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NUCLEAR
Dr. Norman C. Rasmussen, 75, Expert on Nuclear Power Risk, Dies
Hydrogen gas a nuclear waste danger?
UN nuclear watchdog planning new Iran missions
South Korea Says North Talks Process Bogged Down
Duke Power Company to Test Plutonium Fuel
House Chooses Nuclear Space Flight Over Superfund
Kucinich: Bring troops home
Lieberman says Bush mishandling of Iraq
Was Poppy Right After All?
Against Liberal Intervention
MILITARY
U.S. May Authorize $1 Billion to Speed Up Afghan Projects
Afghan Says Aid Will Help Rebuild Peace
U.S. Ambassador to Liberia Urges Rebels to Leave Capital
Pentagon's Futures Market Plan Condemned
OPEC sees little risk from Iraq as sabotage saps oil production
Poll finds majority in Poland oppose sending troops
US presses India to supply Iraq peacekeepers
'Dead dictators tell no tales'
US says 30 nations have signed on for Iraq stabilization force
U.S. Adopts Aggressive Tactics on Iraqi Fighters
Iraqi civilians caught in crossfire of US operations
US troops turn botched Saddam raid into a massacre
Bloody U.S. Raid in Baghdad Leaves Iraqis Furious
3 Iraqis Killed as G.I.'s Set Up Raid in Hunt for Hussein
Israel to Free Many Militants and Lift Some Roadblocks
ISRAEL DELAYS SECURITY FENCE PROJECT
Palestinians Losing Land to the Fence
Outposts highlight Israeli failure to meet terms of roadmap
Israel Removes 3 Checkpoints
Japan Courts a Public Wary of Sending Its Troops to Iraq
Japanese reporters in Iraq say U.S. troops roughed them up
Japan strikes commercial oil deal with Iraq
Shootout in Saudi Arabia Kills Eight
Syrian PM: Regional states should resist US bid to reshape the Middle East
Sheikh Nasrallah: US Administration is sponsor of terrorism
Brief Mutiny Was Pale Shadow of Past Philippine Coups
U.S. far outdistancing potential competitors in space-weapons race
Pentagon's Futures Market Plan Condemned
Moscow Dusts Off Informers
West Wing Pipe Dream
Rwanda Is Said to Seek New Prosecutor for War Crimes Court
Lawyers sue Blair over war
U.N. to replace war court attorney
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Congress' 9/11 Report Raises Credibility Questions
Immigrants Fear Deportation After Registration
Study Finds 2.6% Increase in U.S. Prison Population
Number Of Prisoners Rises as Crime Drops
OTHER
EPA Will Reconsider Enforcement Policies
ACTIVISTS
As Trial in Taped Beating Nears End in Los Angeles
Israeli Troops Shoot to Stop 'Fence' Protest
Police fire rubber bullets at fence protesters
There always have been those who stymied liberty
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Dr. Norman C. Rasmussen, 75, Expert on Nuclear Power Risk, Dies
July 28, 2003
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/obituaries/28RASM.html
Norman C. Rasmussen, a former professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who pioneered a technique for measuring risk at nuclear power plants, died on July 18 at a nursing home in Concord, Mass. He was 75.
The cause was complications from Parkinson's disease, his son, Neil E. Rasmussen, said.
In 1975 Dr. Rasmussen oversaw the production of a landmark report, the 21-volume Reactor Safety Study, sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, a precursor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The report predicted that in power reactors in this country, a core damage accident would occur only once in every 20,000 years of operation, with one reactor running for one year counting as a year of operating experience.
But after the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island 2 reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979, when the nuclear industry in this country had fewer than 500 years of operating experience, a new study ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reassessed the risk and estimated it at one meltdown per 1,000 years of reactor operation.
The commission disavowed some of the findings of the Rasmussen study. But it continued to embrace his technique, now known as probabilistic risk assessment, which involved drawing up a "fault tree" to trace how problems can spread through a plant when a piece of equipment fails. Among the problems with the Rasmussen study were that it overlooked some risks, like fires, and that it was based on reactor designs that did not include the Three Mile Island type.
Dr. Rasmussen was a professor of nuclear engineering at M.I.T. from 1958 until 1994, and was in charge of the institute's nuclear engineering department from 1975 to 1981. In 1985, the government presented him with the Enrico Fermi Award for his "pioneering contributions to nuclear energy in the development of probabilistic risk assessment techniques that have provided new insights and led to new developments in nuclear power plant safety."
Born in Harrisburg, Pa., Dr. Rasmussen served in the Navy from June 1945 to August 1946 and graduated from Gettysburg College in 1950. He received a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T. in 1956.
In addition to his son, of Concord, Mass., survivors include a daughter, Arlene R. Soule, of Littleton, N.H.; five brothers, Frederick, of Moorestown, N.J., Howard, of Charlotte, N.C., Holger, of Penn Valley, Calif., John, of Columbus, Ohio, and David, of Clarksville, Va.; and four grandchildren.
--------
Hydrogen gas a nuclear waste danger?
July 28, 2003
By Charles Choi
UPI Science News
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030725-052215-2034r.htm
NEW YORK, July 28 (UPI) -- Controversial new findings from an international team of scientists have renewed the debate over whether nuclear waste can absorb enough oxygen from water to produce explosive hydrogen gas.
The worry is not that nuclear waste canisters will detonate like dirty bombs after swelling with a Hindenburg's worth of hydrogen. The chemical reaction in question, if it happens at all, would take place over years. But experts think the prospect highlights just how much remains unknown about the mysterious element plutonium and how such uncertainty can effect attempts to handle and store it.
"Hopefully, if we can better understand how safe is safe enough with plutonium and have scientific backing of that, we could save money (and) spend money in the right place," actinide chemist Ken Czerwinski of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge told United Press International.
"We don't have a complete understanding of plutonium," Czerwinski said. "It's a very complicated material, and these issues are very serious. We need to get a handle on this material. It isn't going to just go away."
Plutonium is a silver-grey metal that weighs more than twice as much as lead. Discovered in 1941, the human-manufactured radioactive element was named after the planet Pluto, which in turn was named after the Roman god of the dead. In a certain form, plutonium is 10 times more toxic than any nerve gas. When inhaled, as little as 12 millionths of a gram can cause death within 60 days.
A handful of plutonium is capable of generating incredibly large amounts of energy. About two pounds is equivalent to 3,800 tons of coal. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945 contained only about 12 pounds of plutonium. Between 1944 and 1994, the United States produced or acquired nearly 111.4 metric tons of plutonium, enough for more than 18,000 Nagasaki-sized bombs.
To reduce the danger of accidental explosion, when spheres of plutonium are removed from the hearts of atomic weapons for storage, they are cut up, powdered, reacted with oxygen and converted to plutonium dioxide, a substance scientists had thought was chemically stable. PuO2 was the compound of choice for the long-term storage of plutonium, showing no sign of reaction when exposed to air, physicist Axel Svane of the University of Aarhus in Denmark and colleagues note in a report in the July 25 issue of the journal Science.
Despite these precautions, early PuO2 storage cans developed problems. "There was some swelling," Czerwinski noted.
Chemist John Haschke, formerly head of Los Alamos National Laboratory's applied weapons research and development team in New Mexico, suggested plutonium dioxide could be chemically reacting with moisture sealed inside the container. Plucking oxygen from water would leave hydrogen gas -- the H2 of water's H2O. Hydrogen is the lighter-than-air gas used to float the Hindenburg, the infamous airship that went down in flames on May 6, 1937 in Lakehurst, N.J.
This chemical reaction became the center of much concern over the long-term storage of plutonium. Haschke and his colleagues suggested the amount of hydrogen in canisters in a few years could accumulate enough pressure to damage the containers.
"Potentially you could have an explosion from hydrogen gas as the worst-case scenario," Czerwinski said.
Yet, the theory remained controversial because attempts to prepare hyper-oxygenated plutonium failed. Now, new theoretical results from Svane and his colleagues in Britain and the United States lend weight to Haschke's suggestion.
When the scientists modeled electron behavior in plutonium dioxide, the molecules assembled into cubes. Based on their calculations, the investigators found plutonium could act as an electron reservoir, accommodating electron-loaded oxygen atoms right in the core of each cube. In their paper in Science, the researchers said the temperatures needed to trigger such a reaction could occur in plutonium-storage facilities.
Analytical chemist Mark Paffett of Los Alamos National Laboratory disagreed with the chemistry proposed. His research suggests instead that plutonium dioxide is far more chemically stable, with water molecules sitting atop the surface of the radioactive material and only occasionally releasing hydrogen.
"In practice, we haven't seen high pressures of hydrogen from these materials. We do see some hydrogen, but it's very, very low-content," Paffett said.
Still, Paffett found Svane's team's work intriguing. "The calculations are very interesting and useful. These are things I've been trying to get others to do," Paffett told UPI. "Hopefully this will raise more work and questions."
Paffett stressed storage procedures for plutonium dioxide are now very careful to bake out as much moisture and any other contaminants as possible at 1,742 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours before it is canned. Every 10 pounds or so of plutonium of dioxide is sealed inside a two-layer container that is welded shut with a chemically inert gas such as argon.
"We've done everything that's scientifically possible to mitigate this problem. Clearly you don't want to store plutonium dioxide with water," Paffett said.
Although hydrogen buildup from nuclear waste seems to pose no imminent danger, "the better we understand what would happen to plutonium dioxide in a radioactive waste depository, the better," nuclear physicist Frank von Hippel of Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., told UPI.
Czerwinski agreed. Plutonium dioxide currently is thought to be insoluble, but interaction with water or other chemicals could change that condition over thousands of years, he suggested.
"The more we scientifically understand the element, the more we can translate that to better policy decisions," Czerwinski said. For instance, scientists hope to burn plutonium-loaded elements as fuel, "but these questions about the chemistry need to be understood before we can decide."
A better understanding of how plutonium can release hydrogen could even help with the hydrogen-powered economy President Bush is proposing to replace fossil fuel dependence. "I'm not talking about plutonium catalysts, mind you," Czerwinski said. But investigations of plutonium could reveal how metals in general could generate the gas, he said.
"The obstacle I see to the future is that it's very difficult to get students trained in these areas," Czerwinski told UPI. Most chemistry classes in the country don't discuss heavy, radioactive elements such as plutonium, he said, "or don't talk about radiation generally. For students to actually work with an element like plutonium in a university setting is extremely rare."
Czerwinski also said he was concerned that "the age of the people at the national laboratories is only growing. "We're really trying to find replacements, and students just aren't getting the training."
-------- iran
UN nuclear watchdog planning new Iran missions
VIENNA (AFP)
Jul 28, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030728135119.k5zwzc9b.html
The UN nuclear watchdog said on Monday it will next month send two new teams of specialists to Iran, suspected by the United States and its allies of developing nuclear weapons.
The announcement came a day after Iran's representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency took the unusual step of urging his government to agree to surprise inspections of its nuclear facilities by the
The international community is pressing Tehran to sign an additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow the no-notice inspections, but so far Iran has not obliged.
A first IAEA team of judicial experts will go in the first week of August on a 48-hour mission to explain how the protocol will work if Tehran signs, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
The second team will carry out routine inspections ahead of a report on Iran's nuclear facilities by the IAEA due to be released on September 8, Fleming said, without giving specific dates for the visit.
During a visit to South Africa last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said the country's leadership would decide whether to agree to sign after hearing from the IAEA experts.
Iran, however, repeated assurances Monday that it has no intention of quitting the NPT altogether.
"Our policy remains the same as we declared before," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said.
Earlier this month, European Union foreign ministers expressed their increasing concern" over Iran's nuclear programme and demanded Iran's unconditional acceptance of the additional NPT protocol.
The EU, which is negotiating a key trade pact with Iran, said it would review its cooperation with Tehran in September, when the IAEA delivers its latest report.
Iran, a country rich in oil, is suspected by its archfoe the United States of covertly developing nuclear weapons under the guise of its civilian nuclear programme, allegations strongly denied by Tehran.
Last week, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami accused the United States of seeking to overthrow the Islamic regime and of using the nuclear weapons allegations as a pretext.
Iran's representative to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, warned Sunday that if the protocol was not signed, there was a real danger the agency might refer Iran's case to the UN Security Council, as threatened by Washington.
-------- korea
South Korea Says North Talks Process Bogged Down
July 28, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - Negotiations between China and North Korea on restarting talks on Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions have become bogged down, South Korea's foreign minister said Monday.
Yoon Young-kwan told reporters no one could tell for sure whether multilateral talks would be held next month or in September because Pyongyang had yet to respond to the idea.
``The negotiating progress between North Korea and China is not speedy, but has slowed down a bit,'' Yoon said. ``North Korea holds the key. The ball now is in North Korea's court.''
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said last Friday after talks with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun she saw possible fresh nuclear talks in a few weeks and said ``hopefully August'' when asked whether that meant September or next month.
China has played a crucial role in seeking to persuade its communist neighbor and long-time ally to return to talks and accept Japan, South Korea and possibly Russia at the table, too. Beijing hosted an inconclusive first round between China, the United States and North Korea in April.
``No one can tell for sure what the timing of the talks will be,'' Yoon said. ``Since North Korea has yet to respond, we can't predict the timing. We need to wait.''
Separately, a YTN television quoted an unnamed Unification Ministry official as saying multilateral talks could be held one day after a re-run of the three-way talks. A Unification Ministry official could not confirm the report.
BUMPY ROAD TO TALKS
The road to talks with North Korea is often circuitous and bumpy. North Korea has been pumping out the rhetoric from its state-run media, as veterans and dignitaries from the United States and its Korean War allies marked the 50th anniversary of the armistice that halted the fighting on July 27, 1953.
The Koreas are still technically at war because the armistice has not been replaced by a peace treaty.
The North would like that, plus a non-aggression pact with Washington, but Roh told ABC News ``This Week with George Stephanopoulos'' Sunday he thought the latter was unnecessary.
North Korea says it won the Korean War and refers to the ``50th anniversary of the Great Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War.'' The North's official KCNA news agency said an extravaganza was staged in Pyongyang around a central square.
``The square turned into a veritable sea of dancers with the will to demonstrate the invincible spirit of heroic Korea once again in the present confrontation with the U.S.,'' it said.
In the South, Among those commemorating the armistice were members of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, a little-known team that has helped monitor the truce along the Demilitarised Zone bisecting the Korean peninsula for 50 years. Polish Maj. Gen. Andrzej Ekiert told Reuters in Seoul Monday Poland may return full-time to the commission.
A camp at the heart of the DMZ, on the southern side of the divide, houses five Swiss and four Swedish officers in makeshift but well-kept huts in national colors.
When first set up under the 1953 Armistice Agreement, the commission included Polish and Czechoslovak camps north of the border. North Korea expelled the Czechoslovaks when their country split in 1993. Poland was later forced out and has since sent two-man teams to commission meetings but not set up at the camp.
``Maybe, but this is our government decision, there will be the situation that a small Polish delegation will be in Panmunjom like the Swiss and Swedish delegations,'' said Ekiert in English.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Duke Power Company to Test Plutonium Fuel
July 28, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2003/2003-07-28-09.asp#anchor4
WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) published a notice in the Federal Register Friday about plans by the Duke Power Company to test plutonium fuel - known as mixed oxide fuel (MOX) - in either its Catawba, South Carolina or McGuire, North Carolina nuclear stations.
Four MOX "lead test assemblies" (LTAs) would be used in one of four Duke reactors. Both nuclear plants are both located near Charlotte, North Carolina.
The test is planned as part of the Energy Department's plutonium disposition program, although the agency acknowledged to Congress last year that "immobilizing" the plutonium in high-level waste was cheaper than using it as MOX.
Many environmental groups oppose the MOX program due to safety questions raised by MOX use in reactors and because of the increased proliferation concerns posed by plutonium handling and processing in the United States and Russia.
The Federal Register announcement affords the public the opportunity to request a hearing on the license amendment necessary to test the MOX.
Greenpeace, a vocal critic of the plan, says that because the United States does not have a MOX fuel fabrication plant, the MOX assemblies would have to be fabricated in Europe. The organization notes this would be controversial as approximately 150 kilograms weapons plutonium would have to be transported overland from Los Alamos National Laboratory and then shipped, along with an armed escort vessel, to one of two MOX fabrication plants in France or Belgium.
Earlier this week the NRC announced that its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the U.S. MOX plant, which is planned for the Energy Department's Savannah River Site would not be ready until the end of September.
-------- us politics
House Chooses Nuclear Space Flight Over Superfund
By J.R. Pegg,
July 28, 2003
(ENS)
http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2003/2003-07-28-10.asp
WASHINGTON, DC - The House turned back an effort Friday to fully fund the Bush administration's 2004 request for the Superfund program, opting not to divert $115 million from an initiative to develop nuclear powered space flight in order to fund additional efforts to clean up hazardous waste sites.
The move comes amid rising concerns that the Superfund program is being undermined by a lack of funding - cleanup of existing sites has fallen by some 50 percent in the last two years.
The provision was offered by Representatives Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Charles Bass, a New Hampshire Republican, as an amendment to the House spending bill for several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
It was easily defeated with 309 members voting against and only 114 in favor.
"It is very disappointing to see so many members place the health of their communities so low on their list of political priorities, and is impossible to justify as a matter of environmental justice or wise allocation of scarce federal funding," Markey commented on the vote.
The Bush administration, which has been blasted by environmentalists for the slowdown in clean up at Superfund sites, asked for $1.39 billion. The failure of the amendment means the House has provided the Superfund program with $1.275 billion for fiscal year 2004 - in line with the $1.27 billion it appropriated for the current fiscal year.
The House leadership says the limited increase is the result of its policy of strict fiscal discipline. The Bush administration recently announced that the budget deficit could be as high as $400 billion.
Markey and Bass proposed taking $115 million out of the bill's $279 million allocation for NASA's Project Prometheus, an initiative to develop nuclear powered space probes.
Markey told House colleagues that the amendment struck the necessary balance "our exploration of the stars and our preservation of the Earth."
The $279 billion the House has put forth for Prometheus is in line with the Bush administration's request and is a 133 percent increase over the program's 2003 appropriations. This figure includes $186 million for the Nuclear Systems Initiative and $93 million for a first flight mission - known as the Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter (JIMO).
Taking $115 million out of the initiative and allocating it to the Superfund program, Markey said, would give Prometheus a 31 percent increase and afford Superfund a nine percent increase over 2003 levels.
"It is an issue of priorities," Bass added. "The moons of Jupiter are going nowhere, but the people who live around these Superfund sites are people that are affected and potentially affected by this issue every single day."
Supporters of the amendment noted that earlier this month, the EPA announced 20 new Superfund sites and acknowledged that only 11 would be funded. There are more than 1,230 Superfund sites across the nation.
"We are not keeping up with our Superfund responsibilities," said Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat.
But opponents of the amendment said that nuclear powered space flight is integral to the future of space exploration and that Prometheus is too important to be cut.
The money allocated by the House for Superfund "keeps cleanups going at a steady pace," said New York Republican Jim Walsh. The $115 million cut to the space initiative would "severely hamper the operations of NASA."
"It would also place in jeopardy many worthwhile space and Earth missions which would improve the understanding of our world, basic knowledge, which we, as humans, strive for," Walsh said.
NASA wants to spend some $3 billion on Project Prometheus over the next five years, with $2 billion slated for development of the JIMO spacecraft, which is being designed to investigate three of Jupiter's 52 moons. The three moons - Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa - may harbor vast oceans beneath their icy surfaces.
Aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman have each been awarded multimillion dollar contracts to develop design studies for the orbiter.
Speaking against the amendment, California Republican David Drier said the cut in funding for the space project would "be extraordinarily short-sighted."
"If you do not take risks, you are not going to learn anything," said Drier.
Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank countered that Americans ought not to have to "take the risk of living next to a Superfund site."
Seventy million people, including some 10 million children, live within four miles of the nation's more than 1,230 Superfund sites. Children are most vulnerable to the arsenic, DDT and brain-damaging toxins like lead and mercury that are found in the water and soil at these locations.
In the late 1990s, the EPA cleaned up an average of 86 Superfund sites a year, but it only cleaned up 42 sites in 2002.
Last year, 46 sites that requested cleanup funds did not receive full funding, resulting in a 45 percent shortfall in funding.
And earlier this year, Congress voted against reinstating the polluter pays tax, which forces polluters to pay the bill for toxic cleanups at Superfund sites. The provision expired in 1995, when the trust fund was at a historic high of some $3.6 billion.
The fund is likely to be completely depleted by 2004, forcing the government to pay entirely for future Superfund cleanup.
The bill passed Friday included a total of $8.01 billion for the EPA, $375 million more than the Bush administration requested but some $1 million less than Congress gave the agency last year.
Although generally displeased with the funding levels in the bill, environmentalists hailed the decision by the House to reject the Bush administration's proposal to cut the EPA's enforcement staff amid widespread concern that enforcement at the agency is underfunded and understaffed.
The Senate has yet to consider the EPA's budget for fiscal 2004 and will not discuss it until after the August recess.
----
Kucinich: Bring troops home
The presidential candidate also spoke about education and renewable energy.
By LYNN OKAMOTO
Des Moines Register Staff Writer
07/28/2003
http://www.dmregister.com/news/stories/c4789004/21851964.html
Ottumwa, Ia. - It's time to bring American troops home from Iraq, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said Sunday at a nationally televised forum in Ottumwa.
"This is the time for us to rejoin the world community, rejoin the United Nations and get our troops out of there," said Kucinich, an Ohio congressman, at a forum hosted by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and televised by C-SPAN. "I don't like the fact that our men and women are being used for targets."
Kucinich's comments came as yet another U.S. solider was killed early Sunday south of Baghdad. According to the Associated Press, 163 U.S. soldiers have now died in Iraq, including 48 killed since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1.
Springdale resident Clara Oleson, one of about 200 who attended Sunday's 90-minute forum, grew frustrated after an hour had passed and no one had talked about the war. The discussion focused instead on the economy, health care, education and renewable energy.
"George W. Bush is ready to blow up this world in our name and we're sitting here asking about prescription drugs," Oleson said. "The vast majority of people watching this are never going to vote for you or anyone else because the disbelief and the disenchantment is that great."
Kucinich said he understands the anger in this country. He led an effort in the U.S. House of Representatives that challenged the Bush administration's move toward war with Iraq, and "I continue to challenge this administration on a daily basis on why we're there and on the tremendous effect this is having on our nation and our families."
Kucinich's call for the return of U.S. troops stands in contrast to former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, another opponent of the war who has said the United States can't withdraw from Iraq now, because that could lead to chaos.
Dean said he would replace reserves with Muslim troops from places such as Egypt, Morocco and Malaysia.
Nine candidates are vying for the 2004 Democratic nomination for president; five opposed the war. The other four, Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and John Edwards, voted in favor of a resolution last fall that granted Bush authority to attack Iraq.
Aside from the war, Kucinich called Sunday for "deep, fundamental change" and echoed themes from his standard stump speech.
"If people elect me president, there will be real changes," he said.
He called for cutting the Pentagon's budget by $60 billion to pay for universal pre-kindergarten and canceling President Bush's $1.5 trillion in tax cuts in favor of universal college education. Kucinich said universal health care can be achieved with a system administered by the federal government.
Kucinich also said Sunday that the United States should have 20 percent of its energy produced from renewable sources by 2010.
Kucinich is in the bottom tier of candidates in terms of fund-raising and national polls. However, some Democratic activists have referred to him as an "up-and-comer" in Iowa, home to the first-in-the nation presidential caucuses Jan. 19.
----
Lieberman says Bush mishandling of Iraq 'threatens to give a bad name to a just war'
WILL LESTER,
Associated Press Writer
Monday, July 28, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/07/28/national0808EDT0483.DTL
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate Joe Lieberman on Monday faulted President Bush for a lack of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq while he assailed his rivals for opposing the conflict, saying "they don't know a just war when they see it."
Critical of his foes for the party nomination but reticent to name names, the Connecticut senator defended his strong support for U.S.-led military action, arguing that 12 years of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime warranted the military campaign to oust him.
"Congress did the right thing in authorizing the war," Lieberman said in a Capitol Hill speech.
He expressed concern about his foes "disquieting zeal" in seizing on questions of shaky U.S. intelligence that Bush used to justify the war and the inability of coalition forces to find weapons of mass destruction, particularly those lawmakers who supported the war but "seem to have forgotten why."
"There's a danger there will be a misimpression sent about the historic Democratic Party record of being strong on security," Lieberman said, "going back to Wilson, and Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy and Clinton."
Asked whether he was losing the debate within the party about the war, reflected in the recent rise in popularity of anti-war candidate Howard Dean, Lieberman responded: "The battle has just begun," he said. "It won't officially begin until next year when the primaries begin, that's why I'm speaking out now."
Asked repeatedly to cite his rivals by name, Lieberman finally mentioned Dean, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri. Dean has remained a staunch opponent of the war, Kerry and Gephardt supported the congressional resolution authorizing force but have pointedly questioned President Bush's statements and policies.
Lieberman said he was concerned that Democrats, "in expressing the justified questions about 16 words (in the State of the Union address) and the stunning lack of preparedness, we obscure the fact that this was a just war."
"My confidence in the rightness of the war against Iraq is unshaken," he said.
But he also criticized the Bush administration for its lack of preparedness in dealing with postwar Iraq and its distortion of intelligence and diminished credibility.
"Why did the White House insist on pushing the uranium claim into the president's speech despite the CIA's consistent objection?" he asked. "Why has no one been held accountable? Why has no one been dismissed?"
Lieberman said the administration's poor handling of the postwar period may mean missing weapons of mass destruction are now on the open market.
Another Democratic presidential aspirant, Sen. John Edwards, said he thinks the administration has failed to sufficiently involve the international community in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Lieberman also said the administration should overcome its anger at European allies who opposed the war and moved quickly to recruit NATO forces to help secure Iraq after the initial military success.
----
Was Poppy Right After All?
by Pat Buchanan
July 28, 2003
The American Conservative
http://amconmag.com/07_28_03/buchanan.html
After five weeks of air strikes and 100 hours of ground war, President Bush ordered General Schwarzkopf to end his attacks and halt his advance. Receiving reports of air massacres of retreating Iraqis on the Highway of Death out of Kuwait City, unwilling to risk a defection of his Arab allies, Bush I ordered an end to the war. America agreed. Our goal had been to liberate Kuwait. It had been achieved, brilliantly. Saddam's army had been evicted. The 500,000-man army of Desert Storm was ordered home. And the neoconservatives never forgave Bush I for not going to Baghdad.
A dozen years later, the son, at their fanatical urging, invaded Iraq, seized Baghdad, and committed America to building a democracy that would serve as a model for the Arab and Islamic world.
Three months have now elapsed since Baghdad fell. In those 100 days, the wisdom of the father in disregarding the neocons, and the folly of the son in heeding them, have become apparent.
America has 150,000 troops bogged down in Iraq as proconsul Paul Bremer is demanding thousands more to put down a guerrilla revolt that has broken out against our occupation.
Each day brings reports of new American dead and wounded. Our enemies are said to be terrorists, Saddam's Fedayeen, the remnants of the Ba'ath Party. But Saddam had hundreds of thousands of men in his army, Republican Guard, and Special Republican Guard. We did not kill a tenth of these soldiers. Where are they now?
George W. Bush is in more trouble than he realizes. Indeed, his place in history may yet hinge on how he deals with what Americans are coming to see as an intolerable cost in lives to maintain a presence in Iraq when they are not yet convinced it is vital to our security.
The president spent a year convincing us of the ominous threat of Saddam-his weapons and ties to terrorists-a threat that could be eliminated only by an invasion and the death of his regime. But he has not even begun to make the case for why we must stay on in Iraq.
Why are we still there? If our goal is a democracy in Iraq, that is surely noble, but is it doable? What is the price in blood of achieving it? What is the cost in tens of billions? What are the prospects for success? What would constitute indices of failure, at which point we would write off the investment? What is our exit strategy?
None of these questions has been answered. What we hear from the president is "Bring 'em on," and from senators who visit Baghdad, "We must be prepared to stay five or ten years." But why must we be prepared to stay five or ten years? Now that Saddam is gone and his weapons of mass destruction no longer threaten us, if ever they did, why must we stay?
Iraq is not Vietnam where we lost 150 soldiers each week for seven years. But it has taken on the aspect of the colonial wars of the European empires, all of which were lost because the natives were more willing to pay in blood to drive the imperialists out than the imperialists were willing to pay in blood to stay around.
The truism stands: the guerrillas win if they do not lose. And they do not lose as long as they keep fighting, dying, killing, and raising the cost of the occupation. British, French, Israelis, and Russians can testify to that.
Americans sense, rightly, that we do not need to occupy Iraq to be secure here at home.
Bush's father understood this. Is the son wiser? Why did Bush I stop at Basra and not go on to Baghdad? He had no desire to occupy and rule Iraq. He saw no need to. He feared that a U.S. occupation would alienate Arab allies, inflame the Arab street, and invite an Iraqi intifada. He placed a high value on the coalition he had stitched together to fight, and to pay for, the war. He was warned Iraq could split apart and a Shi'ite south sympathetic to Iran could break loose. He did not see a routed Saddam as a mortal threat. He believed Iraq could be deterred, contained.
On this, he was a conservative. Has not history proven him right?
His son, however-to invade and occupy Iraq and oust Saddam-was willing to shatter alliances, alienate Arabs, Turks, French, Germans, and Russians, have his country pay the full cost of the war, and run the entire occupation ourselves. Now, U.S. casualties, after the fall of Baghdad, are approaching the number of lives lost in the war.
Looking back, were Saddam's weapons so imminent a menace they required an invasion? Or did the neocons get revenge on the father by leading his son down the garden path-to the empire of their dreams, now creaking at the joints?
What does the son do now, with the election 15 months away?
----
Against Liberal Intervention
By John R. MacArthur
7.28.03
In These Times
http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=285_0_1_0_C
The United States vetoed any attempt to reinforce U.N. troops in Rwanda, leaving 800,000 to die on the altars of national sovereignty and Western indifference.
During the early phase of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, I came across a scathing critique of the war in a suprising locale, written by the unlikeliest (or so I thought) accuser of the Bush-Blair axis of imperialism.
The publication was Conrad Black's militantly right-wing, pro-war British weekly, The Spectator, and the author was named Hitchens-not the putatively "leftist" one named Christopher, but his supposedly "reactionary" brother, Peter.
In its high rhetorical pitch the essay was pure Hitchens, regardless of given name. But there was no confusing the brothers after the first paragraph. Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Peter Hitchens, was a "left-wing war," a destructive enterprise that provided "the excuse for censorship, organized lying, regulation, and taxation," a "paradise for the busybody and the narc" that "damages family life and wounds the Church, all the while polluting the minds of millions with scenes of horror and death."
Remarkable, especially coming after my old ally C. Hitchens' celebrated defection from the leftish, anti-American peace camp to the bipartisan war party. But a left-wing war? Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. in the same ideological basket as Eugene Debs, William Sloane Coffin, and Michael Moore?
At first glance, Peter Hitchens' thesis was preposterous-the application of raw, unilateral military power (and the subsequent war profiteering by big business) seems a rather authoritarian idea more in keeping with the brutal dogma of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan than with nice liberal notions of international cooperation, humanitarian aid, and peaceful disarmament. But on closer examination I realized that Peter Hitchens was on to something, for if you think that namby-pamby niceness is all the liberal left has been pushing the last two decades, you haven't been paying attention.
Indeed, liberals have been lobbying since the early '80s for more aggressive "humanitarian" interventions that would override the niceties of international law, the sovereignty of nations, and even U.N. peacekeeping efforts. To the extent that the Bush-Blair doctrine of pre-emptive war encompasses human rights and the "right" to overthrow tyrants, this one was very much a "left-wing" war.
Of course, I don't buy George Bush's human rights rationale for Gulf War II any more than I bought his father's epiphany in 1990 that Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. Too many murderous American clients, including Saddam, have gone in and out of favor since 1898 (the year we "liberated" Cuba from Spain) for me to take seriously the altruistic prattle emanating from this White House.
But a surprising number of liberals did take Bush at his word (as they had his father) whenever he turned misty-eyed about Baathist atrocities (real and fabricated), as well as the urgent need for "liberating" the Iraqi people. Behind their dovish compassion lay a ferocious streak of Wilsonian hawkishness that had first presented itself during the Bosnia crisis in the early '90s.
It was then that human rights hawks adopted the principle of "liberal intervention" laid down in the '80s by two Paris-based intellectuals, the international law professor Mario Bettati and the physician-activist Bernard Kouchner. Eventually, as Ian Buruma recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, the rhetorical grandstanding by Kouchner-"the day will come ... when we are able to say ... 'Mr. Dictator, we are going to stop you preventively from oppressing, torturing and exterminating your ethnic minorities'"-took hold and nice liberals started sounding like nasty, pre-emptive militarists.
I recall a hair-raising speech by the currency speculator-turned-human-rights-promoter George Soros, in which he argued for creation of a U.N. rapid deployment military force that could intervene anywhere in the world on a moment's notice to prevent the powerful from killing the weak-by killing the powerful. Around the same time, it became fashionable on the left (especially in the neighborhood inhabited by Susan Sontag and David Reiff) to denounce the U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia for not being sufficiently anti-Serb, the Serbs being ultra-nationalist "fascists." At a human rights group board meeting I heard a well-known U.S. television journalist actually refer to the blue-helmeted soldiers in Sarajevo as "capos in a concentration camp," who functioned as oppressors, not protectors, of the noble Bosnians.
"Liberal" military interventions by the United States and its allies followed in due course. Bush I had already played the human rights card by promoting the fake baby incubator atrocity in Kuwait, a brilliant maneuver that undermined both the "no blood for oil" and the "no more Vietnams" lobbies. Then came Somalia, which was a disaster for Americans and Somalis alike; Haiti, where the United States intervened in support of the sometimes repressive Bertrand Aristide; and lastly, Kosovo, which achieved reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Like Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic was alternately denounced by do-gooders on the left as a Hitler-like fascist and "the last Stalinist," first cousins to Christopher Hitchens' "Islamic Fascists."
Kosovo was the clearest assertion of the new doctrine of liberal intervention, a legal and moral template for the overthrow of Saddam. According to its critics, the NATO bombing campaign was a pre-emptive war in clear violation of international law (Kosovo was legally part of Serbia, which had attacked no other country). But liberals were happy because the 78 days of aerial mayhem led to the eventual removal of Milosevic from power.
"Leftists" more radical than Kouchner, like Paul Berman, now seek to expand the concept of liberal pre-emption by claiming Abraham Lincoln as their patron saint. Lincoln, they say, was bent on liberating the whole world, not just the southern states-a foolish exaggeration about a practical politician who nearly wrecked his career by opposing America's imperialist invasion of undemocratic Mexico in 1846 (and who initially wanted to send the slaves back to Africa). It's no coincidence that President Bush has chosen the USS Abraham Lincoln for his welcome- home photo op.
Where does all this leave the liberal constitutionalists like me, who opposed all the aforementioned interventions? I certainly subscribe to the principle of universal human rights, just as I support the corrupt and imperfect United Nations. But I understand that the Enlightenment ideals codified by the United Nations stem from the (thus far) historically unique Nazi terror. And I suspect that all attempts to compensate for the lack of pre-emptive intervention against Hitler are essentially symbolic. Look how virtuous and tough we are, says Berman, compared with those weak-kneed French and British appeasers of the '30s.
The problem with symbolic military gestures is that they kill innocent bystanders as surely as do acts of naked aggression that are devoid of good intentions. Total the many thousands of civilian dead (or just dead women and children) in the first Gulf War, Somalia, Kosovo/Serbia and Gulf War II, and you already have a pretty good argument against liberal intervention.
Moreover, war unleashes death in unpredictable ways; I think, for example, that the NATO bombing led to the death of more Albanians than would have died from nonintervention--by sowing panic and granting the Serbs a pretext for settling scores with the KLA. (It's forgotten that Milosevic had agreed to U.N. monitors in Kosovo, just not in Serbia proper).
As a liberal, I wish the French had invaded the Rhineland in 1936 when Hitler remilitarized the region in violation of the Versailles peace agreement. But as an American liberal, I also wish that my fellow citizens believed that charity begins at home; I wish the United States had taken in millions of persecuted Jews before Hitler could liquidate them; I wish we'd offered a haven to tens of thousands of Bosnians-Muslim, Orthodox Christian, and Catholic-for we could certainly have afforded it. And I wish that we had listened to a liberal Swedish internationalist named Blix, instead of a right-wing Texas nationalist named Bush.
Liberal interventionism has given moral cover to the ugliest, most undemocratic impulses seen in this country since Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act (which put Eugene Victor Debs in jail for opposing the war) and unleashed his attorney general's infamous "Palmer raids" against "subversives" (John Ashcroft must envy the free hand of Alexander Mitchell Palmer). Worse still, Liberal interventionism has defaced the Constitution with the forged signature of Lincoln, written in the blood of Arabs who will never stroll on the Mall.
John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine and author, most recently, of The Selling of Free Trade.
-------- MILITARY
------ afghanistan
U.S. May Authorize $1 Billion to Speed Up Afghan Projects
July 28, 2003
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/international/asia/28AID.html
WASHINGTON, July 27 - The Bush administration is weighing a proposal to seek up to $1 billion in aid to help rebuild Afghanistan, administration officials said today.
Congress authorized $3.3 billion in financial and military assistance over four years in the fall of 2001, but only about $300 million has been spent so far.
The new proposal would accelerate some of that spending and request additional money from Congress, a senior military official said.
The proposal aims to finance projects that could be completed within a year and have a maximum effect before Afghan elections in late 2004. The projects could include building roads and schools, and speeding the training of the Afghan Army, the officials said.
A major purpose of the plan, which is expected to involve State and Defense Department financing and would probably require Congressional approval, would be to shore up the government of President Hamid Karzai and demonstrate both to the American public and to foreign donors that the administration is not neglecting Afghanistan, even as it grapples with the more complex task of rebuilding Iraq.
"This is part of a strategic update that was begun in April or May," the military official said. "It's part of a concerted effort in which, during the time when everyone's attention is focused on Iraq, we're also doing everything we could be doing in Afghanistan."
The aid proposal was first reported today by The Washington Post.
Asked today on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" if the United States would send $1 billion in new aid to Afghanistan, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said, "We'll wait and see." But he added, "The best thing we can do in Afghanistan is help the Afghan people help themselves, which helps us."
The accelerated financial assistance would likely be on top of the $10 billion the Pentagon is now spending annually to maintain 9,000 United States troops in Afghanistan.
Despite the administration's stated commitment to Afghanistan, many aid agencies, lawmakers and Afghan leaders themselves have warned that the administration has budgeted less for rebuilding the nation than Congress has authorized.
During a visit to Washington in February, President Karzai thanked President Bush both for driving the Taliban from power and for initial reconstruction efforts.
But Mr. Karzai also brought another message, saying, "I'm also here to ask you to do more for us in making the life of the Afghan people better, more stable, more peaceful."
On July 14 the Afghan foreign minister, Abdullah, made a similar plea during a visit here. Dr. Abdullah said Afghans still trusted Mr. Karzai's government and the American-led recovery effort, but he warned that support could wane without improvements soon in providing jobs, electricity and security.
"They are giving us time - how long?" Dr. Abdullah asked. "This is my point. The international community should build the capacity in the central government in order to deal with the core issues of security and reconstruction in the economic sector."
International donations to the rebuilding have lagged behind the $4.5 billion pledged last year at a donors' conference in Tokyo. Earlier this month the former top American general in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, warned in an interview that recovery was imperiled unless the international community took bolder steps in rebuilding.
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Afghan Says Aid Will Help Rebuild Peace
U.S. Assistance 'Gives People Hope,' Top Official Asserts
By April Witt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 28, 2003; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54072-2003Jul27?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 27 -- A $1 billion aid package that the Bush administration plans to propose soon will help war-shattered Afghanistan rebuild the peace as well as roads and schools, President Hamid Karzai's chief of staff said today.
"Reconstruction creates jobs," Said Tayab Jawad said. "It creates a sense of trust and gives people hope for a more peaceful future."
His comments came in response to a Washington Post report on the aid, which quoted senior Bush administration officials.
In meetings over the past few weeks, Jawad said, Washington has discussed giving Afghanistan a $1 billion aid package, more than triple the $300 million in U.S. aid that it now receives. Afghan and U.S. officials expect other international donors to match the U.S. package, coming up with another $600 million to $1 billion, Jawad said.
The money will be spent largely on projects to reconstruct infrastructure such as roads and schools; the efforts are designed to have a significant and rapid impact on people's daily lives. The money also will fund training for police nationwide as well as for soldiers of the Afghan army.
Nearly two years after the U.S.-led coalition toppled the Taliban regime -- and pledged to help rebuild Afghanistan -- much of the country and the economy remain shattered. Major roads are unpaved and so rutted that it can take three or four hours to drive 100 miles. The economy remains so devastated. that some doctors earn a salary of about $50 a month. Legions of schoolchildren still study outdoors, under tents so hot in summer and so cold in winter that students frequently fall ill. Plumbing is so rudimentary that even here in the capital most people still bathe by dumping buckets of water on themselves.
Police and other key government employees lack the basic tools -- such as cars and radios -- to do their jobs. Many haven't been paid for months. Desperate farmers, deprived of usable irrigation systems and unable to support themselves growing wheat or corn, have begun planting opium poppies. Afghanistan is now the world's largest opium producer.
The new U.S. aid package is designed to improve people's lives before national elections slated for October 2004 and to mitigate Afghan disappointment at a time when terrorist attacks on coalition forces, and on supporters of the central government, are increasing. Afghan officials increasingly have said that the slow pace of reconstruction is contributing to instability and terrorist attacks.
"We have nothing here," Said Rahman, assistant border commander of Nangahar province, in eastern Afghanistan, said recently. "We don't say the U.S. hasn't helped us. They helped us. But not as much as we expected."
"Afghans are standing beside the U.S. looking for al Qaeda and fighting al Qaeda. We need factories for our people to find jobs. Of course, when we have nothing, it's a problem," he said. "These are poor people. For five afghanis [the national currency] they are ready to lay a land mine somewhere or kill someone."
Even as the United States prepares to provide an influx of new aid, Afghans will have to scale back their expectations and to be more realistic, Jawad said. "Some of the disappointment and disillusionment were due to the fact that people were initially very optimistic about the process of reconstruction," he noted. "Everything people hoped for was not realized in a matter of a year and a half or two years.
"We are trying to rebuild our country brick by brick. It's going to take time. Initially people did not have a good sense of how long it would take. Now we are learning."
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U.S. Ambassador to Liberia Urges Rebels to Leave Capital
July 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/international/africa/28LIBE.html
MONROVIA, Liberia, July 27 (AP) - Explosions rocked this capital city today as rebels and government forces battled at crucial crossings leading to President Charles G. Taylor's downtown stronghold, and at least 16 people died late Saturday and today when mortar shells hit their homes.
The United States ambassador to Liberia appealed to insurgents to lift their eight-day siege of Monrovia and withdraw - even as government commanders and residents reported that the rebels were stepping up their drive into the city.
Rebels are pressing forward in their third effort in two months to take Monrovia, an isolated and disease-ridden city of at least 1.3 million hungry residents and refugees. Their goal is to drive out Mr. Taylor, a former warlord behind nearly 14 years of ruinous conflict in this once prosperous West African nation.
The main rebel movement "needs to show that they have regard for the people of Liberia, that it is not indifferent to the great human suffering that is taking place here," Ambassador John Blaney told reporters at the heavily guarded American Embassy.
The ambassador urged the rebels, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, to pull back to the natural boundary of the Po River, six miles outside the capital. The withdrawal would open up the port and camps outside the city for urgently needed food and aid.
Mr. Blaney said Mr. Taylor had agreed to the proposal, and the ambassador urged the rebel movement to do the same. "If they want to get to a post-Taylor era, this is the way to do it," he said.
Sekou Conneh, the rebels' civilian chairman, said they would retreat only when peacekeepers were in place.
"We agree to fall back, but we want the peacekeepers to come," Mr. Conneh said. "We don't want to hand over the port to Charles Taylor."
Under international pressure to intervene, President Bush has ordered American ships to take up positions off the coast of Liberia, ready to support a West-African-led peace force, which has been delayed amid debates over financing.
Mr. Bush has demanded that Mr. Taylor, who is indicted for war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone, step down. Mr. Taylor says he will do so, accepting an asylum offer in Nigeria, only when peacekeepers arrive.
Fighting has focused on the port and bridges leading to downtown. Insurgents overnight bypassed the Stockton Bridge, which leads from a rebel-held island to mainland Monrovia, government field officers said.
At daylight, after a night of combat, rebels were in what had been a government-controlled suburb around the bridge, saying they were in control.
"This morning we saw fighters coming in, telling us not to panic," said one resident, reached by telephone, in the New Georgia neighborhood. Gunfire and booms echoed behind her. "I'm scared," she added, saying she was too fearful to give her name.
Taking northern neighborhoods around the bridge would give the rebels a foothold on the mainland, from which they could battle their way toward the government-held downtown. New bombardments also crashed into neighborhoods. One round landed before dawn today on a tin-roofed shack near the embattled Old Bridge, killing four people, according to aid workers collecting bodies in the area. Another fell on a nearby house, killing two people.
A shell that had fallen close by late Saturday killed an entire family - eight adults and two children, aid workers said.
Mr. Taylor said on Saturday that as many as 1,000 people had died since rebels began their latest effort to take the capital. Aid workers put the week's toll at about 400.
Government and rebel officials have traded accusations of blame for the shelling in densely populated neighborhoods. Witnesses in areas closest to the fighting said today that some mortar rounds fired by the government were landing short of their rebel targets, killing residents on their own side.
Elsewhere, the Liberian defense minister, Daniel Chea, said his forces were repelling an advance by Liberia's second, smaller rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, in the southeast. Insurgents of the group had advanced in recent days to within 30 miles of Buchanan, Liberia's second-largest city and home to an important port.
Rebels said to be backed by the governments in neighboring Ivory Coast and Guinea control at least 60 percent of Liberia, a country founded by freed American slaves in the 19th century.
West African leaders have pledged to send two Nigerian battalions to Liberia within days - the vanguard of what they say should be an international force of 3,250 to bring peace to the devastated nation.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said on the television program "Fox News Sunday" that American forces were "going in when there is a cease-fire, when Charles Taylor is leaving, has left."
Mr. Wolfowitz also said the United States' role was to assist the United Nations and West African countries "to stabilize the situation, to avert a humanitarian disaster."
"As part of that, it's necessary to get Charles Taylor to leave the country and for the U.N. to begin a political process," Mr. Wolfowitz said.
-------- business
Pentagon's Futures Market Plan Condemned
Mon Jul 28
By KEN GUGGENHEIM,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&e=5&u=/ap/20030728/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_market
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.
Two Democratic senators demanded Monday the project be stopped before investors begin registering this week. "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said.
The Pentagon office overseeing the program, called the Policy Analysis Market, said it was part of a research effort "to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." It said there would be a re-evaluation before more money was committed.
The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts - essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.
A graphic on the market's Web page showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown.
Although the Web site described the Policy Analysis Market as "a market in the future of the Middle East," the graphic also included the possibility of a North Korea missile attack.
That graphic was apparently removed from the Web site hours after the news conference in which Wyden and fellow Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota criticizing the market.
Dorgan described it as useless, offensive and "unbelievably stupid."
"Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in ... and bet on the assassination of an American political figure, or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?" he said.
According to its Web site, the Policy Analysis Market would be a joint program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and two private companies: Net Exchange, a market technologies company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the publisher of The Economist magazine.
DARPA has received strong criticism from Congress for its Terrorism Information Awareness program, a computerized surveillance program that has raised privacy concerns. Wyden said the Policy Analysis Market is under retired Adm. John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness program and, in the 1980s, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.
In its statement Monday, DARPA said that markets offer efficient, effective and timely methods for collecting "dispersed and even hidden information. Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions."
The description of the market on its Web site makes it appear similar to a computer-based commodities market. Contracts would be available based on economic health, civil stability, military disposition and U.S. economic and military involvement in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey.
Contracts would also be available on "global economic and conflict indicators" and specific events, for example U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state.
Traders who believe an event will occur can buy a futures contract. Those who believe the event is unlikely can try to sell a contract. The Web site does not address how much money investors would be likely to put into the market but says analysts would be motivated by the "prospect of profit and at pain of loss" to make accurate predictions.
Registration would begin Friday with trading beginning Oct. 1. The market would initially be limited to 1,000 traders, increasing to at least 10,000 by Jan. 1.
The Web site says government agencies will not be allowed to participate and will not have access to the identities or funds of traders.
The market is a project of a DARPA division called FutureMAP, or "Futures Markets Applied to Prediction." FutureMAP is trying to develop programs that would allow the Defense Department to use market forces to predict future events, according to its Web site.
"The rapid reaction of markets to knowledge held by only a few participants may provide an early warning system to avoid surprise," it said.
It said the markets must offer "compensation that is ethically and legally satisfactory to all sectors involved, while remaining attractive enough to ensure full and continuous participation of individual parties."
Dorgan and Wyden released a letter to Poindexter calling for an immediate end to the program. They noted a May 20 report to lawmakers that cited the possibility of using market forces to predict whether terrorists would attack Israel with biological weapons.
"Surely such a threat should be met with intelligence gathering of the highest quality - not by putting the question to individuals betting on an Internet Web site," they said.
Wyden said $600,000 has been spent on the program so far and the Pentagon plans to spend an additional $149,000 this year. The Pentagon has requested $3 million for the program for next year and $5 million for the following year.
Wyden said the Senate version of next year's defense spending bill would cut off money for the program, but the House version would fund it. The two versions will have to be reconciled.
On the Net:
Policy Analysis Market: www.policyanalysismarket.org
DARPA's FutureMap Web site: http://www.darpa.mil/iao/FutureMap.htm
----
OPEC sees little risk from Iraq as sabotage saps oil production
July 28, 2003
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20030727-104258-8401r.htm
LONDON - OPEC ministers are not nearly as concerned these days about oil exports from a resurgent Iraq undermining high prices.
Chronic looting and sabotage have hampered Iraq's efforts to ramp up oil exports and exploit its crude reserves, which rank second in size only to those of Saudi Arabia. The longer Iraq takes to restore its once-mighty oil industry, the longer its fellow cartel members can put off cutting their own output to make way for fresh Iraqi barrels.
Demand for oil remains strong, with the United States and other major importers running down their inventories and the peak summer driving season shifting into top gear. The price for OPEC's benchmark crude has been stuck at or near $28 a barrel - the top end of the group's desired price range.
Given such conditions, representatives of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting Thursday in Vienna, Austria, will feel little need to tinker with output, oil analysts say.
"At these sorts of numbers, they must be quietly rubbing their hands," said Rob Laughlin, managing director of London brokerage GNI Man Financial.
OPEC supplies about a third of the world's crude. The group agreed at its June meeting to leave its production ceiling unchanged at 25.4 million barrels a day.
"OPEC should retain the current production quota, because the current price is still quite good," Purnomo Yusgiantoro, Indonesia's minister of energy and mineral resources, said in comments reported last week by Indonesia's national news agency, Antara.
Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali Naimi, seeking to reassure consumers, insisted that oil prices "are not high" in an interview Thursday with the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat.
"Even if we do not change the production ceiling, it is important to meet to review the market situation and developments and to hear the views of the 10 ministers regarding the developments in the markets," Mr. Naimi explained.
The United Arab Emirates' top oil minister, Obaid bin Saif al-Nasseri, yesterday said that there are no "convincing reasons" to change the ceiling. The big issue, as always, will be Iraq.
Although Iraq is a founding member of OPEC, it hasn't participated in OPEC's quota agreements since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Iraq's erratic exports under the U.N. oil-for-food program made it the cartel's biggest wild card. Iraq stopped pumping crude altogether during the U.S.-led invasion, and it started offering long-term supply contracts just last week.
In anticipation of an early resumption of Iraqi exports, other OPEC members began this spring to rein in excess production and stick more closely to their agreed quotas. Led by Saudi Arabia, they trimmed their excess output by 1 million barrels a day in May and an additional 250,000 barrels in June, Mr. Laughlin said.
Some oil ministers suggested at OPEC's June meeting that it needed to go even further and lower its production ceiling to avert a price crash once Iraq began pumping again at its prewar level of 2.1 million barrels a day.
Few of them foresaw the problems and delays Iraq would face. Looters and, more recently, saboteurs have compounded the task for American and Iraqi oil workers trying to repair facilities left in tatters after 12 years of U.N. sanctions and a lack of investment.
"It's still not looking like OPEC needs to get worried about a major return of Iraqi oil to the market," said John Waterlow of Wood Mackenzie Consultants in Edinburgh, Scotland.
OPEC ministers likely will show "a steady hand on the tiller" in Vienna and decide to do nothing, he said.
-------- europe
Poll finds majority in Poland oppose sending troops to Iraq; More also fear terrorism
ANDRZEJ STYLINSKI
Associated Press Writer
July 28, 2003
http://ap.lubbockonline.com/pstories/packages/iraq/20030728/1334030.shtml
Public support for Poland's role in Iraq appeared to be eroding, with a poll published Monday showing more than half of those surveyed disapproved of sending troops.
A growing number of Poles also feared that Polish participation could lead to attacks at home.
Against the backdrop of daily attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, 68 percent said they feared Poland would become a target if the government sends troops as planned to command a stabilization zone, the independent CBOS polling agency said. That was up a full 15 percent from a survey in June.
The July 4-7 survey of 952 Poles was the first time Poles were asked specifically if they approved of their nations' role in helping stabilize Iraq.
About 55 percent of the respondents were against sending Polish troops to command a stabilization zone, some 36 percent approved and eight percent had no opinion. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Warsaw, a leading European supporter of the U.S.-led military operation in Iraq, is deploying 2,000 troops to lead an international peacekeeping force controlling a zone in southern central Iraq beginning in September.
Asked in June if they supported Warsaw's decision to accept the U.S. proposal to lead a stabilization zone, 50 percent said yes and 33 percent said no.
COBS analyst Anna Grudniewicz said the previous survey tested attitudes toward U.S. recognition of Poland's support during the Iraq war. The latest numbers, she said, are a more reliable measure of Poles' attitudes, indicating a fear of "sending their sons or grandsons to war, even as a part of a stabilization force."
Grudniewicz said Poles' changing attitudes clearly were influenced by continuing attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.
The growing fear of terrorist attacks is due to concerns that the presences of a large number of Polish troops in Iraq will make Poland a target of extremists, she said.
-------- india
US presses India to supply Iraq peacekeepers
By Edward Luce in New Delhi
July 28 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1058868224832
The US on Monday stepped up pressure on India to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq despite New Delhi's polite refusal to do so earlier this month. Advertisement
General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, met Madhavendra Singh, his Indian counterpart, in New Delhi on Monday and will today meet Brajesh Mishra, head of the national security council.
US diplomats say the participation of India, which is being asked to supply 17,000 troops and to manage its own sector in the north of Iraq, would be of high value in widening the scope of the US-led occupation.
As the world's most populous democracy with more than 1m men in uniform, India also has an extensive record of coping with "low intensity" conflict in the disputed state of Kashmir.
"Say what you like about India's record in Kashmir, but it does not use tanks, artillery or helicopters in civilian areas," said Prem Shankar Jha, an Indian commentator. "The same cannot be said for the US forces in Iraq."
However, Indian officials said New Delhi would stick to its line that it would not consider the request until there was a United Nations resolution authorising the US-led occupation of Iraq. "If the US wants Indian peacekeepers in Iraq then perhaps General Myers should be visiting Paris instead," said one official.
The US is thought to be offering further relaxation of its restrictions on the export of dual use technology that India claims hinders the development of its civilian space and information technology industries.
There has been heavy lobbying to persuade the US to permit Israel to go ahead with the $100m sale of the Arrow anti-ballistic missile system to India. Earlier this year Washington allowed Israel to on-sell the Phalcon airborne early warning system to India.
"Washington has already considerably relaxed its export licensing regime for India," said Amit Mitra, head of Ficci, an Indian industry body. "But there are still constraints on trade in supercomputers and technology that affects India's IT and space industries."
Military co-operation between the US and India is intensifying. In the past 12 months the two have conducted on average one joint exercise a month. The Indian navy has also provided anti-piracy protection to US commercial vessels travelling through the Malacca straits. US warships now refuel in Bombay and Madras.
US defence sales to India have increased from zero to almost $200m in the past 14 months. Future deals are thought to include the possible Indian purchase of defensive nuclear, biological and chemical equipment, Special Forces gear and P3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft.
Gen Myers will also be travelling to Pakistan, which is under pressure to send a smaller contingent of peacekeepers to Iraq.
-------- iraq
'Dead dictators tell no tales'
by Eric Margolis,
CBC News (Canada)
Mon, 28 Jul 2003
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/07/27/saddam_margolis030727
TORONTO - U.S. soldiers have intensified the hunt for Saddam Hussein in recent days, but the White House is hoping they find him dead not alive, says a foreign affairs analyst.
"If they put him on trial Saddam Hussein will have very embarrassing revelations to make about the time when he was a close American ally during the 1980s," Eric Margolis told CBC TV's Sunday Report.
"Dead dictators tell no tales."
On the weekend, U.S. soldiers raided a house where the former Iraqi leader had been hiding only 24 hours earlier, according to American military commanders.
- FROM JULY 27, 2003: U.S. 'tightens noose' in search for Saddam
"The Americans think they're very close," said Margolis.
"This is like shooting fish in a barrel. Iraq is not that large a place," he told CBC TV's Sunday Report. "And Saddam has lots and lots of enemies."
The toppled president is not only hiding from American troops, noted Margolis, but also from the Kurds and countless bounty hunters keen to claim the $25-million reward.
Written by CBC News Online staff
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US says 30 nations have signed on for Iraq stabilization force
Monday, 28-Jul-2003
Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/du/Qus-iraq-force.Rn72_DlS.html
WASHINGTON, July 28 (AFP) - The United States said Monday that 30 nations have thus far agreed to participate with it in an international stabilization force for Iraq even without a specific UN mandate demanded by some.
The State Department would not say exactly what the countries would contribute to the mission, but maintained that each would provide at least some military, technical or logistic component to the force.
"We know of 30 countries already whose participation in stabilization operations is confirmed," spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"(They) will have some form of direct participation in the stabilization operation," he told reporters. "Each will have to provide the details on its own."
He added that the effort to recruit more nations was ongoing.
"We're continuing our discussions with a number of other countries regarding possible contributions," he told reporters.
Several nations, including India, France, Russia and Germany, have said they will not participate in the stabilization mission unless it is specifically authorized by the UN Security Council in a new resolution.
US officials have indicated in recent weeks that Washington is open to the idea of a new UN mandate for the forces, but Boucher gave no indication that such a resolution would be pursued.
"Several countries have raised the issue of mandate ... so we have looked at this we are continuing to consider it and discuss it," he said.
"Whether we actually go forward with it or not in the United Nations will depend on how those discussions proceed," Boucher said. "At this point, I don't have a judgement for you."
He identified the 30 countries as: Albania, Azerbaijan, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, El Salvador, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain and Ukraine.
Most of the countries identified by Boucher were also members of the so-called "coalition of the willing" that publicly backed the US-led war in Iraq.
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U.S. Adopts Aggressive Tactics on Iraqi Fighters
Intensified Offensive Leads To Detentions, Intelligence
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54345-2003Jul27?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- Over the past six weeks a small but intense war has been conducted in the mud-hut villages and lush palm groves along the Tigris River valley, fought with far different methods than those used in the campaign that toppled president Saddam Hussein.
As Iraqi fighters launched guerrilla strikes, the U.S. Army adopted a more nimble approach against unseen adversaries and found new ways to gather intelligence about them, according to dozens of soldiers and officers interviewed over the last week.
Thousands of suspected Iraqi fighters were detained over the six-week period, many temporarily, in hundreds of U.S. military raids, most of them conducted in the dead of night. In the expansive region north of Baghdad patrolled by the 4th Infantry Division, more than 300 Iraqi fighters were killed in combat operations, the military officials said. In the same period, U.S. forces in all of Iraq have suffered 39 combat deaths. The continuing casualties -- such as the four soldiers killed Saturday -- are the direct result of the intensified U.S. offensive, the military officials added.
Despite their losses, Army officers and soldiers asserted that they are making solid gains in this region, where most of the fighting has taken place and where about half the 150,000 U.S. troops in the country are posted.
At the beginning of June, before the U.S. offensives began, the reward for killing an American soldier was about $300, an Army officer said. Now, he said, street youths are being offered as much as $5,000 -- and are being told that if they refuse, their families will be killed, a development the officer described as a sign of reluctance among once-eager youths to take part in the strikes.
At the same time, the frequency of attacks has declined in the area northwest of Baghdad dominated by Iraq's Sunni minority, long a base of support for Hussein. In this triangle-shaped region -- delineated by Baghdad, Tikrit to the north and the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi to the west -- attacks on U.S. forces have dropped by half since mid-June, military officers reported.
That decrease is leading senior commanders here to debate whether the war is nearly over. Some say the resistance by members of Hussein's Baath Party is nearly broken. But other senior officers are bracing for a new phase in which they fear that Baathist die-hards, with no alternative left, will shift from attacking the U.S. military to bombing American civilians and Iraqis who work with them.
In addition, there is general agreement among Army leaders here that in recent weeks both the quality and quantity of intelligence being offered by Iraqis has greatly improved, leading to such operations as the one last Tuesday in Mosul that killed Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay.
Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info." They would have been released in due course, he added later.
The tactic worked. On Friday, Hogg said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered. The U.S. Offensive
In the weeks after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, there were growing signs of resistance in the Sunni triangle, where many former Baath Party operatives, intelligence officers and Special Republican Guard members were still actively fighting the U.S. military.
Rocket-propelled grenade attacks on U.S. vehicles began in earnest near the end of the month. On May 30, a sophisticated three-point ambush was launched against U.S. troops patrolling in the town of Bayji, just north of Tikrit. As U.S. troops evaded one line of fire, they were attacked by the next. When troops fired back, the Iraqis continued to fight instead of running.
On June 7, a patrol of U.S. military police drove into the town of Thuluya, on a big bend in the Tigris River southeast of Tikrit. Iraqis there told them to leave, and warned that if they came back, they would be killed, said a U.S. commander. It was then that "we started to kick down doors," recalled a senior Central Command official.
Instead of leaving, at 2 a.m. the next morning, hundreds of U.S. troops cordoned off Thuluya and hundreds more conducted searches throughout the town. F-15 fighters and Apache helicopters whirred overhead, ready to launch missiles on ground commanders' call. U.S. military speedboats patrolled the Tigris River, cutting off an escape route. The aggressive operation set the tone for the new phase of the war.
Since then, the Army has sought to keep up an unrelenting pace. "The reality is that in this company, we've been doing raids and cordon searches nearly every day" since early June, said Capt. Brian Healey, commander of an infantry company based near Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. Over the past six weeks, he said, sitting on a cot in an old Iraqi military base, his unit alone has detained nearly 100 people.
"I figure you can either sit barricaded in your base camp or take the fight to the enemy," said Lt. Col. Larry "Pepper" Jackson, commander of an Army outpost on the outskirts of Bayji, which is still described as hostile by U.S. military intelligence analysts. "Our key to success is staying on the offense. But you don't do it recklessly, because then you'd lose the people."
He said he has two patrols on the streets of Bayji at any given time. His troops are still attacked, but as a result of the new tactics, "It is a lot quieter -- about half as much contact as in May."
Three major U.S. operations unfolded over the past two months. In the first one in June, Peninsula Strike, U.S. commanders learned that much of the opposition was coming from Baath Party operatives and their allies in the old Iraqi intelligence services. Desert Scorpion, aimed at cutting off escape routes for fugitive Iraqi leaders, came in late June. It began with 56 simultaneous large-scale raids across central Iraq and brought in a hoard of intelligence. Among those netted was Abid Hamid Mahmud, Hussein's trusted aide. "That was a big event," recalled a senior Army official. "He has revealed a lot. He knew where all the safe houses and ratlines were." Ratlines is an Army term for escape routes.
The third major operation, dubbed Soda Mountain, was the first expressly preemptive effort. Concerned about the threat of an offensive tied to July 17, the 35th anniversary of the day Hussein's Baath Party took power, U.S. troops rounded up 600 party operatives. "We were aggressive and out there, looking to preclude attacks," the official said. For example, for six days leading up to the holiday, every car leaving Bayji -- a town of 30,000 sitting astride Iraq's major north-south highway -- was stopped at a checkpoint, and many were searched.
Results and Resistance
U.S. officials say they began to see a significant payoff from the series of operations early this month, when the number of attacks began to decline and Iraqis began to provide more information about the resistance. "When you have one operation after another, there is a cumulative effect," the Army official said. "The effect of all these operations was that walk-in humint" -- human intelligence -- doubled from early June to mid-July. What's more, he said, "it was very good quality."
Tips began paying off so quickly that officials would launch one raid before another was completed, allowing troops to catch some targets off-guard because they didn't know that fellow resistance fighters had been apprehended. Iraqi resistance fighters in the Sunni triangle at first tried to attack U.S. forces directly with AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. While some killed U.S. troops, many attempts were ineffective. So in recent weeks, military officers said, Iraqi fighters have turned to other weapons.
"They've gone to standoff weapons -- mines and mortars, and IEDs" -- improvised explosive devices, or bombs -- said Capt. John Taylor, the intelligence officer for the base near Bayji.
Last Wednesday, a tank from the base hit an antitank mine for the first time since its unit came to Iraq in April. Lt. Erik Aadland, a former resident of Springfield, Va., was standing in the turret of his tank as it was returning to base after a patrol through Bayji. With the tank just a stone's throw from the front gate, the mine exploded. "Everything went red," he recalled. "Then we were covered in black smoke." Aadland and his crew dismounted and stared at the damage: The right track was blown off, the fender above it twisted upward and three armored panels weighing a total of about 1,100 pounds had been hurled about 90 feet away.
Iraqi fighters have adjusted their tactics in other ways. Upon learning that their homes were being targeted for raids, Baath Party operatives often moved their weapons, cash and documents into the homes of neighbors, military officials said.
In turn, U.S. forces expanded the scope of their raids. "The past six weeks, our patrols have gotten more aggressive, much more frequent," said Healey, the infantry company commander. "Instead of doing one house, for example, we'll do a whole street."
Likewise, Iraqi fighters learned the U.S. military is most comfortable operating at night, when it stands to gain the most from its technical advantages, such as night-vision goggles. Some fighters started going back to their homes during the day, and even holding meetings then, U.S. military officials said.
But in military operations, for every action there is a reaction. Hogg, the 2nd Brigade commander, noted this as he sat in a Humvee on Wednesday afternoon, clenching the butt of a Dominican cigar in his teeth. "The knuckleheads kind of figured out that we like to operate at night, so they started operating during the day, so we starting hitting them during the day," he said as he waited for one of his battalions to launch a daylight raid. "It's harder, because of the crowds, but it's also effective."
Underscoring the intense nature of the combat, Hogg's brigade, after weeks of being pestered by enemy mortars, has begun responding with heavy artillery, and so far this month has fired more than 60 high-explosive 155 mm shells.
Some Army units have modified their equipment to help them adjust to urban warfare. At least two battalions in the 4th Infantry Division have mounted .50 caliber heavy machine guns on the back of the pickup-truck version of their Humvees, vehicles sometimes used to carry infantry troops to raids. "Gun-vees," which resembles the "technicals" used by Somali fighters, are especially useful in battling guerrilla fighters in alleys and other tight urban spaces where tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles cannot maneuver.
The modified vehicle also provides a helpful element of surprise, said Jackson, the U.S. commander near Bayji. "A Humvee can sneak up for a raid," he said. "A tank you can hear a mile away."
After the fighting is over, U.S. military officials say, it becomes important to repair the damage -- a door smashed, a wall breached, an irrigation culvert flattened by a 70-ton M1 Abrams tank. Every U.S. brigade commander in Iraq has a "Commander's Emergency Repair Fund" of $200,000 that is replenished as he spends it. Over the past six weeks of the U.S. offensive, commanders across Iraq dispensed $13 million to rebuild schools, clinics, water treatment plans and police stations, said Army Col. David MacEwen, who helps coordinate the civic works.
"During Peninsula Strike, we worked very hard for every combat action to have a 'carrot' that followed," MacEwen said. "We'd do a cordon and search in one area, and then make sure the next day that LPG [cooking gas] was available, or that a pump at a water plant was working."
The efforts aren't just aimed at winning hearts and minds, but also at gaining intelligence. "When you're out doing the civil affairs operations, you get a lot of people coming up and giving you good information," said Maj. David Vacchi, the operations officer for a battalion operating just northeast of Baghdad.
Senior U.S. commanders here are so confident about their recent successes that they have begun debating whether victory is in sight. "I think we're at the hump" now, a senior Central Command official said. "I think we could be over the hump fairly quickly" -- possibly within a couple of months, he added.
Hogg, whose troops are still engaged in combat every day, agreed. "I think we're fixing to turn the corner," he said Thursday. "I think the operations over the next couple of weeks will get us there."
Staff researcher Robert Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.
----
Iraqi civilians caught in crossfire of US operations
Mon Jul 28,
(AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030728/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_us_raids_030728140406
BAGHDAD - At the checkpoint, the Americans found a handgun, ordered the 56-year-old man out of his car and proceeded to bash his head with a rifle butt.
Rahim Nasser Mohammed points to his right temple, the side of his mouth and lifts his shirt, to show the spots where the soldier cudgeled him again and again nearly a month ago.
His story -- that of a government employee pulled over in his car by the US army -- seems one in a thousand as reports mount of beatings and sometimes deaths of Iraqi civilians at the hands of US soldiers.
On Sunday, five Iraqis were killed during a raid on a home in Baghdad's wealthy Mansur district, witnesses said, as troops searched the house of a relative of Saddam Hussein for the strongman himself.
The same day, a demonstration over a nighttime patrol near a holy shrine in the southern Shiite holy city of Karbala, turned ugly, ending with marines firing in the air and a protestor dead.
"It's an embarrassment for us. A lot of this has to do with the war being over, and there being not a lot for us to do and soldiers getting killed and then their friends taking it out on regular civilians," said a US military police officer investigating instances of excessive force.
The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, vented anger over the army's failure to make a real example of those soldiers doling out their own "Dirty Harry" style of vigilante justice or operating in brutish fashion.
"They should do certain things like sting operations and arrest those soldiers like common criminals. A lot of them should be relieved and reassigned ... That's not happening," he said.
"I've seen at least 20 cases," he added, referring to incidents where soldiers have beaten or robbed civilians at checkpoints.
In a first sign the Pentagon was starting to deal with the problem, it announced Saturday four US soldiers were under investigation for beating Iraqi prisoners of war.
Asked if there were any other cases under investigation, a senior coalition military official said Sunday he was not aware of any other such disciplinary inquiries.
But Mohammed's story is a cause for alarm, with his account backed by US military officers and Iraqi police during interviews with AFP.
"They beat him pretty bad. They beat him, tied him up and beat him again," said a US officer on condition of anonymity.
On July 3, Mohammed, an electricity department employee, was stopped by two army vehicles and his government car searched at 9:30 pm.
The soldier found a small handgun, which Mohammed said he carried to protect the car and himself, but immediately the soldier started to beat him.
"He cuffed my hands behind my back and taped my mouth and started to beat my face, hands and stomach using his rifle," Mohammed said, faint bruises still visible on his face.
The rifle was butted into his stomach repeatedly even as Mohammed tried to warn him he had just received an operation for a hernia, with the scars fresh on his belly.
Mohammed was then shoved into the police car.
"He put me down on the floor and kicked me with his feet and put the rifle to my head, as if he was about to shoot," Mohammed recalled.
"Then he took me to the police station, where he started to hit me with the gun in front of the police station."
A senior coalition official, working with Iraq's interior ministry, told AFP it did not surprise him there would be some cases of soldiers beating Iraqis in post-war Baghdad.
"I know when you take young soldiers when they're not police officers and are expected to act like ones, there are going to be problems," he said.
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US troops turn botched Saddam raid into a massacre
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
28 July 2003:
(The Independent, UK)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4245.htm
Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants.
The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house.
Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of Mansur - by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried to kill Saddam towards the end of the war in April - whatever political advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam's sons have been squandered. A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead, turned on me angrily last night, shouting: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him."
Two civilians, both believed to have been driving with their families, were brought to the Yarmouk, one with abdominal wounds and the other with "his brain outside of his head", according to another doctor.
At the scene of the killings, there was pandemonium. While US troops were loading the bullet-shattered cars on trucks - and trying to stop cameramen filming the carnage - crowds screamed abuse at them. One American soldier a few feet from me climbed into the seat of his Humvee, threw his helmet on the floor of the vehicle and shouted: "Shit! Shit!"
There was no doubt about the target: the home of Sheikh Rabia Mohamed Habib, a prominent tribal leader who had met Saddam but who was not even in his house when the Americans stormed it. One report says they killed a guard as they entered.
"The Americans searched the house completely, very roughly," Sheikh Habib said. "It seems they thought Saddam Hussein was inside." It appears the killings started as the troops were searching the building and as motorists approached the barbed wire which the soldiers had placed without warning across the road. Witnesses said the first car contained at least two men. "The second contained two children about 10, their mother and their father who had been wounded in the Iran-Iraq war - he was a cripple," a local shopkeeper told me. "They all died. The man's legs were cut in half by the bullets," he added. A third car then approached the Americans, who opened fire again. One of the occupants fled, but the other two remained in the vehicle and were killed.
When another car arrived US troops riddled it with more bullets and it burst into flames. It is believed that two people were inside and both were burnt to death. "The Americans didn't try to help the civilians they had shot, not once," a witness said. "They let the car burn and left the bodies where they lay, even the children. It was we who had to take them to the hospitals."
Yet again, false informers, ill-trained American soldiers who appeared to exercise no fire control and a lack of military planning has created a tragedy among the people the Americans claimed to be 'liberating' from Saddam Hussein only 15 weeks ago. Last night, there were reports from the southern city of Karbala that three men had been shot dead by American troops during a demonstration.
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Bloody U.S. Raid in Baghdad Leaves Iraqis Furious
Mon July 28, 2003
By Cynthia Johnston
(Reuters)
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3SM1YXJOGWADACRBAELCFFA?type=reutersEdge&storyID=3169263
BAGHDAD - Caked pools of blood and a bullet hole in the window of Baghdad's al-Sa'ah restaurant are the only remaining signs of a U.S. raid that killed five Iraqi civilians as they unwittingly drove into a firestorm.
Furious residents of the upscale Mansur district accuse U.S. soldiers of firing indiscriminately at passing cars Sunday as colleagues raided a villa in a vain search for Saddam Hussein.
"The cars came down the road. They didn't know the Americans were here. They were normal civilians and wanted to go home," one witness told Reuters Monday as he stood in the courtyard of the Sa'ah restaurant.
"They (U.S. soldiers) opened fire right away."
A U.S. military spokesman said the raid was conducted by Task Force 20, a special team set up to hunt Saddam and his key aides, but gave no other details.
A soldier at a nearby hospital said the bodies of five people had been brought in from the scene of the raid, including a boy in his early teens.
Monday morning not a soldier was in sight in Mansur, and four burned or bullet-riddled cars had been taken away.
"All these things are making people hate the Americans," said Muhammad, a Mansur resident.
"In the beginning, all the Iraqi people welcomed the Americans, but now the Americans have built a wall between themselves and the Iraqi people."
NO WARNING
Residents who witnessed the shooting said about 75 U.S. soldiers poured into the area in the early evening, blocking off the main street but failing to prevent innocent motorists straying into the fire zone from quiet side streets.
"They need to have barbed wire up so that people know there is an operation," one witness said. "This is a residential area. They need to take care of the civilians. There are kids here."
Another witness, who gave his name as Abbas, said he had turned away cars in a street near the restaurant. But smaller streets remained open. Witnesses said soldiers opened fire from atop a Humvee armored vehicle at the first car that neared their position. Moments later they raked a second car with gunfire as well.
"It was indiscriminate firing," one witness said as others nodded in agreement and pointed out a bullet hole in the window of the restaurant.
Flying bullets also hit the gas tank of a parked car, setting it and another car ablaze. In minutes, the shooting was over and the soldiers withdrew.
"They just left," one resident said. "Then the Iraqi firemen came to put out the fires."
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3 Iraqis Killed as G.I.'s Set Up Raid in Hunt for Hussein
July 28, 2003
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ROBERT F. WORTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/international/worldspecial/28IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 27 - American soldiers fired on a Toyota passenger car in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood late this afternoon, killing at least three Iraqis, as an American Special Operations team prepared to raid a nearby house in what an Iraqi policeman later described as an unsuccessful attempt to capture Saddam Hussein.
A military spokesman confirmed that the operation involved Task Force 20, which is leading the search for Mr. Hussein, but he declined further comment about what led to the raid and whether the troops had found any evidence that the deposed dictator had recently been there.
The owner of the home that was raided, Rabia Muhammad al-Habib, a prominent tribal leader, said he had not seen Mr. Hussein for more than a year, but he acknowledged that he was "respected" by Mr. Hussein and that they used to meet occasionally. Mr. Habib was away from his home when the troops arrived.
The shootings outraged local residents, who said the Americans had not offered adequate warnings before firing on the Toyota and on another car half a block away, in which three other people were wounded. The people in the Toyota were members of a family that lived near the site of the raid, said Qais Estefan Ibrahim, who said he was a neighbor.
Witnesses said two other people traveling in a sport utility vehicle had also been shot by soldiers who chased their vehicle after it left the scene. Other reports from a Baghdad hospital said a total of five Iraqis had died during the operation.
[On Monday, a U.S. patrol was attacked with a grenade in broad daylight in central Baghdad, according to Reuters, and two soldiers were badly wounded.]
American officials said that since the killings on Tuesday of Mr. Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, an increasing stream of tips from informants had moved them closer to capturing Mr. Hussein himself. On Thursday night, American forces arrested nearly a dozen of his personal bodyguards in Tikrit, his hometown. Today, The Associated Press reported, troops acting on information gleaned from the bodyguards raided three Tikrit farmhouses and, according to the soldiers, barely missed seizing Mr. Hussein himself and his security chief.
"In my opinion, if he's alive, it's just a matter of time," Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Baghdad today. "He is so busy saving his own skin, he is having no impact, no impact on the security situation."
While American officials had held out hope that the killings of Uday and Qusay Hussein would weaken the violent resistance to American troops, attacks by insurgents continued today. One soldier was killed and another wounded at 2:30 a.m. when a rocket-propelled grenade struck their patrol in Al Haswah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. The soldier was attached to the First Marine Expeditionary Force.
Fourteen American servicemen have been killed in hostile attacks since July 20, the deadliest period for Americans in Iraq since May 1, when President Bush declared the end to major combat operations. Since May 1, 49 Americans have been killed in hostile attacks and 55 have died from other causes, like traffic accidents and accidental weapons discharges, a senior military official in Baghdad said today.
The shootings this afternoon created an uproar among residents in Mansur, the Baghdad neighborhood, who said the Iraqis had been gunned down with little warning after traveling onto a street that the Americans were trying to block off. The street was one block west from where the raid later took place.
"They suspected that Saddam was in one of the homes, and they cordoned off the area," said Lt. Aodee Sami, an Iraqi police officer on the scene. He said three people had died in the Toyota and one had been wounded. The driver of the Toyota was an older man who used a crutch or a cane, neighbors said.
The intensity of the shooting was evident from the condition of the Toyota, which had at least two dozen bullet holes in its front and rear windshields. Witnesses said three of the passengers, including an older woman who was wounded but not killed, were immediately taken from the car, but the body of the driver remained in the vehicle for some time.
A military spokesman, Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, would not comment on the deaths except to confirm that the operation involved Task Force 20. But speaking generally about how soldiers react when Iraqi drivers fail to heed orders to halt, he said, "If you cross a roadblock, we assume you mean to do harm."
This evening, Mr. Habib, the owner of the house, who said he had just returned from a trip out of Baghdad, showed reporters broken windows and other damage that he said came from bullets fired by Americans during the raid. He also displayed what he said had been a locked desk that had been forced open and searched.
Mr. Habib scoffed at the notion that Mr. Hussein had been hiding in his house. But, he said, "if anybody said he would seek refuge in my home, people would believe it." Commenting on their relationship, he added: "He was president of Iraq, and we would meet from time to time. He was helpful, and he respected me very much."
In an incident late Saturday in Karbala, a city about 60 miles south of Baghdad where relations with the occupation forces have been fairly calm, a 30-year-old cafeteria worker was shot during a confrontation between soldiers and an unruly crowd. Today, during the man's funeral, mourners chanted, "There is no God but God, and America is the enemy of God!"
Accounts of the worker's death vary, but apparently Iraqi police officers tried to intervene with some local criminals and were overwhelmed. They then sought help from American troops.
When the Iraqi officers pursued the criminals into a shrine, people nearby thought the American soldiers were going to enter, too, and began pelting them with cans and stones. The Americans fired, first into the air and then into the crowd, killing the cafeteria worker.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel to Free Many Militants and Lift Some Roadblocks
July 28, 2003
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/international/middleeast/28MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, July 27 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government reversed an earlier position and voted today to free Islamic militants, while the military lifted several roadblocks in the West Bank. The moves came just hours before Mr. Sharon flew to the United States, where he could face rare differences with President Bush on Middle East peacemaking.
The Israeli actions seemed timed to show that Mr. Sharon's government was improving conditions for Palestinians and took place two days after the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, listed a range of Palestinian demands during a White House visit with Mr. Bush.
The Bush administration was host to Mr. Abbas and moved up the visit by Mr. Sharon, who will see Mr. Bush on Tuesday, with the goal of nudging both sides forward with the peace plan formally initiated last month. While violence is down sharply, the two sides have taken only limited steps required under the initiative, known as the road map.
Mr. Sharon's cabinet voted 14 to 9 today to free some jailed members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian factions responsible for most of the suicide bombings against Israel. Shaul Mofaz, Israel's defense minister, voted for the releases, describing the decision as a "harsh dilemma" but necessary for the peace effort.
"I think we must give this process a chance and see how it unfolds," Mr. Mofaz told Israeli radio. "It is still a bit early to say, but when examining things over the past month, I can say, with the utmost caution and considerable doubt, that the general direction is positive."
The Israeli government had said it would not free members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which have declared a truce but oppose peace negotiations with Israel.
The peace plan does not specifically require Israel to release any of the roughly 6,000 Palestinian prisoners it is holding. Mr. Abbas, however, has made it a priority.
News agencies traveling with Mr. Sharon cited an Israeli official as saying the government would free 210 prisoners from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, 210 linked to the Fatah movement of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and 120 common criminals, for a total of 540.
The Israeli authorities emphasized that none of the Palestinians being freed had "blood on his hands." They have either been convicted of relatively minor crimes or have been held without being charged.
Palestinian leaders and factions said the Israeli action fell far short of their demand for the release of all prisoners. "This decision is not enough," said Ismail Haniya, a Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip. "This is only public relations for Sharon before he meets Bush."
Mr. Sharon left for the United States shortly after the cabinet vote. He has been a frequent White House visitor since he came to power more than two years ago, and the Bush administration has been strongly supportive of Israel during the fighting with the Palestinians.
During this visit, Mr. Sharon plans to emphasize that the Palestinian leadership has failed to arrest and disarm Palestinian factions as required under the peace plan, Israeli officials said.
He may also raise other issues in contention. In a news conference with Mr. Abbas on Friday, Mr. Bush was critical of an Israeli security fence that cuts into the West Bank. He also called on Israel to stop developing Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In another development, Israel removed 10 major West Bank checkpoints and other barricades that had blocked or greatly limited Palestinian movement since they were imposed shortly after the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.
The checkpoints dismantled in the last few days had tended to limit movements from one Palestinian town to another. Palestinians had contended that these checkpoints were largely punitive and that they did not enhance Israel's security.
But Israel said the barriers inside the West Bank were necessary to monitor Palestinian movements and to channel the flow of traffic before would-be attackers approached Israeli towns. Israel still has dozens of West Bank checkpoints.
A senior Israeli military commander said Israel was taking an "enormous risk" by removing the barriers. He said that troops continued to prevent planned attacks and that a bomb belt fashioned for a suicide bomber was found this week near the West Bank city of Nablus.
The commander said the military was encouraged by the overall reduction in violence. In addition, the first leg of the security fence, which runs along the northern part of the West Bank, is nearing completion despite the American complaints about its route.
The northern West Bank has been the main launching pad for suicide bombers, and the fence will make it more difficult - but not impossible - for bombers from those areas to reach Israeli towns, the commander said.
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ISRAEL DELAYS SECURITY FENCE PROJECT
Mon, 28 Jul 2003
Middle East Newsline
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2003/july/07_29_3.html
JERUSALEM [MENL] -- Israel has agreed to delay plans to complete the establishment of a security fence to protect against Palestinian insurgents from the West Bank.
Israeli officials said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has agreed that the government would shelve plans to erect the fence within the West Bank in an effort to encompass an enclave of Israeli communities. The officials said Sharon has decided to focus on construction of the fence along the old 1967 border.
The Israeli agreement came ahead of Sharon's visit to Washington and his meeting with President George Bush on Tuesday. Bush has expressed opposition to the security fence, particularly in areas tilled by Palestinian farmers.
"It's not clear that it [security fence] will be raised with the president," Israel's ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon said. "It might be raised by National Security Adviser [Condoleezza Rice], but it will not be at the top of the agenda. I am sure they will come to mutual agreement, even if not during this visit."
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Palestinians Losing Land to the Fence
Israel's anti-terrorism security wall makes its way through people's property in West Bank.
By Megan K. Stack
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 28, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-wall28jul28235419,0,3482108.story
RAFAT, West Bank - The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. "Mortal danger; military zone," they read. "Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life."
And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land - but exclude the people.
"We can see our land, but we can't reach it," Habbas said. "We are like birds now, stuck in a cage."
In the year since construction began, Israel's West Bank wall has evolved into a political quandary. Settlers think that it's perilous; Palestinians think that it's poisonous. Some of the Israeli security experts who originally pressed for its construction have forsworn the project in disgust. And the United States has warned that the miles of coiled barbed wire and electronic currents could spell the subversion of fragile peace talks.
President Bush has said it will be difficult to build confidence "with a wall snaking through the West Bank," and he pledged to raise the contentious issue with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during the Israeli leader's White House visit Tuesday. But Israel is pressing on, spending millions of dollars and squandering goodwill to raise the wall.
When construction began last summer, the barrier was introduced to a terror-battered Israeli public as a security or "separation" fence that would keep suicide bombers at bay. With hundreds of Israelis dead at the hands of Palestinian militants, it was time to build a wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories, defense officials said.
Since then, the wall's path has shifted east to consume swaths of the West Bank as one Jewish settlement after another demanded to be included on the side of the fence that is closer to Israel. Palestinians, Israelis and international peace mediators all fear the fence will harden into a border. The wall's final route is a mystery, even to the Israeli lawmakers who were pressured last week by Sharon to set aside an extra $170.5 million for it.
So far, only the northern portion has been finished - the more than 90 miles of wall run west across the north of the West Bank, then cut a looping path south to peter out just below the town of Kalkilya. More layers of fencing are rising on the outskirts of Jerusalem, including here around Rafat, and officials are talking about walling off the Jordan Valley. But they remain circumspect on the question of where - and when - the rest of the fence will be raised. Many analysts say that's because the debate is still crackling among Israel's highest officials.
Palestinians say Israel plans to wall off more than half of the West Bank. In other words, they say, the territory where Palestinians hope to found their long-awaited state is being whittled away by a fence line.
"The Palestinian vision is being crushed every hour," said Saeb Erekat, a veteran Palestinian negotiator. "Israel will tell you it's about security, but it's really about confiscating land and fait accompli policies. It seems to me that everything is about to collapse on the ground."
The Israeli government describes the fence as a badly needed security measure - and nothing more. "You have to defend yourself," said Uzi Dayan, former chair of Israel's National Security Council and one of the wall's most vocal advocates. "Otherwise we are exposed, we are vulnerable."
In the face of U.S. warnings, Israeli officials have upheld their right to self-defense.
Speaking to Israel Radio last week, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom lamented what he deemed Palestinian success in swaying world opinion to believe that the wall "will make their lives more difficult and create facts on the ground."
"The construction is intended to keep out terrorists and extremists seeking to blow up the peace process," he said.
The wall's staunchest advocates mention the Gaza Strip, which was wrapped in fences when Israeli troops withdrew in the early 1990s. The notorious walls of Gaza have drawn the ire of Palestinians and human rights groups, who point out that more than 1 million Palestinians live penned in a sprawling beach-side cage, generally unable to come and go.
But Israel lauds the Gaza arrangement as a stunning success - after all, security experts say, in nearly three years of fighting, not a single suicide bomber has managed to slip from Gaza into Israel.
But the lawmaker and former army commander who pioneered the construction of the Gaza fence in 1993 and 1994 bristles at the comparison between his pet project and the West Bank wall. Much like the Palestinians, Matan Vilnai thinks that the original notion - to wall off the West Bank with a security fence - has been hijacked.
Vilnai argues that, despite ongoing peace talks and Sharon's repeated statements in support of Palestinian statehood, the fence's path illustrates the true intentions of a government fundamentally opposed to a Palestinian nation forged on territory some Israelis regard as their rightful land.
"It's not a security fence from the point of view of the government, but rather a political fence," Vilnai said. "It's meant to make sure that under no circumstances can there be a Palestinian state. They talk about a Palestinian state, but they don't believe in it, and they're doing everything they can to prevent it."
If the government wanted to build a security fence, Vilnai argued, it would have stuck to the 1967 border between Israel and the West Bank. "The line of the fence is a catastrophe," he said. "It's not to secure our people, it annexes thousands of Palestinians to Israel. And we don't need them, and they don't want it."
Vilnai echoes the complaint of Palestinian officials: that Israel has no right to nudge the construction into the West Bank. "They can put a wall in Israel proper, and it can reach the sky. It's none of our business," Erekat said. "But to put a wall in the heart of our land - we're going to turn into the biggest prison in the world."
Jewish settlers in the West Bank are of two minds about the project. As long as government-sponsored pioneers have been homesteading the Palestinian territories in the name of "redeeming the land," the idea of erecting fences has been anathema to most ideological settlers.
When Israel began to move in earnest to build the fence, many settlers decried the project as a betrayal. While Palestinians complained that turf was being grabbed, settlers warned against abandoning a stake in biblical lands of the West Bank.
"It's a mirror image of Palestinian concerns, that the territories beyond the wall have already been, in effect, conceded," Israeli political analyst Mark Heller said.
But as the months passed, and the layers of barbed wire, towering concrete walls and military roads crept south through the West Bank, some settlers grew nervous about the prospect of being abandoned on the wrong side. Abruptly, complaints shifted.
"If the Israeli government decides to build a fence, then we should have one also," said Ron Nachman, mayor of one of the West Bank's largest settlements, Ariel. "If there's to be a fence, the Israelis should be inside the fence."
The trouble is, about 230,000 Israeli settlers live scattered throughout the West Bank - and encompassing settlements means annexing Arab towns and villages too. Ariel, a massive, secular community complete with a hotel, university and industrial park, lies about 10 miles into the West Bank. According to most predictions, the fence will dip all the way into the West Bank to protect Ariel.
"Even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you. Especially when Abu Mazen wants to know too," said Nachman, referring to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.
In the nearby settlement of Karnei Shomron, an unruffled settler said she was sure her government wouldn't wall her town out. "That America is pressuring Israel doesn't interest us - we want to see what our government will do," Sondra Oster Baras said. "And we see the bulldozers - it's being built to the east of us."
Last week, members of Sharon's Likud Party staged a minor revolt, refusing to endorse the budget for the fence until they knew where it would run and precisely how the money would be spent.
The entire discussion enrages Dayan, who argues that the wall should have been built by now.
Innocent lives could have been saved, he said, if Israel hadn't allowed the construction to be bogged down in politics. "I can't accept that, because of people's views about where the fence will go, we sit around and do nothing," he said.
But on the ground, as bulldozers rumble and walls grow higher, the debate fades into background noise. Palestinians are finding themselves hemmed into their villages, divided from their land by a fence they are forbidden to approach. Palestinians refer to it as the "apartheid wall" and compare the project to the Berlin Wall.
Mahmud abu Habseh stood on the hilly rise of his Rafat backyard on a recent aft