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NUCLEAR
Deserting Our Troops
We really are living on the dark side of the moon
Iran says enriched uranium found by inspectors was on imported equipment
Britain demands Iran come clean on nuclear ambitions
Iran rejects any curbs on its civilian nuclear programme
PENTAGON TARGETS IRAN
Iranian FM warns Israel not to strike nuclear plants
Iran Says It'll Work With U.N. on Nukes
Iran Says IAEA Inspections Will Be Limited
Panel says govt's nuclear reactors waste money
North Korea seeks new "peace mechanism"
N. Korea Demands Treaty as U.S., Seoul Mark Alliance
U.S. and Russia Take Major Steps Toward Shut Down
Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass project manager values community
Cantwell proposes study of Hanford nuclear reactor as a museum
White House Says Top Aide Was Not Behind C.I.A. Leak
New Criticism on Prewar Use of Intelligence
Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked By Cheney
Halabja: How Bush Sr. Continued to Support Saddam
The Secrets Clark Kept
MILITARY
War in Iraq put to the test
7 Afghan Soldiers Are Killed in an Ambush
Boeing sees defence business growing 10 percent per year
Clark capitalized on Army career, rank
Defense Stocks Have Seen Their Peak
Federal Contracts
Curtiss-Wright To Develop Weapons Hoist
Tokyo ordered to compensate Chinese killed or injured by dumped weapons
11 Killed in Bombing in Colombian City
Colombian Blast Kills At Least 10
France takes command of maritime task force based in Djibouti
European Union Ministers Support Iraq Handover
U.S. Soldier Killed, 1 Hurt in Rebel Raid West of Baghdad
U.S. Troops Find Stores of Weapons at 2 Iraq Sites
Ethnic and Religious Fissures Deepen in Iraqi Society
NATO deployment in Iraq "not yet thinkable": new alliance chief
Russia Proposes Global Ban On Space Arms
CIA pursues video game
Bush officials who leaked name of US spy 'for revenge' could face jail
Agency Belittles Information Given by Iraq Defectors
Rice Knew 'Nothing' About CIA Agent Leak
Army Reserve fears troop exodus
Pay-Gap Remedy for Military Reserves Appears Doomed
Media Review Conduct After Leak
Data Reveal Inaccuracies in Portrayal of Iraqis
An Argentine Prosecutor Turns Focus to New War Crimes Court
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Clark's economic plan
U.S. Readies Program to Track Visas
ENERGY AND OTHER
Town in La Mancha Battles Against Windmills
Putin Casts Doubt on Kyoto Protocol
ACTIVISTS
Update of case re USAF Croughton
Sign On Against Forced Cancellation of Chavez Trip to US
Peace Activists' Parents Seek U.S. Probe
Palestinians Demonstrate For Arafat
7.9 earthquake Nov 02 where military wants to build antimissile sites!
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Deserting Our Troops
Steven Rosenfeld, senior editor,
TomPaine.com,
Sep 29 2003
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8995
The Army and Air Force failed to obey Congress' orders to create baseline medical records for soldiers sent to overseas war zones, in this case Iraq, Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO) concludes in a just-released report.
"The percentage of Army and Air Force service members missing one or both of their pre- and post-deployment health assessments ranged from 38 to 98 percent of our samples," the GAO, Congress' investigative arm, found. "Moreover, when health assessments were conducted, as many as 45 percent of them were not done within the required time frames."
These statistics confirm what veterans of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War and members of Congress have been saying for months: the Pentagon has been ignoring a law whose primary intention was avoiding a repeat of the military's mistakes surrounding its handling of veteran illnesses that have become known as Gulf War Syndrome.
After the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, tens of thousands of veterans became sick with mysterious illnesses. But because the Pentagon did not have baseline medical records for each soldier in that conflict, it was very slow to acknowledge and act on its responsibility to provide health care for these veterans.
So, in 1997, Congress passed a Public Law 105-85 requiring the military to conduct detailed pre- and post-deployment medical records for every soldier sent into a war zone. The GAO says the military "did not comply" with that requirement in the Iraq War. It also found the Department of Defense (DOD) "did not maintain a complete, centralized database of service members' medical assessments and immunizations."
The issue has been simmering in veteran's circles for some time, but with the Pentagon announcing last week a new round of National Guard deployments to Iraq, it raises the question anew: will the Pentagon fully implement the law?
"We've been calling for it. It's time for it to happen," said Steven Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Veterans Center. "We've had the hearings on the hill. We've done the Kabuki dance. [Undersecretary of Defense for Health Affairs William] Winkenwerder says they don't need to do the screening. The GAO says it's insufficient. Now what?"
Robinson said he and other veterans advocates will be speaking to members of the House Armed Services Committee -- which requested the GAO report -- and Veterans Affairs Committee this week to see what the next steps may be.
Veterans' advocates became aware last fall and winter that troops being sent to Iraq were not being examined as required. Instead, the military gave soldiers a short questionnaire to fill out. After congressional hearings and public criticism from veterans last winter, the Pentagon said it would conduct post-deployment exams and expand its questionnaire.
The GAO report was based on investigations at five military bases: Fort Campbell; Fort Drum; Hurlburt Field and Travis Air Force Base. It recommended that the Secretary of Defense and undersecretary responsible for military health "establish an effective quality assurance program that will help ensure that the military services comply with the force health protection and surveillance requirements for all service members."
In a Sept. 11 letter responding to the GAO report, Assistant Secretary of Defense William Winkenwerder said his office "has already established a quality assurance program for pre- and post-deployment health assessments." Winkenwerder said this program has been in place "since June 2003," which would be several months after Congress held hearings on the law and launched the GAO investigation.
While it remains to be seen what impact the GAO report will have on military health policies, many soldiers now in Iraq and their family members say the Pentagon has all-but ignored the requirement for creating the baseline medical records.
"My husband [an Army Reservist]'s physical was waived before he left," wrote one member of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), an activist group of families with relatives in the military in Iraq. Those contacted requested their names not be used.
"Myself and my wife were given the anthrax and small pox vaccines and were not given a choice in the matter," wrote a soldier. "No screening was done before these vaccines were given to see if there might be complications from a genetic or health standpoint. No blood work was done on us besides a few general questions from a colonel."
"My son has returned home and as far as I know no one has made any mention of medical testing," wrote another member of MFSO. "They arrived back the first week in August... [They] gave him a questionnaire to look over. There are three sections, but he said [questions] in the last section, more current symptoms didn't seem relative for now."
These anecdotes corroborate the GAO's findings: that the pre- and post-deployment medical exams were largely an after-thought, not a policy priority.
Among the soldiers contacted, several said they were aware there could be health consequences of their military services. What they and their family members most frequently cited was exposure to byproducts of depleted uranium (DU) munitions. DU is a slightly radioactive metal that's denser than lead and burns at very high temperatures. It is used in bullets and artillery pieces. Upon impact, it burns and vaporizes. Particles from the smoke are very tiny and can be breathed in and become embedded in lung tissue.
"My daughter told me that as they rolled into Baghdad from Kuwait, right after the end of the big bombing, in mid-April, there were Iraqi tanks on the sides of the roads, that still had the dead Iraqi soldiers in them," wrote another MFSO member. "She asked why the tanks were not cleared off or the bodies taken out, and she was told that no one wanted the duty because the tanks had been hit with DU shells.
"She said they all assumed the dust in the road was full of DU dust, and she said she felt she would now be at an increased risk of cancer, as did all of her unit. She was manning the 50-caliber on top of the truck, and said she breathed in the dust for many miles."
Only one e-mail out of more than one dozen received from MFSO families said their spouse or relative had received the pre- and post-deployment exams and shots.
In conclusion, the GAO said the Pentagon was poised to repeat the mistakes of the first Gulf War, where it did not promptly or adequately address the illnesses among veterans that became known as Gulf War Syndrome.
"Failure to complete post-deployment health assessments may risk a delay in obtaining appropriate medical follow-up attention for a health problem or concern that may have arisen during or following the deployment," the GAO said. "Similarly, incomplete and inaccurate medical records and deployment databases would likely hinder DOD's ability to investigate the causes of any future health problems that may arise coincident with deployments."
----
We really are living on the dark side of the moon
Barbara Sumner Burstyn,
29.09.2003
New Zealand Herald
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3525880&thesection=news&thesubsection=dialogue
My friend Ben emailed me from Vancouver: "Dear Barbara, What happened to you? You've become cynical. Why not look at the positive things happening in our world. Especially in the environment. There are so many good things happening out there."
So I decide to try to view things through Ben's eyes, to look for, as he calls it, the green shoots of change in our world. The same day I opened the Independent and the headline "Pentagon spends millions seeking environmentally friendly bullets" jumped out at me.
Of course. All that toxic lead, just lying around in hotspots like Iraq, can't be good for the environment. Perhaps Ben was right.
The article quoted Bob DiMichele, spokesman for the US Army's environmental centre. With lead bullets, he said without the slightest hint of irony, there is a cost in terms of human safety. Mr DiMichele called it green ammunition, one that can kill you or that you can shoot a target with and that's not an environmental hazard.
I felt Ben's optimism wavering. It's the kind of news that makes you wonder if you're inside some kind of altered reality. A place of profound cognitive dissonance where a lead-free green bullet is described as frangible and extolled as environmentally sound and the vice-president of the company who gained the Pentagon's US$5 million ($9.6 million) contract can say, also without irony, that if lead were not toxic he would not be having this conversation.
But the disconnect goes deeper. On the first day of the war against Iraq the US was reported to be dousing Iraqi lines with napalm. Washington denied it. They were adamant that napalm had not been part of their arsenal since 1993. But napalm's first cousin the MK-77 firebomb was - and five months later the colonel, who made the first denial, said if he'd been asked about MK-77s, he would have confirmed their use.
And the difference between these two devices? According to the Pentagon, while the new mixture still coats its victims bodies in fuel gel before igniting, causing untreatable third degree burns, a la Vietnam, it's less harmful to the environment.
"This additive has significantly less of an impact on the environment," said Marine spokesman Colonel Michael Daily.
Well that makes sense, first a PC bullet and now a PC version of Agent Orange. Especially in light of the ongoing disastrous effects of the chemical spraying in Vietnam. A report in the Guardian by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy exposes horrendous deformities three generations after the country was defoliated. They reveal that more than 650,000 people today suffer from an array of baffling chronic conditions while another 500,000 have already died.
But sadly the PC approach to warmongering is not across the board. In the breakdown of law and order since the invasion the of Iraq, the US has failed to prevent things such as the expected biological disaster from the releasing of thousands of flies known as chrysomya bezziana (screw worms) which were bred by Iraq's Nuclear Authority. Or the inadvertent looting of radioactive yellow cake by impoverished civilians who saw the storage barrels as ideal water and milk containers. Or the looming medical disaster for the people of Iraq from radioactive depleted-uranium (DU). Even a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser produces levels 1000 times the normal level of radiation and over 75 tons of DU is reported to have been dropped on Iraq.
And then, last week, Iraq was put up for sale. Defoliated now of its infrastructure, its morale, its educated and competent people and all impediments to the new regime of a perfect free-market economy, the US announced that all 192 state companies will be sold to foreigners, income tax will be introduced for the (local) workforce and the entire country opened to unlimited foreign investment.
Like new owners everywhere, they'll no doubt set about renovating, stripping out what's left of the old and decorating in their own style. And the previous owners, the Iraqis who will become no more than serfs in their own country? No one's even bothered to do an official body count yet so it seems unlikely the negative realities of their new lives will make even a news item, let alone a headline.
So I'm sorry Ben, I tried, but the green shoots just didn't stand a chance. Not against a world that describes bullets as frangible, that turns the human suffering of napalm into a plus for the environment, that destroys and steals a country under the guise of liberating it.
When I was a teenager, I loved the Pink Floyd song Us and Them. It caused in me an inexplicable ache. Today that ache is back. I'm cynical yes, but my cynicism is no match for theirs. We really are living on the dark side of the moon.
-------- iran
Iran says enriched uranium found by inspectors was on imported equipment
TEHRAN (AFP)
Sep 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030929103544.xaohm76w.html
A top Iranian official on Monday confirmed that traces of highly enriched uranium were found in the country for the second time by UN inspectors but attributed the find to the contamination of imported equipment.
The explanation for the discovery of highly-enriched uranium in August by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the Kalaye Electric Company near Tehran was given on state television by Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi.
The United States has charged that the Iranians have used Kalaye to test centrifuges used to make highly enriched uranium that can be used to make atomic bombs.
The Iranians claim their nuclear program is peaceful and that traces of highly enriched uranium found earlier this year at a factory to make nuclear fuel and located in Natanz, 250 kilometres (150 miles) south of Tehran, were due to contamination from second-hand components bought abroad and imported into Iran.
It is these components that would have been stored temporarily at Kalaye, allegedly leaving the uranium traces.
----
Britain demands Iran come clean on nuclear ambitions
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Sep 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030929085901.lws9amw3.html
Iran must declare "unequivocally" that it harbours no ambitions to develop nuclear arms, Britain's Europe Minister Denis MacShane said Monday.
The will of the European Union and the rest of the international community is "very, very clear", MacShane told reporters as he arrived for a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
"We want Iran to state unequivocally that there are no nuclear weapon possibilities that could be developed as a result of any nuclear programme in Iran," he said.
"We want Iran to cooperate fully with the international inspection agencies," added MacShane, standing in for Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the EU meeting.
"That's what the entire international community wants from Iran and I hope Iran is listening to that common and uniform demand from everybody in the international community."
Iran on Sunday signalled its willingness to comply with the demands of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, but vowed to continue its uranium enrichment programme.
"We are trying and we are determined to cooperate" with the IAEA, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi told ABC television in the United States.
The IAEA has given Iran until October 31 to answer all its questions concerning allegations that it is seeking to develop atomic weapons.
The EU foreign ministers are expected to renew their demands for Tehran to sign an additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that would allow IAEA inspectors to descend on its nuclear sites without warning.
The EU has warned that, without credible guarantees over the protocol, it will review its economic ties with Iran.
----
Iran rejects any curbs on its civilian nuclear programme
TEHRAN (AFP)
Sep 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030929103310.8194jgje.html
Iran will not accept any restrictions on how it uses civil nuclear technology, government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh said Monday, rejecting international demands for tougher safeguards on the Islamic republic.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran rejects any restrictions on the peaceful use of nuclear technology," Ramazanzadeh was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has given Iran until October 31 to answer all its questions concerning allegations that it is seeking to develop atomic weapons, and has also called on the country to cease uranium enrichment.
----
PENTAGON TARGETS IRAN
By Gordon Thomas
Sep 29, 2003,
Michigan News
http://bigjweb.com/artman/publish/article_1176.shtml
GLOBE-INTEL -- The Pentagon's forward planners have targeted two Iranian nuclear facilities after weapons-grade enriched uranium has been found in one by UN inspectors. A UN report published this week says the country could acquire a nuclear bomb within two years.
Particles of weapons-grade enriched uranium were discovered at Natanz. Iran claims the particles were from "contaminated components" it bought on the black market in the 1980s when it was trying to set up its "peaceful nuclear programme" - and could not find a supplier in the West ready to help.
But both the CIA and MI6, who have now each made intelligence gathering on Iran a priority, discount Iran's claim of how it came to have sufficient enriched uranium to make an effective "dirty bomb".
Neo-conservatives around Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld have not discounted a pre-emptive strike against the plants at Natanz and Arak. They are sited south of Tehran, in the remote fastness of central Iran.
Unlike the rift that developed over the war with Iraq between the United States and the European Union, there is a consensus that it is "essential and urgent" for Iran to stop arming itself with nuclear weapons.
Washington is supporting a UN resolution - sponsored by Britain, France and Germany - that Iran must stop its nuclear programme by the end of October. Implicit in the resolution is a warning the plants could be hit by missiles fired from US warships in the Gulf.
The plant at Natanz is far bigger than anything Iraq ever had. Natanz is guarded by a heavily patrolled thirty-mile deep perimeter within the featureless landscape.
The Tehran regime claims the Natanz plant is only working to develop the country's peaceful nuclear energy programme to bring power, heat and electricity to its hundreds of small towns and villages.
But British and German intelligence agents have pinpointed an underground complex capable of holding 1,000 personnel.
UN inspectors, diverted from searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, have confirmed the existence of the complex.
Buried thirty-feet below ground, it has eight-feet thick walls to protect two large halls.
In a report last week to the 35-member board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, the inspectors told their closed meeting in Vienna they are certain the underground complex is designed to carry out the process of turning enriched uranium into weapons-grade material.
The report states: "there are 1,000 gas centrifuges and components for the manufacture of 50,000 further centrifuges".
Highly enriched uranium is an essential element in producing a nuclear weapon.
Iran has two plants - one at Arkadan, east of Natanz, the other near the historic town of Isfahan - to convert uranium ore into yellowcake, a processed form of uranium. The yellowcake can be converted into enriched uranium as well as producing hexaflouride gas, essential to drive the centrifuges.
Russian engineers are helping Iran to build a heavy water plant at Arak. Iran again claims the plant will be used only for peaceful purposes.
But the UN report states: "heavy water can also produce more plutonium than light water reactors, and therefore can produce significant quantities to be used in weapons".
Kenneth Brill, the US ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna said last week that the evidence against Iran "already justifies an immediate non-compliance verdict".
Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the UN Security Council could introduce crippling sanctions against Iran. That would most certainly place the United States on a collision course with one of the nations President Bush has named as being part of the "axis of evil".
There is also a clear danger that Israel could act unilaterally and launch its own air strikes against Iran's nuclear plants. It has done so before - when it destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor outside Baghdad in March, 1981.
"We will not stand by and allow the Iranians to use the same cat-and-mouse games over their nuclear plants that Saddam used over many years", said a senior Israeli intelligence officer in Tel Aviv. "There is a need to take a touch line now. In two years time, it could be too late".
The prospect of military action came that much closer after Hashemi-Rafsanjani, one of Iran's most influential clerics and the country's former president, called on Muslim states last December to use nuclear weapons against Israel.
Mossad analysts told Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, that the appeal was directed not only at Pakistan, the one Muslim nation known to have nuclear weapons, but also to Iran's partner in the "axis of evil" - North Korea.
That possibility has led to the Pentagon forward planners continuing to prepare their own missile strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.
As the Israeli intelligence officer said: "it could be a race who presses the button first - us or the Americans".
----
Iranian FM warns Israel not to strike nuclear plants
By Reuters
29/09/2003
Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/344893.html
WASHINGTON - Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi, denying his country has "any program to produce weapons of mass destruction," warned Israel that Iran would respond to any strike on its nuclear facilities.
In an interview aired on Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Kharazi said the possibility of an Israeli military strike on its nuclear program was "a threat, no question."
Israel has warned that Iran's
nuclear program posed a threat to the world and was reportedly considering such a strike if Iran is pursuing a nuclear option. Kharazi said: "Israel knows if it commits such an action, it would be reacted." He declined to be more specific, saying simply "there will be a response" if Israel launched such a strike.
Iran faces mounting pressure to prove it is not developing nuclear weapons. Diplomats in Vienna last week said the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, had discovered traces of weapons-grade enriched uranium at a second site in Iran.
The IAEA has given Tehran until Oct. 31 to prove it does not have a secret atomic arms program or be reported to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.
On Saturday, U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded Tehran give up any ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
Early last week, Iran paraded six of its newly deployed medium-ranged missiles, which military analysts say could reach Israel or U.S. bases in the Gulf.
Iran insists its nuclear scientists are not working on a weapons program but are trying to meet the country's soaring electricity demand. "Certainly, we don't have any program to produce weapons of mass destruction, that is for sure," Kharazi said in the interview taped on Saturday evening.
Iran is willing sign a new inspection protocol with the IAEA, but only if that makes clear "we can continue with enrichment facilities to produce fuel needed for our power plants," he said.
-------
Iran Says It'll Work With U.N. on Nukes
September 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iran.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Iran's foreign minister said his country is willing to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear agency as the United States and Russia press Tehran to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons program.
``We are trying and we are determined to cooperate'' with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC's ``This Week.''
He also indicated that Iran was receptive to resuming talks with the United States. Talks last were held in May in Geneva, under the auspices of the United Nations.
Discussions began not long after the Afghan war started in the fall of 2001 and initially were largely limited to developments in Afghanistan. They grew to include exchanges on Iraq, with which Iran fought an eight-year war in the 1980s. Iran shares long borders with Afghanistan and Iraq.
``To start any dialogue between Iran and the United States, this has to be based on mutual respect and equal footing,'' Kharrazi said in the interview, taped Saturday. ``Otherwise, there's no meaning to have such a dialogue.''
He said Iran does not want the Bush administration ``to interfere in our internal affairs. We want the United States to take gestures to prove that it's sincere in its call for a dialogue.''
Relations with Washington were severed after Iranian militants overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held U.S. diplomats hostage until 1981.
Officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations have suggested from time to time that there was a reformist surge in Iran that could have a moderating influence on the Muslim fundamentalist government.
Still, the State Department this year again accused Iran of sponsoring terrorism. Iran also is accused regularly of trying to undercut peace efforts in the Middle East.
Asked if Iran was prepared to restart the talks, the foreign minister replied, ``If it is useful.''
On Saturday, President Bush and visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin urged Iran to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons program.
Putin, though, gave no indication he was willing to pull back from an $800 million deal to build a nuclear power plant in southern Iran, although Bush has pressed the Russian leader for two years to abandon the project.
The IAEA said last week it had found new evidence that Iran is enriching uranium.
Kharrazi said the ``contamination'' of the uranium had occurred outside Iran. He said, however, that uranium enrichment ``is legal, and nothing is wrong as long as it is under the auspices of the IAEA and the inspection regime.''
In Tehran, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman reaffirmed his country's commitment to its nuclear program.
``Relinquishing peaceful nuclear technology or enriching uranium is not a subject Iran can compromise on,'' Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States needs ``to have all questions with respect to their nuclear weapons programs answered.''
He told ABC's ``This Week'' that over the past year, ``the evidence that has come forward ... has made it clear to the world that there is something going on in Iran with respect to nuclear weapons development that goes beyond their nuclear power industry.''
Putin, after meeting with Bush at Camp David, said Russia would ``give a clear but respectful signal to Iran about the necessity to continue and expand its cooperation'' with international inspectors.
Iran says its nuclear programs are to produce energy and that the traces of weapons-grade material were imported on equipment purchased from abroad. ``We want to make sure that we can continue with enrichment facilities to produce fewer needed power fuels,'' Kharrazi said,
The United States and its allies argue the only purpose of Iran's nuclear efforts is for weapons programs.
The U.N. agency has set an Oct. 31 deadline for Iran to prove that its nuclear program is for energy purposes and not for weapons.
Asked about the deadline, Kaharrazi said, ``We want to make sure that this is enough and is going to solve our problems and remove all suspicions.''
--------
Iran Says IAEA Inspections Will Be Limited
September 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Angered by a resolution calling for Tehran to halt uranium enrichment activities, Iranian officials said on Monday U.N. inspectors would have only limited access to nuclear sites when they arrive this week.
But while hard-liners continued to argue Tehran should halt all cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reformist government officials said they may allow tougher inspections in future.
The IAEA has said it hopes the inspectors' visit, from Thursday, will enable it to verify Iran's stance that it has no intention of developing nuclear arms and merely hopes to use nuclear technology to produce electricity.
The IAEA has given Tehran until October 31 to dispel doubts about its nuclear ambitions, which Washington says include making weapons.
But Iran, outraged by a tough IAEA resolution passed this month which also called on it to halt all uranium enrichment activities, said it will scale back its cooperation with U.N. inspectors for the time being.
``The (inspection) visits will be within the existing framework of the agency, which is the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),'' Saber Zaimian, spokesman of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told Reuters by telephone.
Under the NPT, inspectors are only allowed access to certain declared nuclear facilities. A wide range of countries, including Russia and Japan, have urged Iran to sign an Additional Protocol of the NPT to allow thorough, snap checks.
Government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh said a return to greater cooperation with the IAEA would depend on the results of talks with the agency.
``Until now we have cooperated above our commitments with the agency and the continuation of our cooperation depends on our negotiations with the agency,'' he told a news conference.
HARD-LINER: PULL OUT OF NPT
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, in an interview with U.S. television, said Iran was prepared to sign the Additional Protocol provided it was given assurances it could then continue with its nuclear program, including uranium enrichment.
But hard-liners in Iran, who control the main levers of power in the country, continue to argue that Iran should not cave in to international pressure and instead follow North Korea's example by pulling out of the NPT.
``It is naive to think that after accepting the protocol (on snap inspections) America, the European Union and America's allies will stop accusing Iran,'' Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hardline Kayhan newspaper, told the students news agency.
Diplomats in Tehran say the wide discrepancy between comments from hard-liners and government officials indicates that fierce debate is still raging within Iran's ruling establishment on how to respond to the international pressure.
Officials have acknowledged that the IAEA found traces of arms-grade uranium at two sites in Iran. But Tehran says the finds were to due contamination from parts it had imported.
Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, told state television on Monday Iran would have needed large numbers of centrifuges operating for a long period of time to produce the level of uranium enrichment found.
``Both the IAEA and we know that such a thing does not exist (in Iran),'' he said.
-------- japan
Panel says govt's nuclear reactors waste money
Yomiuri Shimbun
September 30, 2003
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20030930wo32.htm
An oversight committee of the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute has compiled a report contending that the institute's advanced thermal converter reactor, Fugen, lacks "cost-effectiveness and an international strategy in its research and development," a source close to the committee said Monday.
Operations at Fugen, located in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, ended in March, although the cost of planning and constructing the plant, which opened in 1979, ran to 450 billion yen.
The institute has accepted the main criticism leveled in the report--that its nuclear power development program has always been too costly--and plans to introduce a policy of "focusing more on international competition" in the future development of fast-breeder reactors, including Japan's first such reactor, Monju, the source said.
The institute plans to submit a report on the issue to the Atomic Energy Commission on Tuesday.
Fugen is Japan's first power-generating nuclear reactor created solely with domestically developed technology. It uses mixed oxide fuel (MOX), made of plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel and uranium. Fugen has consumed the largest number of MOX fuel rods of any nuclear plant in the world--772--since it opened.
While noting that Fugen has operated safely for 25 years and has contributed to promoting the use of plutonium, the panel pointed out that the advanced thermal converter reactor is inefficient--it costs three times as much to generate electricity at Fugen than it does at an ordinary nuclear reactor, the source said.
-------- korea
North Korea seeks new "peace mechanism"
SEOUL (AFP)
Sep 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030929113804.nxi4xck9.html
Communist North Korea called Monday for a "new peace mechanism" on the Korean peninsula to replace a mutual defense treaty signed half a century ago by the United States and South Korea.
US and South Korean officials will mark the 50th anniversary of the treaty signed at the end of the 1950-53 Korean war at a ceremony here Tuesday.
The treaty is a "confrontational structure" from the era of the Cold War that hinders peace on the peninsula and in the region, a North Korea foreign ministry spokeman said, and has slowed the development of inter-Korean ties and blocked a resolution to the nuclear crisis.
"This is also quite contrary to the common interests of the neighboring countries, which wish to see a new peace mechanism on the Korean peninsula," the spokesman was quoted as saying in a statement to Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency.
The United States stations 37,000 troops in South Korea under the treaty as a deterrent to North Korea's 1.1 million-strong army whose 1950 invasion of the South sparked the Korean War.
The North's spokesman said the treaty would no longer be needed if the United States signed a non-aggression pact with Pyongyang.
North Korea and the United States have been locked in an 11-month standoff over North Korea's nuclear weapons drive, with the Stalinist state demanding a non-aggression pact before it will respond to Washington's condition that it scrap its atomic programs.
Washington will not sign the pact because it worries that if it does so it will no longer have any justification for keeping troops here, the spokesman said.
"The US is foolishly seeking to fish in the troubled waters by maintaining the confrontational structure in the era of the Cold War through the South Korea-US mutual defense treaty," he added.
----
N. Korea Demands Treaty as U.S., Seoul Mark Alliance
Mon September 29, 2003
(Reuters)
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3523820
SEOUL - North Korea used this week's 50th anniversary of a defense treaty between South Korea and the United States on Monday as an occasion to renew its call for a non-aggression pact with Washington.
Communist North Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by official news agency KCNA, that Washington was worried that agreeing to a non-aggression pact with Pyongyang might weaken its defense treaty with South Korea.
"It is the U.S. worry that the conclusion of the non-aggression treaty between the DPRK and the U.S. might reduce the South Korea-U.S. mutual defense treaty, which stipulates the DPRK as a principal enemy, to a dead document.
"It is because of this worry that the U.S. is talking about such written security assurances in the form of Congress resolution minus legal-binding force or collective security assurances by neighboring countries, persistently refusing to assure the DPRK of non-aggression through a treaty."
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK, is North Korea's official name.
South Korea and the United States mark the 50th anniversary of their mutual defense treaty on Wednesday. United Nations forces led by the United States battled Chinese-backed North Korea in the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce that has since kept the two Koreas in a technical state of war.
South Korea and the United States, along with China, Russia and Japan, held talks with North Korea about its nuclear program in August in Beijing.
No firm schedule has been set for another round of talks on the nuclear impasse that resulted a year ago when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted pursuing a secret nuclear arms program.
Washington wants North Korea to agree to a verifiable and irreversible end to its nuclear programs, including production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear fuel.
Pyongyang, for its part, wants firm assurances -- in the form of a non-aggression pact -- that the United States will not attack or invade.
Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun daily said on Monday Japan would press the United States to state specific terms under which it would provide security guarantees.
-------- russia
U.S. and Russia Take Major Steps Toward Shut Down of Last Three Weapons Reactors;
Contracts Signed for Fossil-Fuel Plants
9/29/03
U.S. Newswire
To: National Desk, Energy Reporter
Contact: Jeanne Lopatto of the U.S. Department of Energy, 202-586-4940;
or Bryan Wilkes of NNSA, 202-586-7371
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=147-09292003
WASHINGTON -- The United States and Russia have taken another major step toward closing down the last three remaining Russian reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium with the signing of two contracts for fossil-fuel power plants to be built and refurbished in Siberia.
The two U.S. companies under contract, Washington Group International and Raytheon Technical Services, will carry out this work at the two sites, which will begin in Fiscal Year 2004. The companies have completed negotiations with Rosatomstroi, a Russian investment and construction company, for preliminary designs of projects to refurbish and construct fossil-fuel power plants in Seversk and Zheleznogorsk. When the refurbishment and construction have been completed, operation of the plants will permit the shut down of the plutonium production reactors.
This agreement represents another major step in the U.S.-Russia Elimination of Weapons-Grade Plutonium Production Program (EWGPP) initiated by U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Alexandr Rumyantsev.
"The administration places a high priority on successful nonproliferation programs, and elimination of weapons-grade plutonium production in Russia is an important step in our joint nonproliferation program," Secretary Abraham said. "Our two countries have made good progress towards nonproliferation goals, and we look forward to continuing our good work and progress through successful ventures like this."
The three Russian reactors not only produce significant amounts of weapons-grade plutonium daily, they also provide heat and electricity to several hundred thousand Russians in the traditionally closed cities of Seversk and Zheleznogorsk. These reactors have deficiencies in the areas of design, equipment, and materials, and are considered to be among the highest risk reactors in the world. To ensure reactor safety, high priority safety upgrades are being expeditiously pursued with the help of the Department of Energy (DOE).
At a ceremony in Vienna in March 2003, Secretary Abraham and Minister Rumyantsev signed the agreement that would reduce the threat from weapons of mass destruction by stopping plutonium production at the last three Russian plutonium production reactors. In May 2003, Abraham and the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Yuri Ushakov, announced that $466 million was awarded to two U.S. companies to begin the shutdown work.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- kentucky
Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass project manager values community
Richmond, KY, Register News
Jodi Whitaker
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
http://www.richmondregister.com/reader.cfm?si=1&sd=7475
He may not know many people in Richmond yet, but after tonight, Chris Midgett hopes that will change.
Midgett, project manager for Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass - the company which will perform the work necessary to destroy 523 tons of chemical weapons stored at the Blue Grass Army Depot - will meet the public tonight at an open house. The open house is designed to introduce Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass and the other players in the chemical demilitarization process to the community. The event will be from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight at Eastern Kentucky University's Perkins Building.
"We truly believe it is important to be open with the public on what's going on," Midgett said. "I'm trying to get out and talk to as many groups as I can...to discuss the project, communicate our status and talk about issues. And hopefully, the public will have various forms of input on how the project is conducted."
Born in Nashville, Tenn., Midgett moved around the country a lot with his family growing up, including his father, who was in the Navy.
After following in his father's footsteps and graduating from the Naval Academy, Midgett went on to Naval post-graduate school in Monterey, Calif., where he received a master's degree in nuclear physics.
Midgett then spent seven years in the Navy's nuclear submarine program, and spent some time working on a submarine which collected intelligence off the Russian coast.
"We spent a lot of time at sea, and it wasn't good on the family," Midgett said. "So after seven years, I decided to get out."
From there, Midgett went to work for Westinghouse, where he worked on nuclear engineering products in various locations.
In Washington, D.C., Midgett managed a facility called PUREX - which stands for Plutonium Uranium Extraction - dissolving nuclear fuel and acid with a chemical process which separated out the plutonium that was used in chemical weapons. There, he helped shut the facility down after the mission was complete.
After that job, Midgett said he was asked to head up proposals to bid on the chemical demilitarization program.
A little over two years ago, Midgett was hired with Bechtel, and went to work in Idaho at an engineering lab where he managed a test reactor which tested fuels and materials mainly for the Navy's nuclear submarine program.
"I had spent two years doing that when I got a call that this bid was coming up, and they asked me to help head up the bid process for Blue Grass," Midgett said.
Midgett has been with the project since the Bechtel Parsons company decided to submit a bid for the job in January, and is currently traveling back and forth between Kentucky and Pasadena, Calif. during the design stage of the process.
Next June, Midgett plans to move his wife Jane - who is now in Idaho where she is co-founding a charter school - to Richmond to settle down for the remainder of the process, which will take more than 10 years to complete.
As the project to destroy the weapons stored at the Blue Grass Army Depot continues, Midgett said there are some key things he wants the community to know his company is intent on providing - including safety and efficiency.
"We're going to operate this facility as safe as possible," he said. "We have a proven track record in safety. We far exceed the industry standard nationwide in the chemical industry and the nuclear industry. Our record is good.
"Number two is the efficient destruction of the weapons," Midgett said. "We want to do this right, and we want to do this right the first time. We want to rid this community of chemical weapons as soon as we can."
Jodi Whitaker can be reached at jwhitaker@richmondregister.com. Story created Monday, September 29, 2003.
-------- washington
Cantwell proposes study of Hanford nuclear reactor as a museum
Seattle Business Journal,
September 29, 2003
http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2003/09/29/daily17.html
A move is afoot in Congress to study turning a Hanford nuclear reactor into a museum.
Sen. Maria Cantwell from Washington and Rep. Doc Hastings announced they have proposed legislation directing the secretary of the interior to study the potential for turning Hanford's B Reactor and other Manhattan Project facilities into historical sites.
The Manhattan Project was the World War II effort to develop and construct the first atomic bomb.
In 1943, shortly after Enrico Fermi first demonstrated that controlled nuclear reaction was possible, ground was broken on the B Reactor in Eastern Washington. It became the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactor, and produced the plutonium for the first ever man-made nuclear explosion -- the Trinity test in New Mexico. It also produced the plutonium used in the bomb that the United States was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The reactor was decommissioned in 1968.
"The B Reactor at Hanford made significant contributions to the United States' defense policy from World War II through the Cold War," said Cantwell. "I believe it is tremendously important that future generations know the history and impact of the B Reactor as well the other various Manhattan Project sites. It is critical that our nation reflect on both the Manhattan Project's unprecedented engineering achievements, such as B Reactor, as well as the human and environmental costs of this initiative, which changed the course of world history."
-------- us politics
White House Says Top Aide Was Not Behind C.I.A. Leak
September 29, 2003
DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/politics/29CND-LEAK.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - The White House said today that it was "ridiculous" for anyone to suggest that President Bush's top political adviser had leaked secret information in an effort to discredit an outspoken critic of Mr. Bush's policy on Iraq.
But the White House assertion that Mr. Bush's political aide, Karl Rove, was not behind the leak failed to satisfy Democrats, several of whom demanded investigations of one kind or another. By this afternoon, it was apparent that the White House had a messy affair on its hands just as the political season was warming up.
The controversy, which has been simmering for two months and boiled over during the weekend, concerns Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former United States diplomat, and his wife, Valerie Plame. The syndicated columnist Robert Novak, citing "two senior administration officials," wrote in July that Ms. Plame was an undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency specializing in weapons of mass destruction.
On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that Bush administration officials had contacted a half-dozen Washington reporters in an effort to publicly disclose Ms. Plame's identity, apparently in retaliation for Mr. Wilson's public assertions that President Bush had exaggerated the threat of any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to help justify the war to topple Saddam Hussein.
A government official acknowledged over the weekend that the C.I.A.'s office of general counsel wrote to the Department of Justice in late July to complain of the disclosure and to ask for an investigation into whether administration officials had indeed been involved in what could be a violation of federal law.
Mr. Wilson, a former ambassador to Gabon, has said publicly that he suspects Mr. Rove of being behind the leak, which he theorized was intended to sound a warning to others who might challenge the White House on whether intelligence about Iraq was reshaped or ignored to fit a political agenda.
But the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said today that he had spoken to Mr. Rove and had been assured that it was "simply not true" that Mr. Rove had had anything to do with the leak.
"The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved," Mr. McClellan said at a midday news briefing. Pressed on just how the president knew that, Mr. McClellan said, "Well, I've made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place," adding, "It is simply not true."
Mr. McClellan also pledged that the White House would cooperate with the Justice Department in any investigation of the leak.
Officials are barred by law from disclosing the identities of Americans who work undercover for the C.I.A. That provision is intended to protect the security of operatives whose lives might be jeopardized if their identities are known. Until Mr. Novak's column, Ms. Plame was known to friends as an energy industry analyst.
Although the Justice Department was known to be considering at least a preliminary inquiry, several Democrats urged that the matter be entrusted to an independent inquiry outside the Justice Department, which has drawn criticism of partisanship from Democratic circles.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who called for the F.B.I. to investigate the disclosure after it first surfaced in July, said today that an independent counsel should be appointed. And some of the 10 Democrats seeking to challenge President Bush in 2004 said the disclosure of an ambassador's wife as a C.I.A. officer demonstrated that the Bush administration was intertwining politics and national security and could not be trusted to investigate itself.
"This administration has played politics with national security for a long time, but this is going too far," one of those Democratic hopefuls, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, told Reuters, suggesting an independent commission look into the accusations. "I don't think, in this administration, the Department of Justice will have the credibility it needs to reassure American allies abroad, and people around the world, about this matter."
The general suggested former Senator Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, or John Shalikashvili, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to lead an independent inquiry.
Another candidate, former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, said that keeping Mr. Ashcroft out of an investigation would help ensure a thorough inquiry free of political pressure, and he suggested that the review be carried out by the Justice Department's inspector general, an independent post.
"We need to determine the facts in the highly sensitive matter free from any political taint," Mr. Dean told Reuters.
Other Democratic presidential candidates joined in the chorus as the day wore on.
Representative Richard Gephardt called for a Congressional investigation. "I don't think we can leave this to the administration's own Justice Department," he said.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts called for a special counsel. "Too many questions exist to risk allowing any potential for political intervention," he said.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut said that if White House aides did indeed unveil Ms. Plame's government identity "it is a moral outrage" and that an "independent, nonpartisan counsel should investigate."
The roots of the controversy go back to January and President Bush's State of the Union address, when he said that British intelligence officials had learned that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa.
In July, Mr. Wilson wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times that he had warned the C.I.A. well before the speech that the British reports were unreliable. The administration conceded that Mr. Bush's remarks were too categorical and that it had erred by including them in his address. The White House has since been dogged by accusations that it took the country to war without adequate evidence that Saddam Hussein had unconventional weapons.
If a special counsel is appointed, he or she would not have the same powers as did Kenneth Starr, who investigated President Bill Clinton and was one of numerous special lawyers named under the old Independent Counsel Law, which provided for outside inquiries in instances involving possible wrongdoing by high administration officials.
Under that law, an independent counsel was selected by a panel of three federal judges. Now, the attorney general has the authority to name a special counsel, though that person would be answerable to the attorney general himself instead of a panel of judges.
--------
New Criticism on Prewar Use of Intelligence
CARL HULSE and DAVID E. SANGER
September 29, 2003
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/international/middleeast/29INTE.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - The Bush administration, which has been laboring to build domestic and international support for its Iraq policies, is facing renewed criticism about how it managed intelligence before the war, and internal tensions over the leak of a C.I.A. agent's identity.
The debate over the rationale for the war was reopened by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who have delivered a critical interim assessment of how intelligence agencies concluded that Iraq had forbidden weapons and ties to Al Qaeda.
There were "too many uncertainties" in the outdated and inadequate information underlying a National Intelligence Estimate that the administration used to justify the war, the senior Republican and the senior Democrat on the panel said in a newly disclosed letter to George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence.
At the same time, officials confirmed that Mr. Tenet had asked the Justice Department to look into whether one or more administration officials had leaked information to the news media disclosing the identity of a covert C.I.A. agent. Mr. Tenet's request was first reported by NBC News.
The agent is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador to Gabon. It was Mr. Wilson who, more than a year and a half ago, concluded in a report to the C.I.A. that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium ore in Niger in an effort to build nuclear arms. But his report was ignored, and Ambassador Wilson has been highly critical of how the administration handled intelligence claims regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons programs, suggesting that Mr. Bush's aides and Vice President Dick Cheney's office tried to inflate the threat.
The very fact that Mr. Tenet referred the matter to the Justice Department comes as a major political embarrassment to a White House that is famously tight-lipped, and a president who has repeatedly vowed that his administration would never leak classified information. White House officials said today that they would cooperate in an investigation if the Justice Department decided that one was merited.
The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was questioned persistently today about the House Intelligence Committee letter, which was first reported today by The Washington Post. She held to the White House position that its prewar intelligence about Iraq was as solid as it could be, given the difficulties of piercing the secrecy around Mr. Hussein's authoritarian government.
"The president believes that he had very good intelligence going into the war, and stands behind what the director of central intelligence told him going into the war," she said on the television program "Fox News Sunday." "Obviously, this was the accumulation of evidence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction over a 12-year period, information that was relied on by three administrations, several different intelligence services, and indeed the United Nations itself."
The new questions come at a particularly uncomfortable moment for Mr. Bush. Only last week, the administration's chief investigator into Iraq's arms programs sent back a preliminary report that sketched out very little evidence supporting the administration's case for going to war. That has put the administration on the defensive as it is trying to persuade Congress to provide $87 billion for the military stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and to persuade other nations to contribute troops and cash.
Several of the Democratic presidential aspirants seized on the investigations today to try to chip away at what had been, until the war, Mr. Bush's biggest political asset: his credibility with Americans, which grew after the Sept. 11 attacks. A statement from Howard Dean, a leading contender, was typical of the comments. "President Bush came into office promising to bring honor and integrity to the White House," he said. "No more promises. It's time for accountability."
White House advisers are clearly concerned that the F.B.I. may conclude there is reason to investigate the intelligence leak. Ms. Rice said repeatedly today that the facts were not yet known, and Attorney General John Ashcroft has not yet acted on the C.I.A.'s formal referral of the matter to the Justice Department.
But the mere charge may itself gain some political currency. "There is blood in the water, and there are people all over Washington who want to take advantage of that," one senior official said.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who had called earlier for an investigation into the disclosure of the agent's name, said the inquiry should be "thorough, complete and fearless."
"This was a despicable act," he said today. "Whoever did it should go to jail."
The Sept. 25 letter to Mr. Tenet from the House committee leaders could carry added weight because Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida, the Republican committee chairman and a former C.I.A. agent, is typically a supporter of the agency and the White House.
The letter does note that Mr. Goss has a "fundamental disagreement" with Representative Jane Harman of California, the committee's top Democrat, on whether the overall intelligence analysis was "deficient."
But the letter, arising from the panel's ongoing inquiry, cited serious shortcomings in the intelligence on Iraq's programs to develop illegal weapons and its ties to Al Qaeda, two central justifications for the war.
"The intelligence available to the U.S. on Iraq's possession of W.M.D. and its programs and capabilities relating to such weapons after 1998, and its links to Al Qaeda, was fragmentary and sporadic," it said.
A spokesman for the C.I.A. responded today, saying that the lawmakers were wrong and that they had not done the work necessary to reach such sweeping conclusions.
"The letter tries to give the impression that they have done a whole lot of due diligence on this subject, but in fact they have not really had significant hearings or briefings," said the spokesman, Bill Harlow.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in a television appearance today, noted that the Iraqi leader threw weapons inspectors out in 1998, making it more difficult for intelligence agencies to get hard information.
"From 1998 until we went in earlier this year, there was a period where we didn't have benefit of U.N. inspectors actually on the ground, and our intelligence community had to do the best they could," Mr. Powell said on the ABC News program "This Week." "And I think they did a pretty good job."
In an interview this evening, Mr. Goss said that the letter was intended to seek a C.I.A. response as the House inquiry moved ahead and that it did not represent final conclusions. He said it was his view that the intelligence problems cited in the letter resulted from not having enough human sources of solid intelligence to resolve uncertainties and inconsistencies in the information collected. "There were not enough assets on the ground," he said.
The letter points to a "dearth" of underlying intelligence about Iraq after 1998 and says intelligence experts held to longstanding assessments about Iraq's capability. "The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered as proof that they continued to exist," it said.
The letter said that the committee extensively reviewed allegations that administration officials had distorted intelligence findings in making their public case for the invasion but that the panel had no authority over articulating foreign policy.
However, the letter said, if public officials misstate intelligence, agencies have "a responsibility to go back to that policymaker and make clear that the public statement mischaracterized the available intelligence."
--------
Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked By Cheney
By Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14901-2003Sep28.html
In making the case for war against Iraq, Vice President Cheney has continued to suggest that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with a Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker five months before the attacks, even as the story was falling apart under scrutiny by the FBI, CIA and the foreign government that first made the allegation.
The alleged meeting in Prague between hijacker Mohamed Atta and Iraqi Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was the single thread the administration has pointed to that might tie Iraq to the attacks. But as the Czech government distanced itself from its initial assertion and American investigators determined Atta was probably in the United States at the time of the meeting, other administration officials dropped the incident from their public statements about Iraq.
Not Cheney, who was the administration's most vociferous advocate for going to war with Iraq. He brought up the connection between Atta and al-Ani again two weeks ago in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" in which he also suggested links between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Neither the CIA nor the congressional joint inquiry that investigated the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon found any evidence linking Iraq to the hijackers or the attacks. President Bush corrected Cheney's statement several days later.
Cheney's staff also waged a campaign to include the allegation in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's speech to the United Nations in February in which he made the administration's case for war against Iraq. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, pressed Powell's speechwriters to include the Atta claim and other suspected links between Iraq and terrorism, according to senior and mid-level administration officials involved in crafting the speech.
When State Department and CIA officials complained about Libby's proposed language and suggested cutting large sections, Cheney's associates fought back. "Every piece offered . . . they fought tooth and nail to keep it in," said one official involved in putting together the speech.
The vice president's role in keeping the alleged meeting in Prague before the public eye is an illustration of the administration's handling of intelligence reports in the run-up to the war, when senior officials sometimes seized on reports that bolstered the case against Iraq despite contradictory evidence provided by the U.S. intelligence community.
Cheney's office declined to comment. Mary Matalin, a former senior aide to Cheney who still provides the vice president with advice, said Cheney's job is to focus on "the big picture." His appearance on "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, she said, was intended to "remind people that Iraq is part of a bigger war that will require patience and sacrifice."
Cheney does not fully vet his speeches or public statements with the CIA or the wider intelligence community for accuracy, according to several administration officials, but usually gives the CIA a list of possible points or facts that might be used in a speech or appearance.
Matalin said Cheney "doesn't base his opinion on one piece of data," but has access to information that cannot be declassified because it would harm national security or compromise sources. "His job is to connect the dots in a way to prevent the worst possible case from happening," she said, but in public "he has to tiptoe through landmines of what's sayable and not sayable."
The claim that Atta, an Egyptian and Sept. 11 hijacker, had met with al-Ani in early April 2001 has been a constant element of the vice president's case against Iraq. Surveillance cameras at the Radio Free Europe building in Prague had picked up al-Ani, an intelligence officer at the Iraq embassy, surveying the building in April, five months before the Sept. 11 attacks. The tape was made available to Czech intelligence. Al-Ani was expelled at the U.S. government's request soon afterward for conduct incompatible with his diplomatic status.
In October 2001, after pictures of Atta had circulated publicly, an Arab student who worked as an informant for BIS, the Czech Security Information Service, told the service he had seen Atta meeting with al-Ani in April.
That November, Stanislav Gross, the Czech Republic's interior minister, said publicly that al-Ani and Atta had met in Prague. A short while later, Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman told Powell that the two had discussed targeting the Radio Free Europe building, not the Sept. 11 targets.
On Dec. 9, 2001, Cheney said on "Meet The Press" that "it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."
But that same month, Czech President Vaclav Havel was retreating from the more definitive accounts provided by his government, saying there was "a 70 percent" chance the meeting took place. Indeed, while Czech officials never officially backed away from their initial stance, officials at various agencies say that, privately, the Czechs have discredited the accuracy of the untested informant who came to them with the information. According to one report, Havel quietly informed the White House in 2002 there was no evidence to confirm the meeting.
The Czechs had reviewed records using Atta's name and his seven known aliases provided by the CIA and found nothing to confirm the April 2001 trip. Meanwhile, CIA and FBI officials were running down thousands of leads on Atta and the other 18 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 plot.
U.S. records showed Atta living in Virginia Beach in April 2001, and they could find no indication he had left Virginia or traveled outside the United States.
Even so, on March 24, 2002, Cheney again told NBC, "We discovered . . . the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague."
A few weeks later, in April, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a San Francisco audience, "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts." The FBI, he said, could find no evidence that Atta left or returned to the United States at the time.
In May, senior FBI and CIA analysts, having scoured thousands of travel records, concluded "there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the U.S.," according to officials at the time.
But on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney, again on "Meet the Press," said that Atta "did apparently travel to Prague. . . . We have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center."
"What does the CIA say about that?" asked host Tim Russert. "Is it credible?"
"It's credible," Cheney replied. "But, you know, I think the way to put it would be it's unconfirmed at this point."
As war loomed closer, the Atta allegation generally began to disappear from the administration's public case against Iraq. Bush did not mention Atta or the Prague meeting in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address, when he sought to show Iraq's links to terrorism.
But behind the scenes, the Atta meeting remained tantalizing to Cheney and his staff. Libby -- along with deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, a longtime Cheney associate -- began pushing to include the Atta claim in Powell's appearance before the U.N. Security Council a week after the State of the Union speech. Powell's presentation was aimed at convincing the world of Iraq's ties to terrorists and its pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
On Jan. 25, with a stack of notebooks at his side, color-coded with the sources for the information, Libby laid out the potential case against Iraq to a packed White House situation room. "We read [their proposal to include Atta] and some of us said, 'Wow! Here we go again,' " said one official who helped draft the speech. "You write it. You take it out, and then it comes back again."
Libby described the material as a "Chinese menu," simply the broadest range of options, according to several administration officials. "The papers were designed to assist [Powell's] preparation by organizing a lot of materials so that he could choose the order and evidence he found most compelling, although some of it, in the end, could not be declassified," said one administration official.
But other officials present said they felt that Libby's presentation was over the top, that the wording was too aggressive and most of the material could not be used in a public forum. Much of it, in fact, unraveled when closely examined by intelligence analysts from other agencies and, in the end, was largely discarded.
"After one day of hearing screams about who put this together and what are the sources, we essentially threw it out," one official present said.
Cheney's staff did not entirely give up. Late into the night before Powell's presentation, Libby called Powell's staff, waiting at the United Nations in New York, to question why certain material was not being included in the terrorism section, according to two State Department officials.
Earlier this month, on his most recent "Meet the Press" appearance, Cheney once again used Atta to subtly suggest a connection between Iraq and Sept. 11, 2001.
"With respect to 9/11, of course, we've had the story . . . the Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we've never been able to develop anymore of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it."
Defense and intelligence officials say al-Ani, who was apprehended by U.S. forces earlier this year, has denied meeting with Atta.
Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
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Halabja: How Bush Sr. Continued to Support Saddam After the 1988 Gassing of Thousands
And Bush Jr. Used it As a Pretext For War 15 Years Later
Monday, September 29th, 2003
Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/29/155243
After the Halabja gassing President Bush I and Sen. Bob Dole fought sanctions against Iraq even though the gassing killed thousands and was reportedly carried out in part by U.S.-made helicopters. From 1989 to 1990 the gassing was mentioned about once a month in major press outlets, yet in the three weeks leading up to the 2003 invasion, the press mentioned it 150 times. In 15 years the gassing went from an untold story to a pretext for invasion. [Includes transcript] Click here to read to full transcript
As the occupation of Iraq drags on, U.S. forces have yet to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction were cited to the public as well as Congress as the primary reason for the invasion.
In the months leading up to the war and since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens has been stated with greater frequency by the administration. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
In an interview yesterday on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopolous, Secretary of State Colin Powell said "Halabja is a city in northern Iraq, where, and on a Friday in March of 1988, Saddam Hussein gassed the people with VX, with sarin, nerve agents, and it killed 5,000 people in one day; that was 15 years ago. Now, if you want to believe that he suddenly gave up that weapon and had no further interest in those sorts of weapons, whether it be chemical, biological or nuclear, then I think you're -- it's a bit naive to believe that."
Powell also didn't bother to mention that people connected to the US government at the time of the Halabja massacre believe Iran, not Iraq, committed the atrocity.
In January of this year former CIA senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war Stephen C. Pelletiere wrote in the The New York Times "We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds."
Furthermore, both the Reagan and Bush administrations authorized the sale to Iraq of various items that had both military and civilian applications, i.e., chemical and biological weapons.
In a 1991 New York Times piece about U.S. ties to Iraq, Harvey Weinstein writes, "In 1982, the Reagan administration excused Iraq from the list of international terrorists that had been a barrier to virtually all trade Baghdad...First on Hussein's shopping list was helicopters - he bought 60 Hughes helicopters and trainers with little notice. However, a second order of 10 twin-engine Bell "Huey" helicopter, like those used to carry combat troops in Vietnam, prompted congressional opposition in August, 1983."
Weinstein continues: "In 1988, Kurdish civilians were attacked with poisonous gas from Iraqi helicopters and planes. U.S. intelligence sources say they believe that the American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs."
- John Stauber, co-author of the new book Weapons of Mass Deception. He is the founder and executive director of the Center for Media & Democracy which publishes the news magazine PR Watch.
- Stephen Pelletiere, former senior CIA political analyst on Iraq. Pelletiere was privy to much of the classified material having to do with the Persian Gulf and he headed a investigation in 1991 into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States. The classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you can stay with us as we move on to our next subject, which is the issue of weapons of mass destruction. And now, hearing both general Colin Powell yesterday on "this week with George Stephanopoulos" on ABC, and Condoleezza Rice, both on CNN. And in this example, this clip from Fox news, as they tried to distance themselves from the issue of weapons of mass destruction being found now in Iraq. They're going back in time. This is Condoleezza rice.
[TAPE]
CONDOLEEZA RICE: The president took a very bold and decisive action. Everybody knows that the world is much better off with Saddam Hussein gone. Nobody wants to argue that we would have been better off to leave him in place. Given that this brutal dictator is gone, this man who used weapons of mass destruction in really one of the great crimes against humanity in this century.
AMY GOODMAN:So there we have it. Condoleezza Rice talking about the example of Halubjah.
Now, let's talk about Halubjah, March of 1988. And what exactly happened there. We're joined out phone, in addition to Ray Mcgovern, by another C.I.A. analyst for a number of years, Steven Pelletiere, as well as John Stauber. He's the co-author of Weapons of Mass Deception. We're going back in time now, we're going back 15 years. John Stauber, you to a very interesting chronology in your book of what happened after the people of Halubjah were gassed. Can you describe the incident and then tell us in terms of what U.S. bush administration, the first bush, said.
JOHN STAUBER: Well, Amy, let me first start by saying that even I have been absolutely stunned by the statements of Colin Powell and Condoleezza rice, especially the secretary of state who went to Halubjah recently and said the U.S. should have acted sooner there because of what occurred there, which is the gassing of thousands of men, women, and men. And here is the ultimate hypocrisy. I think this has become the primary justification now for the war. But the event occurred in 1988. The chemicals were supplied by the Reagan administration. And after the gassing of civilians in Halubjah, there was a bipartisan effort to try to pass the 1988 prevention of genocide act. That act was killed by Colin Powell, who was Ronald Reagan's secretary of-or was Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, and he led the effort to kill the prevention of genocide act introduced after Halubjah. I mean, chemical Ali, who we're hearing so much about, was essentially our ally during that time. And if history were truthfully told, we would probably be referring to Colin Powell as chemical Colin. Now, what happened after Halubjah, of course, just a couple years later, Saddam Hussein apparently thought he was so well loved by what was then the bush administration succeeding the Reagan administration that, of course, he invaded Kuwait, took over those oil fields, and soon learned that the bush administration would not allow that. In order to galvanize U.S. support for a war against our former ally, Saddam Hussein, the bush administration working with a front group funded by the Kuwaiti royal family called citizens for a free Kuwait staged a stunt in October of 1990, a hearing before the congressional human rights caucus, at which they were investigating Iraqi atrocities. Well, there were plenty of Iraqi atrocities, such as the most stunning atrocity, the gassing at Halabjah. But rather than refer to events in which the U.S. Reagan administration was complicit, they concocted a phony atrocity, and that, of course, was the "Nayirah Testimony" where this tearful young girl said she saw Iraqi soldiers rip babies out of incubators and leave them to die in occupied Kuwait. That was probably the turning point. That testimony, which was repeated over and over on the news was probably the turning point in the U.S. Senate voting to support the first gulf war. Of course, it came out a year later, although I think most Americans still do not know this, that that testimony was completely false, that anonymous young girl was actually a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Her family, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., was in the room. A Llyod Fitz-Pegado Vice President of the Hill & Knowlton, which received over $10 million from Kuwaitis, to set up the front group, coached that young girl in her false testimony. And it's very interesting, as we wrote, I wrote "weapons of mass deception" to go back and look at how the first gulf war, there was almost no mention of Halabjah because, of course, there was no desire on the part of the bush administration to draw attention to a genocidal event in which they had been complicit. Instead, in order to demonize Saddam Hussein, the former bush ally, they repeated over and over the baby killing charge, the phony charge. Now flash ahead to the current situation and what we see is that the true story that this was a staged and phony event is not in the news.
What's in the news today and has become sort of the primary argument for a wider war was a good thing is Halabjah. And the real crank up for publicizing Halabjah began in September of 2002, just as the current bush administration was doing its so-called product launch for the war in Iraq. Now, we've gone back and actually analyzed very carefully the number of reportings both in the Halabjah with the search program.
And I won't spit out the statistics stinks, they're in our book, but they ignored Halabjah in which the U.S. was complicit, provided the weapons of mass destruction, and then Colin Powell led the lobby campaign to kill the prevention of genocide act. More recently, I think they've got the American public duped and confused into thinking that Halabjah was some sort of recent event because they are now repeating the Halabjah story over and over, and it's been echoed over and over in the news since September 2002. But bottom line here, if chemical Ali goes on trial, I think probably chemical Colin should be on trial with him.
AMY GOODMAN: Well It t sounds like they would not be the only ones on trial in a just world, if Halabjah is the example being used for the killing of innocent civilians. When we come back, I'd like you to actually give the numbers of the times Halabjah was raised right after it happened through the gulf war, and then how often it has been raised now. But what about that trip in 1990 that senator Alfonse D'Amato took-rather, senator Robert Dole took? Alfonse D'Amato was raising this issue early on. But senator Robert Dole went with four other senators to meet with Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq, and they fought to prevent sanctions from being applied to Saddam Hussein. This was after Halubjah. It was senator Robert dole, then senator-Alan Simpson of Wyoming, senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska, and senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio. Stay with us.
[MUSIC BREAK]
AMY GOODMAN: You're listening to Democracy Now!, the war and peace report. I'm Amy Goodman. As we talk about Halabjah. We're talking about Halabjah because that is being used more and more-being raised- as the reason the U.S. invaded Iraq. No, not in 1988 when the Kurds were gassed in Halabjah, not in 1989, not in 1990 or 1991 when the U.S. bombed Iraq. But being used now in 2003. Secretary of state Colin Powell went to Iraq in the last few weeks, and he visited the site of the mass graves in a museum dedicated to the 5,000 people who lost their lives in the 1988 chemical attack. A reminder, he said, of why the United States went to war to oust Saddam Hussein's regime. John Stauber is the author of Weapons of Mass Deception: the uses of propaganda in Bush's war on Iraq."
We're also joined by Steven Pelletiere, who is a former C.I.A. analyst who was in charge of Iraq years ago at the time of the Halabjah gassing, as well as Ray McGovern' remaining on the line with us, a longtime C.I.A. analyst for more than a quarter of a century under the director of central intelligence George Bush and also when George Bush was Vice President was one of his daily briefers. But, I just wanted to get those numbers John of how often in that Nexis Lexis search how often Halabjah was raised after the actual gassing, the Persian gulf war, and now.
JOHN STAUBER: During the buildup to "Operation Desert Storm", and I'm just reading right out of our work here in "Weapons of Mass Deception," the first Bush administration avoided mentioning the Halabja incident didn't mention it, reporters seldom mentioned it either. The search of the Lexis Nexis news database shows that Halabjah was mentioned in 188 news stories in the U.S. in 1988, the year it occurred. It was rarely mentioned, however, in subsequent years. 20 stories in 1989, and only 29 in 1990, the year that Saddam invaded Kuwait. Between the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and the end of operation desert storm on February 27, 1991, Halabjah received only 39 mentions. And during the entire following decade, it barely averaged 16 mentions per year. During the presidential election year of 2000, Halabjah got 10 mentions. The story didn't really begin to circulate again in the U.S. media until September 2002 when the George W. Bush administration began its public push for war with Iraq. After that, mentions began to increase sharply. The Halabjah incident was mentioned 57 times in the month of February 2003 alone.
In March, the month the war began, it was mentioned 145 times. By then, nearly 15 years had passed, memories had faded, and it was safe to talk about Saddam's gassing of Iraqi citizens. Only a few of the journalists who wrote about Halabjah in 2002 and this year bothered to mention that Saddam committed his worst atrocities while the president's father was showering him with financial aid. So there you have it.
Now Halabjah is probably one of the few foreign words pronounceable by most people in the U.S., but I suspect if a survey were done, they would tell you that, indeed, this must have been a recent occurrence, not something that took place 15 years ago with the complicity and collusion and cover-up by Colin Powell and the Reagan administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's bring Steven Pelletiere into this conversation. You were working at the C.I.A. at the time of the Halabjah gassing, is that right?
STEPHEN PELLETIERE: That's right.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you tell us what you understood at the time happened there? You've raised some very serious questions.
STEPHEN PELLETIERE: Yeah, I can tell you, and it's not just that I was working at the agency at the time. It's that after I left the agency to become senior professor at the war college, I was passed by the army to specifically investigate Halabjah. With all due respect to your guest, Stauber, in my opinion, he's got it wrong. We know the circumstances under which the alleged attack took place. It was a battle. The Iranians had infiltrated the town and were attempting to take it over so they could use it as a staging ground to perpetuate-to perpetrate an invasion into Iraq. The Iraqi commander ordered the use of chemical weapons in order to drive the Iranians out of the town. Those chemicals were delivered by mortar shells. Chemical Ali had nothing to do with this operation. That was a decision of the Iraqi commander on the spot, and he took that decision because it was essential to regain the town. Now, the Kurds that were killed, and it's an unfortunate expression, collateral damage. The Iraqis were not aiming at the Kurds, they were aiming at the Iranians. And there was a report done by the D.I.A. at the time, which also investigated it, in which the D.I.A. determined because of the condition of the bodies that the Kurds had been killed by Iranian gas, not by Iraqi gas. And they determined this because the extremities were blue, and that indicated a cyanide-based gas, and the Iraqis didn't have it.
Finally, the journalists who appeared on the spot and investigated it and took those awful pictures which everyone has seen, never counted more than a few score of bodies, and the original stories, and you can go back and look at the Christian Science Monitor and other reports of what went on by reporters in the town, all uniformly saying a couple of hundred people killed, now that's been swollen to the point where we're now claiming between 3,000 and 5,000.
Now, the problem here is that there seems to be an attempt by and it's unfortunate, because it seems to be coming mostly from the peace community-to characterize Halabjah as an instance of Washington's duplicity because they supported Iraq, and therefore, didn't mention the atrocity when it occurred. But then later on, when they went to war with Iraq, they dug it up. The implication is that, in fact, it was an atrocity all along. It's quite true that the administration has attempted to exploit Halabjah to bring, to take the United States to war, and that's dreadful. That's a lie. Because, in fact, the circumstances surrounding Halabjah had been completely distorted.
AMY GOODMAN: I'm looking at a series of pieces that Henry Weinstein of the Los Angeles Times did way back in 1991 about the vehicles that were used to, among other things, perhaps deliver that gas attack. And it says in 1982, the Reagan administration excused Iraq from the list of international terrorists that had been a barrier to virtually all trade with Baghdad. The next year, the U.S. began providing agricultural credits to allow Iraq to buy American rice and grain. In 1984, former diplomatic relations were restored for the first time in 17 years. Let's remember, when they were restored, they were restored when Reagan-Bush envoy Donald Rumsfeld went to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, shook his hand, and even when they knew at the time that he had been using chemical weapons, in a U.N. report, as well as a state department report, they normalized relations. In 1985, that was my insert, going back to Henry Weinstein's piece, in 1985, U.S. companies were invited to the first Iraq-sponsored business exhibition in Baghdad. Trade between U.S. firms in Iraq began as soon as Baghdad escaped the terrorist list. First on Hussein's shopping list was helicopters. He bought 60 Hughes helicopters and trainers with little notice. However, a second order of 10 twin-engine Bell "Huey" helicopters like those used to carry combat troops in Vietnam, prompted congressional opposition in August 1983. Congressman Berman complained in a letter to Secretary of State George P. Shultz that it had been a "serious mistake to take Iraq off the terrorism list" and warned that "American helicopters will fuel the Iran-Iraq conflict." Nonetheless, the sale was approved. Hussein was still buying helicopters in 1984 when Berman again urged Schulz to intervene. This time Iraq sought 45 Bell 214ST helicopters that originally were designed for military purposes. U.S. officials said Iraq proposed using some of them to fury V.I.P.'s and equip others for crop-dusting. It then went on to say that the procedural changes in Washington came after the helicopter sales were completed. In 1988, Kurdish civilians were attacked with poisonous gas that were Iraqi helicopters and planes. U.S. intelligence sources say they believe that the American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs. While officials in the U.S. were debating the wisdom of helicopter sales to Iraq, Hussein was undertaking a massive global weapons oppositions program of far greater consequence. Your comment on that, Steven Pelletiere.
STEPHEN PELLETIERE: My comment on that is this-put it into context. What was the American position when the Iran-Iraq war broke out? We obviously were against Khomeini and obviously against Iran. First of all, we'd just gone through the hostage ordeal. But beyond that, what was the aim of Khomeini? The aim of Khomeini was to exploit the Iranian revolution to Iraq and into the Saudi peninsula and into Kuwait. He was appealing,to Shias and the Shias are extensive all through Iraq, Kuwait, into Saudi Arabia, to rise up and revolt against their governments. At that time, those governments were supplying us with oil. It was not in our interest to see Khomeini take over Saudi Arabia. We sent Steven Solarz, then out to Iraq --
AMY GOODMAN: Then Congressman of New York -
STEPHEN PELLETIERE: To Baghdad in 1983, and Solarz met with Saddam Hussein, and Saddam Hussein agreed that he would discontinue all of his activities with various terrorists organizations.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring John Stauber back into this conversation, because I know what Steven Pelletiere is putting forward is quite controversial. John?
JOHN STAUBER: It is controversial. I do want to respond to it. You know, Steven wrote an op Ed in the "New York Times" on January 31 where I think most people first became aware of this argument titled "the war crime or an act of war". And that precipitated a letter from Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, who took sharp disagreement to what Steven has said and how he's portrayed Halabjah and I'll just quote briefly --
STEPHEN PELLETIERE: But also, Kenneth Roth before the war advocated our going to war with Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Let -
STEPHEN PELLETIERE: And Human Rights Watch now has a team out there looking for mass graves, and as far as I'm aware, they haven't found them. That is mass graves specifically associated with these alleged attacks on the Kurds.
AMY GOODMAN: Let John Stauber finish his point.
JOHN STAUBER: Thank you, Amy. I think it would be very useful to probably further examine this having Steven on with someone from Human Rights Watch. But the Human Rights Watch position is this-Human Rights Watch, researchers and I'm quoting from their letter interviewed survivors from Halabjah and reviewed 18 tons of Iraqi state documents to establish beyond doubt that the attack was carried out by Iraq. Iraqi forces used mustard and nerve gas, as well as mass executions to kill some 100,000 Kurds in the genocidal 1988 campaign.
STEPHEN PELLETIERE: I can speak to each one of those claims
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we're going to continue this discussion, because we've come to the end of this program, but we will do it very soon. I want to thank you all for being with us.
STEPHEN PELLETIERE: Oh, my God, Amy, you're cutting me off?
AMY GOODMAN: I am because the show is ending. We'll have you back. I want to thank you for being with us, Steven Pelletiere, John Stauber, and Ray Mcgovern. Please go to our web site for more information at democracynow.org. This is clearly an issue that needs further investigation. You can get a copy of today's show by calling 800-881-2359. You can also sign up for our daily digest at democracynow.org.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, call 1 (800) 881-2359.
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The Secrets Clark Kept
What the General Never Told Us About the Bush Plan for Serial War
by Sydney H. Schanberg
Village Voice
September 29th, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0340/schanberg.php
Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general who is one of 10 candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, has written a new book that is just arriving on bookstore shelves. Called Winning Modern Wars, it's mostly about the Iraq war and terrorism-and it is laced with powerful new information that he held back from the public when he was a CNN military commentator during the Bush administration's preparations for the war.
For example, he says he learned from military sources at the Pentagon in November 2001, just two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that serious planning for the war on Iraq had already begun and that, in addition to Iraq, the administration had drawn up a list of six other nations to be targeted over a period of five years.
Here's what he writes on page 130:
"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan." Clark adds, "I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."
He never disclosed anything like this information in any of his CNN commentaries or in the opinion columns he wrote for print media at the time. If Americans had known such things, and if the information is accurate, would they have supported the White House's march to war? Would Congress have passed the war resolution the White House asked for?
On the next page of the book, 131, Clark writes: "And what about the real sources of terrorists-U.S. allies in the region like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia? Wasn't it the repressive policies of the first, and the corruption and poverty of the second, that were generating many of the angry young men who became terrorists? And what of the radical ideology and direct funding spewing from Saudi Arabia? Wasn't that what was holding the radical Islamic movement together? . . . It seemed that we were being taken into a strategy more likely to make us the enemy-encouraging what could look like a 'clash of civilizations'-not a good strategy for Winning the war on terror."
These are very potent observations, coming from a military man with more than three decades of experience who is known for his intellectual candlepower. He was a leading commentator on television, chosen for his expertise in military strategy and geopolitics. Why didn't he share these opinions with us then, when an informed public might have raised its voice and demanded more answers from the White House?
Was Clark being censored? Or was it self-censorship? In the introduction to Winning Modern Wars, he writes that while he is "protecting" his military sources by leaving them unidentified, "the public interest demands that some of this information be shared." He adds, "Nothing in this book is derived from classified material nor have I written anything that could compromise national security." Then why wait until now to serve "the public interest"? Was the general worried that if he had spoken earlier, in a jingoistic atmosphere, he would have been labeled unpatriotic? It's an understandable concern.
Whatever his reasons, General Clark surely has some explaining to do now.
Maybe he has some valid explanations, such as that these views are conclusions that evolved over a period of time. But that's not the way he writes it in the book.
Inconsistencies between old and new remarks are common topics in presidential elections-if that's what these are. Inconsistencies aren't mortal sins, just mortal imperfections. Reporters commit them. Anyone who publishes stuff commits them. Sometimes they happen because of changes in circumstances. Sometimes it's plain old sloppy thinking. But the best way for the perpetrator to deal with them is to point them out as quickly as possible and explain them.
For a presidential candidate, the urgency is more intense, because if you let such problems hang around unattended to, the press will eventually discover them and, like rabid geese, nibble you to death.
Also, in this campaign especially, truth telling (or the lack of it) has become a big issue. The president and several lieges at his roundtable uttered so many distortions and exaggerations and untrue "facts" about why we had to go to war with Iraq that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney eventually had to come forward and admit they had "misspoken"-in particular about Iraq's nuclear capabilities. They still haven't acknowledged a lot of other misspeaks. Those running against this president would be well-advised not to fall into his errant ways.
Getting back to the Winning Modern Wars book, it is Clark's second and a sequel of sorts to the first one, which had a similar title, Waging Modern War, and came out two years ago. Both are published by PublicAffairs. Waging was mostly about the successful 78-day air war in Kosovo in 1999, which Clark directed as NATO military chief (officially the supreme allied commander, Europe). Winning is a much slimmer book that reads like a campaign document. Clark knows people will perceive it that way and he denies any political motivation, saying in the introduction that he wrote it as a public duty, especially for the nation's military men and women. "Offering this analysis," he says, "is the least I can do to help them and to help my country."
One must note, however, that by his own word in the book, he wrote it with considerable speed over the summer and was updating it as late as the first week in September. It started arriving in bookstores only a few days ago, one week after he announced his candidacy.
Also in the introduction, the general writes another commentary that he never gave on CNN:
"After 9/11, during the first months of the war on terror, a critical opportunity to nail Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was missed. Additionally, our allies were neglected and a counter-terrorist strategy was adopted that, despite all the rhetoric, focused the nation on a conventional attack on Iraq rather than a shadowy war against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: Al Qaeda. I argue that not only did the Bush administration misunderstand the lessons of modern war, it made a policy blunder of significant proportions. . . . [E]vidence and rhetoric were used selectively to justify the decision to attack Iraq. . . . [W]e had re-energized Al Qaeda by attacking an Islamic state and presenting terrorists with ready access to vulnerable U.S. forces. It was the inevitable result of a flawed strategy."
And on page 135, still another previously unspoken analysis: "And so, barely six months into the war on terror, the direction seemed set. The United States would strike, using its military superiority; it would enlarge the problem, using the strikes on 9/11 to address the larger Middle East concerns. . . and it would dissipate the huge outpouring of goodwill and sympathy it had received in September 2001 by going it largely alone, without the support of a formal alliance or full support from the United Nations. And just as the Bush administration suggested, [the conflict] could last for years."
I think reasonable people would agree that GeneraI Clark has a campaign problem-namely, the differences between what he has said in the past about the war and the president, and what he's saying now. Now he's saying that George Bush took the country "recklessly" into war. He never used language like that as a commentator. In fact, in an April 10 column for the Times of London, just after the fall of Baghdad, he wrote, "President Bush and Tony Blair should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt."
Clark should probably talk to the public about these discrepancies as soon as he can. The issues for him are credibility and trust. Americans have grown cynical. They've listened to hurricanes of hot air over the years. Who knows? If a candidate were to start telling the unvarnished truth, they might freeze in their tracks and listen.
-------- MILITARY
War in Iraq put to the test
September 29, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030928-114706-5956r.htm
The following is the text of a question from a multiple-choice test on the war in Iraq, translated from Korean. It is from an exam prepared by the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union, and was provided by the U.S. Embassy in Seoul.
Question: Which is not a reasonable justification for opposing the war against Iraq? Choose one.
1) [Saddam] Hussein was elected by the Iraqi people, but it is also true that he is a tyrant who has held on to his power for a long time. If this gives reason for the war against Iraq, then does this mean that the U.S. has reason to hit North Korea and other countries such as [Fidel] Castro's Cuba and [Moammar] Qaddafi's Libya?
2) If the war against Iraq started because the country has [weapons of mass destruction], then doesn't this mean that the United States, which possesses the greatest amount of WMD in the world, should be attacked by the U.N. forces?
3) If the war started because Saddam Hussein oppressed the Kurds for calling for independence, then why did the United States support Hussein and provide funding and weapons to him when he had oppressed the Kurds in the past? And why didn't the United States attack Russia when it used its tanks to invade Chechnya for pursuing its independence?
4) If it is true that the United States started the war because Hussein and [Osama] bin Laden planned and carried out 9/11 together, then why is it that the United States cannot provide any evidence of this? And why is it that the two (Hussein and bin Laden) denounce each other as the traitor of Allah?
5) If the war started because Hussein oppressed the human rights of the Iraqi people, then does this mean that [South] Korea should also be attacked by the United States for the same reason, since it has been branded by the Human Rights Committee of the U.N. as a country that fails to uphold its people's human rights for reasons such as overly strict censoring of student conduct, dress codes and incarceration of former North Korean spies for refusing to denounce their communist beliefs, based on its national-security law?
6) All of the answers above are reasonable; therefore there is no answer.
Source: U.S. Embassy in Seoul
-------- afghanistan
7 Afghan Soldiers Are Killed in an Ambush
September 29, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/international/asia/29AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 28 (Reuters) - Taliban guerrillas killed seven bodyguards of the governor of the volatile southern province of Helmand on Saturday in the latest of a series of violent strikes by the resurgent movement, officials said today.
Hajji Muhammad Ayoub, deputy chief of police in Helmand Province, said Taliban fighters attacked a military vehicle carrying the soldiers in Sangin district, northeast of Helmand's capital, Lashkar Gah, on Saturday night.
The governor, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, was not traveling with them, he said. Five soldiers died instantly and two within a few hours.
Hajji Muhammad Wali, a spokesman for the governor, said at least 10 guerrillas in two cars staged the attack. They escaped but abandoned one car with a mechanical problem.
The attack is the latest of a series of strikes attributed to a resurgent Taliban movement ousted by American-led forces late in 2001 and the second in Helmand in less than a week, after an attack that killed two aid workers on Wednesday.
In another incident on Saturday night, suspected Taliban supporters burned down a secondary school in the southeastern province of Nangarhar whose students are girls as well as boys.
The incident took place at around midnight on Saturday in the village of Shaga, about 17 miles north of the provincial capital, Jalalabad, the headmaster, Abdul Gani Hadayad said.
"The people who did this are people opposed to education and the government," he said. "It's obvious they are Taliban and Al Qaeda." The Taliban banned female education during its rule and has been blamed for other school burnings in the past.
The NATO secretary general, Lord Robertson, visited Kabul on Friday and said that the alliance was looking at options for a possible expansion of the peacekeeping force it leads, from the capital into the provinces, and that a decision would be made within weeks.
The United Nations spokesman David Singh said at a briefing today that the attack on the aid workers showed "the critical necessity for all parties concerned to establish security throughout the country."
Guerrilla attacks have hampered aid efforts, leading to disillusionment with international assistance among many rural Afghans. Western-backed efforts to improve security have not been able to prevent attacks on aid workers, government forces and officials.
-------- business
Boeing sees defence business growing 10 percent per year
PARIS (AFP)
Sep 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030929091319.pv4wu8bx.html
The defence division of US aircraft manufacturer Boeing is set to grow by 10 percent per year, the president of the defence activities James Albaugh told the Financial Times newspaper on Monday.
Aldbaugh said that the Integrated Defence Systems division had achieved sales last year of 25 billion dollars (21.7 billion euros).
Aldbaugh said: "We think we can grow over the next several years at a compounded annual growth rate of 10 percent or so -- it is higher than the actual (US defence) budget."
He said the growth should be achieved despite stabilisation of the US defence budget in 2006 and 2007 following a big increase in spending in the last few years.
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Clark capitalized on Army career, rank
September 29, 2003
By David Pace
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030929-123112-7749r.htm
Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark has parlayed his 35 years of military experience into a budding business career in the three years since retiring from the Army as a four-star general.
Mr. Clark "has been helpful to our company in putting them in touch with the right people both inside the military and in the commercial sector and in promoting our technology to them," said WaveCrest spokesman Tom McMahon, whose company has sold the Pentagon prototypes of its first product.
"He knew the military structure so well he would counsel them who to contact," Mr. McMahon said.
The former general serves on the boards of at least four other companies. He also has worked as a military consultant for CNN and started his own consulting firm in his hometown of Little Rock, Ark.
Mark Fabiani, a spokesman for Mr. Clark's presidential campaign, declined to answer questions about Mr. Clark's business activities. He said campaign officials are working to compile detailed information that will document the candidate's business dealings.
Mr. Clark's entry into the business world was facilitated by the Stephens Group, the parent company of a privately held family financial giant in Little Rock that operates one of the largest investment banks off Wall Street.
The influential company has been on the periphery of several Washington political scandals in the past three decades, from the resignation of President Carter's budget director in 1977 to the campaign fund-raising investigations of the mid-1990s.
Mr. Clark joined the Stephens Group as a managing director for merchant banking in mid-2001. That December, Acxiom Inc., a Little Rock data analysis company, signed a $300,000 contract with Stephens to obtain Mr. Clark's help in lobbying the government for homeland security business.
Mr. Clark joined Acxiom's board at the same time, and after leaving Stephens earlier this year, he signed another $150,000 consulting agreement with the company. That contract was terminated when he announced his candidacy for president, Acxiom said, but he remained a paid board member.
A privacy group filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Acxiom and JetBlue Airways Corp., which acknowledged that, in violation of its own privacy policy, it gave information from about 5 million passenger records to a Defense Department contractor. Acxiom provided additional demographic information to the contractor, which produced a study, "Homeland Security: Airline Passenger Risk Assessment," that was purported to help the government improve military base security.
One of Mr. Clark's Democratic rivals, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, said yesterday that Mr. Clark should explain his service on Acxiom's board given the privacy concerns he has raised about some post-September 11 antiterrorism laws.
At the Stephens Group, Mr. Clark's role "was primarily that of evaluating and looking for investment opportunities in the technology and defense areas," said Frank Thomas, a spokesman for the investment house.
In that capacity, Mr. Clark worked directly for Jackson Stephens, the billionaire chairman of the company; his son, Warren Stephens, the company's president; and other Stephens family members and senior company executives, Mr. Thomas said.
It was Jackson Stephens who helped Bert Lance dispose of his stock in the National Bank of Georgia after Mr. Lance was forced to resign as Mr. Carter's budget director in 1977.
Mr. Stephens also was a business partner with Indonesian tycoon Mochtar Riady and his son, James Riady. The Riadys owned the Lippo Group, which was a key player in the investigation into claims of illegal foreign campaign contributions during the 1996 election.
It was the Washington office of the Stephens Group that John Huang, a former Lippo executive, used in 1996 to make numerous phone calls while working at the Commerce Department, where he had access to U.S. intelligence. Mr. Huang, the Democratic Party's chief Asian-American fund-raiser, pleaded guilty in 1999 to violating campaign finance laws.
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Defense Stocks Have Seen Their Peak
By Jerry Knight
Monday, September 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14288-2003Sep28?language=printer
The fighting in Iraq isn't over, but the defense stock boom is.
Three major Wall Street firms downgraded the industry, or at least most of it, last week, adding to the selling pressure that was already driving down the stocks of Pentagon contractors.
Shares of Lockheed Martin Corp. and General Dynamics Corp., the two biggest locally based defense contractors, each dropped more than 10 percent over the past couple of weeks.
Lockheed Martin stock fell for nine days in a row until Thursday, when a Morgan Stanley analyst issued a downgrade on most of the defense industry but maintained the equivalent of a "buy" rating on the Bethesda company's stock.
Both General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin rebounded Friday after the Senate unanimously approved a $368 billion defense spending bill that includes several billion dollars for projects by the two firms.
Pentagon spending is key to the financial health of defense contractors and it is likely to slow sooner than expected, industry-watchers for Banc of America Securities, Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley warned in their volley of downgrades.
Most analysts' reports look at the operations and finances of individual companies from the bottom up and reach conclusions about the entire industry. These industry-wide revaluations were based on a top-down assessment of the political and economic factors that determine defense budgets and their implications for individual companies.
The economic overview is that burgeoning budget deficits and other spending needs will force Congress and the White House to cut defense spending or at least reduce its growth rate.
"Federal budgetary pressures and raiding to pay for the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to cause U.S. procurement and R&D [research and development] budget growth to slow," said Nick Fothergill, who follows defense contractors all over the world from the Banc of America Securities offices in London.
President Bush has favored defense spending over social programs, wrote Heidi Wood of Morgan Stanley. "If Bush wins the next election, we wonder if he and his advisers . . . will use the second term to soften this stance for more balance towards butter vs. guns."
Health care and Social Security top the list of needs that could challenge the Pentagon as the top government spending priority. Defense spending might also have to be cut simply to keep deficits from driving up interest rates and hurting the economy.
Citing polls showing plummeting public support for defense spending, Smith Barney's George D. Shapiro said that "the weak economy could also be hurting public support."
"It is also possible that the problems in Iraq are causing some of the drop, as Iraq appears to us to potentially be similar to Vietnam," Shapiro said.
All three firms concluded that military spending is nearing its peak, and with it prices of defense stocks. The business cycle is turning as well, they agreed, entering a period when other industries will be as good -- or better -- investments as defense stocks.
Defense stocks outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index for three years running (2000, 2001 and 2002), but they are expected to do no better than the overall market from now on.
What that means for Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics is the key question for Washington investors, and on that the analysts do not agree.
Morgan Stanley's Wood maintained her "buy" recommendations on the two local giants, rating them as the industry's "top picks," along with Raytheon Co. She ranks Raytheon first, General Dynamics second and Lockheed Martin third.
In contrast, Smith Barney's Shapiro dropped Lockheed Martin to "hold/medium risk" and pushed General Dynamics down to "sell/medium risk."
Banc of America's Fothergill cut Lockheed Martin from "buy" to "neutral" and maintained his "neutral" assessment of General Dynamics.
In Wood's assessment Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are among the best investments in an industry that will do about as well as the overall market and could be attractive buys at the right price.
Smith Barney, on the other hand, does not give a "buy" rating to a single stock in the entire aerospace and defense industry. Nor does Banc of America, which pins the "neutral" tag on every defense contractor.
But their reports reveal differences not only about how individual firms will fare but also about why defense spending is likely to slow down.
Shapiro bases his industry downgrade on Smith Barney's own public opinion polling, which found a "sharp drop in public support for increased defense spending."
Two years ago, 80 percent of the people polled said they support spending more on defense. Last year it was 50 percent. This year it is 31 percent.
"The collapse in public support for defense spending from 80 percent in 2001 to only 31 percent now is unprecedented," Shapiro noted. The erosion of backing for military spending was so dramatic that the poll was done twice, and the results confirmed, he said in the report issued a week ago.
Three days later, Morgan Stanley aerospace and defense analyst Wood put out a "change in industry view," which was less negative and included a section headed "Debunking the Myth of Public Opinion."
"There is a view that public opinion is a lead indicator of future defense spending," Wood wrote. "Under the light of relevant facts -- historical and present -- we find that not to be the case."
Since the time of the Roman Empire, she said, defense spending has been determined by three factors: the availability of funds, the threat and "the agenda (of those in power, not the populace)." Funding could become an issue, she agreed, and the threat is impossible to predict. But public opinion is not the deciding factor.
"The ambitions of the powers at the top drive military expenditures, and historically, much as today, the populace follows," Wood said. In the 1960s when opposition to the war in Vietnam was growing, she noted, "neither the lack of popular support in the polls nor marches in Washington were successful in preventing the budget increases of 1965-1968."
Smith Barney's Shapiro, however, sees a close correlation over the past 40 years between public support for defense spending, the size of the Pentagon budget and the price of defense contractor stocks.
"The level of public opinion for increased defense spending is a key leading indicator" of how much money Congress will budget for the Pentagon, he said.
When public support is strong and the defense budget is growing, he said, defense stocks tend to trade at higher prices relative to their earnings -- the P/E ratio. The higher the ratio, the more investors think earnings will grow in the future. "We expect P/E multiples to contract further, as there has been a correlation with lower public opinion causing lower multiples," Shapiro said.
The phrase "lower multiples" means lower stock prices, and even Wood agrees that defense stocks are going to sell for less than they have been.
Lockheed Martin stock, which closed Friday at $45.43 a share, had peaked in July. Nudging against $54.50 a share for a few days, then drifting down to about $52, the shares began to slide in earnest in early September. Driven to $45.10 by nine consecutive days of losses -- a hint that some big investors were getting out -- they gained 3 cents a share Thursday and another 30 cents Friday after Congress voted on Pentagon spending
General Dynamics shares held pretty close to their $87.18 high for the year until a couple of weeks ago when they went into a seven-day slide that was also halted by Friday's Congressional vote. Up 99 cents Friday, the stock closed at $77.07.
The Pentagon spending bill did not stop the retreat in shares of CACI International Inc., which until a couple of weeks ago had been the star of the local defense stocks. After hitting a record $48.10 on Sept. 16, CACI fell for eight consecutive days, closing Friday at $42.35.
An eight-day decline also drove down the shares of Anteon International Corp. from $33.80 to $30.32 but that sell-off may not have been entirely from the defense stock retreat. Anteon insiders sold several million shares of their stock starting Sept. 16.
Jerry Knight's e-mail address is knightj@washpost.com.
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Federal Contracts
States News Service
Monday, September 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15089-2003Sep28?language=printer
CACI International Inc. of Arlington won a $154.7 million contract from the Army Intelligence and Security Command to provide mission support services at Inscom sites, other national intelligence agency sites, and for other army tactical units worldwide. The contract, known as Genesis II, is awarded for one base year and four option years.
SRA International Inc. of Fairfax won a contract valued at up to $47 million over five years from the National Archives and Records Administration to provide a broad range of information technology services.
Naval Systems Associates LC of Columbia won a $41.61 million contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center for naval architecture and marine engineering services to improve the performance, effectiveness and affordability of ship-submarine design, manufacture and support through management, assessment, research, development and integration of current and emerging technologies.
Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax won a five-year, $38 million contract from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs to provide a broad range of high-end information technology and engineering services, development and software support.
Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax won a five-year, $24.6 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to support its Electromagnetic Technology Division at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass. Work includes research and development services to enhance Air Force activities dealing with advanced modeling techniques, material studies, and sensors that support a variety of Air Force weapon system applications.
Lockheed Martin Naval Electronics and Surveillance Systems of Manassas won a $14 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command's Training Systems Division to integrate, test and deliver one MH-60S cockpit procedures trainer.
BearingPoint Inc. of McLean won a $12.68 million contract from the Agency for International Development's Overseas Missions Division-Kenya for professional, administrative and management support services associated with East and Central African Global Competitiveness Hub.
Alliant Techsystems Inc. of Radford won an $11.91 million delivery order from the Department of Defense's Joint Munitions Command as part of a $130.11 million contract for a 5.37 million pound supply of trinitrotoluene.
Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax won a five-year contract valued at up to $11.9 million from the Navy Personnel Command to provide information technology and technical services to support a customer service center.
BAE Systems Applied Technologies of Rockville won an $11.52 million contract modification from the Naval Air Warfare Center's Aircraft Division for technical and engineering services to support the development, procurement, integration, testing, installation and certification of shipboard communication systems; development and integration of systems at shore sites associated with fleet support to surface combatants and the development, testing and integration of mobile and airborne communication systems.
Sprint of Herndon won an enhancement of a previously announced contract from the Defense Department that now makes the package valued at $10.5 million for day-to-day management of tactical communications systems for Air Force bases in Southwest Asia. Sprint will support at least three bases in two countries within the region.
Futron Inc. of Springfield won a $10.11 million contract from the Social Security Administration for maintenance and support services for SSA Multimedia Centers nationwide.
Eagle Systems Inc. of California, Md., won a $9.96 million contract modification from the Naval Air Systems Command's Aircraft Division to provide a support for the Electromagnetic Environment Effects Division.
Professional Software Engineering Inc. of Virginia Beach won a $9.57 million contract modification from the Naval Air Systems Command's Aircraft Division for engineering, technical and management support services in support of the Marine Corps Distance Learning Program.
John C. Grimberg Co. Inc. of Rockville won a $9.45 million contract from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command's Engineering Field Activity Chesapeake for demolition and replacement construction of the high temperature water piping distribution system at the Naval Academy, Annapolis.
Kellogg Brown and Root Services of Arlington won a $9.4 million contract modification from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command's Atlantic Division for construction of a ferry terminal.
SRA International Inc. of Fairfax won a 52-month task order valued at $8.9 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Systems Integration and Management Center to design, develop and implement a new information system to enable the Library of Congress' Copyright Office to improve its public services and deliver more services electronically.
Unidyne Corp. of Norfolk won an $8.42 million contract modification from the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center for an increase in the number of man-hours in the level of effort for engineering, technical and logistics services for the installation, removal and testing of navigation and other systems in ships and shore facilities supporting Naval Sea Systems Command.
Radian Inc. of Alexandria won an $8 million contract modification from the Air Force to provide for various hardware components for the Deployable Power Generator Distribution System.
Integral Systems of Lanham won a $7.74 million contract modification from the Space and Missile Systems Center to refine in-scope specification requirements and relocate effort between contract line item numbers and fiscal periods because of milestone and funding changes.
Advanced Technologies and Laboratories International Inc. of Germantown won a contract valued at up to $7.25 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for participation in the Logistics Worldwide program.
These contracts were awarded by the federal government to companies in Maryland, Virginia and the District. For more information, contact States News Service at 202-628-3100, extension 266.
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Curtiss-Wright To Develop Weapons Hoist Unmanned Combat Air System
Roseland - Sep 29, 2003
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/uav-03zr.html
Curtiss-Wright Corporation said Friday that The Boeing Company awarded it a contract to design, develop and integrate the weapons bay hoist systems for the new Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) X-45 program.
The J-UCAS X-45 demonstrators are being developed by Boeing Phantom Works to demonstrate the military utility and operational value of UCAV systems for the United States Air Force and Navy.
Curtiss-Wright expects to deliver development hardware in early 2005. The first flight of the new X-45 is scheduled for early 2006.
Meanwhile, Phantom Works continues to flight test the X-45A technology demonstrators to verify the core functionality of the software necessary for the USAF/USN missions.
"Because of their stealth capabilities and precision-guided weaponry, UCAVs are considered the future of air defense," said Martin Benante, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Curtiss-Wright.
"We're proud to have been selected by Boeing as a strategic partner in developing this new technology and look forward to seeing it integrated into the military's other systems."
-------- chemical weapons
Tokyo ordered to compensate Chinese killed or injured by dumped weapons
TOKYO (AFP)
Sep 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030929085406.3qq8uqir.html
In a landmark ruling, a Japanese court on Monday awarded 1.7 million dollars in damages to Chinese people whose relatives were killed or who themselves were injured by chemical weapons dumped by the defeated Japanese Imperial Army at the end of World War II.
The ruling at the Tokyo District Court for total damages of 190 million yen (1.7 million dollars), comes as China is urging Japan to speed up the disposal of abandoned weapons after one man died and more than 30 were injured last month by mustard gas dumped by Japan in northeast China.
Presiding judge Yoshihiro Katayama ruled it was "possible" for Japan to collect information on the deployment of forces and weapons in the closing days of the war and offer to collect the munitions.
"If (the Japanese government) had provided information, many weapons might have been disposed of safely" over a shorter period of time, he ruled.
"It would be against the notion of justice and fairness" if the court rejected some of the damages claims on the grounds that the 20-year period for demanding compensation has expired, he said.
An official at the Japanese foreign ministry's Chinese affairs division said the ruling was "harsh on the state."
"We will decide on what to do in the future after examining the ruling," she said.
The 13 plaintiffs -- seven survivors and six relatives of three dead people -- brought the action in December 1996. They had been demanding a total of 200 million yen in damages for injuries suffered between 1974 and 1995.
They argued the Japanese military dumped massive quantities of chemical weapons such as mustard gas and lewisite in China as they withdrew following Japan's defeat in 1945, destroying all records of the stockpiles. Monday's ruling was in contrast to a May ruling at the same court.
The same Tokyo court rejected the damage claims by Chinese nationals in the first legal judgment in Japan handed down concerning injuries caused by chemical weapons left behind by the Japanese military.
Chief judge Takashi Saito at that time acknowledged that the Japanese army had left unused chemical weapons and bombs in China and that it was predictable they would pose a risk to the lives of people there.
But he stopped short of saying Japan had a legal obligation to take action and ruled it was "very difficult" for Japan to search for and collect munitions in another sovereign country.
Even if Japan had warned China of the danger, "it could not be considered an effective measure to prevent accidents as it would depend on the Chinese government's judgment," Saito said in the May ruling.
Japan started on-the-spot investigations in China in 1991 and promised in 1999 to collect and dispose of the abandoned chemical weapons by 2007.
According to the foreign ministry here, the Japanese military left 700,000 chemical weapons in China after the war.
The Chinese side has said two million chemical weapons were left over.
Attorneys for Chinese plaintiffs say some 2,000 Chinese have been killed or injured by abandoned chemical weapons and several thousand more have fallen victim to bombs.
-------- colombia
11 Killed in Bombing in Colombian City
September 29, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/international/americas/29COLO.html
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Sept. 28 (Reuters) - A remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle exploded today on a crowded street lined with restaurants and nightclubs in southern Colombia, killing 11 people and wounding at least 40, the authorities said.
The government blamed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerrilla army known as FARC, for the blast. The roughly 10-pound bomb exploded about 3 a.m. in the Zona Rosa district in Florencia, 210 miles south of Bogotá, said Gen. Luis Ardila, commander of the 12th Army Brigade in Florencia.
Two police officers were among the dead. The blast also killed a 12-year-old boy who sold candies on the street, and a 15-year-old girl had a leg amputated, doctors and military officials said.
The attack was a setback for President Álvaro Uribe's efforts to rein in indiscriminate violence in a four-decade guerrilla war.
"Colombia weeps but doesn't surrender," Mr. Uribe said in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta during a political gathering.
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Colombian Blast Kills At Least 10
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 29, 2003; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13233-2003Sep28.html
BOGOTA, Colombia, Sept. 28 -- A bomb detonated by remote control exploded before dawn today in front of a crowded nightclub in the city of Florencia, killing at least 10 people and wounding scores of others. Colombian military officials said leftist rebels were responsible for the blast.
The roughly 10-pound bomb, apparently attached to a motorcycle, exploded around 3 a.m. as people poured out of the bars and nightclubs in Florencia, a provincial capital 210 miles south of Bogota. Florencia serves as an important urban base for Colombia's largest guerrilla force and as a financial center for the drug trade.
In recent years, Florencia, a city of roughly 100,000 people on the edge of a former government-sanctioned guerrilla haven used for peace talks, has come under the increasing control of a privately funded paramilitary force. The contest between the guerrillas and paramilitary forces, which fight the insurgency alongside the army in much of Colombia, has led to a spike in urban violence.
Among the dead today were two children -- ages 11 and 12 -- and two police officers, army officials said. Local health officials immediately began a blood drive to help treat the wounded, who numbered at least 50.
In terms of casualties, the blast was the largest since February, when a remotely detonated bomb in the southern provincial capital of Neiva killed 15 people. A week earlier, a bomb exploded in a club frequented by Colombia's elite in Bogota, killing more than 30 civilians.
On Sept. 10, a bomb attached to a horse killed at least eight people and wounded 20 when it exploded in the village of Chita in the central province of Boyaca. Authorities have attributed each of the bombings to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, an 18,000-member Marxist insurgency movement that has been at war with the state since 1964.
Government officials said the FARC's increasing reliance on terrorist tactics is a sign of weakness as the army, backed by $1.97 billion in U.S. military equipment and training since 2000, becomes a more skilled and mobile force.
The FARC, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, has retreated in several strategic regions of the country since President Alvaro Uribe took office last year and began a more aggressive military campaign against it.
-------- europe
France takes command of maritime task force based in Djibouti
DJIBOUTI (AFP)
Sep 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030929112108.k5ia49w1.html
The French navy on Monday took control from Germany of a six-nation task force tasked with surveillance in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean as part of the anti-terrorist operation "Enduring Freedom".
At a ceremony on board German frigate the Brandenburg, German Rear Admiral Manfred Nielson handed control of the allied naval fleet, "Task Force 150", to his French counterpart Jacques Mazars.
French ambassador to Djibouti Patrick Roussel, Djibouti army chief General Fathi Ahmed, and vice-admiral Alain Dumontet were among those who witnessed the handover ceremony.
Also present were the commanding officer of French forces stationed in Djibouti, General Gerard Pons, and US General Martin Robeson, who is commanding officer of allied land forces based in the Horn of Africa engaged in the international coalition against terrorism.
"Task Force 150" is made up of around 1,000 soldiers stationed on nine warships flying the flags of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States.
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European Union Ministers Support Iraq Handover
September 29, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-EU-Iraq.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The European Union, whose members were bitterly divided over the war to oust Saddam Hussein, disagreed Monday on a timetable for a handover of power to a sovereign Iraqi government.
Meeting behind closed doors, the foreign ministers of the 15-member European Union issued a unanimous statement that a transfer of power in Iraq should occur ``as soon as feasible'' and that the United Nations should play a ``vital'' role in the transition.
The EU foreign ministers also asked foreign policy chief Javier Solana to develop proposals on an ``enhanced EU role in Iraq,'' including the possible dispatch of peacekeepers.
The statement did not detail the positions of member nations about a timetable, but French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has called for a transfer by the end of the year.
``We think that would create favorable conditions'' for Iraq's reconstruction, de Villepin told reporters Monday. ``France insists on the implementation of a rapid transfer of power ... within several months.''
Germany did not want to be pinned down on a date just yet.
``We will actively support the sovereignty of the Iraqi people and at the same time avoid new risks,'' German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said, adding it was important to avoid a ``power vacuum'' in Iraq.
The United States has proposed that Iraq adopt a new constitution in six months, with elections to follow, and a greater U.N. role in the country's reconstruction.
EU foreign ministers said a new U.N. resolution was essential to formalize a transfer of power from the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and that the United Nations ``should play a vital role'' in Iraq's reconstruction.
Their statement said it was necessary to reach a deal ``on a realistic schedule for handing over political control to the Iraqi people ... as soon as feasible.''
The issue over how and when power should be given to an independent Iraqi government is thwarting a deal at the United Nations, pitting France against the United States.
France, Germany and Belgium were the most vocal EU nations in opposition to the war while Britain sent troops and sided with the United States. The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Portugal and Spain have also recently sent troops.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, whose country holds the EU presidency, sought to bridge the divide between France and Britain over a new U.N. resolution.
Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said a lot of work remained to be done to get consensus on Iraq both in Europe and at the U.N. ``This (proposed resolution) could be the beginning of a solution, but we are not there yet,'' he said.
The ministers said the appointment of an interim Iraqi Cabinet and moves toward writing a new constitution marked were ``significant'' steps. But they remained concerned over the security situation, and condemned the recent attacks against U.N. aid workers.
-------- iraq
U.S. Soldier Killed, 1 Hurt in Rebel Raid West of Baghdad
September 29, 2003
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/international/worldspecial/29CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 29 - American troops battled Iraqi guerrillas today in a six-hour firefight, leaving one soldier dead and another wounded, a United States military spokesman and witnesses said.
The fight began after guerrillas attacked an American convoy with a roadside bomb at about 9:10 a.m. in Habbaniya, a town 40 miles west of Baghdad, the spokesman, Lt. Col. George Krivo, said. The guerrillas then fired automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades at the convoy, he said.
The American unit counterattacked, pursuing the Iraqis with helicopters and armored vehicles and surrounding them in several houses, Colonel Krivo said.
The fight continued at least through midafternoon, far longer than most battles between American soldiers and Iraqi guerrillas.
Local witnesses to the clash described a fierce battle, with helicopters, fighter jets and tanks attacking suspected guerrilla positions, according to The Associated Press and Reuters.
Residents told Reuters that the fighting broke out after an American vehicle ran over a mine. Assailants emerged later, firing rocket-propelled grenades at the soldiers who returned fire, the agency said.
After several hours, American reinforcements arrived at the scene in armored personnel carriers and Humvees, as civilians fled on foot, the witnesses said.
No accurate figures were available for Iraqi deaths or injuries from the fighting, either guerrilla or civilian.
The American soldiers in the firefight were members of the 82nd Airborne Division, which replaced the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment earlier this month in most of the Sunni Triangle, an area west and north of Baghdad that has been the center of resistance to the occupation of Iraq.
The region is home to most of Iraq's Sunni Muslims, who are about 20 percent of the population but have long dominated Iraq and fear that Shiite Muslims, who make up a majority of Iraqis, may gain control of the country's new government.
Since the 82nd Airborne began its patrols, civilian deaths in the area, which includes the town of Falluja, appear to have increased dramatically.
In at least three high-profile incidents since Sept. 12, soldiers from the 82nd have killed Iraqi civilians and police officers in incidents near Falluja where Iraqi witnesses say the casualties put up little or no resistance.
To the north of Baghdad, soldiers of the Fourth Infantry Division made two dozen raids in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit and other areas, arresting 92 people and seizing weapons and ammunition in operations that ended this morning, The A.P. said.
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U.S. Troops Find Stores of Weapons at 2 Iraq Sites
September 29, 2003
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/international/middleeast/29IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 28 - American soldiers found large stores of weapons in several raids this weekend, an American military spokesman said today.
The biggest cache was discovered in a raid Saturday afternoon in Owja, a town just south of Tikrit that is the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, Lt. Col. George Krivo said at a news conference here today. Soldiers from the Fourth Infantry Division discovered 23 surface-to-air missiles, more than 400 grenades, a mortar and more than 1,000 pounds of high explosives, Colonel Krivo said.
In a separate raid on Saturday near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, soldiers from the Fourth Infantry Division discovered eight surface-to-air missiles, 196 helicopter rockets, a machine gun, and electrical switches that could be used to make homemade bombs. Two other raids found mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, and automatic rifles, Colonel Krivo said.
The good news for the American military in its effort to locate these weapons came on a weekend of relative quiet in Baghdad. Improvised rockets hit the Rashid Hotel, where senior American officials live, on Saturday, but the missiles did little damage and no one was hurt. No American soldiers had died since Thursday, the military reported late today.
The calm in Baghdad was broken today, though, by a firefight between police officers and security guards for Jalal Uldin al-Saghir, a senior member of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading Shiite Muslim group. Two police officers died in the firefight, and one was wounded, Mr. Saghir said.
The incident occurred when the cleric's guards came across the police, who were taking part in an unrelated stakeout. The gunfire occurred in an ensuing period of confusion.
Colonel Krivo said the military was continuing to investigate the shooting death in Falluja on Sept. 12 of at least eight Iraqi police officers and one Jordanian hospital worker.
In a news conference on Thursday, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of American forces in Iraq, had seemed to say that the investigation was nearly complete and that American soldiers would probably face no penalties in the incident.
Colonel Krivo said today that General Sanchez had actually been referring to a different investigation into another shooting of Iraqi police officers by American soldiers.
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Ethnic and Religious Fissures Deepen in Iraqi Society
Tensions Escalating Over Land, Power and Loyalties
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14841-2003Sep28?language=printer
HAIFA, Iraq -- The Kurds who descended upon this hardscrabble Arab village in northern Iraq 11 days ago were so confident they would be able to evict everyone and seize the surrounding farmland that they brought along three tractors.
But instead of responding by fleeing, as thousands of other Arab villagers in northern Iraq have done when confronted with similar Kurdish demands, the residents of Haifa refused to budge. "Our people went to them and said, 'What the hell are you doing here? This area doesn't belong to you,' " recalled Kadhim Hani Jubbouri, the village sheik.
Words were exchanged. Threats were hurled. When the Kurds began tilling a field lined with golden flecks of harvested hay, gunfire erupted.
Arabs contend the Kurds shot first. Kurds maintain it was the Arabs who opened fire. Both agree, however, that the 15-minute firefight was one of the clearest signs of the growing fissures between Iraq's two dominant ethnic groups -- its Arab majority and its Kurdish minority -- since the fall of former president Saddam Hussein's government.
At the same time, in central and southern Iraq, fault lines have widened between the country's two principal religious communities: Shiite Muslims, who are a majority of the country's approximately 24 million people, and Sunni Muslims, Iraq's traditional rulers and Hussein's principal supporters.
Although a rift between Sunnis and Shiites is relentlessly discouraged by leaders of both communities, tensions have escalated in recent weeks, raising new prospects of strife. Small bombs have been planted at a handful of mosques in Baghdad. In Khaldiya, a Sunni-dominated town west of Baghdad, unknown assailants ransacked the green-domed shrine of a Shiite saint and set off an explosive last month that damaged his brick tomb. In Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, some residents suspect that recent killings of former Baath Party members are inspired by religious zeal, and leaders of Shiite religious parties openly argue that vengeance is warranted against officials of a government that subjugated Shiites, particularly in its last decade of rule.
Hussein's Baath Party, which was in power for 35 years, was dominated by Sunni Arabs and treated Shiite Arabs, Kurds and ethnic Turkmens as second-class citizens. Although Hussein's ethnic and religious favoritism fostered animosity, those feelings and past grievances were largely kept in check by his iron-fisted rule. When he was deposed, Iraqis suddenly found themselves with the freedom to redress old grudges -- and many have sought to right what they regard as injustices of the past.
The deepening divisions between Iraq's principal ethnic and religious groups have unsettled many Iraqis, who generally oppose the idea of their country breaking apart. They contend that U.S. and British occupation forces have played down or ignored many warning signs of a larger conflict that have bubbled forth in the tumult of postwar Iraq.
Many of the confrontations have taken place not in large cities where U.S. reconstruction specialists have their offices, but in tiny villages such as Haifa where there are no soldiers or prominent Iraqi leaders to defuse tensions. "I am sure," Jubbouri said, "the Americans have no idea what is happening here."
"Relations in our country have become very tense," said Anwar Assi Hussein Obeidi, a Sunni Arab who is a leader of the Obeidi tribe, one of Iraq's largest. "If the Americans don't resolve these problems soon, the people will start killing each other." In the North, Whose Land?
The problem in Haifa is all about land.
Hassan Abid, a farmer with a weathered face and gray-streaked hair, said he moved to Haifa in 1974 along with dozens of other Shiite Arabs fleeing a drought in Diwaniyah, their ancestral home in southern Iraq.
"It was a wonderful new home," he said as walked through Haifa, a village of mud-brick houses and dirt streets 20 miles northwest of Kirkuk, a city in northeastern Iraq known for its oil fields.
To Kurds, however, the steppe around Kirkuk is Kurdish territory. Tens of thousands of Kurds had lived in the area until Hussein's government, in a campaign against a group he deemed subversive, pushed many of them out and resettled the area with Arabs.
But Abid contends Haifa was open land until the Arabs arrived. "There was nobody here before us," he said. "We did not displace the Kurds."
He noted that the Arabs of Haifa arrived in 1974, before Hussein's forced relocations began. And, he said, the villagers are Shiites, while those moved under the Hussein government were typically Sunnis.
"There should be no dispute here," he said.
After Hussein's government collapsed in April, thousands of Kurds moved down from the northernmost regions of Iraq, where they had lived in an autonomous enclave since 1991. They came to reclaim property they deemed to be theirs. Entire villages were commandeered by armed Kurds, who sent scores of Arabs fleeing.
On April 19, Arabs said, a band of armed Kurds arrived in Haifa. Panicked residents initially fled on foot and settled on the plain a few miles away, where they set up a tent camp.
The Arabs returned in May, when the Kurds had moved on for reasons that are not clear. As the Kurds left, the Arabs said, they ransacked the village, peeling off roofs, ripping out doors and windows and looting whatever else they could.
Then the Kurds came back Sept. 18. This time, the Arabs resolved they would not leave again. The land was theirs, they insisted. "This village belongs to us," said Mohammed Nafad Jabara, an 80-year-old retiree. He pointed to a grove of towering date palms which were planted, he claimed, upon his arrival in 1974, as proof of his residency.
Armed with that conviction and dozens of AK-47 rifles, the men of Haifa took positions in a trench between the village and the fields where the Kurds had arrived with their tractors and two pickup trucks mounted with machine guns. As the bullets whizzed by, recalled Mohammed Kadhim, "it felt like we were fighting a war."
After a 15-minute firefight, residents said, the Kurds drove away.
Nobody was killed or seriously wounded, a fact that amazes people who participated in the skirmish.
Arabs in Haifa view the firefight as the opening skirmish of an impending battle. "We're expecting them to come back," Abid said. "And we'll be ready for them. We'll greet them with bullets." Who Should Control Tuz Khurmatu?
Kurdish militiamen swooped into the town of Tuz Khurmatu on April 9, the day before Kirkuk fell. Their mission, according to Kurdish leaders, was to protect the town from looters and Hussein's loyalists.
The militiamen, known as pesh merga, seized government buildings and deployed along the town's main streets. "We came to care for Tuz," said Karim Shukor, the local director of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of Iraq's two largest Kurdish political parties.
Tuz Khurmatu, built in the shadow of rolling brown hills about 110 miles north of Baghdad, is a nondescript way station of stucco buildings on the road connecting the capital to Kirkuk.
Kurds contend that it used to be an entirely Kurdish area. Ethnic Turkmens, who migrated south from present-day Turkey hundreds of years ago, insist that the village was exclusively Turkmen until 1975.
The Turkmens in Tuz Khurmatu viewed the arrival of the Kurdish militia as a power grab. The jobs of mayor and police chief, formerly held by Hussein-appointed Arabs, were claimed by Kurds. So were other powerful government posts. "They came with arms and took everything," complained Ali Hashem Mukhtar, the local director of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, a coalition of Turkmen political parties.
The dispute in Tuz Khurmatu is about political power, not land. Both Kurds and Turkmens believe they are in the majority in this area of about 70,000 people.
Shukor argued that records from Hussein's Baath Party, which repressed both groups, lists Kurds at 52 percent of the population and Turkmens at 32 percent. Mukhtar insisted those figures include outlying villages. Within the town, he said, Turkmens are in the majority.
Turkmens argue that Kurds are trying to expand the area under their control so towns such as Tuz Khurmatu will be deemed part of a future Kurdish state in a federal Iraq. Kurds, in turn, claim that the Turkmens are agitating at the behest of neighboring Turkey, which opposes Kurdish aspirations for autonomy in the north.
Although U.S. forces in the area attempted to quell the tension by creating a town council with equal numbers of Kurds and Turkmens, the powerful posts of mayor and police chief were given to Kurds, leading Turkmens to complain that the Americans were favoring the Kurds in return for their help during the war.
As spring turned into summer, the animosity on both sides escalated. Finally, in late August, the town erupted.
The spark was the destruction of green-domed Shiite shrine in the khaki-colored hills east of town. The shrine, which had been destroyed during the Hussein era and recently rebuilt, is venerated by the town's predominantly Shiite Turkmen population. In the early hours of Aug. 22, the shrine was blown to rubble with explosives.
Turkmens blame the Kurds. The Kurds deny responsibility for the attack. The precise reasons for the blast are not known but Kurds, who are Sunnis, insist that the conflict with the Turkmens is about politics, not religion.
Later that morning, hundreds of angry Turkmens flocked to the town's main Shiite mosque for a demonstration that turned into a protest march through the main market.
A video now sold at the market shows what happened as the protesters made their way through the town: Amid the shouts of "God is great," shots rang out. It is not clear from where.
Turkmens claim that the first shots were fired from Kurdish party offices. Kurds contend their security forces started shooting after Turkmen mobs began hunting down Kurds in the street.
A battle ensued, with both sides shooting from rooftops and behind corners. U.S. soldiers in the town also began firing, in an attempt to halt the violence. Five Turkmens and three Kurds were killed. It was the worst ethnic clash since the end of the war.
Now, Tuz Khurmatu is a town on the brink. There is open talk of revenge. And Turkmens who once welcomed Americans as liberators said they now regard U.S. forces as the enemy because of their perceived favoritism toward the Kurds.
"After the war, I was so happy I was ready to put up a picture of [President] Bush in my house," said Muzhir Kassim Jaffar, a pharmacist whose 21-year-old son, Ashraf, was killed in the protest -- by what he believes were bullets from U.S. soldiers. "If I see Americans now, I will try to kill them," he said. "I only care about revenge."
He is equally bitter about the Kurds. "Five months of them," he said, "is worse than 35 years of Saddam." Near Basra, the Muslim Divide
The trouble began in the hamlet of Hamdan on Sept. 14, just as southern Iraq's summer heat was wilting. Along dusty roads lined with adobe huts and the palm groves for which the region is famous, hundreds of Sunni mourners marched, armed and angry, according to Shiite residents. Hamdan is a village about a half-hour's drive south of Basra, where the Shatt al Arab river flows into the Persian Gulf. It is the only city in Iraq's Shiite south where Sunnis make up a substantial minority.
The Sunnis were marching in a procession to bury five men they believed had been killed a week earlier by members of the Dawa party, a Shiite Muslim movement.
In a 15-minute rampage at the local Dawa headquarters, the Sunni mourners ransacked the building, a former schoolhouse. They shot up the cream-colored stucco walls and tossed a grenade inside. They tore down pictures of Shiite clergymen from the entrance, stomped on them, then carted them away. Fires were lit in the mostly vacant rooms and, residents recalled, shots were fired randomly at the concrete and mud-brick houses that line Hamdan's parched groves and farmlands.
The residents, who stayed indoors, still recall the insults: Shiites are cowards -- and worse. And they still recall the chants.
"There is no god but God," the Sunni mourners cried. "The Dawa party is the enemy of God."
Residents call the trouble in Hamdan over that week in September fitna, a resonant word in Arabic that translates as strife, but suggests anarchy. In Islamic lore, fitna and the chaos it brings will precede the Day of Judgment.
"Hundred percent, there will be more fitna," said Sayyid Murtada Hussein, a Shiite farmer who witnessed the rampage.
In Hamdan and its nearby hamlets, the population is split almost in half between Shiite and Sunni residents, some of their neighborhoods separated by centuries-old canals that snake along farms. Now, a gulf of fear, suspicion and resentment divides them.
As Hussein walked through the looted party headquarters, he acknowledged the deaths of the five Sunnis, but said the village had nothing to do with it. He blamed Wahhabis -- members of an austere Sunni sect dominant in Saudi Arabia and a term often used as code for any militant Sunni -- for inflaming the anger. He contended that a majority of the Sunnis in Hamdan and nearby villages follow the Wahhabi sect. Given the history of enmity between Shiites and Wahhabis, a feud that dates to the 19th century when Wahhabi tribesmen from Saudi Arabia regularly attacked and pillaged southern Iraq, Hussein predicted more troubles in hamlets where government exists in name only and police keep to themselves.
"We can recognize them in the streets. They have long beards and dirty faces," said Hussein, a 46-year-old wearing a white gown and thumbing black worry beads. "If they return," he warned, "it will be a bloody fight. It will be killing." 'This Will Bring Trouble'
A 10-minute drive away, in the neighboring village of Abu al Khasib, Asad Shihab sat in his mud house, its roof built with trunks of palm trees and dried fronds. Green water collected in a metal bin. A rusted door leaned at the entrance.
"If you say we are taking money, look at my roof, look at my water tank," he said. "What's your impression?"
It was the death of Shihab's relatives that prompted the funeral march and rampage in Hamdan. Shihab blamed Sayyid Salman Sayyid Talib, the local representative of the Dawa party, one of Basra's largest Shiite political groups. The Dawa party acknowledges that Talib is a member, but denies having ordered him to take any action. Talib is now in hiding.
On Sept. 7, Shihab said, Talib captured Shihab's uncle and two brothers in a nearby village after evening prayers. Then, escorted by 30 armed men, Talib headed down a dirt path, past okra plants and a pile of harvested dates, to arrive at Shihab's house, shrouded in dark by a blackout. Two white pickups were parked outside. Talib's men blocked escape routes.
"They claimed that there were armed Wahhabis in the house," Shihab said.
Shihab hid. But his father and 12-year-old brother were taken away. Two days later, police found two brothers in a busy street in Basra with gunshot wounds to the head, Shihab said. His father and the two others were tortured and killed by throwing acid on them, he said, their bodies dumped in a cesspool of engine oil and stagnant water near a fertilizer plant. He pulled pictures out of a black plastic bag, showing the bloated corpses in a row before the police station. Some had blindfolds; others had their legs bound.
"Those people are trying to ignite sectarian fitna between the people," he said, wearing the long beard of religious devotion and a face grim with smoldering anger. "These are not good tidings. This will bring trouble."
Shihab said he took part in the funeral procession on Sept. 14. While he denied shooting up the Shiite neighborhood in Hamdan, he acknowledged the damage done to the party headquarters. They were angry, he said, and they deserved vengeance.
"You found five people who were killed. They were innocent, and they were killed in a terrible way," he said.
"Sayyid Salman," he added, "should die."
In conversations in Hamdan and Abu Khasib, the degree of mutual suspicion is matched by the divide in how they remember the past and how they envision their future.
Shiites in Hamdan celebrate their majority status, and insist that Sunnis should understand they are the minority. While Sunnis in the villages insist they were treated no differently by Hussein, Shiites there point out they were deprived of jobs, promotions and land rights. Sunnis are reluctant to talk about religious divisions; they are all Muslims, they insist. The presence of Wahhabis, they say, is a myth fabricated by the most militant Shiites to further their own agendas.
The British who occupy Basra say religious differences are under control. The deaths and the protest that followed probably had "something to do with a tribal dispute," said Maj. Charlie Mayo, a military spokesman.
As for sectarian strife, "I'd say the lid is on it at the moment," he said.
Shihab's grandfather, Ahmed Ismail, said he was not so sure. Sitting on a rickety porch, he said fitna had already arrived.
"We are Sunni, we pray in the mosque, and they hate us," the 76-year-old said. "We don't know why they hate us."
Chandrasekaran reported from Haifa and Tuz Khurmatu. Shadid reported from Hamdan and Abu al Khasib.
-------- nato
NATO deployment in Iraq "not yet thinkable": new alliance chief
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Sep 29, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/030929104851.w6i3e1bw.html
A NATO deployment in Iraq is "not yet thinkable," the alliance's incoming secretary general Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Monday.
"I don't know exactly how that could work. It is still too early," he told journalists, arriving for a meeting with his EU counterparts in Brussels. "I think that it is not yet thinkable," he added, speaking in German.
The 19-member alliance, which was deeply split over the Iraq war, is providing logistical support to a Polish-led multinational force in the centre and south of the war-scarred country.
The head of NATO's military committee, German general Harald Kujat, said in a German newspaper interview at the weekend that a NATO deployment in Iraq was "probable."
De Hoop Scheffer was designated last week to succeed current NATO chief George Robertson, who stands down in September. The Dutchman was asked about Iraq as he arrived for a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
"Wait until I have taken up my post, it is still to early to make a comment," he added.
-------- space
Russia Proposes Global Ban On Space Arms
New York - Sep 29, 2003
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-03y.html
Russia has proposed a global ban on the deployment of weapons in outer space reports Interfax. "We are for preparing a comprehensive agreement on the nondeployment of weapons in outer space and invite countries with space potential to join the Russian initiative," President Vladimir Putin told the 58th session of the UN General Assembly in New York.
He also urged the session to issue a resolution to provide "concrete further steps in the construction of a global system of counteracting new threats under the UN aegis."
The proliferation of mass destruction weapons and their means of delivery is "a serious modern challenge," he said. "The greatest danger is that terrorists may get hold of such weapons."
The threat can be eliminated by "further universalizing the current regimes of nonproliferation, by strengthening international instruments of verification and by introducing basic technologies in nuclear production and the nuclear energy industry," Interfax reported Putin as saying.
"In general, states should dispose of excessive arsenals and military programs which could undermine the military political balance and provoke an arms race."
-------- spies
CIA pursues video game
September 29, 2003
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030929-123116-1145r.htm
The CIA is set to spend several million dollars to develop a video game aimed at helping its analysts think like terrorists, The Washington Times has learned.
The agency's Counter Terrorist Center, or CTC, is working with the Los Angeles-based Institute for Creative Technologies on a project designed to help its analysts, "think outside the box," a CIA spokesman said. The project is close to approval, but officials wouldn't comment on the exact cost of the program.
The institute, part of the University of Southern California, works with Hollywood movie and video game specialists.
Disclosure of the CIA video game project follows the Pentagon's recent cancellation of a plan for an online gambling parlor designed to predict a Middle East terrorist attack. The Pentagon's gambling scheme led to the resignation of retired Navy Vice Adm. John Poindexter, head of the Total Information Awareness data-mining counterterrorism program.
A military official said the CIA video game is "a ridiculous and absurd scheme that makes Poindexter's project look good in comparison."
A second critic of the program said: "These absurd ideas about countering terrorism suggest that the war on terrorism has been a failure, that terrorists are still ahead and that the CTC does not know what it is doing. The key issue here is the CTC misspending funds on silly, low-priority projects, exactly the kind of thing that forced Admiral Poindexter to resign."
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield defended the video project and called it an "innovative approach" to counterterrorism. The game will select a scenario that could involve analysts playing terrorist-cell leaders or members, a terrorist "money mover" or a facilitator, he said.
"For out-of-the-box thinking, we are reaching out to academics, think tanks and external research institutes that are critical in the fight against terrorism," Mr. Mansfield said. "If it will help us to prevent terrorist attacks, it is worthwhile."
A CIA analyst playing the game also could be placed in the role of CIA analyst or operations officer, a U.S. Customs agent or even a cooperative or hostile neighbor living next to a terrorist.
"Analysts would have to think and act inside the character they choose or are assigned," Mr. Mansfield said.
The goal, he said, is for "our analysts to become accustomed to looking at the world from the perspective of the terrorists we are chasing."
Richard Lindheim, the institute's executive director, said in an interview that the goal of the CIA game project is to train analysts.
"They will put their analysts in analytical specialities in one role or another and then change the roles," Mr. Lindheim said. "It's a learning tool."
He said the institute develops simulations, such as the virtual reality simulator that it installed recently at the Army's Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
The institute also makes video games.
"We think computer games are a really good way of imparting information," he said. "We don't call them games; we call them computer-based training aids."
A game developed by the institute for the Army, called "Full Spectrum Warrior" and designed to help soldiers conduct peacekeeping operations, has won awards, he added. The institute has also received $45 million from the Army for other projects, including the warrior game.
The Army game involves no shooting, Mr. Lindheim said.
"It's a decision-making strategy game," he said. "You never have a gun. What you do is issue orders and see the effect of those orders. That's the value of it."
Administration officials said the game is typical of the "politically correct" Army under recently retired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki.
The CTC has come under fire from some in Congress for the intelligence failures related to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The September 11 congressional committee stated that the CTC staff doubled from 400 to 800 after the attacks. Agency sources said that the number of people, including CIA and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, is now around 1,000.
The video game project is part of a $10 million "academic outreach" program at the Counter Terrorist Center, headed by a CIA analyst. Army officials say the analyst was responsible for derailing the career of a senior Army intelligence officer by making false claims of sexual harassment against the officer.
According to the officials, several Army officials objected to the CIA video game project because they feared disclosure of the game would undermine the service's work with the California institute for its transformation and training program.
The analyst and several other CIA counterterrorism officials have traveled to the institute and got VIP tours of movie studios in the area, according to administration officials.
Other projects being worked on by the California institute reportedly include Roman shields with skateboards that come off the sides of tanks, and foam sprayed by troops that can stop tank rounds.
The congressional joint inquiry report stated that in 1999 an internal CTC study found that the center "was unable to carry out more ambitious plans against al Qaeda for lack of money and personnel."
The CTC funding and personnel shortfalls were highlighted at a time when CIA Director George J. Tenet said the agency in 1998 had declared "war" on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group.
According to administration officials, several Army officials objected to the CIA video game project because they feared it would undermine the service's work in using the California institute for its transformation program.
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Bush officials who leaked name of US spy 'for revenge' could face jail
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
29 September 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=448037
The Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration officials broke the law by revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative whose husband disparaged claims by the White House that Iraq was seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
George Tenet, the director of the CIA, has sent a memo to the department asking it to find out who revealed Valerie Plame's identity in July.
Ms Plame, a weapons expert, is the wife of the former US ambassador Joe Wilson. It is alleged that her identity was revealed in retaliation for comments he made about Iraq's alleged scheme to buy uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons. Mr Wilson, who travelled to Niger to investigate the claims, toldThe Independent on Sunday that he believed they were false.
Ms Plame's identity was first mentioned by a syndicated newspaper columnist, who said his sources were "two administration officials".
Yesterday The Washington Post reported that the two officials had telephoned at least six journalists and identified Ms Plame. "Clearly it was meant purely and simply for revenge," a White House official said.
Mr Wilson's comments caused the White House to admit that "16 words" in President George Bush's State of the Union address last January which claimed Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa were incorrect.
Mr Wilson, who went to Africa at the request of the CIA, has never confirmed his wife's position. He said previously that if she were an operative, "naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."
Mr Wilson said yesterday: "I have always said that the desire to implicate my wife in this was intended to intimidate others from coming forward. The idea that someone would do this is an anathema to me and should be an anathema to a president who came to office promising to restore honour to the White House." Naming a undercover operative is a federal offence which carries penalties of $50,000 (£30,000) and up to 10 years jail.
After Ms Plame was named, the CIA launched a widescale investigation to ascertain whether any of her overseas contacts had been put at risk. That investigation continues.
----
Agency Belittles Information Given by Iraq Defectors
September 29, 2003
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/international/middleeast/29DEFE.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement.
In addition, several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.
The arrangement, paid for with taxpayer funds supplied to the exile group under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, involved extensive debriefing of at least half a dozen defectors by defense intelligence agents in European capitals and at a base in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil in late 2002 and early 2003, the officials said. But a review early this year by the defense agency concluded that no more than one-third of the information was potentially useful, and efforts to explore those leads since have generally failed to pan out, the officials said.
Mr. Chalabi has defended the arrangement, saying that his organization had helped just three defectors provide information to American intelligence about Iraq's suspected weapons program, and that two of them had been judged to be credible.
But several federal officials said the arrangement had wasted more than $1 million in taxpayers' money and had prompted them to question the credibility of Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. Both have enjoyed powerful backing from civilian officials at the Pentagon and are playing a significant role in the provisional government in Baghdad.
Intelligence provided by the defectors that could not be substantiated included information about Iraq's suspected program for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as other information about the Iraqi government, the officials said. They said they would not speculate on whether the defectors had knowingly provided false information and, if so, what their motivation might have been. One Defense Department official said that some of the people were not who they said they were and that the money for the program could have been better spent.
Two other Defense Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, defended the arrangement. While the credibility of the Iraqi defectors debriefed under the program had been low, they said, it had been roughly on par with that of most human intelligence about Iraq. The officials also said the Defense Intelligence Agency had been generally skeptical of the defectors from the start, on the ground that they were motivated more by the money and the desire to stir up sentiment against Saddam Hussein than by a desire to provide accurate information.
A Defense Department official who defended the arrangement said that even most of the useful information provided by the defectors included "a lot of stuff that we already knew or thought we knew." But the official said that information had "improved our situational awareness" by "making us more confident about our assessments."
The Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions about the value of the intelligence provided as part of the arrangement are believed to have been included in a broader, classified report sent this month to Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, the officials said. That report focused on lessons learned by intelligence agents during the war in Iraq, they said.
The Iraqi National Congress had made some of these defectors available to several news organizations, including The New York Times, which reported their allegations about prisoners and the country's weapons program.
The Iraqi National Congress, a London-based umbrella group, was formed with American help in 1992 and received millions of dollars under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. In a stance that angered the dissidents and some Pentagon officials, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency had long been skeptical of the information from defectors that Mr. Chalabi's organization had brought out of Iraq. Among that group of defectors was Khadhir Hamza, the most senior Iraqi official ever to defect from Mr. Hussein's nuclear program, who complained about the seeming lack of interest of American intelligence organizations in hearing what he had to say.
The partnership between the Iraqi exiles and the American government was initially run by the State Department, with millions of dollars provided to the Iraqi National Congress under the Iraq Liberation Act, whose declared purpose was to promote a transition to democracy in Iraq. One element was intended to collect information about Iraq in order to promote public awareness about the failings of Mr. Hussein's government.
Instead, State Department officials involved in the program said, the Iraqi exiles used most of the money to recruit defectors who claimed to have sensitive intelligence information. Until 2002, the State Department handed over those defectors to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for debriefing. Federal officials said that very few of them had been judged to be credible, but that they knew of no specific assessment of their credibility.
After internal State Department reviews in 2001 and 2002 concluded that much of the $4 million allocated for the program had not been properly accounted for and that the intelligence-gathering program was not part of the department's mission, oversight was transferred to the Defense Department in 2002.
The Defense Intelligence Agency then took the lead in debriefing the defectors, Defense Department officials said. The officials said they believed that the review of the defectors' credibility overed only the period in which the defense agency had run the program.
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Rice Knew 'Nothing' About CIA Agent Leak
September 28, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-intelligence-probe.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday she knew ``nothing of any'' White House effort to leak the identity of an undercover CIA officer in July, a charge now under review at the Justice Department.
On ``Fox News Sunday,'' the top aide to President Bush said, ``This has been referred to the Justice Department. I think that is the appropriate place for it.''
Rice said the White House would cooperate should the department headed by Attorney General John Ashcroft decide to proceed with a criminal investigation of the matter, which centers on the alleged public disclosure of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
The Washington Post reported in Monday editions that White House officials said they would turn over phone logs if the Justice Department asked them to. But the aides said Bush had no plans to ask staff members whether they were involved in revealing the name of Wilson's wife.
Wilson was sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to investigate a report that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger, but returned to say it was highly doubtful.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife -- apparently in retaliation for his conclusion, which undermined the position of the White House.
The Post said CIA Director George Tenet sent a memo to the Justice Department raising questions about the alleged leak, which could mean prison time and a fine.
Rice said, ``I know nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this. And it certainly would not be the way the president would expect his White House to operate.''
Bush made the Iraq uranium claim in his January State of the Union speech. Critics have said the Iraq-Niger assertion, which later was found to be based partly on forged documents, showed the administration had tried to hype intelligence to make a case for going to war.
URANIUM REPORT
Wilson said in August there had been several attempts to discredit him but mainly through an article by Chicago columnist Robert Novak that said two senior administration officials said Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the uranium report.
Novak's column named Wilson's wife and said she was a CIA operative dealing with weapons of mass destruction.
Asked if the White House was not concerned that top officials might have done such a thing, Rice said she did not recall any discussions of the matter.
``I don't remember any such conversations,'' Rice said.
``It is well known that the president of the United States does not expect the White House to get involved in such things, anything of this kind,'' she added.
On NBC's ``Meet the Press,'' U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Bush personally should ``investigate what happened ... And people ought to be punished for doing this.''
Rice also said top officials ``didn't remember'' in the case of the president's State of the Union address in January, in which he said, ``The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''
-------- us
Army Reserve fears troop exodus
9/29/2003
By Dave Moniz,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-09-29-reserves_x.htm
If the United States is unable to recruit significantly more international troops or quell the violence in Iraq in the next few months, it could trigger an exodus of active and reserve forces, the head of the U.S. Army Reserve said Monday.
Lt. Gen. James Helmly, chief of the 205,000-member Army Reserve, said he and other Pentagon leaders will be monitoring retention rates closely next year, when problems could begin to become apparent for full-time and part-time soldiers coming off long tours of duty in Iraq.
"Retention is what I am most worried about. It is my No. 1 concern," Helmly told USA TODAY's editorial board. "This is the first extended-duration war the country has fought with an all-volunteer force."
Helmly described the war on terrorism as an unprecedented test of the 30-year-old all-volunteer military. Historically, he said, the National Guard and Reserve were designed to mobilize for big wars and then bring soldiers home quickly.
Today, he said, they have "entered a brave new world" where large numbers of troops will have to be deployed for long periods.
Counting training time and yearlong tours in Iraq, some Army Reserve soldiers could be mobilized for 15 months or more. Helmly described the situation facing soldiers in Iraq as "stressed" but said he could not characterize it as at a "breaking point."
The stresses facing the nation's reservists were demonstrated again this week when the National Guard announced it had alerted a combat brigade from Washington state that it could be sent to Iraq next year if a third block of international troops cannot be recruited to join the British and Polish-led divisions now in Iraq.
Guard officials said Monday that the 5,000-member 81st Army National Guard brigade from Washington state has been notified that it could be called to active duty.
Helmly said a huge factor in Iraq will be the Pentagon's ability to train an Iraqi army and security force.
The Defense Department recently announced plans to accelerate the development of an Iraqi army, pushing the goal from 12,000 troops to 40,000 troops in the next year.
The Army National Guard and Army Reserve have about one-fourth of their troops - nearly 129,000 soldiers - on active duty.
The active-duty Army and the Army Reserve both met their recruiting goals for the fiscal year that ends today. The Army National Guard, however, is expected to fall about 15% short of its recruiting goal of 62,000 soldiers.
Although the Guard and Reserve say their retention rates have not suffered this year, the figures could be misleading. Under an order known as "stop loss," soldiers on active duty are prohibited from leaving the service until their tours end.
Active-duty and Reserve commanders fear that when U.S. soldiers on yearlong rotations come home next year, many will choose to leave the service.
--------
Pay-Gap Remedy for Military Reserves Appears Doomed
By Stephen Barr
Monday, September 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15167-2003Sep28.html
A proposal to close any pay gap faced by civil service employees who are called to active duty in the military reserves will not be considered by House and Senate negotiators working on the fiscal 2004 defense authorization bill, according to congressional aides.
Most lawmakers feel that the issue was evaluated by the House Armed Services Committee during its deliberations and is now closed, the aides said.
The proposal, pushed by a group of House Democrats, ran into opposition because of its cost, as well as concern that it might cause morale problems among regular military troops.
In May, the House Government Reform Committee approved an amendment sponsored by Reps. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Chris Bell (D-Tex.) aimed at requiring federal agencies to make up the difference between civil service and military pay for those on military duty. The provision was one of several civil service changes proposed for the Defense Department and forwarded to the Armed Services Committee.
But the provision was dropped when the Armed Services panel put together the House version of the defense authorization bill, which sets out guidelines for weapons and equipment purchases, military benefits and troop strength.
The Lantos-Bell amendment stalled because of its cost -- $160 million over five years, including $75 million in fiscal 2004 -- and because it could have triggered jurisdictional questions that would have given the Government Reform Committee a voice in shaping the defense bill, a congressional aide said.
More important, however, were objections from the Defense Department, which argued that making up differences in pay for civil service employees would undercut military morale. "You have two sergeants, one a career military and one a reservist, doing the same job. And essentially the government is paying the civilian employee more for that service than the career military guy -- that is the heart of the Defense Department objection," the congressional aide said.
A Pentagon spokeswoman said there would be no comment on the issue.
Supporters of the Lantos-Bell effort argue that National Guard and reserve families are increasingly at risk of financial hardship because reservists are being called up more frequently since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Army recently issued a policy requiring Guard and reserve troops to serve 12-month tours in Iraq, meaning that most Army reservists will be mobilized for more than a year.
About 200 private-sector employers and 50 state and local governments make up the difference in pay for their workers and the federal government should serve as an example of the importance of assisting reservists, an aide to Lantos said. But other congressional aides said the issue needs more study. It might be more appropriate to use pay supplements to offset income loss for specific occupations or individuals rather than to take a blanket approach, they said.
Recent studies indicate that between 30 percent and 40 percent of activated reservists face a loss of income during mobilization.
About 65,000 reservists are employed by federal agencies, making the government the single-largest employer of reservists. An additional 48,000 federal technicians are required to be members of the Guard as a condition of employment.
The Office of Personnel Management has called on federal agencies to shoulder the cost of health insurance premiums for employees called to active duty. At last count, about 80 out of more than 100 federal agencies had agreed to pick up the premiums. Premium Increase
Premiums for certain older enrollees in the Federal Employees' Group Life Insurance program will increase in January, the second step in a three-stage increase. The increases will affect FEGLI's "Option B," which provides insurance of up to five times the salary for active employees and for retirees who elect to keep the coverage.
The monthly rate per $1,000 of coverage for those aged 70 to 74 will rise to $2.232 from $1.885; those from 75 to 79 will pay $3.098, up from $2.318; and those 80 and older will pay $3.965, up from $2.752.
Further increases for enrollees 65 and older are already scheduled for January 2005. Active-duty employees at those ages pay at the same overall rates, but on a biweekly rather than monthly basis. Retirement
Robert E. Neilson of the Information Resources Management College, National Defense University, will retire Tuesday after 30 years of service. He spent the first 16 years of his career at the Health and Human Services Department and the remaining 14 at the National Defense University, where he was a professor and department chair.
Stephen Barr's e-mail address is
barrs@washpost.com.
-------- propaganda wars
Media Review Conduct After Leak
CIA Inquiry Leads to Questions About What Should Be Published
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 29, 2003; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14399-2003Sep28.html
When syndicated columnist Robert Novak reported on July 14 that "two senior administration officials" had told him that the wife of a prominent White House critic did undercover work for the CIA, it barely caused a ripple.
Former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV talked about the leak in interviews and at the National Press Club soon after, telling Newsday the message was "that if you talk, we'll take your family and drag them through the mud." Nation writer David Corn called the leak a "thuggish act," and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called it a "criminal act." After Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for an investigation, the New York Times, Washington Post and Buffalo News ran inside-the-paper stories.
But it was not until this weekend's reports that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to examine the matter that the story hit the front page of The Washington Post and the Sunday talk shows, sparking questions not just about White House motives but about media conduct.
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said Novak was in "dangerous territory. . . . Journalists should apply a civil disobedience test: Does the public good outweigh the wrong that you're doing? In a case where you are risking someone's life, potentially, or putting someone in danger, you have to decide what is the public good you are accomplishing. Because you have the freedom to publish doesn't mean it's necessarily the right thing to do."
Novak, a veteran conservative whose column appears in more than 300 papers, is well connected in the administration, although he opposed the war in Iraq. He declined yesterday to discuss the issue in detail, saying: "I made the judgment it was newsworthy. I think the story has to stand for itself. It's 100 percent accurate. I'm not going to get into why I wrote something."
Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Washington Post, one of the papers that published the July 14 column, said that "in retrospect, I wish I had asked more questions. If I had, given that his column appears in a lot of places, I'm not sure I would have done anything differently. But I wish we had thought about it harder. Alarm bells didn't go off. . . . We have a policy of trying not to publish anything that would endanger anybody."
But Steve Huntley, editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, Novak's home paper, said: "I trust his judgment and accuracy unquestionably, and his ethics as well. . . . This is the sort of thing you're always faced with when a source tells you something a source should not be telling you. Do you become a second gatekeeper? Our business is to report news, not to slam the door on it."
News organizations often face the dilemma of whether to publish a politically juicy story that might jeopardize someone in a sensitive government position. These judgment calls often involve national security secrets -- troop movements, terrorism investigations, classified military documents -- or police matters, as during the Washington sniper investigation. Journalists sometimes withhold or delay publishing such information at the request of authorities.
It is a violation of law for officials to intentionally disclose the identity of a covert operative. The column by Novak came eight days after Wilson wrote a July 6 New York Times op-ed piece challenging President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. Also on July 6, Wilson, who had gone to Niger to investigate at the CIA's request, was quoted by The Washington Post as saying the administration was "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war." Bush has since backed off the uranium claim.
A senior administration official told The Post on Saturday that two top government officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. Wilson said yesterday that journalists for the three major broadcast networks told him they had been contacted by someone in the White House. He named only one, Andrea Mitchell, NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent, who interviewed Wilson and reported on July 22 that he said the administration was "leaking his wife's covert job at the CIA to reporters." Mitchell could not be reached for comment yesterday.
NBC's Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, and ABC's bureau chief, Robin Sproul, said yesterday they could not discuss any matter involving confidential sources. But John Roberts, a CBS White House correspondent, said that to his knowledge, no administration official had contacted anyone at the network about Wilson.
If anyone had called him, Roberts said, "I'd immediately have to wonder what the ulterior motive was. We'd probably end up doing a story about somebody breaching national security by leaking the name of a CIA operative."
The Wilson case has parallels in Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair has plummeted in popularity after his aides leaked the name of a BBC source, government scientist David Kelley, who had questioned Blair's evidence on Iraqi weapons. Kelley committed suicide after his name was made public.
If recent history is any guide, federal investigators are unlikely to discover who the leakers are. In 1999, a federal appeals court ruled that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and his staff did not have to face contempt proceedings for allegedly leaking damaging information about President Bill Clinton because no grand jury secrets were disclosed. The next year, a former Starr spokesman, Charles G. Bakaly III, was acquitted of making false statements about his role in providing information to the New York Times.
In 1992, Senate investigators said they could not determine who leaked confidential information to National Public Radio and Newsday about Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation. In 1989, then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh launched an unsuccessful $224,000 investigation of a leak to CBS of an inquiry into then-Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pa.).
--------
Data Reveal Inaccuracies in Portrayal of Iraqis
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 29, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14545-2003Sep28.html
Top Bush administration officials in the past weeks have been citing a pair of public opinion polls to demonstrate that Iraqis have a positive view of the U.S. occupation. But an examination of those polls indicates Iraqis have a less enthusiastic view than the administration has portrayed.
For example, in testimony before Congress, L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz both cited a recent Gallup Poll that found that almost two-thirds of those polled in Baghdad said it was worth the hardships suffered since the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein. Bremer also told Congress that 67 percent thought that in five years they would be better off, and only 11 percent thought they would be worse off.
That same poll, however, found that, countrywide, only 33 percent thought they were better off than they were before the invasion and 47 percent said they were worse off. And 94 percent said that Baghdad was a more dangerous place for them to live, a finding the administration officials did not discuss.
The poll also found that 29 percent of Baghdad residents had a favorable view of the United States, while 44 percent had a negative view. By comparison, 55 percent had a favorable view of France.
Similarly, half of Baghdad residents had a negative view of President Bush, while 29 percent had a favorable view of him. In contrast, French President Jacques Chirac drew a 42 percent favorable rating.
Earlier, on Sept. 14, Vice President Cheney on NBC's "Meet the Press" discussed findings from a Zogby International poll of 600 Iraqis done in August in conjunction with American Enterprise magazine. He described the poll as "carefully done" and said it found "very positive news in it in terms of the numbers it shows with respect to the attitudes to what Americans have done."
"The U.S. wins hands down," Cheney said, when Iraqis were asked what model of government they would prefer among five choices. Cheney's information, according to an aide, came from the American Enterprise essay on the poll that said 37 percent of respondents chose the United States, and 28 percent selected Saudi Arabia.
But a look at the raw data from the poll on the magazine's Web site revealed different figures. According to the data, only 21.5 percent chose the United States, while 20 percent refused to select any model, and 16 percent selected the Saudi government.
Cheney also said, "If you want to ask them do they want an Islamic government established, by two-to-one margins they say no, including the Shia population." He said that when asked how long they want the Americans to stay, "over 60 percent of the people polled said they want the U.S. to stay for at least another year."
But the poll also found that half of respondents said Western democracy would not work well in Iraq, while 40 percent said it would. Asked whether the United States would help or hurt Iraq over the next five years, 35 percent said the U.S. would help but half said it would hurt Iraq. Also, on the question of an Islamic government, the alternative offered was "or instead let all people practice their own religion," which implied that could not be done under the former.
-------- war crimes
An Argentine Prosecutor Turns Focus to New War Crimes Court
September 29, 2003
By MARLISE SIMONS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/international/americas/29COUR.html
THE HAGUE - Back in 1985, Luis Moreno Ocampo joined the team to prosecute Argentina's generals and admirals who stood accused of secretly torturing and killing thousands of civilians.
The nation's fragile new democracy was barely two years old, and the hard-line military was restive. Other lawyers had refused the post of deputy prosecutor out of fear. When Mr. Moreno Ocampo accepted it, his own family was furious, he said. His grandfather had been a general in the military, and one uncle, a colonel, never spoke to him again.
But the young lawyer from Buenos Aires told friends he had to play his part to consolidate democracy. The trial of the nine junta members shook Argentina for months and reverberated through the pro-military powerhouses of Latin America.
"I thought that trial would be the height of my professional life," Mr. Moreno Ocampo said in a recent conversation. "But when I see where I am today, it turns out that this period was only training."
Three months into his new job as the first chief prosecutor of the first permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague, Mr. Moreno Ocampo, now 51, is just setting out to navigate through a global minefield of justice and politics.
His task is to set the court's prosecution policy and seek out, on a worldwide scale, the people responsible for the sort of large-scale crimes that brought such pain to Argentina.
The court's purpose is to deal with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes if they are going unpunished elsewhere. The United States is not only opposed to the global court, but actively campaigning against it, pressing countries into bilateral deals to exempt Americans.
Mr. Moreno Ocampo declines to give interviews about his personal life, but has held monthly press briefings. "I will not answer any personal questions," he told reporters recently. "You can say, this is a crazy guy, whatever you want. But there is a huge distance between my personal information and the real issues of this office."
This new court, unlike the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, does not answer to the United Nations Security Council but to the 92 countries that have agreed to take part in it since it was created by the Rome treaty in 1998. It can deal only with crimes that occurred after July 1, 2002.
Mr. Moreno Ocampo, who has an easy, affable style, has so far moved with caution, aware that his decisions will be minutely scrutinized.
"Inevitably the prosecutor will be the public face of the institution," said Edmond Wallenstein, a Dutch diplomat involved in setting up the court.
Mr. Moreno Ocampo recently told a group of reporters, "This is only an emergency court," picking another of his favored phrases to deflate any image of an unconstrained, arbitrary political weapon. "We are not here to replace national judicial systems. We will act only when they need us."
In the glass-and-steel office tower where he has his office, a temporary home while the court awaits a permanent headquarters, he is putting together a staff of lawyers, researchers and investigators. They are writing regulations and sorting through the first avalanche of complaints arriving from all over the world.
But given the high expectations from member countries, the myriad human rights groups and the court's 18 judges, who are eager to take on cases, he is under pressure to prepare his first prosecution.
"There's a range of opinions," he said, when asked about his plans. "Some people want us to act fast and aggressively - others prefer us to be slow and conservative. But I'll say that we will start with a very clear situation."
Plans are for his office to be able to handle up to three investigations in a year's time. He has said he is already closely looking at the recent killing, torture, rape and mutilations of thousands of civilians in the Ituri region of the eastern Congo.
But the business behind mass killings must also be examined, he said recently, citing the illegal trade in diamonds and arms, and the banks that enable it. He said he was calling on national prosecutors for help.
In one early but important policy decision, he said that even in the case of "massive crimes," investigations would focus only on the top leaders responsible. That means he is not likely to deal with some of the lower-ranking war criminals of the kind tried at the Yugoslavia tribunal, which initially was not handed high-ranking prisoners.
"The number of cases taken up by the court should not be a measure of its efficiency," he cautioned. On the contrary, he added, the absence of trials would be a success because it means national institutions are functioning properly and are handling these cases themselves.
One of Mr. Moreno Ocampo's first acts in office was to organize two days of public discussions with lawyers, judges and human rights workers about the role and structure of his office. He has put draft regulations and other documents relating to the working of his office on the Internet, soliciting public comments, a far cry from the secrecy that surrounded the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals in their early days.
In August, while screening candidates to be his deputy, he asked other international prosecutors, including Carla Del Ponte, Richard Goldstone and Louise Arbour, for advice.
His own appointment as prosecutor may not be a surprise, given his past record. Although he was not a household name outside his own country, he became well known at home not just because of his role in the trials of the members of three military juntas - including two former presidents - but also in trials of the chief of the Buenos Aires police, the military leaders responsible for the Falkland war and many public corruption cases.
Because of his activities, he gained numerous admirers and critics. He was often the target of threats, he has told friends, but he pressed on. Aside from a number of legal texts, he has also written a more personal book, with his four children in mind, friends say. The book, in Spanish, is titled: "How to Explain the Dictatorship to Our Children."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Clark's economic plan
September 29, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030928-114701-6142r.htm
Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who actually taught economics for several years at West Point, apparently is under the impression that problems besetting the nation's $11 trillion economy can be solved by increasing taxes and government spending by $50 billion per year for a couple of years. Even if it is not on Dick Gephardt's grand scale, the plan still qualifies as classic tax-and-spend economic liberalism. It also satisfies the Democrats' obsession with class warfare by targeting all of the tax increases on families earning more than $200,000 per year.
The effective impact of Mr. Clark's proposal would be to repeal the income-tax-rate cuts for the upper two brackets. Those rates were lowered in 2001 and 2003 from 39.6 percent and 36 percent to 35 percent and 33 percent, respectively. Even after these rate reductions were implemented, it's worth recalling, they are still significantly above the top rate of 31 percent that President Bush's father approved in 1990 and the top rate of 28 percent that emerged from bipartisan tax reform in 1986. Considering the Republican-initiated middle-class tax cuts, moreover, the Bush-engineered income-tax cuts will produce a more progressive tax structure than before.
With his two-year $100 billion tax increase, Mr. Clark would shift $40 billion to profligate state governments, helping to bail them out for the spending binge they pursued before the Clinton stock-market bubble burst.
He also would use up to $20 billion over two years to provide federal subsidies of $5,000 for each new worker companies hired. Here, Mr. Clark's tax-and-spend plans conflict. After all, many of the nation's small businesses, which are the source of job growth (given that the total employment of Fortune 500 firms has been declining for years), are organized as so-called Subchapter "S" corporations. In such business enterprises, the profits and losses "pass through" the individual tax returns of the corporations' shareholders. By repealing the upper-bracket tax-rate cuts, Mr. Clark would be confiscating the small-business profits that would finance job growth. A one-off subsidy for a single year will hardly replace the lost incentive for a Subchapter "S" small business to make a long-term hire.
Finally, Mr. Clark would spend $40 billion over two years on homeland-security measures, including training first-responders, improving hospitals' abilities to deal with bioterror attacks, and strengthening ports, tunnels and other likely infrastructure targets. All of these projects may well be useful endeavors in their own right as legitimate homeland-security precautions and preparations. And, that is how they should be considered - independent of class-warfare politics and economics. A retired general and economics instructor should be the first person to understand this.
-------- immigration / refugees / visas
U.S. Readies Program to Track Visas
By Anitha Reddy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 29, 2003; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14287-2003Sep28.html
The federal government is about to unveil a blueprint for one of its largest information technology projects ever, a vast automated system that will track every foreigner entering the United States with a visa.
The program, which is designed to prevent terrorists and criminals from obtaining visas, is likely to cost $3 billion to $10 billion, analysts said.
Under the system, U.S. consular officials will fingerprint and photograph visa applicants in their home countries and check their profiles against terrorist watch lists and criminal databases. Border agents will electronically scan travelers' index fingers to make sure their prints match those on their visa documents. And a massive computer system storing travel and visa data will automatically alert the government to individuals whose visas have expired.
The Homeland Security Department plans to release details of the project in November. Companies will then submit bids to design and build the system. The department plans to award the contract in May and to begin using the system to screen foreign visitors at the 50 largest land crossings by 2005, though experts warn such ambitious projects often take more time than expected.
The project, called U.S. Visitor and Status Indication Technology, or U.S. VISIT, has a budget of $380 million this year, and the Homeland Security Department has asked for $380 million next year for the contract. Lockheed Martin Corp., Computer Sciences Corp. and Accenture Ltd. each plan to lead a team of companies bidding on the project.
"I think it's safe to say for non-[Defense Department] programs this is one of the largest efforts to integrate databases together," said Dick Fogel, director of strategic initiatives for Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin's transportation and security solutions unit.
Civil rights advocates warn that a fingerprint system that can access so much personal data could easily be expanded to target other groups. "This will inevitably abridge the privacy of Americans, not just foreigners," said Timothy H. Edgar, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Homeland Security officials counter that the government needs a broad new system to identify dangerous visitors, and they stressed that there are no plans to screen American citizens.
Because immigration officials do not now record departures, they have no way of knowing how many people have overstayed their visas. In the past year alone, the State Department issued 5 million visas to foreigners for short visits. The program would plug that information gap by monitoring for the first time when people leave the country, said Robert A. Mocny, deputy director of the program.
Skeptics say that collecting information about so many visitors is pointless unless the government dedicates more money and agents to finding and deporting foreigners who are a threat to national security. In the past four years, 400,000 people ordered to leave the country have fled before they could be deported.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Town in La Mancha Battles Against Windmills
Story by Alejandro Lifschitz
REUTERS SPAIN:
September 29, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22377/story.htm
LUZAGA, Spain - Four centuries on, a new kind of windmill dotting the countryside of Spain's La Mancha region has led the people of this small town to take up Don Quixote's battle against the giants.
But unlike those in the Cervantes classic in which the confused Quixote jousts with a mill he mistakes for an ogre, these machines are not turning grain into flour but wind into energy.
Spain is the world's second-largest producer of wind power after Germany with 4,830 megawatts of installed capacity, nearly eight percent of the country's generation capacity.
With many of the best sites to install wind power generators already taken, promoters of wind parks are looking frantically for new places to garner the breezes to produce power.
Along the way they are clashing with small towns that don't want them. Although wind power does not burn fossil fuel, it does affect the environment by clearing woodland to build noisy and unsightly towers.
The 100 people of Luzaga - in La Mancha about 200 km (125 miles) northeast of Madrid - are mobilizing against a project by the Danish company Neg Micon to install 33 turbines outside town.
"We are not against wind power, but if they build a wind park here it will destroy the ecosystem surrounding the town," said Celso Hernando, 31, who is leading the movement against a wind park in Luzaga, which is surrounded by pines and oak-covered hills.
By itself the Castille-La Mancha region of Quixote's travels has as much wind power as the Netherlands.
There could be more clashes. The government projects wind power capacity will nearly triple to 13,000 megawatts by 2011 to help meet demand and reach Kyoto Protocol targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
If Neg Micon's plan goes forward, the 48 million euro ($54 million) investment to build 49.5 megawatts capacity would provide clean energy for 100,000 people.
"The project would have a major impact on the environment by destroying a Mediterranean ecosystem that is very valuable from a botanical point of view and wildlife point of view," said Alberto Mayor, a member of the environmental protection group Ecologists in Action.
WINDS OF CHANGE
Neg Micon says the ecologists do not have all their facts straight, but declined to go into detail. A spokesman said the project was going through the bureaucracy and that an environmental impact report would be required before approval.
People from the neighboring towns of Cortes de Tajuna and La Hocezuela de Ocen have joined the movement against wind power.
"There are towns that don't want to live next to a wind park. But we are trying to balance industry and the environment and, if the project fails to pass its environmental report, we won't approve it," said a spokesman for the Castille-La Mancha regional government.
The environmental group Greenpeace, which favors wind energy, says the main problem is simply that wind parks can be seen.
"Because they can be seen, they provoke a reaction, which is something that does not happen with most power plants that pollute," said Jose Luis Garcia, head of the clean energy campaign for Greenpeace in Spain.
"Even though there might be a case where the site selection was poorly done and the neighbors have a right to complain, the main concern of Greenpeace is to get rid of energy that could end life on this planet."
-------- environment
Putin Casts Doubt on Kyoto Protocol
September 29, 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Climate-Change.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- President Vladimir Putin on Monday cast a cloud of doubt over the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, which needs Russian ratification to take effect, saying his country is still undecided and pointing to theories that claim Russia could even benefit from global warming.
Speaking on the first day of the U.N. World Climate Change Conference in the Russian capital, Putin offered no clue as to when his government might make up its mind on the landmark pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
To go into force, the 1997 protocol must be ratified by no fewer than 55 countries, accounting for at least 55 percent of global emissions in 1990. After the United States rejected the treaty, the minimum can be reached only with Russia's ratification.
``The government is thoroughly considering and studying this issue, studying the entire complex of difficult problems linked with it,'' Putin said. ``The decision will be made after this work has been completed, and of course it will take into account the national interests of the Russian Federation.''
Pressed by some of the conference's delegates for a commitment to ratification, Putin responded ambiguously, citing domestic critics of the Kyoto pact who theorized that Russia could even profit from global warming. He added, however, that Russia may see some adverse effects too.
``They often say, half-jokingly and half-seriously, that Russia is a northern country and if temperatures get warmer by two or three degrees Celsius, it's not that bad -- we could spend less on warm coats and agricultural experts say that grain harvests would increase further,'' Putin said with a grin. ``That may be so, but we must also think about the consequences of global climate change.
``We must think what consequences of these changes we will face in certain regions where there will be droughts and where there will be floods,'' he added. Russian officials must consider ``what consequences there will be for people living in these regions; social, economic and environmental consequences.''
The Kyoto Protocol calls for countries to reduce their level of greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. If a country exceeds the emissions level, it could be forced to cut back industrial production.
Russia's emissions have fallen by 32 percent since 1990, largely due to the post-Soviet industrial meltdown, but they have started to rise again slowly amid the economic revival of recent years.
Putin's ambitious goal of doubling Russia's gross domestic product by 2010 might come into conflict with the Kyoto Protocol, requiring Russia to launch a costly overhaul of its industries in order to cut emissions and thereby slowing down economic growth.
Putin said Monday the interests of all countries must be taken into account in setting pollution limits, which he said should not strangle economic development.
Putin's comments marked a move backward from Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's pledge a year ago that Russia would ratify the Kyoto Protocol in the ``very near future.'' But it was not entirely unexpected.
The government must submit ratification documents to parliament, and officials had already said lawmakers are not likely to review the issue before the Dec. 7 parliamentary elections.
U.N. and European backers of the Kyoto Protocol had hoped Russia would commit to ratification while hosting the Moscow conference, and some openly voiced their disappointment.
Klaus Toepfer, the executive director of the U.N. Environmental Program, warned that while some nations could reap some temporary benefits from global warming, ``at the end of the day we will only have losers.''
-------- ACTIVISTS
Update of case re USAF Croughton
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003
From: "CAAB" <caab@btclick.com>
Northampton Magistrates' Court
Pre-trial review
R v Lindis Percy
Friday 26 September 2003
Alleged offence
USAF Croughton
26 March 2003
S.68 'Aggravated trespass'
(Criminal Justice and Public Order Act)
This was the second of two pre-trial reviews before District Judge Freil. We had asked for a list of disclosures from the CPS. The hearing was about whether or not the District Judge would allow these documents to be disclosed to the Defence. The arguments centred round the 'justicability' of the court and the 'lawfulness' of the US security forces personnel.
Simply put, our defence is that the activities of USAF Croughton are illegal because they played/play a crucial role in the issue of the invasion of Iraq; therefore the US security personnel are acting unlawfully. The list included a request for the Attorney General's ruling on the legality of the invasion of Iraq, the activities of USAF Croughton and various other documents connected with the 'lawful' activities of this base and the 'lawfulness' of the US security forces personnel.
District Judge Freil ruled against the Defence saying that the documents were irrelevant to the case. The issues must be confined to whether the activities of the US security personnel were 'disrupted' or not (one of the elements of s.68) during the incident.
A very short section (about 30 seconds) of a CCTV recording of the incident was finally produced in the afternoon by the CPS (Mr Blair - Barrister acting for the CPS) with Mr Nusspickel (US Security Forces Operations Superintendant at USAF Croughton and a witness) standing by to explain the video.
Razza Hussein (Defence barrister) applied for a copy of the US security forces personnel 'respective orders and standard operating procedures' (as mentioned in the witness Statement from the RAF Liaison officer at USAF Croughton - Flight Lieutenant Richard Harwood).
Mr Blair said that the CPS had applied for a copy of this document from the 'third party' (US authorities) and this had been refused. He said that one of the options for the Defence would be to make a request for this document under the US Freedom of Information Act which would probably take up to 4 - 6 weeks. Even then, Mr Blair thought that this request would probably be denied.
After taking instructions for Lyndon B James (British solicitor based at USAF Mildlenhall and who has followed Lindis round the courts over the years), an American from the base, an American from USAF Mildenhall and a British observer from the base - these four sat at the back of the court all day) Mr Blair said that possibly something could be produced by Monday (the next hearing).
We return to Northampton Magistrates' Court on Monday 29 September at 10 am when this document may be produced. The trial of Lindis Percy will then start.
It was extremely disappointing that despite alerting the press, there were no reporters in court. The case was heard in Court 5 - a court tucked away in Northampton Magistrates' Court.
Thank you to the Ffriends who came to support.
Anni Rainbow and Lindis Percy
Joint Co-ordinators
CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AMERICAN BASES (CAAB)
8 Park Row, Otley, West Yorkshire, LS21 1HQ, England, U.K.
Tel/fax no: +44 (0)1943 466405 0R +44 (0)1482 702033
email: anniandlindis@caab.org.uk or caab@btclick.com
Website: http://www.caab.org.uk
----
Sign On Against Forced Cancellation of Chavez Trip to US
From: "Phila Crossroads Women's Center" <philly@crossroadswomen.net>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003
Dear Friends:
The Global Women's Strike, which has Bolivarian Circles GWS in a number of countries, is part of the Coalition to Welcome President Hugo Chavez. President Chavez was to speak at the United Nations, give a televised speech at Riverside Church, and visit Texas. But he had to cancel his trip due to US plans of violence against him. Below is a statement issued by the Coalition condemning those US actions. It is outrageous that a democratically elected president is prevented from representing his country at the UN by the US. We must not allow this to happen in our name and must hold this government accountable for this outrageous treatment of a democratically elected head of state and of the UN which rests on governments having access to other governments through the United Nations. The world is counting on us. We urge everyone to sign and circulate the enclosed protest letter for endorsement. We hope ultimately to submit it to Congress, United Nations member states, trade unions, and many more urging them to express their views. As women, people of color and other grassroots people, we have a lot at stake. President Chavez and those engaged in the Venezuelan process have consistently stood for our rights, and for resources to go to those of us with the least, not only in Venezuela but throughout Latin America and the world. Please sign today! No more Chiles and other US intervention!
The Global Women's Strike/Philadelphia philly@crossroadswomen.net
Or sign online: http://womenstrike8m.server101.com
For more info 215-848-1120.
PS. The Spanish version of this statement will be available soon.
--
The Coalition to Welcome President Hugo Chavez
We, the undersigned, condemn the US actions that prevented Venezuelan President Chavez from coming to the US to speak at the United Nations
While heads of states and the people of the world have been able to hear President Bush address the United Nations this week, they will not hear from the democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. His trip has been cancelled due to security concerns . Not only is the US not offering protection, but has organized violence against him and the Venezuelan people. It is totally unacceptable that a head of state would have to risk his life to meet with other heads of state at the UN in New York.
Background: Venezuela is the world s 5th largest oil supplier, yet 80% of its population lives in poverty. President Chavez was elected in a landslide in 1998, initiating a "peaceful and democratic process" aimed at making fundamental change, such as using the country s oil revenue to end poverty & corruption, and tackling racism, sexism, & other forms of discrimination. In April 2002 the US backed a coup which kidnapped Pres. Chavez and overthrew the new democratically constructed constitution. But within three days, millions of people from the poorest areas took to the streets and, with the help of loyal soldiers, won both back. The wealthy white racist coup leaders now reside in Florida.
Days before President Chavez was forced to cancel his trip to New York, the US government sent a message when it refused to sign a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli threats to remove Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat by deportation or assassination: it wants us to accept its right to remove any head of state, democratically-elected or not, whom it does not want. The US administration together with the President of Colombia have decided to give amnesty to paramilitary death squad leaders, as a condition for receiving aid. Venezuelan airspace has been violated by 15 Black Hawk helicopters flying over the border from Colombia in a clear act of aggression.
These events, along with the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, another large oil-producing nation, and the violent overthrow of Chilean President Allende (that commemorated its 30th anniversary on Sept 11), are ever-present specters. Now Venezuelan intelligence reports that the CIA was plotting to bring down Pres Chavez s airplane. No one who knows the CIA s history will reject that possibility.
President Chavez represents the growing global movement for economic and social justice, against US domination and for self-determination - beginning in Latin America. The people in the United States have been deprived of truth and of information about the new Venezuelan process, by a corporate media which has vilified and censored Pres. Chavez, and the movement he spearheads. Pres. Chavez has said he most regrets not being able to give a televised speech at Riverside Church where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a year to the day before he was assassinated, declared "[the Vietnam] war is the enemy of the poor."
We call on governments at the UN, Congress and people in the US in whose name these policies are carried out, to join us in:
- Protesting US interference in the ability of a government to represent itself in the UN, and this attack on free speech;
- Condemning the US refusal to protect President Chavez on its soil and, worse, its use of assassinations, deportations, illegal arrest, torture, overt and covert invasions and other methods to dispose of democratically-elected and social change leaders it doesn't want us to have;
- Demanding that the Bush administration stop its complicity with Venezuela's discredited and corrupt elite, financing & sheltering their attempts to destabilize the economy, provoking violence and chaos, and imposing a dictatorship that would enable them again to steal, impoverish and exploit the Venezuelan people, on behalf of US multinationals and themselves.
Add your Name: Organization: Email:
Return to Coalition to Welcome Chavez (a coalition of 15 Latino, Black, women s and community organizations). 212-924-8585. chavezinnewyork@yahoo.com
----
Peace Activists' Parents Seek U.S. Probe
By LARA SUKHTIAN
Associated Press Writer
Sep 29,
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PEACE_ACTIVIST?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Parents of an American activist killed earlier this year in Gaza by an Israeli army bulldozer called Monday for an independent U.S. investigation of her death.
Rachel Corrie, 23, from Olympia, Wash., was crushed to death March 16 while trying to block a huge army bulldozer destroying a row of Palestinian homes in a refugee camp near the Gaza-Egypt border.
The Israeli military conducted an internal investigation and said the bulldozer driver could not see Corrie because of the size of the bulldozer and its limited view due to heavy armor plating. Peace activists have disputed that.
Corrie belonged to a pro-Palestinian group called International Solidarity Movement, whose members often place themselves between Israeli forces and Palestinians to try to block Israeli military activity.
At a news conference in Jerusalem, Corrie's parents said they were not satisfied with the Israeli explanation. "Having read the report, we still have a lot of questions," said Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother.
Nearly 50 members of the 435-seat U.S. House of Representatives have signed a bill calling for an independent investigation, she said.
"I need to know if Rachel's death was intentional or accidental," she said, her voice breaking. "I just want to know the truth."
Two other International Solidarity volunteers were shot shortly after Corrie was killed.
On April 5, Brian Avery, 24, of Albuquerque, N.M., was shot in the face during fighting in the West Bank town of Jenin.
On April 11, Thomas Hurndall, 21, of Britain, was shot in the head by Israeli troops as he helped children to safety in the Gaza Strip. He remains brain dead in England.
The Israeli army has said they are investigating the incidents.
Corrie's parents are concluding a three-week tour of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They said they came to try to understand the conflict and come to terms with their daughter's death.
----
Palestinians Demonstrate For Arafat
By Andy Mosher
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 29, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14570-2003Sep28.html
JERUSALEM, Sept. 28 -- Palestinians marked the third anniversary of the outbreak of their uprising, or intifada, by taking to the streets today in support of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, while a recent opinion poll showed that roughly two-thirds of Israelis expect the conflict to continue for at least another year.
Witnesses reported that about 4,000 people marched in the West Bank city of Nablus, carrying pictures of Arafat, chanting slogans and beating drums. News services reported smaller demonstrations in recent days in other West Bank cities and in the Gaza Strip.
More than 2,000 Palestinians and 800 Israelis have been killed since Sept. 28, 2000, when Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel's political opposition, toured the site in Jerusalem's Old City revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. Violence erupted immediately and spread quickly throughout a Palestinian population already disillusioned by the breakdown of statehood negotiations at Camp David just weeks before.
Sharon, who was elected prime minister in February 2001, said Friday in an interview with the newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth that after three years of conflict, he remains committed "to reach peace and security. At the same time, those who thought this would be short were wrong. I didn't think it would take a few months."
In a poll of Israelis conducted by the newspaper Maariv, 65 percent of respondents said they did not think the intifada would end within the next year. At the same time, when asked to rate their mood on a scale of 1 to 10, those polled averaged 6.2, and 76 percent said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their lives.
Israeli and Palestinian sources today identified the gunman who carried out the most recent attack. Mahmoud Hamdan, 22, infiltrated the Jewish settlement of Negahot in the West Bank on Friday night, the start of the Jewish New Year, killing a man and an infant girl before being slain by Israeli soldiers. The newspaper Haaretz identified the victims as Eyal Yiberbaum, 27, and Shaked Avraham, 7 months. The Web site of Islamic Jihad, one of the largest Palestinian militant groups, said Hamdan was a supporter of the group. Hamdan, a resident of the West Bank village of Tabeka, was released from an Israeli prison on July 28 after serving nearly 14 months on a conviction of intending to carry out a terrorist attack, according to an Israeli security source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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7.9 earthquake Nov 02 where military wants to build antimissile sites!
9/29/2003 6:30 PM
Dear Editor,
The antimissile systems don't work, and why build anything dangerous in this zone where giant earthquakes occur?! See: http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/111202/sta_quake.shtml
Perhaps this information will help bring the U. S. American public to stop this useless pork-barrel and dangerous project in Alaska!
Thank you.
-PJohnson pjohnson@ccthita.org
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