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NUCLEAR
Some Seek Preschool Nuke Evacuation Plans
MoD IN ANTHRAX BLUNDER
Hiroshima, yesterday and tomorrow
Japanese nuclear arsenal looks unlikely
Russia to Host Preparatory Talks on N. Korea
Russia to Host Talks Between Koreas
Henry A. Boorse, Atom-Bomb Physicist, Dies at 98
Bush and Nuclear Arms
Bush documents progress in Iraq
Inside the Prewar Debate
MILITARY
Peacekeepers find looted warehouses at Monrovia's port
British police given 'shoot to kill' orders for suicide bombers
Firm to help Air Force with laser combat setup
Army Begins Burning of Chemical Weapons in Alabama Town
WWII Toxic Gas Leaks, Sickening 36 in China
Indian PM Wants End to Bloodshed
Iran Plans to Try Qaeda Suspects
Protests Over Power Cuts Continue in Basra
Terror Group Seen as Back Inside Iraq
Shortages in Basra Fuel Anger
Israeli Warplanes Blast Hezbollah Areas
Suicide bombers shatter Israeli calm
Zapatistas emerge to reach out peacefully
America Cancels War Drills With Egypt
NATO to Command Peace Force in Kabul
Researcher at Taiwan's Spy Agency Resigns
A Washington suicide?
A summary of domestic spying activities in the war on terrorism
CIA Director George J. Tenet Discusses the National Intelligence Estimate
Army to consider anthrax as cause in pneumonia cases
Bush's scary message control
US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Justice Criticizes Lengthy Sentences
Net link to warn D.C. of bioterror
Report Finds Threat Alerts in Color Code Baffle Public
Terrorist risk lists leave gap, even now
OTHER
California to Ban Chemicals Used as Flame Retardants
ACTIVISTS
Protesting Washington's killing sprees
Protest Groups Planning for Republican Convention
Survivors Tell Japan's Tale Of Devastation
Protesters Mark Hiroshima Anniversary
Veterans Organize To Bring Troops Home
Demonstrators support Afghan refugees
A tiny town shouts 'Whoa!' to Patriot Act
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Some Seek Preschool Nuke Evacuation Plans
August 10, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/news/6504412.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Plants-Preschoolers.html
MIDDLETOWN, Pa. (AP) -- If an accident or terrorist attack at a nuclear power plant required an evacuation, plans already exist to get school children and nursing home residents out of harm's way.
But preschools and day care centers around nuclear plants aren't required to have evacuation plans, and child-care officials say many don't.
The father of a child who attends a nursery near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to require child-care facilities within 10 miles of a nuclear plant to file emergency plans. Critics say the lack of such plans could be problematic -- or dangerous -- if there is an accident or attack.
``I was dumbfounded to find out that our most vulnerable population was left out of the planning,'' said Larry Christian, the New Cumberland parent who filed the petition last fall with Eric Epstein, member of a nuclear watchdog group. ``It angered me quite a bit.''
The petition has drawn the support of state Attorney General Mike Fisher, state Rep. Bruce Smith, R-Dillsburg, Lancaster County's Emergency Management Agency and Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed.
Smith, whose district includes areas within the 10-mile evacuation zone around TMI, said the NRC needs to update its rules. He noted that day care programs for children are more prevalent now then they were in 1979, the year a portion of the core of Three Mile Island's reactor melted.
The NRC has taken no action on the petition, which the nuclear industry and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency oppose.
``We just don't think that the NRC ... or state government should be establishing rules that usurp a parent's right,'' said PEMA Director David M. Sanko.
Instead, PEMA is encouraging private child-care centers and nursery schools to voluntarily develop emergency plans and file them with local emergency officials.
Epstein, member of the group Three Mile Island Alert, called Sanko's position ``irresponsible'' and ``pre-9/11.''
-------- depleted uranium
MoD IN ANTHRAX BLUNDER
Aug 10 2003
By Rupert Hamer,
UK Sunday Mirror
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/content_objectid=13274922_method=full_siteid=106694_headline=-MoD-in-anthrax-blunder-name_page.html
DEFENCE chiefs put thousands of troops at risk during the first Gulf War - by ignoring safety guidelines on vaccinations.
Soldiers were given the anthrax vaccine with other multiple jabs when guidelines warned the injection "should be given alone".
Now the Ministry of Defence looks set to admit the blunder - opening the way to massive compensation claims.
Up to 5,000 veterans of the 1991 war claim they have suffered what has become known as Gulf War Syndrome after receiving up to 28 jabs.
Defence officials have so far refused to acknowledge any breach in safety guidelines.
But health minister Lord Hunt made the shock disclosure about the vaccine just before he quit in protest over the Government's policy in Iraq.
Now the Royal British Legion has taken up the case and the MoD has promised to respond to its questions on vaccine guidelines "very shortly".
Last night Shaun Rusling, President of the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association, said: "This admission would be a major step to getting justice for thousands of veterans."
It follows last week's Sunday Mirror revelations that the troops will also be tested for depleted uranium, a possible factor in Gulf War Syndrome.
-------- japan
[To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]
Hiroshima, yesterday and tomorrow
August 10, 2003
Washington Times Editorial
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030809-110416-3124r.htm
On August 6, 1945, "Little Boy" exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima with devastating effect, killing approximately 140,000 Japanese and exposing another 340,000 to the damaging radiation that rushed out of the blast. Three days later, "Fat Man" exploded over Nagasaki with even greater power and even greater effect - shortly afterwards, Japan's leaders decided to surrender unconditionally.
The attacks were terrible beyond measure. Yet, the alternatives - whether starvation of the Japanese people or an invasion that would have cost millions of lives - were even worse. Japan's leaders were determined to fight to the end, even if it involved the deaths of all theirl countrymen. This was evidenced by the fact that even the night before the emperor's announcement of unconditional surrender, military officers broke into the palace in an attempt to discover and destroy the recording before it was played for the public.
One hopes that a leader of a free people will never again be faced with such a stark choice. But the same specter is again overshadowing the region. While Japan has been transformed from an expansionist empire into a peaceful democracy with a constitutional clause (Article IX) renouncing war, it is now threatened by a tyrannical Korean state, determined to develop nuclear weapons.
That threat has caused some in Japan to look up from the stark girders of the dome at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to the day when the country might arm itself with nuclear weapons. That day may never come, as Japan currently adheres to three non-nuclear principles: not possessing nuclear weapons; not producing them; and not introducing them. However, the idea of having nuclear weapons is no longer the taboo it once was, especially given the nation's new security concerns.
Japan has already built up its conventional forces. In 2002, Tokyo spent $47 billion on defense, and Japan's Self Defense Forces currently contain about 240,000 well-equipped soldiers, sailors and airmen. One thousand of those soldiers will soon be headed to Iraq, thanks to the Japanese government's end-of-July decision to send peacekeeping forces. The troops will fill support roles, but when they arrive in October or November, they will represent Japan's biggest deployment to a combat zone since the end of World War II.
That military strength has made many of Japan's neighbors nervous, especially when coupled with the region's memories of Japanese expansionism and the continued denials of that militaristic past by some Japanese leaders. Yet, the nation has been a true friend of the United States since then, and a true supporter of our democratic aims. While Japan must look its past squarely in the eye, its leaders must also stare unblinkingly at the dangers that lie ahead.
Those threats are likely to include hostile neighbors armed with nuclear weapons. While the United States may not wish to encourage Japan to arm itself with such weapons, Washington should not discourage it. Japan has experienced one Hiroshima. It should not leave itself vulnerable to another.
----
Japanese nuclear arsenal looks unlikely
By JEFF THOMPSON
The Japan Times
Sunday, August 10, 2003
http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo20030810a2.htm
WASHINGTON -- Speculation is rife about whether North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons could drive Japan to develop a nuclear arsenal. Some opinion leaders have even suggested that America should exploit this prospect to scare China into resolving the North Korea nuclear crisis. However, the reality is that Japan will not go nuclear anytime soon -- even with a nuclear North Korea in the region -- because it is simply not in its own national interests to do so.
Statements by several high-profile Japanese political figures in 2002 about Japan's ability to go nuclear drew widespread attention as possible indicators that Japan was actively considering a nuclear option. That is a misreading.
Rather than reflecting any heated debate among policymakers in Japan, they represent isolated comments about the capability, or legality -- not intention -- to respond to future regional security threats.
Unfortunately those remarks have been incorrectly linked to the escalating North Korea crisis, recent changes in Japan's defense policy and Japan's nuclear technology as evidence of the imminent transformation of Japan toward a nuclear-weapons state.
A close look at Japan's position on the Korea crisis clearly shows that it does not view military escalation -- nuclear or conventional -- as an option. Japanese leaders, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, have made clear that they will strive for a diplomatic and peaceful solution.
While agreeing with the United States to use "tough measures" if North Korea continues to increase threats, Japan remains extremely cautious about supporting any use of military force. Even Defense Agency Director General Shigeru Ishiba, viewed by some as a defense hawk, has clarified that no outcome of the crisis will lead Japan to enter a nuclear arms race in Northeast Asia.
To be sure, if North Korea chooses to point nuclear-tipped Nodong missiles toward Tokyo in an escalation of the crisis, Japan would not remain idle.
Rather than pursue a nuclear deterrent, Japan would likely bolster its regional ballistic missile defense capabilities and cooperation with the U.S., as it has already begun to do.
Recently passed legislation allowing Japan's Self Defense Forces to prepare for imminent attacks permits greater flexibility to plan in advance for a North Korean attack. Ultimately continued protection provided by the U.S. nuclear umbrella and the robust U.S.-Japan alliance relationship should foreclose any serious consideration of Japan's own nuclear deterrent.
To many observers of the East Asia security environment, a nuclear Japan fits in neatly with the continuum of change in Japan's defense policy over the past decade. The SDF's missions have expanded in the context of U.N. peacekeeping, the war against terrorism and, maybe soon, the reconstruction of Iraq. Acquisition of nuclear weapons, however, is not a natural "next step" because such a decision would undermine the key elements of Japan's policies in the areas of defense, nuclear energy and nonproliferation/arms control -- policies that limit nuclear and rocket technologies to peaceful usage, forbid the development of nuclear weapons, and advocate reducing worldwide stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
If this approach were to be abandoned, the international community would lose confidence in Japan's commitment to abide by its treaty obligations and bilateral agreements as well as to make a positive contribution to international security. Regional tensions are also certain to escalate, possibly into an arms race.
Many point to Japan's advanced nuclear energy and space programs, as well as stockpiles of plutonium, as signs of Japan's capability to develop nuclear weapons in short order if it chose to do so. The foundation for a weapons program certainly exists, but technological, institutional and political constraints are overwhelming.
Time would be needed for Japanese nuclear and rocket engineers to reorient their work and programs for weapons production and delivery. Domestic institutions that oversee Japan's nuclear energy and space issues would require considerable reconfiguration for the management of a weapons program.
Perhaps most importantly, gaining political approval in the Japanese Diet to move forward with such an endeavor -- requiring widespread public approval -- would certainly prove an extraordinary challenge.
Some state that the current discourse on Japan's nuclear issue signifies a new level of tolerance within Japanese society to discuss what was previously known as a taboo topic. It is important to note, however, that such discourse is not as widespread as it is often portrayed to be. Also, it is crucial to differentiate greater attention on the issue from public support of a nuclear option.
As discussions about Japan's nuclear future continue inside and outside of Japan, and as events in North Korea unfold, observers must take time to understand the larger picture of why the majority of the Japanese leadership and the public view going nuclear as not in Japan's interests.
Jeff Thompson is research associate of the Japan Project at The Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington.
-------- korea
Russia to Host Preparatory Talks on N. Korea
August 10, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said Sunday it would hold talks with North and South Korea in Moscow this week to prepare for six-way negotiations in Beijing aimed at defusing a standoff over the North's nuclear ambitions.
``The consultations will begin literally the day after tomorrow,'' Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov told Itar-Tass news agency as he arrived in Beijing amid a flurry of weekend meetings between regional players.
``We are working on the possibility of conducting a similar meeting with Japan in the near future,'' Losyukov said. ``It is likely that those who are taking part in these consultations will lead the delegations at the talks in Beijing.''
The nuclear crisis erupted last October after U.S. officials said Pyongyang had admitted to pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program.
It escalated after Stalinist North Korea expelled United Nations nuclear inspectors, pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and restarted a mothballed reactor north of Pyongyang.
The United States has long been urging Russia and China, North Korea's old Communist allies, to use their influence in Pyongyang to help resolve the crisis but until recently Moscow appeared reluctant to play a major role, diplomats say.
That changed when North Korea, which had been holding out for bilateral talks with Washington, agreed this month to multilateral talks with the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.
DIPLOMATIC FLURRY
Tass said Losyukov would discuss preparations for the multilateral talks with Chinese officials including Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi who has played a key role in bringing North Korea back to the negotiating table.
Wang returned Saturday from a three-day visit to Pyongyang and told reporters the six-party talks would start in Beijing in the latter part of August.
No precise date has been announced but Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun daily said the United States, South Korea and Japan had told China they wanted two days of dialogue from August 26.
Beijing hosted initial talks with Washington and Pyongyang in April.
Russia had proposed holding the next round at the deputy ministerial level, in which case Losyukov would likely represent Moscow and Wang China, Tass said.
But the United States has yet to choose a representative, it quoted Losyukov as saying. ``It seems they have not yet decided,'' he said.
Chinese, Japanese and South Korean envoys shuttled around the region at the weekend to pave the way for the Beijing talks.
Japanese chief cabinet secretary Yasuo Fukuda, a top aide to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, arrived in Beijing for talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing also flew to Japan on Sunday en route to South Korea on Aug. 13.
South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Jae-sup left for Russia Saturday.
Also: http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/R/RUSSIA_KOREA_TALKS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
-------- russia
Russia to Host Talks Between Koreas
August 10, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Korea-Talks.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia will host talks between North and South Korea this week in preparation for larger negotiations about the North's suspected nuclear weapons program, a Russian diplomat was quoted as saying Sunday.
Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov said from Beijing that the talks in Moscow would begin Tuesday, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. The report did not say which Korean officials would take part. Advertisement
A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said he was unaware of the plan.
Losyukov was in China to discuss the particulars of six-nation talks expected later this month in Beijing. The negotiations will include Russia, Japan, China, the United States and the two Koreas.
Those talks are aimed at defusing a 10-month standoff over U.S. allegations that Pyongyang is trying to develop nuclear weapons in violation of a 1994 agreement.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Henry A. Boorse, Atom-Bomb Physicist, Dies at 98
August 10, 2003
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/obituaries/10BOOR.html
Henry A. Boorse, a physicist who was one of the original scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project in the development of the atomic bomb, died on July 28 in Houston, where he lived. He was 98 and a former resident of Leonia, N.J.
Dr. Boorse, who received his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia in 1934, taught for more than three decades at Barnard College, where he was the dean of faculty for more than 20 years and the acting president in 1962 and 1967.
An expert on low-temperature physics, he was an initial member of the staff of a laboratory at Columbia University that was a unit of the Manhattan Project looking into the separating of uranium isotopes for producing a nuclear bomb.
Dr. Boorse was a consultant to the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1958 and to the Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1951 to 1955.
He and Lloyd Motz wrote a two-volume work, "The World of the Atom" (1966), and - with Jefferson Hane Weaver - a one-volume book, "The Atomic Scientists" (1989).
His wife, the former Margaret Hazelton, died in 1996. He is survived by a son, Ronald H., of Houston; and a daughter, Suzanne Remond of Kerrville, Tex.
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Bush and Nuclear Arms
August 10, 2003
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/opinion/L10NUCL.html
To the Editor:
Re "Facing a Second Nuclear Age" (Week in Review, Aug. 3):
By invading Iraq, which they knew did not have nuclear weapons, and treating North Korea with kid gloves because they knew it did, and now by planning to develop a new class of battlefield nuclear weapons, President Bush and his advisers send a dangerous message to "rogue states" and terrorists everywhere - that the road to world power lies in possessing these weapons.
A generation of physicians has warned that nuclear weapons result in such enormous and long-lasting devastation for human populations that they cannot be used in warfare. By ignoring their warnings, much as it continues to ignore the warnings of the international scientific community about global warming, the Bush administration is leading us all down paths of greater and greater peril.
ERIC CHIVIAN, M.D. Boston, Aug. 6, 2003 The writer is a co-founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
-------- us politics
Bush documents progress in Iraq
August 09, 2003
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030808-115950-1720r.htm
One hundred days after he declared an end to major combat in Iraq, President Bush yesterday said coalition forces have achieved great progress toward improving security, restoring vital services and fostering democracy in that nation.
Citing the reopening of banks, a return of water and electrical service to many parts of Iraq and a shifting mentality toward democracy, the president said Iraq is well on its way to enjoying the fruits of freedom.
"Iraq is more secure. The economy of Iraq is beginning to improve. ... Banks are now opening up, and the infrastructure is improving. ... And the political process is moving toward democracy, which is a major shift of system in that part of the world," Mr. Bush said.
"We've been there a hundred days. We've made a lot of progress in a hundred days, and I am pleased with the progress we've made, but fully recognize we've got a lot more work to do," the president said. "The ultimate aim is for the infrastructure to be the best in the region."
Mr. Bush - standing with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B. Myers - commented on the war's progress from his Crawford, Texas, ranch.
An hour after the president spoke, the White House released a detailed document, "Results in Iraq: 100 Days Toward Security and Freedom." The 25-page report says:
•For the first time in the lives of most Iraqis, a representative government is being established and human rights and freedom are being enshrined.
•Nearly three dozen countries are contributing financially to the renewal of Iraq, with 19 countries providing personnel for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
•The food-distribution system is functioning, "based on equitable needs, rather than cronyism."
•Nearly all Iraqi children have finished exams from last year. All universities are open.
•A $53 million program to rehabilitate more than 100 schools and clinics is under way.
In addition, the report says new military and police forces are being established, hospitals are open, food programs are serving millions of Iraqis, theaters are reopening and 150 newspapers are circulating. A unified currency for Iraq has been announced, and the exchange of old bank notes for new ones is set to begin Oct. 15.
Disputing the notion that Mr. Bush exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, the progress report says "a senior al Qaeda terrorist, now detained, who had been responsible for al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, reports that al Qaeda was intent on obtaining WMD assistance from Iraq."
Despite continuing casualties in Iraq, Mr. Bush said U.S. and coalition soldiers are "slowly but surely demolishing the elements of the Ba'athist regime, those foreign terrorists who feel like they can use Iraq as a place to arm up and inflict casualty or perhaps gain strength to come and attack Americans elsewhere."
The White House report says: "Most of Iraq is calm, and progress on the road to democracy and freedom not experienced in decades continues. Only in isolated areas are there still attacks."
Asked by a reporter, "What can you tell the American people about how many more soldiers will die?" Mr. Bush said Americans "suffer when we lose life."
"Our country is a country that grieves with those who sacrifice, and our heartfelt sympathies and appreciation go to the loved ones of any soldier who's willing to defend the security of the United States - and that's what they're doing in Iraq," he said.
On other topics, Mr. Bush said he and his defense advisers "spent time making sure that our military is configured in such a way as to represent the modern era - which means it will be more likely that the world will be peaceful; a modern, strong, light, active military will make it easier to keep the peace, and, after all, that's the objective of the administration, to promote freedom and peace."
Mr. Rumsfeld, who commented only on the military, said he and other military leaders are reviewing whether U.S. troops are stretched thin because of the war in Iraq.
"We have found there are literally about two dozen things we can do that reduce stress on the force," he said. "The time it takes to bring them in - recruit them, train them, equip them - means there's a significant lag, so it's not something one does quickly."
Mr. Bush also said Israel's willingness to reroute a security barrier in Palestinian areas is an encouraging sign that "the Israelis are willing to work with us" over a contentious matter that has stalled Middle East peace talks.
Reiterating that the barrier is a problem, Mr. Bush said he understands both the Israeli and Palestinian positions. For Israelis, he said, the barrier "is a reaction to the days when there was terror ... to the days of the intifada." But to Palestinians, it will make it more difficult to develop "contiguous" political borders for a state, he said.
On Germany, a vocal foe of the Iraq war, Mr. Bush sounded a conciliatory note, praising the nation for its help in Afghanistan.
"Germany has assumed a big responsibility, and we really appreciate German participation," he said. "That's a change from six months ago. Not only German participation is strong and robust, but it is more robust than we would have anticipated, and I look forward to thanking Chancellor [Gerhard] Schroeder for that."
Mr. Bush said he and Mr. Cheney, an avid outdoorsman, went fishing on a lake on the president's 1,600-acre ranch at dawn yesterday, but said it "turns out the fish like cooler weather than hot weather. Probably the press corps feels the same way."
The president also said he had added a new member to the "Hundred-Degree Club," which joins the president for three-mile runs without regard for the Texas heat.
"Did Dick Cheney catch anything?" one reporter asked.
"Dick Cheney is a great fly fisherman," the president said to laughter.
"But not a member of the Hundred-Degree Club," the vice president said.
--------
IRAQ'S NUCLEAR FILE
Inside the Prewar Debate
Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence
By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39500-2003Aug9.html
His name was Joe, from the U.S. government. He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush administration.
An engineer-turned-CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S. government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic mission downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River, he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a serious mistake.
At issue was Iraq's efforts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. The U.S. government said those tubes were for centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. But the IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, had uncovered strong evidence that Iraq was using them for conventional rockets.
Joe described the rocket story as a transparent Iraqi lie. According to people familiar with his presentation, which circulated before and afterward among government and outside specialists, Joe said the specialized aluminum in the tubes was "overspecified," "inappropriate" and "excessively strong." No one, he told the inspectors, would waste the costly alloy on a rocket.
In fact, there was just such a rocket. According to knowledgeable U.S. and overseas sources, experts from U.S. national laboratories reported in December to the Energy Department and U.S. intelligence analysts that Iraq was manufacturing copies of the Italian-made Medusa 81. Not only the Medusa's alloy, but also its dimensions, to the fraction of a millimeter, matched the disputed aluminum tubes.
A CIA spokesman asked that Joe's last name be withheld for his safety, and said he would not be made available for an interview. The spokesman said the tubes in question "are not the same as the Medusa 81" but would not identify what distinguishes them. In an interview, CIA Director George J. Tenet said several different U.S. intelligence agencies believed the tubes could be used to build gas centrifuges for a uranium enrichment program.
The Vienna briefing was one among many private and public forums in which the Bush administration portrayed a menacing Iraqi nuclear threat, even as important features of its evidence were being undermined. There were other White House assertions about forbidden weapons programs, including biological and chemical arms, for which there was consensus among analysts. But the danger of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein, more potent as an argument for war, began with weaker evidence and grew weaker still in the three months before war.
This article is based on interviews with analysts and policymakers inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal documents and technical evidence not previously made public.
The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:
• Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.
• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.
• Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.
• In the weeks and months following Joe's Vienna briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa's Italian manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm rocket."
• The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.
Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in unauthorized interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's near-term nuclear potential.
"I never cared about the 'imminent threat,' " said one of the policymakers, with directly relevant responsibilities. "The threat was there in [Hussein's] presence in office. To me, just knowing what it takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he needed a lot of equipment. You can stare at the yellowcake [uranium ore] all you want. You need to convert it to gas and enrich it. That does not constitute an imminent threat, and the people who were saying that, I think, did not fully appreciate the difficulties and effort involved in producing the nuclear material and the physics package."
No White House, Pentagon or State Department policymaker agreed to speak on the record for this report about the administration's nuclear case. Answering questions Thursday before the National Association of Black Journalists, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said she is "certain to this day that this regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear weapon, that it had biological and chemical weapons, that it had used them." White House officials referred all questions of detail to Tenet.
In an interview and a four-page written statement, Tenet defended the NIE prepared under his supervision in October. In that estimate, U.S. intelligence analysts judged that Hussein was intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon and was trying to rebuild the capability to make one.
"We stand behind the judgments of the NIE" based on the evidence available at the time, Tenet said, and "the soundness and integrity of our process." The estimate was "the product of years of reporting and intelligence collection, analyzed by numerous experts in several different agencies."
Tenet said the time to "decide who was right and who was wrong" about prewar intelligence will not come until the Iraqi Survey Group, the CIA-directed, U.S. military postwar study in Iraq of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs is completed. The Bush administration has said this will require months or years.
Facts and Doubts
The possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq loomed large in the Bush administration's efforts to convince the American public of the need for a preemptive strike. Beginning last August, Cheney portrayed Hussein's nuclear ambitions as a "mortal threat" to the United States. In the fall and winter, Rice, then Bush, marshaled the dreaded image of a "mushroom cloud."
By many accounts, including those of career officials who did not support the war, there were good reasons for concern that the Iraqi president might revive a program to enrich uranium to weapons grade and fabricate a working bomb. He had a well-demonstrated aspiration for nuclear weapons, a proficient scientific and engineering cadre, a history of covert development and a domestic supply of unrefined uranium ore. Iraq was generally believed to have kept the technical documentation for two advanced German centrifuge designs and the assembly diagrams for at least one type of "implosion device," which detonates a nuclear core.
What Hussein did not have was the principal requirement for a nuclear weapon, a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And the U.S. government, authoritative intelligence officials said, had only circumstantial evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain those materials.
But the Bush administration had reasons to imagine the worst. The CIA had faced searing criticism for its failures to foresee India's resumption of nuclear testing in 1998 and to "connect the dots" pointing to al Qaeda's attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Cheney, the administration's most influential advocate of a worst-case analysis, had been powerfully influenced by his experience as defense secretary just after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
Former National Security Council official Richard A. Clarke recalled how information from freshly seized Iraqi documents disclosed the existence of a "crash program" to build a bomb in 1991. The CIA had known nothing of it.
"I can understand why that was a seminal experience for Cheney," Clarke said. "And when the CIA says [in 2002], 'We don't have any evidence,' his reaction is . . . 'We didn't have any evidence in 1991, either. Why should I believe you now?' "
Some strategists, in and out of government, argued that the uncertainty itself -- in the face of circumstantial evidence -- was sufficient to justify "regime change." But that was not what the Bush administration usually said to the American people.
To gird a nation for the extraordinary step of preemptive war -- and to obtain the minimum necessary support from allies, Congress and the U.N. Security Council -- the administration described a growing, even imminent, nuclear threat from Iraq.
'Nuclear Blackmail'
The unveiling of that message began a year ago this week.
Cheney raised the alarm about Iraq's nuclear menace three times in August. He was far ahead of the president's public line. Only Bush and Cheney know, one senior policy official said, "whether Cheney was trying to push the president or they had decided to play good cop, bad cop."
On Aug. 7, Cheney volunteered in a question-and-answer session at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, speaking of Hussein, that "left to his own devices, it's the judgment of many of us that in the not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear weapons." On Aug. 26, he described Hussein as a "sworn enemy of our country" who constituted a "mortal threat" to the United States. He foresaw a time in which Hussein could "subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he said. "Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law."
That was a reference to Hussein Kamel, who had managed Iraq's special weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan. But Saddam Hussein lured Kamel back to Iraq, and he was killed in February 1996, so Kamel could not have sourced what U.S. officials "now know."
And Kamel's testimony, after defecting, was the reverse of Cheney's description. In one of many debriefings by U.S., Jordanian and U.N. officials, Kamel said on Aug. 22, 1995, that Iraq's uranium enrichment programs had not resumed after halting at the start of the Gulf War in 1991. According to notes typed for the record by U.N. arms inspector Nikita Smidovich, Kamel acknowledged efforts to design three different warheads, "but not now, before the Gulf War."
'Educating the Public'
Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities."
In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.
The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
The first days of September would bring some of the most important decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the United Nations in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General Assembly, when to take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in the midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day.
A "strategic communications" task force under the WHIG began to plan speeches and white papers. There were many themes in the coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace was among the most prominent.
'A Mushroom Cloud'
The day after publication of Card's marketing remark, Bush and nearly all his top advisers began to talk about the dangers of an Iraqi nuclear bomb.
Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair conferred at Camp David that Saturday, Sept. 7, and they each described alarming new evidence. Blair said proof that the threat is real came in "the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites." Bush said "a report came out of the . . . IAEA, that they [Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
There was no new IAEA report. Blair appeared to be referring to news reports describing curiosity at the nuclear agency about repairs at sites of Iraq's former nuclear program. Bush cast as present evidence the contents of a report from 1996, updated in 1998 and 1999. In those accounts, the IAEA described the history of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that arms inspectors had systematically destroyed.
A White House spokesman later acknowledged that Bush "was imprecise" on his source but stood by the crux of his charge. The spokesman said U.S. intelligence, not the IAEA, had given Bush his information.
That, too, was garbled at best. U.S. intelligence reports had only one scenario for an Iraqi bomb in six months to a year, premised on Iraq's immediate acquisition of enough plutonium or enriched uranium from a foreign source.
"That is just about the same thing as saying that if Iraq gets a bomb, it will have a bomb," said a U.S. intelligence analyst who covers the subject. "We had no evidence for it."
Two debuts took place on Sept. 8: the aluminum tubes and the image of "a mushroom cloud." A Sunday New York Times story quoted anonymous officials as saying the "diameter, thickness and other technical specifications" of the tubes -- precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts -- showed that they were "intended as components of centrifuges."
No one knows when Iraq will have its weapon, the story said, but "the first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."
Top officials made the rounds of Sunday talk shows that morning. Rice's remarks echoed the newspaper story. She said on CNN's "Late Edition" that Hussein was "actively pursuing a nuclear weapon" and that the tubes -- described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as "dual-use" items -- were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."
"There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons," Rice added, "but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Anna Perez, a communications adviser to Rice, said Rice did not come looking for an opportunity to say that. "There was nothing in her mind that said, 'I have to push the nuclear issue,' " Perez said, "but Wolf [Blitzer] asked the question."
Powell, a confidant said, found it "disquieting when people say things like mushroom clouds." But he contributed in other ways to the message. When asked about biological and chemical arms on Fox News, he brought up nuclear weapons and cited the "specialized aluminum tubing" that "we saw in reporting just this morning."
Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," also mentioned the tubes and said "increasingly, we believe the United States will become the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on CBS's "Face the Nation," asked listeners to "imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction," which would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."
Bush evoked the mushroom cloud on Oct. 7, and on Nov. 12 Gen. Tommy R. Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, said inaction might bring "the sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the major population centers on this planet."
'Literary License'
In its initial meetings, Card's Iraq task force ordered a series of white papers. After a general survey of Iraqi arms violations, the first of the single-subject papers -- never published -- was "A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein's Quest for Nuclear Weapons."
Wilkinson, at the time White House deputy director of communications for planning, gathered a yard-high stack of intelligence reports and press clippings.
Wilkinson said he conferred with experts from the National Security Council and Cheney's office. Other officials said Will Tobey and Susan Cook, working under senior director for counterproliferation Robert Joseph, made revisions and circulated some of the drafts. Under the standard NSC review process, they checked the facts.
In its later stages, the draft white paper coincided with production of a National Intelligence Estimate and its unclassified summary. But the WHIG, according to three officials who followed the white paper's progress, wanted gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence.
The fifth draft of the paper was obtained by The Washington Post. White House spokesmen dismissed the draft as irrelevant because Rice decided not to publish it. Wilkinson said Rice and Joseph felt the paper "was not strong enough."
The document offers insight into the Bush administration's priorities and methods in shaping a nuclear message. The white paper was assembled by some of the same team, and at the same time, as the speeches and talking points prepared for the president and top officials. A senior intelligence official said last October that the president's speechwriters took "literary license" with intelligence, a phrase applicable to language used by administration officials in some of the white paper's most emotive and misleading assertions elsewhere. The draft white paper precedes other known instances in which the Bush administration considered the now-discredited claim that Iraq "sought uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa." For a speechwriter, uranium was valuable as an image because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb. Despite warnings from intelligence analysts, the uranium would return again and again, including the Jan. 28 State of the Union address and three other Bush administration statements that month.
Other errors and exaggerations in public White House claims were repeated, or had their first mention, in the white paper.
Much as Blair did at Camp David, the paper attributed to U.N. arms inspectors a statement that satellite photographs show "many signs of the reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear program." Inspectors did not say that. The paper also quoted the first half of a sentence from a Time magazine interview with U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix: "You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos." The second half of the sentence, not quoted, was: "but you don't know what's under them."
As Bush did, the white paper cited the IAEA's description of Iraq's defunct nuclear program in language that appeared to be current. The draft said, for example, that "since the beginning of the nineties, Saddam has launched a crash program to divert nuclear reactor fuel for . . . nuclear weapons." The crash program began in late 1990 and ended with the war in January 1991. The reactor fuel, save for waste products, is gone.
'Footnotes and Disclaimers'
A senior intelligence official said the White House preferred to avoid a National Intelligence Estimate, a formal review of competing evidence and judgments, because it knew "there were disagreements over details in almost every aspect of the administration's case against Iraq." The president's advisers, the official said, did not want "a lot of footnotes and disclaimers."
But Bush needed bipartisan support for war-making authority in Congress. In early September, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began asking why there had been no authoritative estimate of the danger posed by Iraq. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote Sept. 9 of his "concern that the views of the U.S. intelligence community are not receiving adequate attention by policymakers in both Congress and the executive branch." When Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then committee chairman, insisted on an NIE in a classified letter two days later, Tenet agreed.
Explicitly intended to assist Congress in deciding whether to authorize war, the estimate was produced in two weeks, an extraordinary deadline for a document that usually takes months. Tenet said in an interview that "we had covered parts of all those programs over 10 years through NIEs and other reports, and we had a ton of community product on all these issues."
Even so, the intelligence community was now in a position of giving its first coordinated answer to a question that every top national security official had already answered. "No one outside the intelligence community told us what to say or not to say," Tenet wrote in reply to questions for this article.
The U.S. government possessed no specific information on Iraqi efforts to acquire enriched uranium, according to six people who participated in preparing for the estimate. It knew only that Iraq sought to buy equipment of the sort that years of intelligence reports had said "may be" intended for or "could be" used in uranium enrichment.
Richard J. Kerr, a former CIA deputy director now leading a review of the agency's intelligence analysis about Iraq, said in an interview that the CIA collected almost no hard information about Iraq's weapons programs after the departure of IAEA and U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, arms inspectors during the Clinton administration. He said that was because of a lack of spies inside Iraq.
Tenet took issue with that view, saying in an interview, "When inspectors were pushed out in 1998, we did not sit back. . . . The fact is we made significant professional progress." In his written statement, he cited new evidence on biological and missile programs, but did not mention Hussein's nuclear pursuits.
The estimate's "Key Judgment" said: "Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that UNSCOM inspectors departed -- December 1998."
According to Kerr, the analysts had good reasons to say that, but the reasons were largely "inferential."
Hussein was known to have met with some weapons physicists, and praised them as "nuclear mujaheddin." But the CIA had "reasonably good intelligence in terms of the general activities and whereabouts" of those scientists, said another analyst with the relevant clearances, and knew they had generally not reassembled into working groups. In a report to Congress in 2001, the agency could conclude only that some of the scientists "probably" had "continued at least low-level theoretical R&D [research and development] associated with its nuclear program."
Analysts knew Iraq had tried recently to buy magnets, high-speed balancing machines, machine tools and other equipment that had some potential for use in uranium enrichment, though no less for conventional industry. Even assuming the intention, the parts could not all be made to fit a coherent centrifuge model. The estimate acknowledged that "we lack specific information on many key aspects" of the program, and analysts presumed they were seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
'He Made a Name'
According to outside scientists and intelligence officials, the most important factor in the CIA's nuclear judgment was Iraq's attempt to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. The tubes were the core evidence for a centrifuge program tied to building a nuclear bomb. Even circumstantially, the CIA reported no indication of uranium enrichment using anything but centrifuges.
That interpretation of the tubes was a victory for the man named Joe, who made the issue his personal crusade. He worked in the gas centrifuge program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1980s. He is not, associates said, a nuclear physicist, but an engineer whose work involved the platform upon which centrifuges were mounted.
At some point he joined the CIA. By the end of the 1990s, according to people who know him casually, he worked in export controls.
Joe played an important role in discovering Iraq's plans to buy aluminum tubes from China in 2000, with an Australian intermediary. U.N. sanctions forbade Iraq to buy anything with potential military applications, and members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a voluntary alliance, include some forms of aluminum tubing on their list of equipment that could be used for uranium enrichment.
Joe saw the tubes as centrifuge rotors that could be used to process uranium into weapons-grade material. In a gas centrifuge, the rotor is a thin-walled cylinder, open at both ends, that spins at high speed under a magnet. The device extracts the material used in a weapon from a gaseous form of uranium.
In July 2001, about 3,000 tubes were intercepted in Jordan on their way to Iraq, a big step forward in the agency's efforts to understand what Iraq was trying to do. The CIA gave Joe an award for exceptional performance, throwing its early support to an analysis that helped change the agency's mind about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear ambitions.
"He grabbed that information early on, and he made a name for himself," a career U.S. government nuclear expert said.
'Stretches the Imagination'
Doubts about Joe's theory emerged quickly among the government's centrifuge physicists. The intercepted tubes were too narrow, long and thick-walled to fit a known centrifuge design. Aluminum had not been used for rotors since the 1950s. Iraq had two centrifuge blueprints, stolen in Europe, that were far more efficient and already known to work. One used maraging steel, a hard steel alloy, for the rotors, the other carbon fiber.
Joe and his supporters said the apparent drawbacks were part of Iraq's concealment plan. Hussein's history of covert weapons development, Tenet said in his written statement, included "built-in cover stories."
"This is a case where different people had honorable and different interpretations of intentions," said an Energy Department analyst who has reviewed the raw data. "If you go to a nuclear [counterproliferation official] and say I've got these aluminum tubes, and it's about Iraq, his first inclination is to say it's for nuclear use."
But the government's centrifuge scientists -- at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its sister institutions -- unanimously regarded this possibility as implausible.
In late 2001, experts at Oak Ridge asked an alumnus, Houston G. Wood III, to review the controversy. Wood, founder of the Oak Ridge centrifuge physics department, is widely acknowledged to be among the most eminent living experts.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Wood said in an interview that "it would have been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges. It stretches the imagination to come up with a way. I do not know any real centrifuge experts that feel differently."
As an academic, Wood said, he would not describe "anything that you absolutely could not do." But he said he would "like to see, if they're going to make that claim, that they have some explanation of how you do that. Because I don't see how you do it."
A CIA spokesman said the agency does have support for its view from centrifuge experts. He declined to elaborate.
In the last week of September, the development of the NIE required a resolution of the running disagreement over the significance of the tubes. The Energy Department had one vote. Four agencies -- with specialties including eavesdropping, maps and foreign military forces -- judged that the tubes were part of a centrifuge program that could be used for nuclear weapons. Only the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research joined the judgment of the Energy Department. The estimate, as published, said that "most analysts" believed the tubes were suitable and intended for a centrifuge cascade.
Majority votes make poor science, said Peter D. Zimmerman, a former chief scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
"In this case, the experts were at Z Division at Livermore [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] and in DOE intelligence here in town, and they were convinced that no way in hell were these likely to be centrifuge tubes," he said.
Tenet said the Department of Energy was not the only agency with experts on the issue; the CIA consulted military battlefield rocket experts, as well as its own centrifuge experts.
Unravelings
On Feb. 5, two weeks after Joe's Vienna briefing, Powell gave what remains the government's most extensive account of the aluminum tubes, in an address to the U.N. Security Council. He did not mention the existence of the Medusa rocket or its Iraqi equivalent, though he acknowledged disagreement among U.S. intelligence analysts about the use of the tubes.
Powell's CIA briefers, using data originating with Joe, told him that Iraq had "overspecified" requirements for the tubes, increasing expense without making them more useful to rockets. That helped persuade Powell, a confidant said, that Iraq had some other purpose for the tubes.
"Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so," Powell said in his speech. He said different batches "seized clandestinely before they reached Iraq" showed a "progression to higher and higher levels of specification, including in the latest batch an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces. . . . Why would they continue refining the specification, go to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel when it went off?"
An anodized coating is actually a strong argument for use in rockets, according to several scientists in and out of government. It resists corrosion of the sort that ruined Iraq's previous rocket supply. To use the tubes in a centrifuge, experts told the government, Iraq would have to remove the anodized coating.
Iraq did change some specifications from order to order, the procurement records show, but there is not a clear progression to higher precision. One tube sample was rejected because its interior was unfinished, too uneven to be used in a rocket body. After one of Iraq's old tubes got stuck in a launcher and exploded, Baghdad's subsequent orders asked for more precision in roundness.
U.S. and European analysts said they had obtained records showing that Italy's Medusa rocket has had its specifications improved 10 times since 1978. Centrifuge experts said in interviews that the variations had little or no significance for uranium enrichment, especially because the CIA's theory supposes Iraq would do extensive machining to adapt the tubes as rotors.
For rockets, however, the tubes fit perfectly. Experts from U.S. national labs, working temporarily with U.N. inspectors in Iraq, observed production lines for the rockets at the Nasser factory north of Baghdad. Iraq had run out of body casings at about the time it ordered the aluminum tubes, according to officials familiar with the experts' reports. Thousands of warheads, motors and fins were crated at the assembly lines, awaiting the arrival of tubes.
"Most U.S. experts," Powell asserted, "think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium." He said "other experts, and the Iraqis themselves," said the tubes were really for rockets.
Wood, the centrifuge physicist, said "that was a personal slam at everybody in DOE," the Energy Department. "I've been grouped with the Iraqis, is what it amounts to. I just felt that the wording of that was probably intentional, but it was also not very kind. It did not recognize that dissent can exist."
Staff writers Glenn Kessler, Dana Priest and Richard Morin and staff researchers Lucy Shackelford, Madonna Lebling and Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Peacekeepers find looted warehouses at Monrovia's port
August 10, 2003
By Glenn McKenzie
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030809-110423-7820r.htm
MONROVIA, Liberia - American and West African military officers ventured into Monrovia's rebel-held port for the first time yesterday and found aid warehouses looted and corpses floating by the docks. With days left in President Charles Taylor's regime, his spokesman warned that government fighters might create chaos when he leaves.
"We are ready to kill and steal anytime," said a marijuana-toking government fighter, who goes by the name Red Devil. He spoke at an abandoned, bullet-pocked hotel serving as an outpost for Mr. Taylor's fighters on war-divided Monrovia's urban front lines.
U.S. and West African officers negotiated for days to gain access to the port, across front lines. The access is crucial to opening humanitarian lines for Liberia's capital, especially for the cut-off government side, where tens of thousands of civilians have little to eat but leaves.
Rebel fighters, clutching rocket launchers and taped-up assault rifles, escorted the West African troops, three U.S. Marines, and a U.S. Embassy military attache, Army Col. Sue Ann Sandusky, through the port to view damage from more than two months of rebel sieges.
The West Africans and U.S. Marines, all in green camouflage, surveyed shelled, charred piers - looking for docking for aid ships to deliver desperately needed food to the war-ruined capital.
Discolored bodies, victims of the fighting, floated next to upended, rusted ships.
At one point, the gray-haired Col. Sandusky stopped to chide a rebel boy, looking about 12, who stood with a bayonet blade thrust out. "Put that knife away," she told him.
"See how easy that was?," a Marine asked when the rebel boy, abashed, slid the blade into its sheath.
Presence of a slowly building West African peace force, and Mr. Taylor's promise to resign tomorrow, have helped bring a weak truce to Monrovia, while fighting persists in the countryside.
Vaani Passawe, Mr. Taylor's spokesman, said yesterday, "Our morale has been sapped" as the clock ticked on the president's tenure.
"The situation is likely to collapse unless some pressure is put to bear" on rebels, Mr. Passawe declared. "Once the president leaves, our boys might be stigmatized. If that is the case, you must expect chaos. Hell might just break loose."
The peace force had 687 troops on the ground in Liberia yesterday, on its way to a promised 3,250-member deployment.
The capital remains split, with rebels refusing to allow the opening of the port and the flow of food until peacekeepers deploy in numbers adequate to hold it against Mr. Taylor's fighters.
U.N. workers returned to Monrovia for the first time yesterday after evacuating during fighting in late July. They had hoped to find largely intact World Food Program warehouses, holding the bulk of the agency's 10,000-ton stockpile of wheat, cornmeal and other goods.
Instead, the U.S.-West African assessment mission found looted warehouses, with a trail of cornmeal and crushed crackers in the otherwise empty buildings.
The West African peace force's chief of staff, Col. Theophilus Tawiah of Ghana, told reporters that rebels had agreed to put in place a U.S.-backed proposal for a humanitarian corridor to the port as soon as peacekeepers build up an adequate force. He did not say when that would be.
A rebel civilian official, A.L. Hadjia Sekou Fofana, insisted that government forces were responsible. "If anybody loot, they are placed on firing squad," he said.
Mr. Taylor, a former warlord blamed for 14 years of conflict here, has pledged to resign tomorrow and go into exile in Nigeria sometime after.
Mr. Taylor's government has refused comment on suggestions that Mr. Taylor could leave as soon as tomorrow, escorted by fellow West African leaders they say are coming for a resignation ceremony. The president has been reported as being adamant that he should have a dignified send-off.
-------- britain
British police given 'shoot to kill' orders for suicide bombers
August 10, 2003
By David Bamber
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030809-110421-1539r.htm
LONDON - Police have been ordered to "shoot to kill" suicide bombers following intelligence warnings that an al Qaeda terrorist attack in Britain may be imminent.
According to security sources, London Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens placed his force on its highest state of alert last week following the warning.
He also took the unprecedented step of ordering all front-line officers to be trained in how to spot potential suicide bombers and how to respond when they do.
The move follows renewed intelligence from British and American security services that al Qaeda intends to bomb public buildings in central London, the sources said.
Britain has already been targeted twice by terrorist groups this year, although both plots were foiled. In January, police seized the deadly poison ricin from an apartment in Wood Green, north London. The following month, they uncovered a plot to attack Heathrow Airport. Armed troops and tanks were sent to guard the airport.
Scotland Yard's decision to issue new guidance has been prompted by new intelligence passed to Britain by the FBI in late July. It warned that London, among a number of other cities, was facing an increasing threat of a suicide bomb attack.
Mr. Stevens' response has been to instruct the hundreds of armed officers who patrol the capital that they must shoot to kill if they believe that someone is attempting to detonate explosives carried on their body or in a vehicle.
"He's made it plain that if we think we are facing a suicide bomber, we should shoot first and ask questions later," one senior officer said.
Mr. Stevens has also told his officers that information from British intelligence indicates there are more al Qaeda agents in Britain than previously thought. He believes that the terrorist network is sufficiently extensive to be able to mount suicide attacks.
Senior Metropolitan Police officers were briefed on the threat at a presentation at Scotland Yard's firearms unit last week. Extra guidance on countering suicide bombers is now being given to officers in London and will be extended over the next month to police around the country.
The training and guidance is being organized by specialist officers who have visited Sri Lanka and Israel, which have long experience of suicide bombings.
The new guidance will be included in a confidential Home Office counterterrorism manual to be issued to police forces.
The advice to officers is also understood to detail the cases of the two British suicide bombers who struck in Israel in April - as a warning that Britons have been trained in such methods of attack.
Omar Khan Sharif, 27, from Derby, and Asif Hanif, from west London, planned to blow up a seafront bar in Tel Aviv on April 30. Mr. Hanif's bomb went off, killing him and three others. Mr. Sharif's failed to explode and he fled. He was later found dead in the sea.
-------- business
Firm to help Air Force with laser combat setup
By Dan Mayfield
Albuquerque Tribune Reporter,
August 10, 2003
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news03/072903_news_lasers.shtml
Anybody who's seen the 1979 James Bond flick "Moonraker" knows how cool lasers can be.
The movie ends with a whimsical laser battle around an invisible space station.
Now, an Albuquerque company is helping the Air Force get one step closer to developing similar combat lasers - the invisible space station will have to wait.
Albuquerque's Boeing SVS announced Monday it has been awarded the Air Force Research Laboratory's Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated Experiments, or MATRIX, contract.
In the four-year, $23 million MATRIX contract Boeing SVS, an Albuquerque subsidiary of Boeing, will design and build laser testing systems that are the precursors of future aircraft-mounted lasers.
The company will build the testbeds at its Albuquerque offices in the !25 complex, bringing about 20 additional jobs to the company, said Dave DeYoung, SVS project manager for the contract.
The testing systems, called pods, are coffin-sized boxes outfitted with telescopes, cameras and lasers, said AFRL spokesman Rich Garcia. The pods will be mounted on Air Force C130 cargo planes.
"They'll be using those things to develop and improve our ability to aim and fire a laser to improve our accuracy," Garcia said.
"We'll try things out in the air and on the ground and demonstrate," how they work, DeYoung said.
The contract officially started July 15, and the company has already began work on the systems, DeYoung said.
"The MATRIX win is key to our tactical strategy since it allows us to stay at the forefront of beam control and fire control technologies for high-energy laser systems," said Robert Van Allen, general manager and a co-founder of SVS.
Van Allen, Paul Shirley and Sherm Seltzer started the company as SVS Technologies Inc. in 1993.
It was named one of the city's fastest-growing technology companies, producing high-energy laser-related devices.
In 2000, employee-owned SVS merged with Boeing.
The company has had previous weapons contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, including the Airborne Laser and Space Based Laser. The company has also made products that use lasers to track objects, such as missiles.
"This (contract) is exactly what we do," DeYoung said.
-------- chemical weapons
Army Begins Burning of Chemical Weapons in Alabama Town
August 10, 2003
The New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/national/10ALAB.html
ANNISTON, Ala., Aug. 9 - With the push of a button and a spurt of steam, the Army brought an end to years of legal wrangling today and began burning the first of millions of pounds of chemical weapons stored here.
The first M-55 rocket, after it was drained of the deadly nerve agent sarin, was chopped up into eight pieces and roasted in a 1,100-degree furnace, turning a cold war relic into a pile of ash.
"This is absolutely a gorgeous day," said Michael B. Abrams, a spokesman for the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility. "We're beginning the end of chemical weapons in Anniston."
Many residents were less enthusiastic. For six years, since construction began on a giant, $1 billion weapons incinerator, an alliance of local and national environmental groups has fought to block its use.
"We're very disappointed today," said David Christian, an Anniston architect who led protests. "They're putting poisons in the air and we may not know for years what the effects will be."
Army officials have said the process is completely safe, but just to make sure, Alabama officials issued protective hoods to residents living near the incinerator, which just made many people feel worse.
Environmental groups in many places, including Anniston, have been pressing the Army to find other ways to neutralize its stockpile of cold war weapons. More than 660,000 chemical weapons, packed with chemicals like VX gas, mustard gas and sarin, are stored here, in concrete bunkers known as igloos.
The environment groups said the Anniston area, along the I-20 corridor between Atlanta and Birmingham, was too heavily populated for an incinerator. About 250,000 people live within a 30-mile radius of the plant, many more than in the other places the Army has burned chemical weapons, like Tooele, Utah, and Johnston Atoll near Hawaii.
The Army's response was that it more dangerous to keep the aging, corroding weapons than to burn them. Hundreds of mortar rounds and M-55 rockets in the igloos are leaking, Army officials said.
The Army plans to destroy as many 10 rockets this weekend and work up to more than 900 a day.
Protesters asked a federal judge in Washington to issue an injunction, saying that safety plans had not been completed. But on Friday Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of United States District Court ruled that there was no imminent harm and that the plant could begin destroying the weapons.
This morning, Army officials gathered under a tent near the incinerator to announce that the first rocket had been destroyed. There was nary a protester in sight. (Several said they did not have enough advance notice to get organized.)
"That rocket is now history," Mr. Abrams said. "This community is now one rocket safer."
He then added that there were tens of thousands of more rockets to go.
--------
WWII Toxic Gas Leaks, Sickening 36 in China
WORLD IN BRIEF
Washington Post
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39439-2003Aug9.html
BEIJING -- Toxic gas that leaked from canisters left behind from World War II sickened 36 people in northeast China, the official New China News Agency reported yesterday. The agency said experts had concluded that the canisters were chemical weapons left by the Japanese army. Japan is believed to have abandoned about 700,000 chemical weapons loaded with mustard gas and other poisons in China's northeast after its 13-year occupation of the region ended in 1945. Click here!
Twenty-nine people were reportedly hospitalized after the cans were unearthed Monday in the city of Qiqihar, about 650 miles northeast of Beijing. Fumes from an oily substance in the canisters caused headaches, eye irritation and other symptoms, according to the news agency.
Lawyers for Chinese plaintiffs who have sued the Japanese government say the weapons have caused about 2,000 deaths since the war.
-------- india / pakistan
Indian PM Wants End to Bloodshed
By SADAQAT JAN
Associated Press Writer
Aug 10, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PAKISTAN_INDIA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- India's prime minister called for an end to bloodshed between Pakistan and India in a statement read Sunday before a peace conference in the Pakistani capital, saying the two nations must heed the will of their peoples and learn to live side by side.
"Violence and bloodshed cannot provide any solutions. We can live together only if we let each other live," Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said in the statement, read aloud by an Indian delegate at the conference. "Cooperation, rather than confrontation, is the answer to our common problems."
The conference, organized by a prominent journalists' group with branches in both countries, is the latest effort to ease tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors. It brings together Indian and Pakistani parliamentarians for two days of talks at Islamabad's Marriott hotel.
The 59-member Indian delegation - 33 lawmakers and 26 journalists - crossed the Indian-Pakistani border on Saturday afternoon, receiving a warm welcome from Pakistani political parties and human rights workers, who shouted slogans of peace and showered them with rose petals.
On Sunday, Pakistani and Indian parliamentarians sat facing each other in a brightly lit ballroom at the hotel, each taking turns speaking about their nations' future.
As some gave speeches, others exchanged pleasantries over cups of tea. Some Sikhs on the Indian side had flowing beards, while leaders of a Pakistani religious alliance wore Islamic turbans.
"We have come here with a message of love and brotherhood," Indian lawmaker Laloo Prasad Yadav said in a speech. "Everyone should play their role in tearing down the wall of hatred."
After the opening session, the meetings were closed to reporters.
During the conference, the delegates will encourage both governments to resume stalled peace talks. They will also discuss Kashmir, a divided Himalayan region that both India and Pakistan claim in its entirety.
Vajpayee said in the statement, written from the Indian capital of New Delhi, that the conference provided hope for the future.
"The meeting and the themes for discussion are a forceful reiteration of the popular desire in both of our countries for a normal, peaceful, friendly and cooperative relationship," he said. "We cannot deny our people their right to peaceful and cooperative economic development."
M. Ziauddin, the Pakistani president of the South Asia Free Media Association, which organized the conference, said he hoped it would serve to bring better understanding.
"These are exciting times for Pakistan and India. There is a peace process going on and I hope this conference provides participants the right kind of atmosphere to air their ideas and thoughts without inhibitions," he said.
The two nations have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over Kashmir. They were on the brink of a fourth war last year after a Dec. 13, 2001, attack on the Indian parliament. New Delhi blamed the assault on two Pakistani-based militant groups and Pakistan's spy agency.
Pakistan outlawed the militant groups but denied involvement.
Both countries rushed hundreds of thousands of troops to the border, but international mediation ended the crisis. Relations have improved in recent months, since a call by Vajpayee for renewed peace talks. India and Pakistan have restored diplomatic ties and resumed bus links.
The two countries are also discussing re-establishing air and train links.
Still, progress has been slow and no dates for formal peace talks to begin has been announced. Politicians on both sides have continued to fire off inflammatory statements from time to time.
The issue of Kashmir remains a thorny one, and is not likely to be solved anytime soon. More than 63,000 people have died in Kashmir since 1989.
Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the head of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q party, said that any peace talks must include the issue of Kashmir, and noted that progress on other fronts would lack substance if the flashpoint issue is not addressed.
-------- iran
TEHRAN
Iran Plans to Try Qaeda Suspects
August 10, 2003
The New York Times
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/international/middleeast/10IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Aug. 9 - An Iranian government minister has said that foreigners suspected of being Al Qaeda operatives whose home countries refuse to take them back will be put on trial in Iran, the daily Entekhab reported today.
Ali Yunessi, Iran's minister of intelligence, said such people "will be tried in Iran and the trial will follow its legal procedure," Entekhab said.
The minister, who was interviewed on Thursday, did not state how many people were in this category or what charges they would face.
Earlier this year Iran said it had arrested hundreds of Qaeda agents and repatriated many of them, often to Kuwait. The number remaining who are stateless may be a dozen or less.
But one is Suleiman Abu-Ghaith, Al Qaeda's spokesman, whose Kuwaiti citizenship has been revoked, Entekhab said.
"Tehran has held arduous negotiations to resolve the issue of detained Al Qaeda operatives," the daily quoted an unnamed diplomat as saying. "The cases of those whose citizenships were revoked were the hardest ones."
"Tehran informed America and its Western allies that handing them over to them would be difficult because there were fears that Al Qaeda would seriously threaten Iran's interests," this diplomat said.
Mr. Yunessi said last month that a large number of "small- and big-time" elements of Al Qaeda were in Iran. In the interview he did not say if the trials would be public.
Iran has repeatedly said it would not reveal the identity of those it has arrested for security reasons.
-------- iraq
Protests Over Power Cuts Continue in Basra
August 10, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp
BASRA, Iraq (AP) -- Basra residents overwhelmed by the heat and angry about fuel shortages and electricity cuts bombarded British soldiers with rocks in a second day of protests Sunday. A demonstrator and a security guard were killed.
Elsewhere, four U.S. soldiers and a journalist were wounded in guerrilla attacks, and the U.S. military said a 3rd Corps Support Command soldier died of heat stroke while traveling in a convoy near the southern city of Diwaniyah on Saturday.
The military also reported a soldier was found dead in his bed Saturday. The cause of death was not determined.
Basra had been one of the quietest cities in the country. On Sunday, the protester was shot dead after an angry crowd tried to block four four-wheel drive vehicles crossing the main bridge leading to the airport and the British military headquarters. It was not clear who shot the demonstrator.
British troops patrolling the area gave away their own fuel to calm the demonstrators, coalition spokesman Charles Heatly said.
The dead guard worked for Global Security, a private company hired to provide security and other services for coalition bases throughout the country. The guard, of Nepalese origin, was bringing mail from Kuwait to United Nations staff in Basra.
He was shot by an unknown assailant as a two-car convoy neared an intersection in the center of the city, coalition spokesman Iain Pickard said.
Protesters blocked roads with rows of burning tires. They threw rocks at the cars when shots rang out that apparently killed the protester. It was unclear who was in the cars or who fired the shots. British military spokesman Capt. Hisham Halawi denied British forces were involved.
The shooting followed clashes by about 1,000 residents Saturday. British soldiers suffered minor injuries when attacked by crowds throwing rocks and bricks, Halawi told The Associated Press.
In Baghdad, Heatly said coalition forces were taking steps to alleviate the power and fuel crisis in Basra. The coalition also brought in two new gas turbine generators to try to patch up the antiquated electricity system, and British soldiers were supervising distribution at gas stations to make sure people were not charged exorbitant black-market prices.
The U.S. military reported that two soldiers and a journalist were wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack at the Baghdad University complex Sunday. It said one soldier had quickly returned to duty.
Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite TV reported one of its cameramen was wounded after the U.S. patrol he was traveling with came under fire at the College of Islamic Sciences. His wounds were not life-threatening, a coalition spokesman said.
A team of FBI investigators, meanwhile, searched the bombed Jordanian Embassy, where a car bomb on Thursday killed 19 people.
The attack rattled Baghdad residents who feared it signaled a rise of terror tactics in the already violent Iraqi capital. L. Paul Bremer, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, said the al-Qaida linked Ansar al-Islam group was at the top of his list of suspected terrorist organizations operating in the country.
In an interview published Sunday, Bremer said intelligence reports suggest that Ansar al-Islam was planning large-scale attacks.
``So as long as we have, as I think we do, substantial numbers of Ansar terrorists around here I think we have to be pretty alert to the fact that we may see more of this,'' Bremer told The New York Times.
U.S. military officials have blamed almost daily attacks on Saddam loyalists and Iraqis angered by a foreign occupation. There is growing concern that foreign fighters in Iraq may join the conflict, conducting terrorist attacks like the one Thursday on the Jordanian Embassy in which 19 people died.
A previously unknown group calling itself the Iraqi Resistance vowed in a statement aired on Al-Jazeera to continue fighting coalition troops and said it had no links to Saddam Hussein's Baath party.
``We swear by God, we will we make the whole land of Iraq a graveyard to all those villain invaders,'' said the statement read by one of four armed men wearing red-checked Arab headdresses masking their faces. Two of the four men held rocket-propelled grenade launchers, two held Kalashnikov automatic rifles.
On Saturday, five men claiming to represent three previously unknown groups -- the White Banners, Muslim Youth and Mohammed's Army -- appeared in a similar video broadcast on the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite channel.
Taped claims of responsibility have appeared often on Arabic satellite stations since the U.S. invasion. U.S. military officials and terrorism experts say it is impossible to determine whether the self-proclaimed groups are real fighting forces. Terrorism experts say the videos may be aimed at recruiting fighters.
--------
Terror Group Seen as Back Inside Iraq
August 10, 2003
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/international/worldspecial/10MILI.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 - The American-led administration in Iraq has received intelligence reports that hundreds of Islamic militants who fled Iraq during the war have returned and are planning to conduct major terrorist attacks.
L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, said in an interview on Friday night that fighters from Ansar al-Islam, a militant organization that the United States tried to destroy during the war, had escaped to Iran and then slipped back across the border into Iraq. He said hundreds of the militants were now in Iraq, where they were preparing to attack the occupation forces or administration.
"The intelligence suggests that Ansar al-Islam is planning large-scale terrorist attacks here," Mr. Bremer said. "So as long as we have, as I think we do, substantial numbers of Ansar terrorists around here I think we have to be pretty alert to the fact that we may see more of this."
The Bush administration has asserted that Ansar has ties to Al Qaeda. Officials of the occupying authority, including Mr. Bremer, said it was possible that Al Qaeda was in Iraq, but they said there was no conclusive proof of that.
Mr. Bremer spoke a day after a car bomb attack ripped through the Jordanian Embassy in central Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding scores more. It was the deadliest attack against civilians since the American military took control of Baghdad, and it represented a new type of security problem for the American-led occupation. The perpetrators of the attack are still unknown and investigators from the F.B.I. have been sent to investigate the blast.
"We have seen here a new technique for Iraq that we have never seen before," Mr. Bremer said, referring to the car bomb used in the attack.
Mr. Bremer, who served as the chief counterterrorism official at the State Department during the Reagan administration, said his first thought was that the attack had been carried out by a foreign militant organization and not former members of Saddam Hussein's government. That initial assessment was based on the fact that car bombings were a standard technique of such organizations in the Middle East but have been virtually unknown in Iraq during the American-led occupation.
But Mr. Bremer said intelligence experts had since told him that some elements of Mr. Hussein's security apparatus were capable of making car bombs.
"My initial instinct was to believe that this had to be done from somebody from outside," he said. "But I have been told we captured and spoke to some ex-regime people and that there was part of the Mukhabarat that specialized in sophisticated bombing and it is possible that this kind of technique did exist."
The Mukhabarat was the Iraqi intelligence service.
Mr. Bremer said it was also possible that Ansar al-Islam or another militant organization had provided technical expertise on making car bombs to former Baathists who then carried out the attack.
He said the motivations of the attackers were unclear. The Jordanian Embassy, he said, might have been attacked because of Jordan's cooperation with the United States during and after the war to topple Mr. Hussein's government. He said it was unlikely that opponents of the government carried out the attack to punish Jordan for having granted asylum to Mr. Hussein's daughters.
The central question for the American-led administration here, however, is whether the car bombing is an isolated act or the beginning of a new series of bombings. Officials are worried that they may be facing a new wave of attacks by Ansar al-Islam even if the group had no role in the attack on the embassy.
The onset of major bombings of this type would present a new danger to American and allied forces, who so far have been attacked primarily by insurgents and foreign fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades, explosive devices and small arms.
The prospect of such attacks is a worry for another reason. The Bush administration has calculated that attacks by Baathist operatives will substantially decrease if Mr. Hussein is captured or killed and former officials of his government are deprived of a rallying cry. But there is no reason to think that attacks will necessarily cease because they seem to be motivated by a desire to lash out at the Americans over their support for Israel and their presence in the Middle East.
Ansar al-Islam had set up camp near the eastern Kurdish territory in northern Iraq, and the United States had mounted air attacks on the group during the war.
Kurdish forces who supported the American campaign to overthrow Mr. Hussein moved into the group's former stronghold, but many of the group's fighters fled to Iran and then infiltrated back into Iraq, according to American intelligence.
Mr. Bremer said the group had a history of carrying out major terrorist attacks, including car bombings. "The history is they do big stuff," he said. "They don't do chicken-feed-type stuff."
He said more precise information about the group and its makeup would probably not be available until American and allied troops captured or killed many of its members.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that some suspected members of the group have been captured and are being interrogated. But Mr. Bremer seemed to suggest that there was still considerable uncertainty about the identity and nationality of many of the group's operatives.
In addition to terrorist threats, Mr. Bremer has been concerned about the role of foreign fighters, who have been conducting ambushes and guerrilla attacks against American forces.
He said the new Governing Council in Iraq had asked the administration here to contact nations like Syria to find out how many of their citizens had come to Iraq to fight against the allies and the Council. But he said officials here had not obtained any precise information on such a count.
The Third Armored Cavalry Regiment recently apprehended about 40 suspected fighters near the Syrian border, officials said. They are being interrogated to determine how many are foreign fighters from nations like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Mr. Bremer said the basic strategy to fend off terrorist attacks was to press for new intelligence and mount raids to pre-empt them. "In the broadest sense, of course, though it is hard on us here, I would rather be fighting them here than fighting them in New York," he said.
--------
Shortages in Basra Fuel Anger, Rioting British Counter Violence With Restraint
By Abdel Razzak Hamid
Reuters
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39340-2003Aug9.html
BASRA, Iraq, Aug. 9 -- British troops put on riot gear and fired into the air today as Iraqi anger over fuel and power shortages boiled over into stone-throwing and torching of vehicles in Basra, witnesses said.
Several British soldiers suffered minor injuries during some of the most widespread violence in the country's mostly Shiite Muslim south since Saddam Hussein was toppled by U.S.-led forces four months ago. As night fell in Basra, burning tires lit the sky and witnesses said they saw troops shoot and wound an Iraqi gunman. A crowd shouted abuse at foreigners at a hotel, and others threw stones at soldiers guarding the main British headquarters.
British military spokesmen, who reported that a military vehicle had also been set alight, said calm was returning to Iraq's second city. They had no information on Iraqi casualties.
Witnesses said soldiers fired into the air to keep back a crowd at a gasoline station. Another witness said the British fired rubber bullets at a group, wounding two Iraqis. Troops rescued the drivers of a Kuwaiti tanker that was set ablaze.
As U.S. troops continued their hunt for Hussein, military officials said his former interior minister, Mahmoud Diab Ahmed, had turned himself in on Friday. The U.S. Central Command said it had made a mistake in reporting the detention a month ago of the man, who is No. 29 on Washington's most wanted list.
[At least four American soldiers were wounded in attacks today, the Associated Press reported.
A 173rd Airborne Brigade patrol in the northern city of Kirkuk was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire, said Lt. Col. Bill McDonald, spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division, which is operating in the area. Two soldiers wounded in the explosion were in stable condition, McDonald said. The troops returned fire, he added.
In south-central Baghdad, two soldiers were wounded in a roadside bomb attack on their armored Humvee, said Maj. Todd Mercer of the 82nd Airborne Division.]
A previously unknown group called for more attacks on occupation forces, saying in a videotape shown on a pan-Arab television channel that this was the only way to free Iraq. Five masked men on the tape, aired on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television, said they were Iraqis from the White Flags, Muslim Youth and Army of Muhammad organizations.
"We warn countries of the world, and for the last time, not to send troops into Iraq," their spokesman added.
The violence in Basra was a reminder that the problems facing U.S.-led forces are not restricted to the Sunni Muslim minority in Hussein's heartlands north and west of Baghdad, where U.S. troops have come under daily attack.
Iraq's majority Shiites, glad to be rid of the dictator who oppressed them, have been less restive than Hussein's Sunni kin. But their leaders, some of whom want an Iranian-style Shiite republic, are keen to accrue power themselves. Some clerics opposing violence took to the streets of Basra today to reason with the protesters.
British troops' tactic of "softly softly" policing southern Iraq -- honed in Northern Ireland and held up as a contrast to the more combative approach taken by the Americans -- was put to its biggest test since six British military policemen were killed in the Shiite village of Majjar in June.
The mainly British local authority issued a statement blaming fuel shortages on smugglers, looters and saboteurs and stressing its efforts to combat them and ease the problems. It said British marines seized a ship that was smuggling Iraqi diesel oil into the Persian Gulf overnight.
Many protesters today accused people from neighboring Kuwait of involvement in smuggling out cheap Iraqi oil.
"All the disasters that have come upon us are because of Kuwait and Kuwaitis," said one Basra man, Abu Hassan, as a mob attacked Kuwaiti-registered cars in the streets. "The British have been here four months and things have not improved. Now we have shortages in everything."
-------- israel
Israeli Warplanes Blast Hezbollah Areas
By PETER ENAV
Associated Press Writer
Aug 10, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_HEZBOLLAH?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Gold says Israel's neighbors are to blame for Hezbollah's attacks. (Audio)
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli warplanes bombed suspected Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon on Sunday, Lebanese security officials said, hours after the militant group shelled northern Israel, killing a teenage boy.
The attacks came amid a surge of border violence following months of calm. Earlier Sunday, Israel's foreign minister demanded that Syria and Lebanon restrain Hezbollah, or "we will have no choice but to defend ourselves."
The Lebanese officials said warplanes fired at least one missile on an area near the village of Teir Harfa, about three miles from the Lebanese-Israeli border.
There was no immediate word on casualties, said the officials, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
The Israeli military did not immediately confirm the attack.
Earlier Sunday, a senior Israeli security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah fired three anti-tank shells at the town of Shlomi, near the Israeli-Lebanese border.
A 16-year-old boy was killed and four adults were lightly wounded by shrapnel, a spokesman for the hospital in nearby Nahariya said.
The Lebanese militant group, backed by Iran and Syria, said it had fired anti-aircraft shells at Israeli fighter jets flying over southern Lebanon, but Israeli security officials denied its aircraft were in the area at the time.
Dore Gold, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said the shelling constituted "unbridled escalatory attacks, ... an intolerable state of affairs."
Hezbollah routinely responds to Israeli air force flights over Lebanon with anti-aircraft fire, but tensions have worsened in recent days.
On Friday, Israel and Hezbollah exchanged artillery fire over a disputed area near the confluence of the Syrian, Lebanese and Israeli borders - the first such exchange in eight months.
Hezbollah said Friday's shelling was retaliation for the Aug. 2 killing of Hezbollah security official Ali Hussein Saleh by a bomb in his car south of Beirut. Hezbollah blames Israel for his death.
Anti-aircraft shells also fell Saturday on the northern town of Kiryat Shemona, but no injuries were reported.
On Sunday, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom held Lebanon and Syria - which dominates Lebanese policy-making - responsible for Hezbollah's actions.
"We say to Syria and Lebanon as responsible parties for Hezbollah behavior ... that if Hezbollah activities continue and constitute an undermining of security of the citizens of Israel, we will have no choice but to defend ourselves," Shalom said. He declined to elaborate.
"We don't want to use the language of threats now and say what we will do and how we will do it," he said. "I think the regime in Syria knows very well what our capabilities are, and I don't think it's worthwhile for it to put us to the test."
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations also sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan holding Syria and Lebanon responsible for Hezbollah's "acts of terror," Foreign Ministry spokesman Yonatan Peled said Saturday.
American diplomats also told Lebanon and Syria that the administration was concerned about the "calculated and provocative escalation" by Hezbollah, State Department deputy spokesman Philip T. Reeker said.
Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Sheik Naeem Qassem said Sunday that Hezbollah "is fully prepared and ready to respond in the proper manner to any Israel aggression or threat."
Syria's state-run Tishrin newspaper charged in an editorial Sunday that Israel was trying "to expand the circle of its aggression and deliberately provoke and threaten more than one Arab country," in hopes of slowing progress on the "road map" peace plan with the Palestinians long enough to deal with its internal problems.
Israel withdrew its forces from a self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon in May 2000, following more than a decade of low-level warfare with Hezbollah, including frequent Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israeli towns. Since then, the level of violence between the sides has declined sharply.
Hezbollah, which is on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist organizations, led a guerrilla war against Israel's 18-year occupation of the border zone in southern Lebanon.
----
Suicide bombers shatter Israeli calm
Tuesday, 12 August, 2003
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3143783.stm
Palestinian suicide bombers have struck in Israel and the West Bank for the first time in over a month, killing two Israelis.
One blast ripped through a shopping centre in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rosh Haayin and a bomber blew himself up at a bus stop outside the Jewish settlement of Ariel.
Two Palestinian militant groups claimed they carried out the attacks in specific retaliation for a deadly Israeli raid last week.
But officials from one group, Hamas, stressed that they were still keeping to their ceasefire.
Israel has called for a "complete halt to terror" and suspended its release of Palestinian prisoners, but a senior Israeli official suggested the releases would resume.
Israel had been expected to free 76 detainees on Tuesday before the attacks.
I saw fire and a cloud of smoke. They brought out an injured child and then his mother Avigail Josef, eyewitness
In pictures: Aftermath of attacks
Zalman Shoval, a senior foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, commented that "from the point of view of public opinion, today would not be a very suitable day to release Palestinian prisoners".
"But ultimately the Israeli Government is committed to releasing prisoners and I think it will continue to do that," he added.
Mr Sharon himself said there could be no progress on the US-backed roadmap to peace without a complete halt to attacks.
An Israeli military source quoted by AP news agency said there would be no large-scale retaliation for Tuesday's attacks.
The BBC's Simon Wilson in Jerusalem says the attacks are undoubtedly the severest threat yet to the period of relative calm since the main Palestinian militant groups announced a unilateral ceasefire in June.
Shopping mall
In Rosh Haayin, the suspect bomber detonated a charge he was carrying - possibly in a backpack or in a belt - after being challenged by a security guard at the entrance to a supermarket.
The blast left a mass of twisted blinds and shattered glass and sparked a large fire.
Firefighters with breathing equipment rushed to the scene to pull out the injured, some 10 people.
"I saw fire and a cloud of smoke," said witness Avigail Josef. "They brought out an injured child and then his mother."
The Palestinian militant group al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade - part of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction - claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was to avenge an Israeli raid on Friday.
Two Hamas militants and two Palestinian civilians died in that raid which also claimed the life of one Israeli soldier.
In the Ariel attack, the bomber detonated his device at a bus stop near several young Israelis. He killed one and wounded three.
Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility for the attack on its website.
Israeli 'provocations'
Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas condemned both bombings but said they had been provoked by Israeli raids into Palestinian areas.
Militant groups, he added, were still committed to their truce with Israel.
A senior Palestinian legislator, Saeb Erekat, rejected Israeli suggestions that the Palestinian Authority could have acted to prevent the attacks.
Hamas's armed wing, al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement that the Ariel attack was a response to the killing of its members in Nablus.
A senior Hamas leader, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, said the killing of Palestinians would not be tolerated and he blamed Ariel Sharon for the new violence.
"For 40 days we have been committed to our imitative but Sharon has refused to accept that initiative and he has continued to kill," the Hamas official said.
-------- latin america
Zapatistas emerge to reach out peacefully
August 10, 2003
By John Rice
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030809-110416-6857r.htm
OVENTIC, Mexico - The basketball announcer wore a ski mask. So did the guys playing the marimbas between games. The ice cream vendors and some of the players made do with bandanas that sometimes slipped below their mouths.
The relaxed atmosphere as Mexico's Zapatista rebels began a three-day public party yesterday was evidence of how far the movement has come since the tense, bloody days after it emerged in public by seizing several cities Jan. 1, 1994.
Masked Zapatista commanders gathered shortly before midnight Friday to inaugurate centers meant to smooth their dealings with outsiders. They call the locations "caracoles," or "snails," a Mayan symbol that represents, among other things, the "opening to the heart," according to a recent communication from the movement's spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos.
By yesterday morning, thousands thronged the site of the inaugural festivities, cluttering it with tents, tarps and hammocks. The assembly of rebels, villagers and foreign supporters was as thick in places as the New York City subway at rush hour.
At the gathering, the Zapatistas adopted "good-government committees" to help oversee a scattering of rebel-controlled townships in Chiapas state and to handle contacts from outsiders, who have often been frustrated in efforts to reach leaders of the clandestine organization.
The centers will handle conflicts with neighboring Indian communities. The Zapatistas have been unable to win over most local Indians - who are often wary of the movement's style of collectivization, its military stance and its rejection of government aid.
"I think they are going to make it easier to resolve some conflicts with the neighbors, and that is good for us," said Juan Gonzalez, the Chiapas state official in charge of resolving intercommunal disputes.
They are also evidence of a continuing shift toward political rather than military struggle for the Zapatista movement, whose adherents use ski masks to hide their identity even though there have been no major military conflicts in more than nine years.
The poorly armed movement was beaten back into the jungle in 10 days before a cease-fire halted Mexico's army, but the Zapatista banner of Indian rights and opposition to free trade - combined with Mr. Marcos' witty communiques - won it international support.
"Whole years preparing to fire a weapon and it turns out that what we have to fire are words," Mr. Marcos wrote in one of a sudden spurt of communiques issued in July, after a period of silence.
Those communiques outlined the changes and invited supporters to a three-day bash in Oventic, a village about 10 miles north of San Cristobal de Las Casas.
Mr. Marcos had not appeared publicly at the gathering as of yesterday, although other rebel commanders were seen.
A string of trucks wound up the mountain roads carrying ski-masked Zapatistas past new signs reading, "You are in the territory of Zapatistas in rebellion."
Foreign and Mexican supporters also made their way to the mountain slope clearing, where they bunked down in a community hall or strung hammocks beneath plastic tarps to keep out the rain.
Two Mexican federal administrations dealt with the Zapatistas by alternating military threats with appeals to negotiate.
Vendors offered boiled corn on the cob, watermelon, plums, tamales and soft drinks to the milling visitors, many of whom wore ski masks or bandanas.
A third - that of President Vicente Fox, who took office in December 2000 - pulled the military back from positions near Zapatista towns and said that it "is definitively canceling the option of violence" in dealing with the rebels.
But the movement has cut off all negotiations with the government and has accused Mr. Fox of trying to sell much of the country to foreign investors with his "Plan Puebla-Panama" for highway, port and industrial development in impoverished southern Mexico.
Mr. Gonzalez said community disputes have led some settlements to break away from the Zapatistas in recent years, reducing the movement's strength in the canyonlands where it began, though he said it appears to be growing stronger in the Mayan highland areas such as Oventic.
-------- mideast
America Cancels War Drills With Egypt
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 10, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41239-2003Aug10
CAIRO, Egypt - The United States has canceled this year's "Bright Star" maneuvers with the Egyptian military because American forces are over-stretched, the charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy said Sunday.
"This decision was made purely on technical grounds because of commitments we have in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in fighting the war against terrorism," Gordon Gray said in remarks posted on the embassy's Web site.
Gray spoke after a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher.
"We wanted to emphasize the importance we attach to the U.S-Egyptian military relationship and to the bilateral relationship," Gray said.
The Bright Star maneuvers, which were scheduled to take place next month, have been held in the Egyptian desert every two years since 1981. The most recent drills - in October 2001 - involved 70,000 troops from 10 countries and were said to be the largest military exercises in the world.
Egypt receives more than $2 billion worth of military and civil aid from the United States as a consequence of its signing the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1979.
-------- nato
NATO to Command Peace Force in Kabul
By Todd Pitman
Associated Press
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39179-2003Aug9.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 9 -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Monday plans to take command of the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan's war-shattered capital, a move that reflects the nearly 54-year-old alliance's shifting priorities in the global war on terror.
The deployment will be NATO's first outside Europe since it was formed during the Cold War to provide a bulwark against possible attacks by the Soviet Union.
NATO will take over command of the 5,000-strong International Security Assistance Force, known as ISAF, from Germany and the Netherlands.
"NATO's commitment to the ISAF mission is a reflection of our transformation agenda and the alliance's resolve to address the new security challenges of the 21st century," the organization said in a statement today.
NATO decided several months ago to take over the security force, in large part to end the task of searching for a new "lead nation" every six months to run it.
The force has been led by Britain and Turkey -- and for the last six months jointly by Germany and the Netherlands -- since it was created in December 2001 to bolster security in Kabul following the U.S.-led war that toppled the Taliban government.
NATO has said that the security force's mission will not change under the alliance's direction.
About 90 percent of the force's troops are from NATO countries, though 15 of the 29 contributing countries are -- and will still be -- from non-NATO nations, said German peacekeeping spokesman Lt. Col. Thomas Lobbering.
The force's mandate from the U.N. Security Council expires in June, when nationwide elections are to be held to choose a new head of state. That mandate is likely to be extended, and NATO is prepared to lead the force "indefinitely," Lobbering said.
NATO will face the same challenge other lead nations have in the past: ensuring stability in Kabul and preventing possible terrorist strikes. The security force there suffered its worst attack in June, when a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden taxi killed four German peacekeepers and wounded 31 others.
Despite such threats, the capital is considered a safe island in a sea of insecurity. Much of Afghanistan is ruled by rival warlords whose armed factions frequently turn their guns on each other. A vast area along the southern and eastern border with Pakistan, meanwhile, is the scene of a low-level guerrilla insurgency being waged by Taliban rebels and their allies.
NATO currently leads other peacekeeping forces in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, and Bosnia.
-------- spies
Researcher at Taiwan's Spy Agency Resigns
Aug 10, 2003
(AP)
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TAIWAN_CHINA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Opposition lawmakers raised concerns about Taiwan's security Sunday, a day after a researcher at the island's spy agency resigned amid allegations that she invested in real estate in rival China.
In a brief statement Saturday, the National Security Bureau said Chang Pei-chen only conducted research on China's economy and was not involved in intelligence. It did not give a reason for her resignation.
Taiwan and China have had acrimonious relations since the two sides split in 1949 amid civil war. China regards the self-ruling island as part of its territory and has threatened military action against Taiwan.
Although Taiwan and China now have close business ties, the Taiwanese government regards China as its biggest security threat, and civil servants are not allowed to invest in the mainland.
Taiwanese newspapers said Chang and her husband had invested in real estate in Shanghai for 10 years in a joint venture with a state-run Chinese company. The investment was made public following the couple's financial disputes with their partners.
Lee Chia-chin, a lawmaker with the opposition Nationalist Party, accused the security bureau of failing to conduct proper checks on its employees. He also called for further investigations on whether Chang had leaked any state secrets to China.
The incident came days after a Taiwanese businessman was arrested on allegations of spying for China. Yeh Yu-chen was accused of selling military technology to Beijing.
----
A Washington suicide?
August 10, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/books/20030809-110425-9559r.htm
Just after publication of his damning account of the sins of the Soviet regime in 1939, "In Stalin's Secret Service," defected Soviet intelligence officer Walter G. Krivitsky told the New York Times, "If they ever try to prove that I took my own life, don't believe it." The Times used that quotation in a story when Krivitsky was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a locked hotel room near Washington's Union Station on Feb. 10, 1941. Washington police, after a cursory walk through, dismissed the death as a suicide. (OGPU is one of the many names for the agency that became KGB.)
Now we have "A Death in Washington," what should be the definitive book on the Krivitsky Affair: GaryKern offers a multi-faceted examination of a case that intrigued intelligence officers and buffs for more than half a century - essentially, the spook world's own "Who Killed Kennedy?" mystery. Did the Soviets murder Krivitsky, or did fears of harm to his family goad him into killing himself? Mr. Kern, a Soviet specialist who was an operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency's Clandestine Services for 34 years, dispassionately lays out the murder versus suicide evidence, and I do not intend to spoil a whopper of a book by telling you his conclusion.
By all accounts, Krivitsky was one of the best officers Soviet intelligence produced in its early years, and recounting his career occupies the first third of the book. Much of his story was related in his 1939 book, written by Isaac Don Levine., which for the most part has proved credible. Mr. Kern adds fresh details, confirming parts of the account, questioning others. But he does not contest that Krivitsky was a very important figure in the espionage world.
Krivitsky's origins were murky. The evidence is that he was born Samuel Ginsberg in 1899, in a drab Polish village in what is now Ukraine, smack against the border of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Oddly, this little hamlet produced no less than six able intelligence officers.) He joined the Bolsheviks in 1919 and soon became a razvedchik - an intelligence man, or spy in everyday language. He chose as his revolutionary cryptonym "Krivitsky," from the Slavic root term kriv, meaning "crooked, twisted, awry."
The size of the nascent Soviet intelligence services being what they were, a seemingly natural bent for the covert gave Krivitsky a fast rise; in short order he was the recognized expert on Poland, Germany, and other countries to a lesser extent.
His intelligence coups, in their totality, were awesome. Two of his officers in Germany obtained complete designs for a new aircraft engine. He counted among his agents Pierre Cot, the French minister for air (whose name would appear in Soviet intelligence cables in the famed VENONA intercepts made during the war years). There was even a fruitful contact with the mistress of King Carol II of Romania that led to a USSR alliance with that country. For a decade, Krivitsky was the ultimate super-spy, flitting from country to country, devoid of the diplomatic status that would save him from jail if caught, recruiting agents and gathering information. Such an agent walks the ultimate tight rope.
But his visits to the USSR showed Krivitsky the dark side of the revolution for which he toiled. One morning he left a comfortable rail coach in Moscow and strolled into the station. There he saw some 600 men, women and children, "some half-naked in the cold, some slumped over, others obviously dying of typhus." OGPU guardstold Krivitsky these wretched souls were "kulaks," which in Stalin-speak meant successful small farmers who opposed confiscation of their lands. These were the very people from whom Krivitsky had come. Now they were enroute to the Gulag. Shaken, nonetheless Krivitsky felt that given what was happening elsewhere in Europe, communism "still seemed the only hope of mankind."
But other disillusions followed. As the 1930s rolled on, he saw trusted intelligence colleagues summoned to Moscow for summary execution by a crazed Stalin. Many of these men he knew to be innocent of outlandish charges brought against them. Krivitsky knew his days were numbered.
Here commences the second phase of Mr. Kern's densely documented narrative: Krivitsky's defection by stages, beginning with contacts with French intelligence in 1938. By one account, his hours of interrogation on Soviet espionage in Europe produced 80large volumes of material - "perhaps one volume per spy?" Mr. Kern asks. We'll never know. The volumes vanished, accidentally dumped into the Seine (by French accounts) or pilfered by Soviet agents. He managed to get into the United States on a forged passport, but his location was surely soon known by Soviet agents.
A minor mystery at the time was why Rep. Samuel Dickstein, a New York Democrat, worked assiduously to have immigration authorities deport Krivitsky. The reason for Dickstein's interest is nasty. Documents from the VENONA intercepts and elsewhere reveal that Dickstein was on Moscow's payroll, and that he was ordered to force Krivitsky's deportation so he could be snatched up in Europe. Sending Krivitsky to certain death surely was a chore worth a handful of Soviet gold, andthe whorish Dickstein succeeded in gettingKrivitsky out of the United States for a period that he spent in Canada. But Krivitsky had told the core of his story to Adolph Berle of the State Department and to author Levine, who put his revelations into print.
But to little practical avail. The Roosevelt Administration essentially ignored leads that could have outed Alger Hiss and others. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shunned Krivitsky because of J. Edgar Hoover's rage about learning of a major Soviet defector through articles in the Saturday Evening Post serializing Krivitsky's book.
Krivitsky bounced briefly to London where he gave interrogators material enough to identify about 100 spies and their control officers. He told of seeing documents sent by these agents to Moscow that revealed the extent of Soviet penetration of the British government. A handful of the spies were jailed; others were neutralized. But the Brits missed much more. For instance, during initial interviews at the British Embassy in Washington, Krivitsky spoke of a Foreign Office agent who was a "Scotsman" from "a very good family."
Properly pursued, this could have led to exposure of Donald MacLean, who remained in Soviet service for more than a decade more. Krivitsky's information concerning another of the Cambridge traitors, Kim Philby, was overly broad: He knew that "a young Englishman" had been sent to Spain under journalistic cover during the Civil War to assassinate Francisco Franco. Given the number of Fleet Street men in Spain, the lead was worthless.
The depth of Stalin's rage over Krivitsky's defection is shown by the ferocity of attacks on his book by the trained-seal leftist media. A glitch by ghostwriter Levine gave critics material, for he inaccurately identified Krivitsky as a "general" - he held equivalent rank of a colonel - and with some overstatement he claimed he ran all of Soviet intelligence in Europe. In an attack with vicious anti-Semitic overtones, the left made much of the fact that Krivitsky had been born under another name - surely no surprise in the case of a professional intelligence officer.
If the left is capable of embarrassment (I happen to think not) the reddest face in journalism should have been the Nation, which published an angry denunciation of Krivitsky (by a so-called 'Committee of 400") for encouraging "the fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike." The Nation hit the newsstands the same week that Hitler and Stalin announced their infamous pact.
Krivitsky's prediction of just such a deal gave him renewed credibility - and also gave renewed urgency to Stalin's killers on the prowl. Krivitsky encountered three goons in a Times Square cafe. He confronted one of them, Sergei Basoff, an "illegal" longtime resident in the United States. (He was also known as Hans Brusse.) "Did you come to shoot me?" Krivitsky asked. No, no, Basoff protested, he wanted only a friendly chat. Krivitsky fled.
David Shub, a Russian-born journalist, sought to allay his fears. Given what you've said and written, Shub said, "nothing further can make a difference." Krivitsky shook his head and said, "I haven't told the most important." He would not elaborate. And what was "most important" can now only be a matter of speculation.
With his wife Krivitsky arranged to buy a chicken farm near Charlottesville, Va., plans he discussed while visiting a refugee couple living nearby. He had changed his name once again and applied for citizenship. He was moody but during the visit he talked of a new life as an anonymous farmer.
The last week of his life, he went into town to buy a pistol. The friend's wife drove him to Washington on Sunday, Feb. 9, 1941 and at 5:49 P. M. he checked into the Bellevue Hotel (now the George, in another incarnation) on E Street NW, a block or so from Union Station - a bustling place large enough to house 140 permanent residents and 260 daily guests. A maid found him the next morning behind a locked door, dead of a single gunshot wound to the head.
And here is where Gary Kern undertakes the most important part of his book, an analysis of the evidence of how Krivitsky came to die. For teasers, consider several items:Mr. Kern, himself a veteran field operative, notes that the supposedly locked door could be opened with a skeleton key sold at most hardware stories. The OGPU had samples in Krivitsky's handwriting in several languages, so forging suicide notes would have been easy.
The single bullet that killed Krivitsky penetrated a tile wall, fragmented, and dropped into a hollow space; D. C. police could not fish out the pieces, and they decided against tearing up the wall to retrieve them.The death weapon was found to the left side of Krivitsky's body, although he was right-handed. The DC cops quickly concluded suicide.
Krivitsky's memoir ended with a poignant sentence, written after he described his encounter with the Stalin hit men on Times Square: "I got away safely once more." Alas, not for long.
Arthur Koestler, himself a refugee from the communist system, spoke for many skeptics when he famously commented of the Krivitsky death, "There's an old OGPU saying, 'Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a natural death.''"
So, suicide or death? Mr. Kern's book is of enormous value in seeking the answer.
Joseph C. Goulden is working on a book on Cold War intelligence. His e-mail is JosephG894@AOL.COM.
----
A summary of domestic spying activities in the war on terrorism
BY BILL BERKOWITZ
August 10, 2003
Weekly Planet
http://www.weeklyplanet.com/current/cover3.html
Since 9-11, domestic spying projects have become as American as apple pie, the Fourth of July and baseball.
And like baseball in the age of free agency -- when eligible players can switch teams when their contracts expire -- it's difficult to follow the multitude of spy ops without a scorecard. With "The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003," otherwise known as the Patriot Act II, now under consideration by Congress, now is an opportune time to review some of the projects offered up by the Bush Administration since 9-11. Not every cranky proposal has passed muster: Some have already been kiboshed; some are operational; and some are still in development.
Let's start with the USA Patriot Act -- whose full name is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."
The Patriot Act was introduced by the administration, sailed through Congress and signed into law less than two months after 9-11. It essentially gave the government "new power to wiretap phones, confiscate property of suspected terrorists, spy on its own citizens without judicial review, conduct secret searches, snoop on the reading habits of library users," says Matt Welch, the Los Angeles correspondent for the National Post, and an editor of the L.A. Examiner.
Patriot Act II aims to "fill in the holes."
There are Terrorist Watch Lists currently being maintained by nine federal agencies. These lists, while not standardized, contain a wide variety of data including biographical information and, in some cases, biometric data such as fingerprints. An April 2003 General Accounting Office (GAO) report concluded that "the federal government's approach to developing and using terrorist and criminal watch lists in performing its border security mission is diffuse and nonstandard."
Early in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced his intentions to expand the Neighborhood Watch program. He earmarked $1.9-million in federal funds to help the National Sheriff's Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide. Neighborhood Watch, which began as a fairly low-key crime-prevention tool focused on neighborhood break-ins and burglaries, was earmarked for a broader role -- surveillance in the service of the "war on terrorism."
Highway Watch was established in 1998 by the American Trucking Association for truckers to report on a variety of common highway situations -- stranded motorists, drunk drivers, changing road conditions, poor signage, accidents, etc. Now, watching for suspicious terrorist activity is a major part of its activities.
Recently, the Transportation Security Administration announced it is developing a system called the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program II (CAPPS II), which will screen names, addresses, birth dates and other data regarding airline passengers.
Local police departments in a number of cities have re-instituted domestic surveillance programs that had been barred after revelations that the government had spied on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other so-called subversive individuals and groups.
Some cities are experimenting with e-surveillance, which allows residents to log on to their computers and monitor strategically placed video cams for criminal or terrorist activities.
Then there are a number of what could be called "big-ticket items" under development, such as:
1. The controversial Total Information Awareness program, proposed by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), became Terrorism Information Awareness and is now facing extinction.
2. The granddaddy of all neighbor-versus-neighbor spy-ops, Operation TIPS, was killed by Congress but appears to have morphed into something called the Talon project -- overseen by the omnipresent Paul Wolfowitz.
3. And LifeLog, a project that aims to gather as much information about an individual's activities as possible, is also under construction.
Total ... er, Terrorism Information Awareness
Last fall, DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, unveiled its Total Information Awareness (TIA) project. This project was the brainchild of retired Admiral John Poindexter, the Iran-Contra veteran who had been working as a DARPA contractor at the Arlington, Va.-based Syntek Technologies Inc., based in Arlington, Va. In November 2002, the Washington Post reported that Syntek "helped develop technology to search through large amounts of data."
Poindexter intended Total Information Awareness to be the mother of all data retrieval systems, sweeping information garnered from e-mail, Internet use, travel, credit-card purchases, telephone and bank records, driver's licenses and much more, into one very smart database.
Enough of a stink was raised about TIA that DARPA went back to the drawing board. In late May, the agency issued a 108-page report, which Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation found "disappointing." Tien told Wired News that "after more than a hundred pages, you don't know anything more about whether TIA will work or whether your civil liberties will be safe against it. DARPA is constantly trying to assuage privacy concerns. Their mantra is, 'We always operate within current law.'"
DARPA came up with one change -- they gave it a new name. Right-to-privacy advocates won't have Total Information Awareness to kick around any more. Conceding that the original name may have freaked out many Americans who hold dear the right to privacy, the Pentagon re-christened the project the "Terrorism Information Awareness" program -- a name DARPA hoped would silence the critics.
According to the TIA website, "The goal of the TIA program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists -- and decipher their plans -- and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts."
"While it's not even clear if the technology exists to make TIA work," Cynthia Webb pointed out at washingtonpost.com, "the Pentagon is already dedicating serious cash to the endeavor: $9.2-million is budgeted for the program this year; $20-million next fiscal year and $24.5-million in 2005."
The cosmetic changes by DARPA may not have been enough to save TIA. The Senate recently denied all funds for the Terrorism Information Awareness program.
Snipping Operation TIPS
Last year, the Department of Justice, in concert with several other agencies, was on the cusp of launching Operation TIPS (the Terrorist Information and Prevention System), a project that aimed to enlist one-million workers to act as extra eyes and ears for the president's war on terrorism. A wave of negative pre-launch publicity from privacy advocates, civil libertarians, liberal and conservative legislators and newspaper editorialists forced the government to moonwalk on TIPS.
A message was quickly posted at the Operation TIPS website saying that the government had "never intended" for workers to call the hotline for "anything other than publicly observable activities." Expressing concern that it wished to "safeguard against all possibilities of invasion of individual privacy," the Justice Department claimed that the hotline number would "not be shared with any workers, including postal and utility workers, whose work puts them in contact with homes and private property."
That didn't satisfy the critics and in July 2002, Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) introduced legislation banning Operation TIPS. Ultimately, TIPS was excluded from the final version of the Homeland Security Act.
Eliminating TIPS, however, didn't mean an end to the government efforts to involve ordinary citizens in the defense of the homeland.
Talon: The son of TIPS?
In early May, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz "directed the heads of military departments and agencies" to begin creating a database that would contain "raw, non-validated" reports of "anomalous activities" within the U.S., Wired News reported in late June. This new domestic spying system, called Talon, will develop a "mechanism to collect and rapidly share reports 'by concerned citizens and military members regarding suspicious incidents.'"
Wolfowitz, one of the neo-conservative architects of the Bush Administration's pre-emptive strike doctrine and a longtime advocate of invading Iraq, will oversee Talon's development. (Wolfowitz also was recently handed another new task by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- the authority to decide which terrorist captives should be tried by military tribunals.)
Details about Talon -- first reported at Kitetoa, a French security website -- remain sketchy. Peter S. Probst, a former Pentagon terrorism expert and currently a terrorism consultant and program director for the Virginia-based Institute for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, thinks the Talon program is necessary to protect Department of Defense property and personnel. "It would be derelict not to keep track of anomalous incidents. This is just common sense," Probst told Wired News.
Lee Tien, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that Talon raises red flags similar to those raised by Operation TIPS. "What is the value in accelerating the speed of the rumor mill?" Tien told Wired News. "You have a wealth of really weak data that ends up percolating its way through the system. How will they ensure that there's no opportunity for people's dossiers to become tainted?"
It's unclear "whether Talon reports would become part of the Pentagon's controversial Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program, or whether the data would be shared with other government agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security," reports Wired News. The Talon system "appears to have grown out of Eagle Eyes, an antiterrorism project developed by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Launched in April 2002, Eagle Eyes is a neighborhood watch-type program that 'enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror,' according to the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) website."
LifeLog
Then, there is LifeLog. In late-May, Defense Tech's Noah Schactman reported that the same folks at DARPA who had designed the Internet and given the world the global positioning satellite system (GPS) had come up with "a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable." It is called LifeLog, and it aims to catalogue every step you take and every move you make.
Schactman: "The embryonic LifeLog program would take every e-mail you've sent or received, every picture you've taken, every web page you've surfed, every phone call you've had, every TV show you've watched, every magazine you've read, and dump it into a giant database. All of this -- and more -- would be combined with a GPS transmitter, to keep tabs on where you're going; audio-visual sensors, to capture all that you see or say; and biomedical monitors, to keep track of your health.
"This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to 'trace the "threads" of an individual's life,' to see exactly how a relationship or events developed," according to a DARPA briefing.
And that's your domestic surveillance scoreboard. What's coming next is anybody's guess. One can't help but wonder: If 9-11 hadn't happened, what would the best and the brightest be working on?
Bill Berkowitz writes for WorkingForChange.com, where this article first appeared.
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CIA Director George J. Tenet Discusses the National Intelligence Estimate
Sunday, August 10, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39103-2003Aug9.html
On Oct. 1, 2002, the U.S. intelligence community completed a highly classified, 90-page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Most NIEs are initiated by administration policymakers, but this one was undertaken at the request of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose Democratic members wanted the community's judgments on the eve of voting on the resolution authorizing President Bush to take military action against Iraq. It also provided a basis for administration statements on Iraq's intentions. The Washington Post presented CIA Director George J. Tenet with a series of oral and written questions about the NIE. Here are excerpts from his written responses:
How was the NIE put together?
The process by which we produce NIEs -- including the one on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction -- has been honed over nearly 30 years. . . . This process is designed to produce coordinated judgments -- but not to the exclusion of differing views or without exposing uncertainties. During coordination, [intelligence] agencies send representatives who are actively engaged and change NIE drafts to reflect better the views of the experts in their respective agencies.
It is an open and vigorous process that allows for dissent to be registered by individual agencies in the final product. Indeed, alternative views are encouraged. Finally, the NIE is reviewed by the directors of U.S. intelligence agencies composing the Director of Central Intelligence-chaired National Foreign Intelligence Board, including, in this case, CIA, DIA (the Defense Intelligence Agency), INR (the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research), NSA (the National Security Agency), DOE (the Department of Energy) and NIMA (the National Imagery and Mapping Agency).
There have been reports that hard, new intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs has not been available since United Nations inspectors left that country in 1998 and that the NIE is thus based upon old information.
The history of our judgments on Iraq's weapons programs is clear and consistent. On biological weapons and missiles, our data got stronger in recent years. We have had a solid historical foundation and new data that have allowed us to make judgments and attribute high confidence in specific areas. And we had numerous credible sources, including many who provided information after 1998. When inspectors were pushed out in 1998, we did not sit back. Rather, we significantly increased our collection efforts throughout the intelligence community. In other words, despite what many read in the media that the NIE is based on nothing -- no sources, no understanding of complicated procurement networks, etc. -- the fact is we made significant professional progress.
Before the United States attacked Iraq last March, what was the assessment of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programs?
The NIE points out that by 2002, all [intelligence community] agencies assessed that Saddam did not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient fissile material to make any, but never abandoned his nuclear weapons ambitions.
Moreover, most agencies believed that Iraq's attempts to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes for centrifuge rotors, magnets, high-speed balancing machines and machine tools, as well as Iraq's efforts to enhance its cadre of weapons personnel and activities at several suspect nuclear sites, indicated that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam's personal interest in some of these efforts was also considered.
DOE agreed that reconstitution was underway, but assessed that the tubes probably were not part of the program. INR assessed that Baghdad was pursuing at least a limited effort to acquire nuclear weapon-related capabilities, but not an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons; INR was not persuaded that the tubes were intended for the nuclear program. All other agencies, including DOE, assessed that Iraq probably would not have a weapon until 2007 to 2009, consistent with the decade-old judgment of Iraq needing five to seven years to develop a weapons-grade uranium enrichment capability if freed from constraints.
What should people look for now since no weapons have yet been found?
As with any other topic addressed in an NIE, the acquisition of further evidence may confirm some of our judgments while calling others into question. Operation Iraqi Freedom obviously has opened a major new opportunity for learning about the WMD activities of Saddam Hussein's regime. We have no doubt, however, that the NIE was the most reasonable, well-grounded, and objective assessment of Iraq's WMD programs that was possible at the time it was produced.
-- Walter Pincus
-------- us
Army to consider anthrax as cause in pneumonia cases
August 07, 2003
By Mark Benjamin
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030806-104019-1693r.htm
The Army will consider whether the anthrax or other vaccines could be causing a cluster of pneumonia cases among soldiers in Iraq and southwestern Asia, an official said yesterday.
Col. Robert DeFraites of the Army Surgeon General's Office told United Press International that the Pentagon would look into whether vaccines, among other factors, might have triggered the pneumonia that has killed two soldiers and sickened 100.
"Among all of the possible causes or contributing factors, we are looking at the immunizations that the soldiers received as well," Col. DeFraites said. "It is premature to say that there is any relationship at all."
The Pentagon announced Tuesday it is investigating the cases in search of a common factor, but did not mention vaccines as a possibility.
A co-author of a government-sponsored study of possible side effects from the anthrax vaccine told UPI Tuesday that the Army should look at whether that vaccine is behind the cluster of pneumonia cases. That study last year found the vaccine was the "possible or probable" cause of pneumonia in two soldiers.
"As physicians, I would think they would be looking at all possible causes. I would think vaccines would be part of that," said Dr. John L. Sever of George Washington University's medical school, who was one of six authors of the study.
Under a 1998 law, the military is supposed to take samples of soldiers' blood before and after deploying. One Gulf war illness expert said yesterday that the Pentagon should use the samples to see if the anthrax vaccine is to blame.
"We need them to investigate the role of vaccines as aggressively as everything else in order to rule it in or out," said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.
"The question is, did these soldiers get their blood screened?" Mr. Robinson said. "It is my opinion that they missed a large portion of the soldiers who deployed for this war."
Last year's anthrax vaccine study, printed in the May 2002 issue of Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, found that the vaccine was the "possible or probable" cause of pneumonia among two soldiers, according to Dr. Sever. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services convened the group, called the Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee, which studied 602 reports of possible reactions to the vaccine among nearly 400,000 troops who received it, Dr. Sever said.
In addition to identifying pneumonia and flulike symptoms among troops who received the vaccine, the group also looked at four other cases of potentially serious reactions, including severe back pain and two soldiers who had sudden difficulty breathing in a possible allergic reaction to the vaccine.
Dr. Sever described the two cases of pneumonia as "wheezing and difficulty breathing going into a pneumonialike picture."
To conduct the study, the Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee examined reports from the U.S. military to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; they are anecdotal reports and do not necessarily show a cause-and-effect relationship.
Col. DeFraites said that the two deaths under investigation by the Army surgeon general occurred in June and July, and that both soldiers had been in Iraq. He said the investigation began as soon as the first death occurred.
-------- propaganda wars
Bush's scary message control
Saturday, August 09, 2003
Roanoke Times (Virginia)
http://www.roanoke.com/roatimes/news/story153538.html
This White House has gone beyond mastering damage control to making pre-emptive strikes that distort unfavorable information or keep it hidden from public view.
THE PICTURE emerging of the Bush White House is that of a radical administration so certain of its ideological rightness that it will distort and manipulate information as needed to soothe moderates and silence critics.
And beware of telling truths that stymie administration aims or contradict its spin. That offense can endanger loved ones.
This latest and, to date, most chilling allegation comes from retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whose wife was exposed by conservative columnist Robert Novak as a CIA operative. Novak says he got his information from senior administration officials.
If so, someone high in the administration broke the law. Wilson is sure the disclosure is meant to warn off anyone who can reveal information on the administration's possible misuse of intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq war.
Wilson was in a position to do so because, at the behest of the CIA, he had traveled to Niger in February 2002 to check the reliability of a document that contended Iraq was trying to buy nuclear weapons material.
Wilson found no basis for the report - bad enough, from the perspective of a White House building its case for war. But Wilson ran truly afoul of the administration only last month, when he wrote an op-ed article in The New York Times that revealed both his role and the duplicity of senior administration officials in contending that only low-level intelligence officials knew of his findings.
The White House was forced at last to admit that it knowingly included in President Bush's State of the Union address in January a justification for war that, in Wilson's words, was "so transparently unsubstantiable."
Outing an undercover operative would escalate hardball politics to political suppression. And Wilson's frightening portrayal of an administration in which "spin" is spinning wildly out of control is all too credible.
Bush shows time and again his willingness to censor, distort or simply ignore scientific evidence contrary to his policy objectives - including data on global warming, on Arctic oil drilling and wildlife, on stem-cell research, on tax cuts and budget deficits, on abortion, on condoms and "abstinence only" sex education.
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman's 40-page report detailing administration manipulations might be dismissed as partisan politics - except that, in recent months, the editors of a list of prestigious scientific journals have sounded the same alarm.
Every modern president's penchant for controlling the message has metastasized during this presidency into controlling the free flow of information that is the lifeblood of a self-governing society. Bush and his advisers are heading beyond partisanship onto dangerous new ground.
-------- war crimes
US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
10 August 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=432201
American pilots dropped the controversial incendiary agent napalm on Iraqi troops during the advance on Baghdad. The attacks caused massive fireballs that obliterated several Iraqi positions....
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Justice Criticizes Lengthy Sentences
August 10, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/national/10JUST.html
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 9 (AP) - Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court said today that prison terms were too long and that he favored ending mandatory minimum sentences for some federal crimes.
"Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long," Justice Kennedy said in remarks prepared for delivery to the annual meeting of the American Bar Association.
"I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences," he said. "In too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unwise or unjust."
Justice Kennedy's criticism puts him at odds with Attorney General John Ashcroft, who wants prosecutors to monitor which judges impose more lenient sentences than federal guidelines recommend. Such oversight, critics say, could limit judicial independence.
-------- homeland security
Net link to warn D.C. of bioterror
August 08, 2003
By Tom Ramstack
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20030807-100846-3912r.htm
The D.C. Department of Health is setting up a computerized system to link area health clinics and other agencies in an early warning system for a bioterrorist attack.
The system would depend heavily on the Internet and wireless communications to receive reports of any unusual biological activity and coordinate an emergency response.
"It greatly enhances our ability to respond to these threats effectively and it increases the facilitation of critical information sharing when such events occur," said John Davies-Cole, chief epidemiologist for the D.C. Department of Health.
"The project will be done in phases," Dr. Davies-Cole said. "Phase 1 will be completed in November. This is a multiyear initiative with several different implementation phases that are still currently in development."
The health department plans to announce the program this month.
The Washington Automated Disease Surveillance System is one of dozens of disease early warning systems being developed in cities and states nationwide under guidance and funding by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The D.C. Health Department is enlisting schools, hospitals, pharmacies, veterinary clinics and others. They would put their regular activity records into "a controlled and secure access Web interface," Dr. Davies-Cole said.
The system would file the records into a central database operated by the health department. The software would be programmed to note any unusual activity.
Examples include a sudden increase in school absenteeism, more over-the-counter sales of drugs for specific symptoms or a large number of animals being treated by veterinarians for illness.
When the number of reports reaches a threshold set by the health department, the disease surveillance system would send automated warnings about an outbreak or similar incident to appropriate health officials.
Health department investigators then would be sent to the scene of the incident to collect any other important information and report it with hand-held wireless data transmitters.
The D.C. Health Department is acquiring its software from Atlantic Management Center Inc. of Falls Church and its contractors, Accela and Oracle.
The health department already shares a database with some institutions, such as Washington Hospital Center.
Shared information generally consists of the age, sex, chief complaints and ZIP codes of patients, but it does not list their names.
"There's never anything more than those very broad demographic characteristics," said Dr. Mark Smith, Washington Hospital Center's chief of emergency medicine. "You're looking for population trends."
Although organizations submitting their records will not be paid, the added workload would be minimal, says the Medical Society of the District of Columbia.
"It won't be more work," said David Love, spokesman for the medical society.
The only difference for the organizations involved is they would enter the information they already collect into a special Internet site, he said.
The D.C. health department's Bureau of Epidemiology and Health Risk Assessment is overseeing the program.
A General Accounting Office report in May cited deficiencies in the information technology for responding to biological incidents. The disease surveillance system and GAO report come in response to the 2001 anthrax scare, when deadly spores were sent through the mail to members of Congress, news outlets and others.
--------
Report Finds Threat Alerts in Color Code Baffle Public
August 10, 2003
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/national/10THRE.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 - A new Congressional report has found that the government's much ridiculed color-coded terrorist alert system is so vague in detailing threats that the public "may begin to question the authenticity" of the threats and take no action when the alert level is raised.
The review by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan branch of the Library of Congress, offered lawmakers options for replacing or overhauling the system, including a proposal that the five-color palette of alert levels be replaced with "general warnings concerning the threat of terrorist attacks."
The Aug. 6 report has not been made public, although it has been circulated to members of Congress involved in oversight of the Department of Homeland Security, which administers the color-coded alerts.
While the report does not recommend that the alert system, called the Homeland Security Advisory System, or H.S.A.S., be scrapped or suggest any other specific action, its catalog of existing criticism will probably be seized on by lawmakers who argue that the system needlessly confuses and alarms the public.
"This report seriously calls into question the value of the Homeland Security color-code system," said Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat who is a leading critic of the system. "The system may be doing more harm than good. If the Department of Homeland Security doesn't revamp this system, Congress may have to do it for them."
The report's authors cited, but did not necessarily endorse, criticism that "when federal officials announce a new warning about terrorist attacks, the threats are too vague."
"The vagueness that characterized the four increases in the threat condition in the past two years has raised concerns that the public may begin to question the authenticity of the H.S.A.S. threat level," the report said. "Questions about the credibility of the threat, say other observers, might cause the public to wonder how to act or whether to take any special action at all."
The Homeland Security Department has acknowledged that the system, which went into operation in March last year, needs adjustment.
In June, Tom Ridge, the department secretary, who is responsible for setting the alert level, said the agency would try to create a procedure allowing for alert levels to be raised or lowered for specific regions or industries, rather than for the whole country.
Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that agency officials had not seen the Congressional report but that they continued to believe the color-coded alerts were valuable.
"The color-coded system indicates the U.S. intelligence community's best assessment of the collective threat against this nation," Mr. Roehrkasse said, adding that the department was trying to provide more detailed threat information to the public and had begun "a process of working with our state partners, mayors and private sector partners, inviting them to provide feedback on how the system is working for them."
The nation's current alert level is set at yellow, representing an "elevated" level of terrorist threat. The level has been raised to orange ("high") four times, most recently in May, after terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco. It has never fallen below yellow to blue ("guarded") or green ("low"), nor has it ever been raised to red ("severe"), the highest level of alert.
The color-coded system has been a constant target of criticism from state and local government leaders, who say their law enforcement budgets are strained whenever the national threat level is raised, and a target of ridicule from late-night television comedians and much of the public.
The system has created particular confusion in rural, sparsely populated parts of the country that appear to face no obvious terrorist threat but have been expected to step up security nonetheless when the national alert is raised. Mr. Ridge has acknowledged the confusion, noting that the intelligence reports that lead to raising the alert level are usually vague about times, places and methods of attack.
In weighing whether to replace or overhaul the color-coded system, the report's authors said that Congress might want to leave the decision to the homeland security agency.
But the report said that "maintaining the status quo" means that the department will be forced to deal indefinitely with "complaints about the vagueness of H.S.A.S. warnings and the critiques of D.H.S.'s perceived inability to give adequate terrorist attack warnings."
The report said Congress might want to direct the department to replace the current system with "general warnings concerning the threat of terrorist attacks."
--------
Terrorist risk lists leave gap, even now
8/10/2003
By Mimi Hall,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-08-10-watchlist_x.htm
WASHINGTON - Nearly two years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, key federal agencies have not consolidated a dozen separate "watch lists" intended to keep terrorists out of the country, even though sharing that kind of information might have caught two of the suicide hijackers before they carried out their plot.
The Department of Homeland Security says it is working to combine lists of potential security risks maintained by at least nine agencies, but it has no timetable for finishing the job. Officials say critics underestimate the complexity of the task, especially technical problems involving computers and databases not designed to share information. They add that it is important to verify accuracy among lists that often name the same person with different spellings, birth dates or hometowns.
If federal agencies had been sharing information and using a master watch list, "then 9/11 might not have happened," says Ivo Daalder, a homeland-security expert at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. "I find it criminal that it hasn't happened yet."
Making all lists of people-to-watch accessible to all the intelligence agencies became a priority after Sept. 11 revealed critical lapses in information-sharing between the FBI and CIA.
Last month, a congressional report criticized the CIA for waiting until August 2001 to give the FBI detailed information about Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The two men, who were hijackers on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, were placed on a watch list. But by then they had lived for several months in San Diego.
Watch lists are used by consular officials abroad who check names of those applying for visas to enter the USA, agents who check those crossing U.S. borders and airline workers who check people making flight reservations.
"The administration is getting closer to the end of its planning process," says Gordon Johndroe of the Homeland Security Department. "But this is a very complicated issue, and we're not going to rush something out that isn't completely effective."
Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democratic leader on homeland security in Congress, says the lack of progress is "an intolerable failure that exposes the American public to unacceptable risk."
Lieberman, who is running for president, has called on President Bush to sign an executive order requiring consolidation of the lists by the end of the year. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge last week, he demanded a timetable for when the work would be done.
Bush and Ridge have not responded directly to Lieberman.
The task is daunting. "It's a huge problem," says Roger Kay, a technology analyst with IDC, a market research company in Framingham, Mass. Some companies that have merged have taken years to combine databases not nearly as complex. But if the government made integrating the systems a priority, it could put as much money as needed into the project and hire the world's best experts and get it done, Kay says.
"It's not a surprise that with 12 different lists held by nine different agencies that there have been difficulties in consolidating those lists," says Asha George of the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security.
"On the other hand, it's been two years."
Contributing: Contributing: Toni Locy
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
California to Ban Chemicals Used as Flame Retardants
August 10, 2003
New York Times
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/national/10CHEM.html
Reacting to research showing the rapid accumulation of widely used flame retardants in humans and wildlife, California will become the first state to ban the chemicals, which are suspected of contributing to learning disorders, attention deficit and hyperactivity in children.
Gov. Gray Davis is scheduled to sign legislation to eventually ban flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDE's. The chemicals, developed in the 1960's, are found in the plastics and foams used in furniture and electronic equipment. The ban would start in 2008, a compromise date set by the chemical industry and California state legislators.
Of the chemicals besides pesticides that humans and wildlife absorb from the environment, only three - mercury, lead and polychlorinated biphenyls or PCB's - are known to harm health at levels that accumulate in the body. PBDE's, scientists say, are a strong candidate to be a fourth. They appear to be traveling widely around the globe, showing up in polar bears, dolphins and sperm whales.
California is following the lead of the European Union, which imposed a similar ban this year, prompted by a Swedish study that reported the levels of the chemicals in breast milk in Sweden had increased fortyfold from 1972 to 1997. China and South Korea are considering bans.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency is analyzing the effect of the chemicals. Lisa Harrison, a spokeswoman, said the agency was evaluating information from the chemical industry and would "make recommendations whether additional hazard and exposure information is needed."
Research shows that the level of the chemicals in the breast milk of North American women is the highest recorded, the California Environmental Protection Agency said. The median level in the breast milk of California women is 3 to 10 times higher than the level in the milk of European women, the agency said.
The levels in the bodies of American women and babies are within the minimal safety margin often used by environmental toxicologists. Scientists say that levels in humans are rising rapidly.
Scientists liken PBDE's to PCB's, industrial chemicals that were banned in 1977 for their environmental hazard and harm to humans. The chemicals, which have similar structures, accumulate in body fat and take decades to break down in the environment.
"All you have to do is look at the molecule and say, `This is a bad scene,' " said Ross Norstrom, an environmental chemist who retired from Environment Canada, a government agency, in June.
Tests on mice at Uppsala University in Sweden show that the chemicals can harm their brains in ways similar to the harm from PCB's.
No studies of the effect of the chemicals on human health have been published, but researchers are extrapolating their concern from animal studies and knowledge about how PCB's harm humans.
"Our primary concern is that PBDE disrupts the thyroid hormone balance and causes harm to the developing brain," said Tom McDonald, a toxicologist with the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. "We're talking about subtle effects: hyperactivity, hearing loss, less ability to learn."
Two recent studies of mice show that PBDE's and PCB's may have a compound effect.
While the hazards of PCB's were first noted in the 1930's, PBDE's have only recently emerged as a cause for concern.
"The most interesting thing about PBDE`s is that we were taken completely by surprise," said Jianwen She, an environmental biochemist with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.
While the United States does not archive breast milk samples as Sweden does, American blood samples from the 1960's do not show the presence of PBDE's.
"What we could measure in the 1990's, we couldn't measure in the 1960's," said Mytro Petreas, an environmental biochemist with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.
The rise in PBDE's apparently is occurring in part because the chemicals became more widely used as governments raised flammability resistance requirements for products. California has among the most stringent antiflammability requirements in the country, though the California environmental toxicologists say tests show that women from Indiana, Colorado, New York, Texas and Canada have levels of PBDE's similar to those of California women. Scientists say it is unclear how PBDE's are getting into humans. California environmental scientists say they have observed high levels of PBDE's in household dust.
Great Lakes Chemical, based in Indianapolis, is the primary producer of PBDE's. It lobbied to have the year the California ban takes effect changed to 2008, from 2006, and has begun looking for flame retardant substitutes.
States generally defer to the federal government in regulating toxic chemicals because of the scientific and financial burden of studying them. The emerging research, however, prompted Wilma Chan, the majority leader of the California Assembly, to propose a ban, which drew the support of the California Environmental Protection Agency.
Winston Hickox, secretary of the agency characterized the federal policy as "inaction."
"It seemed to us to be irresponsible for us not to address these health risks," Mr. Hickox said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesting Washington's killing sprees
BY ALISON DELLIT
From Green Left Weekly,
August 10, 2003.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/549p5.htm
"So why should I be here protesting, when the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 41 years before I was born?", Duncun Meerding asked the 130 protesters gathered in Hobart on August 9. "I may not have lived through that war, but the wars I know are unjust and greedy. These are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Like hundreds of other Australians - 500 in Melbourne, 4-500 in Sydney, 200 in Brisbane (on August 8), 100 in Perth and 50 in Canberra - Meerding protested on the anniversary of the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US government, pointing out how little had changed in a world still marked by Washington's military aggression.
Protesters condemned the US-British occupation of Iraq. "[The occupation] is about privatising the Middle East and providing a springboard for further military action", anti-bases activist Denis Doherty told the Sydney rally.
The use of depleted uranium, and the spread of nuclear weapons, was also a focus of activists around the country, as was Israel's war on Palestine. Sydney Palestinian activist Rihab Charida reminded the crowd that "we cannot accept war and occupation dressed up as peace. Real peace requires justice."
A key concern was summed up the Brisbane leaflet: "How do we prevent the Australian government from being involved in an open-ended series of pre-emptive military actions and confrontations?"
"We need to keep taking to the streets", David Glanz from the Cancun Solidarity Committee told the Melbourne protest. In Perth, the Socialist Alliance's Max Lane also argued that it was possible to stop the US. "We can only win a safe, just world by acting in solidarity with the Third World", he emphasised.
--------
Protest Groups Planning for Republican Convention
August 10, 2003
New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/nyregion/10CONV.html
One night last week, dozens of young people - anarchists, environmentalists, pacifists, and just about every other ist out there - crammed together in a Brooklyn storefront to brainstorm how they would take advantage of a unique opportunity a year away.
The man they view as their archnemesis, President Bush, will visit their turf next summer for the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, a springboard for Mr. Bush's re-election campaign and for what dissenters say will be protests on a scale not seen in the city in dozens of years.
Those at the meeting discussed everything from where protesters could stay to proposed rally themes. One woman suggested, "How Bush stole the election in Florida," and another offered, "The politicization of 9/11." Perhaps most important, they promised to bring together their divergent voices in the name of tarnishing what is planned to be a shining moment for the president.
The meeting was an example of the growing number of discussions, meetings, e-mail communications and other forms of networking taking place across New York City among more than 150 groups planning demonstrations during the convention. The groups intend to voice their disagreement with the Bush administration's policies, especially the Iraq war, and the perception that his re-election campaign will politicize the commemoration of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Organizers said they believe that the city's size and the fact that many radical groups call it home will lead to larger-than-usual protests.
"The truth of the matter is we were given an advantage by them being in New York because of the population center here," said Leslie Cagan, a leader of United for Peace and Justice, an antiwar group planning a march on the eve of the convention.
United for Peace and Justice has applied for a police permit to march past the Garden on Aug. 29, 2004, and into Central Park for a rally on the Great Lawn. The convention is to run from Aug. 30 through Sept. 2.
The Police Department has not responded to the march application, but the Parks Department has denied the group permission to gather in the park because, a spokeswoman said, the group's projected attendance for the event - 250,000 people - exceeds the Great Lawn's capacity of 80,000 for gatherings. The spokeswoman, Megan Sheekey, said the department offered to help the group find another site.
Some relatives of people killed on 9/11 say they are considering joining protests or organizing their own, out of a feeling that the Republicans, by holding the convention in New York so close to the anniversary of the attacks, are exploiting it.
Some protesters were galvanized by news reports, which state officials have denied, that the cornerstone for the rebuilding of ground zero would be laid during the convention.
"The unifying theme about the Republican convention next year is keep your hands off ground zero," said Rita Lasar, a founder of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group of about 80 relatives of attack victims. "Do not make a political football out of this. This is a place where very close, dear relatives died. It's not the backdrop for a political campaign."
Republican officials insist their convention will not politicize the attacks, though they have wrestled internally over what, if anything, to do or say about ground zero. But former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the chairman of the convention host committee, said at a gathering of party leaders last month that discussion of Sept. 11 and the president's actions should not be off limits.
"There is no escaping the fact that Sept. 11 is going to be analyzed from a political point of view," Mr. Giuliani said. "Opponents are going to find things to criticize, and those of us who support the president are going to rightfully use it as an example of his very strong leadership."
The chief executive of the convention, William D. Harris, said the Republicans would not stifle protests. "We believe in free-speech rights," he said, adding that organizers would yield to the Police Department and the Secret Service to determine where protests would be allowed.
So far, city officials do not have a plan. Although conventions for both parties in recent years have designated areas for protests, New York officials did not include such plans in their contract with the Republicans.
Jennifer Falk, a spokeswoman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said city officials anticipated large demonstrations and would aim to accommodate them while ensuring that the convention was not interrupted.
"Once we are closer to the convention and have a sense of the volume of requests, and their size and scope, we will make a determination as to the location and size of the demonstration areas permitted," she said.
But some organizers said that in an effort to assert their free speech rights, they would plan demonstrations in areas other than those designated for that purpose.
The Rev. Peter Laarman, the leader of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South, who is coordinating discussion among dozens of groups, said he was emphasizing peaceful protests.
"The overarching message should be Republicans are welcome here and should spend lots of money here because we need it," Mr. Laarman said. "But we have reservations about the way the country is going."
At least two Web sites - counterconvention.org and rncnotwelcome.org - have been created to promote demonstrations.
William Etundi Jr., a founder of counterconvention.org, which helped organize the Brooklyn meeting last week, said the aim was not to halt the convention but to unify protest groups around a common goal of getting their message out.
"What we have seen in protests in the past was unions who don't speak to religious organizations who don't speak to the anarchists who don't speak to community organizations," he said. "Organizations and people are not always on the same page."
"I would love to see grandmas from Harlem come down in droves, Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn, people from East New York," Mr. Etundi added. "And what I think is going to drive the mainstream is that they are exploiting 9/11 for political gain. It's going to be a showdown."
----
Survivors Tell Japan's Tale Of Devastation
Atomic Bomb Anniversary Evokes Painful Memories
By Maha Al-Azar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page C08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39436-2003Aug9.html
Masakazu Saito says he still suffers from physical pain -- 58 years after the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, where he was stationed as a soldier. But he feels lucky, because unlike 200 friends, relatives and acquaintances who died of cancer, he has shown no symptoms of the illness.
Saito, 80, is one of four Hiroshima survivors who came to the United States to raise awareness of the horrors of nuclear weapons, marking the dates in 1945 when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki on Aug. 9.
At least 200,000 people died; Saito is one of an estimated 280,000 Japanese Hibakusha, or survivors.
During a potluck dinner held Friday at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church on 16th Street NW, Saito showed an audience of about 30 personal drawings describing his story in 1945.
The hand-drawn pictures were bright and colorful, but the subject was suffering.
Saito said that he was 1.12 miles away from the bomb's point of impact. He was 21.
The almost 60 years have not dimmed his memories: intense heat and pressure, falling buildings, skin and stone burning, melting. Saito showed drawings depicting his body covered with burns. He was pinned beneath the two-story barracks where he was stationed, he said, five ribs on the right side of his body broken.
Unconscious and covered in blood, he was taken to a crematorium. "On the verge of being cremated, I somehow uttered a few words and was saved," he said in a translated written statement distributed to reporters.
"I still have pieces of glass embedded in my body. . . . When the weather changes, the symptoms get worse; I experience nausea, headaches and fatigue," Saito told the audience through an interpreter.
Saito is one of the founders of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations, established in 1956 and known as Nihon Hidankyo. He was here at the invitation of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee of the National Capital Area, initiated in the early 1980s under the guidance of the Gray Panthers. And the dinner was a culmination of four days of activities that began Tuesday. Two of the four touring survivors, Ryuma Miyanaga, 73, and Eiji Nakanishi, 61, spent the past week giving talks in New Jersey. The four are scheduled to return to Japan on Tuesday.
The survivor who accompanied Saito, Koji Ueda, 61, said he was 31/2 when the Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. His family lived 6.2 miles from impact. He has no memory of what happened, but he has heard many stories.
"My mother has talked about what she saw that day, saying it was impossible to believe that those scenes . . . were from this world," Ueda said in a written statement. "People with severe burns, faces melted beyond recognition, skin dripping twenty centimeters off their fingertips."
"In the heat of the summer, victims' wounds began to crawl with maggots after only a day. They cried out in pain, but all my mother could do was try to remove the maggots with chopsticks and offer encouragement.
"As more and more died, their bodies were piled up on the riverbank and burned with gasoline. Mixed among the dead were those that were still barely alive. When the pile was ignited you could hear those that were still alive let out one final ghastly scream."
Shalom Black, who teaches English literature at Catholic University, said that though World War II is a common theme in literature classes, stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not included and not available in small public libraries.
"Literature about the Jewish Holocaust was required reading when I was in school. I was moved and shocked by stories from the concentration camps," she said. "In school I was never assigned a book or story on the Japanese victims."
She argued that overlooking lives lost to nuclear weapons has led to a pop culture with nonchalant references to the bomb.
Scott Gordon read Hidankyo's message, which called for the United States to apologize and commit to eliminating nuclear weapons from its arsenal. "Nuclear weapons cause a large number of victims through the entire process of their production -- from uranium mining, to development, manufacturing, testing and use.
"No words can adequately describe the horror of these weapons that tortured and killed tens of thousands of people by throwing them into infernos in an instant," he said. "That is why we say nuclear weapons are the weapons of the devil."
----
Protesters Mark Hiroshima Anniversary
August 10, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-peace-protests,0,2904807.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Peace-Protests.html
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- About 300 protesters marched on the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant Sunday, waving banners and carrying ashes to symbolize the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
``It is fire and damnation. You are protecting a death camp,'' protester Erik Johnson, 59, shouted at two dozen security guards watching from the other side of a barricade at the entrance to the Y-12 facility.
Johnson and four other protesters, ages 69 to 86, were arrested for blocking the roadway.
About 50 veterans and plant supporters gathered for a counter-demonstration, with one shouting over a bullhorn: ``You lose, we win, the plant is still open.''
The Y-12 plant made uranium for the ``Little Boy'' bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, near the end of World War II. The protest marked that anniversary and Y-12's continuing role in making parts for every nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal.
``That bomb got me back to the United States,'' said Ken Allred, 80, a counter-demonstrator who said he was serving in the Navy in the South Pacific when the bomb was dropped. ``It saved a lot of lives.''
Also Sunday, about 1,000 people rallied outside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 35 miles east of San Francisco, to protest the Bush administration's move to develop new nuclear weapons. Three women were arrested after blocking an entrance to the nuclear weapons lab, but were later cited and released.
Some protesters held signs that read ``Hiroshima Never Again,'' and ``Abolish Nuclear Weapons Now.''
``When you have an administration openly talking about a possible use of so-called tactical nuclear weapons, we have to be out to talk about stopping it in places like Livermore lab,'' said protester Damu Smith.
Demonstrators lashed out against the government's ongoing research project on a new Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a nuclear bomb that could destroy deeply buried targets but also create radioactive fallout.
``The U.S. nuclear policy is leading the world in exactly the wrong direction,'' said Nathan Britton of California Peace Action. ``Global disarmament starts at home.''
EDITOR'S NOTE: AP writer Toshi Maeda in Livermore, Calif., contributed to this report.
----
Veterans Organize To Bring Troops Home
"Veterans For Peace" is gearing up to become a major national force to oppose the Bush Administration both at home and overseas.
By Stewart Nusbaumer
Intervention Magazine
Sunday, August 10, 2003
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=469
At the Veterans for Peace annual convention this weekend in San Francisco, the most pressing issue was not veterans' affairs or government benefits or even homeless veterans, although these and more subjects were discussed. What fired up these aging veterans was the threat to our civil rights, and even more, the continuing war in Iraq. Veterans For Peace is not your traditional veterans' group.
The largest antiwar veterans group in the United States, Veterans For Peace has 103 chapters from Maine to California to Florida. With the war in Iraq, membership has grown substantially. The New Mexico chapter had 11 members when it formed last year, this year it has 130. Overall membership has climbed to more than 3,500, doubling in a single year.
At its annual convention held this year in San Francisco's historic Veterans Memorial Building (the birthplace of the United Nations), an estimated 400 veterans discussed subjects ranging from gay and lesbian veterans to networking with traditional veterans' groups. Drawing the largest crowds were the meetings pertaining to the Iraq war and those strategizing to oppose that war: "Lessons of Recent Veterans' Anti-War Actions: Working Out Strategies Opposing Militarism," and "The Invasion of Iraq: Background and Personal Observation."
"The beginning of the end of war starts with remembrance," said Woody Powell, chairman of Veterans For Peace. "If this is true, then the beginning of starting war must be in forgetting."
Remembering and forgetting is the heart of every veterans gathering, but with these veterans there is a major difference. Remembering is put into the service of ending war, and forgetting is slammed for allowing war. Most of these veterans served during the Korean and Vietnam War eras, and now they want Americans to remember that wars to control other people's resources and sovereignty are not only wrong but will end in disaster for America. They know this from personal experience; they have no problem with remembering that war is seldom a good idea. And they want Americans to remember it was they who fought America's past wars, not President Bush and nearly all of his top advisors who today are so hawkish for war. It is they who possess the experience and the knowledge and therefore the credibility to be listened to on issues of war and peace, not the chickenhawks in Washington.
And veterans, said Korean War veteran Woody Powell, must remember that they have a responsibility to seek out citizens and speak at public forums -- to not allow Americans to forget. The special responsibility of veterans to tell the truth about war was a constant theme, as was the need for Veterans For Peace to raise its national profile as the primary voice for military veterans opposing not only the Iraq War but also all of the Bush Administration's reckless foreign adventures.
Amongst these veterans, there is a sense of growing crisis, a feeling that America is in danger of changing irrevocably for the worse. "We are facing the greatest struggle of our lives," Vietnam veteran Dave Cline told a packed room of veterans. "What Johnson and Nixon did on a regional level, Bush is now attempting to do on a global level."
"Most Americans were against this war, but they were manipulated, they were systemically lied to," said Cline, who is the current President of Veterans For Peace. "Veterans attempted to stop the war, we organized a teach-in, a demonstration and lobbying effort in the nation's capital. We worked hard."
But the mainstream corporate media highlighted those veterans who supported the war, especially retired colonels and generals (paid by the media because of their contacts with the Pentagon), and tended to ignore veterans who opposed the war, often former enlisted soldiers and sailors. "What was truly surprising about this veterans' effort to stop the Iraq War," said Jan Barry, an organizer of Veterans Against Iraq War a new group that worked in a coalition with other veteran groups in opposition to the war in Iraq, "is how many career military veterans and politically conservative veterans opposed the invasion of Iraq. Opposition to this war is very deep and very broad in the veterans' community." But this anti-war message was muffled and even ignored by the media.
Unable to stop the invasion and occupation of the war, Dave Cline continues, veterans pulled back; some became depressed. "But we're gearing up again, this time to bring the troops home. We'll join with other antiwar groups and coalitions in large actions, but we will also perform independent actions."
Among the resolutions passed by the Veterans For Peace Board of Directors, one demands an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and another the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Still another supports a United Nation's takeover of the security and reconstruction effort in Iraq.
"We have to demystify war, make it not glamorous," former Green Beret Stan Goff told another group of veterans and their spouses. "And we need to reduce fear here at home but talking out, by going in the streets where people can see us and speaking out." A woman spoke up, saying veterans are the "moral compass" of the antiwar movement, which brought a healthy applause.
Still, the central question remains: can Veterans For Peace transform itself into a national power to influence national policy? Will it continue to develop its veterans' grassroots network and will the media broadcast its antiwar message? Can Veterans For Peace become a powerful force for peace?
For over a quarter of a century, since the end of the Vietnam War, America has been without a strong veterans' peace movement. In much of the public's mind, antiwar veterans are an anachronism. Today veterans support the President, not oppose him. Veterans lobby for veterans' benefits not march against a war. Only those who really remember Vietnam, a dwindling number, remember there is a different type of veteran, a veteran for peace, not for war. As Woody Powell pointed out, forgetting is the start of wars. And many Americans have forgotten.
But Stan Goff is also correct when he said, "Veterans have the potential to strip this administration's veneer of legitimacy -- which is why veterans are the administration's most feared group." Veterans have the power to de-legitimize this administration because this is an administration of mostly men who avoided public service for personal advancement, an administration that sent young Americans off to Iraq by concealing the truth with lies, an administration that knows the American people are slowly turning against this war, Bush's war. And more than any one group, veterans can make Americans remember.
Veterans For Peace wrapped up its three-day convention with a demonstration at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, implementing the pledge to resist militarism abroad and repression at home. Members are now fanning out across America, bringing that pledge to your hometown. Join them to bring our troops home now!
For more information, go to Veterans For Peace: http://www.veteransforpeace.org
Other sites:
Veterans Against Iraq War http://www.vaiw.org
Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org
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BELGIUM
Demonstrators support Afghan refugees
August 10, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/briefly.htm
BRUSSELS - Around 500 people demonstrated yesterday in support of a group of Afghan refugees holed up in a Brussels church after negotiations on their status broke down, police said.
About 300 asylum-seekers, including women and children, have been in the Holy Cross Church in Brussels since July 24. Many of them are on a hunger strike after the government's refugee office turned down their applications for asylum.
As negotiations between the Afghans and the government ground to a halt yesterday, Interior Minister Patrick Dewael criticized the asylum-seekers, saying "hunger striking is an unacceptable form of blackmail in a democratic society."
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A tiny town shouts 'Whoa!' to Patriot Act
By Ron C. Judd
Seattle Times staff reporter
Sunday, August 10, 2003
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001461096_patriot10m.html
TONASKET, Okanogan County - If this is a hotbed of sedition, they're hiding it pretty well.
In fact, the most suspicious group activity on this scorching day in Tonasket, the bellybutton of the Okanogan Valley, is the alarming number of people eating ice-cream cones, all at once, down at Shannon's on the south edge of town.
Plenty of vanillas in the crowd. Radical these folks are not.
But you don't have to dig very deep at Tonasket City Hall to find the small seed of a populist uprising planted this spring and spreading like cheatgrass down to the county courthouse in Okanogan - and beyond.
It's a simple, two-page resolution supporting the constitutional rights of Tonasket's 1,000 citizens - and directly opposing one of the most significant acts of Congress in recent history.
"The Tonasket Resolution" is a symbolic broadside at the USA Patriot Act, the far-reaching "terror-obstruction" measure approved by Congress six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Washington, D.C., area.
Tonasket's cheeky response was penned by self-described "constitutionalist" Mark Alan and edited by Tonasket's police chief, Don Schneider. It has since been adopted by the city councils of nearby Oroville and Riverside and is being considered by the Okanogan County Commission.
Its preamble reinforces the notion that America was created "in the shadow of bloody conflicts" with intentionally strict limits on government. It goes on to suggest that the Patriot Act and similar incursions on individual civil rights are unconstitutional.
The meat of the resolution takes care to endorse most efforts to combat terrorism. But it insists government had all the tools to do that before the Patriot Act.
And it boldly proclaims that any law that "dilutes, weakens or denies" a person's constitutional rights is "unenforceable in our jurisdiction."
Practical impacts are debatable. Federal law clearly trumps local ordinances, but similar resolutions in other U.S. cities contain "unenforceable-in-our-jurisdiction" language to warn the feds that their police are there to protect citizens, not serve as FBI gofers.
Local push has yet to come to federal shove in places that have approved Patriot Act snubs - a list that now includes three states and 141 counties and cities representing 16 million Americans, according to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, which supports citizen petitioners. Opposition has increased with rumors that the Justice Department is drafting a stronger "Patriot II."
Anti-Patriot Act measures have been produced by an odd alliance of libertarians, extreme conservatives and flaming liberals, and often in the expected places. The act has been assailed in varying degrees in Bellingham, Bainbridge Island, Jefferson and San Juan counties, Port Townsend, Seattle and Vashon Island.
But opposition also has risen in lands less expected. Apple-growing, God-fearing, Wranglers-wearing north-central Washington might be the last place you'd expect locals to be shouting - during and after wartime - "Whoa!" to Congress, the Justice Department and the president.
Unless, these newbie constitutional activists insist, you'd bother to read the fine print.
Major changes
The Patriot Act sailed through Congress with little debate in those harried, post-9-11 days. It is a 56,870-word grab bag - a medium-sized novel's worth of bureaucratese.
But it made sweeping changes in laws affecting freedom of speech, rights to legal representation, freedom from unreasonable searches, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront witness, and government access to formerly private, personal information.
Even in remote Okanogan County, where news sometimes arrives late, this perked up eyebrows. Two of them belonged to Alan, 46, who knows about tangling with the power of the federal government.
In February 2001 - before the Patriot Act was ever imagined - Alan was approached in downtown Oroville by two men who knocked on the window of his truck, asking him to roll it down. Fearing the men were carjackers, Alan hit the gas. Big mistake: The men were federal agents, in town to serve Alan with contempt-of-court papers.
His crime: Running a nonlicensed radio station from an apple-picking shack on a hillside above Oroville, pop. 1,600. With a sister transmitter down the valley in Tonasket, Alan's faint, 5-watt FM signal reached only around the two towns, carrying news, high-school sports, advertising - and provocative, right-leaning political commentary pulled by satellite dish from "patriotic" national broadcasting networks.
Alan insisted his North Valley Broadcasting "microcast" station didn't need a federal license because it didn't interfere with other station signals and didn't broadcast over state lines. The Federal Communications Commission - pressured, Alan says, by a radio competitor in Omak - disagreed.
Moments after fleeing the undercover feds that day in Oroville, Alan, a former reserve police officer with nary a parking ticket on his record, was chased down and arrested at gunpoint. The father of six was tossed into the Spokane County Jail, where he sat for nearly two months, becoming something of a cause célèbre in his community.
After a series of legal maneuvers, and a dispute over the legal name under which he could be charged (he goes by Mark Alan, his "baptized" name, but the feds insist he is Mark Alan Rabenold, his "family" name), he pleaded to a minor offense and agreed to unplug Radio Free Oroville.
He took the deal, he says, only after prosecutors threatened to arrest his wife, Jeri, as an accomplice, and put his six children in foster care.
A resolution is born
What does that have to do with the Tonasket Resolution and the USA Patriot Act? Maybe nothing, maybe everything, Alan explains from his new office - a leatherwork and saddle-repair shop in tiny Riverside, north of Omak.
Alan, a thin, quick-to-smile Libertarian Party activist and 4-H volunteer, says his radio gig was born of "self-imposed poverty." He moved his family to a vacation getaway in Havillah, in the hills above Tonasket, nine years ago when his sales job at a Seattle international freight and customs brokerage was eliminated. He started selling ads for another would-be radio microcaster in Oroville, then went out on his own.
He recalls the radio station fondly, saying it served as a grand community forum and meeting place. "There were times when it seemed like everyone in town was listening," he recalls.
But he put the arrest behind him, he insists, and holds no burning resentment of the federal government - just a lingering dislike for Attorney General John Ashcroft's brand of justice.
Earlier this year, an acquaintance handed Alan a stock version of an anti-Patriot Act resolution purloined from the Internet. Alan made some changes and brought it to the Tonasket City Council.
The resolution was long and full of invective against President Bush, which made council members leery. After watching the council bat it around for several meetings, Don Schneider, 52, the Tonasket police chief who says he "normally tries to stay out of politics," stepped in.
Schneider suggested editing the resolution "to make it more positive, not necessarily anti-Patriot Act, but strongly supportive of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights." A slimmer, more politically palatable version was adopted unanimously by Tonasket in April, then Oroville and Riverside in succeeding months.
Alan is now hoping the County Commission will embrace the measure. That would be a positive omen for civil-liberties defense nationwide, he says, because Okanogan County, which almost always picks the presidential-election winner - is a "pretty good place to take the pulse of John Q. American."
The Tonasket Resolution
Section 1. The City of Tonasket supports all lawful and Constitutional efforts to prevent and investigate terrorist or other criminal acts and prosecute their perpetrators.
Section 2. The City of Tonasket believes that sufficient Constitutionally acceptable tools existed, prior to the passage of the "USA Patriot Act" or other such restrictive acts, for Law enforcement to accomplish their intended lawful purpose.
Section 3. The City of Tonasket believes that any act, enactment, law, or legislation, etc., which dilutes, weakens, or denies the State and / or Federal Constitutionally guaranteed Rights of the Citizen is void from its inception, is unenforceable in our jurisdiction, and should be quashed, repealed or found by a court of jurisdiction to be unconstitutional in part or in full, as appropriate, to protect the Rights and Freedom of the Citizenry.
Section 4. The Tonasket City Council strongly encourages all citizens, organizations, and governmental legislative bodies to study, for understanding, the State and Federal Constitutions and their history, and the Bill of Rights and its history so that they can recognize and resist attempts to undermine our Constitutional Republics and the system of government that has brought our civilization so much success.
Section 5. The Tonasket City Council believes it is the duty of every citizen to protect and defend the State and Federal Constitutions from all enemies - foreign and domestic - and to demonstrate outspoken respect for the Rights that have been paid for with the blood and sweat of the American People throughout our history. John Q., in Alan's mind, is only now waking from a "9-11 slumber" and realizing it's OK to act like an American again. To him, that means asking hard questions about actions taken in the name of national security, from the war in Iraq to the Patriot Act, that amount to "textbook fascism."
Alan says the resolution is more than symbolic and gives local officials leeway to refuse to cooperate with federal actions:
"If (a federal agent) showed up at the Tonasket Library and said, 'I want to see so-and-so's records,' I'm sure Chief Schneider would step in and say, 'Not here. You're going to need a warrant.' "
The chief himself is less cocky about that scenario, saying his officers have neither the desire nor the legal right to interfere with a federal investigation. But he's doubts it will ever be an issue.
"We rarely see an FBI agent or a DEA officer here," he says.
If the situation described by Alan did occur, "We'd be there to keep the peace and take notes," Schneider says - same as always.
Some have concerns
Other legal officials, however, do worry about the resolution being expanded to all of Okanogan County, rather than just the boundaries of three small cities.
Okanogan is the state's largest county. It borders Canada and overlaps two national forests and an Indian reservation. So officials there have daily contact with officers from the U.S. Border Patrol, Forest Service, Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management and other agencies.
"I'd hate to see it create a bad situation here for our law enforcement," says Heidi Appel, the county's civil deputy prosecutor, who is reviewing the resolution for the County Commission. "I'm not really sure what to do with it."
But Alan remains resolute, saying he can address any county concerns. He's encouraged by the lack of backlash against the resolution in the three small towns.
Schneider is, too. For several weeks after the measure was approved in Tonasket, he would open the "letters" section of the local paper, braced for the worst. It never came.
"Everyone has been really positive about it," he says.
And working on the resolution has renewed his own appreciation for, and interest in, the Founding Fathers.
That's the goal, in Alan's mind. While average citizens here might not think daily about the Patriot Act, he says, they know what they value.
"In Okanogan County, most of us would just prefer to be left alone," he says. "People look at (the Patriot Act) and think, 'Here's another intrusion. Another way we can't control our own destiny.' "
He's confident the people will take that power back - even if it's one city council at a time.
"I've still got faith in America."
The Patriot Act
Some of the fundamental changes to Americans' legal rights by the Bush administration and the USA Patriot Act after the 9-11 attacks:
Freedom of association: To assist terror investigation, the government may monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity.
Freedom of information: The government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public-records requests. "Sensitive" information has been removed from government Web sites.
Freedom of speech: The government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
Right to legal representation: The government may monitor conversations between attorneys and clients in federal prisons and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
Freedom from unreasonable searches: The government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.
Right to a speedy and public trial: The government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
Right to liberty: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them. "Enemy combatants" have been held incommunicado and refused attorneys.
Source: The Associated Press, with information from Knight-Ridder Newspapers included
Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280, or rjudd@seattletimes.com
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