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NUCLEAR
Iran defies US over weapons hunt
Saddam's nuclear arsenal? A scattering of yellow powder
Chief weapons hunter: Tips to anthrax, Scud missiles in Iraq
Kay: Iraq search team making significant finds
U.S. Arms Hunter Dismisses Skeptics Over Iraq Search
Scientist retires from chasing nuke fallout
Republicans unsure of Bush's chances for 2004 election
A White House Smear
A cynical betrayal
Republicans question motive for CIA leak
Skull And Bones
MILITARY
Poles apologize over Iraq missiles
Ex-Minister Says Blair Knew Iraq Had No Banned Arms
No uranium, no munitions, no missiles, no programmes
Survey Group head's link to arms industry
Denmark snubs EU military development alongside NATO
US and Iran in secret peace talks
British troops accused of torture
Iraqis' patience wears thin as America delays handover
Report Offered Bleak Outlook About Iraq Oil
Iraqi Army Takes Shape as Recruits End Training
Arafat Declares Emergency in Palestinian Areas
INSIDE THE SUNNI TRIANGLE
Arafat Declares Emergency in Palestinian Areas
Israel hits Palestinian 'camp' in Syria
Israeli Warplanes Bomb Target Deep Inside Syrian Territory
Israel could launch new attacks on Syria: Sharon spokesman
Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 20 in North of Israel
U.S. Cites Syria As Sponsor of Terrorism
Israeli Raid in Syria Alarms Arab World
Top U.S. Envoy Praises Pakistan for Raids
U.S. closes controversial detention camp
SNOOPING ON THE C.I.A.
C.I.A. Chief Is Caught in Middle by Leak Inquiry
The Focus On Tenet Sharpens After Leak
CIA Operative in Leak Drama Fears for Safety
U.N. to Meet on Israeli Strike in Syria
Groups fight to keep restrictions on military tests
AWOL STATE OF MIND
A Question Of Naming Names Journalists' Secrecy At Issue in Scandal
ENERGY AND OTHER
'The Discovery of Global Warming': Living in the Greenhouse
ACTIVISTS
Protesters fear nuclear arms in space
Iraqis: 'We Are Left With Nothing'
Riot police clash with anti-globalizers
-------- NUCLEAR
------- iran
Iran defies US over weapons hunt
IAN MATHER DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENT imather@scotlandonsunday.com
Sun 5 Oct 2003
Scotsman
http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/international.cfm?id=1103012003
IRAN is on a collision course with the US as international inspectors arrive in the country to begin yet another search for weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. The CIA has already briefed on a plan for air and missile strikes
Technical experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who flew to Tehran yesterday, have one month to investigate Iran's nuclear programmes, which are widely suspected of shielding the development of nuclear weapons.
If they are not satisfied, the IAEA will report to the UN Security Council, which will then be asked by the US to impose punitive sanctions against Iran.
Military action by the administration of President George Bush could eventually follow. The CIA has already briefed friendly foreign intelligence services on a contingency plan for air and missile strikes on Iran's nuclear sites, according to western diplomats.
Under pressure from Washington the IAEA has set an October 31 deadline for Iran to provide full disclosure of its nuclear programme to demonstrate it is not covertly making nuclear weapons, as the United States alleges.
Iran must also suspend all uranium enrichment, and agree to accept snap inspections even of locations that are not declared as nuclear sites.
Last week, IAEA director-general Dr Mohammed El-Baradei, said that the coming weeks will be "decisive" and that the deadline was "non-negotiable". He called on Iran to provide "full transparency and full disclosure".
But Iran remains defiant. "For the time being we will continue enriching uranium," Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in Tehran. Enriched uranium can be used to fuel power plants or to make weapons if highly enriched.
Tehran insists that its nuclear programme is strictly for generating electricity. But it also says it will allow the inspectors access only to declared nuclear sites and ban them from military establishments.
"At the moment it looks like they're on a collision course with the Security Council," said a European diplomat in Tehran. "I can't see them pulling a surprise and meeting our demands before the deadline."
Traces of weapons-grade uranium have been discovered at two Iranian facilities in the past few months. Salehi claimed that they had arrived in contaminated equipment bought abroad.
Since then IAEA inspectors have been granted entry to some sites only after they have been thoroughly cleaned of potentially incriminating evidence.
Tensions with Washington have been inflamed further by a report for the Pentagon which concludes that the Islamic Republic is now two years away from producing its first nuclear weapon, and which argues that its nuclear facilities should be "covertly" attacked if it fails to cooperate.
In the report Henry Sokolski, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence in the first Bush administration, argues that Iran should scrap its entire nuclear programme, including a reactor under construction by the Russians at the southern port of Bushehr, which Iraq says is for electricity.
"The Iranians have a bomb-making option as long as they have a reactor," said Sokolski, executive director of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington. "You are whistling past the graveyard of political and technical reality if you leave any fissile production capability in that country."
Sokolski, who is close to Bush administration conservatives, including John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said "covert" operations should be considered against Iran's facilities. Overt military strikes would be "self-defeating".
But if Iran, which Bush has branded part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and pre-war Iraq, cooperated, and also ended its support for terrorist groups, it should be offered "security guarantees, economic assistance and normalised diplomatic relations," he said.
Iran is considered unlikely to give up the Bushehr project, which has already cost the country nearly $1bn and has become a matter of national pride.
But there have been mixed signals resulting from tensions between the elected leaders and leading clergy, experts say. Reformist President Mohammed Khatami said that Iran would continue to cooperate with the IAEA.
While insisting that Iran would "vigorously pursue its peaceful nuclear programme", foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi added: "We don't have anything to hide because we do not have a programme for producing nuclear weapons. We are ready to be quite transparent."
Kharrazi said that the US campaign was causing tensions within the Iranian government, with Khatami being "in the middle of two sides of pressure".
Stephen Kinzer, author of All The Shah's Men, said: "Iran is unique in that it has two functioning governments. There is a functioning democracy with an elected president and a parliament. Next to them is a repressive theocracy. They have been fighting ever since the Islamic revolution of 1979.
"The danger is that if the US seems like it's intervening in Iran it will unite a lot of people behind the repressive theocracy, which is anti-American and anti-Western. Iran does not have nuclear weapons yet. But I think it's a real danger the world has to worry about, because the regime has shown that it can't be trusted."
COUNTDOWN TO STANDOFF
January 1995 Iran signed a contract for Russia to provide a light water reactor at Bushehr. Spent fuel rods were to be shipped back to Russia to extract plutonium which could be used in weapons production.
October 1997 The government of newly-elected President Mohammed Khatami (right) announced that it planned to meet 20% of its electricity demand through nuclear power, and would build a second power unit at Bushehr.
December 2002 The National Council of Resistance, an Iranian opposition group, revealed that Tehran was developing a secret heavy-water production plant in Arak, west central Iran, and a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, a fuel-making facility 150 miles south of Tehran.
June 2003 The IAEA board was shown evidence that Iran had secretly imported 1,800 kilograms of uranium from China, and planned to build a plutonium-production reactor.
August 2003 Inspectors found traces of enriched uranium at Natanz.
September 12, 2003 The IAEA gave Iran until 31 October to prove it did not have a hidden nuclear weapons programme.
Late September 2003 IAEA inspectors found traces of highly enriched uranium at the Kalaye Electrical Company site in Tehran.
November 2003 If the IAEA board rules that Tehran has violated the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the Security Council could impose economic or diplomatic sanctions.
-------- iraq
Saddam's nuclear arsenal? A scattering of yellow powder
Villagers sell deadly uranium to the US army at $3 a barrel
Patrick Graham in Al Mansia
Sunday October 5, 2003
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,1056483,00.html
Dhia Ali makes a throwing motion as he tells how he dumped out the blue barrels of powder. The nine-year-old and his brother, Hussein, weren't looking for weapons of mass destruction when they went into the low brown buildings, known to UN weapons inspectors as Location C, near his home last April. They just wanted the blue barrels.
The yellow cake powder they poured out and breathed into their lungs - a form of natural uranium - was part of the nuclear programme which, the Iraq Survey Group's recent report claims, somewhat vaguely, was being restarted before the last war. The report won't do much for Dhia or Hussein - they haven't even been examined by a doctor yet.
'If you inhale even a small amount, it stays in your lungs,' said one of the senior scientists who worked on Iraq's atomic programme. He spoke anonymously because, like many of the country's best researchers, he didn't want any trouble from the Americans.
Even the ducks in the canal in the village of Al Mansia, where they dumped the barrels, later tested for increased radiation. When the US army offered a reward of $3 a barrel, the villagers fished them out and sold them.
The report's claim that Iraq was revamping its nuclear programme in such a way that it could constitute any serious threat was described as 'ridiculous' by the scientist. By 1991, when the he left the programme, Iraq had succeeded in producing no more than one kilogram of enriched uranium - 6 to 14 kgs short of a bomb. By 1997, the programme had been exposed and most of its capabilities destroyed.
To produce more would be impossible. Nuclear research, he pointed out, is a massive undertaking and difficult to conceal, especially under sanctions while being monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The report, at least the available declassified version, acknowledges as much. 'These initiatives did not in and of themselves constitute a resumption of the nuclear weapons programme, but could have been useful in developing a weapons-relevant science base for the long term,' it states.
The Iraqi scientist acknowledged that, while Iraq may have already had the theoretical basis for a nuclear bomb, 'they never reached the stage of trying'. Given enough plutonium or enriched uranium, he thought Iraq might have been able to produce a bomb in two to three years. But he doubted that, under sanctions, the country would ever have had access to sufficient material.
Interviewing scientists in Iraq is a tricky business. Through a well-connected intermediary we were turned down by four others. One of them, a leader of a chemical weapons programme we had met shortly after the war, denied ever having heard of us. The last time we talked he said Iraq had failed to stabilise nerve agents to put into warheads and the programme had been abandoned. Now many of the scientists who worked on these programmes have, or want, jobs with the administration and are reluctant to speak openly.
'It was just an excuse to attack,' the nuclear scientist said. 'Now it turns out there is nothing. They talk to everybody, they offer money and still nothing.'
But the search for weapons of mass destruction is really just a distraction from the main task, rebuilding Iraq and keeping the peace. Ask Sheikh Muttar Saheb Neama Al Musawi. Many of people from his village, like Dhia of Al Wardia, returned with barrels from the yellow cake storage facility at Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre.
The Sheikh has been asking for a health centre to keep an eye on the population but, so far, nothing. He strongly advised not talking to the people in the village - many organisations had come and gone but nothing had been done. They were extremely unfriendly, he said, and talked of the growing anger of the population toward the US army in the area south of Baghdad.
'The Americans have done nothing for us. They don't respect our customs, breaking into people's houses and searching their women.The UN would do a better job.'
Asked if he thought the situation would get worse, he said: 'Boom - Iraqis like a balloon waiting to burst.'
Outside Dhia's house, the dust blows across the barbed wire fence from Tuwaitha as his father Ali shows the open sewer in front of his mud brick house where he washed out the barrels of yellow cake. Inside the small dirt court yard where Ali and lives with his wife and six sons, the unemployed labourer shows us his water barrel. 'Poison' it reads, but he says he bought before the war from a friend.
'I worry about my kids - I want somebody to come and look at them,' he says. 'The Americans must come and decontaminate the area. And foreigners must to come and take the nuclear stuff away from the village.'
At the end of last April, Husham Abdul Malik, a former Iraqi nuclear inspector, came to the village and warned the people about the yellow cake. Now he works as a translator with US soldiers who wear radiation patches while guarding Tuwaitha. Standing outside Dhia's house, he looks sceptically at the blowing dust he believes is potentially radioactive.
'The effect of the yellow cake will appear in a year or two. They need medication right now and they are not getting it - all the Americans did was buy back the barrels.'
He advises the villagers to drink a lot of milk because the calcium compounds with uranium.
'No - they will never find weapons of mass destruction. Saddam wanted a bomb but all he did was propaganda,' he says.
----
Chief weapons hunter: Tips to anthrax, Scud missiles in Iraq
10/5/2003
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-10-05-kay-weapons_x.htm
WASHINGTON - Weapons hunters in Iraq are pursuing tips that point to the possible presence of anthrax and Scud missiles still hidden in the country, the chief searcher said Sunday.
David Kay told Congress last week that his survey team had not found nuclear, biological or chemical weapons so far. But he argued against drawing conclusions, saying he expects to provide a full picture on Iraq's weapons programs in six months to nine months.
While lacking physical evidence for the presence anthrax or Scuds, Kay said tips from Iraqis are motivating the search for them.
Critics, including many in Congress, say Kay's findings do not support most of the Bush administration's prewar assertions that the United States faced an imminent, serious threat from Iraq's Saddam Hussein because of widespread and advanced Iraqi weapons programs.
President Bush has said the U.S.-led war on Iraq was justified despite the failure to find weapons.
Kay reported that searchers found a vial of live botulinum bacteria that had been stored since 1993 in an Iraqi scientist's refrigerator. The bacteria make botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, but Kay has offered no evidence that the bacteria had been used in a weapons program.
The live bacteria was among a collection of "reference strains" of biological organisms that could not be used to produce biological warfare agents.
Kay said Sunday the same scientist told investigators that he was asked to hide another much larger cache of strains, but "after a couple of days he turned them back because he said they were too dangerous. He has small children in the house."
Kay said the cache "contains anthrax and that's one reason we're actively interested in getting it." Kay, speaking on Fox News Sunday, did not say whether the anthrax was live or a strain used only for anthrax research.
Before the war, Iraqis said they had destroyed their supply of anthrax. Inspectors haven't found any and Iraqis haven't been able to provide evidence to satisfy investigators that they did destroy it. Experts note that old supplies of anthrax would have degraded by now.
While the Bush administration argued before taking the country to war that Iraq's arsenal posed an imminent threat, much of what Kay discovered is that Iraq had interest in such weapons and was researching some agents.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said Kay's report shows Saddam's clear intent to develop chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. He said, however, that the administration didn't tell the public the whole truth.
"There is some evidence that the Bush administration exaggerated unnecessarily," he told "Fox News Sunday." Lieberman, a presidential candidate, said the exaggeration "did discredit what was otherwise a very just cause of fighting tyranny and terrorism."
Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have contended the vial of botulinum bacteria that Kay's team found is one strong piece of evidence of Saddam's weapons intent.
Searches have been unsuccessful for the kind of long-range Scud missiles the Iraqis fired at Saudi Arabia and Israel in 1991. Many were destroyed during and after the Persian Gulf War, but the Bush administration had accused Iraq of continuing to hide Scuds.
Kay said there are indications there may still be Scuds even though Iraq declared it got rid of them in the early 1990s.
"We have Iraqis now telling us that they continued until 2001, early 2002, to be capable of mixing and preparing Scud missile fuel. Scud missile fuel is only useful in Scud missiles," he said. "Why would you continue to produce Scud missile fuel if you didn't have Scuds? We're looking for the Scuds."
Kay's report to Congress said the information on fuel production came from Iraqi sources and has not been confirmed with documents or physical evidence.
Weapons hunters still are looking for chemical weapons at scores of large ammunition storage sites throughout Iraq. Because of the size of the depots, searchers have examined only 10 of 130 sites so far, Kay said.
"These are sites that contain - the best estimate is between 600,000 and 650,000 tons of arms," he said. "That's about one-third of the entire ammunition stockpile of the much larger U.S. military."
The Iraqis stored chemical weapons, often unmarked, among conventional munitions, so "you really have to examine each one," Kay said. He said 26 sites are on a critical list to be examined quickly.
----
Kay: Iraq search team making significant finds
Discoveries include banned equipment, but no WMDs
Sunday, October 5, 2003 (CNN) http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/10/05/kay.wmd/
WASHINGTON -- Although no weapons of mass destruction have been found by U.S. inspectors searching Iraq, Saddam Hussein's government was hiding prohibited equipment, laboratories and other activities of concern to those fighting terrorism, the leader of the U.S. search team said Sunday.
David Kay said Iraq had managed to conceal equipment related to the production of weapons of mass destruction from U.N. weapons inspectors.
Kay, Washington's chief weapons inspector and a special adviser to the CIA, leads the 1,200-strong Iraq Survey Group. In an interim report on its first three months of work presented to congressional intelligence committees last week, he said the group had found no chemical, nuclear or bioweapons, but had turned up evidence of a biological program. (Full story)
"We now have three cases in which scientists have come forward with equipment, technology, diagrams, documents and, in this case, actual weapons material, reference strains and botulinum toxin that they were told to hide and that the U.N. didn't find," he said Sunday.
Asked about nuclear weapons, Kay said the team can't prove that Iraq was pursuing them immediately before the war began in March.
"What we have said, and we said it in the report, we have numbers of Iraqis who tell us that Saddam was committed to acquiring weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons," he said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." "And the issue is, how far along was that activity actually before the war?" EVIDENCE DISCLOSED Some of the evidence of Iraqi weapons programs disclosed by CIA weapons inspector David Kay during congressional committee testimony Thursday:
# A clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment that was subject to U.N. monitoring and was suitable for continuing chemical and biological weapons research.
# A prison laboratory complex that possibly was used to test biological weapons agents on humans. Kay said his investigations have shown that Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N. inspections were ordered not to declare the facility to the U.N.
# Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in the home of an Iraqi scientist. One of the strains can be used to produce biological weapons.
# New research on biological weapons-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin -- none of which were declared to the U.N.
# Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have helped Iraq resume uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation.
Kay said there was evidence that Iraq was interested in starting a nuclear weapons program, but the work was at an early stage.
He said on ABC's "This Week," "If someone had given them the enriched material or the plutonium, I think it would have taken them a year or less to fabricate a weapon from that material."
Kay said there was "significant evidence" that Saddam was in violation of U.N. resolutions banning certain weapons. In last week's report, for example, he detailed evidence that Iraq's missile program -- which he said showed evidence of foreign assistance -- would have eventually led to missiles that could travel 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) "with a significant payload."
U.N. sanctions against Iraq leveled after the Persian Gulf War of 1991 did not allow Baghdad missiles with a range of more than 150 kilometers (93 miles).
Asked about the probability of finding weapons of mass destruction, the former U.N. weapons inspector said on "Fox News Sunday," "I simply don't know. I have tried to conduct a work program that guarantees us that if they are there, we will find them. ... I don't want to estimate. I want to have proof."
Because no weapons of mass destruction were found, the report prompted criticism against President Bush from opponents who accused him of going to war with Iraq too quickly. The claim that Iraq possessed banned weapons and was poised to use them was one of the U.S. government's main reasons for launching the war.
Bush has indicated that he felt vindicated by the group's preliminary findings.
The inspectors have found 130 large ammunition storage points containing more than 600,000 tons of arms -- one-third of the ammunitions stockpile of the U.S. military, Kay said.
He said he is optimistic that the survey group will "get to the bottom of the program" because of the number of Iraqis cooperating. He has asked for millions in additional funding and six to nine months to finish the work.
----
U.S. Arms Hunter Dismisses Skeptics Over Iraq Search
October 5, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-kay.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Though no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have yet been found, Washington's chief inspector David Kay said on Sunday he was confident the search would turn up ``remarkable things'' in the coming months.
In a series of television interviews, the CIA special adviser and head of the Iraqi Survey Group said much had been overlooked by the media in an interim report presented last week, in which he said no actual weapons had been discovered.
Kay stressed that the report concluded that Iraq had a vast secret network of laboratories, including some two dozen hidden in the Iraqi intelligence service and operated while U.N. inspectors were still in the country.
President Bush justified his decision to invade Iraq citing the imminent threat posed by President Saddam Hussein's biological, chemical weapons and efforts to develop a nuclear bomb.
Critics seized on Kay's report as further evidence that U.S. intelligence may have been exaggerated in the drive to oust Saddam.
On ``Fox News Sunday,'' Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Democratic presidential candidate, said though he supported the Iraqi war, he was troubled ``the exaggerations and misleading statements made by this administration before the war ... has compromised the just cause of the war.'' Kay said his team still was pursuing a number of leads that could result in the discovery of weapons.
He said an Iraqi scientist had produced a vial containing an active biological toxin, and his team was now searching for another reported cache possibly containing anthrax.
He also cited the manufacture as late as in 2002 of fuel for Scud missiles that Iraq used in the first Gulf war and then told United Nations weapons inspectors it had destroyed.
PROHIBITED ACTIVITY
``What everyone has skated over, both in the chemical and the biological area, is what we indeed have found. We found a vast network of undeclared labs engaged in prohibited activity in both of those areas,'' Kay said on CNN's ``Late Edition.''
``So it's not that we have found nothing. ... We have actually found quite a bit although we have not yet found shiny pointy things that I would call a weapon.''
Kay told ABC's ``This Week'' program: ``We're inside the country. I know in that country we're going to find remarkable things about their weapons program.''
Vice President Dick Cheney pressed the case in Des Moines, Iowa, citing Kay's findings at a Republican fund-raiser and declaring, ``Don't let anybody tell you that this was not a significant threat.''
Kay said the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons would take another six to nine months as his 1,300 inspectors work on many fronts, including the examination of 130 conventional ammunition storage depots that contained some 650,000 tons of arms. He said there were 26 such sites considered critical because chemical munitions might be there.
``We're going through them, but it is a tough go,'' he told ABC.
On biological weapons, he told the Fox program: ``Based on information leads, we have no reason to believe that we will not find more. But we're searching still.''
He said the team was still investigating how far Saddam had progressed in a ``very nascent start up'' of a nuclear weapons program.
Kay said information had come from many sources, including Iraq's former deputy prime minister, Tareq Aziz, who surrendered to U.S. forces in April.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- tennessee
Scientist retires from chasing nuke fallout
Clayton Gist performed many roles during career
By FRANK MUNGER, munger@knews.com
October 5, 2003
Knox News
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_2322936,00.html
OAK RIDGE - Clayton Gist grins as he recalls the early days of his career, when he worked under mushroom clouds and chased radioactive fallout across the desert.
"I never felt like I was in mortal danger,'' said Gist, who did research at the Nevada Test Site during the 1950s and '60s.
"My major role was looking at close-in blast effects of weapons and long-range fallout. We chased fallout clouds all over the place.''
The 65-year-old scientist retired last week, which means the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge office is missing one of its real characters.
Funny, outspoken and keenly intelligent, Gist performed many roles in a varied career. He taught statistics, prepared models for oil-shale exploration, and studied the effects of radiation on a tropical rain forest. He worked in government, academia and the private sector.
One of his recent - and favorite - assignments was figuring out the best way to dispose of hot nuclear waste at an underground site in New Mexico.
But surely the most intriguing part of his career took place in Nevada, where he witnessed 16 A-bomb detonations - both above ground and underground.
Watching a bomb blast was a physical experience, and participants felt the stunning heat, light and shock waves - even from miles away. It also was an emotional experience that left Gist with mixed feelings.
"Seeing the technology was awe-inspiring. The physics was so elegant, just incredible,'' he said. "But knowing what those things could do was kind of depressing. They have such destructive potential.''
Gist joined the A-bomb program as an intern while an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, and he continued working there for about 10 years.
Among the memorable times was the July 6, 1962, Sedan test shot, a 104-kiloton underground blast that displaced about 12 million tons of earth. It created the Sedan Crater, which is 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep.
The excavation experiment was part of the Atomic Energy Commission's Plowshare Program, which studied the use of atomic bombs for industrial applications. The thought at the time, Gist said, was that nuclear devices could be used to help build a second Panama Canal.
Gist remembers Sedan in part because he got stranded in the desert while taking radiation measurements after the test. His car broke an axel when he hit a depression covered with soft sand. The impact dismembered the battery, which meant he couldn't use the radio to call for help. He had to walk back to his work camp, four or five miles away.
"I was just going out to do some work and wasn't paying as much attention as I should have. I probably was going a little bit faster than I should have been cross-country,'' he said.
The area was radioactive, but that wasn't the kind of heat that bothered Gist. He was battling summer conditions in the desert, with temperatures in triple digits, while loaded down with his heavy anti-contamination clothing.
"With all that radiation-protection equipment, you could lose a lot of weight just in sweat,'' he said. "It was plenty hot. On a cool day it was 100.''
Gist just laughs at that and other episodes that sound frightening to folks who can't imagine getting up close and personal with atomic weaponry. "The name of the game was unexpected situations,'' he said.
Scientific teams set up their research stations at various points from ground zero, and within hours of detonation they would speed back to those sites in four-wheel-drive trucks to collect samples of radioactive particulate.
If a bomb's yield was higher than expected, which happened sometimes, the collection equipment was obliterated - along with just about everything else.
"We were looking at the involvement of fallout - radionuclides - in biological systems, natural ecosystems, agricultural systems,'' Gist said. "We were looking at potential entries into the human food chain."
The researchers gathered plants and killed desert animals - jackrabbits and mule deer - to evaluate the uptake of radioactive materials. Nighttime hunters would freeze the rabbits with a spotlight and take them down with a rifle. Gist doesn't claim any special skills as a marksman.
"Well, I shot at them,'' he said.
In addition to their work at the test site, researchers sometimes took to the road to track the movement and dispersal of nuclear fallout after a bomb shot. They would use "fallout trays'' loaded with nylon beads to help capture particles of radioactive fallout at different sites. Then they'd rush back to NTS, where chemists would determine the types and level of radioactivity.
Those road trips occasionally covered hundreds of miles into America's heartland.
"It was exciting, it was hard work, and we did work incredibly long hours,'' he said. "But, you know, you didn't notice it because everyone was doing the same.''
Having worked in many aspects of the U.S. nuclear industry, including his start in weapons testing, Gist has an interesting thought on why nuclear energy remains unpopular with many people.
"If electricity had been introduced to society through the electric chair, it probably wouldn't be as popular as it is today.''
Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329.
-------- us politics
Republicans unsure of Bush's chances for 2004 election
By RON HUTCHESON and STEVEN THOMMA
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Sun, Oct. 05, 2003
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/6926616.htm
WASHINGTON - In a sharp reversal, Republicans who just months ago daydreamed about a 2004 election landslide now worry that President Bush is losing control of events at home and abroad and faces a real chance of leading the party to defeat.
At home, anxiety about the economy is escalating and respect for Bush is sinking. His domestic agenda has stalled in Congress.
Abroad, troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan have eroded Bush's traditional Republican advantage on foreign policy. His calls for international help in Iraq have gone unanswered. And in both countries, Americans continue to die in guerrilla attacks.
There is time, of course, for both situations to improve, and with them Bush's prospects. But for now, Bush has work to do avoid his father's fate: defeat after one term.
Complicating matters for Bush is the possibility of a full-blown scandal involving allegations that someone in his White House revealed the identity of a CIA officer out of political spite at the officer's spouse. The ensuing political firestorm, not to mention the Justice Department investigation, could further hurt Bush's standing.
"It's a feeding frenzy. ... They've just got to take the punches, make sure everybody is cooperating with the investigation and see where it goes," said veteran Republican strategist and informal Bush adviser Charles Black. "It's going to be a distraction for a while."
"They need to get a handle on these things," said Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. "We have a saying around here - don't let your monkeys turn into gorillas."
There are no signs of panic among Bush supporters, but their heady optimism over Republican gains in the 2002 congressional elections, Bush's previous sky-high poll numbers and the swift fall of Saddam Hussein has given way to recognition that Bush could face a tough re-election contest.
If anything, recent problems have stripped away what was left of the national unity following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. With the country again deeply divided, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie recently said that Bush faces a 2004 election much more like 2000's than Ronald Reagan's landslide in 1984.
"I'd just as soon not have the election today," said Black, "but we don't."
Indeed, Bush might need the next year to improve his fortunes. Americans are growing more skeptical of him as they worry about the state of their country.
The majority, 56 percent, now believes the country is going seriously down the wrong track, while 37 percent believe it is headed in the right direction, according to a new CBS-New York Times poll.
Most troubling for Bush is that Americans now rank the economy and jobs a far greater problem than terrorism. As long as Americans were more concerned about terrorism, they felt better about Bush, whose forceful leadership after Sept. 11 rallied people to his side. But only 37 percent approve of his performance on the economy, while 56 percent disapprove, according to the poll.
Bush faces problems on foreign affairs as well. Only 44 percent approve of his performance on foreign policy, while 45 percent disapprove. On Iraq, 47 percent approve while 48 percent disapprove.
Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, another informal White House adviser, predicts dramatic changes by Election Day - robust economic growth and relative quiet in Iraq - developments that even many Democrats acknowledge would probably secure Bush's re-election.
Neither is a sure bet.
Bush hailed a new report Friday that businesses added jobs in September for the first time in eight months. "Things are getting better," Bush said, speaking in Milwaukee.
But Bush knows too well that it can take time for people to feel better about the economy. On Election Day 1992, the economy was rebounding from recession, but lingering economic anxiety contributed heavily to the defeat of his father, President George H. W. Bush.
Job growth typically lags behind overall economic revival, and it has not yet become strong or sustained. Even with September's addition of 57,000 jobs, the unemployment rate remains at 6.1 percent, and the country still has nearly 3 million fewer jobs than when Bush took office.
Iraq is the other political wild card.
Bush's recent request for an additional $87 billion largely to shore up Iraq helped crystallize nagging questions many Americans had about the continuing deaths of American soldiers months after Bush flew triumphantly to an aircraft carrier to pose beneath a banner declaring "mission accomplished." A majority of Americans oppose Bush's $87 billion request.
It didn't help Bush that this week the top U.S. general in Iraq said "this is still wartime," and chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay reported that he has found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "We have not found at this point actual weapons," Kay said. "It does not mean we've concluded there are no actual weapons."
Bush insisted Friday that Kay's report supports his invasion of Iraq. "Saddam Hussein," he maintained, "was a danger to the world."
(Knight Ridder correspondent James Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.)
----
A White House Smear
October 5, 2003, originally published 07/16/2003
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=823
Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?
It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted.
In a recent column on Nigergate, Novak examined the role of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV in the affair. Two weeks ago, Wilson went public, writing in The New York Times and telling The Washington Post about the trip he took to Niger in February 2002--at the request of the CIA--to check out allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium for a nuclear weapons program from Niger. Wilson was a good pick for the job. He had been a State Department officer there in the mid-1970s. He was ambassador to Gabon in the early 1990s. And in 1997 and 1998, he was the senior director for Africa at the National Security Council and in that capacity spent a lot of time dealing with the Niger government. Wilson was also the last acting US ambassador in Iraq before the Gulf War, a military action he supported. In that post, he helped evacuate thousands of foreigners from Kuwait, worked to get over 120 American hostages out Iraq, and sheltered about 800 Americans in the embassy compound. At the time, Novak's then-partner, Rowland Evans, wrote that Wilson displayed "the stuff of heroism." And President George H. W. Bush commended Wilson: "Your courageous leadership during this period of great danger for American interests and American citizens has my admiration and respect. I salute, too, your skillful conduct of our tense dealings with the government of Iraq....The courage and tenacity you have exhibited throughout this ordeal prove that you are the right person for the job."
The current Bush administration has not been so appreciative of Wilson's more recent efforts. In Niger, he met with past and present government officials and persons involved in the uranium business and concluded that it was "highly doubtful" that Hussein had been able to purchase uranium from that nation. On June 12, The Washington Post revealed that an unnamed ambassador had traveled to Niger and had reported back that the Niger caper probably never happened. This article revved up the controversy over Bush's claim--which he made in the state of the union speech--that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Africa for a nuclear weapons program.
Critics were charging that this allegation had been part of a Bush effort to mislead the country to war, and the administration was maintaining that at the time of the speech the White House had no reason to suspect this particular sentence was based on faulty intelligence. "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said days before the Post article ran. "But no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions." Wilson's mission to Niger provided more reason to wonder if the administration's denials were on the level. And once Wilson went public, he prompted a new round of inconvenient and troubling questions for the White House. (Wilson, who opposed the latest war in Iraq, had not revealed his trip to Niger during the prewar months, when he was a key participant in the media debate over whether the country should go to war.)
Soon after Wilson disclosed his trip in the media and made the White House look bad. the payback came. Novak's July 14, 2003, column presented the back-story on Wilson's mission and contained the following sentences: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate" the allegation.
Wilson caused problems for the White House, and his wife was outed as an undercover CIA officer. Wilson says, "I will not answer questions about my wife. This is not about me and less so about my wife. It has always been about the facts underpinning the President's statement in the state of the union speech."
So he will neither confirm nor deny that his wife--who is the mother of three-year-old twins--works for the CIA. But let's assume she does. That would seem to mean that the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it.
The sources for Novak's assertion about Wilson's wife appear to be "two senior administration officials." If so, a pair of top Bush officials told a reporter the name of a CIA operative who apparently has worked under what's known as "nonofficial cover" and who has had the dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material. If Wilson's wife is such a person--and the CIA is unlikely to have many employees like her--her career has been destroyed by the Bush administration. (Assuming she did not tell friends and family about her real job, these Bush officials have also damaged her personal life.) Without acknowledging whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, "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." If she is not a CIA employee and Novak is reporting accurately, then the White House has wrongly branded a woman known to friends as an energy analyst for a private firm as a CIA officer. That would not likely do her much good.
This is not only a possible breach of national security; it is a potential violation of law. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent. The punishment for such an offense is a fine of up to $50,000 and/or up to ten years in prison. Journalists are protected from prosecution, unless they engage in a "pattern of activities" to name agents in order to impair US intelligence activities. So Novak need not worry.
Novak tells me that he was indeed tipped off by government officials about Wilson's wife and had no reluctance about naming her. "I figured if they gave it to me," he says. "They'd give it to others....I'm a reporter. Somebody gives me information and it's accurate. I generally use it." And Wilson says Novak told him that his sources were administration officials.
So where's the investigation? Remember Filegate--and the Republican charge that the Clinton White House was using privileged information against its political foes? In this instance, it appears possible--perhaps likely--that Bush administration officials gathered material on Wilson and his family and then revealed classified information to lash out at him, and in doing so compromised national security.
Was Wilson's wife involved in sending him off to Niger? Wilson won't talk about her. But in response to this query, he says, "I was invited out to meet with a group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject. None I knew more than casually. They asked me about my understanding of the uranium business and my familiarity with the people in the Niger government at the time. And they asked, 'what would you do?' We gamed it out--what I would be looking for. Nothing was concluded at that time. I told them if they wanted me to go to Niger I would clear my schedule. Then they got back to me and said, 'yes, we want you to go.'"
Is it relevant that Wilson's wife might have suggested him for the unpaid gig. Not really. And Wilson notes, with a laugh, that at that point their twins were two years old, and it would not have been much in his wife's interest to encourage him to head off to Africa. What matters is that Wilson returned with the right answer and dutifully reported his conclusions. (In March 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that the documents upon which the Niger allegation was based were amateurish forgeries.) His wife's role--if she had one--has nothing but anecdotal value. And Novak's sources could have mentioned it without providing her name. Instead, they were quite generous.
"Stories like this," Wilson says, "are not intended to intimidate me, since I've already told my story. But it's pretty clear it is intended to intimidate others who might come forward. You need only look at the stories of intelligence analysts who say they have been pressured. They may have kids in college, they may be vulnerable to these types of smears."
Will there be any inquiry? Journalists who write about national security matters (as I often do) tend not to big fans of pursuing government officials who leak classified information. But since Bush administration officials are so devoted to protecting government secrets--such as the identity of the energy lobbyists with whom the vice president meets--one might (theoretically) expect them to be appalled by the prospect that classified information was disclosed and national security harmed for the purposes of mounting a political hit job. Yet two days after the Novak column's appearance, there has not been any public comment from the White House or any other public reverberation.
The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.
----
A cynical betrayal
The exposure of a CIA officer's identity calls attention to a broader White House effort to intimidate anyone who might challenge its claims against Iraq.
A St. Petersburg Times
October 5, 2003
The apparently intentional exposure of a CIA officer's identity by someone in the Bush administration is a serious offense that warrants a thorough investigation and, if necessary, a vigorous prosecution. As the first President Bush, a former director of the CIA, noted years ago, those in power who betray the work of our intelligence community are "the most insidious of traitors." Attorney General John Ashcroft's politically tainted Justice Department has only a short time to show that it is capable of a full and independent inquiry. Otherwise, the Washington Republicans who so loved special prosecutors during the Clinton years will look like hypocrites if they oppose one in this case.
But as that investigation goes forward, the country should remain focused on the more important issue this case has illuminated: the Bush administration's broader effort to discredit and intimidate anyone - even members of its own team - who challenged the dubious intelligence claims on which the administration based its case for war in Iraq.
When the CIA and other intelligence agencies failed to find solid evidence of Iraq's illegal weapons programs, the administration created a new agency in the Pentagon to produce the desired results. When military leaders such as the then-Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, differed with optimistic White House assumptions about the military and economic costs of occupying postwar Iraq, they were ridiculed and replaced. When NATO allies such as Germany and France raised questions about evidence at the heart of the administration's rush to war, they were ostracized.
In each case, the administration appears to have tailored the evidence to fit a predetermined policy. And in each case, subsequent events have vindicated those who challenged the administration's claims.
The case of retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife certainly fits that broader pattern. Wilson, who served with distinction under Republican and Democratic presidents, is an Africa expert who publicly debunked the administration's claim, repeated in the president's State of the Union address, that Iraq had sought nuclear material from Niger.
Wilson was proved correct: The president's assertion was based on crudely forged documents. But instead of thanking Wilson for correcting the record, someone in the White House apparently set out to punish him - and to send a message to anyone else who might be considering challenging the administration's assertions about Iraq.
A subsequent article by syndicated columnist Robert Novak, alluding to conversations with two "senior administration officials," revealed the classified information that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. The White House has promised to cooperate fully with the Justice Department investigation to determine who was responsible for that breach. However, some members of the administration, including the president's press secretary, are still trying to discredit Wilson. Their characterization of Wilson's political motivations are misleading and irrelevant. The facts are the facts: Wilson was right about the Iraq-Niger story, and at least one person in the Bush administration apparently tried to punish him by exposing and endangering his wife.
It is against the law, for obvious reasons, for a government official to reveal the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. We will soon know how seriously the Justice Department, the White House and other administration agencies intend to respond to this cynical act of betrayal.
----
Republicans question motive for CIA leak
By DAVID GOLDSTEIN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Sun, Oct. 05, 2003
http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/news/6938830.htm
WASHINGTON - Amid the partisan debate over whether an independent counsel is needed to investigate the leak of a CIA agent's name, some Republicans are raising a more basic political question:
Why leak the name of a possibly covert CIA operative who is also the wife of a critic of the Iraq war in the first place?
Several Republicans said they were struggling to find any political pluses for the president, on whose behalf the leaking was allegedly done.
"It doesn't make any sense," said Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It's very stupid. It just seems like something an administration would not want to do under any circumstances."
As the story has unfolded, someone in the administration supposedly leaked classified information that Valerie Plame, the wife of Joseph C. Wilson, was a CIA agent. Wilson is a former ambassador whom the CIA sent to Africa to find evidence that Iraq was trying to gain uranium for nuclear weapons.
He returned empty-handed, and subsequently embarrassed the Bush administration, which, in its effort to justify war with Iraq, had been insisting that the uranium story was true.
"How do you embarrass Mr. Wilson by saying that his wife is in the CIA?" asked Republican Sen. Jim Talent of Missouri. "It just seems to me to be stupid. If you're going to try to discredit a guy because of his comments on intelligence, you don't say his wife's in the CIA. That would make him more credible."
Neither Roberts nor Talent supported the growing calls among Democrats for an independent counsel to investigate the leak. A "purely political effort," Bond said.
The Justice Department has opened a full-scale investigation that will be directed by career prosecutors in its counterespionage section and led by agents from the FBI's inspections division.
Justice has asked the White House to preserve documents that could be related to the investigation, including papers, phone records, tapes, computer files and other materials. The investigation also will cover the State and Defense departments.
A growing chorus of Democrats, however, has pushed for the appointment of a special counsel, or for Attorney General John Ashcroft to at least recuse himself. They contend that he has the appearance of a conflict of interest because of his close ties to administration officials.
Chief among them is Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser and a former political consultant to Ashcroft during several of his past campaigns when he ran successfully for governor and senator in Missouri.
Ashcroft paid Rove's former Texas-based direct-mail company more than $300,000 for work on his 1994 Senate campaign, according to campaign finance reports.
"This can't be a wink and a nod once-over from the president's friend - and Karl Rove's client - John Ashcroft and his very political staff," Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who is running for president, said through an aide. "The only way to get to the truth is to have someone independent of politics."
Ashcroft recused himself from a 2001 federal probe of former Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey. Torricelli had headed his party campaign committee and had campaigned against Ashcroft when he was running for re-election to the Senate in 2000.
Spokesmen for the White House and Justice Department have said no options concerning the leak investigation have been ruled out.
"The president has made it very clear that he wants to get to the bottom of this," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said last week. "Unfortunately, there are some that are looking through the lens of political opportunism. There are some that are seeking partisan political advantage."
Talent, who holds the Senate seat that had once been Ashcroft's, said he has no doubt about the attorney's general's impartiality.
"John Ashcroft has a law enforcement mentality," Talent said. " ... I don't have any question in my mind that he'll take this wherever it leads."
The House Government Reform Committee also plans to look into the leak. Roberts, however, said he was not sure how that committee has any jurisdiction in the matter, but "with certain kinds of leaks, things do get political."
He said that with an investigation by the Justice Department already under way, his own committee has no plans to look into the issue.
One Democrat who said he has no qualms about having the Justice Department handle the probe was Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri.
"I think they'll do a good job," he said. "You only have a handful of people in the White House who knew of her (Plame's) role. You only have a handful of people who talk to the news media. That narrows the search down a great deal."
Skelton, who used to serve on the House Intelligence Committee, said he was "absolutely outraged" by the leaks and would like to see someone prosecuted.
"This isn't political," he said. "This is national security."
----
Skull And Bones
Skull and Bones is an elite secret society at Yale University that includes some of the most powerful men of the 20th century. (Photo: 60 Minutes/CBS)
Oct. 5, 2003
CBS "60 Minutes"
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/02/60minutes/main576332.shtml
(CBS) There are secrets that George W. Bush guards at least as carefully as any entrusted to a president.
He's forbidden to share these secrets even with the vice president -- secrets he has held ever since his days as an undergraduate at Yale.
In his senior year, Mr. Bush - like his father and his grandfather - belonged to Skull and Bones, an elite secret society that includes some of the most powerful men of the 20th century.
All Bonesmen, as they're called, are forbidden to reveal what goes on in their inner sanctum, the windowless building on the Yale campus that is called "The Tomb."
There are conspiracy theorists who see Skull and Bones behind everything that goes wrong, and occasionally even right in the world.
Apart from presidents, Bones has included cabinet officers, spies, Supreme Court justices, statesmen and captains of industry - and often their sons, and lately their daughters, too.
It's a social and political network like no other. And they've responded to outsiders with utter silence - until an enterprising Yale graduate, Alexandra Robbins, managed to penetrate the wall of silence in her book, "Secrets of the Tomb." Correspondent Morley Safer reports. "I spoke with about 100 members of Skull and Bones and they were members who were tired of the secrecy, and that's why they were willing to talk to me," says Robbins. "But probably twice that number hung up on me, harassed me, or threatened me."
Secret or not, Skull and Bones is as essential to Yale as the Whiffenpoofs, the tables down at a pub called Mory's, and the Yale mascot - that ever-slobbering bulldog.
Skull and Bones, with all its ritual and macabre relics, was founded in 1832 as a new world version of secret student societies that were common in Germany at the time. Since then, it has chosen or "tapped" only 15 senior students a year who become patriarchs when they graduate -- lifetime members of the ultimate old boys' club.
"Skull and Bones is so tiny. That's what makes this staggering," says Robbins. "There are only 15 people a year, which means there are about 800 living members at any one time."
But a lot of Bonesmen have gone on to positions of great power, which Robbins says is the main purpose of this secret society: to get as many members as possible into positions of power.
"They do have many individuals in influential positions," says Robbins. "And that's why this is something that we need to know about."
President Bush has tapped five fellow Bonesmen to join his administration. Most recently, he selected William Donaldson, Skull and Bones 1953, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Like the President, he's taken the Bones oath of silence. Ron Rosenbaum, author and columnist for the New York Observer, has become obsessed with cracking that code of secrecy.
"I think there is a deep and legitimate distrust in America for power and privilege that are cloaked in secrecy. It's not supposed to be the way we do things," says Rosenbaum. "We're supposed to do things out in the open in America. And so that any society or institution that hints that there is something hidden is, I think, a legitimate subject for investigation."
His investigation is a 30-year obsession dating back to his days as a Yale classmate of George W. Bush. Rosenbaum, a self-described undergraduate nerd, was certainly not a contender for Bones. But he was fascinated by its weirdness.
"It's this sepulchral, tomblike, windowless, granite, sandstone bulk that you can't miss. And I lived next to it," says Rosenbaum. "I had passed it all the time. And during the initiation rites, you could hear strange cries and whispers coming from the Skull and Bones tomb."
Despite a lifetime of attempts to get inside, the best Rosenbaum could do was hide out on the ledge of a nearby building a few years ago to videotape a nocturnal initiation ceremony in the Tomb's courtyard.
"A woman holds a knife and pretends to slash the throat of another person lying down before them, and there's screaming and yelling at the neophytes," he says.
Robbins says the cast of the initiation ritual is right out of Harry Potter meets Dracula: "There is a devil, a Don Quixote and a Pope who has one foot sheathed in a white monogrammed slipper resting on a stone skull. The initiates are led into the room one at a time. And once an initiate is inside, the Bonesmen shriek at him. Finally, the Bonesman is shoved to his knees in front of Don Quixote as the shrieking crowd falls silent. And Don Quixote lifts his sword and taps the Bonesman on his left shoulder and says, 'By order of our order, I dub thee knight of Euloga.'"
It's a lot of mumbo-jumbo, says Robbins, but it means a lot to the people who are in it.
"Prescott Bush, George W's grandfather, and a band of Bonesmen, robbed the grave of Geronimo, took the skull and some personal relics of the Apache Chief and brought them back to the tomb," says Robbins. "There is still a glass case, Bonesmen tell me, within the tomb that displays a skull that they all refer to as Geronimo."
"The preoccupation with bones, mortality, with coffins, lying in coffins, standing around coffins, all this sort of thing I think is designed to give them the sense that, and it's very true, life is short," says Rosenbaum. "You can spend it, if you have a privileged background, enjoying yourself, contributing nothing, or you can spend it making a contribution."
And plenty of Bonesmen have made a contribution, from William Howard Taft, the 27th President; Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine; and W. Averell Harriman, the diplomat and confidant of U.S. presidents.
"What's important about the undergraduate years of Skull and Bones, as opposed to fraternities, is that it imbues them with a kind of mission for moral leadership," says Rosenbaum. "And it's something that they may ignore for 30 years of their life, as George W. Bush seemed to successfully ignore it for quite a long time. But he came back to it."
Mr. Bush, like his father and grandfather before him, has refused to talk openly about Skull and Bones. But as a Bonesman, he was required to reveal his innermost secrets to his fellow Bones initiates.
"They're supposed to recount their entire sexual histories in sort of a dim, a dimly-lit cozy room. The other 14 members are sitting on plush couches, and the lights are dimmed," says Robbins. "And there's a fire roaring. And the, this activity is supposed to last anywhere from between one to three hours." What's the point of this?
"I believe the point of the year in the tomb is to forge such a strong bond between these 15 new members that after they graduate, for them to betray Skull and Bones would mean they'd have to betray their fourteen closest friends," says Robbins.
One can't help but make certain comparisons with the mafia, for example. Secret society, bonding, stakes may be a little higher in one than the other. But everybody knows everything about everybody, which is a form of protection.
"I think Skull and Bones has had slightly more success than the mafia in the sense that the leaders of the five families are all doing 100 years in jail, and the leaders of the Skull and Bones families are doing four and eight years in the White House," says Rosenbaum.
Bones is not restricted to the Republican Party. Yet another Bonesman has his eye on the Oval Office: Senator John Kerry, Democrat, Skull & Bones 1966.
"It is fascinating isn't it? I mean, again, all the people say, 'Oh, these societies don't matter. The Eastern Establishment is in decline.' And you could not find two more quintessential Eastern establishment, privileged guys," says Rosenbaum. "I remember when I was a nerdy scholarship student in the reserve book room at, at the Yale Library, and John Kerry, who at that point styled himself 'John F. Kerry' would walk in."
"There was always a little buzz," adds Rosenbaum. "Because even then he was seen to be destined for higher things. He was head of the Yale Political Union, and a tap for Skull and Bones was seen as the natural sequel to that." David Brooks, a conservative commentator who has published a book on the social dynamics of the upwardly mobile, says that while Skull & Bones may be elite and secret, it's anything but exciting.
"My view of secret societies is they're like the first class cabin in airplanes. They're really impressive until you get into them, and then once you're there they're a little dull. So you hear all these conspiracy theories about Skull and Bones," says Brooks.
"And to me, to be in one of these organizations, you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for tedium 'cause you're sittin' around talking, talking, and talking. You're not running the world, you're just gassing."
Gassing or not, the best-connected white man's club in America has moved reluctantly into the 21st Century.
"Skull and Bones narrowly endorsed admitting women," says Robbins. "The day before these women were supposed to be initiated, a group of Bonesmen, including William F. Buckley, obtained a court order to block the initiation claiming that letting women into the tomb would lead to date rape. Again more legal wrangling; finally it came down to another vote and women were admitted and initiated."
But Skull & Bones now has women, and it's become more multicultural.
"It has gays who got the SAT scores, it's got the gays who got the straight A's," says Brooks. "It's got the blacks who are the president of the right associations. It's different criteria. More multicultural, but it's still an elite, selective institution."
On balance, it may be bizarre, but on a certain perspective, does it provide something of value?
"You take these young strivers, you put them in this weird castle. They spill their guts with each other, fine. But they learn something beyond themselves. They learn a commitment to each other, they learn a commitment to the community," says Brooks. "And maybe they inherit some of those old ideals of public service that are missing in a lot of other parts of the country."
And is that relationship, in some cases, stronger that family or faith?
"Absolutely," says Robbins. "You know, they say, they say the motto at Yale is, 'For God, for country, and for Yale.' At Bones, I would think it's 'For Bones.'"
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Poles apologize over Iraq missiles
WASHINGTON TIMES
Briefly,
October 5, 2003
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/briefly.htm
WARSAW, Poland - After a protest from French President Jacques Chirac, Poland said yesterday it had been mistaken in reporting that its troops found new French-made anti-aircraft missiles in central Iraq.
Mr. Chirac swiftly denied selling Iraq weapons in violation of the U.N. weapons embargo against Saddam Hussein's regime. The claims, he said, "are as false today as they were yesterday."
An aide to the Polish prime minister said an initial report that the Roland missiles found by Polish troops days ago were produced in 2003 was incorrect. France said it stopped producing any type of Roland missile in 1993.
-------- britain
Ex-Minister Says Blair Knew Iraq Had No Banned Arms
October 5, 2003
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/europe/05CND-BRIT.html?hp
LONDON, Oct. 5 - Prime Minister Tony Blair conceded privately that Iraq did not have the quickly deployable weapons of mass destruction that the British government cited as justification for war, former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook asserted today.
Mr. Cook, who resigned his post as leader of the House of Commons because of Britain's decision to join in the American-led war, said Mr. Blair also made it clear to him in a conversation two weeks before combat began that he did not believe Saddam Hussein's weapons posed a "real and present danger" to Britain.
A controversial intelligence dossier published last September argued that Iraq had unconventional weapons that could be used within 45 minutes of an order being given. Mr. Cook said that he had no reason to doubt that Mr. Blair believed the claim at the time it was made, but that in a conversation on March 5 Mr. Blair told him the weapons were only battlefield munitions and could not be assembled by Mr. Hussein for quick use because of "all the effort he has put into concealment."
Mr. Cook's account was made public in extracts published in The Sunday Times of London from "Point of Departure," a book based on his diary entries from the period.
Mr. Cook asks, "If Number 10 accepted that Saddam had no real W.M.D. which he could credibly use against city targets and if they themselves believed that he could not reassemble his chemical weapons in a credible timescale for use on the battlefield, just how much of a threat did they really think Saddam represented ?"
In response, a 10 Downing Street spokesman said: "The idea that the prime minister ever said that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction is absurd. His views have been consistent throughout, both publicly and privately, as his cabinet colleagues know. Robin Cook's views are well known and have been expressed many times before."
Mr. Blair's popularity has fallen to its lowest point since he came to power in 1997 because of the American and British failure to find unconventional weapons and because of public suspicions, aired during six weeks of hearings this summer, that the British government doctored intelligence to win support for an unpopular war.
Mr. Cook said it was his impression last March that Mr. Blair was determined to take military action regardless of any progress made by Hans Blix and his team of United Nations weapons inspectors.
Mr. Cook said that he and other cabinet members worried that Mr. Blair's decision was motivated more by his desire to maintain Britain's influence in Washington than to protect British interests against a possible terror attack.
"I am certain," Mr. Cook writes, "the real reason he went to war was that he found it easier to resist the public opinion of Britain than the request of the president of the United States."
A year before, Mr. Cook says, Mr. Blair had instructed the cabinet: "We must steer close to America. If we don't, we will lose our influence to shape what they do."
Mr. Cook said that days after publication of the intelligence dossier, he returned from a trip to Continental Europe and reported to fellow ministers that people there and in the Middle East saw Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel as a greater threat than Mr. Hussein.
"Somewhat to my surprise," he said, "this line provoked a round of `hear, hearing' from colleagues, which is the nearest I've heard to a mutiny in the cabinet."
Mr. Cook served as foreign secretary during Mr. Blair's first term in office. Unlike the other cabinet member to quit over the war, International Development Secretary Clare Short, Mr. Cook declared himself a Blair loyalist in his resignation speech to the House of Commons and said he hoped to see him remain in office.
Reporting his diary entry from the last meeting he had with Mr. Blair before quitting the cabinet, he says: "I got the impression that he was a man who was genuinely puzzled as to how he had got into his present dilemma. I suspect he had never expected to find himself ordering British troops into war without U.N. backing.
"The root problem of the past year has been that Tony was so convinced of the case against Saddam that he never doubted that the rest of the world would come to see it his way and had therefore left himself no other way out."
-------- business
No uranium, no munitions, no missiles, no programmes
As the first progress report from the Iraq Survey Group is released, Cambridge WMD expert Dr Glen Rangwala finds that even the diluted claims made for Saddam Hussein's arsenal don't stand up
05 October 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=450121
Last week's progress report by American and British weapons inspectors in Iraq has failed to supply evidence for the vast majority of the claims made on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction by their governments before the war.
David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), told congressional committees in Washington that no official orders or plans could be found to back up the allegation that a nuclear programme remained active after 1991. Aluminium tubes have not been used for the enrichment of uranium, in contrast to US Secretary of State Colin Powell's lengthy exposition to the UN Security Council in February. No suspicious activities or residues have been found at the seven sites within Iraq described in the Prime Minister's dossier from September 2002.
The ISG even casts serious doubt on President Bush's much-trumpeted claim that US forces had found three mobile biological laboratories after the war: "technical limitations" would prevent the trailers from being ideally suited to biological weapons production, it records. In other words, they were for something else.
There have certainly been no signs of imported uranium, or even battlefield munitions ready to fire within 45 minutes. Most significantly, the claim to Parliament on the eve of conflict by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, that "we know that this man [Saddam Hussein] has got ... chemical weapons, biological weapons, viruses, bacilli and ... 10,000 litres of anthrax" has yet to find a single piece of supportive evidence.
Those who staked their career on the existence in Iraq of at least chemical and biological weapons programmes have latched on to three claims in the progress report.
First, there is the allegation that a biologist had a "collection of reference strains" at his home, including "a vial of live C botulinum Okra B from which a biological agent can be produced". Mr Straw claimed the morning after the report's release that this agent was "15,000 times more toxic than the nerve agent VX". That is wrong: botulinum type A is one of the most poisonous substances known, and was developed in weaponised form by Iraq before 1991. However, type B - the form found at the biologist's home - is less lethal.
Even then, it would require an extensive process of fermentation, the growing of the bug, the extraction of the toxin and the weaponisation of the toxin before it could cause harm. That process would take weeks, if not longer, but the ISG reported no sign of any of these activities.
Botulinum type B could also be used for making an antidote to common botulinum poisoning. That is one of the reasons why many military laboratories around the world keep reference strains of C botulinum Okra B. The UK keeps such substances, for example, and calls them "seed banks".
Second, a large part of the ISG report is taken up with assertions that Iraq had been acquiring designs and under- taking research programmes for missiles with a range that exceeded the UN limit of 150km. The evidence here is more detailed than in the rest of the report. However, it does not demonstrate that Iraq was violating the terms of any Security Council resolution. The prohibition on Iraq acquiring technology relating to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons was absolute: no agents, no sub-systems and no research or support facilities.
By contrast, Iraq was simply prohibited from actually having longer-range missiles, together with "major parts, and repair and production facilities". The ISG does not claim proof that Iraq had any such missiles or facilities, just the knowledge to produce them in future. Indeed, it would have been entirely lawful for Iraq to develop such systems if the restrictions implemented in 1991 were lifted, while it would never have been legitimate for it to re-develop WMD.
Third, one sentence within the report has been much quoted: Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi intelligence service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research". Note what that sentence does not say: these facilities were suitable for chemical and biological weapons research (as almost any modern lab would be), not that they had engaged in such research. The reference to UN monitoring is also spurious: under the terms of UN resolutions, all of Iraq's chemical and biological facilities are subject to monitoring. So all this tells us is that Iraq had modern laboratories.
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Survey Group head's link to arms industry
By Glen Rangwala
UK Independent
05 October 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=450120
For at least 10 years David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, has staked his professional and business reputation on the case that Iraq was a serious threat.
He was a frequent pundit on US television shows, making the case for regime change in blunt language. He called the attempt by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to broker an effective inspections process in 1998 "worse than useless"; claimed in 2002 that Iraq was pursuing its weapons of mass destruction in order to bring about the elimination of the state of Israel; and said before entering Iraq that the Coalition would find not just a "smoking gun", but a "smoking arsenal".
Until October last year, Mr Kay was the vice-president of a major San Diego-based defence contractor, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), co-ordinating its homeland security and counter-terrorism initiatives. It was while he held this role that he claimed that Iraq could launch terrorist attacks on the US mainland.
SAIC was in the headlines earlier this year when it was revealed that the US government had given it a contract three years ago to produce mobile biological vans for training purposes. Until February SAIC's corporate vice-president was Christopher Ryan Henry, now a senior policy official at the Pentagon.
SAIC's spokesman acknowledged earlier this year that the company is deeply involved in the current war in Iraq, including its role in leading a $650m contract for services and support for the US army. Among other activities, the company runs the US-funded radio station in Umm Qasr, "Voice of the New Iraq", and helps to provide senior advisers to the US occupation authorities in Baghdad. It is not known if Mr Kay retains financial interests in SAIC.
-------- europe
Denmark snubs EU military development alongside NATO
COPENHAGEN (AFP)
Oct 05, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031005173910.v0ydmal3.html
Denmark on Sunday snubbed any development of the military capabilities of the European Union in competition with NATO, saying it would be too costly and unmerited.
"We must not start to establish parallel structures to NATO," Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
"It would be too costly if we have to have our own facilities alongside those of the Atlantic alliance, and it would be stupid to use money for that," Rasmussen said.
"Increased cooperation (within the EU) must not clash with the transatlantic cooperation. It must be opened to each member of the EU," he said, warning against the emergence of a "small exclusive club" of countries at the head of European defence.
"Besides, we are still talking of a cooperation between national defences and not a European army," he said.
A controversial call for a European military headquarters separate from NATO was put forward in April by four opponents of the US-led war on Iraq -- Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg.
The idea has been criticised by Washington and more pro-US countries such as Britain, Italy and Spain as an attempt to undermine the transatlantic NATO alliance.
Washington had derided the HQ idea as the brainchild of "chocolate makers" -- a reference to Belgium's key role in the plans -- and London sharply warned against any attempt to undermine NATO.
The United States has frequently called on Europeans to boost military spending to modernise their armed forces but frowns on a proposal it says would only create more bureaucracy.
Britain has suggested the alternative of a permanent EU "planning cell" based at NATO headquarters in Mons in southern Belgium.
Denmark has since December 1992 had four opt-outs in European cooperation, covering the euro, joint defence, European citizenship and judiciary cooperation.
-------- iran
US and Iran in secret peace talks
Jason Burke and Dan de Luce in Tehran
Sunday October 5, 2003
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1056324,00.html
Secret 'back-door' diplomacy involving some of the Middle East's most influential figures has led to unexpected signals of a rapprochement between America and Iran despite angry public rhetoric on both sides.
Tensions between Washington and Tehran remain high, particularly over the question of Iran's nuclear programme and alleged attempts to destabilise the US occupation in Iraq, but a tentative dialogue has been established.
One go-between has been King Abdullah II of Jordan, who visited Tehran shortly before meeting President Bush at Camp David last month. King Abdullah is understood to have been briefed by Mohammed Khatami, the Iranian president, and Kamal Kharrazi, the foreign minister, and to have transferred their 'analysis of the regional situation' to the Americans.
Last week US officials confirmed that they had received 'positive signals' from Iran. 'There is some indication that the Iranians want to talk to us about a range of issues and we are responding appropriately,' one State Department official said.
However, analysts say that different groups in Iran are reacting to the country's new security situation in different ways, and the seemingly contradictory stances reflect deep divisions within Iranian politics and society. Religious hardliners, who control many of the key institutions, are taking a firm stance over Iran's nuclear programme and are working to cause problems for the US-led forces in Iraq. However, Iranian reformists, such as Khatami and Kharrazi, are taking a more conciliatory position.
Iran is expected to attend an international donors conference on the post-war reconstruction of Iraq in Madrid later this month, while continuing to take a hard line on the nuclear issue.
'As much trouble as we have with them on the nuclear issue, we have a slightly different relationship with them on Iraq,' Richard Armitage, the American deputy secretary of state, said last week. 'They have big interests in stability in Iraq.'
Another issue causing tensions is the alleged presence of senior al-Qaeda figures in Iran. Here differences in the US administration mirror those in Iran. American hawks, particularly those close to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claim that Iranian hardliners are harbouring militants and facilitating their terror campaign. Their opponents in Washington say that any Sunni Muslim Islamic militants held by the Iranian regime are in prison and unable to operate.
The most pressing issue for all remains the suspicion that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear bomb.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has asked for prompt access to sensitive nuclear sites, giving Iran one last chance to come clean about the true nature of its nuclear programme.
Inspections last summer found traces of weapons-grade uranium and obstruction of the IAEA's work could lead to UN sanctions. The IAEA has demanded that Iran cease all uranium enrichment activity and prove it has no weapons programme by 31 October.
Senior Iranian conservatives last week dismissed the terms of the 31 October deadline. At the weekly Friday prayers ceremony at Tehran University, the powerful former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, condemned the IAEA resolution.
'The hypocritical policy of the Americans and Westerners has no justification,' Rafsanjani told worshippers amid chants of 'Death to America', though he did indicate that Iran would be willing to meet some international demands in return for guarantees protecting Iran's sovereignty.
Dr Ali Ansari, lecturer in Middle Eastern history at the University of Durham, said that the nuclear issue united many reformists and conservatives. 'Many believe it is their national right to develop a nuclear programme,' he said.
-------- iraq
British troops accused of torture
British soldiers are responsible for the southern city of Basra
Reuters
Sunday 05 October 2003
http://english.aljazeera.net/Articles/News/ArabWorld/Military%2Binvestigating%2Bclaims%2Bof%2Btorture.htm
Amid allegations of torture, the British military is investigating the death of a 26-year-old Iraqi man who died in their custody.
Baha Salim Musa was arrested in the southern Iraqi city of Basra last month.
But after being held for four days, his father was asked to identify his body.
"His face was covered in blood, his nose broken, and the skin on his face was torn. There were bruises on his neck and all over his body," Baha's father Dawood told Reuters news agency.
"One wrist was broken and the flesh exposed where handcuffs had been pulled too tight. A sergeant confirmed that a rope had been put round his neck."
Dawood is convinced his son was tortured to death, and wants to know what happened.
The British military, which is responsible for Basra since the war on Iraq ended, says it is investigating the issue.
"Those suspected of any crimes will be tried, and if found guilty, punished under the laws of the United Kingdom"
Lieutenant Colonel David Amos acting commander of UK forces
"Seven men were arrested during a planned operation on the 14th of September, and one subsequently died in custody," a British spokesman said, adding the Special Investigations Branch of the Royal Military Police was investigating Baha's death.
Lieutenant Colonel David Amos, acting commander of British forces in the Basra and Maysan region, said this week that "those suspected of any crimes will be tried, and if found guilty, punished under the laws of the United Kingdom".
Orphaned children
Dawood had just dropped off his son at the Hotel Al-Haithum, where Baha worked as a receptionist, when the British raid began. Raids by occupation troops to seize weapons or detain suspects are common across Iraq.
"The safe was broken into by the soldiers and the money inside seized. They found three rifles and two pistols - needed for the security in the hotel," he said.
"Then they called for reinforcements. That was when I saw my son and six of his colleagues lying face down on the floor with their hands behind their heads."
His death left his two young children orphaned - Baha's wife died just before the war. Baha had also looked after four of his nephews after their father died.
UK soldiers have had an easier time than their US counterparts
"My son did not belong to any political party," Dawood said. "He didn't even read the papers. He always said he wasn't interested in the war."
Kefa Taha, who was in charge of the generator at the hotel, was also arrested in the raid. He is currently in a critical condition in Basra's Shaiba hospital and unable to talk.
British army hospital records say that Taha, 44, was admitted with "renal failure, rhabdomyolysis and severe bruising to his upper abdomen and the right side of his chest".
"We know that only a few of the soldiers are bad. The soldiers and officers we have dealt with since the death have been very excellent," Baha's brother Allah said.
"But maybe this has happened before and gone unpunished. We don't want anyone else to suffer like us."
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Iraqis' patience wears thin as America delays handover
As Europe and UN put pressure on Washington, Iraqi leaders say they fear being 'puppets' of US
Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Sunday October 5, 2003
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1056326,00.html
When Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Baghdad, appointed the Iraqi governing council, he held out the promise of a significant Iraqi influence on America's postwar reconstruction.
But nearly three months later, widening differences are emerging between the chosen Iraqi leaders and Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that threaten American attempts to bring stability and security to Iraq. In a series of interviews with The Observer, several members of the council complained they had only a limited influence over American policies and were deeply frustrated at their lack of control over security and spending plans.
'They want to keep all the control for themselves,' said Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish politician and one of the 24 council members. 'When you are not controlling the budgets, when the security file is not under your control, and when you cannot create jobs, what can you do? It is better to give up.'
'We will be looked at as puppets of the Americans and we will fail. If we fail, they fail.'
Washington is already facing pressure from France, Germany, Russia and even the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself to transfer more authority more quickly to an Iraqi government ahead of elections. Yesterday, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said he believed a new constitution might be in place within six months. Many states want to see Iraqis given power in the same way that the transitional authority in Afghanistan ran the country after fall of the Taliban in October 2001.
In another blow to the CPA, unemployed former soldiers in Saddam Hussein's disbanded army clashed with troops in Baghdad and the southern city of Basra on Saturday in violent protests that left at least two Iraqis dead. The British Army said one of its soldiers shot dead an armed Iraqi during an angry demonstration in Basra by hundreds of men who had gathered to collect redundancy payments after being laid off from the Iraqi military.
Major Simon Routledge said a British soldier heard gunfire and then shot and killed an Iraqi holding a weapon. British troops also fired rubber bullets to disperse the crowd.
Hundreds of former Iraqi soldiers also rioted at a disused airport in Baghdad where redundancy payments are handed out. Officials at a nearby hospital said one Iraqi had been killed and several wounded in the violence. The US army said two of its soldiers were wounded.
Washington is trying to negotiate a new UN resolution that would give the world body a broader mandate in Iraq in an effort to coax reluctant countries to provide troops and funds. But France and Russia, both permanent members of the Security Council, say they are unhappy with the draft US resolution. The two countries, which opposed the war in Iraq, want a faster hand-over of power to Iraqis as a condition for their support.
Annan has said the world body could not play a proper political role in Iraq under the terms wanted by the US. Adding to tensions between the US and France, Polish troops in Iraq said on Friday they had found four French-built anti-aircraft missiles which had been produced in 2003. France said it had issued no arms export licences to Iraq since 1990 and that it was impossible its newest missiles, though not weapons of mass destruction, should turn up in Iraq.
The splits between the governing council and the CPA will delay reconstruction and a shift towards Iraqi political control. Several times in recent weeks there have been outright disputes over policy. Othman said the council was not told last week about a US decision to train 35,000 Iraqi police cadets, half the planned police force, in Jordan. The decision angered many on the council who regard the government in Amman as a former ally of Saddam's regime.
Last week, the council tried to overrule an announcement by the Finance Minister that a new investment law would allow foreign firms the right to complete ownership of Iraqi companies and the right to repatriate their profits immediately. The announcement, which senior Iraqi political sources said was largely shaped by American officials, caused an uproar among Iraqi businessmen. But American officials forced the council to back down from its criticism.
Last week, the council said it wanted committees set up to consider reinstating some members of Saddam's Baath party who had been banned from their work by an American decree. A CPA spokesman said later there would be no appeals and said 'few exemptions' for former Baath Party members had been granted.
'The problem is that whenever we have a discussion about the future with the coalition forces they say everything will be handed over after 18 months. It's their magic number,' said Ahmad al-Barak, a human rights lawyer and another council member. 'We don't want an immediate transfer of power from the Americans to the Iraqis but it should happen step by step and much faster.'
For its part, the CPA argues that the council does have an influence on decisions but that from the start Bremer always had the final say. Washington is intent on continuing to run the country until elections for a new government are held.
The council's biggest problem has been the issue of security. Last week, the senior US military commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, admitted that attacks on American troops were becoming better organised and more deadly.
At least six soldiers are killed each week and around 40 injured, he said. Late last Friday, Iraqi guerillas attacked a US convoy near Baghdad with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades, killing a 4th Infantry Division soldier and wounding another, bringing the number of US soldiers killed in action in Iraq since Washington declared major combat over on 1 May to at least 85.
Iraqis on the governing council say only handing control of security to Iraqi forces will stem the growing violence. Some on the council want to deploy militias, like the Kurdish Peshmerga forces and the Shia Badr Brigade, to handle security across the country, although the US is strongly opposed to having unlicensed militias operating in public.
Some on the council, like the Kurdish politician Othman, say Iraqis should be given control of one city at a time as part of a gradual handing over of power. 'The Americans don't know the people, they don't know the area,' he said. 'The responsibility for security should be handed to Iraqis.'
The next dispute is likely to emerge over the drawing up of a constitution which Washington wants completed before elections are held. The constitution will decide the role of Islam in the new Iraq, whether the country will be run by a president or a parliament and how strong a federalist structure will be established. But first the governing council will have to decide how to form the group that will draw up the constitution. Options range from holding full elections to choose the people who will write the constitution to simply appointing a small group to do the job.
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Report Offered Bleak Outlook About Iraq Oil
By JEFF GERTH
October 5, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05OIL.html?ex=1066310684&ei=1&en=3bacb6e6931ac79c
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 - The Bush administration's optimistic statements earlier this year that Iraq's oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force secretly established last fall to study Iraq's oil industry, according to public records and government officials.
The task force, which was based at the Pentagon as part of the planning for the war, produced a book-length report that described the Iraqi oil industry as so badly damaged by a decade of trade embargoes that its production capacity had fallen by more than 25 percent, panel members have said.
Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that "we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said in April, on the day Baghdad fell, that Iraq's oil production could hit 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year, even though the task force had determined that Iraq was generating less than 2.4 million barrels a day before the war.
Now, as the Bush administration requests $20.3 billion from Congress for reconstruction next year, the chief reasons cited for the high price tag are sabotage of oil equipment - and the poor state of oil infrastructure already documented by the task force.
"The problem is this," L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, asserted at a Senate hearing two weeks ago: "The oil infrastructure was severely run down over the last 20 years, and partly because of sanctions over the last decade."
Similarly, Bush administration officials announced earlier this year that Iraq's oil revenues would be $20 billion to $30 billion a year, which added to the impression that the aftermath of the war would place a minimal burden on the United States. Mr. Bremer now estimates that Iraq's total oil revenues from the last half of 2003 to 2005 will amount to $35 billion, running at a rate of about $14 billion a year.
The administration now plays down the report's findings.
Senior administration officials said that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, were aware of the oil group's overall mission, but that they could not say whether they knew of its specific findings.
"I think when it is all said and done," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, "prewar estimates that may be borne out in fact are likelier to be more lucky than smart."
Mr. Di Rita added that earlier estimates and statements by Mr. Wolfowitz and others "oozed with uncertainty."
Iraq's Most Valuable Asset
In the months leading up to the war, administration officials said little in public about oil, partly because they were "encumbered by fear" that their actions would be seen as helping the American petroleum industry, said one administration adviser. But behind the scenes, officials were studying how to handle Iraq's most valuable asset.
It was evident from much of the information they received that Iraq's oil was not a ready resource for reconstruction.
One expert consulted by the government, Amy Myers Jaffe, who heads the energy program at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, said her group concluded in a report last December that "oil revenues would not be enough and that the expenses of reconstruction would be huge."
In addition, United Nations reports dating back to the late 1990's documented the deterioration that occurred in Iraq's oil system as a result of trade embargoes, which curtailed Iraq's access to technology and equipment.
The administration's examination of the subject began last September when Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, asked an adviser to oversee plans for Iraq's oil industry in the event of war, according to a Pentagon official involved in the project.
The result was the Energy Infrastructure Planning Group, whose existence has not been previously disclosed. It drew on the expertise of government specialists including the Central Intelligence Agency and retired senior energy executives. It planned how to secure the oil industry during the war and, afterward, restoring it to its prewar capacity.
The task force's job was not to make a direct assessment of how much money the oil industry could contribute to rebuilding Iraq. But determining Iraq's actual oil production capacity was important. First, it could help other administration officials gauge how much revenue might be generated for the reconstruction effort. Second, the administration was concerned that it did not want to be seen as profiting from invading an oil-rich nation and giving oil production levels a boost.
The task force concluded that although Iraq's stated production capacity was just over 3 million barrels per day, the system was only producing 2.1 million to 2.4 million barrels, panel members said.
"I think most people would agree that the 2.4 was a little high and the average for 2002 was 2.1," said a Pentagon official on the task force who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The "condition of the Iraqi oil infrastructure was not particularly good," the official said. "That would be evident to anybody who realized the country had been under U.N. sanctions for many years."
The United Nations produced reports on Iraq regularly from 1998 to 2001. The documents painted a picture of a troubled system and cited the need for improvements, some of which are now being proposed by Mr. Bremer, like the $125 million repair of the Qarmat Ali water plant in the south.
In April, when Vice President Cheney was asked about Iraq's oil during an appearance before newspaper editors, he cited higher numbers rather than the task force's more sober findings.
While noting that Iraq's oil fields were in "bad shape," Mr. Cheney said, "With some investment we ought to be able to get production back up on the order of 2.5, 3 million barrels a day, within, hopefully by the end of the year."
An aide to the vice president said recently that those estimates were "consistent with prewar capacity," but could not say whether Mr. Cheney was aware of the task force's different assessment.
An Optimistic Vision
The administration was also optimistic when it came to public estimates of Iraq's oil revenues.
Shortly after the war began in March, the administration's budget office provided Congress and reporters with a background paper on Iraq. It said that Iraq would "not require sustained aid" because of its abundant resources, including oil and natural gas.
On March 27, Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, told the House Appropriations Committee that his "rough recollection" was that "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years."
Testifying in the Senate that same day, Mr. Rumsfeld emphasized that "when it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayers we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government." He noted that the war's costs were not knowable, but he also said an important source of money for reconstruction would flow after the United States worked "with the Iraqi interim authority that will be established to tap Iraq's oil revenues."
At the outset of the war, the administration had asked Congress for $62 billion for Iraq, which included $1.7 billion for reconstruction and $489 million for oil-related repairs.
In a televised interview in late April, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the United States Agency for International Development, the group overseeing Iraq's reconstruction, said that amount was "it for the U.S." He said any other reconstruction money would come from elsewhere, including other countries and future "Iraqi oil revenues," which he predicted at "$20 billion a year."
In an interview this week, Mr. Natsios said he had based those comments on "the discussion in the interagency process at the time," adding, "That's what the Office of Management and Budget was telling us."
Trent Duffy, a budget office spokesman, said this week that "the administration was very clear that the $1.7 billion in initial reconstruction was for the beginning stages and that it was necessary to get a better understanding of the fuller, comprehensive needs going forward."
Last week, appearing again before the Senate committee, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I don't think I did misjudge" Iraq's oil capacity. According to current projections, he said, the country's oil revenues will grow to $12 billion next year from $2 billion this year; they should reach $19 billion in 2005 and $20 billion in 2006.
"So, their oil revenues will be contributing," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Yet Mr. Bremer, in his remarks to legislators two weeks ago, said that for the next two years, whatever revenue was reaped from oil production would not exceed the cost of Iraq's day-to-day operating expenses. In 2005, he said, there would be a surplus of only $4 million to $5 million.
As for Mr. Cheney's projection in April that oil would produce as much as $20 billion a year, a Cheney aide said last week that "there was much more extensive damage due to looting and sabotage, so we're not going to get there when the vice president anticipated."
Reassessing Revenues
The public revenue estimates made in the spring were in line with the very top range of projections made by the Pentagon task force.
According to the Pentagon official who served on the task force, its projections for yearly oil revenues were $25 billion to $30 billion "in the very best case, no sabotage and little or no battle damage," and about $16 billion in the "worse than best case."
The worst case was no revenue for a few years, if there was "major sabotage and some significant battle damage."
Last December the Baker Institute estimated that even if there was no war damage, "Iraq's total oil revenues would still only likely average around $10 billion to $12 billion annually."
Yet even after the war, some officials in Washington seemed to cling to an optimistic view of Iraq's oil production.
In July, Mr. Wolfowitz told a group of senators that production had reached "over a million barrels per day." Although Iraq was having electrical power problems, Mr. Wolfowitz said the oil was flowing "because we brought in portable generators to provide electricity" and planned to bring in more.
But Philip Carroll, a retired petroleum executive and the senior American oil adviser in Baghdad, said in an interview that Iraqi oil production "experienced a terrible month in July because electrical problems cut us back to half of what we should have produced." Those problems, including the need to import considerable fuel, he said, led him to arrange new generator leases in late July.
Mr. Carroll said that although gross production for the week of July 25 was a million barrels a day, 350,000 barrels had to be injected back into the ground, because of a lack of storage or distribution infrastructure.
An aide to Mr. Wolfowitz said he believed that the oil information came from a briefing and that Mr. Wolfowitz's testimony was "sober and nuanced."
Once the war ended, and United States officials gained access to Iraq's oil records, they got a more complete picture.
"When we actually got their production figures for 2002, we were able to make a distinction between productive capacity and what they were actually producing," said Gary Loew, an Army Corps of Engineers official, reducing their capacity figures by 20 to 25 percent.
That reduction roughly corresponded to the Pentagon task force's cuts before the war began.
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Iraqi Army Takes Shape as Recruits End Training
October 5, 2003
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05IRAQ.html
kIRKUSH MILITARY TRAINING BASE, Iraq, Oct. 4 - Iraq officially got back its army on Saturday as almost 700 new soldiers graduated from basic training here, the first battalion in a much larger force the United States is quickly establishing to help stabilize Iraq and reduce the burden on American troops here.
In Baghdad, one American soldier was killed and another wounded late on Friday when their convoy was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade, the military said on Saturday. At least 177 American soldiers have died since President Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq on May 1, 85 of them in combat.
Also, former Iraqi soldiers, now unemployed but still collecting pay from the American-led forces here, scuffled with American and British soldiers in Baghdad and in the southern city of Basra. The British military reported that it had killed one Iraqi on Saturday in Basra, and the United States military reported that two of its soldiers were injured in the disturbances in Baghdad. It was the latest of several skirmishes with former Iraqi soldiers.
At the Kirkush training base, in the desert between Baghdad and the Iranian border, the graduation of the 700 Iraqi soldiers was celebrated with a ceremony and parade, but there was no pretense that the new Iraqi Army would play a central military role in the country anytime soon. Until a new Iraqi leadership takes over, American officials say, the Iraqi Army's duties are expected to be aimed more toward guarding the country's lengthy borders and replacing American soldiers for routine duties like manning checkpoints. Still, Americans and Iraqis hailed the new battalion as a small, early step toward Iraqi self-rule. In a short speech to the new soldiers, Iyad Alawi, this month's president of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, said the new army would not oppress Iraqis, like the one commanded by Saddam Hussein.
"Our army will be the defenders of our nation as well as of its citizens," he said.
As white flags fluttered with the initials N.I.A., for New Iraqi Army, nearly 700 pairs of boots crunched over hot gravel as the new soldiers marched past Iraqi and American officials, including L. Paul Bremer III, the American civilian administrator in Iraq. The next class, with about 1,000 recruits, stood watching.
Mr. Bremer did not speak at the ceremony but offered brief congratulations before a row of cameras afterward.
"We have seen a group of Iraqi men who have trained in a very short time to become professional soldiers," he said. "It's a wonderful and proud day for all Iraqis."
The battalion that graduated today - recruited largely from former Iraqi soldiers, but not members of Mr. Hussein's Republican Guard - is the first of a planned 27, for a total of 40,000 soldiers, to be trained over the next two years. They are to form the core of an army ultimately to be commanded by Iraqis. In the next year, the United States plans to spend about $2.2 billion on various military training programs.
The graduates went through two months of basic training. Of them, 65 officers, 230 noncommissioned officers and 400 soldiers are to be deployed around the border area near here within a few weeks, an American official said.
Unlike the old army, which largely rewarded soldiers who were, like Mr. Hussein, Sunni Muslims, Saturday's graduates were a mix of both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Kurds and other groups in roughly equal proportions to Iraq's population, said Walter B. Slocombe, the Pentagon official in charge of rebuilding Iraqi security institutions. It was an experience, he said, that "took a little adjustment on all sides."
Just before the ceremony, three new officers stood chatting. One was a Kurd who once belonged to militia that fought Mr. Hussein, and the other two were a Sunni and a Shiite who both were in Mr. Hussein's army.
"This is evidence that we are one people," said the Sunni, Capt. Zuher Mahmoud, 38.
The Kurd, Maj. Sherwan Britkay, 34, said he was not concerned that the United States Army still held the real power in Iraq.
"Power is the last thing to be used, not like the old regime, who used power as the first way of solving problems, even against innocents," he said. "It's a great day for us. It's different from the old Iraqi Army. Everybody in the world looked at the old army as wild and starting wars."
--------
Arafat Declares Emergency in Palestinian Areas
October 5, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-arafat.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - President Yasser Arafat, facing Israeli threats to ``remove'' him after further Palestinian suicide bombings, declared a state of emergency on Sunday and approved a scaled-down cabinet to deal with it.
Palestinian officials said Arafat's decree aimed to reinstate security in Palestinian areas, where militant factions opposed to peacemaking with Israel have grown powerful three years into a revolt for statehood.
But Palestinian security services have been impaired by Israeli offensives and blockades that have bred resentment fueling the popularity of militants, raising questions whether any ``emergency'' crackdown might quickly fizzle.
``The declaration of emergency is meant to bolster the principle of one Palestinian Authority and maintain the rule of law, because our situation is very, very critical,'' said a senior Palestinian official who asked not to be identified.
The eight-member crisis cabinet unveiled by Arafat's Prime Minister-designate Ahmed Qurie included longtime Arafat ally Nasser Youssef as interior minister, while two U.S. favorites would retain the finance and foreign affairs posts.
Officials said the cabinet, a third the size of its forerunner, would not require a parliamentary vote of confidence because of its emergency status.
``We have a deterioration of the security situation and we need to assert control over security,'' Qurie told Reuters.
He was alluding both to continued suicide attacks by Islamist radicals sworn to destroying Israel and the Israeli government's military actions against militants including assassinating their leaders in missile strikes.
'EXCEPTIONAL, DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES'
``Due to the exceptional and difficult circumstances and the dangers facing the Palestinian people and Palestinian Authority...there is a necessity to control the security situation and unify the work and performance of our security services,'' said senior Arafat adviser Nabil Abu Rdainah.
A Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant killed 19 people in a suicide bombing in Israel on Saturday, a day before the onset of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday. Arafat condemned the attack and Qurie urged militants to stop targeting civilians.
Israel responded by bombing what it called a Palestinian militant training camp in Syria and said the possibility of carrying out its decision in principle to expel Arafat might depend on Palestinian actions in the coming 48 hours.
Israel says Arafat has incited militant violence throughout the revolt, a charge he denies, and says a U.S.-backed ``road map'' peace plan envisaging a Palestinian state will go nowhere as long as he stays in power.
Qurie's predecessor, Mahmoud Abbas, resigned a month ago over what he called Arafat's obstruction of his efforts to take over security services to rein in militants, and what he said were Israeli military strikes that provoked militants.
Qurie, keen to avoid another paralyzing power struggle with Arafat, allowed leaders of the president's Fatah movement a bigger say in the next cabinet's composition.
Israel says Arafat's refusal to relinquish ultimate control over murky security services has been a critical obstacle to peace, but has indicated it will give Qurie a chance to show whether he can take charge and start curbing militants.
A key U.S. demand has been the unification of Palestinian security services to enforce control over militants and accountability for their actions.
Salam Fayyad, a former International Monetary Fund official and a reformer dedicated to curbing Palestinian corruption and fiscal chaos, will stay on as finance minister and Nabil Shaath, a leading Fatah veteran, remains as foreign minister.
----
INSIDE THE SUNNI TRIANGLE
ON THE FRONTLINES: Core of resistance
Anna Badkhen, Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle,
Sunday, October 5, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/05/MN86744.DTL
Fallujah, Iraq -- First of 3 parts
Perched on a rusty metal dock over the rapid green waters of the Euphrates River, Hamis al Fahdawi dragged on a cigarette and listened to the fighting in the distance.
Somewhere upstream, a heavy machine gun responded to the low thud of a mortar, a weapon of choice for Iraqi resistance fighters. Two U.S. helicopters swooped low over the palm trees on the other side of the mighty river, startling a flock of white egrets out of dusty riverside reeds.
"They must be shooting Americans," al Fahdawi said with satisfaction.
It is not that al Fahdawi, a retired army colonel-turned-fruit farmer, hates Americans. In fact, he said, "We like American people. If they come as guests, we will treat them as guests."
But al Fahdawi insists the Americans have come to kill his countrymen. Therefore, he says, "we have to kill them, too."
In this area of Iraq, Americans have been dying almost daily. Al Fahdawi's hometown of Fallujah and the surrounding villages and towns in the lush Euphrates valley west of Baghdad are the center of resistance to the U.S. occupation.
The area is part of the so-called Sunni Triangle, a volatile tribal heartland dominated by Iraq's Sunni minority, and home to between 15 and 20 percent of the country's population.
Most of the 88 American soldiers killed by hostile fire since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to "major combat," have died in the Sunni Triangle - "the most troubled area in Iraq," according to Lt. Col. George Krivo, U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.
Attacks more sophisticated
U.S. officials said last week that Iraqi fighters are mounting an average of 15 hit-and-run attacks daily against American troops.
And the sophistication of the attacks is growing. Krivo and others note, for example, that the rebels are increasingly using remote-controlled roadside bombs and devices known as "Willie Petes," mines stuffed with white phosphorus that burn through victims' bodies and cannot be put out by water.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of coalition forces, said on Thursday, "The enemy has evolved - a little bit more lethal, a little more complex, a little more sophisticated and, in some cases, a little bit more tenacious."
American authorities say the continuing attacks on U.S. forces are primarily the work of Saddam Hussein loyalists and hard-core Baath Party members - "members of the old Saddam regime who fled the battlefield and now fight in the shadows," President Bush said in a speech last month.
The Sunni Triangle formed the backbone of support for Hussein's rule. By overthrowing his Baath regime, the U.S.-led coalition has potentially undermined the long-standing political and economic dominance of the Sunni Muslim minority in Iraq. The U.S.-appointed 25-member Iraqi Governing council, for example, has 13 Shiites and only 10 Sunnis.
But Fallujah's police chief, Brig. Gen. Riyad Abbas al Karbuli, believes the threat goes beyond just former Baathists.
Citizens up in arms
U.S. military officials must realize that it is not a small group of holdovers from the Hussein government they are up against, said al Karbuli, but rather tens of thousands of Iraqis disgruntled with an occupation that has left scores of innocent civilians dead.
"It's true that the occupation changed the old regime," he added. "But if anyone occupied the United States by force, would you accept it? It is like a thorn. It keeps bothering you."
Interviews with local residents indicate that the opposition to the occupation is so widespread here that the U.S. troops may have already lost the battle for hearts and minds.
"Men and women will fight (the Americans)," said a Fallujah fisherman, Abu Imad. "None of us want to see them in our town."
Police and imams, students and construction workers interviewed for this story deny they are supporters of Hussein's fallen regime. They say their support for the resistance is a consequence of the Americans' often heavy- handed tactics, which have sometimes resulted in the death of innocent civilians. For some, opposition to the U.S. occupation is magnified by a militant interpretation of Islam and a factor that U.S. war planners may have badly underestimated - nationalist sentiment.
Sunni tribal and religious leaders deny that their opposition to the U.S. occupation is prompted by fear of losing their Hussein-era political privilege.
And they play down their religious differences with Iraq's Shiite majority. "We all read one Koran, we are all Muslims, we are all Iraqis," said Sheikh Yunnis Abdalla, an imam who had come to visit al Fahdawi from Baquba, a provincial capital 40 miles north of Baghdad.
Abdalla could hardly be described as a Baathist sympathizer. He was sentenced to death for draft dodging in 1989, during Iraq's eight-year war with Iran. He was later granted amnesty, but for more than a decade afterward Abdalla risked his life by urging Muslims to rise up against Hussein's rule, which he said was "un-Islamic."
'We will kill them here'
Now Abdalla has a new enemy. "Islam teaches us to fight wrong wherever you find it," he said. "So the people who fight against Americans have a right to do so."
"All our Muslims are so happy that the Americans are here because when they weren't here, it was difficult to travel to kill them," he said with a smirk. "Now we will kill them here. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to Iraq."
At a wedding party in Deshah, 60 miles west of Baghdad, as three dozen men jumped and line-danced to the traditional wailing of a kazoo as 200 other males looked on, Mohammed Turki, an elderly guest, said proudly, "During the day we fight against Americans. During the night we party like this."
Occupation authorities have been taken aback by such hostility and say they have tried to show good faith with local residents by helping them rebuild the country.
Charles Heatley, spokesman for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority,
says the Fallujah and Ramadi areas have been provided with $4.5 million since the end of the war to finance various reconstruction projects. Iraqi contractors have repaired and equipped 1,140 schools, as well as train stations, hospitals, police stations, water treatment facilities, a television tower and a soccer stadium.
Confusing checkpoints?
At the same time, American military checkpoints pop up unannounced in towns and on highways, blocking crucial roads. Devoid of any warning signs, the checkpoints - often nothing more than a couple of U.S. soldiers standing on a rooftop or an armored Bradley vehicle parked under a road bridge - are sometimes hard to notice. But the troops nonetheless shoot at any car that fails to stop, sometimes killing innocent civilians.
Residents say that when the troops come under attack from resistance fighters, they respond by firing back indiscriminately, frequently causing more civilian deaths. U.S. military officials acknowledge they often kill or wound civilians by mistake during raids in search of guerrillas.
Afraid of being caught in the cross fire, area residents have learned to stay away from American soldiers wherever they see them. On a wall along Highway 10 from Fallujah to Ramadi, a hand-painted sign informs the locals: "We are warning you for the last time: Don't drive close to convoys. They will be attacked."
Iraq's 'Road of Death'
Iraqis call Highway 10 the Road of Death because of the frequent insurgent attacks against U.S. convoys; American soldiers call it Ambush Alley.
"If I see Americans, I turn around 180 degrees and walk away," said Mohammed, a 19-year-old youth fishing for bream from a rusted water pump on the Euphrates that supplies water to Fallujah's water purification plant.
Over the light green current, Mohammed and four other fishermen talked about the occupation in the chopped, monosyllabic language of rough-hewn men, as three small fish floated in a plastic bag they had tied to the dock, half- submerged in the river.
"This is our country. Their country is America," Mohammed said.
Another boy, Mahmud, chimed in: "Before the war we had security. Now we have thieves, looters and killers. This is what America brought."
After a brief discussion, the boys decided that the only thing to be done with American soldiers was to kill them. Asked how he was going to accomplish this, Mahmud's 10-year-old brother Abdullah spoke up: "We have RPGs (rocket- propelled grenades). It's not a problem to get them."
Al Fahdawi, his white traditional dishdasha shirt rippling in the slight wind, smiled at the bravado. He finished his cigarette and tossed the butt in the river, then smoothed his gray beard with a long-fingered hand. Somewhere upstream a machine gun dueled with an assault rifle.
"Every time an American soldier is killed we are very happy," he said. "It's their fault they came to our country and attacked us."
INSIDE THE SUNNI TRIANGLE
-- TODAY: Saddam Hussein's home base is America's biggest challenge in Iraq.
-- MONDAY: U.S. anti-guerrilla operations' toll on civilians.
-- TUESDAY: An Iraqi guerrilla on a mission to kill Americans.
E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat Declares Emergency in Palestinian Areas
Sun October 5, 2003
By Mohammed Assadi
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=VRATDGEGQRREECRBAEOCFFA?type=worldNews&storyID=3560238
RAMALLAH, West Bank - President Yasser Arafat, facing Israeli threats to "remove" him after further Palestinian suicide bombings, declared a state of emergency on Sunday and approved a scaled-down cabinet to deal with it.
Palestinian officials said Arafat's decree aimed to reinstate security in Palestinian areas, where militant factions opposed to peacemaking with Israel have grown powerful three years into a revolt for statehood.
But Palestinian security services have been impaired by Israeli offensives and blockades that have bred resentment fueling the popularity of militants, raising questions whether any "emergency" crackdown might quickly fizzle.
"The declaration of emergency is meant to bolster the principle of one Palestinian Authority and maintain the rule of law, because our situation is very, very critical," said a senior Palestinian official who asked not to be identified.
The eight-member crisis cabinet unveiled by Arafat's Prime Minister-designate Ahmed Qurie included longtime Arafat ally Nasser Youssef as interior minister, while two U.S. favorites would retain the finance and foreign affairs posts.
Officials said the cabinet, a third the size of its forerunner, would not require a parliamentary vote of confidence because of its emergency status.
"We have a deterioration of the security situation and we need to assert control over security," Qurie told Reuters.
He was alluding both to continued suicide attacks by Islamist radicals sworn to destroying Israel and the Israeli government's military actions against militants including assassinating their leaders in missile strikes.
'EXCEPTIONAL, DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES'
"Due to the exceptional and difficult circumstances and the dangers facing the Palestinian people and Palestinian Authority...there is a necessity to control the security situation and unify the work and performance of our security services," said senior Arafat adviser Nabil Abu Rdainah.
A Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant killed 19 people in a suicide bombing in Israel on Saturday, a day before the onset of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday. Arafat condemned the attack and Qurie urged militants to stop targeting civilians.
Israel responded by bombing what it called a Palestinian militant training camp in Syria and said the possibility of carrying out its decision in principle to expel Arafat might depend on Palestinian actions in the coming 48 hours.
Israel says Arafat has incited militant violence throughout the revolt, a charge he denies, and says a U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan envisaging a Palestinian state will go nowhere as long as he stays in power.
Qurie's predecessor, Mahmoud Abbas, resigned a month ago over what he called Arafat's obstruction of his efforts to take over security services to rein in militants, and what he said were Israeli military strikes that provoked militants.
Qurie, keen to avoid another paralyzing power struggle with Arafat, allowed leaders of the president's Fatah movement a bigger say in the next cabinet's composition.
Israel says Arafat's refusal to relinquish ultimate control over murky security services has been a critical obstacle to peace, but has indicated it will give Qurie a chance to show whether he can take charge and start curbing militants.
A key U.S. demand has been the unification of Palestinian security services to enforce control over militants and accountability for their actions.
Salam Fayyad, a former International Monetary Fund official and a reformer dedicated to curbing Palestinian corruption and fiscal chaos, will stay on as finance minister and Nabil Shaath, a leading Fatah veteran, remains as foreign minister.
----
Israel hits Palestinian 'camp' in Syria
The army destroyed the home of the suicide bomber
(BBC)
Sunday, 5 October, 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3165394.stm
Israeli warplanes have attacked a Palestinian "terrorist training base" inside Syria - the first Israeli attack on Syrian soil for more than 20 years.
An Israeli army statement said the raid had targeted the Ein Saheb camp, near Damascus, which it said was used by several militant groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The operation came in response to Saturday's bloody suicide attack on a restaurant in the northern Israeli port Haifa, which killed 19 people.
Syria has said the raid is a "grave escalation" and has called for an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, for his part, has condemned it as "aggression against a brother country".
Syria and Israel have long been at loggerheads over the Golan Heights, which Damascus lost to Israel in the 1967 war.
Haifa horror
Syrian media have described Ein Saheb as a Palestinian refugee camp.
RECENT SUICIDE ATTACKS
9 September: 15 killed in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
19 August: 23 killed in Jerusalem
11 June: 17 killed in Jerusalem
18 May: 7 killed in Jerusalem
5 March: 17 killed in Haifa
Eyewitness: Dead children Bomber's deadly mission
And a spokesman for Islamic Jihad - which claimed responsibility for the Haifa bombing - denied having "any training camps or bases in Syria or any other country".
A senior commander of another militant group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said the camp was one of his group's disused bases.
The army released video footage, apparently filmed by Iranian TV 18-months ago, showing a camp and underground munitions stores, which it said was the site targeted in the raid.
Earlier, the Israeli army demolished the home of the female Palestinian suicide bomber who carried out the Haifa attack.
It also launched missile attacks against two separate locations in Gaza City, including a Palestinian refugee camp.
Four young children and several Arabs were among the 19 people killed at the seafront restaurant in Haifa. About 50 people were injured in the attack, which wrecked the building.
It was one of the deadliest suicide attacks since the start of the Palestinian intifada three years ago.
The bombing came as Israel imposed a total closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for Yom Kippur - the day of atonement - which runs for 24 hours from Sunday evening.
Syrian 'restraint'
Israeli Government spokesman Avi Pazner stressed that the air strike was not directed against Syria - but against Islamic Jihad.
Israel released footage of what it said was the target of the raid But he said every country had to understand that it would be held responsible for harbouring any terrorists.
The Israeli raid marks a clear change in policy for Israel, which normally responds to Palestinian suicide attacks by striking against targets in the West Bank and Gaza.
Syria's Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa said his country was capable of deterring Israel but would exercise restraint over the raid.
Syria has been under pressure from the United States to clamp down on the activities of militant groups and says it has closed down offices of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Damascus.
A spokesman for the UK Government in London said that "while Israel is entitled to take steps to protect itself against terrorist attack, these steps should be within international law".
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, on a visit to Egypt, said the raid "cannot be accepted".
--------
Israeli Warplanes Bomb Target Deep Inside Syrian Territory
October 5, 2003
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05CND-MIDE.html?hp
JERUSALEM, Oct. 5 - In a change of military tactics, Israel responded to a suicide bombing with an airstrike today deep inside Syria, directed at what Israel said was a training camp used by Palestinian extremists.
The predawn bombing raid outside the Syrian capital Damascus did not cause major damage and only one person was injured, according to reports from Syria. But the strike raised the possibility that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could begin to include neighboring countries in the combustible region.
During the past three years of Mideast bloodshed, Israel has battled Palestinians only in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel had not hit at Syrian territory since the 1973 Mideast war, which marks its 30th anniversary on Monday.
"Israel had to send the message it cannot be repeatedly struck with impunity," said Dore Gold, an adviser to Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
The Israeli air raid came about 14 hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber from Islamic Jihad blew herself up on Saturday inside a crowded restaurant in the northern port city of Haifa, killing 19 people, both Jews and Arabs.
Syria denounced the Israeli airstrike as a "serious escalation" and complained to the United Nations, but it gave no indication whether it planned to respond militarily.
Israel said the Ein Saheb camp is located about 10 miles northwest of Damascus and served as a training ground for several Palestinian factions, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the two groups behind most of the suicide bombings in Israel.
Syria dismissed the Israeli claim, calling it a civilian facility for Palestinians. Also, Islamic Jihad said it had no "military presence" in Syria.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a radical group that has been largely dormant in recent years, said the base belonged to its organization, but had been deserted for years, The Associated Press reported.
Israeli officials described the air raid as a limited operation and acknowledged it would not diminish Islamic Jihad's overall ability to carry out attacks.
But the officials said Israel wanted to emphasize Syria's role in supporting radical groups. The Palestinians who lead Islamic Jihad and Hamas live in Damascus, though their bombers and gunmen operate from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Hanadi Jaradat, the woman who carried out Saturday's suicide bombing, was a 27-year old lawyer from Jenin, a town in the northern West Bank that is a stronghold for Islamic Jihad.
The Israeli military demolished her family home today, a practice that Israel calls a deterrent to other would-be attackers.
A senior Israeli security official said Islamic Jihad leaders in Syria played a detailed role in orchestrating Saturday's bombing, and this contributed to Israel's decision to strike at the base in Syria.
The Israeli military released video footage of the camp in Syria, saying it had appeared on an Iranian television broadcast several months ago. The video showed a man in a military uniform giving a tour of a base with underground rooms and tunnels heavily stocked with weaponry.
Israel, meanwhile, was prepared to carry out additional strikes against Palestinian factions, but a senior security officer declined to say whether Syria would again be a target.
"You can expect to see more and more Israeli actions in the next few days," the officer said.
The United States and Israel have long accused Syria of sponsoring terrorism.
Syria has hosted radical Palestinian factions for decades, but says the groups had only information offices in Damascus, and they were closed recently in response to demands by the United States.
The United States also says that many Islamic militants fighting American troops in Iraq have come via Syria.
"As a United Nations Security Council member, Syria is supposedly charged with protecting peace and security," Mr. Gold, the Israeli official, said. "But it has become the crossroads for terror from Iraq to the Gaza Strip."
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war, and Syria sought to take it back when it joined forces with Egypt for a surprise attack against Israel in the 1973 war.
The Arab countries struck on Oct. 6, 1973, which was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year and a time when Israel completely shuts down. After being caught off guard, Israel regained the initiative and still controls the Golan Heights.
Israel and Syria also waged air battles in the 1980's, with Israeli fighter planes delivering decisive blows to Syria's air force.
Over the past two decades, Israel and Syria have battled indirectly in southern Lebanon.
Syria and Iran back the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah, which fought Israeli troops throughout the 1980's and 1990's. Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon in 2000, but Hezbollah and Israel still periodically trade fire across the border.
----
Israel could launch new attacks on Syria: Sharon spokesman
Sun Oct 5, 2003
(AFP) http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1504&ncid=1504&e=1&u=/afp/20031005/ts_afp/mideast_israel_031005103203
JERUSALEM - Israel could launch new attacks on Syria if the country continues to shelter "terrorist organisations who are preparing anti-Israeli attacks", Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites)'s spokesman said.
"The attack carried out by our air force some 15 kilometres (10 miles) north of Damascus is a warning aimed at making Damascus understand that all those who abet and support terrorism no longer enjoy any immunity wherever they are," Raanan Gissin told AFP.
"Syria can only blame itself because it refused to deliver on the commitments it made to the United States after the Gulf war (news - web sites) to close down the headquarters of terrorist organisations based on its soil," he added.
Israeli said Sunday its air force launched a raid on an Islamic Jihad training camp in Syria, in retaliation for a suicide bomb attack by the hardline Palestinian group which killed 19 people in the northern Isralei city of Haifa on Saturday.
The raid was the first direct attack by Israel on Syrian soil in some two decades.
Gissin stressed that "the training camp targeted 10 miles (16 kilometres) north of Damascus was used to train terrorists belonging to Islamic Jihad and Hamas."
"This base was financed and ideologically controlled by Iran," Gissin said.
----
Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 20 in North of Israel
October 5, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS and GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05MIDE.html?hp
HAIFA, Israel, Oct. 4 - A suicide bomber detonated explosives inside a crowded restaurant on Saturday afternoon in the northern coastal city of Haifa, killing at least 20 people and wounding dozens, according to Israeli officials, news media reports and rescue workers.
The blast shattered several weeks of relative calm and came a day before the start, at sundown Sunday, of Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish day.
The explosion smashed windows, overturned chairs and tables and left the floor covered in blood. The restaurant, which is on the main road into Haifa and is only a short distance from the Mediterranean beachfront, was filled with families eating lunch, witnesses said.
As emergency workers rushed the wounded to hospitals and gathered the dead, a police colonel, Danny Kuffer, said at least 20 people had been killed. Earlier, Israeli radio and television reports said at least 18 had been killed, while the rescue services said more than 30 were wounded. Several children were reported to be among the casualties.
Initial reports indicated that the suspected Palestinian attacker shot a security guard at the entrance to the restaurant, called Maxim, and then stepped inside and set off the blast. The Israeli authorities said their first suspicions were that the attacker was a woman and that she was carrying the bomb in a body belt weighing about 22 pounds.
Bullet holes could be seen in the entry to the restaurant, but the police said later they did not believe that the bomber had shot the security guard.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The restaurant has been owned for years by an Israeli Arab family.
Hamas, the Islamic faction that has carried out the largest number of suicide bombings, said Friday that a barrier Israel was constructing to separate itself from Palestinian areas would not halt attacks, and the group vowed to press ahead with its bombing campaign.
Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian prime minister-designate, issued a statement condemning the attack, but also said that Israel must end measures that oppress Palestinians.
The Israeli government said the Palestinian Authority, led by Mr. Arafat, was responsible because it had failed to crack down on violent groups.
Asked about what might happen to Mr. Arafat, Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said: "Everyone who has had a hand in this attack should worry. We have the full right to take whatever measures we choose to take to defend the lives of our citizens."
David Baker, an official in Mr. Sharon's office, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying, "The bombing in Haifa is another indication that the Palestinian Authority continues to refuse to take even minimal steps against the terrorist infrastructure."
After two suicide bombings last month, Mr. Sharon's government decided in principle to oust Mr. Arafat, but it did not say when or how it might act. Israel's health minister, Danny Naveh, speaking on army radio, said Israel should "seize this opportunity to get rid of Arafat."
Haifa has been a target for Palestinian suicide bombers during the three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. The most recent attack was on a Haifa bus in March, killing 15 people.
The barrier Israel has been building is designed to prevent attackers in the West Bank from reaching Israel. The first segment, which was completed in July, runs for more than 80 miles along the northern West Bank and is intended to shield cities like Haifa.
But Palestinians can still go around the barrier at either end. Mr. Sharon's government on Wednesday approved the building of the next section of the barrier, which runs deep into the West Bank to give at least partial protection to several large Jewish settlements.
Fearing a possible attack this weekend, Israel on Friday imposed a ban on Palestinians entering Israel from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel has often put such measures in place during Jewish holidays.
But such restrictions have not always proved successful, and Palestinians have carried out several major attacks around holiday periods.
There have been more than 100 suicide bombings since the current round of fighting began in September 2000.
Saturday's blast was the first since the two suicide bombings last month, on Sept. 9, which killed 15 people. One was near Tel Aviv and the other took place in Jerusalem.
Mr. Sharon's cabinet responded to those attacks by declaring it had decided to remove Mr. Arafat. Cabinet members said that could even mean killing him. International condemnation was sharp, and Israeli officials said they did not intend to act soon against Mr. Arafat. Mr. Arafat regularly denounces suicide bombings. But Mr. Sharon's government has repeatedly said it holds Mr. Arafat ultimately responsible because he has not called on the Palestinian security forces to act against violent factions.
-------- mideast
U.S. Cites Syria As Sponsor of Terrorism
October 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Mideast.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States served notice Sunday that it considers Syria on the wrong side of the fight against terrorism and appealed for restraint in the Middle East after Israel struck inside its Arab neighbor's territory.
The Bush administration did not criticize Israel for the attack, which Israel said was directed at a training camp for Islamic Jihad, the group that claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that caused heavy casualties Saturday in Israel.
But the State Department said Syria ``must cease harboring terrorists and make a clean break from those responsible for planning and directing terrorist action from Syrian soil.''
Arab leaders warned that a ``circle of violence'' could encompass the region after Israeli warplanes attacked deep inside Syria for the first time in three decades.
The U.N. Security Council called an emergency meeting Sunday to discuss Syria's complaint to Secretary-General Kofi Annan about the strikes near Damascus, the capital.
President Bush telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to offer condolences and condemnation for the Haifa bombing that killed 19 people.
The two agreed on a need to continue fighting terrorism and ``on the need to avoid heightened tension in the region at this time,'' said Ken Lesius, a White House spokesman.
Administration officials said Israel had not informed Washington in advance of its retaliatory strike nor indicated whether it intended any move against Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to remove him from his West Bank headquarters.
The State Department has listed Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism since the list's inception three decades ago, and the department contends Syria offers sanctuary and political protection to groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- all considered terror organizations by the United States.
At the White House, an administration official said the United States repeatedly has told Syria that Washington believes it is on the wrong side in the fight against terrorism and that it must stop harboring terrorists.
At the same time, the United States was urging Israel and Syria ``to avoid actions that could lead to an escalation of tension,'' said Joann Moore, a State Department spokeswoman.
A deep divide over the war in Iraq, which borders Syria, exacerbated already frayed U.S.-Syrian relations. In March, as U.S. troops moved toward Baghdad, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld complained that military gear was being smuggled to Iraqi forces through Syria and threatened to ``hold the Syrian government accountable.'' Syria denied the allegation.
In mid-September, the undersecretary of state for arms control told Congress that Syria was allowing militants to cross its border into Iraq to kill Americans and was seeking aggressively to acquire and develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
John Bolton said the administration was trying to change Syria's behavior through diplomatic means, and he urged lawmakers to let the effort run its course before passing trade restrictions or exacting other punishment.
Syrian President Bashar Assad, after meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell in May in Damascus, indicated his government had closed certain Palestinian offices.
Last weekend, however, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the United States is ``not working as constructively with the Syrians as we need to. ... There is much more that Syria needs to do, and that message is being communicated to them.''
Lawmakers appearing on the Sunday talks shows said they understood Israel's position.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., compared Israel's military action to U.S. strikes against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington.
Lieberman, a presidential candidate, called Israel ``our most steadfast ally in the region, ... an ally in a new way since Sept. 11 -- we're both victims of terrorism.''
``No government can stand by and let that continue to happen,'' Lieberman told ``Fox News Sunday.'' ``Unfortunately, the Syrians have continued to refuse American demands that they break up terrorist bases and headquarters in their country.''
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said Israel had a right to go after its attackers where they are being trained.
But, he told CNN's ``Late Edition,'' ``It obviously does unleash some forces in the Middle East which Israel and all the other countries there have to consider.''
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he was certain Israel had strong proof before attacking the camp in Syria. ``There is a question of how much Israel can take,'' Specter said.
Dennis B. Ross, who was the senior U.S. mediator for the Middle East for 12 years, said Israel had crossed a threshold with its attack in Syria. But he said that was no surprise, given Islamic Jihad's claim of Saturday's bombing in Haifa, Israel.
Ross, in an interview, said the Palestinian group had training camps and support inside Syria. The Israeli missile strike ``establishes a precedent that if these groups have training camps they are not beyond Israel or someone else's reach,'' he said.
Shibley Telhami, a professor of international relations at the University of Maryland, said that in light of U.S. criticism of Syria in the past few months, the Israeli government ``may read this as an opening if they see it as strategically beneficial.''
He added: ``The problem is you do not know where it will end. A lot of Israelis have an interest in pressuring Syria. But they cannot have an interest in instability in Syria.''
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Israeli Raid in Syria Alarms Arab World
October 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Syria.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MAJDAL SHAMS, Golan Heights (AP) -- Israel bombed a target inside Syria that it claimed was an Islamic Jihad training base, striking deep inside its neighbor's territory Sunday for the first time in three decades and widening its pursuit of Palestinian militants.
The airstrike -- a retaliation for a suicide bombing Saturday that killed 19 Israelis -- alarmed the Arab world and deepened concerns that three years of Israeli-Palestinian violence could spread through the region. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for Saturday's bombing, in which 55 people were wounded.
Washington urged both sides to show restraint -- but added pointed criticism of Syria, saying Damascus ``must cease harboring terrorists and make a clean break from those responsible for planning and directing terrorist action from Syrian soil.''
With little option for military retaliation, Syria turned for international support. On requests from Damascus, the U.N. Security Council and the 22-member Arab League held emergency sessions Sunday as Syria's foreign minister Farouq al-Sharaa sought measures to deter Israeli ``aggression.''
Syria's U.N. Ambassador Fayssal Mekdad called on the council to adopt a resolution condemning the attack.
``Arabs and many people across the globe feel that Israel is above law,'' Mekdad said.
Israel's Ambassador Dan Gillerman defended the attack. He accused Syria of providing ``safe harbor, training facilities, funding, (and) logistical support'' to terrorist organizations.
Syria's draft calls for Israel to stop committing acts that could threaten regional security. It was unclear when the council would vote on the resolution or whether the United States would veto it.
Leaders of Islamic Jihad and other militant groups are based in Syria, but Jihad on Sunday denied having any training bases there. Syrian villagers near the targeted site said the camp had been used by Palestinian gunmen in the 1970s but was later abandoned -- and was now only used by picnickers and other visitors to its spring and olive groves.
The raid was a dramatic new tactic for Israel in its attempts to stop Palestinian militants. Closures, assassinations and military strikes into Palestinian areas have failed to stop suicide attacks, and Washington strongly opposes expelling Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as Israel has threatened.
Israel said the bombing signaled it would pursue militants wherever they found support -- and it added an accusation that Iran also backs Islamic Jihad. ``Any country who harbors terrorism, who trains (terrorists), supports and encourages them will be responsible to answer for their actions,'' government spokesman Avi Pazner said.
In the West Bank, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat declared a state of emergency and installed an emergency Cabinet with Ahmed Qureia as prime minister. The hasty action was an apparent attempt to deflect possible Israeli action against Arafat following the suicide bombing since Israel has threatened to expel him.
The leader of Islamic Jihad, Ramadan Shallah, told Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV that the Israeli attack was ``a grave development that exceeded all rules of the game.'' He also warned Israel that the suicide bombing ``will not be the last resistance operation'' committed by his group.
In Egypt, the Arab League condemned the Israeli attack. It said the bombing ``exposes the deteriorating situation in the region to uncontrollable consequences, which could drag the whole region into violent whirlpool.''
The strike was launched just hours before the start of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. It also came on the eve of the anniversary of the 1973 war between Israel and Syria, when Israel fought off a Syrian attack aimed at reversing Israel's 1967 seizure of the Golan Heights, a strategic border plateau. Sunday marked Israel's first military action deep in Syria since 1973.
The attack hit several targets at the Ein Saheb camp northwest of Damascus, Israeli security officials said. Hours later, plainclothes security officials banned journalists from approaching the camp. Dense trees blocked the site from view.
Bush administration officials said Israel had not informed Washington in advance of its retaliatory strike.
Raanan Gissin, adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said the base was financed by Iran and used by several terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Undated footage said to be from the camp, taken from Iranian TV and released by the Israeli military on Sunday, shows a military officer conducting a tour of the camp. Hundreds of weapons, including grenades with Hebrew markings apparently captured from Israel, were displayed in one room. Underground tunnels were packed with arms and ammunition.
Another group, the tiny Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command said it once used the camp, 14 miles northwest of Damascus, but that it is now deserted. A civilian guard was injured in the air strike, the group said.
However, a senior Popular Front member, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that there is close cooperation between his group, Islamic Jihad, the militant group Hamas, and the Lebanese guerrilla faction Hezbollah. All four train together, mostly in Lebanon, but also in Syria, he said.
In an understanding with the Syrian government, Hamas and Jihad leaders have been careful in recent months to give statements from Lebanon to avoid the impression that they still operate from Damascus.
Still, Syrian President Bashar Assad is on the defensive, with the United States accusing him of hosting extremist groups and sponsoring terror.
Assad, after meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell in May in Damascus, indicated that his government had closed certain offices of Palestinian militant groups. However, last weekend, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Syria needed to do more.
It seemed unlikely Syria would retaliate. It has 380,000 active duty soldiers, but Israel holds a commanding technological edge. Israel is more worried about Syria's growing missile program and its ability to launch chemical and poison weapons into Israel's cities.
Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon -- three Arab countries border Israel -- condemned the air strike. ``It can drag the whole region into a circle of violence,'' said Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher.
Britain, the leading U.S. ally in the United Nations Security Council, was more critical of Israel. Britain's U.N. Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said, ``Israel's action today is unacceptable and represents an escalation.''
``Israel should not allow its justified anger at continuing terrorism to lead to actions that undermine both the peace process and we believe Israel's own interests,'' he said.
The United States, trying to put its peace efforts back on track, has in past days appeared willing to give Qureia a chance, and any Israeli action against Arafat could force Qureia's immediate resignation and cause chaos in the Palestinian areas.
-------- pakistan / india
Top U.S. Envoy Praises Pakistan for Raids
BY NOOR KHAN
Associated Press Writer
October 5, 2003
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-afghan-us-envoys,0,4467293.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A top U.S. envoy praised Pakistan on Sunday for raids its military has made against suspected terrorist training camps in mountainous regions that border Afghanistan.
Pakistan's army on Thursday swooped down on a suspected al-Qaida mountain hideout in the country's northwest in its largest-ever offensive against Osama bin Laden's network. Eight suspected terrorists were killed and 18 others captured. Two Pakistani soldiers also died in the battle.
Two days later, Pakistani soldiers backed by helicopters raided another suspected terrorist training camp, but no arrests were made.
"In recent days there have been some rather significant activities that the Pakistani forces have taken against the Taliban and al-Qaida and I think this is a very good omen and I have no doubt it will continue," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
Armitage and Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca are in Afghanistan to discuss the U.S.-led hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban militants and increasing rebel violence against coalition forces.
Sunday's daylong visit comes a week after a U.S. soldier was killed and two others were wounded in a clash with suspected Taliban insurgents.
The envoys were to meet President Hamid Karzai and other officials in the Afghan capital, Kabul, to discuss cooperation in the war on terror, according to a U.S. State Department spokesman.
Armitage arrived in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, late Saturday. Rocca arrived Sunday. Both then flew from Islamabad to Kandahar and met local officials, before heading to Kabul.
Taliban rebels have dramatically stepped up operations in recent months. In addition to attacks against U.S. forces, they have also increasingly targeted Afghan government officials and international aid workers, who have been forced to suspend reconstruction projects in several parts of the country.
Thirty-six U.S. troops have been killed in action in Afghanistan, in addition to at least 164 who have been wounded, since a U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban from power nearly two years ago.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Kabul said the two diplomats would also discuss progress made in rebuilding Afghanistan's infrastructure and work being done on a new constitution, a draft of which is expected to be released in the next week.
The Pakistani Foreign Ministry has said that formal talks between the U.S. envoys and Pakistan will be held on Monday after their visit to Afghanistan.
The meetings with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his officials will cover range of issues, including war on terror, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan-India relations, the ministry said.
-------- prisoners of war
U.S. closes controversial detention camp; Iraqi lawyers win concessions
CHARLES J. HANLEY,
AP Special Correspondent
Sunday, October 5, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/10/05/international1344EDT0495.DTL
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military has shut down Camp Cropper, an increasingly notorious makeshift prison where hundreds of Iraqis were crowded into tents through Baghdad's scorching summer, a U.S. official reported. The detainees were scattered to other facilities.
The Iraqi Lawyers League, pressing a rights campaign under an ex-political prisoner of the Baath regime, has won another concession from the Americans as well: accelerated hearings, with lawyers, for some of at least 5,500 detained Iraqis.
That newly elected league president, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, met with U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer a month ago to register complaints about the internment of thousands of Iraqis without charge since a U.S.-British invasion force toppled Saddam Hussein's Baath government in April.
"I told Bremer the Americans and the Iraqi people ought to have become friends since then, but the way they have handled these things has produced just the opposite effect," Malik said Sunday.
Journalists were barred from Camp Cropper, but released detainees this summer told of overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, and they alleged physical abuse by guards. The human rights group Amnesty International protested it "may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, banned by international law."
The camp population included both Iraqis picked up for allegedly committing common crimes, and so-called "security detainees," mainly Baathists deemed to be a threat to the security of the occupation force.
"They are living in tents in the desert, in a very hot climate. Some detainees are sick," said Malik, interviewed Sunday before the closing of the camp was disclosed.
The former law professor and Iraqi information minister, who was himself imprisoned for 11/2 years by the Baathists after they seized power in 1968, also complained that lawyers were not allowed into the heavily guarded airport.
"That was another reason why we closed the airport (camp)," said U.S. Army Col. Ralph Sabatino, who specializes in detainee issues and is a chief liaison with the interim Iraqi Justice Ministry.
Sabatino said Cropper was shut down last Wednesday, on Bremer's orders, and its several hundred inmates were transferred to at least three Baghdad-area prisons.
Cropper held as many as 1,200 detainees this summer, Sabatino said. "It wasn't supposed to be a detention center" but a temporary holding facility, he said. "It was designed for 250 people. When it grew to 500 to 700, it got very crowded. It had a very bad reputation, appropriately."
The Army Reserve officer, in civilian life an assistant corporation counsel for the City of New York, said he met with Lawyers League representatives two weeks ago. "Since that time we've coordinated to facilitate their representation of people in custody," he said.
Ignacio Rubio, a Spanish judge assigned to Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, is developing a program to assign court-appointed attorneys to represent detainees who will be charged at a kind of preliminary hearing under Iraqi law.
The process began last week when eight investigative judges and eight defense lawyers were summoned by the occupation authorities for a day of hearings at Baghdad Central Detention, the former Abu Ghraib prison on the capital's southwestern outskirts, Sabatino said. Other hearings are to be held Monday.
The slowly progressing hearings are intended for Iraqis held for common crimes, not the security detainees, Sabatino said. "There's been no formal process for many of the civilian detainees," he acknowledged.
-------- spies
SNOOPING ON THE C.I.A.
This Wasn't the First War Fought by Spies and Hawks
October 5, 2003
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
WASHINGTON - Perhaps the biggest surprise about George J. Tenet is that he is still the director of central intelligence. For months, friends and colleagues have said that Mr. Tenet was plotting an exit from the job that has consumed him for the past six years.
But the outbreak of hostilities between the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House after the war in Iraq has had an odd, unintended effect on the personal politics of George Tenet. He now seems bulletproof, insulated from subtle efforts by Bush administration hawks to force him out. And every new political misstep by the White House on the question of how intelligence about Iraq's weapons was managed or mismanaged - and who is to blame for that - only seems to dig him in deeper at C.I.A. headquarters.
Despite his long tenure as the nation's chief spy - and in spite of his personal relationship with President Bush - Mr. Tenet has been unable to heal the widening schism between top Bush administration officials and the professionals in American intelligence. The White House and C.I.A. have been engaged in open bureaucratic warfare for more than a year.
On one side, the fight is about the ability of agency analysts and operations officers to do their work unhindered by political pressure. On the other, it is about the desire of administration officials to have the intelligence reporting from the C.I.A. correspond to their policies.
This is a war that C.I.A. veterans have seen waged many times before. Invariably, the result is that the C.I.A. loses. In the process, the agency's bureaucratic status and influence are diminished, because of the agency's most fundamental weakness: its poor track record in collecting timely and accurate information on topics that matter most to the White House.
A classic case - one with striking parallels to the current furor over Iraqi intelligence estimates - concerned the C.I.A.'s analysis of the strategic threat posed by the Soviet Union in the cold war. On that life and death issue, the agency was wrong - twice. Both times the analysts ran smack into an ideological firestorm that threatened their independence.
The so-called missile gap of the 1950's - the view that the Soviets were far ahead of the United States in the production and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads - was a myth. The myth was shattered in part thanks to one of the greatest Soviet agents to work for the C.I.A., Col. Oleg V. Penkovsky, a top Red Army aide who spied from 1960 until his arrest in 1962.
But in the late 1960's and early 1970's, the C.I.A. missed a critical turn in Soviet strategic development. Vowing never again to be shown up by the Americans as in the Cuban missile crisis, the Kremlin substantially increased military spending. By the early 1970's, the C.I.A. was behind the curve in its estimates of Soviet strategic intentions and strength, and its analysts paid a heavy price. Hawks began pushing for a competing analysis of Soviet power, leading to the creation in 1976 of "Team B" by the C.I.A. director, George H. W. Bush.
By the early 1980's, with William J. Casey running the C.I.A., the pressure on analysts to conform to the Reagan administration's view of the Soviet threat was intense. By then, the C.I.A. had recognized that it had underestimated Soviet missile development in the mid-1970's and had revised its estimates upward. Only in hindsight did it become clear to the agency that it had missed the target again, this time on the high side.
Richard J. Kerr, the former deputy C.I.A. director whom Mr. Tenet recruited to conduct an internal review of the agency's prewar intelligence on Iraq, has said that he sees striking similarities between the Soviet ballistic missile estimates and those concerning Iraq's weapons programs. In both instances, the analysts were crippled by a lack of fresh and accurate information.
Before the first gulf war, the C.I.A. did not believe that Iraq was close to building a nuclear bomb. But when United Nations inspectors went in after the war and discovered that Iraq had, in fact, been close to developing nuclear arms, the C.I.A. was stunned. The discovery made agency analysts far more hawkish and far more willing to believe the worst. And their prewar failure to uncover Iraq's nuclear program would come back to haunt the C.I.A., hurting its credibility with top officials who returned to power under George W. Bush.
After United Nations weapons inspectors were withdrawn in 1998, returning only briefly just before the second gulf war, the quality and quantity of information available to the C.I.A. about Iraq's weapons drastically declined. In the absence of new information, the agency's analysts continued to follow the pre-1998 trend lines they had established for Iraq's weapons program. That meant an ever more ominous threat. They were not about to be duped by Saddam Hussein a second time. This time, they came to believe that the failure to find the weapons only meant that Saddam Hussein had become ever more clever in hiding them.
One solution to the C.I.A.'s analytical weaknesses and its political vulnerabilities is to recruit more spies in the right places. The agency did not have a Penkovsky in Baghdad, and that has made all the difference.
--------
C.I.A. Chief Is Caught in Middle by Leak Inquiry
October 5, 2003
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/politics/05TENE.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 - At a few minutes before eight on Thursday morning, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was parked in his usual chair just outside the Oval Office waiting to brief his chief patron, the president of the United States.
The morning newspapers were full of developments in what amounted to a war between the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House, and a Justice Department investigation that was barely 48 hours old into whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer.
Angry agency officials suspected that someone in the White House had exposed the officer, Valerie Plame, as a way to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for his criticism of the administration's use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.
But after President Bush told his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., that he was ready to see Mr. Tenet - "O.K., George, let's go," Mr. Card called out to the intelligence chief - Mr. Tenet, a rare holdover from the Clinton administration and a politically savvy survivor, did not even bring up the issue that was roiling his agency, Mr. Card said in an interview.
Instead, Mr. Tenet briefed the president on the latest intelligence reports, as he always does, and left it to the White House to make the first move about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame.
"I think I was the one who initiated it," Mr. Card recalled. The subsequent conversation between the president and Mr. Tenet about the investigation, he added, did not consume "any significant amount of time or discussion or angst. It was basically, `We're cooperating, you're cooperating, I'm glad to see the process is moving forward the way it should.' " In conclusion, Mr. Card said, "it certainly didn't reflect a strain in any relationship."
And yet, six years into running the nation's primary spy organization, Mr. Tenet finds himself at one of the most difficult points in his tenure, caught between his loyalty to the president and defending an agency enraged at the White House. Although the leak investigation that is consuming Washington's political class has not, by all accounts, affected the chummy personal ties between the president and the director, it has still taken its toll on Mr. Tenet.
Even before this latest blowup, Mr. Tenet told friends that he was worn out from the relentlessness of his job since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that he felt he had served long enough. (Only Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms held the job longer.) Mr. Tenet, who has directed an extensive overhaul and expansion of the C.I.A. since the attacks, had talked about stepping down by late summer or early fall, people close to him said.
"It's a lot harder job than it was in the Dulles era, and he's been doing it for a long while," an agency official said. "But I think he's for the moment happily engaged."
Friends of Mr. Tenet's said that the leak investigation might now keep him in place longer than he wanted, if only to prove that he was not a casualty of the latest furor - or of the political fallout from the failure so far to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.
"He wants to leave on his own terms, but he doesn't want to leave when it looks like he's being chased out of town," a former C.I.A. official said. David Kay, the government's chief weapons inspector, who was chosen and supervised by Mr. Tenet, told Congress on Thursday that his team had failed to find illicit weapons after a three-month search in Iraq, a major setback for the White House.
The latest fight has turned out to be a particularly angry one in an intelligence tug of war that began before the invasion of Iraq. Some C.I.A. officers have long said that they believe the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify the war, while White House and Pentagon officials have long said that the C.I.A. had been too cautious in its findings.
In the summer, the conflict broke into the open when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Mr. Tenet had been primarily responsible for not stripping from the president's State of the Union address an insupportable claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. Mr. Tenet and his allies were enraged, and Stephen J. Hadley, Ms. Rice's deputy, eventually took the blame.
But within the C.I.A., the exposure of Ms. Plame is now considered an even greater instance of treachery. Ms. Plame, a specialist in nonconventional weapons who worked overseas, had "nonofficial cover," and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a Noc, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create. While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that Nocs have especially dangerous jobs.
"Nocs are the holiest of holies," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former agency officer who is now director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "This is real James Bond stuff. You're going overseas posing as a businessman, and if the other government finds out about you, they're probably going to shoot you. The United States has basically no way to protect you."
Mr. Tenet's latest battle with the White House began on July 6, when Mr. Wilson, in an article on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, wrote of a mission the C.I.A. sent him on in 2002 to investigate whether Iraq had tried to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program from Niger. Mr. Wilson concluded that Iraq had not, and that the administration had twisted evidence to make the case for war in Iraq.
Eight days later, the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that it was Mr. Wilson's wife who had suggested sending him on the mission, implying that Mr. Wilson's trip was of limited importance. Mr. Novak identified Ms. Plame, and attributed the information to "two senior administration officials." Mr. Wilson subsequently accused Karl Rove, the president's chief political aide, of involvement in leaking the information to Mr. Novak to intimidate Mr. Wilson into silence and to keep others from coming forward. But he has since backed off and said that Mr. Rove at least condoned the leak.
But Mr. Tenet was aware of the Novak column, and was not pleased, the C.I.A. official said. As required by law, the agency notified the Justice Department in late July that there had been a release of classified information; it is a felony for any official with access to such information to disclose the identity of a covert American officer. It is unclear when Mr. Tenet became aware of the referral, but when he did, he supported it, the C.I.A. official said, even though it was clearly going to cause problems for the White House. "I don't think he lost any sleep over it," the official said.
The important thing, the official said, was that "the agency was standing up for itself."
Friends of Mr. Tenet's say that he knows how important it is that he be seen as defending the agency from political attacks, and that one reason he has stayed so long is to demonstrate that the directorship of central intelligence is not a partisan job. The other reason for his longevity, friends and detractors alike say, is that this son of a Greek restaurant owner from Queens has been brilliant at cultivating the Yale-educated son of the only president, George H. W. Bush, to have been director of central intelligence.
Last week, Mr. Card said, the director took time out from the grimness of the intelligence reports to talk about a subject dear to the president. "Baseball," Mr. Card said.
As the former C.I.A. official summed up Mr. Tenet: "He's not liked by everybody in the administration, but the president loves him."
-------
The Focus On Tenet Sharpens After Leak
Criticism of CIA and Director Intensifies
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 5, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45143-2003Oct4?language=printer
CIA Director George J. Tenet is under fire as never before. With efforts unsuccessful so far to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, some conservative lawmakers and pundits are blaming the agency for inadequate intelligence on Saddam Hussein. Democrats are accusing Tenet of bending the intelligence to support President Bush's policy of preemption in Iraq.
The focus on Tenet has sharpened in the past week with the revelation that the Justice Department has opened an investigation into the unauthorized leak of the name of a CIA operative -- part of an apparent effort to discredit a former diplomat who raised questions about the Bush administration's case against Iraq.
Sources close to Tenet say the director himself was not responsible for initiating the leak investigation. They say lawyers in the agency's general counsel's office referred the matter to the Justice Department in July -- without consulting the CIA director -- as part of the routine way of responding to the disclosure of classified information.
Still, the controversy comes as Tenet's CIA finds itself increasingly on the defensive over the intelligence used by the administration to make its case for invading Iraq. Senior administration officials, some of whom were never fans of the CIA's work on Iraq, have begun to blame the intelligence community for the mismatch between prewar claims and postwar findings. Last week, even some Republicans traditionally supportive of the intelligence community began to question the CIA's Iraq effort.
"There are a lot of people sitting on pins and needles about WMD and who's going to get blamed for that," said an attorney in the intelligence field.
Some close to the agency see an emerging rift between the CIA and the White House. "I can feel among the seniors angst with the White House now," said a former high-ranking CIA officer who maintains contacts in the building. "It went from a year ago when they thought [the White House was] great, to things I haven't heard before, criticisms. It's quite understandable you're going to have this tension."
Another former intelligence official said the grumbling "comes because the president and others exaggerated the intelligence, and Tenet did not or could not control that."
But as those close to Tenet tell it, the CIA director is not spoiling for a fight -- or to leave anytime soon.
Tenet feels he has "gotten to be the meat in the sandwich," said a source close to the director. "But he plans to keep going with his head down because he feels there are much bigger dangers, with a lot on the line in other parts of the world."
Above all, officials close to Tenet and Bush say the CIA director continues to enjoy a close working relationship with the president, the key ingredient in a successful six-year bureaucratic run in which Tenet is just months short of passing the legendary Richard M. Helms to become the second-longest-serving director after Allen Dulles.
When controversy arose last summer about questionable claims in Bush's State of the Union address, officials noted, Tenet initially took the blame for the administration.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the president continues to believe Tenet "is doing an excellent job." In a statement, she said he has "upheld the best traditions of the U.S. intelligence community while leading the transformation of our intelligence services to meet the most grave challenges . . . fighting the war on global terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction."
People close to Tenet say he does not see a bureaucratic war as much as sniping at lower levels magnified in importance by outsiders and the media. But other national security officials say he has been dismayed at what he sees as exaggerations of Iraq's link to al Qaeda and its nuclear weapons program offered by Vice President Cheney's office. Tenet's regular access to the president remains, and he continues to "tell him what he thinks," one senior official said.
Tenet's spokesman, Bill Harlow, said he would not be interviewed for this article, but some of his subordinates and friends agreed to talk if given anonymity.
Tenet took over the CIA from John Deutch, whose deep cutbacks and large personality demoralized the spy agency. But on Sept. 12, 2001, the CIA went from being a risk-averse, second-tier agency to the brains behind the unconventional war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the leader of what the Bush administration has described as a global war on terrorism. The agency's budgets soared, as did its morale, working as it has with an unprecedented number of foreign intelligence services to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists.
But the failure so far to find chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq has prompted renewed criticism of the CIA and Tenet. Last week, the Republican leaders of both the House and Senate intelligence committees expressed disappointment in the CIA's analysis of the Iraqi threat.
In a letter to Tenet, House intelligence committee Chairman Porter J. Goss (Fla.) questioned whether the agency had rigorously vetted the largely circumstantial information it had acquired after 1998, when U.N. inspectors left Iraq. Goss, a former CIA case officer, identified "serious deficiencies" in the intelligence community's ability to recruit informants in Iraq to provide credible, fresh intelligence.
Senate intelligence committee Chairman Pat Roberts (Kan.) told reporters he was "not pleased" by the interim report of David Kay, who is heading the U.S. effort to find weapons of mass destruction in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Kay reported last week he has yet to find such weapons.
One veteran CIA officer said some CIA analysts "are realizing their intelligence wasn't adequate, and in the DO [Directorate of Operations] they have to come face to face with the fact that there weren't any spies in Iraq, that the product wasn't satisfactory."
Intelligence officials said Tenet believes strongly that, despite the limited findings in Iraq to date, "the analysts believe what they wrote" in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. In that report, analysts judged that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and had reconstituted its nuclear program.
Other intelligence experts said going to war is ultimately the president's call. "The case for going to war was a political case, not an intelligence case," said Winston Wiley, former chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center and deputy director of intelligence.
Guessing how long Tenet remains on the job has become a Washington parlor game. To beat the Dulles record of 81/2 years, he would have to stay on through July 2005, "and that probably won't happen," said one close associate, indicating that Tenet, like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, would leave sometime after the 2004 election.
Ten days ago, however, some officials in the national security establishment were speculating that Tenet had decided to go by the end of this year and join the New York private investment banking firm of Allen & Co., which is headed by Herbert A. Allen, a longtime Tenet friend. One retired senior CIA official said he had learned about it directly from an Allen & Co. executive, and the word was passed around within senior intelligence levels at the agency and the State Department.
One reason the rumor may have started was that Tenet, for the second year in a row, appeared at Allen's prestigious summer seminar for media moguls and gave an off-the-record briefing on world trends. CIA officials say the rumor is not true, as did Allen in a telephone interview last week.
The feeling inside the agency, summed up by one veteran officer, is that Tenet "became bulletproof [from being fired by the president] after taking the spear for the State of the Union speech this year, and he is not going anywhere until maybe after the election."
--------
CIA Operative in Leak Drama Fears for Safety
October 5, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-bush-leak.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The former ambassador at the core of the White House leak controversy accused the Bush administration on Sunday of blowing his wife's CIA cover to muzzle criticism over the Iraq war and said they both now feared for her safety.
Joseph Wilson, a seasoned diplomat in both Republican and Democratic governments, said President Bush's top political aide Karl Rove, while likely not the source of the leak, later ``gave legs'' to a newspaper column that revealed his wife's identity as a CIA operative.
``I do have a number of people, or a person in whom I have a high degree of confidence, who has told me that Karl Rove told him that my wife is 'fair game', and that was one week after the leak,'' Wilson told CBS's ``Face The Nation.''
White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week denied Rove was behind the disclosure of Valerie Plame's name. Revealing classified information is a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison and the Justice Department has opened an investigation into the alleged leak.
Wilson said it now appeared his wife's name was leaked by someone outside the White House, as an act of revenge to stop him and others from questioning the intelligence used to go to war with Iraq.
``This administration apparently decided the way to do that was to leak the name of my wife,'' he told NBC's ``Meet The Press.''
Wilson had questioned the president's State of the Union address in which Bush said Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Africa. Wilson went to Niger early in 2002 at the CIA's request to assess the uranium claim and said it was very doubtful.
Wilson said he and his wife, a specialist in unconventional weapons who worked overseas, were increasingly concerned she might be a target due to the disclosure and ``as a consequence of that, have begun to rethink our own security posture.''
The U.S. government had not offered any security measures, said Wilson, adding that a leading former CIA official had said his wife ``was probably the single highest target of any possible terrorist organization or hostile intelligence service that might want to do damage.''
CAREER ``OVER'' AS CIA OPERATIVE
The New York Times reported on Sunday Plame had ``non-official cover,'' what the CIA calls a ``Noc,'' the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create, often involving especially dangerous jobs.
Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert, working for a company that has been identified as Brewster Jennings and Associates, believed to be a CIA front company.
Jim Marcinkowski, an ex-CIA officer who called Plame the best shot in their class with an AK-47 rifle, told Time magazine her career as an undercover operative was over.
``She will no longer be safe traveling overseas,'' said Marcinkowski, who trained with Plame at Camp Peary, the Virginia school for CIA recruits. ``I liken that to the knee-capping of an athlete.''
With pressure mounting for answers over the leak, Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, said it was up to the president to get to the bottom of the story.
``The president should be asking some pretty tough questions, if he's not already,'' Hagel said on CBS. ``My guess is that he is asking some tough questions. He needs to get a hold of this himself, call his chief of staff in, his national security adviser, the vice president and say 'OK, what do we have here? This is serious, I want it fixed.'''
Wilson's wife's cover was blown in mid-July by syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who reiterated on Sunday he would not reveal his source for the story.
-------- un
U.N. to Meet on Israeli Strike in Syria
October 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Syria-Israel.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The U.N. Security Council called an emergency meeting Sunday after Syria complained to Secretary-General Kofi Annan over Israel's air raid on a purported Palestinian training base near Damascus.
Syria requested that the initial closed-door consultations be followed by an open meeting so the 15 council nations and other countries not on the council can express their views.
Syria, the only Arab country on the council, is also drafting a resolution which it wants the body to adopt, a Syrian diplomat said.
The diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not say what the resolution would seek, explaining that it was still being drafted.
The Israeli raid came in retaliation for a suicide bombing carried out by the Palestinian militant Islamic Jihad against a restaurant in the Israeli coastal city of Haifa Saturday. Nineteen people and the bomber were killed.
An Israeli diplomat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was very cynical that the Security Council would call an emergency meeting after a nation that Israel claims harbors terrorists is attacked, but not when Islamic militants kill 19 people.
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa has lodged his country's complaint to Annan and the president of the Security Council, currently the United States.
In a letter, al-Sharaa urged the Security Council to ``immediately hold a session to discuss the Israeli aggression against Syrian territories and the measures the council ought to take to deter the Israeli government from following a provocative, aggressive policy against Syria.''
``Syria is not incapable of creating a resisting and deterring balance that forces Israel to review its'' actions, the letter said.
Al-Sharaa urged the Security Council to ``condemn, deter and prevent the repetition of this dangerous development that threatens regional and international security and stability.''
The 22-member Arab League is also convening an emergency session later Sunday.
The Israeli raid came in retaliation for a suicide bombing carried out by the Palestinian militant Islamic Jihad against a restaurant in the Israeli coastal city of Haifa Saturday. Nineteen people and the bomber were killed.
-------- us
Groups fight to keep restrictions on military tests
By DEIRDRE FLEMING,
Portland Press Herald Writer (Maine)
Sunday, October 5, 2003
http://www.pressherald.com/news/state/031005marine.shtml
About three dozen Maine environmental groups are opposing an effort by the military to relax rules on bombing tests and other military exercises in the Gulf of Maine, citing risks to marine mammal life.
The Department of Defense has been lobbying for exemption from laws protecting marine mammals, as well as laws protecting endangered species, in order to conduct the military exercises in the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere.
Navy officials contend that precautions already are taken during these tests to avoid endangering marine mammal life, and that existing laws are overreaching and vague.
A full-page ad paid for by the National Environmental Trust in the Sept. 28 Maine Sunday Telegram showed a dolphin with bold white lettering reading: "Don't exempt the Pentagon from the Marine Mammal Protection Act." At least 33 Maine environmental groups ranging from the Friends of Casco Bay to the Penobscot Bay Watch signed and endorsed the ad.
Don Hudson, president of the Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset, said the advertisement was aimed at Maine's congressional delegation in Washington.
"We signed on to the letter because we believe that it is unfair to require fishermen and others to adhere to strict rules while releasing the federal government from the same responsibilities," Hudson said. "It is bad form, to say the least, and creates an immediate and avoidable double standard."
The Navy is allowed to practice bombing exercises in a designated area in the Gulf of Maine, about 100 miles east of Boston in the Atlantic Ocean. The bombing runs are conducted within strict limits, when no mammals are observed in the area.
The Navy wants to loosen those restrictions, and also be allowed to do low-frequency sonar testing in more areas, including the North Atlantic - a practice that is blocked by court order right now.
The Navy's military exercises in open water are necessary to assure "military preparedness," explained John James, director of public affairs for the Brunswick Naval Air Station
"Bombing training conducted in the Gulf of Maine is critical to attaining and maintaining combat readiness for our air crews before sending them on deployment and potentially into harm's way," James explained in a statement.
There is no current plan to discontinue bombing operations in the Gulf of Maine, he said.
Although congressional action is unlikely this year on extending the Marine Mammal Protection Act, a defense policy bill in conference committee could change those rules.
But the environmentalists are arguing that no agency should be exempt from such laws for any reason. The Friends of Casco Bay supported the issue not only to protect mammal life in the Gulf of Maine, but also to thwart the threat to marine mammal life in southern waters where sonar testing would be done.
"We certainly don't want to see a rollback of basic laws that have been working for 30 years," said Mary Cerullo, associate director of Friends of Casco Bay.
Susan Sargent, the Maine representative for the National Environmental Trust, said the group has gained some congressional support in its fight to uphold the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but it was difficult knowing at this stage what would happen.
However, Sargent said the trust gained public support on the issue with little trouble.
"The thing is, why should the military be exempt from environmental laws, when no one else is?" Sargent said. "The Navy says they need to do this for readiness, but they have never shown" how it does.
Congress is currently debating how to update the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, and whether to provide some exceptions for Defense Department activity.
The debate is based around the need to protect whales, dolphins, sea lions, walruses, manatees, polar bears and other mammals from human activity.
The Navy is working with Congress to seek enactment of legislation that would allow for narrowly focused measures that would enhance readiness while also ensuring safe environmental practices. "Clearly this is a vexing issue," Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said when a Senate panel debated the issue this summer.
How much harm marine animals are allowed to suffer, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, is at the center of the conflict.
According to the Navy, several aspects of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, as currently interpreted, "are severely inhibiting appropriate tests and training activities," James reported in an official Navy response.
"The land, sea, air and space we use to test our weapons and train our people are essential national assets, but environmental and other restrictions can have unintended consequences that increasingly limit the military's ability to effectively train for combat," the official response stated.
James said the Navy always checks for marine mammal life before conducting exercises.
All bombing exercises are conducted within a circle of 12 nautical miles, and from May through July the southern half of this area is closed to minimize the impact on northern right whales, according to the Navy.
Navy personnel receive training in identification of whales and their habitat and flight crews are briefed on current marine mammal habitats and migration paths, James said.
Environmentalists remain doubtful.
"If the military is given an exemption, where they don't have to apply, no environmental rules will apply. They will be able to bomb wherever they want. They could do it off Portland Head Light," Sargent said.
Staff Writer Deirdre Fleming can be contacted at 791-6452 or at:
dfleming@pressherald.com
----
AWOL STATE OF MIND: CALLS FROM SOLDIERS DESPERATE TO LEAVE IRAQ FLOOD HOTLINE
By LEONARD GREENE
Aaron Garfield with mom Julie.
October 5, 2003 -- EXCLUSIVE
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/7316.htm
Morale among some war-weary GIs in Iraq is so low that a growing number of soldiers - including some now home on R&R - are researching the consequences of going AWOL, according to a leading support group.
The GI Rights Hotline, a national soldiers' support service, has logged a 75 percent increase in calls in the last 12 weeks, with more than 100 of those calls from soldiers, or people on their behalf, asking about the penalties associated with going AWOL - "absent without leave" - according to volunteers and staffers who man the service.
Many of the calls have come from soldiers who are among those now on the first wave of 15-day authorized leaves that began almost two weeks ago. Some hotline callers have indicated they may not return, staffers said.
"What would happen if I just don't go back" to Iraq, one soldier asked a worker at a GI support-line center.
"I'm going to shoot myself in the foot," said another, referring to his solution for getting home.
Some soldiers are so desperate that they have called directly from the war zone, contacting the hotline when they can get satellite-phone access or after waiting in line for hours in the desert for a military phone.
So worried is military brass about the prospect of desertion that many soldiers say they have been encouraged to take their leaves in Germany - a stopover - to avoid temptation stateside.
"The military is aware of how low troop morale is," said Teresa Panepinto, program coordinator of The GI Rights Hotline, a service that dates back to the Korean War. "They're concerned these people are going to come home and not go back."
Volunteers throughout the country take live calls and respond to messages left by soldiers who want to know their rights. One call base is in a small office in a building on Lafayette Street in the East Village.
Panepinto said monthly calls to the hotline have risen from 2,000 to 3,500 in the last three months.
She said many soldiers complained about the length of the Iraq campaign, the rough desert conditions and a U.S. death toll that has risen well above 300, including nearly 180 soldiers killed after President Bush's May 1 declaration that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.
Pentagon officials said they had no up-to-date numbers on soldiers who have gone AWOL since the Iraq campaign, but an affidavit that surfaced at a recent court martial for a soldier charged with desertion put the number at more than 50.
Most of those charged were reservists who were activated and did not report, said Steve Collier, a lawyer representing a soldier charged with desertion.
Penalties for going AWOL range from a bad-conduct discharge to a court martial and jail time.
Military officials maintain that morale remains high among soldiers, who are paid more in combat zones, and that authorized leaves are being granted as "an investment in readiness."
Maj. Pete Mitchell, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, said the military code of justice is a significant deterrent to unauthorized absences.
"There is a possibility that somebody would make that decision," Mitchell said. "We're going to extend good faith that people are going to make the right decisions here."
Like the GI Rights Hotline staffers, Manhattan resident Julie Garfield said she would never encourage her nephew, Aaron Garfield, to desert his posting as a reservist in Iraq.
But if he did, she would probably cry tears of joy, she said. Aaron, who has never indicated that going AWOL is an option for him, has been in Baghdad six months.
"If he went AWOL I wouldn't blame him," said his aunt, who has been the significant adult in his life.
"They ripped him away from his life and education. He spent nine months in Bosnia. It's enough already."
In recent e-mails, Aaron says soldier morale is low because reservists are forced to stay while active-duty troops are being allowed to leave, if only for two weeks.
"There is no morale here," he wrote his aunt. "The leadership just doesn't care about us. I don't want anything to do with this mess anymore."
Lt. Gen. James Helmly, chief of the 205,000-mem- ber Army Reserve, warned recently that there could be an exodus of active and reserve forces if the United States fails to get other countries to join the Iraq campaign.
José Alvarez, an Army corporal now on duty in Iraq, has told his wife he will not re-enlist when his obligation ends next year.
He's angry that when his wife, Wendy, suffered a miscarriage recently, his unit refused to grant him an emergency leave.
"I'm definitely getting out," he wrote his wife. "To heck with the Army."
"He hates it and he's not re-enlisting," said Wendy from her home on a military base at Fort Hood, Texas. "He basically has given up."
-------- propaganda wars
A Question Of Naming Names Journalists' Secrecy At Issue in Scandal
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 5, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45070-2003Oct4?language=printer
There are at least six people in Washington who know the answer to the city's most politically charged mystery in years. And they're not talking.
That's because they're journalists.
Whether they should maintain their silence -- and whether they might be legally compelled to break it -- lies at the heart of a burgeoning debate about media ethics and the whispered transactions with government officials that shape the daily flow of news and opinion.
Columnist Robert Novak, who sparked a criminal investigation into which "two senior administration officials" told him that the wife of an outspoken White House critic was a CIA operative, isn't the only person who knows the identity of the leakers. Reporters for NBC, Time and Newsday, among others, had similar conversations with administration officials.
Among the questions swirling around the controversy is whether Justice Department investigators might seek to subpoena the journalists after former diplomat Joseph Wilson, who is outraged about the outing of his wife, provides their names, as he has promised to do.
"Our policy has always been to protect our sources," said Newsday Editor Howard Schneider. "People are not going to talk to us if we don't do that. The greater good here is to make sure that confidential sources who have important information can come to us and be protected."
NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who reported after the Novak column was published in July that the administration was trying to intimidate Wilson, said she could not reveal the officials she spoke with because such agreements are "fundamental to what we do as journalists." She said news organizations would have to evaluate the situation on a case-by-case basis "if someone's life was in danger, or a military operation was involved, or evidence of a crime was needed."
Novak said last week that if he revealed his sources, "I would leave journalism."
But not every source is a Deep Throat, the shadowy figure during the Nixon administration who passed Watergate secrets to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward in a parking garage -- and whose identity is still the subject of a capital guessing game.
Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, said he has never betrayed a source and that it is a question of "personal honor" for journalists. But he said the "underbelly of leaking" is not pretty.
"Ninety-five percent of the time, people are basically dropping a dime on other people, dissing other people, leaking from base motives," Lemann said. "Let's not pretend all leaks consist of genuine whistle-blowers. Usually it's Campaign A telling you something sleazy about Campaign B that their candidate is afraid to say in public. But you have to honor the principle for the sake of the minority of cases that are really in the public interest."
Some members of the public, if a torrent of e-mails is any indication, suggest Novak and the other journalists have a duty to come forward. If it is a federal crime for officials to intentionally make public the name of a covert operative, these critics ask, why do reporters who serve as a conduit for such information get a pass?
As journalists see it, they have protected status because they are the public's watchdogs, with special freedoms enshrined under the First Amendment. Reporters also say they could not dig out vital information about government and business if sources who might lose their jobs, or face political retribution, had to be quoted by name.
But critics say journalists sometimes abuse their power by allowing prosecutors -- such as Kenneth Starr during the Clinton impeachment, or authorities in the sexual assault case against Kobe Bryant -- to leak damaging details without having to go on the record.
Inevitably, the special status of journalists clashes with other legal rights during an investigation, such as a defendant's right to a fair trial or to have his grand jury proceedings remain secret.
Victoria Toensing, who as an aide to the late senator Barry Goldwater helped write the 1982 law banning the disclosure of covert operatives' names, said journalists were exempted because they, unlike federal officials, don't have clearances for classified information. The only exception is if a journalist engages in a "pattern" of naming operatives, inspired in part by CIA agent-turned-author Philip Agee, who repeatedly tried to expose agency personnel around the world.
Asked about the possibility of subpoenaing journalists in this case, Toensing, a former federal prosecutor, said: "I don't think it's ever a good idea. You're just going to make a hero out of the reporters, who can raise their book prices. It's like calling a lawyer to talk about attorney-client privileged information. You're not going to get it."
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, said journalists -- like doctors, lawyers, therapists and the clergy -- deserve to be shielded from having to testify. But if Novak were dragged into court, she said, "you think he wouldn't gladly face contempt? This is the kind of thing that young journalists dream of. They love to go to jail."
Actually, it may not be as much fun as outsiders believe. Timothy Phelps, one of two Newsday reporters cited last week in a White House counsel's order not to destroy documents or phone records in the Wilson case, went through such an ordeal in 1991. When he and National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg broke the story of Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, the reporters became the subject of a Senate leak investigation.
Phelps was hit with a subpoena for his home and office phone records, which was blocked when a Senate committee refused to enforce it. And his government sources came under investigative scrutiny.
"It was very difficult to get any reporting done when they're under this kind of order to produce any records relating to any contact with me," Phelps said. "And that is also the case today. I'm not getting my phone calls returned."
Attorney General John Ashcroft must approve any subpoena of a journalist under his department's restrictive guidelines, which is why it happens so rarely.
"The essential guiding principle is that subpoenaing a journalist should be the last resort," said Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo. "We should do everything we can to avoid the chilling effect on the press."
The guidelines say: "All reasonable attempts should be made to obtain information from alternative sources before considering issuing a subpoena to a member of the news media. . . . In criminal cases, there should be reasonable grounds to believe, based on information obtained from non-media sources, that a crime has occurred, and that the information sought is essential to a successful investigation."
Law enforcement sources familiar with the CIA case say subpoenas have basically been ruled out but reporters may be asked to submit to voluntary interviews. "It would be improper for the FBI not to call and say, 'Are you willing to sit down for an interview?' " said one official who asked not to be identified because of the case's sensitivity. "When the reporter says no, that would probably be the end of it."
Some of the Justice Department's leak investigations, such as a probe of a classified intelligence briefing for Congress that leaked out after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are continuing but have not produced any charges.
Ashcroft did not block a subpoena in 2001 for freelancer Vanessa Leggett, a Texas writer who spent 168 days in jail for refusing to reveal the sources she interviewed in the murder of a Houston socialite. Justice officials did not consider Leggett, who was writing a book about the case, a legitimate journalist. She was freed when the grand jury disbanded.
Also in 2001, the Justice Department approved a subpoena for the home phone records of Associated Press reporter John Solomon, who was digging into an investigation of then-Sen. Robert Torricelli. Last year the FBI seized a package that another AP reporter in the Philippines had mailed to Solomon. The FBI has launched an internal inquiry into whether the interception was proper.
The issue keeps popping up in court. On Tuesday, a U.S. district judge in Washington ruled that a reporter for the military's Stars and Stripes newspaper did not have to disclose the government sources who leaked her information about a Pentagon job application by Linda Tripp, who became famous after taping her conversations with Monica Lewinsky.
In one high-profile case, a reporter fired by the Cincinnati Enquirer did divulge his source for stories about Chiquita Brands that led to a retraction and a $14 million settlement. The reporter, Michael Gallagher, cooperated with prosecutors and named former Chiquita lawyer George Ventura as his informant. A federal judge this year threw out a Ventura lawsuit charging that the paper had broken its promise not to identify him.
Protecting sources is important, said Joe Conason, a columnist for Salon.com, but sometimes "you reach a breaking point with it."
"The knee-jerk reaction -- 'Oh no, these are sources and we can't talk about it' -- is a little too easy," Conason said. He said most of the journalists who received the CIA information "had this prod from the White House to go after Joe Wilson, and they didn't report that the White House was out to get a critic. Whenever Bill Clinton was seen to be doing something like that, it was always big news."
NBC's Mitchell believes no-name journalism has gotten out of hand. "Anonymity is conferred much too frequently in Washington," she said. "We really should strive to name sources much more often," or to offer details that would "give readers and viewers as much information as possible about what their bias could be or what ax they could be grinding."
The murkiness of the subject emerged at a White House briefing last week. Reporters wanted to know whether administration officials had not only leaked the identity of Wilson's wife but also called attention to Novak's July 14 column in subsequent conversations with reporters. Press secretary Scott McClellan accused them of "moving the goal posts," saying: "The subject of this investigation is whether someone leaked classified information."
All this puts journalists in the uncomfortable position of peppering administration officials with questions some of their colleagues, now in the media spotlight, could answer.
"It's a tough question for journalists," said Columbia's Lemann. "I see why not revealing a source is very powerfully in your personal professional interest. But why is it also in the public interest?"
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
'The Discovery of Global Warming': Living in the Greenhouse
October 5, 2003
New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/books/review/05REVKINT.html
Eureka moments are rare in science. Achievements like the deduction of DNA's structure etch our imagination precisely because they are exceptional. In most fields, research is more akin to climbing a mist-shrouded mountain of unknown dimensions. Climate science, perhaps above all, has been a perpetual ascent toward understanding. A major achievement so far is a broad consensus that beginning in the industrial era humans, by burning ancient buried stores of carbon-rich coal and oil, have liberated billions of tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, warming earth.
Debate persists over the extent of human-driven warming and what to do about it. But recognition that in a short span our species has nudged the thermostat of a planet remains a momentous, and sobering, finding.
''The Discovery of Global Warming'' describes the intellectual journey toward that conclusion, with all of its false starts, flawed hypotheses, inventiveness and persistent uncertainties. It reveals the effort as one of the great exercises in collective sleuthing, with pivotal insights provided by experts in fields as varied as glaciology, physics and even plankton paleontology. Charting the evolution and confirmation of the theory, Spencer R. Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics, dissects the interwoven threads of research and reveals the political and societal subtexts that colored scientists' views and the public reception their work received.
In many instances, he writes, researchers were pursuing knowledge for other purposes and only later were their data used to determine if humans had influenced the climate. He notes that much of the oceanographic and polar research that eventually helped point to human-driven warming was paid for by the United States Navy and other government agencies that were eager to exert American hegemony during the cold war.
The narrative starts with the 150-year-old notion that some trace gases are transparent to sunlight but opaque to infrared radiation, the radiant energy that pulses from a sun-warmed sidewalk long after dusk. This insulating property of the atmosphere prevents the planet from turning into an iceball. Weart uses excerpts from pivotal papers to let us glimpse the thinking of climatology's pioneers. Thus, in 1862, John Tyndall, a British researcher, wrote about infrared radiation, ''As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the earth's surface.''
As the Industrial Revolution accelerated, scientists soon figured out that emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning coal and other fossil fuels might intensify that natural ''greenhouse effect.'' Chief among these gases was carbon dioxide. One omission from Weart's book is a prescient phrase written in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, a pioneering Swedish chemist: ''We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.''
Still, the human contribution to climate was presumed to be far outweighed by the great cycles of ice ages revealed in fossil and geological records. The puzzle of those cycles remained the prime quarry of Arrhenius and others and has still not been completely solved.
A warm period in the 1930's brought the first specific predictions that humans could alter the climate, but then things cooled down for a few decades and the possibility of a human influence remained a fringe notion. (Later, Weart explains, it was shown that the temporary cooling could also have been caused by humans -- through the release of vast sun-reflecting plumes of sulfates and other tiny pollution particles in the industrial boom after World War II: one human emission was canceling out another until clean-air laws began removing the cooling veil.)
Weart next focuses on the great burst of geophysical research starting in the 1950's, when data started showing for the first time that humans were indeed changing the atmosphere. He describes how individual scientific obsessions, like Charles David Keeling's preoccupation with creating a precise record of carbon dioxide concentrations, produced vital puzzle pieces.
Increasingly, scientists working in the field began to express unease. In a 1957 paper noting that the oceans could not act as a perpetual sponge for carbon dioxide, Roger Revelle, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego, summed things up: ''Human beings are now carrying out a large- scale geophysical experiment.'' Other experts noted an unnerving aspect of the situation: the experimenters were inside their test tube. According to Weart, however, all that had been proved then was ''the possibility of global warming.'' It took another 40 years of data gathering, computer simulations and debate before an international panel of climate experts concluded in 2001 that ''most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.''
He describes how the battle between environmental groups and industries dependent on coal and oil intensified steadily as climate science became more conclusive. But that science, he emphasizes, will never offer a perfect forecast; the atmosphere, with complex links to the sun and oceans, will long remain a source of surprises. In fact, climate science will probably remain easily misconstrued by alarmists of all stripes -- both environmentalists eager to stoke public fears and antiregulatory activists and politicians fearful of any impediment to unbridled enterprise.
''The Discovery of Global Warming'' does cut through much of the persistent hype surrounding the issue. Weart has also set up a Web site, www.aip.org/history/climate, that adds many layers of detail to the scientific chronology.
In a short final chapter called ''Reflections,'' Weart offers his personal ideas on the best course of action to limit risks from warming while avoiding big economic disruptions. But he leaves a deeper discussion of the politics of global warming to others, sticking with his strengths as a historian.
He warns that society should not expect science to answer the biggest question of all: how much should be invested now either to curb emissions or gird for change. Like a flickering compass needle, science offers a trajectory toward truth, but not a recipe for dealing with it.
Andrew C. Revkin reports on the environment for The Times.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters fear nuclear arms in space
Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday October 5, 2003
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,1596,1056417,00.html
Scientists are preparing plans to build nuclear rockets to explore the solar system. Space engineers say the plan is essential if mankind is to send large, complex spaceships to neighbouring planets and to search for life.
But campaigners say the project is a backdoor bid to put nuclear weapons in orbit and yesterday began a week-long protest - including demonstrations at Cape Canaveral.
'This technology is completely unnecessary and could have a devastating global impact if there was a launch accident,' said campaigner Bruce Gagnon, of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
But scientists insist the technology is safe. Nuclear engines would merely provide electricity for a new rocket propulsion system called the ion drive, which shoots out streams of gas particles and can run continuously for years, letting probes build up colossal velocities of more than 10 miles a second - about 36,000mph. America has tested one and Europe launched one on its Smart-1 probe to the Moon last week.
But these ion engines were driven by electricity generated by solar panels. In deep space, beyond Mars, sunlight is too weak to provide enough power. Hence Nasa's decision earlier this year, as part of its Prometheus Project, to build a spaceborne nuclear reactor. 'Fitted to ion drives, these will take us to distant planets with a speed and flexibility that is utterly impossible at present,' said Alan Newhouse, the project's director.
Scientists also point out that probes to the outer planets already use nuclear batteries. 'These are made of capsules of plutonium wrapped in lead,' said Cambridge astronomer Paul Murdin. 'The plutonium's radioactivity warms the lead and that heat is converted into electricity.'
Such nuclear batteries are small beer compared to America's new plans, but they were enough to trigger a row in 1997, when it was discovered they were to be used on the European-American Cassini space probe to Saturn. As a result, the European Space Agency was forced to abandon future projects involving nuclear space technology, and therefore cannot be involved in further missions to the outer planets.
Yet one of these worlds - Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter - is the main reason Nasa is developing its nuclear reactor. Space probes have revealed Europa to be a ball of ice with a liquid ocean inside. 'On Earth, where there is water there is life,' said Dr Murdin. 'That makes Europa very special.'
Nasa wants to orbit Europa, scanning its oceans with radar scanners and high-resolution cameras for signs of life. However, the Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter (Jimo) would need much more power and time than current techniques can provide. Only advanced nuclear reactors could provide the hundreds of kilowatts of power the craft would need, said Newhouse.
'We are talking about a reactor the size of a waste-paper basket. With that, we could move in and out of orbit round Europa and visit other Jupiter moons that may also have oceans and send back reams of data.'
And it is not just Europa that intrigues researchers. Nasa is also considering using nuclear power plants to power bases on the Moon and Mars. In addition, Nasa is planning to launch a probe to visit Pluto, the Sun's most distant planet. As currently planned, the New Horizons mission - using old technology - would be launched in 2006 and take a further decade to fly past Pluto and its moon, Charon.
'That is far too long,' said Dr Colin Pillinger, head of Britain's Beagle 2 probe, currently hurtling towards Mars. ' Probes will reach their destinations with out-of-date hardware and project scientists on pensions.'
But such worries leave protesters cold. They believe Prometheus poses three major dangers. 'First, it will involve firing plutonium on launchers, and rockets blow up,' said Gagnon. 'Second, you will have to gear up production of plutonium on Earth to supply those rockets and that will inevitably lead to contamination of communities near plants.
'Third, the technologies that Nasa develops will inevitably be used by the military. So its new generation of orbiting reactors will end up in the hands of Star Wars technicians who will use them to power space-based laser systems that can give America even greater world dominion.'
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Iraqis: 'We Are Left With Nothing'
Eyewitness Report From Iraq
War Times
by Medea Benjamin,
October 5, 2003
http://www.war-times.org/issues/12art1.html
An Iraqi child cries as he walks through rubbish near his makeshift home in a garbage dump on the outskirts of Baghdad.
http://www.war-times.org/images/12art1image1.jpg
"We believed the U.S. when it said 'Help us get rid of Saddam Hussein and your lives will be better,'" said Baghdad taxi driver Issam Mohammed. "But now we find ourselves occupied by a foreign power taking our resources, and we are left with nothing, not even physical security."
During my two-week visit to Iraq in mid-July, I witnessed firsthand the anger of the Iraqi people. "No electricity, no water, no jobs, no security" was the refrain I heard over and over again.
Indeed, on Aug. 9, just one day after the White House released its rosy 100-day assessment of the Iraq occupation, thousands of Shia Muslims rioted in the streets of Basra. The Shia, a majority in Iraq who had been brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein, were incensed by shortages of gasoline and electricity.
The Bush 100-day report "has nothing at all to do with reality," said Eman Khammas, a veteran journalist and co-director of the newly formed Occupation Watch Center. "I challenge Paul Bremer and George Bush to come out with me to the streets of Baghdad, the streets of Basra, the streets of any Iraqi city and talk to people instead of staying secluded in Saddam Hussein's former presidential palace. They will hear a very different story."
Meanwhile many U.S. soldiers and their families are bristling because of canceled leaves and increasing casualty rates. And the cost of the occupation has jumped to $1 billion per week.
FEAR, BLACKOUTS AND LAYOFFS
The vacuum of legitimate authority caused by the occupation has unleashed thieves--"Ali Babas" as they are called locally--and destroyed public safety. Nightly gunfire and a spate of kidnappings and rapes have made women afraid to leave their homes. "If I get home safely today, I will open the Koran and give thanks," Maha Naama told me at a Baghdad women's clinic.
The other major complaint is the lack of electricity. The U.S. bombed the gas pipeline that feeds the power stations in Baghdad, a problem now compounded by looters and saboteurs--and suffocating 110-degree heat.
Without fans or air-conditioning, people have trouble working and sleeping. Without refrigeration, their food goes rancid. Without electricity, the water pumps don't work, gas can't be pumped, the traffic lights don't work and the roads are utterly chaotic. The streets are dark at night, making it easier for the thieves.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been thrown out of work. "The U.S. took our jobs away when they dismissed government workers, the army and the police. We want our jobs back," said an angry protester at a Union of the Unemployed sit-in at the office of the U.S. authorities. 'ALL DONE, GO HOME'
Iraqis are puzzled why the U.S. can bomb a specific building from 30,000 feet in the air, but can't provide Iraqis with security, electricity, water or jobs. Some attribute the chaos to incompetence, arrogance and stupidity. Others are convinced that it is an intentional attempt to consolidate U.S. rule. They cite an Iraqi saying: "if you starve a dog, it will follow its master."
But there is another Iraqi saying: "if you starve a dog, it will bite you." Certainly the increasing attacks on U.S. soldiers indicate that not all Iraqis will follow the U.S. master. "The press covers the armed attacks," said Ms. Khammas of Occupation Watch, "but there is also a growing non-violent resistance movement."
Women are forming organizations like the Iraqi Women's Society to demand safety, decent living conditions and a real democratic transition. Unions, including the new Union of the Unemployed, are demanding jobs and insisting that Iraqi oil be in the hands of Iraqis. Human rights groups are speaking out against abuses by the occupying forces. Independent media groups are testing the waters of free speech.
The U.S. has responded by indefinitely jailing thousands of Iraqis with no charges and no access to lawyers. Iraqi civilians are shot at roadblocks, at protests or just randomly by nervous U.S. troops. Just one Baghdad hospital, Al Kindi, reported 10-20 civilians wounded or killed by U.S. troops every day.
The statue of Saddam Hussein that we saw toppled by U.S. troops on television now has a message to the occupying forces painted in bright red on its base: "ALL DONE, GO HOME."
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink Women for Peace, was recently in Baghdad to help organize the International Occupation Watch Center. EBC/War Times • 1230 Market Street, PMB 409 • San Francisco, CA 94102 www.war-times.org • editorial@war-times.org
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Riot police clash with anti-globalizers
WASHINGTON TIMES
Briefly,
October 5, 2003
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/briefly.htm
ROME - Riot police clashed with anti-globalization protesters during a demonstration against an EU summit in Rome yesterday, leaving several demonstrators injured, witnesses said.
Scores of police used batons and tear gas to push back several hundred protesters after coming under attack with bottles and stones, witnesses said.
An ambulance took at least one demonstrator away with a deep gash to his head and blood pouring down his face. A few protesters were detained by police.
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