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NUCLEAR
Four nations spark WMD worries
The Welsh brains behind A-bomb tests
International Coalition Launches Campaign to Ban Depleted Uranium Weapons
Blackout on nuclear shipment details alarms ecologists
Nuke Dispute Tightens U.S., Iran Tension
U.N. Nuclear Agency Chief to Visit Iran
Russia delays launch of Iran nuclear power plant: report
EU Accuses Iran of Torture and Liberties Abuses
Iran Said to Hide Nuclear Site as UN Deadline Nears
Iran air-strike plan seen as bluff
Russia, China seek to restart N Korea nuclear talks
N. Korea says pact is key to standoff
Experts fear terrorist N-bomb
Contamination at old nuclear plant results in legal melee
Community's confidence in SRS alleviates some security concerns
'True Patriot' would restore rights
Impeachment is back
All the President's Votes?
Senators Say Bush Needs to Take Control
MILITARY
U.S. probing arms shipped to Iraq
Lockheed Martin Wins $812M Deal For Sea-Based Missile Defense
Chinese war games to face Taiwan again
EU sets out tough terms for aid to Iraq
Bulgarian Soldier Injured in Iraq, Recruitment Problems in Sofia
Iraqi group to kill peacekeepers
War without end
Car Bomb Kills 6 at Baghdad Hotel; at Least 35 Hurt
Suicide Bomber Kills 7 in Baghdad
U.S. Proposes Date for Iraqis to Start Planning for Self-Rule
Iraq Council Asks for Help Rebuilding
Israel ignores UK family's call for truth
Alternative 'peace deal' for Mid-East
New Rules for Israel and Syria
Arafat Appoints Acting Security Chief
Palestinian Cabinet Decides To Stay On Despite Infighting
Jordan's King Says Neighbors Should Avoid Iraq
Pentagon official Richard Perle: US may take action against Syria
US spy aircraft deployed in Philippines
Philippine Forces Kill Terror Suspect
China Plans Giant Step This Week
Bush Goes Around Media to Make Iraq Case
The Truth About Our Good Intentions
FAKE 'GOOD NEWS' FROM IRAQ
Letters Home
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
EU Accuses Iran of Torture and Liberties Abuses
Congress Looks to Grant Legal Status to Immigrants
ENERGY AND OTHER
Honda reduces cost of building fuel cell cars
Energy Industry to Win Big on Energy Bill
U.S. Ghost Ships Arouse Official European Opposition
Bone Marrow Research Is Questioned
ACTIVISTS
Bishops advise Catholic voters
BOLIVIA - Military controls city after deadly clashes
Protest targets military spending
Missile Protests Continue
Five Protesters Die in Bolivia After President Calls in Troops
Bolivian Clashes Claim More Lives
N.Y. Activists Prep for GOP Convention
-------- NUCLEAR
Four nations spark WMD worries
Programs in Mideast, Asia viewed as potential weapon sources for terrorism
Monday, October 13, 2003
JOHN YAUKEY
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE
http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20031013/frontpage/122938.shtml
PART 2 OF A THREE-PART SERIES
About this project
Find an interactive illustration of the key types of weapons of mass destruction and which countries are believed to have them in the Gannett News Service special report, "Deadly Weapons in Dangerous Hands," at www.theolympian.com.
GNS national security correspondent John Yaukey spent months analyzing intelligence reports and interviewing dozens of experts, diplomats, intelligence officers and lawmakers to track the threats Americans face from weapons of mass destruction.
Some of the work was done during a journalism fellowship Yaukey was awarded through the East-West Center, a Honolulu-based organization that promotes relations between the United States and Asia.
Yaukey, 42, is a Best of Gannett award winner. He has been covering national security and terrorism issues since May 2002. Prior to that, he covered technology and science. Yaukey has been with Gannett News Service since 1998.
Three parts
Today is the second part of a three-day series:
- SUNDAY: There is evidence that weapons of mass destruction are spilling into some of the world's most dangerous places through black markets U.S. intelligence knows little about.
- TODAY: Some nations have adopted the strategy in which they get as close to weapons production as possible while abiding by international nonproliferation restrictions, then start making warheads when the United States is caught in a vulnerable position that discourages pre-emptive strikes.
- TUESDAY: Buried in the Pentagon's budget proposal for next year is a statement rescinding the prohibition on the research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons.
WASHINGTON -- The regime-ending mistakes of Saddam Hussein were not lost on the mullahs of Iran.
Instead of pursuing banned weapons underground as the ousted Iraqi leader did after the first gulf war, Iran, by most accounts, is pressing forward with a nuclear weapons initiative in full view of the world.
Only it's disguised as a civilian energy program.
The strategy, intelligence analysts say, is to get as close to weapons production as possible while abiding by international nonproliferation restrictions, then start making warheads when the United States is caught in a vulnerable position that discourages pre-emptive strikes.
Much like it is now.
If Iran succeeds, an anti-American theocracy that supports both terrorists and the eradication of Israel would be able to strike anywhere in the Middle East with nuclear weapons.
That's just one of the many nightmare scenarios the intelligence community is confronting as weapons of mass destruction seep from the thaw of the Cold War into a clandestine coven of hostile governments and terrorists that trade in murky black markets.
And it isn't just adversaries that threaten national security.
Russia, a U.S. ally against terrorism, sits atop the world's largest WMD arsenal with frighteningly inadequate security and legions of ambitious arms dealers. If Pakistan's shaky President Pervez Musharraf falls to Islamic extremists, so goes his nuclear arsenal.
Here are the four most dangerous places:
Russia
Sometime in the 1990s, according to recently declassified intelligence reports, authorities intercepted 3 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a car in Prague, Czech Republic.
The material, stolen from an engineering institute southwest of Moscow, was about a third of the mass necessary to make a nuclear weapon. The seizure led to the capture of a Ukrainian and a Belorussian, both with nuclear backgrounds.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, so did its iron grip on the world's largest arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons scattered from Russia's Arctic coast to Kazakhstan.
Since 1993, the International Atomic Energy Agency has investigated 175 cases of attempted nuclear smuggling, many of them involving elements of the former communist regime.
According to congressional security estimates, 60 percent of Russia's 20,000 nuclear warheads and 600 tons of weapons-grade material is not under adequate security.
Much of Russia's 40,000 metric tons of nerve gas and other chemical agents have not been sufficiently safeguarded because Moscow will not allow U.S. experts to engineer security upgrades, according to a General Accounting Office report.
At the Shchuchye chemical weapons repository in the Ural Mountains southeast of Moscow, there are some 2 million shells filled with sarin, VX and other nerve agents.
At Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea, the Russians dealt with 100 tons of biological agent simply by burying it, with minimal security.
The human element in the Russian equation is cause for equal concern: thousands of WMD scientists making less than $50 a month, some thought to be freelancing in Iran under cover as civilian energy experts.
Iran
For a country that claims it just wants nuclear energy, Iran is going about it in highly suspicious ways.
Iran is trying to build a uranium enrichment facility it claims is meant to produce fuel for the energy reactors it is constructing at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. The enrichment equipment could also be capable of producing weapons-grade nuclear material.
Iran also wants to produce heavy water, a liquid containing a form of hydrogen that's useful in making bomb-grade plutonium, yet its energy reactors will use only ordinary water.
The United States and Europe recently challenged Iran to prove its nuclear program is intended to produce only energy by submitting to aggressive inspections.
"The conclusion is inescapable that Iran is pursuing its 'civil' nuclear energy program not for peaceful and economic purposes, but as a front for developing the capability to produce nuclear materials for nuclear weapons," said John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Iran is known already to have blister, blood and choking agents, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.
Combine all that with well-established connections to terrorists in Lebanon, and the result is unacceptable to both Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem.
Iran has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it can legally back out with 90 days notice. If Iran is allowed to use the treaty as cover for an illegal weapons program, it would set a dangerous precedent, igniting similar ambitions in Egypt, Turkey and even Saudi Arabia.
Pakistan
Third World countries eager to go nuclear or acquire chemical or biological weapons once needed help from a superpower.
Now they're approaching Pakistan, which has a nuclear arsenal and a well-documented record of selling deadly technology to some of the planet's most dangerous regimes, including North Korea.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, is known to have visited North Korea extensively. Meanwhile, Pakistan's Ghauri liquid-fuel ballistic missile is an identical copy of the North Korean Nodong missile, indicating some bartering.
Khan has been a frequent visitor to Iran as well, according to U.S. intelligence, while two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists have admitted to holding "academic" discussions with Osama bin Laden.
Pakistan's volatile politics and restive Islamic radicals are cause for further concern.
Sympathy for Afghanistan's ousted Islamic Taliban regime is rampant among Pakistan's cash-strapped military, which freely sells equipment without approval from the government, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"Pakistan is now leaking dangerous technology," said Joseph Cirincione, director of Carnegie's Non-Proliferation Project. "If it destabilizes, it will hemorrhage the stuff."
North Korea
There could scarcely be a more worrisome addition to the nuclear family than Pyongyang's wildly unpredictable Stalinist leader Kim Jong Il. Kim might already have one to three nuclear weapons and the capacity to make more.
The evidence all indicates North Korea can launch missiles across most of East Asia and possibly to Hawaii and Alaska, and it has a record of selling advanced weapons technology to Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Pakistan.
U.S. officials have accused Kim's cash-strapped regime of selling drugs and missiles and counterfeiting currency to raise money. But would Kim sell fissile material on the terrorist market?
Kim has not been linked to any known terrorists, but he has been caught peddling weapons to the governments that support them.
The more immediate concern is whether Kim will test a nuclear weapon soon, as he has recently threatened. A successful test could easily kick off an Asian arms race, with security implications for Americans as the nuclear dominos fall.
The volatility would almost inevitably push China to expand its nuclear arsenal. India, a longtime foe of China, would follow suit, as would India's archenemy Pakistan.
According to both American and Russian intelligence, North Korea possesses large stocks of the nerve agents sarin and VX that were made at as many as eight chemical weapons facilities. Russian intelligence has reported that North Korea is experimenting with anthrax, cholera, plague and smallpox, and might have weaponized some of these lethal pathogens.
"This is one of the most intractable problems in the world," said Choi Young-jin, chancellor of South Korea's Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security.
-------- britain
The Welsh brains behind A-bomb tests
Oct 13 2003
The Western Mail (Wales)
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0200wales/content_objectid=13508102_method=full_siteid=50082_headline=-The-Welsh-brains-behind-Britain-s-A-bomb-tests-name_page.html
It was 50 years ago this month that Britain successfully exploded its first atomic weapon. Kurt Jacobsen talks to Colin Hughes, a Welsh scientist who was there.
Colin Hughes was standing four miles away when an explosion the size of the blast at Nagasaki happened.
"The ball of fire is turning into a cloud, an orange glowing ball dragging dust with it," said Mr Hughes, who worked on the plutonium core.
"It happens in complete silence. No one ever gets that close to hear and you see the shock wave coming toward you because it ripples the dust and that's when you hear the bang.
"Then we shook hands."
With Mr Hughes, a miner's son from Cefn Fforest, near Blackwood, was a group of scientists, including fellow Welshman Ieuan Maddock, who pressed the button and detonated the device.
Mr Hughes, now a widower, had married Gillian and had three children.
He remembers feeling relief above anything else. No one was likely to top the Bhagavid Gita quote - "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" - uttered at Los Alamos by Manhattan Project scientific leader Robert Oppenheimer.
But Operation Hurricane was a success and Britain at last had gone nuclear seven years after the Americans and three years after the Soviets.
At the time the bomb was seen as "a necessary thing, a deterrent", said Mr Hughes. Did he have any misgivings?
"I made aircraft engines during the war, and followed newspaper accounts of bigger and bigger bombing raids on Germany. To me, the atomic bomb seemed a natural progression, and fewer pilots would be put at risk.
"Yes, I had seen camera footage of Hiroshima, and I had also seen pictures of Japanese soldiers torched by flame throwers.
"No armaments are benign. This was a job the Government wanted done. You were a scientific civil servant."
Mr Hughes began his working life at a Merlin engine factory before seeing an advert in 1949 for "assistant experimental officers" at unspecified research establishments.
Lugging a battered suitcase, he reported at Fort Halstead, an armament research centre high on the Kent Downs.
"Inside the fort was a compound, called High Explosive Research, for which you needed a special pass to get in. That's the bomb project."
It was run by William Penney, who had worked at Los Alamos. Mr Hughes worked among "a tremendous array of talent: mathematicians, physicists chemists, engineers".
They included a surprisingly large number of Weshmen - David Barnes, John Davis, Graham Hopkin, David Lewis and John Rowlands.
Mr Hughes, a chartered engineer, worked under Jack Shackleton on the core of the bomb - "the innards". In 1951 he began to study in Birkbeck's honours physics programme under JD Bernal, an eminent scientist and a Marxist.
"All Bernal knew is that I was working on armament research of some kind. He wasn't against the bomb at that time, and the security services seemed not to be bothered by my presence in his department."
In the summer of 1952, bomb components delicately were loaded into HMS Plym to be taken to the Monte Bello islands off Northwestern Australia.
Mr Hughes said, "The Plym was a rusty old tub. When I disembarked a petty officer was frowning into the water. 'I hope this bloody ship sinks,' he said. I replied with a grin, 'So do I."
In the end, it was vaporised. However, many considered the test a failure.
A year later, Mr Hughes, Alan Moat and Bill Moyce bounced over 14 miles of Australian desert with a plutonium canister in the rear of their Land Rover.
"The area was remote and well patrolled, and no escort was needed."
At the blast site, the team inserted the plutonium cartridge into the bomb.
Penney, who was in charge of the whole trial, organised an Australia-England cricket match on the air strip. Then the team went into the history books with two test explosions 12 days apart.
-------- depleted uranium
International Coalition Launches Campaign to Ban Depleted Uranium Weapons
Press Conference Location:
CSC office rue Plétinckx 19 - B-1000
Brussels, Belgium.
For Immediate Release
Monday, October 13, 2003 at 11:00 AM
Contact: Ria Verjauw at 0032-474 75 66 68 (mobile) or Marc Daelemans at 0032- 0476 35 24 84 (mobile)
Experts in several disciplines and from eight countries met this weekend to discuss the creation of a strategy for an international ban on the use depleted uranium and other radioactive materials in military weapons. Participants traveled from Belgium, Germany, Japan, Malta, The Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States to attend a three-day conference held in Berlaar, Belgium on October 10-11-12.
We believe there is mounting evidence of the effects of depleted uranium on human health and the environment. Therefore, we call for an immediate ban on depleted uranium and the use of other radioactive materials in conventional arms, the cleanup of all contaminated sites, compensation and care for all affected populations, a halt to the production, testing, sale, and export of DU weapons and a decommissioning of all existing stockpiles.
In pursuit of this goal, we have established The International Coalition For a Ban on Depleted Uranium Weapons. We call on Governments, Non-Governmental Organizations and other interested parties to join us in this urgent effort.
These radioactive and chemically toxic weapons were first used on a large scale in the Gulf War in 1991, subsequently in other countries (Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan) and again in the current conflict in Iraq. We feel that the occupying powers as well as the countries involved in the stabilization force in Iraq will be putting their soldiers in harms way. Therefore, we call on governments to demand full disclosure on the amount and the locations of DU contaminated sites, access for the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) to conduct an environmental assessment and for an independent investigation into the human health consequences in Iraq.
Enclosure: List of Coalition Partners
--
International Depleted Uranium Study Team
Military Toxics Project (USA)
No DU Hiroshima Project (Japan)
Campaign Against Depleted Uranium (UK)
Center for Peace and Justice (USA)
Grassroots Action for Peace (USA)
For Mother Earth (Belgium)
Laka Foundation (NL)
AMOK (NL)
Our Common Future (UK)
-------- europe
Blackout on nuclear shipment details alarms ecologists
13.10.2003
By CATHERINE FIELD
New Zealand Herald
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3528422&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
PARIS - France has quietly imposed a ban on information about its controversial shipments of nuclear material, declaring that such details are tantamount to military secrets and disclosure of them is punishable by a jail term.
The move has outraged the country's powerful ecology movement, as it coincides with a push by the Government to not only maintain France's big dependence on nuclear power - a tendency that runs counter to trends elsewhere in Europe - but extend it for decades to come.
The information blackout was requested by Cogema, a state agency which reprocesses nuclear fuel for France's 58 reactors, has a lucrative contract to do the same for clients in Switzerland and Germany and is scouting for customers in Japan.
It asked the Government to classify details about the transport route and timing of these shipments and about training exercises to protect these convoys as being equivalent to "secrets of national defence".
The decree - published without fanfare in the Official Journal on August 9, in the heart of the summer vacation - ostensibly aims at preventing terrorists from using the information to hijack the shipments and get material to make nuclear bombs.
It came after Greenpeace repeatedly published details of shipment itineraries on its website to encourage "citizen inspections" about safety. On February 19, its supporters blocked a truck carrying 150kg of powdered plutonium, enough for several nuclear bombs, in the centre of Chalon-sur-Saone. The truck was en route from Cogema's reprocessing plant at La Hague, on the Normandy coast, to a plutonium fuel production plant at Marcoule, in Provence, in the far south of the country.
France derives about three-quarters of its electricity needs from nuclear power, the highest proportion of any country in the world. The present generation of reactors is heading towards the end of its life and a public debate is supposed to unfold over the next six months about what should be done to replace them.
But remarks last week by Junior Industry Minister Nicole Fontaine are clearly priming the public to accept the building of the next generation of reactors.
-------- iran
Nuke Dispute Tightens U.S., Iran Tension
By BRIAN MURPHY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 13, 2003
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/w-me/2003/oct/13/101307463.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - At a Tehran University forum on nuclear technology, a bright green banner proclaimed the nation's "absolute right" to build reactors. Nearby, a student took notes in a folder decorated with Uncle Sam chasing an elusive atom around the Middle East.
The scene last week was another snapshot from one side of the huge gap between Iran and the United States. The tremors over Iran's nuclear ambitions have apparently wrenched it even wider at a delicate time.
Russia is building a nuclear reactor for Iran that the United States fears could be part of efforts to produce material for atomic weapons. In response, the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency has set an Oct. 31 deadline for Iran to prove it has no secret agenda for producing nuclear weapons.
Iran is also being pressed to sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty giving U.N. inspectors unfettered access to any site.
The tension has reduced hopes that shared regional interests - topped by Afghanistan and Iraq - could draw the United States and Iran into the most productive dialogue since relations ended after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Instead, many Iranian leaders and opinion-shapers have revived the bitterness that followed President Bush's "axis of evil" label last year. They see Washington directing the international pressure to clarify Iran's nuclear objectives and capabilities - though the European Union and others also fully support unrestricted U.N. inspections of nuclear sites.
"It's a classic case of two sides of the same coin," said Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a Tehran-based political analyst. "The United States sees big worries. The Iranians say they are being unfairly bullied."
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - the pinnacle of power in Iran - claims the United States wants to cripple Iran's economic potential by blocking nuclear development. It's one of the few messages that unite feuding reformers and conservatives.
"There is the right for all countries to have the peaceful use of nuclear technology," an Iranian atomic scientist, Mohammad Kazem Marashi, told a gathering of Tehran University students and professors. "Every time someone mentions nuclear power all they can think of is bombs."
Weapons are clearly on the minds of Washington and some allies.
The White House fears a chilling scenario: Iran could develop nuclear warheads for its Shahab-3 missiles, which could reach as far as Israel. That could touch off a regional arms race or an Israeli pre-emptive strike - as in 1981 when Israeli warplanes hit an Iraqi nuclear reactor.
Iran insists it has nothing to hide and wants nuclear plants for research and power - looking decades ahead to when its oil reserves dwindle.
But there is resistance to the U.N. demands that Iran allow international inspections. The Iranian leadership wants assurances that the nuclear reviews won't turn into spying, with inspectors combing ministries and offices.
That's as far as the objections go for the moment. Iran does not want an impasse that ends up in the U.N. Security Council, which could lead to international sanctions and a new host of problems for the ruling theocracy.
"Every way you look at it, the stakes are very high and getting higher," said Jonathan Stevensen, a regional analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
It's also thrown obstacles into what could have been a rare patch of common ground between Iran and the United States.
Iran sits between two of Washington's biggest burdens: Afghanistan and Iraq. And Iran shares the West's immediate goals in those countries.
A modernized Afghanistan would open important new commercial routes for Iran. A stabilized Iraq could boost Iran's regional power as the ally of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority.
Iranian and American envoys have taken part in Afghan meetings. Iran is expected to attend an Iraq donors' conference in Spain later this month.
But - for the moment - much of the diplomatic energy is being diverted to the nuclear dispute.
The United States seeks to keep a united front with European allies, although some have said Iran should be allowed to pursue nuclear power if inspections are thorough.
Iran, meanwhile, must deal with internal quarrels on how far to push nuclear development.
A Russian-built reactor could go into service as early as 2005, and Iran says it will continue to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Highly enriched uranium is needed for nuclear weapons and lower grades are used in power plants and research.
Some hard-line groups have openly urged Iran to develop nuclear weapons, citing neighboring Pakistan's nuclear program and the belief that Israel has nuclear warheads. Israel has never admitted to having a nuclear program.
In July, the conservative Students' Islamic Association urged Iran's government to "openly and seriously" develop nuclear arms as "deterrence against our enemies." Others have also insisted Iran should hold open the right to develop such weapons.
----
U.N. Nuclear Agency Chief to Visit Iran
Oct 13, 2003
(AP)
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_IRAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria -- The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency chief will visit Iran this week to help persuade Tehran to meet an Oct. 31 deadline to prove it is not producing atomic weapons, a diplomat said Monday.
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said only that Mohamed ElBaradei had received a formal invitation. But a Western diplomat close to the agency told The Associated Press that ElBaradei had accepted and would head to Tehran on Thursday.
The IAEA has been pressing Iran to prove it is not producing nuclear weapons as the United States suspects. Iran has protested the Oct. 31 deadline and said its nuclear program is to generate electricity as its oil reserves decline.
Failure to satisfy the IAEA could result in Iran's being referred to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions. The IAEA board of governors will meet on Nov. 20 to assess the Iranians' compliance.
Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bans the spread of nuclear weapons. Pierre Goldschmidt, an IAEA deputy director general, and another top agency official held two days of talks in Tehran earlier this month. An IAEA inspection team is also in Tehran to carry out routine inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities.
A senior Iranian official said earlier this month that the IAEA representatives had reached "total agreement" with Iran on measures to prove the country's nuclear program is peaceful.
Iran has agreed to provide the IAEA with a list of imported equipment it contends had been contaminated.
In recent weeks, Iran has twice confirmed that particles of weapons-grade uranium had been found in separate places in the country. The government said the particles came from imported nuclear equipment that had been contaminated.
----
Russia delays launch of Iran nuclear power plant: report
MOSCOW (AFP)
Oct 13, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031013115604.8t3jjrdm.html
Russia may delay the launch of the Bushehr nuclear power reactor in Iran by one year, the ITAR-TASS news agency quoted a senior Russian atomic energy official as saying Monday.
"The Russian-Iranian commission has developed a new time frame (for Bushehr's development) in which the launch of the first energy reactor has been moved from 2004 to 2005," the unnamed ministry official was quoted as saying.
The official added that the Russia and Iran would agree on a firm date for the Bushehr project's launch in future negotiations.
Russia is building the Islamic state's first nuclear power reactor, but says it will not begin delivering nuclear fuel needed to operate the plant until Tehran signs a deal pledging to return the spent material to Russia.
Under pressure from the United States and Israel -- which fear that Iran is developing nuclear weapons -- Russia has made the return of the spent fuel a key condition for concluding the 800 million dollar (715 million euro) project.
----
EU Accuses Iran of Torture and Liberties Abuses
Mon Oct 13, 2003
(Reuters)
By Sebastian Alison
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=574&ncid=721&e=4&u=/nm/20031013/wl_nm/rights_eu_iran_dc
LUXEMBOURG - The European Union accused Iran Monday of torture and a catalog of civil liberties abuses, but foreign ministers said they wanted to maintain a dialogue on human rights.
For that reason, the 15-nation EU stopped just short of agreeing to table a resolution condemning Iran at the United Nations, saying instead it would "convey its serious concern."
"The Council continues to be seriously concerned about executions being carried out in Iran in apparent absence of respect for internationally recognized safeguards," the EU said in a statement on an Iran-EU human rights dialogue last week.
"The Council is equally concerned by the continued use of torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment in Iran," it added.
The statement highlighted public executions and amputations as well as shortcomings in freedom of opinion and expression, women's rights, religious freedom, and discrimination against women and girls.
It drew special attention to the case of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian citizen of Iranian descent whose death in custody in June, from a blow to the head, seriously damaged relations between Ottawa and Tehran.
A member of Iran's intelligence services is currently on trial for her murder, a charge he denies.
Kazemi's family is to be represented in Iranian courts by human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. The EU congratulated Ebadi in its statement as an "eminent Iranian lawyer and human rights defender."
While welcoming the dialogue and looking forward to the next round of talks on human rights, to be held in Tehran, the EU said improvements on the ground were needed if talks were to continue.
"As the Council has recalled on previous occasions, this dialogue is an acceptable option only if sufficient progress is achieved and reflected on the ground," the statement said.
The EU is fully backing demands by the U.N. nuclear watchdog that Iran produce proof before the end of this month that it is not secretly working to develop nuclear weapons under cover of its bigger than previously disclosed civilian nuclear program.
"The Council considered that the Iranian nuclear program remains an issue of grave concern...," the statement said, reaffirming that the entire relationship would be reviewed in the light of Tehran's compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency deadline.
--------
Iran Said to Hide Nuclear Site as UN Deadline Nears
October 13, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear-opposition.html
TEHRAN/VIENNA (Reuters) - An Iranian opposition group with a proven track record said Monday Iran was hiding another atomic facility, just two weeks before a U.N. deadline for Tehran to come clean about its nuclear ambitions.
The Oct. 31 deadline, set by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency in a tough resolution last month, requires Tehran to prove it has no secret weapons program as Washington alleges, or face possible U.N. Security Council sanctions.
``We have information about another secret nuclear facility in Iran,'' an official from the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an exiled opposition group, told Reuters in Vienna. He said the facility has been hidden from IAEA inspectors.
He gave no details about the site, but said the NCRI would provide full details Tuesday.
Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and did not comment on the fresh allegations.
But separately, Iran said IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei would visit Tehran for talks Thursday.
In August 2002, the NCRI broke the news of two undeclared nuclear sites in Iran -- a massive uranium-enrichment complex at Natanz and a heavy-water production facility at Arak.
Tehran later declared these facilities to the IAEA, which has since placed surveillance cameras at Natanz.
In an e-mailed statement, the NCRI also said it would provide information on Iran's use of foreign technology in its atomic program and details about the Kalaye Electric Co., where U.N. inspectors found traces of weapons-grade uranium.
OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS
U.N. inspectors arrived in Iran two weeks ago and President Mohammad Khatami has said Tehran would provide all cooperation needed to prove its nuclear aims are limited to generating electricity and not making a nuclear bomb, as Washington claims.
A spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organization told Reuters ElBaradei would spend two or three days in Iran. The IAEA confirmed that ElBaradei had accepted the invitation and said he would be accompanied by senior IAEA officials.
IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the purpose of the visit was for Iran to ``provide the IAEA ... with all the remaining information required to clarify important questions that are still outstanding about Iran's nuclear programs.''
``In terms of inspections, so far, we have been allowed to visit those sites to which we have requested access,'' ElBaradei said in e-mailed comments to Reuters Monday.
But he added that ``no later than October 31 Iran must provide full and complete information on their nuclear program. This task is certainly doable in this timeframe and really shouldn't take more than a week or two.''
The IAEA declined comment on the latest NCRI allegation but said it would closely study any information the exiles released.
The NCRI is a coalition of exiled opposition groups and sees itself as a potential replacement for Islamic rule in Iran. But the State Department lists the NCRI and its armed wing, the People's Mujahideen, as a terrorist organization.
Tehran denies it secretly enriched uranium and blamed the traces found on contaminated machinery purchased abroad in the 1980s, an explanation that has met with widespread skepticism.
Russia, which Washington says is helping Iran develop the capacity to build atomic weapons by building a nuclear reactor at Bushehr, said Iran understands it must come clean.
``Iran's even greater understanding of the need for transparency in its nuclear program has become clear,'' First Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov was quoted by Russian agencies as saying after weekend talks in Tehran.
``Tehran announced that it was ready to answer any questions that the IAEA might have,'' he added.
-------- israel
Iran air-strike plan seen as bluff
October 13, 2003
By Abraham Rabinovich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031013-121441-2893r.htm
JERUSALEM - Reports that Israel is preparing for pre-emptive air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities and is now able to fire nuclear missiles from submarines were seen as reflecting deep anxiety in Israel for Tehran's nuclear program.
Israeli newspapers said officials appear to have leaked the reports in an attempt to focus the attention of the international community on the dangers of Iranian nuclear weapons development.
The German magazine Der Spiegel reported Saturday that Israel's Mossad intelligence agency had prepared detailed plans for attacking six nuclear facilities in Iran.
Any attack, according to the report, would be carried out by the Israeli air force, which in 1981 destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear facility just before it was to go on line. Der Spiegel quoted an Israeli pilot as saying such an attack would be "complex, yet manageable."
Simultaneously, the Los Angeles Times, quoting Israeli and American officials, reported that Israel has modified nuclear warheads to fit U.S.-made Harpoon missiles aboard its submarines. This would give Israel a second-strike capability that could respond even if the country's land facilities were obliterated.
Israeli officials denied the Los Angeles Times report yesterday, and nuclear experts expressed deep skepticism that it would even be possible to modify a Harpoon missile for a nuclear attack.
"Anyone with even the slightest understanding of missiles knows that the Harpoon can never be used to carry nuclear warheads," former Deputy Defense Minister Efraim Sneh told Army Radio.
"Not even [Israel´s] extraordinarily talented engineers and its sophisticated defense industries can transform the Harpoon into a missile capable of doing this. It's simply impossible."
Ted Hooton, editor of Jane's Naval Weapon Systems in London, told the Associated Press that the weight of a nuclear payload would put the Harpoon out of balance, limiting its range and accuracy.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has demanded that Tehran open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the end of the month and make them available for spot checks. Three of Iran's nuclear sites have never been inspected.
It was widely assumed in Israel that the stories were initiated by the Mossad as part of a campaign to keep the Iranian nuclear issue high on the international agenda.
"Heading off Iran's attempt to attain nuclear capability is one of the Mossad's main missions," wrote analyst Aluf Benn in the Ha'aretz newspaper yesterday, "and the foreign media is one of the most important instruments utilized in this effort."
Adding substance to this analysis was a report in the daily Ma'ariv yesterday that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has ordered the Mossad to devote most of its efforts to uncovering information about Iran's nuclear program.
"Iran constitutes the biggest danger to Israel," Mr. Sharon said, according to the newspaper. "We are coordinated on this with the U.S. down to the last detail."
A former head of the Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, told Israel Radio that Iran is a threat because "it is ruled by clerics who act according to the word of God, not according to rational considerations." Iranian leaders have frequently called for Israel's destruction.
One of the principal reasons Israel acquired F-16 aircraft from the United States was that its range permits it to reach Iran, some 800 miles from Israel's borders. Iran has warned that Israel would pay a very heavy price for any attack.
-------- korea
Russia, China seek to restart N Korea nuclear talks
MOSCOW (AFP)
Oct 13, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031013094900.5d6ibjv6.html
Top negotiators from China and Russia met in Moscow Monday to discuss how to persuade North Korea to resume nuclear talks with its arch-foe the United States, local media reported.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who flew into the Russian capital on Sunday, began consulations with his Russian counterpart Alexander Losyukov, the Interfax news agency reported, citing diplomatic sources.
"So far, Pyongyang says there is no point in carrying on the (negotiating) process and does not want to. We hope this attitude will eventually be reconsidered. Any type of negotiation is better than war," Losyukov told Interfax.
Wang and Losyukov were the senior Chinese and Russian delegates to six-party talks on the issue in Beijing in August.
In a telephone conversation on the eve of Wang's trip, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing agreed six-way talks were an important step toward the peaceful resolution of the issue through dialogue, Chinese state news agency Xinhua said.
China's ambassador to the United Nations said Friday that December could be a good time for a new round of talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons drive.
North Korea had thrown doubt on the likelihood of more talks when earlier this month it rejected Japan's further involvement in the six country negotiations.
The first round of talks in Beijing in August -- involving the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States -- ended inconclusively.
North Korea expressed no interest in continuing the dialogue without US concessions, which Washington rejected.
In addition to rejecting Japanese involvement this week, North Korea has raised the stakes by claiming it has completed the reprocessing of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, which would yield enough plutonium for six nuclear weapons, and suggesting it was building new weapons.
The North also claimed it was building two nuclear reactors which were part of a 1994 agreement with the United States. The accord was frozen because of North Korea's renewed efforts to acquire a nuclear arsenal.
Wang is expected to remain in Russia until Tuesday, according to Xinhua.
----
N. Korea says pact is key to standoff
Mon, Oct. 13, 2003
By John Zarocostas
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://washingtontimes.com/world/20031013-121423-7389r.htm
GENEVA - North Korean demands for a nonaggression pact with the United States are the key to any resolution of the nuclear standoff between Pyongyang and Washington, North Korean diplomats say.
"A nonaggression pact is the litmus paper for a settlement," said a North Korean diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The United States, while saying it has no plans to attack North Korea, has been unwilling to negotiate a formal agreement to that effect. "That's not in the cards," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said last week.
However Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Friday that the Bush administration has "some ideas with respect to security assurances that we will be presenting in due course."
The North Korean official also said during a visit to Geneva late last week that the United States had been unwilling to negotiate seriously during six-way talks in Beijing, and said the Bush administration had failed to respond to Pyongyang's proposals.
Washington "should respond to the constructive proposals" made by North Korea during the Beijing talks in late August, the official said.
Asked Friday about the prospects for another round of talks, Mr. Powell said the North Koreans were reported to be considering a new round of talks in December but nothing has been scheduled.
"We are in contact with our colleagues. We are also in contact with the North Koreans through different channels," he said.
A senior diplomat from a major power familiar with the six-way talks in August - which involved the United States, China, Russia, Japan, North and South Korea - said Washington had agreed in those talks to provide "political assurances" to Pyongyang but not legally binding ones.
On Oct. 7, the North's official KCNA news agency said the existing security assurances from the United States "are nothing but a blank sheet of paper, which can never give any legal guarantee that the Bush administration will not attack [North Korea]."
Threats by the Communist regime of Kim Jong-il to conduct a nuclear-weapons test pose a serious threat to global security, say senior diplomats and experts.
"We have got a precarious situation in northeast Asia because of North Korea," said Patricia Lewis, director of the Geneva- based U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research.
She said that if North Korea has reprocessed as much plutonium as it claims, "we have a situation far and beyond" their withdrawal earlier this year from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
"Are they going to test a nuclear weapon? That's our biggest fear, because that will spell disaster for the region and international security," she said.
The assessment of some disarmament diplomats is that North Korea will conduct a nuclear test if the standoff continues, prompting fears that other states such as India and Pakistan could use that as an excuse to resume nuclear testing of their own.
If North Korea tests, Mrs. Lewis said, it will mean they have the bomb, and therefore no more negotiations on the possibility they are bluffing.
A Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, "North Korea keeps on upping the ante. But I'm not sure America would blink."
A diplomat close to both Washington and Pyongyang, who also declined to be identified, said: "I don't think the North Koreans realize this is a different [U.S.] government to the previous one.
"They need to be aware this is a very ideological administration. One cannot rule it out that in the end [the United States] might bomb them."
So far, South Korea and Japan have discouraged the United States from such action, the diplomat said.
On July 31, John Bolton, undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs, said in Seoul:
"Some have speculated that the U.S. is resigned to nuclear weapons on the peninsula, and we will simply have to live with nuclear weapons in the hands of a tyrannical dictator who has threatened to export them. Nothing could be further from the truth."
The complete, verifiable and irreversible elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons program through diplomacy remains a top priority of the administration, he said.
-------- terrorism
Experts fear terrorist N-bomb
Sunday, October 12, 2003
(Reuters)
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/10/12/nuclear.fears.reut/
STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- International nuclear experts are quietly confronting the most terrifying scenario of all -- what to do if terrorists manage to build and detonate a nuclear fission bomb, a diplomat and senior nuclear scientist said.
The diplomat, who is also close to the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), told reporters a team of ICRP experts from around the world had met this weekend in Stockholm to discuss emergency responses should this scenario become a reality.
Asked what was the worst-case realistic scenario for an act of nuclear terror, the diplomat said: "A very badly done, but done nuclear weapon."
After September 11, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned states must tighten up security of radioactive sources to prevent terrorists getting hold of them to make a "dirty bomb" -- when a conventional explosive like dynamite is used to disperse radioactive material.
The IAEA has always said the possibility of terrorists making nuclear fission devices was very low because of the difficulty of acquiring bomb-grade uranium or plutonium and the technical sophistication needed to construct a fission bomb.
"The biggest hurdle in making nuclear weapons is getting weapons-grade material," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
But the diplomat, who is also a nuclear scientist, suggested that it was not so hard: "Do you really believe it's difficult?"
As for the technical difficulties, he said: "I know that to do a bad nuclear weapon, not one that would destroy a whole city but just to make an explosion, is not so difficult." 'Just a few kilos'
Although it would take 25 to 35 kilograms (55 to 80 pounds) of highly enriched uranium (HEU) to make a conventional nuclear bomb, the diplomat said in Stockholm that it would be possible to make a less efficient bomb with "just a few kilos."
"The efficiency of the explosion will be bad (but) you will get a chain reaction," he said, adding there would probably be no mushroom cloud, the trademark of a sophisticated fission bomb.
In the simplest terms, the chain reaction in a classic atomic bomb is triggered when a high explosive like TNT is detonated and compresses the highly unstable bomb-grade material into such a dense mass that it sparks a fission explosion.
Without giving details, the diplomat said a crude fission device could cause significant damage -- in contrast to the kind of dirty bomb that has been widely discussed in the media, aimed more at causing panic than physical harm and destruction.
In December 1994, Czech police seized 2.72 kg of HEU from the back seat of a parked car in Prague, the largest ever seizure of bomb-grade nuclear material.
Shifting to the topic of dirty bombs, the diplomat said underground railway systems could be targets. He said highly radioactive caesium-137 powder, found in many hospitals, would be the likely material of choice.
"When the train is coming it is like a piston. You just open the canister and ... after two or three hours you'll have caesium all over the tube," the diplomat said.
"Nothing will (probably) happen from the health point of view but people will be so afraid that no one will use it," he said. "I know the London Underground has a working party looking at this."
Several dirty bomb simulation studies have concluded that an attack with caesium would result in diluted, low-level exposure.
But in 1987, a single canister of it was found in a Brazil junkyard and caused a serious radiation contamination disaster. A total of 249 people were exposed, 10 were seriously injured and four died due to heavy exposure.
There has never been a dirty bomb attack, but the diplomat said he assumed it was only a matter of time before it happened.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- missouri
Contamination at old nuclear plant results in legal melee
The Associated Press
Monday, October 13, 2003
http://www.semissourian.com/story.html$rec=122068
HEMATITE, Mo. -- Over decades, a string of companies made nuclear fuel rods at a plant in Jefferson County. Since the plant closed two years ago, the current and past owners of the plant have been pointing fingers at each other, claiming the others are responsible for cleaning up the contamination left behind.
The current owners, Westinghouse Electric Co. LLC, and former owners Mallinckrodt and United Nuclear Corp. of Waterford Corp. have all made claims in federal court that the other party, and in some cases the federal government, is liable for the contamination at the plant in Hematite, 35 miles southwest of St. Louis.
All parties claim they are not to blame.
Joseph Bindbeutel, chief counsel for the Missouri attorney general's environmental division, expects a legal melee to figure out who is at fault.
"Everybody's going to claim every defense possible under the sun," Bindbeutel said. "They will bring other potentially responsible parties into the litigation. We're going to go through the whole nine yards."
From 1956 to 2001, the plant turned uranium into fuel rods under a parade of owners. The first was Mallinckrodt, which built the plant in 1956 and ran it until May 1961.
After that, United Nuclear owned and operated it until 1971. Combustion Engineering Inc. bought the plant in 1974 and ran it until April 2000, when Westinghouse purchased the nuclear operations of Combustion Engineering's parent company, ABB Ltd.
Westinghouse finally closed the plant in June 2001, days after the purchase was finalized.
60 pounds of uranium
Last month, the state of Missouri got involved by filing a federal lawsuit in St. Louis seeking damages from the companies and the federal government.
The state's lawsuit claims radioactive material -- including nearly 60 pounds of potentially dangerous radioactive uranium-235 -- was dumped in 40 unlined pits from the late 1950s through the early 1960s.
The threat to humans was not found until December 2001, when tests found trichloroethylene -- a cancer-causing chemical used as a solvent -- in the first of eight private wells used for drinking water.
In response, Westinghouse supplied neighbors with bottled water and filtration systems. It has spent more than $2 million to connect about 25 families to a public water system, the company says.
But the company thinks the federal government and former owners are responsible. Kevin Hayes, an environmental manager for Westinghouse, said the government is responsible because the plant made fuel rods for the military and the Atomic Energy Commission for about two decades, ending in the mid-1970s.
Hematite residents are also looking for someone to blame. Several have filed lawsuits saying the companies fouled their land and water while failing to inform them.
"It's something that's been neglected for a long time, and now I don't think they know how to handle it," said Clarissa Eaton, who has filed a lawsuit.
"They kept playing hot potato. Someone would move in and sell the stuff and make a lot of money. Well, the music stopped, and Westinghouse ended up with the hot potato."
-------- south carolina
Community's confidence in SRS alleviates some security concerns
October 13, 2003
Associated Press
http://www.accessnorthga.com/news/ap_newfullstory.asp?ID=21977
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/7000541.htm
AIKEN, S.C. - Just a few miles from a sprawling gated government facility where some of the worlds most powerful and deadly material is being stored, 70-year-old Rabun Cowart buys fresh peanuts from the open-air farmers market.
Cowart is distrustful of the federal government and doesnt think the public knows everything it should about the Savannah River Site. One thing hes not worried about, though, is possible terrorist activity at the former nuclear weapons complex.
Nah, shoot no, Cowart said when asked whether hes scared or worried about living so close to the site, where more than 12 tons of highly radioactive material recently was shipped from a facility in Colorado. That dont ever cross my mind.
Many residents in the small, rural towns surrounding SRS feel the same way about their security, but the potential for terrorist attack remains a big concern at the site, said U.S. Department of Energy spokesman Bill Taylor.
Area emergency officials and law enforcement say they have a great working relationship with staff at the site, talking sometimes daily.
I feel like the folks out at the Savannah River Site do an excellent job. I feel like the security is good, said Aiken County director of emergency services Richard Powell, who has been in the area for 50 years and director for 18. And I was always fairly comfortable with their ability to handle whatever came up. Powell received hazardous material training at the site, donning an impermeable, insulated suit with rubber gloves, and he said other emergency workers have received training there, an aspect of the facilitys outreach to the community.
But not all of the outreach at SRS is official. Much of it is personal, which adds to the communitys safety assurance.
I think all of us would have some ties out there, as far as having a neighbor, a friend or a relative who has worked or been involved with the Savannah River Site, Powell said. I think that gives us even more confidence.
Cowart, who also has been in Aiken for more than 50 years, has a son-in-law who has worked at the plant for 25 years. The two have had disagreements over the site but Cowart concedes it has enabled his son-in-law to raise a family.
It provides good jobs for some, he said. Thats the good side of it, I guess.
SRS has long been one the states biggest employers with a work force of 25,000 during its heyday, down to about 13,400 now.
The reliance on SRS for jobs and the driving force behind the local economy could make it easier for some residents to overlook potential health and security concerns at the site, said University of South Carolina economics professor Don Schunk. It really does sort of identify that community, he said.
Ask Aiken residents Joel Johnson and Michael Priester about SRS safety and the two get into a 20-minute exchange, as emotions run high.
Priester, 47, who has five children, said he is worried about his children growing up near the facility and wouldnt let them work there. Savannah River Site poses a threat, he said. South Carolina needs more plutonium like I need three heads.
His buddy Johnson said theres not much residents can do now because SRS has been a mainstay in the area for so long.
If its not here, its going to be somewhere else, he said. I dont see any threat with it.
Taylor said the facility has a 900-member security team run by private contractor Wackenhut Services Inc.
They have a variety of levels of security they provide. The visible ones are people who man our barricades, he said. We also have people who guard access to areas ... where special nuclear materials are stored.
Those personnel would be roving and walking posts watching for anything unusual, Taylor said.
We dont have a person guarding every foot of our 310-mile perimeter, but we do have what we feel is appropriate security in the areas where its needed, he said.
The site might be vulnerable because of thick vegetation that could shield intruders from detection, said Tom Clements of Greenpeace International.
Any time there is a large stockpile of plutonium accumulated at one spot, a security concern is present, he said. Security threats can come from offsite or from individuals on staff who have nefarious goals in mind. Insiders can help with attacks or divert or steal material.
The SRS security system, consisting of alarms, high fences, cameras and two helicopters has been tested on at least an annual basis in war game situations to find weaknesses, Taylor said. Some guards are considered paramilitary, carrying automatic weapons and staying in top physical condition.
Its probably not impossible to get on this site undetected, but if you get near the areas where the highest level of security are, then, yes, we expect any intruder is going to be detected, he said. Weve increased a lot since 9-11, but we really havent reinvented the wheel because most of these systems were in place.
-------- us politics
'True Patriot' would restore rights
By CHARLES LEVENDOSKY
Casper Star-Tribune / Billings (Montana) Gazette
October 13, 2003
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2003/10/13/build/opinion/guest.inc
The backlash against the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 is picking up speed and snap.
On Sept. 24, Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul introduced the Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act (HR3171) to repeal the most controversial sections of the Patriot Act as well as some of the more egregious actions taken by the Department of Justice.
When introducing the True Patriot Act, Kucinich told members of the House: "Twenty-four months after the Sept. 11th attacks, this nation has undergone a dramatic political change, leading to an unprecedented assault on the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights." Diverse supporters
The act already has 20 other cosponsors, at this point all Democrats, but as the word gets out concerning key elements of this bill, expect conservatives, moderates and liberals to push for its passage.
The Kucinich-Paul bill has already garnered the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), American Muslim Voice, Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and Religious Action Center of Reformed Judaism.
The True Patriot Act heralds its intent by quoting Benjamin Franklin's famous statement: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty or Safety."
The act would make 11 sections of the Patriot Act null and void 90 days after the bill is enacted. Under the language of the bill, the president can request Congress to hold hearings to determine whether a particular section should be removed from the repeal list before the end of the 90-day period. Congress may or may not honor that request.
The True Patriot Act would repeal Section 213 of the Patriot Act, which authorized property to be searched and seized in secret by government law enforcement officials, without notifying the subject of a warrant.
The act would repeal Section 214 and Section 216, relating to the use of pen registers for foreign intelligence purposes and criminal cases. Pen registers record all phone numbers dialed from a person's telephone.
It would repeal Section 215, which authorized searches of library, bookstore, medical, financial, religious and travel records without a judicial warrant. Probable cause
The True Patriot Act would repeal the broader application of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized by the Patriot Act, Section 218. This section of the Patriot Act, in essence, gutted the Fourth Amendment's requirement for probable cause to obtain a search warrant in criminal investigations.
The act would repeal Sections 411 and 412 of the Patriot Act, which granted new grounds for the deportation and/or the mandatory detention of aliens.
The act also would repeal Section 505 of the Patriot Act which authorized FBI field agents to issue national security letters to obtain financial, bank and credit records of individuals - all without a court order or judicial oversight.
And the True Patriot Act would repeal Sections 507 and 508 of the Patriot Act relating to the seizure of educational records and the disclosure of individually identifiable information under the National Education Statistics Act of 1994.
Finally, in regard to the Patriot Act, the True Patriot Act would repeal Section 802, which defined the new crime of "domestic terrorism." The definition is so broad that political protests that unaccountably become violent could be classified as domestic terrorism.
The Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act also would repeal sections of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, so that the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security are no longer exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The True Patriot Act goes further - to roll back policing powers that the federal government took upon itself since Sept. 11 without congressional authorization.
For example, the federal government would no longer be able to monitor conversations between attorneys and their clients, violating the fundamental right of attorney-client privilege.
The act would void U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's memorandum to all agencies of the federal government narrowing the scope of FOIA and the ability of citizens to obtain information about how their government is working.
The act reinstates tough guidelines instituted in 1989 by former Attorney General Dick Thornburg to rein in a runaway FBI, which had been conducting unlawful surveillance of protesters, peace demonstrators and religious groups. Spying on religious institutions - allowed by Ashcroft's rules - would be put under strict limits. Fundamental liberties at stake
The Patriot Act of 2001, a 342-page document, was passed without meaningful review. Many members of Congress hadn't read the bill; some still haven't.
The Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act would rectify the Patriot Act's serious shortcomings. And, if passed, the True Patriot Act would put this administration on notice that the American people will not barter away their fundamental liberties for so-called safety. Americans understand the risks involved in living with and for freedom - after all, our freedom was born in revolution.
Charles Levendosky, editorial page editor of the Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune, has a national reputation for Bill of Rights commentary. His e-mail is levendos@trib.com.
----
Impeachment is back
Andrew Bird,
The Arcata (California) Times-Standard
Monday, October 13, 2003
http://www.times-standard.com/Stories/0,1413,127~2896~1695452,00.html
ARCATA -- Impeachment is on the agenda again this week.
City Councilman Dave Meserve will ask the council at Wednesday's meeting to approve his resolution calling for the immediate impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney.
The vote in Arcata on Wednesday is likely to attract some national attention.
Last month the Santa Cruz City Council voted to send a letter asking the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the Bush administration.
Meserve's resolution, which he is sponsoring on behalf of Veterans for Peace, is somewhat stronger.
As written when presented at an Aug. 20 meeting, the resolution reads, "The City Council of the city of Arcata calls upon the United States House of Representatives to immediately impeach George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney."
The case for impeachment outlined in the resolution focuses on the war in Iraq and statements the president made in his State of the Union address that turned out to be false.
The City Council declined to take action at the Aug. 20 meeting, although Mayor Bob Ornelas said he would vote for the resolution.
To gauge support for the resolution, in early September Meserve and the Veterans for Peace held a town meeting, which was dominated by those who want to impeach the president.
Meserve said the resolution on Wednesday's agenda is identical to the one that came before the council in August.
He needs just one more vote to get it passed.
However, Meserve said on Friday he is willing to compromise if he can't get the third vote.
He said he would accept a letter similar to the one the Santa Cruz City Council sent last month.
The resolution comes back before the council as the White House is attempting to bolster support for its Iraq policy.
Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials have delivered speeches in the past week, as the president's poll numbers have slipped.
Meserve said the California recall election last week was a sign that voters are becoming more disenchanted with government -- and it's reflected in the president's drop in popularity.
Now the White House is facing an investigation by the Justice Department to determine who leaked information that revealed the identity of a CIA agent.
Meserve said he will bring up that investigation at Wednesday's meeting to bolster the case for supporting his resolution.
Mike Harvey, chairman of the Humboldt County Republican Party, said he doesn't care what the Arcata City Council does Wednesday.
"I've said everything I'm going to say about it," Harvey said.
Harvey spoke against the resolution at the town meeting last month, but said he doesn't plan to be at Wednesday's City Council meeting.
"I've got better things to do with my time," he said.
The City Council meets in open session at 7 p.m. Wednesday at City Hall, 736 F St.
The resolution comes under Old Business and is item No. 7 on the agenda.
----
All the President's Votes?
A Quiet Revolution is Taking Place in US Politics. By the Time It's Over, the Integrity of Elections Will be in the Unchallenged, Unscrutinized Control of a Few Large - and Pro-Republican - Corporations.
by Andrew Gumbel
Monday, October 13, 2003
by the lndependent/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1013-01.htm
Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.
Corporate America is very close to running this country. The only thing that is stopping them from taking total control are the pesky voters. That's why there's such a drive to control the vote. What we're seeing is the corporatization of the last shred of democracy.
Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.
Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and launched internal investigations. Political analysts credited the upset - part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country - to a huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the race. They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of "angry white men" punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of the old confederate symbol from the state flag.
But something about these explanations did not make sense, and they have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary of state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election earlier this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white men; in fact, the only subgroup showing even a modest increase in turnout was black women.
There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage points higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the Democrat south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three months earlier.
Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except statistical anomalies worthy of further study. But in Georgia there was an extra reason to be suspicious. Last November, the state became the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54m (Ł33m) on a new system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of the republic. The machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable. With academic studies showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare.
In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up, causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards from the voting machines went missing, delaying certification of the results there for 10 days. In neighboring DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted for; they were later recovered from terminals that had supposedly broken down and been taken out of service.
It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have done was program the computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not.
Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top three computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their products to election officials around the country. Far from questioning the need for rigid trade secrecy and the absence of a paper record, secretaries of state and their technical advisers - anxious to banish memories of the hanging chad fiasco and other associated disasters in the 2000 presidential recount in Florida - have, for the most part, welcomed the touchscreen voting machines as a technological miracle solution.
Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire - all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party. Again, this was widely attributed to the campaigning efforts of President Bush and the demoralization of a Democratic Party too timid to speak out against the looming war in Iraq.
Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested. Another anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery?
Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to look into last November's election to see whether there was any chance the results might have been deliberately or accidentally manipulated. Their research proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful.
First, they wanted to know if the software had undergone adequate checking. Under state and federal law, all voting machinery and component parts must be certified before use in an election. So an Atlanta graphic designer called Denis Wright wrote to the secretary of state's office for a copy of the certification letter. Clifford Tatum, assistant director of legal affairs for the election division, wrote back: "We have determined that no records exist in the Secretary of State's office regarding a certification letter from the lab certifying the version of software used on Election Day." Mr Tatum said it was possible the relevant documents were with Gary Powell, an official at the Georgia Technology Authority, so campaigners wrote to him as well. Mr Powell responded he was "not sure what you mean by the words 'please provide written certification documents'".
"If the machines were not certified, then right there the election was illegal," Mr Wright says. The secretary of state's office has yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary. The investigating citizens then considered the nature of the software itself. Shortly after the election, a Diebold technician called Rob Behler came forward and reported that, when the machines were about to be shipped to Georgia polling stations in the summer of 2002, they performed so erratically that their software had to be amended with a last-minute "patch". Instead of being transmitted via disk - a potentially time-consuming process, especially since its author was in Canada, not Georgia - the patch was posted, along with the entire election software package, on an open-access FTP, or file transfer protocol site, on the internet.
That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most basic of security precautions, opening all sorts of possibilities for the introduction of rogue or malicious code. At the same time, however, it gave campaigners a golden opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own secrecy demands and see exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional teacher at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did a line-by-line review and found "enough to stand your hair on end".
"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the program was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."
Mostly, though, she was struck by the shoddiness of much of the programming. "I really expected to have some difficulty reviewing the source code because it would be at a higher level than I am accustomed to," she says. "In fact, a lot of this stuff looked like the homework my first-year students might have turned in." Diebold had no specific comment on Ms Jekot's interpretations, offering only a blanket caution about the complexity of election systems "often not well understood by individuals with little real-world experience".
But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold software and find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered what they called "stunning flaws". These included putting the password in the source code, a basic security no-no; manipulating the voter smart-card function so one person could cast more than one vote; and other loopholes that could theoretically allow voters' ballot choices to be altered without their knowledge, either on the spot or by remote access.
Diebold issued a detailed response, saying that the Johns Hopkins report was riddled with false assumptions, inadequate information and "a multitude of false conclusions". Substantially similar findings, however, were made in a follow-up study on behalf of the state of Maryland, in which a group of computer security experts catalogued 328 software flaws, 26 of them critical, putting the whole system "at high risk of compromise". "If these vulnerabilities are exploited, significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and availability of election results," their report says.
Ever since the Johns Hopkins study, Diebold has sought to explain away the open FTP file as an old, incomplete version of its election package. The claim cannot be independently verified, because of the trade-secrecy agreement, and not everyone is buying it. "It is documented throughout the code who changed what and when. We have the history of this program from 1996 to 2002," Ms Jekot says. "I have no doubt this is the software used in the elections." Diebold now says it has upgraded its encryption and password features - but only on its Maryland machines.
A key security question concerned compatibility with Microsoft Windows, and Ms Jekot says just three programmers, all of them senior Diebold executives, were involved in this aspect of the system. One of these, Diebold's vice-president of research and development, Talbot Iredale, wrote an e-mail in April 2002 - later obtained by the campaigners - making it clear that he wanted to shield the operating system from Wylie Labs, an independent testing agency involved in the early certification process.
The reason that emerges from the e-mail is that he wanted to make the software compatible with WinCE 3.0, an operating system used for handhelds and PDAs; in other words, a system that could be manipulated from a remote location. "We do not want Wyle [sic] reviewing and certifying the operating systems," the e-mail reads. "Therefore can we keep to a minimum the references to the WinCE 3.0 operating system."
In an earlier intercepted e-mail, this one from Ken Clark in Diebold's research and development department, the company explained upfront to another independent testing lab that the supposedly secure software system could be accessed without a password, and its contents easily changed using the Microsoft Access program Mr Clark says he had considered putting in a password requirement to stop dealers and customers doing "stupid things", but that the easy access had often "got people out of a bind". Astonishingly, the representative from the independent testing lab did not see anything wrong with this and granted certification to the part of the software program she was inspecting - a pattern of lackadaisical oversight that was replicated all the way to the top of the political chain of command in Georgia, and in many other parts of the country.
Diebold has not contested the authenticity of the e-mails, now openly accessible on the internet. However, Diebold did caution that, as the e-mails were taken from a Diebold Election systems website in March 2003 by an illegal hack, the nature of the information stolen could have been revised or manipulated.
There are two reasons why the United States is rushing to overhaul its voting systems. The first is the Florida débâcle in the Bush-Gore election; no state wants to be the center of that kind of attention again. And the second is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), signed by President Bush last October, which promises an unprecedented $3.9bn (Ł2.3bn) to the states to replace their old punchcard-and-lever machines. However, enthusiasm for the new technology seems to be motivated as much by a bureaucratic love of spending as by a love of democratic accountability. According to Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government and a specialist in voting systems, the shockingly high error rate of punchcard machines (3-5 per cent in Florida in 2000) has been known to people in the elections business for years. It was only after it became public knowledge in the last presidential election that anybody felt moved to do anything about it.
The problem is, computer touchscreen machines and other so-called DRE (direct recording electronic) systems are significantly less reliable than punchcards, irrespective of their vulnerability to interference. In a series of research papers for the Voting Technology Project, a joint venture of the prestigious Massachusetts and California Institutes of Technology, DREs were found to be among the worst performing systems. No method, the MIT/CalTech study conceded, worked more reliably than hand-counting paper ballots - an option that US electoral officials seem to consider hopelessly antiquated, or at least impractical in elections combining multiple local, state and national races for offices from President down to dogcatcher.
The clear disadvantages and dangers associated with DREs have not deterred state and county authorities from throwing themselves headlong into touchscreen technology. More than 40,000 machines made by Diebold alone are already in use in 37 states, and most are touchscreens. County after county is poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on computer voting before next spring's presidential primaries. "They say this is the direction they have to go in to have fair elections, but the rush to go towards computerization is very dubious," Dr Mercuri says. "One has to wonder why this is going on, because the way it is set up it takes away the checks and balances we have in a democratic society. That's the whole point of paper trails and recounts."
Anyone who has struggled with an interactive display in a museum knows how dodgy touchscreens can be. If they don't freeze, they easily become misaligned, which means they can record the wrong data. In Dallas, during early voting before last November's election, people found that no matter how often they tried to press a Democrat button, the Republican candidate's name would light up. After a court hearing, Diebold agreed to take down 18 machines with apparent misalignment problems. "And those were the ones where you could visually spot a problem," Dr Mercuri says. "What about what you don't see? Just because your vote shows up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it is registering inside the machine for the Democrats?"
Other problems have shown up periodically: machines that register zero votes, or machines that indicate voters coming to the polling station but not voting, even when a single race with just two candidates was on the ballot. Dr Mercuri was part of a lawsuit in Palm Beach County in which she and other plaintiffs tried to have a suspect Sequoia machine examined, only to run up against the brick wall of the trade-secret agreement. "It makes it really hard to show their product has been tampered with," she says, "if it's a felony to inspect it."
As for the possibilities of foul play, Dr Mercuri says they are virtually limitless. "There are literally hundreds of ways to do this," she says. "There are hundreds of ways to embed a rogue series of commands into the code and nobody would ever know because the nature of programming is so complex. The numbers would all tally perfectly." Tampering with an election could be something as simple as a "denial-of-service" attack, in which the machines simply stop working for an extended period, deterring voters faced with the prospect of long lines. Or it could be done with invasive computer codes known in the trade by such nicknames as "Trojan horses" or "Easter eggs". Detecting one of these, Dr Mercuri says, would be almost impossible unless the investigator knew in advance it was there and how to trigger it. Computer researcher Theresa Hommel, who is alarmed by touchscreen systems, has constructed a simulated voting machine in which the same candidate always wins, no matter what data you put in. She calls her model the Fraud-o-matic, and it is available online at www.wheresthepaper.org.
It is not just touchscreens which are at risk from error or malicious intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is vulnerable. An optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas, last November erroneously declared a landslide victory for the Republican candidate for county commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that the Democrat had in fact won. In Comal County, Texas, a computerized optical scan found that three different candidates had won their races with exactly 18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation, even though the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly suspicious. In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida - which had switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging chad furore - more than 100,000 votes were found to have gone "missing" on election day. The votes were reinstated, but the glitch was not adequately explained. One local official blamed it on a "minor software thing".
Most suspect of all was the governor's race in Alabama, where the incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared the winner. Sometime after midnight, when polling station observers and most staff had gone home, the probate judge responsible for elections in rural Baldwin County suddenly "discovered" that Mr Siegelman had been awarded 7,000 votes too many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand victory to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley. County officials talked vaguely of a computer tabulation error, or a lightning strike messing up the machines, but the real reason was never ascertained because the state's Republican attorney general refused to authorize a recount or any independent ballot inspection.
According to an analysis by James Gundlach, a sociology professor at Auburn University in Alabama, the result in Baldwin County was full of wild deviations from the statistical norms established both by this and preceding elections. And he adds: "There is simply no way that electronic vote counting can produce two sets of results without someone using computer programs in ways that were not intended. In other words, the fact that two sets of results were reported is sufficient evidence in and of itself that the vote tabulation process was compromised." Although talk of voting fraud quickly subsided, Alabama has now amended its election laws to make recounts mandatory in close races.
The possibility of flaws in the electoral process is not something that gets discussed much in the United States. The attitude seems to be: we are the greatest democracy in the world, so the system must be fair. That has certainly been the prevailing view in Georgia, where even leading Democrats - their prestige on the line for introducing touchscreen voting in the first place - have fought tooth-and-nail to defend the integrity of the system. In a phone interview, the head of the Georgia Technology Authority who brought Diebold machines to the state, Larry Singer, blamed the growing chorus of criticism on "fear of technology", despite the fact that many prominent critics are themselves computer scientists. He says: "Are these machines flawless? No. Would you have more confidence if they were completely flawless? Yes. Is there such a thing as a flawless system? No." Mr Singer, who left the GTA straight after the election and took a 50 per cent pay cut to work for Sun Microsystems, insists that voters are more likely to have their credit card information stolen by a busboy in a restaurant than to have their vote compromised by touchscreen technology.
Voting machines are sold in the United States in much the same way as other government contracts: through intensive lobbying, wining and dining. At a recent national conference of clerks, election officials and treasurers in Denver, attendees were treated to black-tie dinners and other perks, including free expensive briefcases stamped with Sequoia's company logo alongside the association's own symbol. Nobody in power seems to find this worrying, any more than they worried when Sequoia's southern regional sales manager, Phil Foster, was indicted in Louisiana a couple of years ago for "conspiracy to commit money laundering and malfeasance". The charges were dropped in exchange for his testimony against Louisiana's state commissioner of elections. Similarly, last year, the Arkansas secretary of state, Bill McCuen, pleaded guilty to taking bribes and kickbacks involving a precursor company to ES&S; the voting machine company executive who testified against him in exchange for immunity is now an ES&S vice-president.
If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years. The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns them?" As it is, fears that US democracy is being hijacked by corporate interests are being fueled by links between the big three and broader business interests, as well as extremist organizations. Two of the early backers of American Information Systems, a company later merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of the Chalcedon Foundation, an organization that espouses theocratic governance according to a literal reading of the Bible and advocates capital punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.
The chief executive of American Information Systems in the early Nineties was Chuck Hagel, who went on to run for elective office and became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected to the Senate from Nebraska, cheered on by the Omaha World-Herald newspaper which also happens to be a big investor in ES&S. In yet another clamorous conflict of interest, 80 per cent of Mr Hagel's winning votes - both in 1996 and again in 2002 - were counted, under the usual terms of confidentiality, by his own company.
In theory, the federal government should be monitoring the transition to computer technology and rooting out abuses. Under the Help America Vote Act, the Bush administration is supposed to establish a sizeable oversight committee, headed by two Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical panel to determine standards for new voting machinery. The four commission heads were supposed to have been in place by last February, but so far just one has been appointed. The technical panel also remains unconstituted, even though the new machines it is supposed to vet are already being sold in large quantities - a state of affairs Dr Mercuri denounces as "an abomination".
One of the conditions states have to fulfil to receive federal funding for the new voting machines, meanwhile, is a consolidation of voter rolls at state rather than county level. This provision sends a chill down the spine of anyone who has studied how Florida consolidated its own voter rolls just before the 2000 election, purging the names of tens of thousands of eligible voters, most of them African Americans and most of them Democrats, through misuse of an erroneous list of convicted felons commissioned by Katherine Harris, the secretary of state doubling as George Bush's Florida campaign manager. Despite a volley of lawsuits, the incorrect list was still in operation in last November's mid-terms, raising all sorts of questions about what other states might now do with their own voter rolls. It is not that the Act's consolidation provision is in itself evidence of a conspiracy to throw elections, but it does leave open that possibility.
Meanwhile, the administration has been pushing new voting technology of its own to help overseas citizens and military personnel, both natural Republican Party constituencies, to vote more easily over the internet. Internet voting is notoriously insecure and open to abuse by just about anyone with rudimentary hacking skills; just last January, an experiment in internet voting in Toronto was scuppered by a Slammer worm attack. Undeterred, the administration has gone ahead with its so-called SERVE project for overseas voting, via a private consortium made up of major defense contractors and a Saudi investment group. The contract for overseeing internet voting in the 2004 presidential election was recently awarded to Accenture, formerly part of the Arthur Andersen group (whose accountancy branch, a major campaign contributor to President Bush, imploded as a result of the Enron bankruptcy scandal).
Not everyone in the United States has fallen under the spell of the big computer voting companies, and there are signs of growing wariness. Oregon decided even before HAVA to conduct all its voting by mail. Wisconsin has decided it wants nothing to do with touchscreen machines without a verifiable paper trail, and New York is considering a similar injunction, at least for its state assembly races. In California, a Stanford computer science professor called David Dill is screaming from the rooftops on the need for a paper trail in his state, so far without result. And a New Jersey Congressman called Rush Holt has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, asking for much the same thing. Not everyone is heeding the warnings, though. In Ohio, publication of the letter from Diebold's chief executive promising to deliver the state to President Bush in 2004 has not deterred the secretary of state - a Republican - from putting Diebold on a list of preferred voting-machine vendors. Similarly, in Maryland, officials have not taken the recent state-sponsored study identifying hundreds of flaws in the Diebold software as any reason to change their plans to use Diebold machines in March's presidential primary.
The question is whether the country will come to its senses before elections start getting distorted or tampered with on such a scale that the system becomes unmanageable. The sheer volume of money offered under HAVA is unlikely to be forthcoming again in a hurry, so if things aren't done right now it is doubtful the system can be fixed again for a long time. "This is frightening, really frightening," says Dr Mercuri, and a growing number of reasonable people are starting to agree with her. One such is John Zogby, arguably the most reliable pollster in the United States, who has freely admitted he "blew" last November's elections and does not exclude the possibility that foul play was one of the factors knocking his calculations off course. "We're plowing into a brave new world here," he says, "where there are so many variables aside from out-and-out corruption that can change elections, especially in situations where the races are close. We have machines that break down, or are tampered with, or are simply misunderstood. It's a cause for great concern."
Roxanne Jekot, who has put much of her professional and personal life on hold to work on the issue full time, puts it even more strongly. "Corporate America is very close to running this country. The only thing that is stopping them from taking total control are the pesky voters. That's why there's such a drive to control the vote. What we're seeing is the corporatization of the last shred of democracy.
"I feel that unless we stop it here and stop it now," she says, "my kids won't grow up to have a right to vote at all."
----
Senators Say Bush Needs to Take Control
Iraq Policy Disputes Cited
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17479-2003Oct12.html
A key Republican lawmaker urged President Bush yesterday to take control of his fractious foreign policy team and plans for Iraq's reconstruction, as one Democrat deepened his criticism of the administration's arguments for going to war.
"The president has to be president," Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "That means the president over the vice president, and over these secretaries" of state and defense. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice "cannot carry that burden alone."
In the first week of the administration's public relations campaign to explain its Iraq policy and highlight its achievements, Lugar noted that Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Rice had given speeches whose tone "was distinctly different" and that senators were rightly concerned about "the strength, the coherence of our policies."
Lugar, a moderate Republican, predicted Iraq's reconstruction would cost $50 billion more than the $87 billion the White House is seeking from Congress for military and reconstruction efforts, and that the duration of U.S. involvement in Iraq "may be comparable to Bosnia," where U.S. and European peacekeepers are nearing their eighth year of deployment.
He and the ranking member of the committee, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), predicted narrow approval of the $87 billion Iraq reconstruction request. But both said the administration had to improve its plan for turning over power to Iraqis, and Lugar added that it should make "a genuine attempt" to persuade competent allies, including "Germany, France, Russia and China" to join the peacekeeping effort.
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said yesterday he was "inclined not to" vote for the $87 billion request and criticized Bush for "haphazard, shotgun, shoot-from-the-hip diplomacy" on Iraq.
Divisions over Iraq policy reflect larger ideological differences within Bush's national security team. Cheney and Rumsfeld have pursued more hard-line, unilateralist approaches to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea; Powell favors dialogue and greater efforts to include allies.
Last week, with rising concerns about the direction and public perception of the Iraq reconstruction project, the White House put Rice in charge of the effort, possibly at the expense of the Defense Department, which had been running the show.
Biden, responding to news that Bush had asked Rice to unify the differing views on Iraq, said Bush had to "take charge, settle this dispute. Let your secretary of defense, state, and your vice president know, 'This is my policy. Any one of you that divert from the policy is off the team.' "
Kerry, who voted for the congressional war resolution before the invasion, stepped up his attacks on Bush's decision to go to war in the first place. He said some of the administration's pre-war assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "misled America."
"They told us there were aerial vehicles" to deliver Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "They weren't there," he said, speaking on ABC's "This Week." "They told us they had a 45-minute deployment period for weapons of mass destruction. That wasn't true. They told us they were on the road to nuclear weaponization. That was not true."
"He ought to apologize to the people of this country because what they've done now is launch a PR campaign instead of a real policy," Kerry said. "We need to go to the United Nations more humbly, more directly, more honestly, solicit help in a way that brings the United Nations into this effort, or you are going to continue to see bomb after bomb after bomb."
Kerry also derided the administration's effort to portray current efforts in Iraq as international in nature. "We have a fraudulent coalition, and I use the word 'fraud.' It's a few people here, a few people there. It's basically the British, and, most fundamentally, the United States of America."
"This administration has alienated people all across this planet," he said. "They have, in fact, made America less safe."
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
U.S. probing arms shipped to Iraq
Federal agents find evidence of illegal components
EXCLUSIVE
By Pete Williams
NBC NEWS,
Oct. 13, 2003
http://www.msnbc.com/news/979931.asp?0cv=CA01
WASHINGTON - Federal agents have turned up evidence that U.S. companies may have illegally sold sensitive equipment that wound up helping Iraq's military, said U.S. officials, who told NBC News that criminal charges were likely.
IN A SIX-MONTH investigation, teams of immigration agents tracking what was left of Iraq's military have found signs not of Iraqi violations but of something entirely different - weapons components that appeared to have been made in the United States, which would be illegal to sell to Baghdad.
"We've gotten approximately 14 good leads on U.S. companies that may have been involved in illegal transactions of material that wound up in Iraq," Michael Garcia, director of the Homeland Security Department's new Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said in an interview.
Specialists said weapons smuggling was notoriously difficult to investigate because agents can seldom trace a sale all the way to the final buyer. It took three years, for example, to build a case against a California liquor dealer, Fadi Boutros, who was eventually convicted in 1999 of trying to buy military-grade night-vision goggles for Iraq.
In addition, arms shipments usually go through several countries before reaching their destination, complicating the paper trail for investigators. Since the United States launched its war to disarm Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in March, teams of U.S. inspectors - like the U.N. teams before them - have found no clear evidence to back U.S. and British claims Saddam had secret caches of weapons of mass destruction.
LEAVING A PAPER TRAIL
But Iraq appears to have offered huge sums of cash and circulated shopping lists seeking components of such weapons, especially missile guidance parts, giving ICE agents in Iraq a rare look at the end of the paper trail.
"Saddam had a dedicated shopping spree going on, in Eastern Europe primarily, to buy missile parts and other things that he wasn't permitted to get under the U.N. embargo," Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, said in an interview.
David Conboy, assistant director of strategic investigations for the immigration bureau, said the companies' motivation was simple.
"In all these cases, one of the common features is their greed, is their drive to make a dollar at the expense of the national security of the United States," Conboy said in an interview.
In a recent report, David Kay, head of a separate U.S.-led team that has been searching for evidence of Saddam's weapons in postwar Iraq, said he had found no stocks of such arms. But he, too, said there was "evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons" and other weapons of mass destruction.
The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Monday that it was imperative that U.N. inspectors return to Iraq to finish verifying whether it had such weapons before the war.
-------- business
Lockheed Martin Wins $812M Deal For Sea-Based Missile Defense
A missile is launched an Aegis guided missile ship
Oct 13, 2003
(AFP)
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/bmdo-03t.html
Moorestown - The U.S. Navy was awarded Friday an $812.5 million contract to Lockheed Martin for the continued development of the Missile Defense Agency's Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) capability.
Under the contract, Lockheed Martin is responsible for developing and fielding the sea-based element of the Ballistic Missile Defense System. The contract includes the development and integration of the Aegis Weapon System upgrades, Vertical Launching System upgrades, Command and Control System upgrades, Aegis BMD signal processor efforts, and Flight Test support including equipment, computer programs and system engineering required to accomplish the Aegis BMD mission.
The work will be performed in Moorestown, NJ, and Baltimore, MD, and is expected to be complete in 2006. The company anticipates approximately 50 - 65 new jobs will be created.
"The U.S. Navy and the Missile Defense Agency have set clear expectations for success of the sea-based missile defense program," said Fred P. Moosally, president of Lockheed Martin's Maritime Systems and Sensors unit. "The Lockheed Martin team understands that our customers are counting on us to deliver, and we will."
The Aegis BMD element of the nation's BMD System will provide the capability for Aegis-equipped cruisers to use hit-to-kill technology to intercept and destroy short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.
Additionally, designated Aegis-equipped destroyers will be modified to expand the ability of Aegis BMD to provide surveillance and tracking of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and work with other BMD System elements to provide advance warning for the defense of the nation, deployed U.S. forces and allies.
The Aegis Weapon System includes the most powerful and robust naval surface tactical radar in the world, SPY-1. Equally advanced and tightly integrated Weapon Control and Command and Control subsystems support it. When paired with the MK 41 Vertical Launching System, it is capable of delivering missiles for every mission and threat environment in naval warfare.
The system is currently deployed on 66 U.S. Navy Aegis-equipped ships on station around the globe, and 23 more ships are planned. Aegis is the primary naval weapon system for Japan, it is part of two European ship construction programs -- the Spanish F-100 and the Norwegian New Frigate -- and the Republic of Korea recently selected Aegis for its newest class of destroyers.
Headquartered in Bethesda, MD, Lockheed Martin employs about 125,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services.
-------- china
Chinese war games to face Taiwan again
October 13, 2003
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031013-121448-6037r.htm
China is set to hold large-scale military exercises aimed at stepping up pressure on Taiwan's government, U.S. officials said yesterday.
About 100,000 Chinese troops are expected to take part in the war games, to be held in China's Fujian province, facing the island of Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait.
"This is almost an annual event," said a senior U.S. defense official.
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it appears that the Chinese are trying this year to be more "open and visible" about the exercises.
"The feeling is that perhaps they are being more open in response to [Republic of China (Taiwan) President] Chen Shui-bian and his current statements that lean toward independence," the official said.
The official said U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Chinese may be conducting an "information operation" using the war games as a tool.
Mr. Chen said in a speech in Taiwan last week that "Taiwan is an independent, sovereign country" that "has long been neglected by the international community."
"We are prevented from entering the [United Nations], denied membership in the World Health Organization and constantly face the threat of a missile attack from China," he said.
Mr. Chen also wants to hold a vote on a new constitution that he said would "transform Taiwan into a normal, great country."
"We hope that by writing a new constitution, we can deepen the democratization of our constitutional system," Mr. Chen said Oct. 4.
The remarks drew a harsh rebuke from Beijing, which views the island as a breakaway province.
A Chinese government spokesman said Mr. Chen's comments had heightened tensions across the Taiwan Strait and were "extremely dangerous."
Chinese war games in 1996 triggered what became known as the Taiwan Strait crisis of that year. China test-fired short-range missiles north and south of Taiwan during the exercises, which were held around the time of upcoming Taiwanese elections.
The U.S. government responded by dispatching two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region.
Officials said the latest exercises will begin later this month.
The annual exercises are "always fairly large-scale" and the exact scenario is difficult to determine, the official said.
However, the official said, "They have all the appearance of focusing on a cross-Strait" conflict scenario.
Another U.S. official said the upcoming exercises are not unusual for the Chinese military. "The Chinese army does exercise a lot in the summer [and] in the fall," the official said.
A recent Pentagon report on China's military stated that Chinese war games "increasingly focus on the United States as an adversary and on preparing for combined arms and joint operations under more-realistic conditions.
"Over the past few years, Beijing's military training exercises have taken on an increasingly real-world focus, emphasizing rigorous practice and operational capabilities, and improving incrementally the military's actual ability to use force," the report said. "These actions are aimed not only at Taiwan, but also at increasing the risk to U.S. forces and to the United States itself in any future Taiwan contingency."
Singapore's Straits Times newspaper, which first reported the upcoming exercises, stated that the war games will practice surprise attacks on Taiwan. Several Chinese army groups and a missile unit will participate.
China's last major war games near Taiwan were in May last year and involved amphibious-assault operations, as well as aerial raids and other ground-forces maneuvers.
The State Department announced Tuesday that it had granted a transit visa to Mr. Chen to permit the leader to make stops in Alaska and New York next month as part of a visit to Panama.
-------- europe
EU sets out tough terms for aid to Iraq
By Mark Turner at the United Nations and Judy Dempsey in Luxembourg
October 13 2003
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480549018&p=1012571727102
The US and its allies were due on Tuesday to make a last-ditch effort to win a new United Nations resolution on Iraq designed to secure international backing for reconstruction efforts, as European Union ministers set out tough new terms for their help in the country.
The draft text, to be proposed formally on Tuesday, seeks a resolution that sanctions greater international military and financial support in Iraq. It could garner enough votes to pass this week, coalition diplomats claimed.
Both France and Germany indicated the text was a step in the right direction but said they needed to study it further.
Diplomats said the draft was about as close as they could go to winning support from UN Security Council members, while at the same time "corresponding to reality" on the ground.
Calling for a multinational force and financial assistance, the text underscores the temporary nature of the occupation but maintains ultimate coalition control until an elected Iraqi government is established.
In response to concerns about the timing of a handover of power to the Iraqis, it asks Iraq's Governing Council to produce a timetable by December 15 for a constitution and elections.
European Union foreign ministers meanwhile yesterday set out tough terms for helping in Iraq. At a meeting in Luxembourg, only the UK offered new funding - a 375m ($442m) commitment, starting from next January and spread over two years. Other countries would not say publicly what contributions, if any, they would make at next week's donors' conference in Madrid.
Sweden won support for demands that the UN play "a strong and vital role" in any successful reconstruction programme. EU ministers also demanded assurances of security, a realistic schedule for the handover of power, and a transparent multilateral donor fund.
UN Security Council members, led by France, Russia and Germany, have called for a rapid return of sovereignty to Iraq and greater UN involvement in the reconstruction than the US has so far been willing to concede.
The coalition says it can only progressively hand over authority over time, transferring effective sovereignty to Iraq after a constitution and elections. Britain, however, says the text does not preclude the possibility of setting up a provisional government before elections.
Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, had complained that the partial UN political role envisaged in an earlier version of the text was unworkable. The new text, on which Mr Annan has yet to comment, says the UN should help in writing a constitution and preparing elections "as circumstances permit".
A coalition diplomat insisted a "partnership" was possible.
Responding to complaints that a US-run Development Fund for Iraq, into which oil receipts are channelled, was not yet subject to international scrutiny, the new text calls for an advisory and monitoring board to be established "as a priority".
It also potentially removes obstacles facing international financial institutions seeking to lend money to Iraq, urging them "to take immediate steps to provide their full range of loans and other financial assistance".
President George W. Bush on Tuesday sought to shore up sagging domestic support for the US presence in Iraq. "If the people don't think I'm doing my job they'll find somebody [else]," Mr Bush told Tribune Broadcasting.
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Bulgarian Soldier Injured in Iraq, Recruitment Problems in Sofia
Politics:
13 October 2003, Monday.
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=27042
A soldier from Bulgaria's stabilization force in the northern part of Iraq's holy city of Karbala, has been slightly injured on Sunday as a car broke through a security barrier at a high-speed, paying no heed to the control post of the Bulgarian contingent stationed in the city. Four Iraqi nationals were in the car.
Yordan Dinev Stefanov from the second infantry company was injured in the left knee and has been treated immediately by the camp's medical staff. An official statement of the Defense Ministry assured that Stefanov feels good and is already carrying out his obligations.
High speed is the most likely cause for the accident, the ministry said.
A nearly 500-strong Bulgarian infantry battalion is carrying out a six-month mission in Iraq, patrolling the city of Karbala, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Baghdad, as part of a 9,000-strong 22-nation force under Polish command.
Bulgaria faces serious problems in recruiting members for its second contingent to help the U.S. restore order in Iraq following the war there, Deputy Defense Minister Ilko Dimitrov admitted on Monday without specifying the number of Bulgarian servicemen yet to be recruited.
The second contingent will see an increase in the military police and civilian members, who need to be experts in economics or public relations. According to Minister Dimitrov the increased presence of civilians in the Bulgarian unit will not reflect negatively on the locals' attitude to the contingent.
In what comes as a comment of the two attacks against Bulgaria's force after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, Minister Dimitrov admitted that the unit works in a "danger-ridden environment".
-------- iraq
Iraqi group to kill peacekeepers
From correspondents in Baghdad
13oct03
Australia Herald Sun
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,7542621%255E1702,00.html
A MAN claiming to speak for an Iraqi resistance group warned foreign troops against joining the US-led occupation forces in Iraq, saying they will be treated as occupiers and provoke attacks on their home countries.
A compact disc video was accompanied by a statement signed by the same group. In the statement, the group promised to kill every member of the US-picked Governing Council and Iraqis who are cooperating with the US-led occupation authorities. It also listed politicians and tribal leaders as among its targets.
It was impossible to verify the authenticity of the statement or the recording, both of them obtained by The Associated Press in the city of Fallujah west of Baghdad.
The recording showed five men wearing robes and covering their faces with Arab head scarves. All five squatted motionlessly on the floor except for the one who read the statement. The group called itself The Jihad Brigades of Imam Ali bin Abi-Taleb. Behind them was a curtain with a floral design.
The men had machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and what looked like anti-tank rockets.
"We are determined to fight every soldier that arrives in Iraq from any Arab or non-Arab nation. We shall treat everyone of them as an occupier," said the man who read the statement.
"In the near future, inshallah (God willing), we shall take our operations to neighbouring and non-neighbouring nations, Arab, and non-Arab nations that send troops to Iraq," he said.
Fallujah, about 50km west of Baghdad, has been one of the most dangerous places for US troops in Iraq. It is in the "Sunni Triangle", a vast swath of land north and west of Baghdad that is mostly inhabited by Sunni Muslims who benefited from the rule of Saddam Hussein, himself a Sunni.
US troops in the area come under daily attacks from insurgents suspected to be Saddam loyalists opposed to American occupation on religious grounds.
The speaker in the recording did not say whether his hitherto unknown group operated in the Fallujah area.
The group is named after Ali bin Abi-Taleb, a cousin of Islam's 7th century prophet Muhammad and one of the most revered Shiite Muslim saints.
Iraq's Shiite majority had for nearly a century been oppressed by the country's minority Sunni Arabs. Unlike many Sunnis, the Shiites have welcomed Saddam's overthrow although they have misgivings about the Americans. Because they are the majority, Iraqi Shiites are virtually assured of dominating any future government produced by a general election, something that the Americans want to see held before the end of 2004.
Attacks on US forces blamed on Shiite Iraqis are rare, a fact that casts doubt on the authenticity of the recording and the statement accompanying it.
The statement's ending, however, makes it clear that the hitherto unknown group is Shiite. It names the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala as its intended battlefields in the fight against the Americans.
----
War without end
A catalogue of killings in Iraq
Monday October 13, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1061760,00.html
May 8
US soldier shot dead by unknown assailant while directing traffic in Baghdad
May 13
US soldier killed when convoy ambushed near Diwaniya
May 26
US vehicle hits landmine in Baghdad killing one soldier and injuring three
May 26
US soldier killed and another wounded as convoy comes under enemy fire near Haditha
May 27
Two US soldiers killed and nine wounded in attack on army unit in Falluja.
Two attackers killed, six captured
May 29
US soldier killed travelling on supply route
June 3
US soldier killed at checkpoint south of Balad
June 5
US soldier killed and five injured in rocket-propelled grenade attack in Falluja
June 7
US soldier killed and four injured in attack near Tikrit involving rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire
June 8
US soldier shot dead at checkpoint in al-Qaim, near Syrian border, by men who had approached vehicle asking for medical help.
One assailant killed and one captured, but others escape
June 10
US paratrooper killed and another injured in rocket-propelled grenade attack in south-west Baghdad. They were manning trash collection point when assailants got out of a van and opened fire.
One attacker killed
June 17
US soldier on patrol in Baghdad killed by sniper
June 18
One US soldier dies and one wounded in drive-by shooting at petrol station in Baghdad
June 19
US soldier killed and two injured in grenade attack on military ambulance in Al Iskandariya
June 22
One US marine killed and eight other US service members injured in explosion that may have been caused by bomb dropped from B-52 Stratofortress that landed near forces at Godoria Range, along northern coast of Djibouti
June 22
US soldier killed and another injured in grenade attack on military convoy south of Baghdad in Khan Azad
June 24
Six British military personnel killed and eight wounded in two incidents in southern Iraq, both near town of Amara, 125 miles north-west of Basra
June 26
US soldier attached to 1st Marine Expeditionary Force killed in ambush near Najaf while investigating car theft
June 26
One special operations force service member killed and eight injured in hostile fire incident in south-west Baghdad
June 28
Two soldiers assigned to 3rd Battalion, 18th Field Artillery Regiment, deployed from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, reported missing three days earlier, found dead west of Al Taji
June 30
Nine Iraqis, including imam, killed after explosion beside mosque in Falluja.
US later claim it was caused by a bomb-making class inside mosque
July 2
US Army 352nd Civil Affairs Command soldier dies of wounds received on previous day, after Baghdad convoy hit by explosive device
July 3
Sniper kills US soldier in Baghdad, while mortar attack on American military base to north-west injures at least 10
July 3
US marine killed and three others injured during mine-clearing operations in Kerbala, south of Baghdad
July 5
Blast kills seven Iraqi police recruits at graduation ceremony in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad
July 6
US soldier from 1st Armored Division dies of gunshot wound, while guarding Baghdad University
July 6
Soldier of 1st Armored Division dies after platoon patrolling Baghdad's Ad Hamiya neighbourhood ambushed by two Iraqi gunmen
July 7
US soldier killed when explosive device blasts vehicle during routine patrol in Kadhimya neighbourhood of Baghdad
July 13
One person killed and another injured after bomb explodes near police station in Baghdad suburb
July 14
US military convoy attacked by rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns in Baghdad. One soldier killed and 10 others injured
July 16
Bomb explodes near highway west of Baghdad killing US soldier and injuring two others
July 18
Bomb attack on US convoy in Falluja kills soldier
June 19
1st Armored Division soldier dies after small arms and rocket-propelled grenade attack in Abu Ghureib neighbourhood of Baghdad
July 20
Two US soldiers killed during ambush by guerrillas firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades near northern city of Mosul
July 21
Soldier of 1st Armored Division killed and three wounded after vehicle hits explosive device in As Sulaykh district of Baghdad
July 22
US soldier killed and another wounded when convoy hit by rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire north-west of Baghdad
July 23
Soldier of 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) killed and seven soldiers wounded when explosive device strikes two military vehicles outside Mosul
July 23
Soldier of 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment killed and another soldier and contractor wounded when convoy attacked by explosive device on Highway 1 in Ar Ramadi
July 24
Three US soldiers from 101st Airborne Division killed in rifle and grenade attack while travelling to Qayarra West outside Mosul
July 26
Three US soldiers guarding Ba'qubah children's hospital killed and four others wounded in grenade attack
July 26
One US soldier killed and two wounded when convoy attacked with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and possibly an explosive device on Highway 10 near Abu Ghureib. Three Iraqis wounded
July 27
US soldier killed and another wounded when rocket-propelled grenade hits patrol in northern Babil province near village of Al Haswa
July 28
Explosive device dropped from overpass on to US convoy travelling through Al Rashid district of Baghdad, killing soldier of 1st Armored Division and injuring three others
July 30
Soldier of 4th Infantry Division killed and two wounded in small arms attack at tactical operation centre 26 miles east of Ba'qubah
July 31
US soldier killed and two wounded after vehicle hits landmine on road to Baghdad airport
August 1
Soldier of 4th Infantry Division killed and three injured after rocket-propelled grenade attack on convoy south of Shumayt.
In separate incident, soldier of 1st Armored Division dies of gunshot wound received previous day in Baghdad
August 6
Two 1st Armored Division soldiers killed and one wounded in firefight in Al Rashid district of Baghdad
August 7
At least 17 people killed and 60 wounded when truck bomb explodes outside Jordanian embassy compound in Baghdad. In separate incident, 82nd Airborne Division soldier shot dead on guard duty in Al Mansor district of Baghdad
August 10
Soldier of 4th Infantry Division killed and two wounded in improvised explosive attack near police station in Tikrit
August 12
US soldier killed and two wounded in bomb attack in Sunni Muslim town of Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad
August 13
Bomb attack on four-vehicle convoy south-east of Tikrit kills US soldier and wounds another.
A further US soldier killed when M-113 armored personnel carrier strikes explosive device near town of Ad Dwar
August 14
Bomb blast hits military ambulance in Basra killing one British soldier and wounding two others
August 16
Mortar attack on Abu Ghraib prison on outskirts of Baghdad kills six Iraqis and injures 59
August 17
Danish soldier killed in gun battle between troops and group of looters in southern Iraq.
Two Iraqis also die.
Dane is first non-US or British soldier to die in conflict
August 18
Soldier of 1st US Armored Division killed by explosive device in central Baghdad
August 19
Twenty-two people killed, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, top UN envoy to Iraq, after truck bomb devastates UN headquarters in Baghdad in worst attack on UN civilian complex ever
August 20
US citizen working as interpreter killed and two US soldiers wounded in small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade attack in Tikrit.
Soldier of 1st Armored Division killed and two wounded by improvised explosive device in Karkah district of Baghdad
August 21
US marine shot dead in Al Hilla by unidentified gunman
August 23
Three British servicemen killed and another wounded in Basra
August 26
Soldier of 3rd Corps Support Command killed and two wounded after convoy blasted by explosive device near town of Hamariya
August 27
Soldier of 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment soldier killed and three wounded by explosive device in Falluja. 205th Military Intelligence Brigade soldier killed in attack on military convoy in Baghdad
August 28
British soldier killed and another wounded during attack by a crowd of Iraqis armed with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms in Ali al-Sharqi, 120 miles north-west of Basra
August 29
Car bomb at Imam Ali mosque in Najaf kills at least 83 people, including top Shi'ite Muslim leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, and wounds around 175.
In separate rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire attack just north of As Suaydat soldier of 4th Infantry Division killed and three wounded
August 31
Two US soldiers killed and one wounded in firefight five miles north-east of Shkin in Paktika province
September 1
Two 220th Military Police Brigade soldiers killed and one wounded when vehicle strikes explosive device along main supply route south of Baghdad
September 2
Car bomb blasts Rasafa police headquarters in east Baghdad, killing one and wounding 15
September 3
Suicide bombing in town of Ramadi kills Iraqi civilian and injures two US soldiers
September 9
Car bomb kills one Iraqi and wounds 53, including six American military personnel, in Arbil, northern Iraq.
In a separate incident US soldier killed and another wounded after vehicle hits improvised explosive device on supply route north-east of Baghdad
September 10
Explosive device kills soldier of 1st Armored Division in Baghdad
September 12
Two US soldiers killed and seven wounded during pre-dawn raid in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad
September 14
US soldier killed and three wounded as convoy runs over bomb planted on road in Falluja
September 15
US soldier on patrol in Baghdad killed in rocket-propelled grenade attack
September 18
Iraqi guerrillas kill three and wound two US soldiers inspecting suspected weapons site near Tikrit
September 20
Two US soldiers die and 13 are injured in mortar attack on US-run Abu Ghreib prison complex. Elsewhere, US soldier killed by roadside bomb near Ramadi
September 22
Suicide bomber at car park next to UN headquarters in Baghdad kills Iraqi security guard
September 24
Bomb apparently aimed at US troops tears through two buses in Baghdad, killing an Iraqi and wounding about 20.
Elsewhere, several injured after bomb blast in cinema in Mosul
September 25
Bomb explodes at Baghdad's Aike hotel housing journalists from US television network NBC, killing a Somali guard.
Separately, a rocket-propelled grenade attack kills US soldier and wounds two others in Kirkuk
September 29
US soldier killed in bomb and gunfire to attack in town of Habbaniya, about 42 miles from Baghdad
October 1
Bomb blast near US military base in Tikrit kills woman soldier and wounds three others. Elsewhere, US soldier killed in rocket-propelled grenade attack near town of Samarra, north of Baghdad
October 4
Rocket-propelled grenade and gun attack on American patrol in Baghdad kills one US soldier and wounds another
October 6
US soldier killed and another wounded by bomb attack west of Baghdad. Separately, two more US soldiers and Iraqi interpreter killed and two US soldiers wounded in bomb blast south of Baghdad
October 7
No casualties after blast hits compound of Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad
October 9
Two suicide bombers kill eight Iraqis at police station in Shi'ite Muslim district of Sadr City, north-east Baghdad.
In same area two US soldiers killed and four wounded in ambush.
Another US soldier killed in separate rocket-propelled grenade attack on military convoy north-east of Iraqi capital
October 12
At least six people killed in blast outside Baghdad Hotel in city centre
--------
Car Bomb Kills 6 at Baghdad Hotel; at Least 35 Hurt
October 13, 2003
By ALEX BERENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/international/middleeast/13IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 12 - A huge car bomb exploded early Sunday afternoon outside a hotel used by members of the Iraqi Governing Council and by many Americans, killing six Iraqi security guards and wounding more than 35 other people.
The bomb, hidden in a white Toyota Corolla that ran a security checkpoint, ripped through the hotel's parking lot, tearing bodies apart and sending shrapnel more than 100 yards. The attack heightened fears that security in Baghdad is deteriorating after a relatively calm month.
The bomb exploded at 12:50 p.m. just outside the Baghdad Hotel, a well-protected building on Saadun Street, a major avenue in central Baghdad. Although officials were not able to estimate the size of the bomb, the force of the explosion shattered windows for hundreds of yards, shook houses more than a mile away and knocked over six 10-foot-tall concrete barriers that separate the parking lot from the street.
The blast occurred after a Toyota Corolla driving south in the street's left lane suddenly swerved right. It sped past a security checkpoint that protects the hotel's parking lot, witnesses said, knocking down a metal bar across the parking lot entrance.
Iraqi security guards immediately opened fire on the car, which came to a stop at the edge of the parking lot, more than 50 yards from the hotel's front entrance.
Moments later, the bomb exploded, destroying the car so completely that only a two-foot-deep crater marked the spot where the driver had detonated the explosive.
"There was a very big explosion," said Thomas Agroston, a nearby shopkeeper. "At the same moment I saw a car flying into the air with a big column of fire and smoke."
The fact that the car was stopped so far from the hotel may have prevented much more extensive damage, said Maj. Will Delgado of the First Armored Division, who was at the scene.
Military officials said there was no structural damage to the hotel and only minor damage to several nearby buildings. The concrete barriers absorbed much of the force of the blast, they said.
Pools of blood and flesh littered the street outside the hotel in the chaos that followed the explosion. As the surviving security guards struggled to restore order, firing shots in the air, two cars burned and the wounded screamed for help.
"I saw blood everywhere and people were crying for help," said Akram Ali, a bystander. "I can't describe how I'm feeling now. I'm very shocked."
The attack, the seventh fatal vehicle bombing in Iraq in the past two months, deepened the unease that has gripped Baghdad since Thursday, when a similar bomb killed two Iraqi police officers and six civilians.
American contractors stay at the hotel, and some members of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council also stay there when they are in Baghdad. Council members have repeatedly expressed concerns about their personal safety, and one of the 25 members, Akila al-Hashimi, died after she was shot in an attack on Sept. 20.
After a month of relative calm here, the American forces must again work to convince residents that Baghdad's streets are safe. The occupation forces and civilian officials are also facing new opposition from Shiite Muslims loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a prominent cleric who on Friday declared that he had formed a new Iraqi government.
Although witnesses said they saw only one vehicle explode, several hours after the bombing, Lt. Col. George Krivo, a spokesman for the United States military, said the attack had been the work of two cars, both of which ran the checkpoint.
"They tried to avoid the checkpoint and they detonated," he said.
There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy between the accounts by witnesses and Colonel Krivo's explanation, which was also contradicted by United States Army officers at the scene.
The attack killed six people, in addition to the bomber, and wounded at least 10 others, said Col. Peter Mansoor of the First Armored Division. Colonel Mansoor said that all the dead were Iraqis, but that he did know whether they were security officers or passers-by. Two American soldiers were wounded in the attack.
Dr. Mustafa Ahmed, chief doctor of Al Kindi Hospital, said 32 people wounded by the bomb, including 6 who were seriously injured, had been brought to his hospital. Doctors at Ibn al-Nafees Hospital said three injured people had been brought there.
Four ambulances and a fire truck arrived at the site of the explosion within minutes, as did two American Humvees that had been nearby when the bomb hit. More American soldiers and Iraqi police officers quickly followed, sealing the hotel, examining nearby parked cars for bombs and evacuating the wounded. The chief of the Iraqi police in Baghdad appeared soon after, carrying an assault rifle and surrounded by 10 armed officers.
"We are seeing our people dying in front of our eyes every single day, and no one's doing anything," said Abdul Razaq Hafadh, who saw the attack. "Where is the Governing Council? I feel wretched to see those policemen, sons and brothers, falling every day."
At Al Kindi hospital, a familiar scene unfolded. Bloodied Iraqis lay on grimy beds as relatives, friends and journalists swarmed around.
"There was suddenly a great explosion, and the ceiling collapsed," said Luai Ali, who works in a travel agency outside the hotel. Mr. Ali's head was bandaged and blood soaked his shirt. "I don't know why, I don't know what it's for," he said. "I don't think they are Islamic people, because Muslims don't kill innocent people."
Dr. Ahmed said the attacks had strained his hospital's resources, and he was girding for more attacks. "The conditions will get worse," he said. Neither the United States Army nor the American occupying authorities have ever offered him medicines or supplies to help treat the wounded, he said.
In a second attack on Sunday, at about the same time as the hotel bombing, a roadside bomb injured five Iraqis near the main American Army base at Tikrit, north of Baghdad. When an American patrol responded, someone threw a homemade hand grenade at the soldiers, slightly wounding three. American troops detained two suspects.
Seven hours after the hotel bombing, with Baghdad dark, troops from the First Armored Division worked to clean the debris and shattered glass from Saadun Street, which remained closed to traffic. A giant crane picked up and put back in place the concrete barriers that had been toppled by the explosion, while a second crane picked up a shattered Peugeot sedan and placed it on a military flatbed truck. In the midst of the giant machines, a street sweeper pushed his broom.
"As far as we're concerned, this place is back in business," said Major Delgado. "Back to normal, as normal as it gets."
Major Delgado said he did not have a good explanation for the sudden rash of violence. "It did get a lot better for a number of weeks," he said. "It was getting quiet almost to the point of being boring."
A Million Shiites Gather in Karbala
KARBALA, Iraq, Oct. 12 (Agence France-Presse) - Prayers echoed through Iraq's holy city of Karbala on Sunday, as a million or more Shiite Muslims paid tribute to a ninth-century imam, in a display of faith virtually banned in the days of Saddam Hussein.
The pilgrims celebrated the birthday of Mehdi, the 12th imam of the Shiite Muslim faith. They also chanted the praises of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad revered by Shiites as the prophet's successor.
The pilgrimage was the first time in 30 years that Karbala, 70 miles south of Baghdad, truly celebrated the faith of the Shiite majority, something that was forbidden under Mr. Hussein, a Sunni Muslim.
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Suicide Bomber Kills 7 in Baghdad
Blast Was Near Hotel Housing Iraqi Officials
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14898-2003Oct12?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Oct. 12 -- A suicide bomber detonated explosives packed in a car outside a Baghdad hotel housing Iraqi government officials and U.S. contractors on Sunday, unleashing a wave of debris that tore through the hotel's crowded driveway and a busy commercial street.
At least seven people and the bomber were killed, and as many as 40 others were wounded in the midday blast at the Baghdad Hotel, including one member of Iraq's Governing Council and three Americans, according to U.S. military officials and hospitals that treated the injured. Six of those killed were Iraqi security guards, a military official said.
The explosion transformed a bustling block in central Baghdad into a panorama of wartime devastation and deepened the unease many Iraqis have about security in the capital. Glass shards, pieces of twisted metal and pools of blood littered the street. Battered and burned survivors, some missing limbs, screamed for help as the acrid smoke from burning cars obscured rescuers. The force of the blast was so powerful that body parts were found on nearby roofs.
The explosion was the seventh fatal car bomb attack on Iraqis and others cooperating with the U.S.-led occupation since early August, dealing another blow to American efforts to achieve stability in Iraq six months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's government. Explosives-laden vehicles have struck U.N. headquarters in Baghdad twice, the Jordanian Embassy, two police stations in the capital and the country's most sacred Shiite Muslim shrine. More than 135 people, almost all of them Iraqis, were killed in those attacks.
Although U.S. officials have not identified a group responsible for the bombings, suspicion has fallen on Hussein loyalists and foreign Muslim extremists who flooded into Iraq over the summer. The attack on Sunday occurred on the one-year anniversary of nightclub explosions in Bali and the three-year anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole off the Yemeni coast -- both of which were blamed on the al Qaeda terrorist organization.
Witnesses said the explosion came shortly after two X-shaped metal barriers near the hotel had been moved to admit a car, allowing a white Toyota sedan to speed through the entrance. As the Toyota swerved around a row of tall concrete barriers -- intended to absorb the impact of an explosion -- and sped toward the hotel's driveway, Iraqi guards fired four or five shots at the driver, who immediately detonated the bomb, witnesses and security officials at the scene said.
The car exploded before it was able to make a right turn into the hotel's driveway, sending a bone-jarring shock wave along the sidewalk and the driveway to the hotel. The blast, which occurred shortly before 1 p.m., left a four-yard-wide crater in the road and toppled a half-dozen concrete barriers.
Ali Adel, a security guard at the hotel, said he shot at the driver. Moments later, he said, the car exploded.
"I shot him, and after that the explosion came," Adel, whose face was bandaged, said at a Baghdad hospital where he was being treated. "I was in the face of the cannon."
He said the driver, who had a close-cropped beard, was the only occupant of the car.
Although only one vehicle exploded, a U.S. military spokesman said Sunday evening that investigators were examining whether a second car was involved in the incident, perhaps as a decoy intended to distract the guards. The driver of that vehicle also was killed.
"At this point we don't know whether the second car was a bystander or whether it was part of the attack," said Lt. Col. George Krivo, the U.S. military's chief spokesman in Baghdad.
Some witnesses said a car drove the wrong way down the street in front of the hotel and sought to enter through the hotel's vehicle exit, although military officials and American security guards at the building could not confirm those accounts.
Within minutes of the explosion, the lobby was enveloped in pandemonium and covered in blood as the wounded were dragged in for first aid administered by American and Iraqi security guards. "Help! We need help right now!" one English-speaking guard said as he brought in a bloody colleague.
In the parking lot, dazed survivors wandered about as gun-toting Iraqi guards, private American security specialists and a small contingent of U.S. soldiers searched for other explosive devices in the billowing smoke. The crackle of a burning sport-utility vehicle initially frightened some guards into thinking they were under attack and prompted them to fire into the air.
U.S. military officials said 10 of the wounded were in critical condition. Several appeared to have lost limbs and suffered severe trauma.
The Baghdad Hotel houses five members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, several cabinet ministers and other Iraqis who are working with the occupation authority. A member of the council, Mowaffak Rubaie, was slightly injured in the bombing. No other members of the Governing Council appeared to have been in the building at the time of the blast.
Several dozen Americans also live in the hotel, many of whom work for a private firm providing security services for the building. Some of the residents work for the U.S. government, but American military officials and several residents of the hotel denied widespread reports that CIA agents are stationed in the building.
The American security specialists, who are employed by DynCorp of Reston, said measures they instituted to deter car bombs, including large dirt-filled barriers, kept the bomber from getting closer to the hotel. They said the car was able to pass through the first entrance because workers had removed a large metal drop-bar gate to move it farther from the hotel. As the car drove up, workers were preparing for installation of the new gate.
"It was perfectly timed," one American security guard said of the attack.
The guard and other security specialists at the scene said U.S. intelligence agencies had passed along several reports of possible attacks on the hotel, including one as recently as two days ago. But the specialists said that the hotel had received numerous threats and that the latest did not generate any particular concern.
"We knew things have been getting more dangerous, so we kept pushing the perimeter out and adding new barriers," the American guard said.
Col. Peter R. Mansoor, commander of the 1st Brigade of the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division, which is responsible for central Baghdad, said the fast work of the Iraqi guards at the hotel prevented greater damage. "They used deadly force against someone who tried to negotiate their checkpoint without stopping and being searched -- that's what they're trained to do," he said.
FBI agents arrived at the scene about an hour after the blast to begin an investigation. They roped off the area and began collecting evidence.
L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator for Iraq, pledged that American forces would "work with the Iraqi police to find those responsible and bring them to justice."
"The terrorists know that the Iraqi people and the coalition are succeeding in the reconstruction of Iraq," Bremer said in a statement issued shortly after the bombing. "They do not share the vision of hope for this new Iraq. They will do anything, including taking the lives of innocent Iraqis, to draw attention away from the extraordinary progress made since liberation."
Correspondent Karl Vick and staff writer Theola Labbé contributed to this report.
--------
U.S. Proposes Date for Iraqis to Start Planning for Self-Rule
October 13, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Iraq.html?hp
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- A new U.S. draft resolution, obtained by The Associated Press on Monday, gives Iraq's Governing Council until Dec. 15 to develop a timetable for elections and a new constitution.
The draft resolution was given to other members of the U.N. Security Council over the weekend and the United States will seek a vote on it this week, diplomats said.
The draft is the latest version of a resolution seeking international troops and money to help the U.S.-led effort to rebuild Iraq. Earlier drafts came under criticism from some European nations seeking a stronger role for the United Nations in Iraq and a speedier timetable for handing over power to Iraqis.
According to the draft, the Governing Council must submit to the Security Council ``a timetable and a program for the drafting of a new constitution for Iraq and for the holding of democratic elections under the constitution'' by Dec. 15.
Earlier drafts of the resolution had not mentioned any timetable for elections or a new constitution, and the deadline was likely a key concession to other members of the 15-nation Security Council. But it was unclear how far the new draft would go toward assuaging other council members' concerns over the draft.
Like before, the draft calls for the creation of a multinational force to help maintain security in Iraq. But unlike the previous draft, it says the Security Council will review the force's mission no later than a year after the resolution passes.
The latest draft also addresses concerns from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had demanded a lead role for the organization or little role at all.
It says the United Nations ``should strengthen its vital role in Iraq,'' saying it can do so by providing humanitarian relief, promoting economic reconstruction and help to restore ``institutions for representative governments.''
U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, who holds the council's rotating presidency for October, said the United States would seek a vote on the resolution sometime this week.
A council diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity said the latest draft had been given to other nations on the 15-member Security Council over the weekend.
Another council diplomat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the draft would be formally submitted either late Monday or Tuesday. That diplomat said the new draft would ``reflect discussions between the United States, the UK, Spain and others.''
The Bush administration launched a review of the resolution following disagreements from council diplomats and Annan's statements.
The United States and Britain have said Iraq must first have a constitution and hold elections before they relinquish sovereignty. France, Germany and Russia are seeking a quick transfer of power to a provisional Iraqi government and want the United Nations to get the major role in overseeing the country's political transition to a democracy.
--------
Iraq Council Asks for Help Rebuilding
October 13, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Islamic-Summit.html
PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia (AP) -- Iraq's U.S.-picked government appealed Monday to the world's biggest gathering of Islamic countries for help rebuilding the war-shattered nation. Muslim foreign ministers responded with sympathy -- but no troops for an international peacekeeping force.
Iraq quickly became the dominant issue when foreign ministers from the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference began work on an agenda for the first summit the world's largest Muslim group has held in three years -- since before the Sept. 11 attacks by Islamic terrorists.
Placing Iraq and terrorism alongside the 34-year-old organization's founding issue of Israeli-Palestinian tensions, the foreign minister of host Malaysia, Syed Hamid Albar, said the summit was being held at a time when the Muslim world faced challenges that ``threaten our very survival.''
Hoshyar Zebari, foreign minister of the Iraqi Governing Council, told reporters that a request had been made by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and the council itself for Islamic countries to participate ``in the reconstruction, the rebuilding, the stabilization of Iraq.''
``The Governing Council would welcome any contribution,'' Zebari said. ``But the indications we are getting here so far ... are not that encouraging. I don't think there is any desire by the Muslim countries to send troops.''
The United States has asked its allies to contribute peacekeepers to Iraq to relieve the burden on the 130,000 U.S. troops, who have come under repeated attack since Saddam Hussein's government was toppled in April. On Sunday, a car bombing rocked a Baghdad hotel where officials of the U.S. occupation authority stay.
The idea has met resistance -- strongest among Islamic countries, many of which consider the U.S.-led invasion to have been illegitimate -- unless there is a U.N. mandate, at least.
Opening Monday's session, Syed Hamid said security in Iraq was ``at its lowest'' and that the ``foreign occupation of the country must be brought to an end as soon as possible.''
But most foreign ministers ruled out sending troops as a possible way to help.
``The sentiment of this meeting is that stability should come as soon as possible in Iraq,'' said Musa Braiza, a Jordanian representative. The countries ``will do anything possible and everything positive. But the question of forces is now not on the agenda.''
Pakistan, a U.S. ally, said it would consider sending peacekeepers, but only with U.N. backing and only if the plan met public approval at home, Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri told The Associated Press.
``We will wait for a United Nations resolution which could reflect international consensus,'' Kasuri said. ``Even then, we would need other Muslim countries to go along with us, because we want the people of Iraq to perceive us not as an extension of the occupation, but as people who have come to help in reconstruction and bringing greater security to the people of Iraq.''
The exception is Turkey, which has offered to send peacekeepers to its southern neighbor.
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told Turkish reporters he urged the OIC on Monday to establish a peacekeeping force for Iraq, the country's Anatolia news agency reported.
``We have to take up the issue, take the initiative, and act jointly,'' he was quoted as saying.
But there is widespread concern about the possibility that peacekeepers from neighboring countries could end up interfering in Iraq's internal affairs.
``We are against sending troops from any neighboring country to Iraq,'' Zebari, a Kurd, told AP.
Turkey once ruled what is now Iraq. It has long battled against Kurdish insurgents on its soil, a fight many Iraqis fear could spill over into Iraq's own Kurdish areas.
Malaysia's Syed Hamid said an OIC peacekeeping force was unlikely because the group ``is not an organization that is a military bloc.''
Ayad Alawi, currently head of the Iraq council's rotating leadership, arrived in Malaysia Monday and said it expected Islamic countries to stand firmly behind it ``during this difficult period.''
Alawi told the Malaysian news agency, Bernama, that the council desires full Iraqi sovereignty ``as soon as possible,'' but cautioned that it will not happen ``without a firm and positive attitude from the international community.''
``We would like the Islamic countries to assist us to move forward and for Iraq to have democracy and stability,'' Alawi said.
The Governing Council's presence at the summit was in dispute until two weeks ago, when Malaysia dropped insistence that it was illegitimate without a U.N. mandate. Arab countries prevailed with their view that the council was transitional and legitimate enough.
On Tuesday, the foreign ministers are expected to approve a draft communique, to be handed to the leaders, that would condemn Israel for its recent airstrike on an alleged militant training camp inside Syria. The leaders also are expected to denounce Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel ignores UK family's call for truth
By Lawrence Smallman
Monday 13 October 2003
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/EE06A7BC-F8D2-4CE9-8A9F-DC2A62B2C133.htm
A British family's quest for the truth over the shooting of their son is being stonewalled by Israel.
That is the accusation being laid by the family of peace activist Tom Hurndall who was shot in the head as he tried to rescue a group of terrified children.
They say Israel has continued to ignore their request for justice after an official government report into the shooting of peace activist turned out to be full of glaring inaccuracies.
The 21-year-old was shot at by an Israeli sniper in the city of Rafah, Gaza, while he went to the aid of some stranded children in April.
According to eyewitnesses Israeli soldiers were tormenting the children by firing in their direction.
Hurndall now lies in a vegetative state in a British hospital after suffering severe brain damage. He is not expected to recover and the family are now considering ending life support, according to Tom's sister whom spoke exclusively to Aljazeera.net on Sunday.
The family's repeated quest for a fully transparent inquiry into the shooting has never been met with a response - despite Tom's parents travelling to Israel in a two-month attempt at getting simple questions answered.
Fabricated report
It has been nearly three months since the results of the family's own investigation were presented to the Judge Advocate General in Israel.
The family investigation included 13 eyewitness testimonies and a substantial body of photographic evidence completely contradicting the findings of a field report provided by the "Israeli Defence Force" through the British Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Major differences are stark, almost incredible, said Hurndall's elder sister Sophie. In the report, she says, Israeli occupation forces failed to correctly identify the actual area in which the shooting happened.
The government report also insinuated that Tom himself was dressed in an army uniform, wandering around and shooting at random - when in fact witnesses said he was helping children escape being shot by an Israeli soldier in a settlement watchtower.
Letter of protest
IDF report claimed Tom was mistaken for a 'terrorist' Last Friday, six months to the day of the shooting, Tom's brother and sister, William and Sophie, presented a letter of protest addressed to the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, Zvi Schtauber. He did not accept the letter in person.
The letter expressed the family's deep distress and disappointment at the lack of progress and government indifference for basic respect for international law.
The Ambassador will be asked to press the relevant authorities in Israel to ensure that there is no further delay in conducting the inquiry.
The distraught family has repeatedly informed the Israeli authorities and the British public of the real reason for the shooting.
"Tom was shot through the head in Rafah by an Israeli sniper in a watchtower who was firing on a group of children. He was shot for the simple reason that he was trying to escort them to safety," said Sophie.
Searching for truth
Younger brother, Billy, explained why Tom travelled to Gaza in the first place.
"My brother didn't know anything [about the Palestinian crisis] for sure, so he travelled to Gaza to find the truth.
"He did and he came back a victim of that truth, the truth so barbarically denied by the western media, as men women and children are being slaughtered in Palestine. And I don't say this because I believe it, but because I have seen it."
Billy Hurndall travelled to Palestine less than six weeks after his brother was flown home to find out for himself what motivated Tom and hundreds of other peace activists.
"We are told by our media of suicide bombers killing innocent Israelis, and an occasional retaliatory strike against terrorists.
"Do I need to say anything of the actual reality? I hear nothing of the sadistic and unnecessary constant humiliation, violence and regular, effective executions that have taken Palestinian civilians lives in the thousands and injured or crippled many tens of thousands more."
There was no one available for a comment from the Israeli Embassy in London on Sunday evening.
----
Alternative 'peace deal' for Mid-East
Israel's left wing has set out to prove Ariel Sharon wrong
(BBC)
Monday, 13 October, 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3186538.stm
Israeli opposition politicians and Palestinian representatives have drawn up a draft peace agreement which they regard as a viable alternative to the international plan known as the roadmap.
The unofficial plan - known as the Geneva Accord - was finalised over the weekend during a meeting in Jordan.
It comes after two years of secret negotiations, backed by human rights activists and intellectuals, and supported by Swiss diplomats.
Those involved hailed it as a blueprint to end the Middle East conflict, but Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has angrily denounced the proposal, accusing left-wing Israelis of trying to bring down his coalition government.
The BBC Jerusalem correspondent, Orla Guerin, says Mr Sharon has long maintained there is no-one to talk to on the Palestinian side.
The left-wingers have set out to prove him wrong, but she says the public on both sides has grown weary and regard the plan as no more than a wish list with no legal standing.
I wouldn't have expected anything else from the people who gave us the Oslo accords - we're still paying for them today Foreign Minister Sylvan Shalom
The full details of the plan are due to be released when the initiative is formally adopted in Geneva next month, but sources say there is a key trade-off at its heart - Palestinians would not demand the right of return for refugees.
In exchange, they would get sovereignty over one of the most disputed religious sites in the Middle East, Jerusalem's Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif.
Negative reaction
The Palestinians involved, including former ministers, are reported to have the backing of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
They, along with their Israeli counterparts, say the accord is aimed at generating public interest and support.
The BBC's Barbara Plett, also in Jerusalem, says that the plan does signal to the Israeli public that there is an alternative to the military strategy adopted by Mr Sharon.
The negotiators hope the plan will appeal directly to the public
Although opinion polls indicate that while the majority of the Israeli public supports that strategy, there is a growing frustration with its failure to stop the violence, our correspondent says.
But members of the Israeli cabinet have been swift to condemn the plan.
"There is a roadmap, and it is not helpful to make people think there might be something else," Mr Sharon told the Jerusalem Post.
Vow to continue
However, others were far more vitriolic:
Israel's Education Minister Limor Livnat has dismissed those involved saying: "The Israelis who put their names to the plan are marginal people who represent nobody but themselves and who paid the price for that at the last elections.
"These people are the playthings of [Palestinian leader] Yasser Arafat."
That sentiment was echoed by Foreign Minister Sylvan Shalom:
"I wouldn't have expected anything else from the people who gave us the Oslo accords - we're still paying for them today," the Israeli press quoted him as saying.
He was reported to be alluding to the former Israeli justice minister and participant in the new plan, Yossi Beilin, who was a leading player in the drawing up of the Oslo accords.
However, the Palestinian officials involved in the negotiations said that they would work to ensure that the agreement became a reality.
"We are ready to campaign to win support for this plan on the Palestinian street because we want a better life and we believe we've found a way to achieve it," Palestinian MP Fares Kadura said.
----
NEWS ANALYSIS
New Rules for Israel and Syria
October 13, 2003
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/international/middleeast/13SYRI.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
DAMASCUS, Syria, Oct. 12 - The first Israeli air raid inside Syria in three decades undermined a crucial convention of the Arab-Israeli conflict - that these two enemies would not attack each other directly.
No matter how much violence raged around it, the Israeli-Syrian border has been quiet since the armistice agreement following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. If the bitter foes wanted to fight, they squared off on the battlefield called Lebanon, or deployed various proxy forces.
The attack last Sunday on what the Israelis said was a Palestinian terrorist training camp changed that formula, perhaps forever.
"The proxy game is over," said a senior Western diplomat familiar with all sides in the conflict. "There is a new Middle East game that we are just seeing beginning."
Diplomats and Arab analysts predict that the Sharon administration, which acted after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 20 people in Haifa, now plans to treat Damascus much as it has treated the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, during the past three years. He has been accused of orchestrating every suicide mission against Israel, attacked militarily, cut off and ultimately isolated.
"The question is whether another Israeli attack on Syria is just a suicide bombing away," said a second Western envoy. "Will they attack here again because the threshold has been raised by the Israelis? The answer is almost certainly yes."
The burning debate in Damascus is what the government will do. Syria played down the significance of the attack on what it calls a long-defunct training camp 15 miles from the capital. A more visible strike would be harder to brush aside.
For Syria to attack Israel directly would be folly given the imbalance of forces, but to ignore a more serious air raid would undermine a main pillar of the Assad reign - trumpeted by both the late President Hafez al-Assad and his son and heir President Bashar al-Assad - that Damascus remains the last redoubt of Arab strength facing Israel.
"Now the rules of the game have changed," said Abdel Bari Adwan, a prominent Arab newspaper editor in London, during a lengthy debate on the subject, shown by the satellite network Al Jazeera this weekend. "I wish Syria hit back and defended itself. Now they have to do that on their own, because now they are the ones hit inside their territory."
The talk of one Damascus barbershop this week was that some reservists had been called up; a political analyst, Haitham Kilani, a retired diplomat and air force general, put the number summoned so far at 300,000 of 1.5 million reservists. There has been no official announcement of a call-up adding to a standing army of more than 300,000.
However, the Syrian ambassador to Spain said the army would respond to any further attack, although Damascus quickly disavowed that as his personal remarks.
Bushra Kanafani, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, in her first public remarks on the attack, presented on Saturday a slightly diluted version of the same warning. "If Israel continues to violate our sovereignty, to violate the disengagement agreement, Syria is going to practice its right of self-defense," she said.
The increasingly creaky Soviet equipment here is no match for the American military equipment owned by Israel. In their last serious confrontation, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Syrian Air Force lost 79 aircraft to none for the Israelis.
Syrian and Western analysts also note that the command structure here requires orders from at least a senior general to fire an air defense missile, ensuring any Israeli warplanes would be long gone before Syria could mount a counterattack.
Syria clearly hopes that the threat of a renewed conflagration will alert Washington to the perils of another Israeli attack, especially when the United States is trying to douse resistance in Iraq. President Bush did not criticize Israel for the attack last Sunday; the United States has, by contrast, accused Syria of allowing foreign militants to enter Iraq to attack American forces. The Syrians say they have sealed their borders.
Mrs. Kanafani noted that Israel had violated a disengagement pact that kept the peace with Syria for 30 years. "That is why we are saying the Security Council and the international community should make sure that Israel will not repeat this act of aggression," she said, "because the repetition will endanger the situation in the area more and more."
It could also shake things up domestically. It is easy to hear grumbling that the Syrian government spends hugely on the military, so it should have something to show for it.
"There would be unrest here if they keep bombing and there is no reaction," said one university professor, preferring to speak without attribution on such a sensitive subject.
Weakening the Assad government, many Syrian and Western analysts here believe, is the point. Having failed to stem the violence fomented by the Palestinians through attacks on Mr. Arafat and what Israel calls terrorist targets inside the occupied territories, the Israeli government is turning its sights on bigger targets.
Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, has a history of undertaking huge military campaigns - the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the current assaults in the occupied territories - with the goal of dismantling Palestinian resistance.
The campaign against Damascus is rooted in the accusation that two groups labeled terrorist organizations by the United States and Israel, among others - Hamas and Islamic Jihad - are orchestrating suicide bombings from here. Few analysts expect that the elimination of their representatives here would do much to dent such operations.
Much of the anxiety here is rooted in the fact that the ruling clique in Syria has played by long-established rules, and adapts uneasily to change.
The aging ministers around the young president had long expected that stopping the proxy war waged by groups including Hezbollah in southern Lebanon as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad would be a card Syria could play to win back the Golan Heights. Now they are finding it is the price asked to restart negotiations, and perhaps not even that.
The Syrians say that they give no logistical support to the Palestinian groups, but that they cannot expel Palestinians residing legally here for decades. But if expelling them is the price demanded to head off attacks, it might be one the government pays.
"Maybe they will volunteer, maybe not," Khaled al-Fahoum, an independent Palestinian official, said of the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. "But I am sure they will leave if America puts pressure on Syria."
--------
Arafat Appoints Acting Security Chief
October 13, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Yasser Arafat appointed a senior official from the ruling Fatah party as acting security chief, an official said Monday, a new blow to Palestinian Prime minister Ahmed Qureia.
Meanwhile, U.N. officials said Israel's three-day military operation in a Gaza Strip refugee camp left 1,240 Palestinians homeless, the largest demolition of houses in a Gaza raid in three years of fighting.
Arafat appointed Hakam Balawi to the security post, a Palestinian official said on condition of anonymity. Qureia, who had supported another candidate, has told Fatah he wants to quit once the term of his temporary government expires in about three weeks because of sharp disagreements with Arafat. However, with the deadline three weeks off, there is still time to settle the differences, Palestinian officials said.
Israeli troops withdrew from the Rafah refugee camp on the Gaza-Egypt border Sunday, after a three-day operation the military said was aimed at finding and destroying weapons smuggling tunnels. Three tunnels were shut down.
The raid, the biggest in Gaza in six months, was accompanied by heavy fighting between soldiers and Palestinian gunmen. Eight Palestinians, including two children, were killed, and dozens were wounded.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which cares for refugees, initially said that about 1,500 Palestinians were left homeless in the raid, the largest-scale demolition of houses in a single operation in Gaza in the past three years of fighting. After further checks, the agency revised the number to 1,240.
``We have had very, very significant damage to the refugee camp,'' Peter Hansen, the commissioner general of UNRWA, said after inspecting the damage Sunday. ``Many houses, maybe as many as 120, have been completely demolished.''
Another 70 houses were damaged, said Saed Zoarub, the mayor of the town of Rafah next to the camp.
The area targeted was the camp's Yabena neighborhood, next to the Gaza-Egypt border. Several of the houses were blown up, while the remainder were razed by army bulldozers. It was the largest-scale demolition in a single raid since the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian fighting three years ago.
Rafah has been repeatedly targeted by Israeli troops.
In all, nearly 3,500 houses have been demolished in the Gaza Strip in the past three years, including about 1,200 in Rafah, municipal officials said.
The Israeli military said it did not know how many houses were demolished in the latest Rafah raid, but that about 30 of the structures were uninhabited and used as cover by gunmen.
The military said that other houses were razed because they were sitting atop or near tunnels. Also, some structures were damaged in the fighting, the army said, noting that Palestinians fired grenades and anti-tank missiles and that soldiers returned fire.
Palestinians charged that Israel was trying to bury peace efforts with the Rafah raid. ``This is a classic war against the Palestinian people,'' Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said Sunday.
The raid was part of stepped-up military activity following an Oct. 3 suicide bombing that killed 20 Israelis in a restaurant in the port city of Haifa.
Military officials said Palestinians planned to use the tunnels to bring in more advanced weapons, like anti-aircraft missiles, that could have a strategic impact on the conflict.
Qureia, meanwhile, said after days of bitter quarreling with Arafat that he would not continue in office after his Cabinet's term expires in three weeks.
Part of the argument was over who would serve as interior minister and de facto security chief. Qureia had supported Nasser Yousef for the job, but Arafat blocked the appointment because he felt Yousef defied him by refusing to be sworn in as part of the emergency Cabinet last week.
The tension between Arafat and Qureia reflects disagreement over the amount of control Arafat would retain over Palestinian armed forces, as well as procedural and personal issues. Israel and the United States insist that Arafat hand over authority, charging that he is tainted by terrorism.
Palestinians deny that and note that Arafat is their elected president -- although the term he won in a 1996 vote has formally expired.
Speaking after a meeting of Fatah leaders, Qureia would say only that a new government would be formed in about three weeks ``with a new prime minister, too.''
If Qureia follows through with his threat to quit, he would be the second prime minister to give up the job amid disputes with Arafat in two months, casting doubt on whether Arafat is willing to give up enough power to allow any premier to succeed.
The office of prime minister was created earlier this year under pressure from the United States and Israel -- who sought to marginalize Arafat and create a more acceptable negotiating partner for Israel.
The United States had hoped the prime minister would implement the ``road map'' peace plan, which envisions the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.
But the first man Arafat appointed premier, Mahmoud Abbas, lasted only four months, resigning Sept. 6 after being caught between Israeli demands for a crackdown on militants and Arafat's refusal to give up power over security forces.
--------
Palestinian Cabinet Decides To Stay On Despite Infighting
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17480-2003Oct12.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 12 -- The Palestinian Authority's week-old cabinet agreed Sunday to remain on the job for three more weeks as an emergency administration in an effort to stave off the collapse of the feuding government, senior Palestinian officials said.
Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, embroiled in many of the same internal squabbles that led to the resignation of his predecessor after four months in office, indicated that he may not accept the post permanently at the end of the emergency period.
"The same government will continue for another 25 days," Qureia, also known as Abu Ala, told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah after closed-door meetings with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and other senior members of his Fatah movement. "And after that there will be a new government and a new prime minister also."
Though Qureia declined to elaborate on the terse statement, his chief of staff, Hassan Abu Libdeh, said in a telephone interview that the new prime minister "could be Abu Ala, or somebody else."
"We still have a crisis," said Saeb Erekat, a minister in the emergency government and the chief Palestinian negotiator. "Today was more of a damage control."
Sunday's meeting averted Qureia's threatened resignation as head of the nine-member cabinet but resolved few of the major disputes between Arafat and some of his most senior officeholders, according to Palestinian officials who attended the session.
The internal political strife came as Israeli military forces continued their largest operation in the Gaza Strip in months. On Friday, tanks and other armored vehicles, backed by attack helicopters, entered the Rafah refugee camp on Gaza's border with Egypt. Israeli military officials said the troops' mission was to destroy tunnels used for smuggling drugs, weapons and other illicit goods across the border.
Eight Palestinians have been killed in the operation. In addition, the homes of between 1,000 and 2,000 residents have been destroyed by the Israeli military, Peter Hansen, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, told the Reuters news service.
Israeli military officials said that while most of the armored vehicles have withdrawn from the neighborhoods, soldiers continued to hunt for tunnels Sunday.
The embattled factions within the Palestinian Authority have not agreed on an interior minister -- one of the most critical and controversial positions in the government. Qureia's nominee for the chief security position, Nasser Yusef, has refused the job because of disputes over control of the security forces and questions over the legitimacy of the emergency government, Palestinian officials said.
The security post remains vacant, and officials said meetings are scheduled to resume Monday in an effort to resolve the impasse.
Palestinian officials "were not able to bridge the differences concerning the mandate of the minister," nor "the name of the minister," Abu Libdeh said.
U.S. and Israeli officials refuse to negotiate with Arafat, accusing him of provoking suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks against Israelis. The two governments have insisted that the Palestinian Authority strip Arafat of control of security forces and turn them over to the prime minister and his cabinet.
Despite U.S. and Israeli efforts to sideline Arafat, he has remained the dominant force in the Palestinian Authority and has thwarted attempts to dilute his powers.
Arafat's first prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, resigned in September, in part because of battles over Arafat's refusal to give up control of the majority of the Palestinian security forces.
Both Abbas and Qureia, however, said they would not confront militant organizations head-on for fear of igniting a civil war among Palestinian factions.
At the conclusion of the 30-day emergency period, the Palestinian Legislative Council will be required to vote on a new cabinet. At that point, Arafat's options include submitting the emergency cabinet to the council for approval as a permanent body or appointing a new prime minister and cabinet for legislative consideration, according to Erekat. He said Arafat also could ask Qureia to form a new cabinet for consideration by the council.
Many Palestinian officials have said they believe that Arafat's appointment of an emergency government was illegal. An attempt to seek a vote of confidence on the cabinet from the Legislative Council last Thursday failed when the government realized it could not win the vote and at the last minute declined to bring the cabinet before lawmakers.
-------- mideast
Jordan's King Says Neighbors Should Avoid Iraq
October 13, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-jordan.html
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Jordan's King Abdullah said on Monday he backed a greater role in Iraq for the international community, but said neighbors such as his own country or Turkey should not get involved because all had an agenda.
Speaking at a session of the World Economic Forum in Singapore en route to a summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Kuala Lumpur, he said he hoped that summit could move beyond rhetoric to take steps to solve the difficulties in Iraq and said he expected an end soon to the Iran crisis.
``No border country should play an active role because all have an agenda,'' he told reporters. ``It is not in the interests of Iraq as its neighbors can't be honest.''
Jordan will provide training for about 30,000 Iraq police but on its own soil and not in Iraq, he said. No troops from Jordan or other neighboring countries should become involved inside Iraq, he said.
Jordan's only contribution on the ground was a field hospital, he said.
However, he said he was optimistic that the recent violence in Iraq marked the last surge of a past regime rather than a new wave of instability.
``It's anybody's guess, but I think it's the last of it,'' he said, adding that the use of suicide bombers seemed to indicate that foreigners were taking part in attacks.
The attacks aimed against Iraqi security targets, such as police stations, were evidence that the aim was to prevent the rebirth of a new, stronger Iraq and the strikes were likely to diminish, he said.
A two-car suicide bombing aimed at a hotel used by U.S. officials on Baghdad's main street on Sunday killed six Iraqis and wounded dozens. Iraq's police chief said he suspected supporters of deposed president Saddam Hussein or members of al Qaeda were responsible.
Iraq's Provisional Governing Council, handpicked by the United States, reiterated its opposition to Turkey sending troops to help U.S.-led occupying forces stabilize its country.
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told reporters he discerned no desire by other Muslim countries to send troops, after meeting counterparts in the Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting in Malaysia's new administrative capital, Putrajaya.
King Abdullah voiced optimism about the crisis involving Iran and its nuclear program, saying he regarded Iran's leadership as among the smartest in the region at reading political maps and they were well aware that instability in Iraq would spill across the border.
In a tough resolution last month, the U.N. nuclear watchdog gave Iran until the end of October to answer doubts about its atomic ambitions, demanding rigorous inspections of suspect sites. Washington is urging strong U.N. measures against Tehran, which it suspects of secretly developing nuclear weapons.
``Dialogue is the name of the game,'' King Abdullah said, adding that he believed Iranian President Mohammad Khatami wanted a deal on the nuclear issue.
``I am more optimistic than pessimistic,'' he said.
----
Pentagon official Richard Perle: US may take action against Syria
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oct. 14, 2003
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1066113923328&p=1008596981749
Pentagon adviser Richard Perle said Tuesday that the recent Israeli attack on an alleged training camp for Palestinian militants in Syria was long overdue and that he would not rule out U.S. military action against the Arab state.
Perle, a close adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, spoke at a Jerusalem conference of conservatives from the United States and Israel.
"President Bush transformed the American approach to terrorism on Sept. 11, 2001, when he said he will not distinguish between terrorists and the states who harbor them," Perle said.
"I was happy to see that Israel has now taken a similar step in responding to acts of terror that originate in Lebanese territory by going to the rulers of Lebanon in Damascus."
Israel has said the training camp it targeted in an Oct. 5 airstrike was used by Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant group that had carried out a suicide bombing in the Israeli port city of Haifa two days earlier, killing 20 people.
Israel has accused Syria of allowing Palestinian militant groups to train and operate from its territory. The Israeli air strike was the first attack on Syrian soil in three decades.
Perle said he hoped the air strike reflected a new Israeli policy similar to the Bush doctrine.
"We have problems with the Syrians who continue to support terrorism. We have to find a way to get them to stop," Perle later told The Associated Press.
Asked whether this would include possible U.S. military action against Syria, he said: "Everything's possible."
Perle said it would not be difficult to commit forces to Syria despite heavy U.S. troop commitments to Iraq and the Korean peninsula, along with a continued presence in areas such as the Balkans and Liberia.
"Syria is militarily very weak," he said.
Perle stepped down from his position as chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board this spring, following allegations that he had used his position with the Pentagon to further business deals in Singapore and the United States. He is still a member of the board.
Perle said that the Bush administration's "road map" to peace between Israel and the Palestinians by 2005 had failed, but that he supported the ideas Bush introduced in a speech on June 24, 2002.
In that speech, Bush outlined his vision for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and called for a change in Palestinian leadership.
-------- philippines
US spy aircraft deployed in Philippines
Monday October 13, 2003
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2003-daily/13-10-2003/world/w5.htm
MANILA: The United States has deployed two long-range military surveillance aircraft in the Philippines as part of assistance in the war against terror, military officials said on Sunday.
"These planes are providing security coverage for the small contingent of US troops in Mindanao," said Major Restituto Padilla, a spokesman for the Philippine Air Force.
There are about 300 US Special Forces in Zamboanga city, on southern Mindanao island, conducting specialised commando training for Filipino soldiers fighting the alleged Abu Sayyaf group, which has been linked to alleged al-Qaeda network.
The training is part of the security assistance promised by the United States to help Manila fight terrorism after initial six-month counter-terrorism joint exercises last year.
US Navy Captain Dennis Williams, a spokesman for the Joint United States Military Assistance Group, confirmed the presence of the two P3C Orion surveillance aircraft, which have been operating out of the central Philippine island of Mactan. "These are related to the ongoing activities in Zamboanga," he told Reuters.
Williams denied the presence of the aircraft was related to the scheduled eight-hour visit to Manila on Saturday of US President George W. Bush on his way to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Thailand.
Spokesman Padilla said the two Orions arrived two weeks ago from a base in Japan.
He said it was not the first time the Americans had based the P3C Orions in the Philippines. In 2002, the US Air Force also deployed similar planes in Cebu in support of last year's six-month counter-terrorism exercise on Basilan Island.
--------
Philippine Forces Kill Terror Suspect
Al-Ghozi Had Fled Manila Jail in July
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17776-2003Oct12.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 13 (Monday) -- Philippine police backed by soldiers shot and killed a prominent Indonesian terrorism suspect in a brief gun battle on the southern island of Mindanao, a top security official said Monday.
Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, a member of the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiah, had escaped from a Manila prison in July in an incident that embarrassed the Philippine government. He became the target of the largest manhunt in recent Philippine history, which at times involved tens of thousands of troops and security officers.
At 7:15 p.m. Sunday, a police team assisted by soldiers flagged down a vehicle traveling on a highway in the town of Pigkawayan in the province of North Cotabato, Philippine national security advisor Roilo Golez said. The small car did not stop, and a man later determined to be al-Ghozi grabbed his companion's firearm and began shooting, Golez said.
Al-Ghozi was shot and wounded, the official said. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. His identity was confirmed by a police crime lab using a fingerprint from the body, Golez said. Al-Ghozi's companion, whose identity Golez did not know, escaped.
The killing of al-Ghozi came on the one-year anniversary of the Bali nightclub bombings, which killed 202 people and were blamed on Jemaah Islamiah, and six days before President Bush is scheduled to arrive in Manila for a state visit. Jemaah Islamiah has been tied to the al Qaeda terrorist network.
"It's very good timing," Golez said. "We've been closing in on him, but he has been very elusive and slippery. But finally we caught up with him. . . . I was not just relieved but very happy about the news."
The operation involved 67 special police tracker teams that had focused on Mindanao, where intelligence officials say al-Ghozi had contacts with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a Muslim separatist group. Some of the group's members were believed to have helped al-Ghozi, intelligence officials said.
"The death of al-Ghozi signals that terrorism will never get far in the Philippines, and the long arms of the law will eventually get them," President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said in a statement. "This event should lift much of the anxieties of our people. . . . We are determined to end this transnational threat decisively."
Al-Ghozi, 32, a graduate of an Indonesian religious school founded by the alleged spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah, also studied in Pakistan and was trained in the use of weapons and explosives. He entered the Philippines in 1996 and, according to intelligence officials, trained Jemaah Islamiah recruits at a camp of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Al-Ghozi was arrested in January 2002 at a hotel in Manila. He was serving a 10- to 12-year sentence for illegally possessing one ton of TNT, which was intended for attacks on Western targets in Singapore, including the U.S. Embassy, police and intelligence officials said. He was also accused of involvement in the bombing of the Philippine ambassador's home in Jakarta in August 2000, which seriously injured the ambassador and killed two bystanders, and of engineering the bombings that killed 22 people in Manila in December 2000.
On July 14, al-Ghozi and two other inmates walked out of their cell after learning that the latch on the door could be pried open enough to let them slip through.
Special correspondent Dana Batnag in Manila contributed to this report.
-------- space
China Plans Giant Step This Week
October 13, 2003
By JIM YARDLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/international/asia/13SPAC.html
BEIJING, Oct. 12 - Amid all the clutter that has been rocketed into space is a clunky satellite expected to circle the Earth until 2070. The satellite, the Dong Fang Hong, was the first ever launched by China, in 1970, and is also an extraterrestrial boombox: It broadcasts into the cosmos the strains of the Maoist anthem, "The East is Red."
If China becomes the third nation to send an astronaut into space, as it plans to do on Wednesday, its top leaders will be sending a new message, to two audiences.
To the rest of the world, China is displaying its growing technological prowess, staking its claim to a future role in space and reasserting its case for being considered a power equal to the United States.
To its own people, the Chinese leadership hopes to stir pride and nationalism and to prove that the Communist Party, rather than being a dinosaur, is capable of the most technical of achievements. A full-throttle propaganda campaign is under way, with huge coverage in state-run newspapers and a 20-part series about the space program about to run on state-run television.
"It's primarily about showing the world; it's about prestige," said Brian Harvey, author of a 1998 book about the Chinese space program. "It's a vindication of their political system."
The mission is meant to orbit the earth 14 times in 21 hours before returning, but it opens the way toward China's much bigger ambitions in space. The government plans to launch a Hubble-like space telescope and to begin exploring the moon within three years. Analysts say China is working to launch a space station, possibly to coincide with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
For now, though, the Shenzhou V is the center of attention. The spacecraft is scheduled to blast off between next Wednesday and Friday from a launching site in the Gobi Desert. The government has still not identified the astronauts. Nor has it said how many astronauts will be on board, through there reportedly will be between one and three.
It might seem anticlimactic to join a space club where the original members, the former Soviet Union and the United States, each sent astronauts into space more than 40 years ago. But if China's late entry speaks to its arrested development, it also underscores the country's determination to be in space and to pursue scientific excellence.
Centuries ago, China invented the rocket as well as gunpowder. But Chinese political analysts and historians note that the country's leaders, many of them engineers or technicians, are strongly influenced by Chinese history from the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the country faced foreign invaders with superior weapons and technology.
"From that time on, China has always been preoccupied with copying and catching up with foreign science and technology," said Lei Yi, a historian of modern China at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "The launching of the Shenzhou V is really a logical extension of this line of thought that goes back a century - saving the nation through science and technology."
The former Chinese president and party chief, Jiang Zemin, who remains the head of the military, which ultimately controls the space program, restarted the astronaut flight program in 1992. (In the 1970's, China discontinued a secret, manned program.) An editor at a major state newspaper, who spoke on condition of anonymity, attributed Mr. Jiang's interest, in part, to his fear of falling too far behind the West.
Mr. Jiang and his successor as president and party chief, Hu Jintao, are expected to attend the launching. "The space program is really Jiang Zemin's legacy, and if the launch is successful, he'll want his share of the glory," the editor said.
There have been reports of debate within China's scientific community about the value of spending so much money on space - the annual budget is $2 billion -- and whether the mission will generate real scientific breakthroughs. He Zuoxiu, a senior physicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said he would applaud a successful launching, but cautioned against reading too much into one.
"If the launch is successful, we'll have joined the space club, but that doesn't mean we're a scientific power - far from it," he said.
Mr. He said China spends only about 1 percent of its gross domestic product on scientific research and development. He said he understood the reasons for sending astronauts into space, but noted that, scientifically, there may be more pressing areas of concern.
"China faces a severe energy shortage, the gap in oil production is growing," he said, offering examples. "Also, transport is extremely backward - look at the railways." But he concluded that "international prestige is the most important consideration here."
Asked about plans for a moon mission, he added:
"Some people will say that we have more pressing problems to deal with before taking on a moon landing, like feeding and clothing all our people."
It is unclear how much the preparations are resonating with the public, but one state-run newspaper reported this weekend that people were pouring into the launching area in hopes of getting a glimpse of the blastoff.
"The Chinese public is also deeply aware of China's image as a scientifically backward country, and I think the idea of reviving China as a scientific power is very popular," said Mr. Lei, the historian. He said the Chinese were stunned by American technical expertise in the Iraq war.
The emergence of China as a space power, possibly with military goals, has spurred some predictions of another space race. India, for one, is rushing to match China. But even as conservatives in the United States regard China's intentions warily, other experts minimize the chance of a coming race with America.
John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said it would likely take a decade for China to send an astronaut to the moon. He said the space program is developing antisatellite weapons and robotic space weapons, but said he did not think that the Shenzhou V had military applications.
"It's earning them a seat at the central table on space issues," he said.
-------- propaganda wars
Bush Goes Around Media to Make Iraq Case
President Bush Looks to Make Case on Iraq Through Outlets That Don't Normally Cover White House
The Associated Press
Oct. 13, 2003
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20031013_603.html
WASHINGTON - President Bush, annoyed by what he considers the "filter" of news reporting, will seek to go around the press on Monday through television outlets that do not routinely cover the White House.
Bush was giving a series of interviews to make the case that the situation in Iraq is getting better.
The appearances are part of a week-old administration initiative against critics of the war and its aftermath. It's included speeches by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and even first lady Laura Bush.
The offensive comes as polls show Americans increasingly worried by Iraq policy.
In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush offered a portrait of Iraq as a country where life is returning to normal after war, insisting that "Iraq is making progress" despite a steady drumbeat of bad news.
Bush said that progress was coming as a result of his "clear strategy." But Democrats retorted, "The president did not plan well for winning the peace and rebuilding the nation."
Bush said Iraq is a place where markets are bustling, shelves are full, oil is flowing and satellite dishes are sprouting up.
"Since the liberation of that country, thousands of new businesses have been launched," Bush said. "With our assistance, Iraqis are building the roads and ports and railways necessary for commerce."
Bush noted other developments: an independent central bank; a new system to absorb foreign capital; a new currency.
He made a new pitch for his $87 billion spending request for military operations and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. He said it was critical for helping Iraq reach its potential and for keeping America safer from terrorism.
In their Saturday radio address, Democrats said Bush must provide a more detailed accounting of how the money is being spent before lawmakers vote on the next budget request, likely next week.
"While the battle to oust Saddam Hussein was well-planned and well-executed, the president did not plan well for winning the peace and rebuilding the nation," said Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind.
"There has been little support from the international community; our troops have been taking almost all the risks, and American taxpayers have been paying all the bills," Hill said.
"Many proposals have been discussed in Congress to ensure accountability" for previous spending in Iraq, which Hill said totaled $63 billion this year.
Bush also sought to reassure Americans about the alarming violence.
"Coalition forces in Iraq are actively pursuing the terrorists and Saddam holdouts who desperately oppose freedom for the Iraqi people," Bush said.
Associated Press Writer Scott Lindlaw contributed to this report.
----
The Truth About Our Good Intentions
By Meline Toumani,
AlterNet
October 13, 2003
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16951
What can we, in America, know of how it feels to be a citizen of any other country in the world?
We do not have brigades of well-meaning volunteers from, say, the Netherlands arriving in our neighborhoods with bold promises of teaching us how to run our schools. We do not have representatives from Singapore engaging in optimistic efforts to reform our legislature, or teams from France trying to develop our media. Scruffy Swedish twenty-somethings, fresh from college, do not take up residence in our midst and teach us about the importance of government-sponsored healthcare.
Though we pride ourselves on traveling the world to help solve its problems - charity or bust - we do not know how it feels to be always on the worse end of the expression, "It is better to give than to receive."
Now - although nobody really believes that the Bush administration waged war for humanitarian purposes - the faltering process of "reconstructing" Iraq is being spun as America's grandest act of altruism in decades. But do we really want our presence in Iraq to seem, to the watching world that has hosted so many of our do-gooders, like just one more foreign aid program in which moneyed Americans set up shop in distant villages to teach a group of people how to do things the American way?
I recently returned from a long stay in Russia, where, with U.S. State Department money, I helped run a journalism training institute at a university in the North Caucasus. The institute proposal was all lofty ideals about how Russian and American journalists could learn from one another, because it would be impolite to call it what it was: a sophisticated foreign adventure for the Americans, in exchange for a gleaming computer lab filled with expensive video equipment and tied up with the ribbons of broadband cable that would allow our Russian hosts to learn for themselves what they really wanted to know.
After leaving Russia, I chatted with a young American friend who had recently set off for another former Soviet republic to run a project (also funded by the U.S. government) that was to "reform" the small nation's parliament. He told me that his charges there barely concealed their scorn for what they saw as a pipedream project to give intrepid Americans an excuse to see the world. The cynics' mission statement, he told me? "Just bring us your computers and then leave us alone."
These less-than-fawning responses to American aid projects in the former Soviet Union reminded me of the way my own relatives, who grew up in the Middle East, describe their experiences as the recipients of the Peace Corps' best intentions. My mother still fumes when she remembers the Peace Corps teachers she endured in both Iran and Lebanon. As the locals perceived it, the volunteers considered it their goal to civilize members of a culture old enough to be America's great-grandparent 35 times over.
"To those people in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves," said President Kennedy, before cutting the Peace Corps ribbon. Over the applause, nobody could have heard a quiet "No, thank you," if there had been one.
I do not mean to suggest that the billions of dollars we spend on exporting U.S. values are entirely wasted, or that our armies of volunteers should head home right away. But while Americans have a great supply of sympathy, we do not have nearly enough empathy for those who are burdened with our ubiquitous attempts to help - and are tortured by the implicit inferiority that is always part of the deal.
"The most repulsive thing to all men is gratitude," wrote Zora Neale Hurston. "Men give up property, freedom and even life before they will have the obligation laid on them."
These examples are, of course, just peace-time dioramas of the scenario taking shape in Iraq, where, President Bush told us in one of his recent stand-up routines, "We are helping the long-suffering people of that country to build a decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East. Together we are transforming a place of torture chambers and mass graves into a nation of laws and free institutions."
If we are confused by Iraqi gunfire, bombing and hostility toward our troops, we need only remember how much less than a declaration of war it takes to make the recipients of American aid disgusted with America.
But a recent poll of Iraqi public opinion, released last month by the American Enterprise magazine and heralded in the Wall Street Journal, tells me I am all wrong if I mean to say that Iraqis aren't embracing their liberators. In his summary of the poll results, Karl Zintsmeister writes that Iraqis are "more sensible, stable and moderate than commonly portrayed, and that Iraq is not so fanatical, or resentful of the U.S., after all."
How does Zintsmeister figure? First off, he reports with great excitement that four out of 10 Iraqis say democracy can work in Iraq. So what about the other five who believe it can't work, or the one who isn't sure? Zintsmeister seems tickled that 37 percent of Iraqis would like to see the new Iraq modeled after the U.S.
Thirty-seven percent? That means that a roiling 63 percent of Iraqis said they'd like Iraq to be modeled after one of the other four choices: Syria, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Zintsmeister tells us, "You can cross out Osama II" because a whopping 57 percent of Iraqis don't have a favorable view of Osama bin Laden. Are we supposed to take comfort in the knowledge that the remaining 43 percent of Iraqis think he's not so bad? I read and re-read Zinstmeister's comments for hints of satire, but I concluded that his eerily Pollyanna-ish interpretation of the poll results was serious.
What all of this adds up to, for me, is continuing evidence that the U.S. - and especially our current administration - has a terribly difficult time putting itself in the other man's shoes. With some kind of willful blindness that sustains evermore the glow of our graced position on this earth, we just keep on shaking our heads at the ungrateful beggar who doesn't appreciate all we've done for him, never seeing him as the angry man whose Hobson's choice is between starving and humiliation.
Our president chastises the Iraqi people from the television screen: "Now they must rise to the responsibilities of a free people and secure the blessings of their own liberty." For an institution so finely skilled in the minutiae of mind-altering propaganda, the Bush administration keeps failing to find words that convey any notion of respect. Can it be otherwise in this troubled union of the liberator and the liberated? Probably not, because condescension is not simply a manner of speaking, but a state of mind, one that is deeply embedded in the American psyche, and communicated like a virus by our well-meaning emissaries all over the world.
Meline Toumani is finishing her master's degree in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU. She spent the past summer teaching journalism in Russia.
----
FAKE 'GOOD NEWS' FROM IRAQ
War Party using the troops for propaganda
by Justin Raimondo
October 13, 2003
Antiwar
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j101303.html
The lying cretins who gave us the Iraq war aren't content that our soldiers are sitting ducks for terrorists throughout the Middle East - now they're using them as props in a propaganda campaign designed to convince the American people that "progress" is being made. As the [Washington] Olympian reports:
"Letters from hometown soldiers describing their successes rebuilding Iraq have been appearing in newspapers across the country as U.S. public opinion on the mission sours.
"And all the letters are the same.
"A Gannett News Service search found identical letters from different soldiers with the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, also known as 'The Rock,' in 11 newspapers, including Snohomish, Wash."
Just a few minutes of googling brings forth at least two identical letters attributed to two different soldiers: Oh, and here's another. Gannett News counts at least 11. Capitol Hill Blue reports "some say they were ordered by their superiors to sign their names."
According to the phony letter, everything is hunky-dory over in "liberated" Iraq:
"Kirkuk is a hot and dusty city of just over a million people. The majority of the city has welcomed our presence with open arms. After nearly five months here, the people still come running from their homes into the 110-degree heat, waving to us as our troops drive by on daily patrols of the city. "
It figures that these fake letters appeared in newspapers just as relatively trouble-free Kirkuk appears to be going off the deep end, along with the entire northern part of the country. Is this the kind of war propaganda we're paying for? I demand a congressional investigation! Why don't they hire Glenn Reynolds - if they already haven't, that is. Here is the Pontifcating Professor as he tries to explain that the bogus letter isn't a bogus letter, you see, because it's a "form letter." Only a law professor could argue that so labeling it ameliorates the essential fraud of misrepresenting both the author and his intent.
Clearly, those who did agree to sign (when asked to do so by their military superiors) had no idea that their names would soon be in print. When one proud father congratulated his son on getting a letter published in the local newspaper, the soldier said: "What letter?"
The Official Story is that some anonymous GI wrote the letter, the military public relations team had nothing to do with it, the high command had nothing to do with it, and somebody - nobody knows who - mailed it out to all the hometown papers of the unit. Whoever did it had access to the soldiers' records, because in at least one case a letter was sent to the Olympian, published in Washington state, when the soldier and his family had long since moved to Idaho.
Aside from that, however, there is the problem of implied coercion. As reported on Capitol Hill Blue:
"One soldier, who asked not to be identified, said he was reluctant to sign the letter because he did not agree with the comments in the letter but said he was ordered by a superior officer to sign. 'When I'm given an order, I obey it,' he said."
The Olympian quotes Sgt. Christopher Shelton, signer of a letter that was published in the Snohomish Herald, saying "his platoon sergeant had distributed the letter and asked soldiers for the names of their hometown newspapers. Soldiers were asked to sign the letter if they agreed with it."
Shelton, it appears, did agree with it, but can anyone honestly imagine a soldier refusing to sign it when asked to do so by a superior officer?
It isn't enough that our soldiers are being put in harm's way in an increasingly ugly and pointless war: now they are being used as political pawns, forced to lie on behalf of the Liar-in-chief and his fellow fibbers in the War Party.
The story that this was a spontaneous campaign initiated by an anonymous soldier just doesn't wash. This has all the earmarks of a more than typically clumsy effort by some government agency or other to fight the "war on terrorism" on the home front. As such, it underscores the character of those who lied about the real reasons we went into Iraq, and are lying as hard as they can, as often as they can, to keep us there.
I suppose there are some good aspects of the U.S. invasion and conquest of Iraq. Someone in Iraq, somehow - if only by accident - is going to benefit from the infusion of all that money. And we are not just talking about material benefits. the proliferation of newly-minted Iraqi newspapers is proof enough of that.
The great irony, however, is that the Coalition "Provisional" Authority is unsettled by all this ideological diversity, and has responded by banning two television outlets, including Al Jazeera, and a number of newspapers, for "incitement." An even greater irony is that we, the American people, derive no benefits from this "liberation." Lives are lost, bodies maimed, but who gains, aside from politically-connected government contractors and lobbyists?
Ordinary Americans will have their tax dollars "liberated" from their wallets and transferred overseas, along with all too many of their sons and daughters - more than a few of whom will be making a one-way trip. Now I think I fully understand why Ayn Rand hated altruism. If that's what this is, then so do I.
No matter what briefly enduring short-term good comes of the American occupation of Iraq, I'm sure the professional apologists for U.S. policy would be incapable of discovering it, or even of telling anyone about it. These people are incapable of telling the truth, even if it is to their advantage. They prefer prevarication. That's why the art of lying has attained cult status among the more exalted neocon intellectuals, who celebrate Leo Strauss's concept of the "noble lie" - fibs fed to the masses for their own good by geniuses like themselves.
It's a depressing scenario, alright, but let's try to end this on a lighter note. Hey, I hear that the USO is sending a group of comedians to entertain the troops in Iraq: I'm sure, at this point, they could use a few laughs. But, uh, look who they're sending over there....
I'm not exactly an encyclopedia of popular culture, but this was the first I'd heard of Ralphie May. Judging from his website, however, I'm not sure I want to know much more. And what about Butch Bradley? Oh wait, you mean this guy? I never even heard of the people he's opened for, never mind him. I'm suuuuuure the troops will be thrilled to know that, along with these worthies, Lahna Turner will be paying them a visit - no, not that one - this one.
Aside from being Ralphie's main squeeze, I'm not sure why she'd be better than, say, Janeane Garofalo. Can anyone speculate as to why Robin Williams was passed over (after he was a big hit in Afghanistan) for a bunch of nobodies? Hey, what about Whoopi Goldberg? I'd love to hear the Pentagon explain why not. If our vocally antiwar Hollywood celebs had any political - or PR - sense, they'd volunteer for the Iraq gig and offer to donate the money to the families of the dead and wounded.
Better yet, why not fire Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle - the whole neocon gang that lied us into war - and send them over there as a comedy act. They could specialize in goofball slapstick, and bill themselves as the Gang that Couldn't Keep Their Lies Straight.
That's my solution to the Iraq disaster: send in the clowns.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
Gee, it's been at least a few weeks since Stephen Schwartz, the Trotskyite-turned-neocon Muslim convert. wrote a screed for Frontpage charging Antiwar.com with sedition and me with being an agent of the Mikado. I was beginning to feel ... neglected. I mean, where is this relationship going? You never call anymore! But then - oh glory be! - my feeling of abandonment was lifted by a missive in the Letters column of the New York Review of Books (October 9, 2003), which reads, in part:
"In a violent diatribe drawing on a disreputable source, the www.antiwar.com Web site, Clifford Gertz described [Stephen] Schwartz as 'a strange and outlandish character.' However, he cites nothing about Mr. Schwartz that could fit such a description."
What can one say about a writer who goes to all the trouble to get over 200 others - including the entire staff of Walter Magazine! - to sign a letter protesting a bad review of his book? Strange and outlandish? That's an understatement. No wonder all sign of his employment at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, where he was listed as a "senior fellow," has been scrubbed clean from their website.
Department of Don't Say We Didn't Warn You:
"The imperial project of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-neoconservative cabal is the Israeli occupation of Palestine writ large."
- "Phase Two Begins," Antiwar.com, April 14, 2003
"US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops."
- "US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops," Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, October 12, 2003
----
Letters Home
Soldiers's Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
October 13, 2003
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/World/iraq031013_letters-1.html
Oct. 13 - The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical:
"Kirkuk is a hot and dusty city of just over a million people. The majority of the city has welcomed our presence with open arms. After nearly five months here, the people still come running from their homes, into the 110-degree heat, waving to us as our troops drive by on daily patrols of the city. Children smile and run up to shake hands and in their broken English shouting, "Thank you, Mister."
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
Caraccilo said he circulated the form letter to his soldiers to give them "an opportunity to let their respective hometowns know what they are accomplishing here in Kirkuk. As you might expect, they are working at an extremely fast pace and getting the good news back home is not always easy. We thought it would be a good idea to encapsulate what we as a battalion have accomplished since arriving Iraq and share that pride with people back home."
Caraccilo wrote that his staff drafted the letter, he edited it and reviewed it and then offered it to the soldiers. "Every soldier who signed that letter did so after a careful read," he said. "Some, who could find the time, decided to send their own versions, while others chose not to take part in the initiative."
Caraccilo was unapologetic, saying that the letter "perfectly reflects what each of these brave soldiers has and continues to accomplish on the ground."
"With the current and ongoing media focus on casualties and terrorist attacks, we thought it equally important to share with the American public, and especially the folks from our soldier's hometowns, the good news associated with our work in Kirkuk," Caraccilo added.
Kirkuk Less Violent Than Other Iraqi Cities
Indeed, Kirkuk has seen improvement over the past several months, and is far less violent than other areas of Iraq.
Amy Connell had no problem sending the letter to her local paper, The Boston Globe, even though she knew her son hadn't written it.
"I thought the letter was a good representation of what they are doing over there in Kirkuk," she said. "It just showed the positive aspect that is coming out of the war, and what they, our soldiers, are doing over there for the Iraqi people."
But The Boston Globe wasn't happy to learn about the origin of the letter. An editor at the Globe told ABCNEWS that it was "a big disappointment."
"Our readers have a right to expect letters that are originals," he said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- human rights
EU Accuses Iran of Torture and Liberties Abuses
October 13, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-rights-eu-iran.html
LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - The European Union accused Iran Monday of torture and a catalog of civil liberties abuses, but foreign ministers said they wanted to maintain a dialogue on human rights.
For that reason, the 15-nation EU stopped just short of agreeing to table a resolution condemning Iran at the United Nations, saying instead it would ``convey its serious concern.''
``The Council continues to be seriously concerned about executions being carried out in Iran in apparent absence of respect for internationally recognized safeguards,'' the EU said in a statement on an Iran-EU human rights dialogue last week.
``The Council is equally concerned by the continued use of torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment in Iran,'' it added.
The statement highlighted public executions and amputations as well as shortcomings in freedom of opinion and expression, women's rights, religious freedom, and discrimination against women and girls.
It drew special attention to the case of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian citizen of Iranian descent whose death in custody in June, from a blow to the head, seriously damaged relations between Ottawa and Tehran.
A member of Iran's intelligence services is currently on trial for her murder, a charge he denies.
Kazemi's family is to be represented in Iranian courts by human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. The EU congratulated Ebadi in its statement as an ``eminent Iranian lawyer and human rights defender.''
While welcoming the dialogue and looking forward to the next round of talks on human rights, to be held in Tehran, the EU said improvements on the ground were needed if talks were to continue.
``As the Council has recalled on previous occasions, this dialogue is an acceptable option only if sufficient progress is achieved and reflected on the ground,'' the statement said.
The EU is fully backing demands by the U.N. nuclear watchdog that Iran produce proof before the end of this month that it is not secretly working to develop nuclear weapons under cover of its bigger than previously disclosed civilian nuclear program.
``The Council considered that the Iranian nuclear program remains an issue of grave concern...,'' the statement said, reaffirming that the entire relationship would be reviewed in the light of Tehran's compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency deadline
-------- immigration / refugees
Congress Looks to Grant Legal Status to Immigrants
October 13, 2003
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/national/13IMMI.html
Eighteen-year-old Yuliana Huicochea moved to the United States at age 4, but now faces deportation because immigration officials stopped her on a school trip to a science fair.
Ms. Huicochea's troubles began last year when she and other members of her high school science team traveled from Phoenix to Buffalo to enter their 15-foot solar-powered boat in the fair and decided to take a side trip to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Immigration officials stopped Ms. Huicochea and three teammates and told them they faced deportation because they were illegal immigrants.
"I'm scared," said Ms. Huicochea (WEE-coe-CHAY-uh), now a sophomore at Phoenix College, who declined to say what country she immigrated from. "I don't know any other place. My whole family is here. This is where my education is, my dreams, my goals. I don't know what I would do anywhere else."
Hispanic groups and immigrant advocates have embraced her cause, insisting that it is wrong to expel teenagers who immigrated as toddlers. And now, with many members of Congress thinking about next year's elections and paying increasing attention to the concerns of Hispanics, the issue is gaining bipartisan interest on Capitol Hill.
Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is sponsoring a bill that would grant legal status to Ms. Huicochea and tens of thousands of other high school students or graduates who are illegal immigrants. His bill - the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (or Dream) Act, has 36 sponsors, one-third of them Republican. His aides say they expect the Judiciary Committee to approve the bill this week.
The bill is part of a wave of immigration legislation that has gathered bipartisan momentum in recent weeks. One bill would grant accelerated citizenship to immigrants who serve in the armed forces. Another would grant legal status to 500,000 farm workers if they commit themselves to doing agricultural work for several more years. That bill's main sponsors in the Senate are Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. They say it has the support of the Senate leadership, conservatives, liberals, agricultural employers, the nation's largest farm workers' union, the Chamber of Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
"On the farm workers' bill," said Cecilia Munoz, a vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group, "you're talking about an alliance of strange bedfellows who have agreed on a major policy that's in the interests of the industry and the workers."
Sharon Hughes, executive vice president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, said, "For the first time, we have a large constituency for the reforms."
Several lawmakers say their strategy is to use the farm workers' bill as a wedge to advance other legislation that would grant legal status to other groups of illegal immigrants, like the hundreds of thousands working in restaurants and hotels.
"We think we have an excellent chance of getting the agricultural workers' bill passed," Senator Kennedy said. "I'm drawing up follow-up legislation for other industries. There's been a dramatic shift in the atmosphere on all this."
Republican backers in the House and Senate say the White House has signaled that President Bush will sign the farm workers' bill if it reaches his desk.
Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said, "We are reviewing this legislation and look forward to working with Congress."
Two years ago a push to grant legal status to millions of illegal immigrants was gaining momentum as President Vicente Fox of Mexico pressed President Bush to give a fairer deal to immigrant laborers. But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, derailed those efforts, because the Bush administration began concentrating on securing borders rather than helping immigrants.
"We are farther away from the horrors of Sept. 11, and we've had a chance to digest it," said John F. Gay, co-chairman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a business group that supports granting legal status to millions of illegal immigrants. "People inside and outside of Congress are beginning to understand that immigration reform makes you more secure."
Under the Craig-Kennedy bill, immigrants who want legal status must show that they did farm work for 100 days over the past 18 months. They will then receive temporary resident status, but if they fail to do 360 days of farm work over the next six years, they will revert to illegal status. The bill would also reduce many bureaucratic barriers that make it hard for farmers to bring in seasonal guest workers from abroad.
"This is not an amnesty program," said Representative Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who is co-sponsoring the House bill with Christopher P. Cannon, a Utah Republican. "This is an earned legalization program."
Opponents of helping illegal immigrants have vowed to fight the new bills. "It's never time to reward people for breaking the law," said Representative Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican who is one of Congress's most outspoken foes of easing immigration rules. "That's the worst kind of public policy."
Mr. Hatch's legislation would grant legal status to teenagers like Ms. Huicochea who have been in the United States at least five years, have graduated from high school and have no criminal record. The bill would also lift a restriction that discourages state universities from charging the lower in-state tuition rate to illegal immigrants.
"We've gone to high school at taxpayers' expense, and now we can't give back to the community because we face deportation," said Ms. Huicochea, who hopes to become a lawyer. "The Dream Act is not only for our benefit, but for everybody. We would be able to start giving back to the community."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Honda reduces cost of building fuel cell cars
REUTERS JAPAN:
October 13, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22517/story.htm
TOKYO - Honda Motor 7267.T has brought the mass production of zero-emission hydrogen vehicles a step closer to reality by developing a cheaper-to-make, high-performance fuel cell stack needed to power the cars.
Japan's No.2 auto maker said last week the new fuel cell stack is lighter, smaller and 10 percent more fuel efficient than the fuel cell it now uses and can operate in temperatures as low as minus 20C (-4F). Its current fuel cell vehicle (FCV) can only run in above-freezing conditions.
FCVs are touted as the ultimate "green car" since they emit only water as a by-product, creating electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen, but mass production is believed to be at least a decade away due to high costs and lack of infrastructure to supply and store hydrogen.
Honda declined to give details on the scope of cost reduction the new technology would achieve, but Yuji Kawaguchi, senior chief engineer at Honda R&D Co, said cost savings were "big".
A gasoline engine can produce one kilowatt of energy for about $50, while a one-kilowatt fuel cell on the market today costs around $5,000.
"We want to be able to sell the fuel cell stack as soon as possible, although we have no concrete plans at the moment," Kawaguchi told a news conference.
Honda's new fuel cell stack features a separator made of metal that is stamped together, versus conventional separators made of carbon that need to be fastened with bolts. The new technology almost halves the number of components, bringing down production time and costs.
The stack also uses newly developed "aromatic" electrolyte membranes made of petroleum-based material instead of the more expensive and complex fluorine electrolyte membranes used in Honda's current FCV.
The new features also increase driving range by 40 km (25 miles) to 395 km (245 miles), although that is short of the minimum 500 km believed to be needed to make FCVs truly practical.
Honda is one of only a handful of auto makers with a saleable FCV on the road, but it has been using fuel cells developed by Canada's Ballard Power Systems BLD.TO . Ballard and Honda have a three-year supply pact until 2005.
Kawaguchi said Honda's new fuel cell stack is better than any on the road now, but stressed its relationship with Ballard would not change.
"We will continue to cooperate and compete with Ballard," he said.
Bigger rivals like Toyota Motor Corp 7203.T and General Motors Corp GM.N also have saleable FCVs on the road, using fuel cell stacks developed in-house.
-------- energy
Energy Industry to Win Big on Energy Bill
Story by Joseph A. Giannone
REUTERS USA:
October 13, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22519/story.htm
NEW YORK - After three years of false starts, Congress could soon pass a sweeping energy bill packed with tax breaks and other benefits for oil, natural gas, coal and power companies - a package that could cost taxpayers nearly $53 billion over the next 10 years.
Recently, bitter disagreements on issues such as power grid rules and ethanol have bogged down the bill, possibly delaying a vote by House and Senate negotiators until January. But some analysts say the Aug. 14 blackout and soaring gasoline prices will generate the support needed to pass a bill this year or early in the new year.
"If you look at the fundamentals, who benefits from the bill and all the different reasons why members of Congress are likely to vote for it in the end, we're looking at excellent chances of getting the bill done this year," said Prudential Securities Washington analyst James Lucier.
The bill is good news for a broad range of energy companies - from oil producer ConocoPhillips COP.N and power company Exelon Corp. EXC.N to drillers like Nabors Industries NBR.A .
It has tax credits to promote drilling unconventional sources of gas, changes the tax code to encourage pipeline and power grid investments and takes steps to open more federal lands to drilling.
According to Joint Committee on Taxation estimates, the bill's provisions would reduce net tax payments by $16 billion to $19 billion over the next 10 years.
"Longer term, there's a lot of stuff in the bill that could move these stocks," said Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst Jacques Rousseau.
For utilities, the bill is even more beneficial. There are financial incentives earmarked for nuclear power, cleaner coal-based power and coal-based synthetic fuels. Lawmakers also hope to restructure power transmission and repeal Depression-era rules to encourage consolidation and investment from outside the energy industry.
Critics complain the bill enriches companies that shaped the Bush-Cheney energy policy behind closed doors in 2001. The legislation, they say, does not do enough to reduce energy consumption, curb pollution or develop renewable resources.
"The industry is reaping huge profits from tax credits, yet there are no benefits to the public," said Navin Nayak, an analyst at consumer advocates U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "It's a waste of money."
Final figures are likely to change, but legislation passed earlier this year indicates the bill will carry a hefty price tag.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill's total cost to taxpayers, including lost revenue, would reach $40.3 billion through 2008 and $52.6 billion over the next decade.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, in a Sept 10 memo, told lawmakers the tax impact should not exceed $8 billion.
Still, sponsors say the bill is needed to boost U.S. security and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
For example, there are more than $2.5 billion of "Section 29" credits to encourage production of gas from coal-bed methane, deepwater wells and landfills. Analysts say these credits help coal-bed wells, which take years to reach peak production, compete with conventional gas.
"I don't think there's any doubt, depending on the exact terms of the tax credit, that you would see shifting in capital toward unconventional projects," Devon Energy DVN.A Vice President Don DeCarlo said at a conference earlier this year.
Beyond tax breaks, the bill expands access to domestic resources, most notably opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drillers. Producers also seek permission to drill in federal lands in the Rocky Mountains.
The bill may also finally launch construction of a 3,600-mile pipeline to Alaska's North Slope by Exxon Mobil XOM.N , BP BP.L and ConocoPhillips. BP and Conoco seek credits that would kick in if gas prices fall below $3.50 before committing to the $20 billion project.
Ultimately, some analysts say, the most powerful benefit to the industry comes from new tax rules such as a 30 percent depreciation bonus, on top of normal first-year depreciation. This could yield huge savings for an industry that makes big pipeline, power line and other infrastructure investments.
"The tax cuts pack a wallop for all asset classes, but the energy industry should benefit the most," Prudential Securities' Lucier said.
-------- environment
U.S. Ghost Ships Arouse Official European Opposition
BRUSSELS, Belgium,
October 14, 2003
(ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2003/2003-10-14-03.asp
The top European Union environment official has publicly denounced the towing of obsolete ships from the United States across the Atlantic Ocean for scrapping in England. EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom Monday questioned the legal basis for the deal, and said she would write letters to both governments opposing it.
In London to deliver a speech on the proposed EU chemicals regime for the Greenpeace Business Lecture Series, Wallstrom said, "I think they should keep the ships in the U.S. Why should they drive them across the Atlantic? It seems to me too much of an environmental risk."
Two of the old ships from the James River Naval Reserve Fleet in Virginia, known as the Ghost Fleet, began their journey across the ocean on October 6, and two more are set to leave shortly.
The two auxiliary oil tankers Canisteo and the Caloosahatchee are being towed by one large ocean going tug. At their current speed of seven miles per hour, the voyage is expected to last about 21 days, and they should be at the dock in England at the end of October.
Ghost Fleet ships were built between 40 and 60 years ago, in an era when the use of PCBs, lead paint and asbestos was commonplace, and the entire fleet of about 130 vessels is contaminated with these chemicals.
Environmental groups on both sides of the ocean oppose the shipment out of concern that the ships will break apart in transit, spilling toxic chemicals into the ocean.
Wallstrom said Monday, "It doesn't make any sense to take that risk by sending these apparently very hazardous ships and old ones, also leaking hazardous substances into the James River in America, to England.
She proposed that European ship breaking experts teach Americans how to handle the decaying vessels. "We can assist them in dealing with these ships and how to break them up and recover them. But keep them there, don't send them here," Wallstrom said.
The U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) arranged for the four ships to leave after a U.S. federal judge ruled October 2 that two U.S. environmental groups did not have sufficient grounds for a restraining order to halt the sailing.
But the federal judge blocked the government from moving nine of 13 ships from the Ghost Fleet to England, saying MARAD had not done environmental studies as required by several federal laws.
Able UK has signed a 16 million pound deal to dismantle all 13 ghost ships at its Graythorp yard at Teesside, England. But the UK authorities have not given Able the green light to construct a drydock where the ships can be scrapped.
Part of the James River Naval Reserve Fleet (Photo courtesy MARAD) Friends of the Earth UK is urging that the "toxic ghost ships heading for England to be turned back to the USA" after the UK Environment Agency made it clear that they should not be dealt with in a wet dock.
Last week, Craig McGarvey, the UK Environment Agency's north east area manager, said that planning permission for the construction of a dry dock does not exist.
"If the boats are allowed into Teesside, and they can't be dealt with in a dry dock, they will be pose a significant pollution threat to the local wildlife sites important for their populations of knot, redshank, shelduck and other birds," said Friends of the Earth.
Friends of the Earth's Campaigns Director Mike Childs said, "This whole issue is fast becoming a sorry farce. Able UK does not have planning permission to build a dry dock to dispose of these boats, and it won't be allowed to deal with them in a wet dock. Yet two heavily polluted, rusty and dilapidated ships have been allowed to set sail from the USA to Teesside, and two more are due to leave any minute."
"It's about time the environment and people of Teesside were put before the interests of those seeking to benefit from the international trade in toxic waste," Childs said.
"These boats must not be allowed into UK waters until all the issues have been resolved," he said. "Better still, the U.S. should be forced to deal with its own toxic legacy, rather than dumping these ships abroad."
But a spokesman for Able UK says he has assured both governments and environmental organizations that there is no danger to the environment. "The arrangements for this contract and Able's ability to handle a project of this size have been subject to comprehensive vetting and approval by both American and UK environmental agencies," said Able Managing Director Peter Stephenson.
The vessels included in the contract have been surveyed in detail, said Stephenson, and they will be cleared as seaworthy by the Independent Surveyors and the U.S. Coast Guard before they are moved to the Teesside Environmental Recycling and Reclamation Centre (TERRC) located on the Seaton Channel close to the mouth of the River Tees in southeast England.
The route the controversial vessels will take in British waters is also at issue. Scotland object to the ships entering its coastal waters, fearing that this and any future convoys would threaten sensitive marine environments that are difficult to navigate, such as the Pentland Firth. Therefore, the planned route is through the English Channel.
Able assures nervous parties that the Ghost Fleet vessels have been inspected and approved by Lloyds of London, which is providing insurance for the towing operation.
"TERRC 25 acre dry dock is large enough to moor all 13 vessels, and once they have arrived, the dock will be drained and sealed, allowing the safest possible conditions for disposal," Stephenson said. "This operation is similar to the work we have been undertaking for many years."
Not reassured, Caroline Lucas, the Green Party Member of the European Parliament representing the affected district in the southeast of England, has lodged an official complaint with the European Commission. The complaint filed on October 8 alleges three separate infringements of European Union law by the transfer to the UK of the ghost ships.
"Needlessly bringing unsafe, leaking and contaminated ships halfway around the world for disposal is madness - and could lead to an environmental catastrophe in European waters," said Lucas.
Environment Commissioner Wallstrom will investigate the deal under the Waste Shipment Regulation, which requires any ship recovery work to be carried out in an "authorized center" in line with "environmentally sound management."
This regulation, binding under EU law, could be breached if Able UK were to dismantle the ships in wet dock having failed to secure planning permission for a dry dock facility, which Dr. Lucas and environmental organizations argue would be a necessary to meet the requirement for environmentally sound management.
Wallstrom will also investigate possible breaches of the Waste Framework Directive, a law which requires the UK to ensure waste disposal does not endanger human health or the environment.
In addition, EU officials will examine the UK government's failure to carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment on the Teesmouth and Cleveland Coast, a wildlife habitat enjoying EU special protection.
MEP Lucas, also a member of the European Parliament's Environment Committee, warned, "If we have learned any lessons from the Erica and Prestige disasters it must be that Europe must investigate the threat of oil spills before the ships concerned leave their port of origin, not after another coastline has been buried in deadly waste. The U.S. has the capacity and the expertise to dispose of its own contaminated military junk, and should do so itself."
-------- genetics
Bone Marrow Research Is Questioned
Potential for Regeneration Overstated, Study Says
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17436-2003Oct12.html
Recent studies suggesting that cells from adult bone marrow have the same therapeutic potential as cells from human embryos probably were interpreted incorrectly, new research suggests.
The new findings, while falling short of proving the earlier reports wrong, strongly suggest that scientists mistakenly overstated the older results, and that only embryo cells have the potential to regenerate ailing hearts, livers and brains.
The new results are significant, scientists said, because the earlier research had been used by opponents of human embryo research to argue that embryo studies were unnecessary. If the new results are confirmed in other experiments, proponents of human embryo research could gain ground in their efforts to stave off state and federal restrictions on their work.
The new study, led by Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, a neurobiologist at the University of California at San Francisco, is the most thorough attempt yet to understand a phenomenon that many in science had found to be incredible: the apparent ability of adult human bone marrow cells to convert themselves into different kinds of cells, including heart, liver and brain cells.
Until those findings began to show up, scientists had presumed that only embryo cells had the potential to turn into such an array of adult cells. Many researchers had wanted to exploit the potential of embryonic cells to develop regenerative therapies for ailing adult organs, but the approach is controversial because to get those embryo cells, human embryos have to be destroyed.
The surprising discovery that easily obtained adult marrow cells might have the same capacity to become healthy heart, liver or brain tissue suggested that research on embryo cells might not be so necessary after all.
Alvarez-Buylla and his colleagues used a sensitive assay to track the marrow cells as they circulated in the blood of mice and, on occasion, arrived in other organs. Their work, in this week's advance online edition of the journal Nature, shows that marrow cells often fuse with existing heart, liver or brain cells. Those hybrid cells retain molecular hallmarks of their bone marrow origins -- hallmarks that apparently misled researchers into believing they were looking at heart, liver or brain cells that had started out as marrow cells.
In fact, the California team could find no evidence that marrow cells can, by themselves, become heart, liver or brain cells.
"This suggests that those previous papers were over-interpreted," Alvarez-Buylla said.
James F. Battey Jr. , director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and chairman of the Stem Cell Task Force at the National Institutes of Health, lauded the study for helping to clear up confusion in the field, calling it "as carefully done a piece of work as I've seen."
It is still possible that a few marrow cells may manage to change their identities, Battey and Alvarez-Buylla said, noting that it is impossible to prove that something could never happen. But lacking evidence for it, they said, it makes sense to maintain momentum in the embryonic stem cell field.
This does not, however, respond to the argument that no amount of therapeutic benefit can justify the destruction of a human embryo. Currently, federally funded researchers cannot do research that harms human embryos and can study only a limited number of laboratory-grown colonies of cells that were retrieved from human embryos years ago. Congress has been considering additional restrictions for privately funded researchers.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Bishops advise Catholic voters
October 13, 2003
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031013-121448-2849r.htm
Catholics need to take the moral absolutes of their religion seriously when they enter the voting booth, says a document prepared for release today by U.S. Catholic bishops.
Called "Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility," the 17-page document restates Catholic doctrines with a look ahead to next year's elections. It will be posted today at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Web site, www.usccb.org.
The U.S. Conference issues a document on voting guidelines every four years, just before presidential primaries begin.
"We never tell people how to vote. That is not our job," said Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington. "We present the facts and Catholic teachings and we hope we take that into consideration when they get into the ballot box."
Catholics generally do not vote as a bloc, he added, but "people have personally told me they are glad we pointed these things out."
Since the 2000 presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, there have been two wars, a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil and a devastating clergy abuse scandal in the Catholic Church itself, the document says.
"Our community of faith and especially we, as bishops, are working to face our responsibility and take all necessary steps to overcome the hurt, damage and loss of trust resulting from the evil of clerical sexual abuse," it says.
Still, the church has an important role in public life, it adds, and the church must "encourage Catholics to act on our faith in political life." This includes running for office, working within political parties and contributing time and money to campaigns.
The document says Catholics should not place their faith in U.S. military prowess.
"September 11 has given us a new sense of vulnerability," it says. "However, we must be careful not to define our security primarily in military terms."
Americans should not ask if they are better off than they were four years ago but instead ask how can "all of us - especially the weak and vulnerable - be better off in the years ahead?"
The United States must lead, it says, in promoting religious liberty and human rights, supporting the United Nations, banning nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, providing shelter for persecuted refugees and bringing peace to regional conflicts.
"The United States should adopt a more generous immigration and refugee policy," it says, including a "generous legalization program for undocumented immigrants," programs for reuniting families and protecting immigrant workers from being exploited.
"There's a temptation in political life to only vote your pocketbook or your party," said John Carr, director of the USCCB's department of social development and moral peace. "This is a challenge from the church to go beyond that and to think how these choices affect the weak and those who are left behind.
"And we think a society where 1 million unborn never see the day of their birth is in serious trouble."
--------
BOLIVIA - Military controls city after deadly clashes
October 13, 2003
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene.htm
LA PAZ - The government imposed martial law on a city of 750,000 outside the Andean capital yesterday after a series of deadly clashes between troops and demonstrators protesting plans to export gas to the United States and Mexico.
Eleven persons, including a 7-year-old boy, have died since the protests began two weeks ago in El Alto, a poor industrial city 10 miles outside La Paz. Witnesses said one man was rushed to a hospital yesterday with a gunshot wound to his chest.
The crisis also was causing a severe gas shortage and bringing public transportation to a standstill in the capital of South America's poorest nation.
----
Protest targets military spending
Darcie_Moore@TimesRecord.Com
10/13/2003
http://www.timesrecord.com/website/main.nsf/news.nsf/0/A336380F6E98240A05256DBE005BFC38?Opendocument
BATH - Peace activists took to the streets of Bath on Saturday to speak out against the militarization of the United States. A new twist was that they also raised the alarm about the growing threat of expanding the U.S. military's control of outer space.
The peace vigil and leafleting effort was part of the International Days of Protest, a global effort to draw attention to what organizers say is an attempt by the U.S. government to militarize space.
The message that the United States plans to shift the emphasis of the space program from exploration to militarization is the reason for the existence of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, which moved to Brunswick from Florida earlier this year. The group, along with Veterans for Peace Chapter 001, Pax Christi Maine and Peace Action Maine, sponsored Saturday's activities, which they described as a peace vigil and information-sharing.
Bruce Gagnon, the coordinator and founder of Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, gathered protesters under the overpass in Bath as vehicles rumbled by. He read from the leaflets they passed out later as they marched throughout the city. The leaflets proclaim that the Aegis destroyer is "not to defend the shores of America, but instead is to provide 'forward deployed offensive' high-tech military capability to protect corporate interests and investments overseas."
Protesters expressed concerns that a U.S. military buildup, including destroyers being built at Bath Iron Works, will play a disastrous role in foreign and domestic policy, and will cause an arms race. This worry extends to the militarization of space. As evidence of that potential, the group cites what members say is the U.S. Space Command's Vision for 2020's call "for control and domination of the earth and space in order to protect corporate interests around the world."
Gagnon and fellow protesters say that by protesting and handing out leaflets, they are educating people and engaging them to think about how their tax money is being spent. They want taxpayers to consider the question "Whose interests are being protected?"
The pamphlets also argue that the country's military spending is causing job losses by not investing in socially beneficial programs - such as health care, education, public transportation and environmental cleanup efforts. They told those who stopped to listen to their message that 7,300 jobs have left Maine over the past year and that the gap between the rich and poor in the United States has doubled in the past 20 years so that the richest 1 percent of Americans have more money that the bottom 40 percent combined.
"Military production is capital intensive," said Gagnon, who argued that more jobs could be created through investments in the environment and social advancements.
Protesters held a cloth dove to symbolize peace, played drums and held up signs on a sunny Saturday; the reaction was muted and mixed. A few people stopped to listen, but a jogger and some passing motorists shouted derogatory statements at the protesters.
Those comments did not deter the peace activists. "It's not about being effective; it's about being faithful," said Mimi Wirtz of Veterans for Peace.
George Ostensen, a member of the faith-based group Plowshares, stood outside BIW and held a sign that said "Stop militarization of space." He said he will be participating in the fourth annual Vigil for Disarmament at BIW on Saturdays in November and December. He realizes that some BIW workers are threatened by the protesters, but said that his group doesn't want to see them out of work, only to change the focus of their labors.
Ostensen said that he realizes that through the vigils he is manipulating people's emotions, but says that if by "egging them on" he gets someone to discuss the issue, then he's achieved his goal of getting people to think about the negative impact of a military-based economy and society.
Gagnon said that this protest was part of an ongoing plan to raise issues and said that the organization he heads will participate in public forums and talk in schools. He also noted that his organization is establishing relationships with Maine colleges and universities, including Bowdoin College and the University of Southern Maine.
Gagnon estimates that on Saturday the group distributed about 750 leaflets, including some to BIW workers.
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Missile Protests Continue
Demonstrators Gather at Vandenberg Air Force Base to 'Keep Space for Peace'
by Dainel Haier - Staff Writer
Monday, October 13, 2003
Daily Nexus
http://www.dailynexus.com/print_article.php?story_id=5713
A Global Network member holds up a packet he was given by military personnel at a protest on Saturday at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The packet contained a letter from the commanding colonel explaining that the base is closed, an information sheet on pepper spray and a description of what happens to protesters if they are detained.
A thick green line painted across the roadway separates protestors from the most advanced space weapons and missile testing facility in the world. Outside the main gate of Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), located six miles north of Lompoc in northwestern Santa Barbara County, demonstrators gather with rocket-shaped signs. Pinwheels protrude from these mock rocket engines in place of superheated exhaust.
"Missiles into windmills," the signs read at last Saturday's anti-weapon in space protest.
However, signs near VAFB's designated protest area - a narrow strip of grass between the busy Highway 1 roadway and a plastic orange snow fence - are not so easily read. Base security covered area street signs and all signs identifying VAFB with black sheets.
Oct. 11 was the last day of Keep Space for Peace Week, an international campaign organized by the Global Network Against Weapons in Space (GNAWS), which has 170 affiliate groups worldwide encompassing "literally millions of people," National Coordinator Bruce Gagnon said. GNAWS sponsored dozens of nationwide protests last week - and hundreds of protests over the past 11 years - calling for the end of government spending on space-based military technology like the missile defense shield.
At VAFB, home of the Air Force's 30th Space Wing, protestors from GNAWS and the Vandenberg Action Coalition (VAC) wanted more - the devotion of base facilities to the study of alternative energy sources rather than to the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
"We feel the priorities of our government are wrong," said Peter Cohen, Santa Barbara Coordinator of GNAWS. "We'd rather see Vandenberg direct its energy to so many other things, like solving global warming, poverty and ignorance. I'm not opposed to the military; I'm opposed to the policy."
Cohen, a 77-year-old retired mural painter, served in the south Pacific during World War II. He said he has been an advocate for peace ever since, and campaigned against the Vietnam War during an unsuccessful 1968 candidacy for a Pennsylvania congressional seat. He agreed to organize this protest after eight other organizers were banned from the base following incidents of trespassing. In one incident, a protestor was arrested for splattering human blood on a VAFB sign in protest of the war in Iraq.
The 30 people who turned out for Saturday's protest, mostly retirees, were a better turnout than Cohen was expecting.
"We do our thing and [our message] starts to sink in," Cohen said, as he clutched a mock rifle barrel with a flower stuffed in it. "Over the course of time, we won't have to be here."
...
That thick green border demarcation line in front of the main gate guardhouse is easily crossed, but nearly a dozen uniformed VAFB security guards and cameramen are waiting and watching from the other side, documenting faces of protest participants and ready to record any trespassing attempt on film.
A helicopter flies over the roadway at regular intervals, and a base security officer hands out information packets to the crowd of about 30 people. The packet's first page is a reminder that unauthorized base entry is forbidden. The second page is a fact sheet about the effects of pepper spray.
Second Lieutenant Michelle Mayo, a representative from 30th Space Wing Public Affairs who was observing the gathering, said the military cameras are there for visual documentation of the protest. She said that anyone who is arrested for crossing the green line gets a ticket, photographed and barred from the base for three years.
"Once they pass the line, we don't know what their intentions are," Mayo said.
As for the black sheets covering the VAFB signs, Mayo said they are covered to prevent protestor photo opportunities, but she did not elaborate.
Reached by phone the day before the protest, Major Stacee Bako, VAFB Public Affairs Officer, said the base is a national security asset and that operations are unaffected by protests.
"They have the right to protest whatever they want, but that doesn't change our mission," she said.
In response to protestor demands that VAFB convert to a center for alternative energy research, Bako said that in fact, the base is engaged in research of windmill-driven power generation.
"We're in the preliminary design stage," Bako said. "We're looking into a small wind farm on the north side of the base that will generate 3 megawatts and supplement the base's commercial power. It should be installed and functional by September of '04."
Bako said VAFB is also one of the largest federal users of electric and natural gas-powered vehicles.
"We're always looking at different ways to conserve energy," Bako said.
...
At around 3:00 p.m., the protestors gathered in a circle to introduce themselves and state aloud their feelings about weapons in space. Several minutes later, the helicopter that had been flying over the roadway returned to circle the crowd. Some demonstrators wondered aloud if this was an intentional form of harassment, since noise from the rotor blades made it very difficult to hear each other speak.
Dorothy Boothe, of Los Olivos, said a major person was missing from this gathering: her husband Bud, who took her to a protest on a first date 14 years ago.
Bud Boothe, 78, was one of the original co-founders of the VAC in 1983. He has been arrested several times for trespassing on base property. In October of 2000, he was one of 22 other protestors who was arrested with actor Martin Sheen for crossing the green line and attempting to deliver a letter to the base commander.
Reached by phone the day after Saturday's protest, Boothe said "it hurt" not being able to participate in the demonstration because he was arrested - he says unjustly - again last December, three days before his probation from the Martin Sheen incident was due to end.
Boothe said backpackers have entered the base and escaped undetected, even after security was heightened after 9/11.
"People have backpacked deep into the base and hung banners on antenna equipment before," Boothe said. "None of them have been arrested, but they arrest me for stepping over the green line."
...
While some protestors say current windmill research is positive step for VAFB, most see it as a very small step-especially when compared to the billions of dollars still spent on space-based weapon systems.
Patrice Acuna, an 83-year-old Isla Vista resident who attended the protest, said she has marched for peace, civil rights and other causes throughout her life.
"I don't like the way this country is going," Acuna said. "No matter how hard I march, things just keep getting worse; it's kind of depressing."
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Five Protesters Die in Bolivia After President Calls in Troops
October 13, 2003
By LARRY ROHTER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/international/americas/13BOLI.html
A PAZ, Bolivia, Oct. 12 - Five people were killed in violent clashes with the military here on Sunday after President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada accused his opponents of provoking chaos in order to drive him from office. He ordered troops backed by tanks into the streets to quell mounting popular discontent and street violence.
A spokesman for the president, Mauricio Antezana, announced the troop mobilization at a news conference late Saturday night and said it was meant to retake control of El Alto, a suburb of the capital that has been the focal point of a general strike in recent days. The government, he added, "is no longer willing to tolerate the situation of violence" in that city, most of whose residents are peasant migrants of Indian origins. The president stopped short of decreeing a state of siege, which has sometimes been used to control social unrest in Bolivia.
The antigovernment protests began in mid-September and have expanded with the support of labor unions and student and indigenous groups. Mr. Antezana blamed Evo Morales, leader of the country's coca growers' union and a former presidential candidate, for the worsening disturbances, calling him the leader of "a seditious process of a coup d'état" that includes "military-style attacks on strategic objectives."
In an interview on Sunday with a local radio station, Mr. Morales denied the accusations and said the president was seeking to justify a coup of his own "so as to be able to shut down Congress." But Mr. Morales, who finished a close second in the presidential election last year, as the candidate of the Movement Toward Socialism, also said coca growers would set up roadblocks intended to cut the main east-west highway, beginning Monday.
Mr. Sánchez de Lozada, an American ally, took office in August 2002 after winning only 22.46 percent of the vote. Since then, his government has been severely hampered by quarrels within a fragile multiparty coalition, by the unwillingness of opposition groups to support legislation he favors and by a police rebellion.
The immediate cause of the unrest is a proposal to export natural gas to the United States via a pipeline that would run to a port in Chile. Opponents say Bolivians would benefit more if the gas were used for industrial development here, but they also strongly object to any role in the project for Chile, a traditional enemy.
As a result of the protests, in which at least five people had been killed before Sunday, highways around the country are being blocked by peasants and miners armed with sticks of dynamite, and normal commerce has been all but strangled. Here in the capital, gasoline is becoming so scarce that many bus and taxi companies have suspended service.
"The fishermen can't get their trout to market, and the farmers are having to watch their fruits and vegetables rot as they sit at the roadblocks," said Mario Vallejos, a long-distance hauler. "These are poor people, and they are all going broke, so everyone is angry."
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Bolivian Clashes Claim More Lives
Protests Over President's Policies Continue as Supplies Run Low
Reuters
Monday, October 13, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17141-2003Oct12.html
LA PAZ, Bolivia, Oct. 12 -- As many as eight protesters were reported killed Sunday after Bolivia's government sent thousands of troops backed by tanks to quell increasingly violent protests against President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.
Witnesses told local radio that the protesters were killed during pitched battles with troops clearing roadblocks in and around the poor industrial suburb of El Alto that have choked food and gasoline supplies to the capital, La Paz.
The government, which has played down death tolls in recent protests, said four civilians and one soldier were killed and that about 30 others were injured.
Sunday's clashes raised to 19 the number of people killed during a month-long wave of protests. The demonstrators criticize Sanchez de Lozada's free-market policies and say he has failed to tackle crushing poverty in Bolivia, South America's poorest nation.
Fuel and basic foods were running short in the capital as thousands of poor Bolivian farmers and workers, calling for Sanchez de Lozada to quit, stopped convoys of trucks entering the Andean city.
"A military operation is underway to regain control of El Alto," presidential spokesman Mauricio Antezana told reporters. He said the government could decree a curfew there at any time to stop what it perceived as a coup attempt -- a charge it has made several times in the past.
Witnesses said troops stood guard on the main road in El Alto, the center of recent anti-government protests.
Bolivia's flagship airline suspended flights out of La Paz because of security fears, but the international airport was still operating under the guard of troops.
Sunday's violence was the worst since February, when a government austerity drive backed by the International Monetary Fund sparked massive riots in which 32 people died.
Two people were killed Saturday and dozens more were injured as protesters fought with police and security forces outside the capital, local media reported.
Protests by the country's poor Indian majority against Sanchez de Lozada have spiraled in the last month during an economic downturn in this nation of 8 million people.
Indian leader and lawmaker Evo Morales, who nearly won the presidency in 2002, rejected the government's claims of a coup bid.
"They are the subversive ones who are trying to act like coup leaders," he told reporters.
An unpopular project to export natural gas to the United States through Chile -- which has had tense diplomatic relations with Bolivia because of a border dispute -- has also become a lightning rod for protests.
Sanchez de Lozada, a U.S. ally in the anti-drug war, has played down the protests and defied calls to step down.
Transport workers and coca farmers -- angry at a U.S.-backed drive to eradicate illegal crops of coca, which is used to make cocaine -- may join the protests soon.
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N.Y. Activists Prep for GOP Convention
October 13, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Republicans-2004.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Adding the Internet and e-mail to traditional organizing techniques, protest groups say they are getting an early start in attracting tens of thousands of demonstrators to New York for next year's Republican convention.
Opponents of the Iraq war, welfare reform -- even those angered by the selection of New York City -- say they will seek protest permits and arrange travel for the four-day convention that begins Aug. 30, 2004.
Protests are an expected sideshow to any political convention, but Steve Ault, a veteran activist helping organize a massive anti-war demonstration, said the events taking shape for next year are unprecedented.
``There's a rather profound and unique opposition to (President) Bush developing, and we see that in the early interest in these actions,'' said Ault, who helped plan a 1982 nuclear disarmament rally in Central Park that drew 750,000 people. ``We haven't seen anything like this.''
Large-scale protests are certain to come up against what arguably will be the tightest security ever for a political convention, which is taking place in the city struck by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.
Some activists are upset with the notion of Republicans meeting in New York City, where Democrats outnumber GOP supporters, 5-to-1. Others argue that Republicans are exploiting the Sept. 11 tragedy by staging the convention the week before the third anniversary of the attacks that leveled the World Trade Center.
That opposition has spawned at least two anti-convention Web sites, including www.rncnotwelcome.org, which advertises itself as a resource for demonstrators. It does not publicize a specific event, but features links to housing, food and transportation options for demonstrators.
Many groups say the Internet and e-mail have transformed and multiplied what used to be leaflets-on-the-street campaigns to draw crowds and spread messages.
Jim Wilkinson, spokesman for the Republican gathering, which has not yet launched its Web site, said convention officials welcome the protesters.
``The great thing about America is everyone has a right to have their voice heard,'' he said.
Convention organizers and protesters agree that the rallies will further disrupt traffic and strain security. Police say they are formulating security plans around Madison Square Garden, the convention site, and other potential protest locations, although details have not been released.
The police department has received two formal applications for permits to stage protests around the convention, said Lt. Elias Nikas, a police spokesman, although organizers say paperwork is being completed for several more.
United for Peace and Justice has already applied for permits for an anti-war march from an area south of Madison Square Garden north to Central Park. The group also plans a Ground Zero rally on Sept. 2, when the convention concludes.
A half-dozen organizations have asked the New York Civil Liberties Union for help with permit applications and other legal issues. Chris Dunn, associate legal director at the NYCLU, said he expects to meet with city officials this month to work out early details.
``There is going to be a huge amount of protest activity focused in midtown,'' Dunn said. ``There's no doubt (the city) will try to impose certain limits on how many people can do what, where.''
In the past, police, citing security concerns, have placed tight restrictions on demonstrators, keeping them behind barriers and limiting their movements. That has drawn complaints from activists, most recently in February when protesters were kept away from the United Nations during an anti-war rally.
Among the groups working with the NYCLU is the New York City AIDS Housing Network, a Brooklyn-based organization planning a demonstration on the first day of the convention. It hopes to stage a Times Square demonstration, recreating an AIDS rally that drew 50,000 in 1992, when the city last hosted a presidential convention -- for the Democrats.
One international group, Food Not Bombs, promises to cook and serve donated food to activists, delivering by bicycle if necessary.
Keith McHenry, who co-founded the group in 1980, said chapters from as far away as Vancouver, British Columbia, and Ireland are coming. ``I've been doing this for 30 years and I can't believe how organized this is,'' he said.
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