing these statements. Now, four of them have taken the form of a memorandum to the president. Actually, we set it up exactly as we used to in the old days: memorandum for; subject; from; and all of this business. We hadn't had a statement since May 1, and so much had happened over the past week, with the revelations that Ambassador Joe Wilson had started with, we decided that it would be irresponsible on our part not to take a look at sifting through all this information and try and make some sense out of it for those Americans who, frankly, have not had the experience that we have had at senior policy and intelligence levels, and try to just give them our read on it, tell them what's going on.
As we looked at this evidence and the bizarre to-ing and fro-ing where administration people are alternately covering up for one another and then sliding daggers into one anothers' back, it seemed to me that the American people really did need some help here. So we talked it over and we sat down and composed this thing over the weekend. On Monday morning, we sent it out.
TP.c: What is the significance that the vice president apparently led this effort to validate Iraq's acquisition of uranium from Niger?
McGovern: It goes to the heart of the problem. You see, to focus on the State of the Union address -- heinous as it is to have the president say something that's not truthful, that's sort of a sideshow. As a matter of fact, I would describe that as a red herring. That pales in significance to what really happened with this information from the forgery, and that is, that it was used in September and early October as the main justification for Congress voting to give the president authority to wage an unprovoked war.
Let me take you back to those times. During the summer, we all know that the president decided to make war on Iraq. [Chief of Staff] Andy Card said they were going to market something new, but they couldn't do that in July and August -- you don't do that in the summer -- so in September we're going to start doing that. And sure enough, Vice President Cheney issued a major declaration on the 26th of August, sort of John the Baptist to this effort, the precursor of what was to come, and he exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein in a most, most significant manner. And the heart of it was that Saddam Hussein is reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.
Now, they did that in September for one major reason, and that is, they didn't have anything else. What do I mean by that?
Well, they had been talking about ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq. So any suggestion that they use that, the next person would say, 'Yeah, but those wimps over there at CIA, they say there's no evidence of that. So they'll come behind us and pull the rug right out from under us.'
'Well, let's use the chemical and biological capability that Iraq has.' 'Well, we can't do that either, because those wimps at the Defense Intelligence Agency have just produced a memorandum that says there's no reliable evidence about that.'
'So what do we do?' 'Well, the nuclear card is the big one, that's what will scare people. What do we have on that?' 'Well, we have those aluminum rods that we tried to make a big deal of, but all the nuclear scientists and engineers say if Saddam Hussein wants to buy more of those rods, sell them to him, because he couldn't possible use them in a nuclear application. So that's not going to work, so what else do we have?'
Well somebody said, 'Well, how about that report going around real early this year that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Niger?' 'Well, yeah, but we found out that those were spurious reports -- it was a forgery.' 'Well, who knows it's a forgery? Well, we do. With whom would we have to share the source material?'
'Well the U.N. has been banging at our door for it for two months, but we put them off. We can probably put them off for three or four more months. So what's the problem? We'll use this report about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger. We'll use it with Congress. We'll raise the prospect of Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons in his hands. Our first indication, our first smoking gun, will be a mushroom cloud, and we'll frighten Congressmen and Senators into approving a resolution for war. We'll have our war. It will be a great success. And in the aftermath of that war, who's going to care if we based some of this P.R. effort on forged evidence?'
Now, there was an ancillary benefit to this approach. That was, 'hey, midterm elections are next month too.' And I can just see the political meisters there in the White House, saying, 'You know, this is no small benefit. We'll have this vote and if any Democrats dare to vote against giving the president authority to make war, we'll paint them out as 'soft on Saddam' and we'll probably do pretty well with that line.'
Well, fellow Americans, it worked. They got the resolution in Congress. They got an unusually strong showing in the mid-term election. They had the war. They won the war. But what they didn't count on is that Americans don't like to be lied to -- and particularly when it has to do with matters of war and peace.
And it's become very clear now that we were lied to. Representatives are writing letters to the president saying, 'Explain how it can be that you deceived me into voting for a war?' And the press, thank goodness, is finally waking up. And the press doesn't like to be lied to either. So there's a very, very different kind of situation this month than last month, and there's some hope that the people who plotted this war and used this "evidence" in such a cynical way will be held responsible.
TP.c: What response and feedback have you received from other former intelligence officers and from those you know in the administration?
McGovern: I went through my office e-mail yesterday and it was incredibly encouraging. As usual, we had about -- I think there were four this time -- four former intelligence officers asking if they could sign on, and then there were about, I would guess, 35, maybe 40 very laudatory e-mails, saying, 'Keep it up. We really need to hear this kind of thing from people who have the credentials to put out some of them.'
TP.c: Tell me your credentials again.
McGovern: Sure. I worked for 27 years in the analytic ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. I also did a few tours abroad, so I know the operational side as well. My initial expertise, my graduate degree is in Russian studies. That what I focused on in the '60s and '70s, and then I broadened out with much wider responsibilities.
Toward the end of my career, I had the privilege of briefing Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, Secretary of State Schultz, Secretary of Defense Weinberger, the rotating-door National Security Aides -- Poindexter, McFarland, Judge Clark -- there were a whole bunch of those. And then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who at that time was Chairman Jack Vescey, a very wonderful serious soldier.
So, there were two teams of briefers. So on any given day, I would be hitting either two or three of those very senior people with the fruit of our labors from the day before and my labors from the very early morning take. It would be one-on-one briefing. And we would have the most sensitive material you can imagine. And we were not permitted to leave any material behind, but rather to answer questions and then take back what we had offered to our people to read.
TP.c: One last question. You now work at Washington's Servant Leadership School, which, from the Web, I see seeks to create leaders that embody Christian values. Does your role there, or your belief in that mission require you to take such a bold stand?
McGovern: It encourages me to. You see, we're involved in justice work, not just charity. Our whole school is a place where people get trained for building relationships with the poor. We don't try to serve the poor. We don't try to help the poor. We try to build relationships with them and we find that we profit as much from that relationship as they do.
As I was telling the hearing in Congress today, earlier, that my work in the inner city reaching out to those poor is just an incredible impetus to my activities in this other arena. Why? Well, because we're supposed to be good news to the poor, right? And Martin Luther King, Jr. made a big point in his Riverside speech in saying 'war could not be worse news to the poor.'
And of course, that's completely right. The poor here. The poor over in Iraq. The poor everywhere. It just drains all the sustenance out of the financial situation in these countries and our country. And so, just as with Vietnam and the Great Society, off to such a good start, went down the tubes. Right now we have an even more serious situation.
And so, I am encouraged. I am freed up. I am delighted to... what my colleagues describe my doing, they say, 'Ray, you're dealing with the empire in a way that only you can, by virtue of the experience you've had in living, breathing and working in the empire. We haven't been in the same empire. We free you to go ahead and do that. Talk truth to this power, and try to talk some sense in what's going on, and expose...
There is a scripture verse that says "everything that is hidden will be revealed." I find that very, very challenging. Actually, there's a verse from John that's chiseled into the marble at the entrance to CIA headquarters that says, "And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."
Now that's good stuff. When I saw that, I had already signed up and started working there. I said, 'You know, if this is the kind of place we have here, I'm proud to serve here.' And for the most part, I was incredibly proud -- and that's what makes me so outraged, and that's about the only word I can think of, so outraged, to see the cardinal sin being committed here. And that is intelligence being cooked to the recipe of high policy.
---
Time to End the Dodginess
Intelligence Unglued
by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Bastille Day July 14, 2003
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0714-01.htm
http://www.counterpunch.org/vips07142003.html
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Intelligence Unglued
The glue that holds the Intelligence Community together is melting under the hot lights of an awakened press. If you do not act quickly, your intelligence capability will fall apart-with grave consequences for the nation.
The Forgery Flap
By now you are all too familiar with the play-by-play. The Iraq-seeking-uranium-in-Niger forgery is a microcosm of a mischievous nexus of overarching problems. Instead of addressing these problems, your senior staff are alternately covering up for one another and gently stabbing one another in the back. CIA Director George Tenet's extracted, unapologetic apology on July 11 was classic-I confess; she did it.
It is now dawning on our until-now somnolent press that your national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, shepherds the foreign affairs sections of your state-of-the-union address and that she, not Tenet, is responsible for the forged information getting into the speech. But the disingenuousness persists. Surely Dr. Rice cannot persist in her insistence that she learned only on June 8, 2003 about former ambassador Joseph Wilson's mission to Niger in February 2002, when he determined that the Iraq-Niger report was a con-job. Wilson's findings were duly reported to all concerned in early March 2002. And, if she somehow missed that report, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff on May 6 recounted chapter and verse on Wilson's mission, and the story remained the talk of the town in the weeks that followed.
Rice's denials are reminiscent of her claim in spring 2002 that there was no reporting suggesting that terrorists were planning to hijack planes and slam them into buildings. In September, the joint congressional committee on 9/11 came up with a dozen such reports.
Secretary of State Colin Powell's credibility, too, has taken serious hits as continued non-discoveries of weapons in Iraq heap doubt on his confident assertions to the UN. Although he was undoubtedly trying to be helpful in trying to contain the Iraq-Niger forgery affair, his recent description of your state-of-the-union words as "not totally outrageous" was faint praise indeed. And his explanations as to why he made a point to avoid using the forgery in the way you did was equally unhelpful.
Whatever Rice's or Powell's credibility, it is yours that matters. And, in our view, the credibility of the intelligence community is an inseparably close second. Attempts to dismiss or cover up the cynical use to which the known forgery was put have been-well, incredible. The British have a word for it: "dodgy." You need to put a quick end to the dodginess, if the country is to have a functioning intelligence community.
The Vice President's Role
Attempts at cover up could easily be seen as comical, were the issue not so serious. Highly revealing were Ari Fleisher's remarks early last week, which set the tone for what followed. When asked about the forgery, he noted tellingly-as if drawing on well memorized talking points-that the Vice President was not guilty of anything. The disingenuousness was capped on Friday, when George Tenet did his awkward best to absolve the Vice President from responsibility.
To those of us who experienced Watergate these comments had an eerie ring. That affair and others since have proven that cover-up can assume proportions overshadowing the crime itself. All the more reason to take early action to get the truth up and out.
There is just too much evidence that Ambassador Wilson was sent to Niger at the behest of Vice President Cheney's office, and that Wilson's findings were duly reported not only to that office but to others as well.
Equally important, it was Cheney who launched (in a major speech on August 26, 2002) the concerted campaign to persuade Congress and the American people that Saddam Hussein was about to get his hands on nuclear weapons-a campaign that mushroomed, literally, in early October with you and your senior advisers raising the specter of a "mushroom cloud" being the first "smoking gun" we might observe.
That this campaign was based largely on information known to be forged and that the campaign was used successfully to frighten our elected representatives in Congress into voting for war is clear from the bitter protestations of Rep. Henry Waxman and others. The politically aware recognize that the same information was used, also successfully, in the campaign leading up to the mid-term elections-a reality that breeds a cynicism highly corrosive to our political process.
The fact that the forgery also crept into your state-of-the-union address pales in significance in comparison with how it was used to deceive Congress into voting on October 11 to authorize you to make war on Iraq.
It was a deep insult to the integrity of the intelligence process that, after the Vice President declared on August 26, 2002 that "we know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced during the critical month of September featured a fraudulent conclusion that "most analysts" agreed with Cheney's assertion. This may help explain the anomaly of Cheney's unprecedented "multiple visits" to CIA headquarters at the time, as well as the many reports that CIA and other intelligence analysts were feeling extraordinarily great pressure, accompanied by all manner of intimidation tactics, to concur in that conclusion. As a coda to his nuclear argument, Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press three days before US/UK forces invaded Iraq: "we believe he (Saddam Hussein) has reconstituted nuclear weapons."
Mr. Russert: ...the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a nuclear program; we disagree?
Vice President Cheney: I disagree, yes. And you'll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of the intelligence community disagree...we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei (Director of the IAEA) frankly is wrong.
Contrary to what Cheney and the NIE said, the most knowledgeable analysts-those who know Iraq and nuclear weapons-judged that the evidence did not support that conclusion. They now have been proven right.
Adding insult to injury, those chairing the NIE succumbed to the pressure to adduce the known forgery as evidence to support the Cheney line, and relegated the strong dissent of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (and the nuclear engineers in the Department of Energy) to an inconspicuous footnote.
It is a curious turn of events. The drafters of the offending sentence on the forgery in president's state-of-the-union speech say they were working from the NIE. In ordinary circumstances an NIE would be the preeminently authoritative source to rely upon; but in this case the NIE itself had already been cooked to the recipe of high policy.
Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who visited Niger at Cheney's request, enjoys wide respect (including, like several VIPS members, warm encomia from your father). He is the consummate diplomat. So highly disturbed is he, however, at the chicanery he has witnessed that he allowed himself a very undiplomatic comment to a reporter last week, wondering aloud "what else they are lying about." Clearly, Wilson has concluded that the time for diplomatic language has passed. It is clear that lies were told. Sad to say, it is equally clear that your vice president led this campaign of deceit.
This was no case of petty corruption of the kind that forced Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation. This was a matter of war and peace. Thousands have died. There is no end in sight.
Recommendation #1
We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice President Cheney "not guilty." His role has been so transparent that such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney's immediate resignation.
The Games Congress Plays
The unedifying dance by the various oversight committees of the Congress over recent weeks offers proof, if further proof were needed, that reliance on Congress to investigate in a non-partisan way is pie in the sky. One need only to recall that Sen. Pat Roberts, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has refused to agree to ask the FBI to investigate the known forgery. Despite repeated attempts by others on his committee to get him to bring in the FBI, Roberts has branded such a move "inappropriate," without spelling out why.
Rep. Porter Goss, head of the House Intelligence Committee, is a CIA alumnus and a passionate Republican and agency partisan. Goss was largely responsible for the failure of the joint congressional committee on 9/11, which he co-chaired last year. An unusually clear indication of where Goss' loyalties lie can be seen in his admission that after a leak to the press last spring he bowed to Cheney's insistence that the FBI be sent to the Hill to investigate members and staff of the joint committee-an unprecedented move reflecting blithe disregard for the separation of powers and a blatant attempt at intimidation. (Congress has its own capability to investigate such leaks.)
Henry Waxman's recent proposal to create yet another congressional investigatory committee, patterned on the latest commission looking into 9/11, likewise holds little promise. To state the obvious about Congress, politics is the nature of the beast. We have seen enough congressional inquiries into the performance of intelligence to conclude that they are usually as feckless as they are prolonged. And time cannot wait.
As you are aware, Gen. Brent Scowcroft performed yeoman's service as National Security Adviser to your father and enjoys very wide respect. There are few, if any, with his breadth of experience with the issues and the institutions involved. In addition, he has avoided blind parroting of the positions of your administration and thus would be seen as relatively nonpartisan, even though serving at your pleasure. It seems a stroke of good luck that he now chairs your President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
Recommendation #2
We repeat, with an additional sense of urgency, the recommendation in our last memorandum to you (May 1) that you appoint Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Chair of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to head up an independent investigation into the use/abuse of intelligence on Iraq.
UN Inspectors
Your refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq has left the international community befuddled. Worse, it has fed suspicions that the US does not want UN inspectors in country lest they impede efforts to "plant" some "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, should efforts to find them continue to fall short. The conventional wisdom is less conspiratorial but equally unsatisfying. The cognoscenti in Washington think tanks, for example, attribute your attitude to "pique."
We find neither the conspiracy nor the "pique" rationale persuasive. As we have admitted before, we are at a loss to explain the barring of UN inspectors. Barring the very people with the international mandate, the unique experience, and the credibility to undertake a serious search for such weapons defies logic. UN inspectors know Iraq, know the weaponry in question, know the Iraqi scientists/engineers who have been involved, know how the necessary materials are procured and processed; in short, have precisely the expertise required. The challenge is as daunting as it is immediate; and, clearly, the US needs all the help it can get.
The lead Wall Street Journal article of April 8 had it right: "If the US doesn't make any undisputed discoveries of forbidden weapons, the failure will feed already-widespread skepticism abroad about the motives for going to war." As the events of last week show, that skepticism has now mushroomed here at home as well.
Recommendation #3
We recommend that you immediately invite the UN inspectors back into Iraq. This would go a long way toward refurbishing your credibility. Equally important, it would help sort out the lessons learned for the intelligence community and be an invaluable help to an investigation of the kind we have suggested you direct Gen. Scowcroft to lead.
If Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity can be of any further help to you in the days ahead, you need only ask.
/s/ Ray Close, Princeton, NJ David MacMichael, Linden, VA Raymond McGovern, Arlington, VA
Steering Committee Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Raymond McGovern is a member of the Steering Committee, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He can be contacted at: rmcgovern@slschool.org
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