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NUCLEAR
Spinning the War; Bombs in Baghdad
Landmine Mania
Documents have 'a lot of details' on atomic program, U.N. says
China Pleased With North Korea Trip
N. Korea Accuses U.S. of 200 Spy Flights
Federal auditors say INEEL could save $90 million
Congressional Unit Analyzes Military Costs in Iraq
Lawmakers Fume Over Canceled Korea Trip
MILITARY
G.I. Dies After Clash With Taliban in Southern Afghanistan
Rival Japanese Parties Clash Over U.S. Troops
Bioterror Researchers Build a More Lethal Mousepox
Engineered Virus Related to Smallpox Evades Vaccine
Suspect Accused of Trying to Aid North Korea
U.S. encircles Saddam's village in barbed wire
Roadside Bomb Kills Two GIs in Iraq
Calls to Jihad Are Said to Lure Hundreds of Militants Into Iraq
Revenge Drives String of Killings in Basra
Israelis Debate Using Women in Combat
Israel Limits Holy Site Access; Vandals Deface Rabin Memorial
OAS balks at defense treaty
Defiance surfaces in Putin Cabinet
Bush's other war
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Gives Senate Panel Some Intelligence Data
Cronkite: The new Inquisition
Car Bursts Through Bush's Security Cordon
Capitol Police Admit Failures
Panel Waiting for Iraq Data
Moussaoui Liable for Death Penalty, U.S. Argues
OTHER
Talks go forward on ships
ACTIVISTS
The compelling heroism of the 'Hibakusha'
A Passion for Life
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Spinning the War; Bombs in Baghdad
Mike Whitney
Al-Jazeerah,
11/1/03
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2003%20Opinion%20Editorials/November/1%20o/Spinning%20the%20War%20Bombs%20in%20Baghdad%20Mike%20Whitney.htm
The smoke had barely cleared from the Baghdad sky on Iraq's bloodiest day, before the Bush public relations team was spinning its story about the proof of "foreign fighters" in the country. Apparently, there is no attack so horrific that can't be used to fuel the ongoing propaganda battle. It's clear the Bush Administration would prefer that the unsuspecting American public see the recent scourge of suicide bombings as evidence of international terrorism rather than what they are, the signs of a growing and well organized insurgency. In this way they can legitimize their dismal grasp of post war Iraq and the failed policies that are now resulting in chaos. Rather than address those policies in a straightforward and self-critical way, the Administration has chosen to throttle the otherwise servile press for its poor coverage of the many "positive things " that are taking in Iraq. But, it's hard to be too tough on an American media that has willingly abstained from filming any of the carnage being grinded out daily basis in the war zone.
The major networks are in such lockstep collaboration with the Administration that they refuse to even film the flag draped coffins of dead American servicemen, knowing that it may dissuade a tentative American audience from further supporting the war effort. Don't say the media hasn't done their job, they've done it quite well. No report on the rash of suicides (perhaps, 26 servicemen) has graced the pages of American newspapers, nor has any story about soldiers unable to get medical treatment when they return home from duty. And, whereas, in the foreign press stories abound about the disappearing $ 4billion of oil revenue (under Paul Bremer's authority), the abuses of Halliburton price gouging, the dividing up of Iraq's public sector businesses to wealthy American corporations, and the 100 plus soldiers who have been evacuated to the US with what looks to be the signs of radiation sickness from the masses of depleted uranium that were used during the conflict stage of the campaign, on these as well as many other issues the American media has remained predictably silent. Still, with 4 bombs going off in one day causing the deaths of 42 people and 200 more injured, it's doubtful that even the obsequious American press will succeed in painting a rosy picture of progress Baghdad. For one thing, the rocket attack on the al-Rashid Hotel that sent the intrepid deputy defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, scurrying to the Baghdad Airport, occurred within the security barrier, the military cordon that protects America's highest-ranking dignitaries. This suggests that there are collaborators working from within the system. This is undoubtedly the worst-case scenario for those trying to fend off future attacks. Secondly, the fact that three of the suicide car bombs were used against the new Iraqi Police Force sends the clear message that collaborators with the occupation will be first in line for reprisal. However, cold-blooded, it's an effective way to deter volunteerism to the American cause. Third, the attack on the Red Crescent sends a chilling message to both the UN and any other NGO's that any assistance, humanitarian or otherwise, will be considered aid to the enemy.
The Bush Administration is portraying the act as one of irrational barbarity (which it may be) but, the fact is, in capitals around the world where leaders are making the critical decisions of whether to send soldiers or assistance, this attack has probably already changed a few minds. President Bush may be right in assuming that if you can control the narrative you can change the outcome. Certainly, the notion that "you can fool all of the people some of the time" is Gospel to this Administration but, it's left to be seen whether a public relations gambit can actually change the facts on the ground. The fact is, Mr. Bush finally has the war that he wanted so dearly, that he lied to get it. Let's see what he does with it now
----
Landmine Mania
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Anti-Personnel Mines
By JOHN STANTON
November 1 / 2, 2003
http://www.counterpunch.org/stanton11012003.html
"A landmine is the most excellent of soldiers, for it is ever courageous, never sleeps, never misses."
Khmer Rouge General
The United States is 1 of 45 countries that refuses to sign the 1997 Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (APM's) and on their Destruction. 137 countries have bound themselves to the rigorous provisions of that treaty. But the Pentagon, never seeing a weapon system it didn't like, and the Bush Administration, never having seen a treaty it liked, remain unmoved by the suffering caused by APM's. Article 1 of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty demands that "each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to use anti-personnel mines." Article 4 of the Mine Ban Treaty requires that all States Parties destroy their stockpiles of APM's. The Pentagon is skittish about signing the Treaty as it fears such a precedent will trigger similar campaigns against other US weapons systems most notably those dependent on depleted uranium.
Even though the US is the largest contributor to demining and mine awareness programs ($80 million in FY 2002), it has reduced funding by close to $24 million less over the last two year period. But that's not a great surprise given that private industry is stepping into what is a lucrative and eternal mine-clearing business. With an estimated 40-50 million APM's below ground around the globe, for-profit demining companies stand to make a killing.
Terrified Pentagon
The Pentagon, and its allies in the US Congress, has traditionally been averse to signing any piece of international legislation that, in their view, limits the use of military capability and that may place American commanders under the spotlight of an International Tribunal. Indeed, APM's remain an active part of US military doctrine as the US retains a stockpile of 10.4 million APM's. US military forces in Afghanistan are making use of minefields sown by the former Soviet military for perimeter defense, refusing to de-mine them. And the US military pre-positioned, but did apparently did not use, 90,000 APM's in and around the 2003 Iraq theater of operations. That, even though al least 31 US military personnel have been killed or injured by APM's in Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of 2003.
More significantly, according to 1997 Nobel Laureate Jody Williams of the International Committee to Ban Landmines (ICBL), and driving force behind the Mine Ban Treaty, "The military is terrified to give into society's wishes." Williams is one of only three American women to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She indicated that the Pentagon understands that the Mine Ban Treaty "has been one of the few examples of successful multilateralism in today's world". According to Williams, the Pentagon under Bush has recommended abandoning the US policy goal of joining the Mine Ban Treaty by 2006 as it has virtually all other international agreements.
The ICBL is composed of 1,400 citizen groups in over 90 countries that brought pressure to bear on their governments through grass-roots campaigning ultimately bringing world attention to APM's. Remarkably, just 8 full-time staff members oversee the ICBL. According to Williams, The Pentagon recognizes that other favored weapons systems may find themselves subjected to citizen-based campaigns similar to the ICBL which shattered accepted arms control negotiations standards by working around governmental institutions in the United States and the rest of the world. "If you ban US landmines, then maybe other weapons may be the subject of further campaigns."
"The United States has not renounced APM production and they are keeping their options open," said Stephen Goose of Human Rights Watch at a recent press conference publicizing the 2003 edition of the Landmine Monitor Report: Toward a Mine Free World. The United States is not alone. "Lack of adherence is notable among major antipersonnel mine stockpilers particularly China, Russia, the United States, Ukraine, India and Pakistan. These six are estimated to hold more than 185 million stockpiled antipersonnel landmines, roughly 90 percent of the world's total."
The Pentagon has deflected domestic and international pressure to sign the Mine Ban Treaty first and foremost because it views APM's as an "essential capability" that must be maintained and be readily available for use in military operations. To deploy or not to deploy depends on the best judgment of US battlefield commanders. "Should an operational commander determine that the use of APM's are required to support operations or to protect U.S. men and women in uniform, he can request authority to use them in accordance with pre-established rules," said a DOD Official.
The Pentagon maintains that the Mine Ban Treaty does not adequately consider legitimate US national security requirements, nor does it fully address humanitarian concerns raised by the use of APM's and anti-tank mines. The Pentagon endorses the Amended Mines Protocol II--enacted in May 1996--which it believes will establish reasonable standards on the use of landmines in order to minimize risks to noncombatants. The Protocol is part of the larger United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons, to which the United States has acceded and has been a state party since 1980. "Unlike the Mine Ban Treaty, the Protocol includes restrictions on anti-tank mines as well as anti-personnel landmines. It also restricts the use of booby-traps and other devices that the Ottawa Convention [Mine Ban Treaty] does not address. In addition to many states that are parties to the Mine Ban Treaty, state parties to the Protocol include key landmine producers and users, such as China, South Korea, India and Pakistan that are not parties to the Mine Ban Treaty," said a DOD Official.
The Pentagon supports the United States' effort to press for other international measures to reduce further the risks to civilians worldwide. "We are working with other state parties to the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons to adopt tighter restrictions on the use of anti-tank landmines, similar to those applicable to anti-personnel landmines. The Ottawa Convention does not address anti-tank mines. We are also working with state parties on an instrument to deal with explosive remnants of war. This instrument would deal with the humanitarian problems posed by all types of munitions," said a DOD Official.
But according to Goose of the ICBL, the value of the Protocol is limited almost exclusively to curbing the use of anti-tank mines. In his view, the Mine Ban Treaty has far more extensive obligations while the Protocol is full of loopholes. "The reality is that at the end of the negotiations, state's parties to that Protocol realized that the agreement being finalized was wholly insufficient to meet the need to ban APM's. In other words, the parties recognized before the ink was dry that the Protocol was not the answer. And in some ways, the Protocol contains justifications for producing more APM's. India, Pakistan and Russia increased production in 2001 and 2002. The US just hasn't learned."
Bad Company
The United States keeps the company of Cuba, Libya, Iran and Syria, among others (www.icbl.org), who want to retain the right to use APM's. The US has ignored the entreaties of NGO's like the ICBL and trusted allies such as the United Kingdom (State Party since 1998) and Spain (State Party since 1999). It has also deflected the views of its own military commanders. On March 19, 2001, Lieutenant General Hal Moore, USA (Ret.), and seven other senior US military officers sent a letter to President Bush urging his administration to sign on to the Mine Ban Treaty.
"We feel strongly that it is in the best interests of the American soldier and our country that you "fast-track" US accession to the Mine Ban Treaty. APM are outmoded weapons that have, time and again, proved to be a liability to our own troops. We believe that the military, diplomatic, and humanitarian advantages of speedy US accession far outweigh the minimal military utility of these weapons." They went on to rebut the oft-cited Korea Argument which states that APM's are critical to the defense of Korea. "Several of us are former commanders of elements of I-Corps (USA/ROK group), and believe that APM are not in any way critical or decisive in maintaining the peninsula's security. In fact, freshly scattered mixed systems would slow a US and ROK counter-invasion by inhibiting the operational tempo of friendly armor and dismounted infantry units."
According to Goose, "The United States has been in compliance with some provisions of the Mine Ban Treaty for years. They are doing the right thing but can't seem to make the leap to sign the treaty. That's interesting because if they did they could bring China, Russia and other non-signatories on board. The United States could exercise some real leadership if they did," said Goose, "We wait with baited breath"
No Loopholes
The Bush Administration was scheduled to release new directives on APM's in the latter part of 2003 that would halt any effort to develop alternatives to APM's. "I've heard some discouraging things from the Pentagon and it may be that the US will roll back its current policies," Goose.
The current APM policy is outlined in Presidential Decision Directive 64 issued by Former President Bill Clinton in 1998. In that Directive, the United States committed itself to signing the Mine Ban Treaty by 2006 if suitable alternatives could be found. But in May of 2002, the Pentagon stated that it could not meet the 2006 deadline since it has been unable to design and field a satisfactory self-destructing alternative to the "dumb" APM's currently in stock. Additionally, the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty States Parties have taken a skeptical view of next-generation APM's promoted by the United States and there's little wiggle room for its negotiators. On a positive note, the United States extended the legislative moratorium on the export of landmines until October 2008 although it is sullied with the brand producer and stockpiler of APM's.
According to Human Rights Watch, Mine Ban Treaty participants rejected U.S. demands that "smart" APM's like the CBU-89 Gator Mine System-- a 1,000-pound cluster munition containing 22 antipersonnel mines and 72 antitank mines-be exempted from the Mine Ban Treaty. The use of self-destructing and self-neutralizing APM's, said Human Rights Watch officials, will not prevent new mine victims and the clearance task will be just as time-consuming and costly, perhaps even more so. Their rationale follows.
· Self-destruct mechanisms are not 100 percent reliable. The Landmine Protocol of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons (to which the United States is a State Party) allows a 10 percent failure rate.
· The mines are scattered (or remotely-delivered) from the air with little precision, there is no way to accurately mark or map or fence the mined areas to keep civilians out.
· Civilians in the mined areas face the danger not only of accidentally detonating mines that have failed to self-destruct, but of coming upon hundreds of those mines randomly self-destructing at unknown times.
· The mines still deny land to civilians. Because they are remotely delivered, they are found on the surface of the ground, not buried. If they are aware the area is mined, civilians will not enter it, knowing that the visible mines may still be dangerous and fearing the presence, in many places, of mines that have been overgrown or otherwise obscured.
· Mines that have failed to self-destruct but have self-deactivated will have to be treated by deminers as live mines that may potentially explode. Thus, an area that has unexploded mines in it will have to be cleared with the same care as any other minefield. The time and cost will be similar.
· The clearance job may be made more difficult by the large numbers of mines present (given the propensity to use thousands at a time in remote-delivery systems). U.S. Gator mines were still being cleared from Kuwait several years after Operation Desert Storm.
Alternative APM's
The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)--along with team leaders SAIC, Alliant-Technologies and Sandia National Labs-continue to push forward with the Self Healing Minefield System (SHMS). It consists of surface scattered and networked antitank mines that can detect an enemy attack of the minefield and respond autonomously, by having a fraction of the mines airlift themselves-through the use of microrockets-into the breach. SHMS uses a man-in-the-loop concept allowing remote control detonation of the ordnance. DARPA claims that after 30 days, the SHMS will self-destruct and not pose any danger to US troops or civilians. Such a system may meet the provisions of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty but it is far from being field-ready.
Novel technologies such as the Taser Anti-Personnel Munition (TAPM) are being developed jointly by industry participants General Dynamics, Ordnance and Tactical Systems and TASER International. Rick Smith, CEO of TASER indicated that TAPM is a hand emplaced remote control activated device that fires two tethered darts up to 21 feet. Military personnel place the devices in an array and remotely activate them. When infrared sensors located within the devices are self-activated, they release darts with up to 50,000 volts of electricity. "It's like shooting a pair of jumper cables at a person." Temporary and painful paralysis ensues, evidently with no loss of life. Smith mentioned that US Marines he spoke with returning from the war in Iraq indicated that they lost a lot of sleep patrolling perimeters. "While TAPM would not obviate the need for personnel to do that, it may let them make better use of their time. Further, TAPM meets the political requirements of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty will providing area of denial capabilities that the US military needs."
Technology Overwhelmed
Eradication of APM's in the field is a painstaking process from both a cost and time perspective. A United Nations report titled The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children indicated that it costs as little as $3 each to manufacture an APM but can cost up to $1,000 to remove just one. APM's can be spread at rates of over 1,000 per minute, but it may take a skilled expert an entire day just to clear by hand 20-50 square meters of mine-contaminated land. A RAND report titled Alternatives for Landmine Detection (www.rand.org), indicated there are approximately 40-50 million APM's still lying in wait for new victims. A mere 100,000 per year are removed from minefields the world over. According to the RAND study, "at that rate clearing 45-50 million APM's will require 450-500 years assuming no new APM's are laid."
Unfortunately, there is no reliable or suitable replacement for bomb sniffing canines and their human handlers, or those brave souls on bended knees probing underground with 15th Century tools for 21st Century weapons. And there is no substitute for the Mine Ban Treaty of 1997 which attempts to rid the world of APM's.
The US continues to give the middle finger to the rest of the world.
John Stanton is a Virginia basd writer specializing in political and military matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com
-------- iran
Documents have 'a lot of details' on atomic program, U.N. says
By Edith M. Lederer,
Associated Press
http://www.sanmateocountytimes.com/Stories/0,1413,87~11268~1738484,00.html
UNITED NATIONS -- As a deadline for Iran to prove it is not building atomic weapons expired Friday, the head of the U.N. nuclear agency said Tehran appears to be moving "in the right direction." But in Iran, thousands of hard-liners protested their country's conciliatory moves.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Associated Press the fact that the dossier Iran handed over last week on its past nuclear activities "has a lot of details ... is positive in itself."
His comments came as hard-liners rallied in several cities in Iran to protest a government decision allowing inspection of its nuclear facilities and suspending uranium enrichment.
"Death to compromisers!" the demonstrators chanted. Some wore white shrouds to symbolize their readiness to die for their cause.
ElBaradei said he was informed that the Iranian government will send him a letter next week saying it will sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty giving IAEA inspectors unfettered access to its nuclear facilities.
"When this happens, it will be a very positive step forward, particularly in terms of enabling us to effectively regulate all future nuclear activities in Iran," ElBaradei said in a statement.
He told AP that Iran's commitment to suspend enrichment of uranium "as a confidence-building measure" in response to the IAEA board's resolution and in agreement with the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany was another "positive" step.
But while the Iranians have assured the IAEA that the declaration they handed over last week is complete and accurate, ElBaradei said his inspectors must make their own determination.
Iran has been under intense pressure to fulfill the demand of the IAEA's board of governors and prove by Friday that its nuclear activities are geared only toward generating electricity -- and not toward building a weapons arsenal, as the United States contends.
Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's representative to the IAEA, said Iran's cooperation was unrelated to the Friday deadline.
Iran has cooperated ... only on the basis of the growing trend of bilateral cooperation, state-run Tehran radio quoted Salehi as saying.
The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons and has pressed for the IAEA to declare Iran in violation of the nonproliferation treaty. Washington, though, does not believe Iran has yet made nuclear weapons, citing a lack of fissile material -- either enriched uranium or plutonium.
But IAEA experts have found traces of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium on equipment at Iranian sites, a discovery ElBaradei has called the most troubling aspect of Tehran's nuclear activities.
Iran insists the traces, found in environmental samples, were inadvertently imported on equipment meant to generate electricity and says it does not know where the equipment originated because it was purchased through third parties.
Our inspectors are currently in Iran visiting sites, interviewing key personnel and taking samples with a view to verifying the accuracy and completeness of this declaration, ElBaradei said.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky added: We're using satellite imagery -- all with a view to coming up with our own independent conclusion on the accuracy of their declaration.
ElBaradei said he will issue a report about the verification process to the IAEA Board of Governors sometime in mid-November.
If the IAEA board finds that suspicions remain about a possible weapons program, it could find Iran in violation of the nonproliferation treaty. That would mean U.N. Security Council involvement and possible international sanctions.
-------- korea
China Pleased With North Korea Trip
November 1, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NKorea-China.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- China has told North Korea it is satisfied with its No. 2 leader's trip to Pyongyang during which the North agreed to rejoin talks on its nuclear weapons program, North Korean state media said Saturday.
Earlier this week, Wu Bangguo, the Chinese Communist Party's second highest official and the head of its legislature, made a rare three-day trip to Pyongyang, where he met North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and won an agreement ``in principle'' that North Korea would resume the nuclear talks stalled since August.
It was a diplomatic coup for Beijing, striving to be recognized as a prominent player in the region.
``We feel satisfied with our visit and deeply thank the officials concerned of the DPRK side for their efforts exerted for the success of the visit,'' Wu said in a ``message of thanks'' sent to North Korean leader Kim on Friday and carried by Pyongyang's official news agency KCNA on Saturday.
``During the visit both sides had an in-depth exchange of views on issues of mutual concern and shared a broad-based understanding,'' it added, without elaborating.
Wu's trip and its achievements were welcomed by the United States, South Korea and other parties who hope to resume six-nation talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions.
No timing was set for a new round of talks, which would also likely include Russia and Japan.
Thursday's agreement ``in principle'' is subject to diplomatic intrigue of Pyongyang and Washington.
U.S. officials demand that the North first shut down its nuclear program and allow inspections.
North Korea scorns such a demand and says it will never ``put down our guns first'' in a duel. It calls for ``a package solution based on the principle of simultaneous actions.''
The impoverished and reclusive country has a shopping list of demands -- economic and humanitarian aid, diplomatic recognition, assurances of nonaggression, and new power plants -- that it hopes to get in phases if it first freezes its nuclear program, allows nuclear inspections, stops missile sales and then dismantles its nuclear facilities as a last step.
Nonetheless, the United States welcomed Thursday's agreement, saying the ``multiparty process'' offers the best hope of getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said of China's role: ``We appreciate it, we welcome it, we think it's great.''
The dispute began a year ago when the United States said North Korea admitted having a secret nuclear program.
Representatives of the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia met in Beijing in August and agreed to convene again, a commitment the North quickly scrapped and scorned -- only to change its stance during Wu's visit.
China is North Korea's last major ally, and one it doesn't want to alienate.
The North is believed already to have one or two atomic bombs, and recently said it extracted plutonium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods to build more. Two weeks ago, it threatened to test a bomb.
--------
N. Korea Accuses U.S. of 200 Spy Flights
November 1, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NKorea-US-Espionage.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea accused the U.S. military on Saturday of conducting at least 200 spy flights against the communist state in October.
North Korea said such maneuvers by the U.S. military questioned Washington's public stance that it seeks a peaceful solution to a standoff over the North's suspected development of nuclear weapons.
Pyongyang's official news agency KCNA said U-2, RC-135 and other reconnaissance planes of the U.S. military flew ``day and night'' near the border between the two Koreas to ``spy on strategic targets of the (North).''
The number of such flights increased from 160 in September, it said.
``This fact clearly indicates what they really seek in talking about 'peaceful solution' to the nuclear issue and 'written assurances of nonaggression,''' KCNA said.
Earlier this month, President Bush proposed that the United States and North Korea's four neighbors provide written security guarantees for the North if it dismantles its nuclear weapons program.
North Korea has said it would consider the offer.
In talks with China this week, North Korea agreed ``in principle'' to return to the six-nation talks aimed at ending the nuclear crisis. The talks have stalled since August.
The U.S. military does not comment on North Korean claims on spy flights, although it acknowledges monitoring North Korean military activity.
The United States keeps 37,000 American troops in South Korea -- a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- idaho
Federal auditors say INEEL could save $90 million
Pocatello Idaho State Journal
November 1, 2003
http://www.journalnet.com/articles/2003/10/31/news/local/news15.txt
IDAHO FALLS, (AP) - Federal auditors have criticized state Energy Department officials for failing to cut the costs of processing nuclear waste after requirements were reduced.
Those reduced requirements eliminated the need for costly technology that had been anticipated when the original contract was negotiated in 1996.
U.S. Department of Energy Inspector General Gregory Friedman's audit found up to $100 million could be saved at the at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory since waste will not be processed to strict landfill standards. Instead, the waste will be stored at the federal underground dump in New Mexico.
Assistant Energy Secretary Jessie Roberson directed Idaho managers to determine the appropriate amount that should be cut from the $569 million construction contract with BNFL Inc.
The estimated 65,000 cubic meters of plutonium-contaminated material comes from production of nuclear bomb triggers during the Cold War.
Dropping surface landfill standards eliminated the need for high-tech cleaning of some waste material and turning all the waste into glass blocks for disposal. A lawsuit also forced the government to drop another plan to incinerate some of the waste, and that alone could save about $90 million, the audit found.
BNFL is using a relatively simple compacting process to now process the waste.
-------- us politics
OCCUPATION
Congressional Unit Analyzes Military Costs in Iraq
November 1, 2003
New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/politics/01TROO.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 - A new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office suggests that the military costs for the occupation of Iraq could range from $85 billion over four years to $200 billion over 10 years, even if the Pentagon sharply reduces the forces there.
The analysis was requested by Representative John M. Spratt Jr., the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. The budget office calculations were based on four hypothetical plans for troop levels supplied by Mr. Spratt, as well as the office's analysis of Pentagon data.
With about 130,000 troops now in Iraq, the Pentagon says the occupation has been costing about $4 billion a month. The Senate is close to approving about $51 billion for military operations in Iraq next year, a figure included in all of the plans worked out by the budget office.
The Pentagon has said little about future troop levels, although some military planners have sketched out their own plans for a possible reduction by next year. Just Tuesday, President Bush declined to say whether he could promise a reduction within a year.
In the most expensive hypothesis examined by the budget office, troop strength declines to 102,000 by 2005 and drops to 50,000 by 2008, remaining there until 2013. Total spending would come to about $200 billion, including about $22 billion in 2005. Spending would then fall to about $14 billion in 2008, and rise from there in line with inflation through 2013.
All of the office's versions include the costs of supporting the occupation, including troops involved in air operations and those training reserve units before deployment or filling administrative jobs vacated by troops going to Iraq. They do not include the costs of reconstruction or classified intelligence activities.
The least costly plan, at about $85 billion, calls for troop levels to decline to 76,000 by 2005 and for all troops to be withdrawn by 2008. That version predicts spending $16 billion in 2005.
A third calls for about 106,000 troops during 2005 and 2006, dropping to 64,000 by 2008 before a gradual pullout completed by 2011. That would cost an estimated $155 billion, including $23 billion in 2005.
In a fourth plan, costing an estimated $100 billion, troop levels would decline to 76,000 by 2005 and 64,000 in 2006, and all troops would be gradually withdrawn by 2009.
Mr. Spratt, of South Carolina, has been critical of the Bush administration for not offering more information about the military costs of the occupation. "Continuing to treat these enormous costs entirely outside our normal budget process now that the combat phase is over is bad policy," he said, adding that the practice "fosters the illusion that these costs do not contribute to our ever-mounting budget deficit."
A spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget declined to comment on the analysis, except to say, "The president is committed to our mission in Iraq and will work with our commanders in the field to make sure our soldiers have the full resources necessary to succeed."
----
Lawmakers Fume Over Canceled Korea Trip
November 1, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Congress-NKorea.html
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CONGRESS_NKOREA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Ten lawmakers whose trip to North Korea was canceled by the White House have sent a scathing letter to President Bush, complaining of the ``arrogant and disrespectful'' treatment from his national security advisers.
The five Republicans and five Democrats said they were offended ``and believe you are being ill-served by your National Security Council staff.'' A copy of the 5 1/2-page letter, dated Thursday, was obtained by The Associated Press.
In response, National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said: ``Given the progress the president has made on the multilateral approach to convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear program we believe any bilateral delegations to North Korea would be inappropriate at this time.''
The letter adds to growing tensions between lawmakers and the White House on foreign policy issues. Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly complained that the White House has been arrogant in its handling of the Iraq issue, failing to provide information sought by lawmakers or heed the concerns they've raised.
The 10 lawmakers had hoped to leave last weekend on a rare official trip to North Korea. They expected to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and visit the nuclear compound at Yongbyon, the source of spent fuel rods that could be used to make nuclear bombs.
But the leader of the delegation, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., issued a statement Sunday saying that the White House withdrew its support for the trip.
The lawmakers' letter said they don't believe a president has ever prohibited congressional travel, except to an active war zone.
``It is extremely ironic that in this case you canceled military transport of a bipartisan delegation that is in total and complete support of your state foreign policy agenda in North Korea,'' they said.
Weldon had contacted the White House within an hour of receiving the North Korean invitation on Oct. 13, the letter said. But it wasn't until Oct. 23, two days before the trip, that White House chief of staff Andrew Card called Weldon to say the administration was pulling its support for the trip. No one in the National Security Council staff had called before to express concerns about the trip, the lawmakers said.
The letter said there had also been problems related to a congressional delegation Weldon led to North Korea in May. Citing an unidentified military officer, it said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had called the Defense Department at one point to say the trip had been canceled. The Pentagon did not tell them the mission could leave until one day before the scheduled departure.
The letter said the National Security Council had ``irresponsibly fabricated, with malicious intent, a rumor'' that the May delegation had passed a 30-page document to North Korean officials, presenting it as ``some type of sinister leak of information.''
The document was actually a 48-page report on U.S.-Russians relation available on the Internet, the letter said.
The lawmakers asked Bush or Card to meet with them to discuss the trip.
In addition to Weldon, those signing the letter were Republicans Jeff Miller of Florida, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, Charles Taylor of North Carolina, Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland and Democrats Solomon Ortiz and Silvestre Reyes, both of Texas, Eliot Engel and Joseph Crowley, both of New York, and Kendrick Meek of Florida.
Associated Press writer Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this report
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
G.I. Dies After Clash With Taliban in Southern Afghanistan
November 1, 2003
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/international/asia/01AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 31 - An American Special Forces soldier has died from wounds sustained during an operation against Taliban guerrillas in southern Afghanistan, the United States military said Friday. He is the third American to die in operations in Afghanistan in less than a week.
The Special Forces soldier, whose name has not yet been released, was with a combat unit of Americans and Afghan militia on Thursday when they came under attack from a group of 10 to 15 gunmen suspected of being members of the Taliban in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan.
While United States Apache helicopters and A-10 planes blasted the rebels, an Afghan soldier, who was also wounded, and the American were both evacuated by helicopter to the United States air base just outside the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
The attack comes after three American soldiers were slightly wounded in an ambush on Monday in eastern Afghanistan and after two Americans working for the C.I.A. were killed during a separate combat operation near the Pakistani border last Saturday.
Forty United States soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the campaign against the Taliban and its Qaeda allies in October 2001. The Taliban have regrouped this year and launched a new insurgency, along with supporters of the renegade guerrilla commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Four American soldiers were killed in combat in August, one of most violent months Afghanistan has seen since the end of the major fighting last year.
In an interview last week the commander of the American-led coalition in southern Afghanistan, Col. Burke Garrett, played down the strength of the Taliban, saying that his forces had never encountered a group of more than a dozen militants at any one time. He described them as cowardly, and without support of the local population.
"The Afghan Taliban are a broken, dispirited, fractured movement," he said. "They have lost hope and are grasping at some last hope with their attacks." But he admitted that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, was still at liberty and was moving in and out of the country from Pakistan, as were two of his more notorious commanders, Mullah Bradar and Mullah Dadullah.
Al Qaeda, while it no longer has a sanctuary in Afghanistan, continues to finance and manipulate the Taliban to continue attacks against American and Afghan government forces, he said.
The United Nations under secretary general for peacekeeping operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, told the Security Council last Friday that the Taliban had de facto control over three districts bordering Pakistan. He added that increasing attacks had forced the United Nations to suspend operations in four southern provinces, and in most of a fifth province, Kandahar, where the United States has stationed thousands of troops.
-------- asia
Rival Japanese Parties Clash Over U.S. Troops
November 1, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-japan-election-usa.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese politicians clashed on Saturday over U.S. troops in their country with a senior opposition official saying most of them should go and a ruling party official saying that would endanger Japan's security.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party and two coalition partners are hoping to hold on to power in a November 9 parliamentary election.
Main election issues include domestic problems such as pensions and public spending and debt.
But the presence of U.S. forces in another topic politicians are tackling, particularly in areas such as Okinawa in the south, where most U.S. personnel are based and where occasional crimes by U.S. servicemen have enraged the public.
``Security in the Far East can be maintained without U.S. bases in Okinawa and the Marines stationed there,'' Naoto Kan, head of the main opposition Democratic Party, was quoted by Kyodo news agency as saying in Naha, capital of Okinawa.
``We are eyeing having them moved out of Japan,'' he told a news conference.
About 48,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Japan -- 26,000 of them in Okinawa - as part of the U.S.-Japan security alliance, a pillar of Japan's post-war foreign policy.
Kan has vowed to forge a more equal partnership between Japan and the United States if he wins the election although he has stressed he does not want to fundamentally alter the alliance.
Kan's comments were quickly criticized by LDP secretary- general Shinzo Abe.
``Mr Kan, who says unilaterally (the U.S. Marines) should get out, lacks the awareness of ensuring (Japan's) security,'' Abe was quoted by Kyodo as saying in a speech in Tokyo.
``With the North Korean issue, can we do that? Can Japan replace the United States to ensure security in the Far East? There is no way that can be done,'' Abe said.
Worries over North Korea's nuclear arms programs are pushing Japanese leaders to forge closer security ties with the United States, Japan's main ally.
North Korea has been locked in a diplomatic standoff over its nuclear weapons program since October last year, when the United States said North Korea had admitted to having a covert nuclear arms program.
-------- biological weapons
Bioterror Researchers Build a More Lethal Mousepox
November 1, 2003
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/science/01POX.html?pagewanted=all&position=
cientists have created a highly lethal virus in an effort to develop stronger protections against supervirulent forms of smallpox that terrorists might turn on humans, researchers said yesterday.
The genetic engineering involved a virus known as mousepox, which infects mice but is not known to hurt people. Into that virus the scientists spliced a single gene that made it superlethal, then tested it on mice treated with different combinations of a smallpox vaccine and drugs.
The scientists said the results showed that the best defenses proved quite effective in preventing deadly disease not only in mice, but probably in humans exposed to customized smallpox of similar design.
This type of research has been debated for years, with critics arguing again yesterday that superviruses created in laboratories could inspire terrorists to create their own deadly diseases. The mousepox scientists countered that the research could help deter terrorism by demonstrating the emergence of more potent medical defenses.
The mousepox research was done at St. Louis University as a project financed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases meant to find new protections against smallpox, which kills one in three victims.
The leaders of the research said that the lethal mouse virus would have no effect on humans even if it somehow escaped from the laboratory, which they said was safeguarded at biosafety level three, the second-highest degree of security.
"To my knowledge, there's no scientific evidence to suggest that this kind of research poses any sort of human health risk," said Mark Buller, a professor of molecular microbiology at St. Louis University who directed the mousepox research. Many experiments have shown that mousepox does not cause disease in humans, he said.
It goes beyond similar research on mousepox that Australian scientists reported in early 2001. They warned that their genetic technique, which they said they stumbled onto, could overpower existing vaccinations and produce deadlier kinds of biological weapons. The news prompted heated scientific debate internationally.
Yesterday, Dr. Buller said the St. Louis researchers had also made a designer form of cowpox, another cousin of smallpox, to better understand how easy or difficult it would be to apply the same kind of genetic engineering to the human smallpox virus and make it more lethal.
Experts said both the threat of such developments and the federal response seemed part of a theoretical debate, not something to worry about for now. They split over whether the research was prudent. Some argued that, given the accelerating pace of advances in genetic engineering, it was wise to investigate worst cases and responses.
"If we do not act across a wide range of areas we will be failing in our responsibilities as global citizens," said Ken Alibek, a former leader of the Soviet Union's germ weapons program.
Other experts called such research a slippery slope that could aid terrorists, and argued that the research should have had the kind of rigorous peer review that a National Academy of Sciences panel called for last month in new recommendations.
"This is bigger than the original Australian work," said Elisa D. Harris, a Clinton administration arms control official now at the University of Maryland. "They knew the mousepox results and deliberately set out to build upon that work in a way to create a more deadly virus."
"There was a need here," she added, "for consequential research to be reviewed to weigh the potential risks and benefits before the work proceeded, and that apparently didn't happen here."
Dr. Lawrence D. Kerr, a senior official at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, agreed, noting that the research began before the recommendations were issued and would have undergone such scrutiny if begun now.
"This is the exactly the kind of scenario" that federal officials worry about, he said in an interview.
Eradicated two decades ago, smallpox no longer exists in nature or human populations. Officially, only the United States and Russia have stocks of the virus, under tight security. But federal experts suspect that clandestine supplies of the virus exist or could be fabricated.
The mousepox research was first reported in the current issue of New Scientist, a British magazine.
It involved inserting into the mousepox virus a mouse gene that controls interleukin-4, a primary chemical in the immune system's response to invaders. In the Australian case, the designer virus so crippled mice's immune system with extra production of interleukin-4 that the microbe reproduced wildly, killing mice that had been vaccinated and leaving others permanently disabled.
Yesterday, Dr. Buller said the St. Louis research made the killer germ more lethal by inserting the interleukin-4 gene into an unimportant region of the virus's DNA, unlike the central part of the genome that the Australians chose. That allowed the virus to multiply even faster, he said.
"It can't affect humans," he emphasized repeatedly.
The human smallpox vaccine offered no protection to mice exposed to the superlethal virus. "They all died," Dr. Buller said.
The antiviral drug cidofovir similarly failed to give protection. But a combination of the drug and vaccine, he added, saved some mice. The researchers found that the best protection was a combination of cidofovir with a monoclonial antibody drug that fought the effects of interleukin-4. "We protected all the mice from a very high dose" of the virus, he said.
He added that he planned to submit the research for publication and had no qualms about disclosing the exact location of the gene transfer. "It's irrelevant" to the design of a human weapon, he said.
Dr. Buller said that colleagues at the Army's biodefense institute at Fort Detrick, Md., were planning to test the superlethal cowpox virus on mice. Yesterday, neither the White House nor Fort Detrick would comment on whether those plans had been approved.
The cowpox virus can infect humans, though the resulting disease is usually mild. Still, critics worry about the ramifications of such research, for safety and for precedent. "The issue here," Dr. Harris said, "is the potential of this research being misapplied for destructive purposes."
--------
Engineered Virus Related to Smallpox Evades Vaccine
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 1, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49149-2003Oct31?language=printer
Scientists in St. Louis have created a genetically altered strain of mousepox virus -- a close relative of the smallpox virus -- that is so potent it kills mice vaccinated against the mouse disease, rekindling concerns that some avenues of biotechnology research may be generating lethal knowledge useful to bioterrorists.
Health officials emphasized that the federally financed work posed no threat to people. Although the mousepox virus is highly contagious and lethal in mice, it does not cause illness in humans.
But given the similarities between the mousepox and smallpox viruses, scientists said, the same technique might be useful for making a beefed-up strain of smallpox virus that could kill people despite their having been vaccinated.
The lead researcher, virologist Mark Buller of Saint Louis University, said he has already heard from many people distressed about his work, details of which he presented at a scientific meeting in Geneva recently. "I've received all this hate mail," he said.
He added, however, that others have done much the same thing in other labs. The big difference, Buller said, is that his effort was aimed not just at making bad viruses but also at finding a treatment that would work against them. And happily, he reported, he was successful.
The research and its reverberations in recent days highlight an ongoing debate in the scientific community, the federal government and the public about the relative risks and benefits of microbiological research that might be adapted for bioterrorism purposes.
Since the anthrax attacks of 2001, the government has looked for ways to curb the dissemination of new and dangerous knowledge about disease-causing organisms. At the same time, experts have argued, the best way to prepare for a possible bioterrorism attack is to allow research to proceed as unimpeded as possible.
Earlier this month, the National Research Council, an independent congressionally chartered advisory group, recommended steering clear of major research restrictions and instead creating a new level of federal review for proposed experiments that pose particular biosecurity risks -- including any research that aims to make microbes more virulent or resistant to vaccines. That system is not in place yet, though federal officials say they are working quickly to implement it. If it were, scientists agreed, Buller's research clearly would have triggered an extra review.
What Buller did was insert an extra gene into the mousepox virus -- a gene that can suppress the immune system of the mouse that the virus is infecting, thus making it easier for the virus to overcome that animal's defenses.
This was not the first time such work had been done. Indeed, it was the accomplishment of just such a feat by Australian researchers in 2001 -- by accident, it turned out, while they were trying to design a mouse contraceptive -- that first drew many experts' attention to the possibility that scientists might naively help terrorists as they went about their everyday work.
Concerns about that and a few similarly worrisome studies have already prompted editors of scientific journals to create a self-imposed review system in which potentially dangerous details may now be occasionally censored. Those concerns also helped prompt the NRC to produce its report.
Buller said yesterday that he has "absolutely no biosafety issues" with his work. The mousepox virus does not infect humans, the gene involved is specific to mice, and the work had been done by others before.
"The things we did to make that virus more virulent is kindergarten stuff," he said.
Although he acknowledged that someone could, in theory, apply similar techniques to smallpox, he said he had no qualms about presenting his data at the Geneva meeting because his team had found two different ways of countering the enhanced virulence with drugs and vaccines, and is close to perfecting a third way.
The meeting, "Smallpox Biosecurity: Preventing the Unthinkable," took place Oct. 21 and 22 and was sponsored by a biotechnology company that is making a new version of the smallpox vaccine.
Lawrence Kerr, assistant director for homeland security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, praised the work.
"This is the type of research we view as critically important to this nation's biodefense research-and-development portfolio," Kerr said. Buller "was developing countermeasures to a model of a very dangerous pathogen and doing everything in a completely safe mouse model," he said.
Kerr applauded the new level of biosecurity awareness that he said biologists have shown in the past year or so and offered reassurance that the government has no intention of placing heavy-handed restrictions on research or the publication of results.
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the part of the National Institutes of Health that funded the work, said that even under the current system of grant review Buller would have had to clear extra hurdles if he wanted to use his techniques in viruses that can infect humans.
"If he wanted to go beyond this . . . he'd have to get further permission from us," Fauci said.
"For goodness' sake," Fauci said. "We already know how to do this. Everybody knows how to do this. The hard part is figuring out how to counter it."
-------- business
Suspect Accused of Trying to Aid North Korea
November 1, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/international/01NUKE.html
New Jersey man was arrested Friday on charges that he sent blueprints for specialized valves to a company's office in New York, knowing that the blueprints would be passed on to North Korea, federal prosecutors said.
The blueprints could be used to produce valves that are critical in the operation of a nuclear plant.
A criminal complaint filed in United States District Court in Manhattan by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York accused Sitaraman Ravi Mahadevan, 40, of Marlton, N.J., of shipping the blueprints to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in New York. Mitsubishi is one of the contractors involved in the construction of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization's nuclear plant in Yongbyon, North Korea, prosecutors said.
Mr. Mahadevan, an engineer and manager at Valcor Engineering Corporation in Springfield, N.J., was released on $750,000 bail. If convicted he could face a prison sentence of up to 10 years and a fine of up to $250,000.
An agent for the United States Department of Commerce, Jonathan Carson, said in court papers that the valves were used to regulate pressure inside the nuclear vessel, The Associated Press reported Friday.
Exporting the valves or blueprints of them without a government export license is prohibited, prosecutors said.
Such shipments to North Korea have been blocked since December 2002, when the North Koreans expelled inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency from its nuclear plants.
Last year, according to the criminal complaint, Mr. Mahadevan applied for a license to export similar valves to India. The Commerce Department rejected that application.
Mr. Mahadevan, a Canadian citizen with permanent residency status in the United States, shipped the blueprints to Mitsubishi, where they were seized by the Commerce Department before they left the country.
-------- iraq
U.S. encircles Saddam's village in barbed wire
November 01, 2003
By Katarina Kratovac and Sameer N. Yacoub
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031031-111420-3880r.htm
UJA, Iraq - American soldiers yesterday cordoned off the village where Saddam Hussein was born, suspecting this dusty farming community of being a secret base for funding and planning assaults against coalition forces.
"There are ties leading to this village, to the funding and planning of attacks against U.S. soldiers," said Lt. Col. Steve Russell, a battalion commander with the 4th Infantry Division, which is based in nearby Tikrit.
Elsewhere in Iraq, U.S. troops battled Iraqi rioters when a dispute over a marketplace exploded into anti-American fury in Abu Ghraib, just outside Baghdad.
Leaflets and rumored warnings called for a "Day of Resistance" today at the start of a three-day general strike to protest the U.S. presence. U.S. officials urged Americans in the Iraqi capital to "maintain a high level of vigilance."
Two Iraqis were killed, and 17 others and two U.S. soldiers were reported wounded at the marketplace clashes, as Iraqi rioters waved portraits of Saddam and shouted "Allahu Akbar [God is great]."
A bomb exploded yesterday morning near an 82nd Airborne Division patrol outside Khaldiyah, west of Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding four others, the U.S. military reported.
In Fallujah, also west of Baghdad and a center of anti-U.S. resistance, an explosion and fire struck the office of the mayor, who has cooperated with the U.S. occupation. In a melee that followed, one Iraqi was killed. Later in the day, U.S. troops came under attack at the same spot.
Three or four American soldiers were wounded in the northern city of Mosul late yesterday when assailants threw a grenade at them from a speeding car, Iraqi police said.
The operation in the village of Uja, 19 miles north of Baghdad, began before dawn with hundreds of U.S. troops and Iraqi police. They erected a fence of barbed wire, stretched over wooden poles, and laid spirals of razor wire around the village, a cluster of mud-and-brick homes set in orchards of pears and pomegranates about six miles south of Tikrit.
Checkpoints were set up at all roads leading into the village of an estimated 3,500 residents, many of them Saddam's clansmen and distant relatives.
It appeared the operation was not aimed at catching Saddam but at identifying those who live here and making sure that outsiders are quickly spotted. All adults were required to register for identity cards that U.S. officials said would allow them "controlled access" in and out of the village.
"This is an effort to protect the majority of the population, the people who want to get on with their lives," Col. Russell said. "What we have seen repeatedly month after month is not necessarily attacks against coalition forces in this village, but there are ties to the planning and organizing these attacks. That is not fair to the rest of this village."
The intensive hunt for the deposed leader is spearheaded by the top secret Special Operations Task Force 20, and American officials in Iraq have said little about any progress. The United States has offered a $25 million reward for Saddam's capture.
Much of the hunt for Saddam appears to be focused in the area around Tikrit, where Saddam and other key followers could find shelter among family and clansmen.
During the operation yesterday, Col. Russell said he did not know whether Saddam was directly involved in coordinating attacks.
"It's hard to tell what exactly his [Saddam´s] role would be, if any," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "Saddam Hussein is in a survival mode. He is no longer in power."
Col. Russell noted that the village of Uja was unusual because so many key figures in the former government had roots in this area.
Among them is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a longtime Saddam confidant whom U.S. officials suspect as a force behind some of the recent attacks. U.S. officials believe al-Douri has linked up with members of the Islamic extremist group Ansar al-Islam to stage attacks against coalition forces.
However, some sources familiar with the former Iraqi regime say al-Douri, who has leukemia, could be too ill to coordinate the attacks.
Despite strong support for Saddam in this area, there was no visible resistance to the American operation, and people lined up quietly outside a police station to register for ID cards.
"I chose right in coming here. We need the safety," said Ahmed al-Naseri, who told reporters he was a cousin of Saddam's. "We need freedom."
Uja Police Chief Ahmed Hamza al-Naseri said the military operation took him by surprise.
"I didn't know what was going on until I received a call in the middle of the night," he said. "This is all new to the people of Uja. They may be afraid at first, but they will accept it."
The police chief said he expected no trouble, and as an example to others, he was first to get an ID card.
--------
Roadside Bomb Kills Two GIs in Iraq
November 1, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Parents kept their childen out of school amid fears of attacks Saturday on a ``Day of Resistance,'' called by Saddam Hussein loyalists, but many Iraqis turned up at work as the day passed in the capital with no widespread violence. In northern Iraq, a roadside bomb killed at least two U.S. soldiers.
The top American official in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said Saddam's ousted party had failed to rally Iraqis behind their calls for resistance to the U.S.-led occupation and the launch of a three-day strike, circulated in leaflets in Baghdad.
Early morning traffic was significantly lighter than usual in the city of 5 milliion people, as Baghdad residents waited to see whether the day would bring violence. Most shops opened, but merchants complained their customers were staying away.
Some schools closed because so few pupils -- or teachers -- showed up. At a boys' secondary school, Al-Jawad, only 80 of 500 students attended, deputy principal Abdel Karim al-Azzawi said. ``Parents are worried about their children,'' al-Azzawi said.
As the day passed without any bombings or attacks, however, traffic steadily rose to nearly normal levels, with streets in some of the main shopping districts clogged with traffic. By nightfall, no major incidents had been reported in the capital.
``My understanding there was a dropoff in schools but there was no general strike,'' Bremer told reporters. ``Business was active and usual.''
Insurgents were active elsewhere. Witnesses said an oil pipeline was on fire Saturday about 10 miles north of Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, an area of widespread opposition to the U.S.-led occupation. Witnesses said they suspected sabotage because an explosion preceded the blaze.
The U.S. military said two U.S. soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were killed and two wounded in the roadside bombing in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city. Identities were withheld pending notification of relatives.
Iraqi police Lt. Walid Hashim said the men were inside two civilian cars when the blast occurred. He rushed to the scene and saw that the drivers were dead while the two passengers were badly injured.
``They were cut all over by shrapnel (and) one was wounded in the abdomen and was moaning,'' Hashim said.
The two deaths would bring to 122 the number of American soldiers killed by hostile fire since President Bush declared an end to combat on May 1 when added to the total given by the Department of Defense on Friday. A total of 114 U.S. soldiers were killed between the start of the war March 20 and the end of April.
Bremer told a Baghdad press conference that the coalition, once it gets additional money from Congress, will accelerate the building of the new Iraqi army, police and other security forces.
``This is after all their country,'' Bremer said. ``It is their future.''
He said the Americans would train 27 battalions for the army within one year rather than two years. With 600-700 soldiers in each battalion, that would add nearly 20,000 troops to the two battalions already trained by U.S. forces.
By September of next year, more than 200,000 Iraqis will be involved in the defense of the country, either in the military, the police or the Civil Defense Force, a sort of national guard, he said.
Bremer said that by March the coalition will double the size of the Civil Defense Force, whcih currently numbers about 7,800 members. The police force now stands at about 50,000 members, said the overall U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.
Bremer said he hoped to make quick progress with the U.S.-created Iraqi Governing Council on the first key step to handing over sovereingty to Iraqis, a decision on how to draw up a new constitution.''
``T believe that we need to move along quickly on that path,'' he said. ``We are prepared to provide a path and a timeline with the Governing Council. we blv it is important to give the iraqi people a perspective and a clear process that shows when sovereignty will revert entirely to an elected Iraqi government, which is the point at which the coalition authority goes out of existence.''
Calls to give Iraqis a stronger role in security have swelled with the dramatic escalation against coalition forces over the past weeks. A week ago, insurgents barraged the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad with rockets, then the following day, four near-simultaneous suicide bombings killed about three dozen people and injured about 200 in the capital, prompting the international Red Cross, the United Nations and other organizations to withdraw foreign staff.
In violence Saturday, insurgents attacked a U.S. convoy Saturday near Heet, 75 miles northwest of Baghdad, witnesses said. They said one man held up part of the wreckage from one vehicle and shouted, ``With our blood and souls, we sacrifice for you, Saddam.'' U.S. military spokesmen had no confirmation of the attack.
U.S. officials have blamed former Baath Party figures, foreign fighters and Islamic extremists for the upsurge.
Bremer said capturing or killing Saddam was a ``top priority'' of the coalition forces, but he dismissed recent reports that the ousted leader is taking a strong role in organizing the anti-U.S. resistance.
``We have no clear indication that Saddam himself is behind these attacks,'' he said. ``There is some sign of control over these attacks at a regional level.''
Rumors swept Baghdad that bombings or other resistance action would strike the capital after a leaflet attributed to Saddam's ousted Baathist party declared Saturday a ``Day of Resistance,'' and called for a three-day general strike.
Security was stepped up in the capital, and police checkpoints caused traffic jams. Many motorists were ordered to stop for inspections by policemen.
Classes were canceled at the Al-Huda girls' elementary school after only 23 of 700 pupils reported for class, according to the principal, Sana Naji Abbas. More than half the teachers also stayed home, she said. Iraqi schoolchildren have one day a week off -- Friday, the Muslim holy day.
One teenage girl who did set out from home Saturday morning sounded a defiant note. ``We heard that they want to bomb schools, but we weren't afraid,'' said Sabrin Talib, 17. ``I came to school today.
--------
Calls to Jihad Are Said to Lure Hundreds of Militants Into Iraq
November 1, 2003
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DESMOND BUTLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/international/middleeast/01RECR.html?pagewanted=all&position=
LONDON, Oct. 31 - Across Europe and the Middle East, young militant Muslim men are answering a call issued by Osama bin Laden and other extremists, and leaving home to join the fight against the American-led occupation in Iraq, according to senior counterterrorism officials based in six countries.
The intelligence officials say that since late summer they have detected a growing stream of itinerant Muslim militants headed for Iraq. They estimate that hundreds of young men from an array of countries have now arrived in Iraq by crossing the Syrian or Iranian borders.
But the officials say this influx is not necessarily evidence of coordination by Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, since it remains unclear if the men are under the control of any one leader or what, if any, role they have had in the kind of deadly attacks that shook Baghdad on Monday. A European intelligence official called the foreign recruits "foot soldiers with limited or no training."
A senior British official, who was in Iraq in September, said most of the foreign men captured there were from the Middle East - Syria, Lebanon and Yemen - or North Africa. He described them as "young, angry men" motivated by the "anti-British, anti-American rhetoric that fills their ears every day."
Signs of a movement to Iraq have also been detected in Europe. Jean-Louis Bruguière, France's top investigative judge on terrorism, said dozens of poor and middle-class Muslim men had left France for Iraq since the summer. He said some of them appeared to have been inspired by exhortations of Qaeda leaders, even if they were not trained by Al Qaeda.
Mr. Bruguière, who earlier this year opened an investigation of young men leaving France to fight on the side of Muslims in Chechnya, said the traffic to Iraq was now a similar problem. He called the changing pattern "a new threat."
The rising agitation in parts of the Muslim world over the American-led occupation in Iraq was clear at Friday Prayers at Al Nur Mosque in a working-class section of Berlin. Dr. Izzeldin Hamad, the director of the Saudi-financed mosque, said political discussion was banned there.
But outside, a 21-year-old man who identified himself as Akmed said that while Saddam Hussein was unpopular, now "there are people who are angry about the American occupation." He and others said that inside the mosque, collections usually requested for Muslims in Palestine and Chechnya were now being offered for Iraq as well.
An initial hint that Iraq would become a magnet for foreign recruits came just before the war began in March, with the arrest in Syria of four Algerian men, who had been living in Hamburg and attending a mosque frequented by three of the Sept. 11 hijackers. The authorities believed that the men intended to fight in Iraq.
One of them, Abderazak Mahdjoub, whom German investigators have linked to a Spanish-based terror network, is under investigation for alleged involvement in a planned terror strike on a tourist location on the Costa del Bravo in Spain. Syria deported the men to Germany, but none of the four men is in custody, since there is no German law against going to Iraq.
A senior German intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the authorities had detected other cases of immigrants in Germany trying to go to Iraq. "We know that in Germany there are people in the militant Muslim scene who are willing to go other places to participate in jihad, including Iraq," the official said.
There are scattered reports from other places, including Saudi Arabia, where a senior Saudi official said two Saudi militants, believed to have ties to Al Qaeda, were missing from the kingdom and believed by the authorities to have gone to Iraq.
Intelligence officials, who base their assessment of the traffic into Iraq on surveillance of mosques and Islamic centers and on interrogations of terrorist suspects captured inside Iraq, say they have found no connections between the recruits. "Nobody is organizing this move from Europe to Iraq," a senior European counterterrorism official said. "At least it is difficult to analyze and know who is organizing this. This may be just the beginning of a new phenomenon."
United States troops patrolling the long Iraq-Syria border have said they have not detained any foreign recruits entering Iraq, but officials investigating attacks on allied targets say they have little question that militant Muslims are being drawn to the country. "It's pretty clear their number is increasing," a senior American official said.
The number of attacks is also increasing. In the last week, the average number of attacks against allied or international relief targets exceeded two dozen a day, from 12 attacks daily in July.
This week's attacks produced some evidence of the role of foreigners in Iraq. One would-be suicide bomber who was shot and wounded by Iraqi policemen was later identified as a man of Yemeni descent who was holding a Syrian passport.
In addition, Monday's multiple, coordinated suicide bombings were a sign to some investigators that foreign terrorists may have added a level of sophistication to the attacks.
Military officials say they suspect that a senior official in Mr. Hussein's government is recruiting foreign fighters to Iraq. They said Izzat Ibrahim, the "king of clubs" in the deck of cards of the most-wanted members of the deposed government, was believed to be a leading organizer and financier of recent attacks.
But allied forces are still struggling to figure out the dimensions and composition of the opponent they now face in Iraq. "We are quite blind there," said the head of an intelligence agency in Europe. He added: "The Americans and Brits know very little about this enemy. They are trying to fight an enemy they cannot see."
As a result, allied forces assume that they are fighting a loose conglomerate of like-minded opponents. Counterterrorism officials estimated that as many as 15 militant groups, some with loose ties to Al Qaeda, might now be operating in Iraq.
"Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, loyalists, disgruntled former army personnel - they are all suspects, but there is no focus on a specific group," said a senior American counterterrorism official; Ansar is a terror group that had been operating in northern Iraq and is suspected to have had a role in the attacks in recent months.
Mr. Bruguière, the French investigative judge, said there were signs of Al Qaeda's influence in Iraq. "Since we had no evidence of an Al Qaeda connection in Iraq before the war, this is worrying," he said.
American officials closest to the intelligence from Iraq say the definition of the enemy is blurry. "Iraq is a magnet for jihadists just as Afghanistan was," a senior official said. "But the bigger question is whether leadership is evolving or coordination. So far we haven't seen it."
For months, the role in Iraq of "foreign fighters" - particularly those of Al Qaeda - has been a matter of sharp debate among American officials and intelligence officials in Europe and the Middle East.
Before the American-led invasion in March, counterterrorism officials and terrorism experts warned that the military action would be used by militant Muslims to recruit a new generation of terrorists, and that Iraq would draw them into the fray.
Al Qaeda leaders have repeatedly invoked the struggle in Iraq. In an audiotape broadcast by Al Jazeera satellite network earlier this month, Mr. bin Laden cited Iraq as the newest front in the terror network's international jihad.
"I say to our brothers, the mujahedeen in Iraq, I share your concerns and feel your pain," Mr. bin Laden said in the 31-minute audiotape. He called on young Muslims to go to Iraq to fight, saying, "You have to go wage jihad and show your muscles."
A day later, President Bush sought to draw a parallel between Mr. bin Laden's call to arms and the effort against terrorism. "The bin Laden tape should say to everybody the war on terror goes on, that there's still a danger to free nations," he said.
But a senior European intelligence official said he doubted that Al Qaeda had established a strong enough organization in Baghdad to pull off attacks, given how fractured Mr. bin Laden's network appears to be.
"Al Qaeda would need a level of organization and sophistication that I don't think it currently has," he said. But he said he did believe that some Qaeda members were now in Iraq "trying to stir up trouble."
There is little debate that more and more people are stirring trouble in Baghdad. Just who they are and where they are from remains a matter of speculation. In September, the authorities in Iraq arrested nine men they suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda. But officials have learned little about them or their connections through interrogations.
"They are not saying much," said one official knowledgeable about the arrests. "But they may just be foot soldiers who don't know that much."
Don Van Natta Jr. reported for this article from London and Desmond Butler from Berlin. Additional reporting was provided by Lowell Bergman and David Johnston in Washington.
--------
VIOLENCE
Revenge Drives String of Killings in Basra
November 1, 2003
By JOEL BRINKLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/international/middleeast/01BASR.html
BASRA, Iraq, Oct. 31 - Over the past month, more than a dozen former senior members of Saddam Hussein's government have been shot dead in the streets of this normally peaceful city - two of them this week alone, both shot in the head at close range.
The Iraqi police, themselves former instruments of the government, seem paralyzed by the sudden burst of revenge killings. With a shrug, Cpl. Hisham Jabar, chief investigating officer in the killing of Muhammad Abdul Nabi al-Gishi on Wednesday afternoon, said, "No one has been arrested."
It has been a time for vengeance in Basra, the second city of Iraq.
Mr. Gishi was the principal of an elementary school and a senior Baath Party official under Mr. Hussein. When the war came he lost his job, and Wednesday afternoon he took a taxi to the Education Ministry to see if officials would rehire him.
As he stood on the street in front of the ministry building, a white Toyota sedan with no license plates pulled up. A man in the passenger seat opened the window and shot Mr. Gishi in the head with an AK-47 rifle, the police said.
His brother, Latif, wept at a wake on Friday morning as he said: "I saw him lying on the street. My son and I carried him on our shoulders" to his grave.
How to deal with the competing forces of revenge and reconciliation is a question that dogs every society in the aftermath of a brutal dictatorship. Iraq is no exception, but events in this area, as in others, have unfolded in an unexpected way.
When the United States laid out its plans for governing Iraq early this year, officials predicted a wave of revenge killings in Baghdad and across the country. Decades of pent-up anger over repression, torture and death at the hands of Mr. Hussein's government would find voice in tens of thousands of Iraqis, suddenly free to say and do what they wanted with their former rulers.
But after many deadly revenge attacks in the first few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, few had been reported since - there or anywhere else - until the killing resumed in Basra a month ago. The city is home to a large Shiite population; the Shiites were often a target of Mr. Hussein's repression.
"It's a big problem here in the south now," said Capt. Hussein Falih of the Iraqi police.
In adjacent neighborhoods on Friday morning, the extended families of the two most recent victims, Mr. Gishi and Muhsen Abdul Wahid al-Hajama, sat at wakes in tents, accepting condolences from friends and well-wishers.
Before the war, the two victims were school principals and teachers who, after class let out each day, assumed the mantle of Baath Party division commanders and "ordered raids," Captain Falih said. "They were responsible for arresting people, lots of people, and having them killed."
The police said the first of the recent victims, in late September, was Dr. Abdullah al-Fadhil. Gunmen shot him dead in his car as he was leaving the College of Medicine.
Dr. Fadhil, they added, may have been selected as the first target because he filled a special need for Baath Party enforcers. When the Baathists caught army deserters, they would haul them over to the doctor's office, where he would cut off their ears. Since his death, at least 12 others have been killed, all of them party leaders.
Within the police force, theories abound as to who is responsible for the assassinations. Most blame "Islamic extremists," as Hayder Mayid, a second lieutenant, put it.
In recent weeks, four different fundamentalist Islamic organizations that have no presence anywhere else in Iraq have opened offices in the Basra area. For some, their names indicate their purpose. One is the Islamic Organization of God's Revenge, according to a sign over the entryway. Several men with assault rifles there said no one was available to discuss the group's work.
Maj. Ian Poole, the chief spokesman for the 4,500 British troops that control Basra, said the military was investigating the killings, "and the important thing is for these people to know they will be caught," though, he admitted, none have yet been caught. "But the fact is, these are former Baath Party officials," he said. "That makes it hard to protect them."
Mr. Gishi left a wife and nine children. His eldest son, Ala-Muhammad al-Gishi, 23, a student, insisted that his father's hands were clean.
"No one had animosity for him," he said. "We didn't have disputes with anyone." A moment later he added, "A couple of days earlier another comrade was killed."
Relatives standing near him suddenly blanched as they tried to quiet him. "Comrade" is the unmistakable greeting among Baath Party members. Around the corner from the dead man's house, graffiti on a white wall declares: "Death to the comrades, the criminals, one by one."
Lieutenant Mayid said, "You can't be a Baath Party division commander unless you do a lot of activities hurting people." In fact, party members won points for arresting enemies of the government, and only by accruing those points would they be promoted to senior positions like division commander.
Mr. Hajama, the other "comrade" who was killed this week, was shot dead in the same spot as Mr. Gishi: in front of the Education Ministry on Sunday, apparently by a gunman in the same white Toyota sedan. He and Mr. Gishi had been friends and Baath Party colleagues; they both held the rank of division commander.
At Mr. Hajama's wake, a few blocks away from Mr. Gishi's, Mr. Hajama's brother, Abbas, said he had no idea why Mr. Hajama was killed. "He had his party activities in the afternoon, but he was a good man," he said. "He didn't hurt anyone." He added: "The police are very weak. They can't do anything."
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis Debate Using Women in Combat
By LAURIE COPANS
Associated Press Writer
Nov 1, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_WOMEN_IN_COMBAT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israelis are questioning the use of women in combat after the killings of two female sergeants by Palestinians and a study suggesting women are too weak for deployment.
The debate comes at a critical time as the military is stretched thin by three years of fighting against the Palestinians and the government tries to fill the gaps by calling up reserves. More women in combat could ease the burden.
It also strikes at the heart of Israeli society, since army service is compulsory for nearly all able 18-year-olds, and the military is often a launching pad for careers.
Concern over deployment of women was fueled by the Oct. 24 ambush of sergeants Sarit Shneor-Senior and Adi Osman at a remote army outpost that guards the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip.
One of the attackers walked to the soldiers' sleeping quarters, opened the door to one of the trailers and killed Osman, 19, in her sleep. A few moments later, Shneor-Senior, 20, opened the door to her trailer and was killed by the attacker. A male soldier also was killed. Some caution against pushing women too far in the army.
Initial findings of the study commissioned by the commander of ground forces found, for instance, that most women are not able to lift the minimum amount required of combat soldiers, 110 pounds. It also said most women could not complete military treks, which typically involve carrying heavy gear, of more than 12 miles. Male soldiers can be required to march more than twice that distance.
The study has not yet been debated in the upper echelons of the army, but could prevent the eventual entrance of women into elite commando units.
Housing Minister Effie Eitam, a former general, called for female soldiers to be removed from conflict areas. "The ability of women to participate in intense combat ... is more limited," Eitam told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper.
Others warned that if women are kept out of combat, they will never achieve equality in the military, nor later in life, since the service shapes their motivation and expectations for future careers.
Recent call-ups of reserve units wouldn't have been necessary if women were used to their full potential, said Brig. Gen. Yehudit Ben-Notan, a former commander in the women's corps.
"I think a small nation needs to make use of everyone and to look at them not according to their sex, but according to the army's needs, and their talents," Ben-Notan told Israel Radio.
A few countries allow women into some combat roles, including Germany, Canada, Denmark and Norway. In the U.S. military, women can serve on combat ships but are not allowed on submarines and are barred from serving in units whose main purpose is ground combat.
Today, Israeli women are the only ones in the world required to serve in their country's army.
Even before Israel's creation in 1948, women fought in militias to defend Jewish communities. They were recruited alongside men when the army was formed. In the early years, women were largely given jobs as secretaries and clerks in the army. The door to combat units was opened by Supreme Court rulings in 1995 and 2000, though most elite units remain off-limits.
Since 1995, when a young woman petitioned the high court to be admitted to pilot training, five women have graduated from flight school and are serving as pilots or navigators. Women also guard Israel's borders in light infantry positions - which can involve ground combat - and operate long-range rocket launchers. Recently a woman was appointed commander on a missile cruiser.
Sgt. Sima Adiv, a commander of a rocket launcher unit in the West Bank, said the public will have to get used to the possibility of women fighters being killed or taken as prisoners of war, like American women soldiers were in Iraq earlier this year.
"My parents thought the chances I would go into combat were very small," the slight, serious 20-year-old said as she led three male soldiers in a foot patrol around her army base.
"Society will just have to get used to the idea of women in combat."
--------
Israel Limits Holy Site Access; Vandals Deface Rabin Memorial
November 1, 2003
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/international/middleeast/01MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Oct. 31 - Israel blocked some Palestinian Muslims from reaching a holy site to pray here Friday, while in Tel Aviv vandals defaced a memorial to former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a day before a ceremony to remember his assassination in 1995.
Israel's leadership condemned the vandalism. On a banner set up for Saturday's memorial, vandals spray-painted praise for a virulently anti-Arab leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was himself assassinated in 1990. According to Israeli news reports, vandals also spray-painted swastikas on the black rocks of the memorial.
Workers quickly washed the graffiti away from the rocks. Moshe Katsav, Israel's president, expressed "shock and disgust" at the vandalism, and said, "The murder of Yitzhak Rabin was a national disaster that will be with us for generations."
Mr. Rabin was shot dead by a right-wing extremist who opposed his efforts to make peace with the Palestinians.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon telephoned Mr. Rabin's daughter, Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, to denounce the vandalism, his office said.
For the first Friday prayers of the holy month of Ramadan, tens of thousands of Muslims gathered peacefully on the man-made plateau in Jerusalem that they revere as the Noble Sanctuary and that Jews revere as the Temple Mount.
It was after a visit to the disputed site in September 2000 by Mr. Sharon, then the opposition leader, that the Palestinians began their present uprising against Israel.
Citing fears of rioting, Israel frequently restricts access by Palestinians to the site. On Friday, the police set a limit of 5,000 on the number of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who could attend prayers. The men had to be at least 45 years old and married, while the women had to be at least 35 and married.
Separately, the American Embassy in Tel Aviv said Friday that the State Department was offering a $5 million reward for information leading to those responsible for a bomb attack on an American diplomatic convoy that killed three American guards.
The attack, on Oct. 15 in the northern Gaza Strip, further hampered a faltering Bush administration peace initiative by prompting United States diplomats to suspend travel to Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel occupied in 1967.
In hopes of resuming the peace process, the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, is seeking talks with Hamas and other Palestinian factions to achieve a cease-fire.
But Ismail Haniya, a political leader of Hamas, said in Gaza on Friday that if Hamas acceded to a truce now, it would signal that it was buckling before Israel's offensive against the group.
"As long as there is Israeli aggression, it's not realistic to talk about a truce," he said. "If we accept a truce at this time, that would mean Hamas collapsed before Israeli aggression."
-------- latin america
OAS balks at defense treaty
November 01, 2003
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031031-094219-9942r.htm
MEXICO CITY - An attempt by the United States to reinforce a 1947 mutual-defense pact has run into vocal opposition from several Latin American member nations, who dismiss it as a Cold War relic.
Mexico, which last year pulled out of the accord known as the Rio Treaty, accused Washington during a security conference of the Organization of American States (OAS) this week of trying to "militarize" the 35-member political group.
"We are not looking for, nor can we accept, the militarization of the OAS," Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez said at the opening of the conference in Mexico City on Monday.
Mr. Derbez's Brazilian counterpart, Celso Amorim, was more tactful. "Given that the treaty was drafted in other historical circumstances, it should be revisited," he said.
The Bush administration invoked the treaty, which says that an attack on any nation in the Western Hemisphere will be considered an attack on all, after the September 11 terrorist attacks, just as it invoked a similar article in the NATO treaty.
The pact "remains an essential component of our security architecture because it is the legally binding security instrument within our hemisphere," said Marc Grossman, undersecretary of state for political affairs, who led the U.S. delegation at the two-day conference.
The United States won a reference to the treaty in the forum's final declaration, which states that the participants "recognize the importance and usefulness of the inter-American instruments and agreements," including the Rio Treaty.
But the OAS members also recommended that the organization's Committee on Hemispheric Security "continue the process of study and assessment" of this and other such documents, "bearing in mind security realities in the hemisphere and the distinct nature of traditional and nontraditional threats."
The member states agreed, after intense negotiations, on the nature of the new threats, including terrorism, trafficking in weapons and people, poverty, HIV/AIDS and attacks on electronic security.
However, divisions remained over how best to address those threats, with Mexico and Brazil rejecting a U.S. proposal to bolster the military role of the OAS's Inter-American Defense Board, which traditionally has had an advisory function.
Some diplomats from Latin America expressed displeasure at the Bush administration's focus on terrorism - sometimes, they said, at the expense of equally important issues.
U.S. security concerns recently have focused on Southeast Asia as the second front in the war on terror after the Middle East, mainly because of the presence there of groups linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
But U.S. officials said this week that South America has become another region of serious concern.
"There has been a documented movement of al Qaeda in at least one of the countries we cover," said a Latin America-based U.S. law-enforcement official who is responsible for six states in the Caribbean and the northern part of South America.
"We believe there is the potential for an emerging terrorist threat," he added. "Suriname, for example, is about 35 percent Muslim [and] has a historical nexus to Indonesia, the home of Jemaah Islamiyah, which is affiliated with al Qaeda and responsible for the Bali bombing" last year.
But, he said, Suriname is not necessarily the country where the movement of al Qaeda members has been documented.
-------- russia / chechnya
Defiance surfaces in Putin Cabinet
November 01, 2003
By Mara D. Bellaby
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031031-111419-7078r.htm
MOSCOW - Russia's prime minister ignored his boss's warning not to meddle in the prosecutors' campaign against the oil giant Yukos, saying yesterday he is "very troubled" by the freezing of the company's stocks.
The comments from Russia's No. 2 leader appeared to be the boldest sign yet of defiance from within President Vladimir Putin's Cabinet to an escalating investigation that has stoked financial and political turmoil.
"The arrest of shares of a private company that is traded on the market is a new phenomenon, the consequences of which are hard to define, since it's a new form of influence," Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said in the southern city of Nalchik. His remarks were shown on Russian television.
Mr. Putin bluntly warned his Cabinet on Monday against interfering in the prosecutors' investigation into Russia's largest oil company and its head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested Oct. 25 by special agents at a Siberian airport.
Mr. Khodorkovsky has blamed the investigation on infighting in the presidential administration, and the split came into the open Thursday when the Kremlin announced the departure of its chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin. Rumors had circulated for days that Mr. Voloshin had resigned over Mr. Khodorkovsky's arrest.
Mr. Voloshin, like Mr. Kasyanov, was linked with former President Boris Yeltsin's circle, which was responsible for carrying out the vast privatization of Soviet state assets in the mid-1990s that led to the creation of tycoons such as Mr. Khodorkovsky.
Mr. Putin named Dmitry Medvedev, the first deputy chief of staff and the chairman of the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, to succeed Mr. Voloshin.
The already 4-month-old Yukos investigation is widely seen as having political overtones. Many in Russia consider it an action staged by some of Mr. Putin's top lieutenants in retaliation for Mr. Khodorkovsky's political activities, which included funding opposition parties.
The campaign has heightened fears about instability in Mr. Putin's government, as different groups jockey for influence, and about the possibility of a broad revision of the privatization program. Mr. Putin has said that won't happen.
After growing criticism about the seizure of 44 percent of Yukos' stocks, the Russian prosecutor's office yesterday lifted a small percentage of the shares that it froze a day earlier. In a statement, prosecutors said they were freeing 4.5 percent of the shares - those belonging to people not under criminal investigation.
Prosecutors also announced they had completed their investigation into Vasily Shakhnovsky, who is a major shareholder in Yukos, for purported tax evasion and turned over their materials to his lawyers.
The Yukos probe, which has also led to the jailing of Platon Lebedev, a top Yukos shareholder and board chairman of the Menatep group, has hurt the Russian stock market and shaken investor confidence. The benchmark Russian trading system, or RTS, closed up 1.9 percent yesterday at 506.12, but it was still down 20 percent from just two weeks ago.
The United States expressed concern again yesterday about the rule of law in Russia and what impact the seizure of Yukos shares and the jailing of Mr. Khodorkovsky would have on investors.
"We think the Russian authorities need to dispel concerns that the Yukos case is politically motivated," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, in the second consecutive day of public criticism by the Bush administration.
"There's always the issue we see in a case like this as to whether it's a single event or whether it has some sweeping implication for the rule of law in Russia," Mr. Boucher said.
-------- spies
Bush's other war
US intelligence is being scapegoated for getting it right on Iraq
Sidney Blumenthal
Saturday November 1, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1075530,00.html
In Baghdad, the Bush administration acts as though it is astonished by the postwar carnage. Its feigned shock is a consequence of Washington's intelligence wars. In fact, not only was it warned of the coming struggle and its nature - ignoring a $5m state department report on The Future of Iraq - but Bush himself signed another document in which that predictive information is contained.
According to the congressional resolution authorising the use of military force in Iraq, the administration is required to submit to the Congress reports of postwar planning every 60 days. The report, bearing Bush's signature and dated April 14 - previously undisclosed but revealed here - declares: "We are especially concerned that the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime will continue to use Iraqi civilian populations as a shield for its regular and irregular combat forces or may attack the Iraqi population in an effort to undermine Coalition goals." Moreover, the report goes on: "Coalition planners have prepared for these contingencies, and have designed the military campaign to minimise civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure."
Yet, on August 25, as the violence in postwar Iraq flared, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that this possibility was not foreseen: "Now was - did we - was it possible to anticipate that the battles would take place south of Baghdad and that then there would be a collapse up north, and there would be very little killing and capturing of those folks, because they blended into the countryside and they're still fighting their war?"
"We read their reports," a senate source told me. "Too bad they don't read their own reports."
In advance of the war, Bush (to be precise, Dick Cheney, the de facto prime minister to the distant monarch) viewed the CIA, the state department and other intelligence agencies not simply as uncooperative, but even disloyal, as their analysts continued to sift through information to determine what exactly might be true. For them, this process is at the essence of their professionalism and mission. Yet the strict insistence on the empirical was a threat to the ideological, facts an imminent danger to the doctrine. So those facts had to be suppressed, and those creating contrary evidence had to be marginalised, intimidated or have their reputations tarnished.
Twice, in the run-up to the war, Vice-president Cheney veered his motorcade to the George HW Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, where he personally tried to coerce CIA desk-level analysts to fit their work to specification.
If the CIA would not serve, it would be trampled. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld formed the Office of Special Plans, a parallel counter-CIA under the direction of the neoconservative deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to "stovepipe" its own version of intelligence directly to the White House. Its reports were not to be mingled or shared with the CIA or state department intelligence for fear of corruption by scepticism. Instead, the Pentagon's handpicked future leader of Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, replaced the CIA as the reliable source of information, little of which turned out to be true - though his deceit was consistent with his record. Chalabi was regarded at the CIA as a mountebank after he had lured the agency to support his "invasion" of Iraq in 1995, a tragicomic episode, but one which hardly discouraged his neoconservative sponsors.
Early last year, before Hans Blix, chief of the UN team to monitor Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, embarked on his mission, Wolfowitz ordered a report from the CIA to show that Blix had been soft on Iraq in the past and thus to undermine him before he even began his work. When the CIA reached an opposite conclusion, Wolfowitz was described by a former state department official in the Washington Post as having "hit the ceiling". Then, according to former assistant secretary of state James Rubin, when Blix met with Cheney at the White House, the vice-president told him what would happen if his efforts on WMDs did not support Bush policy: "We will not hesitate to discredit you." Blix's brush with Cheney was no different from the administration's treatment of the CIA.
Having already decided upon its course in Iraq, the Bush administration demanded the fabrication of evidence to fit into an imminent threat. Then, fulfilling the driven logic of the Bush doctrine, preemptive action could be taken. Policy a priori dictated intelligence á la carte.
In Bush's Washington, politics is the extension of war by other means. Rather than seeking to reform any abuse of intelligence, the Bush administration, through the Republican-dominated senate intelligence committee, is producing a report that will accuse the CIA of giving faulty information.
W hile the CIA is being cast as a scapegoat, FBI agents are meanwhile interviewing senior officials about a potential criminal conspiracy behind the public identification of a covert CIA operative - who, not coincidentally, happens to be the wife of the former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, author of the report on the false Niger yellowcake uranium claims (originating in the Cheney's office). Wilson's irrefutable documentation was carefully shelved at the time in order to put16 false words about Saddam Hussein's nuclear threat in the mouth of George Bush in his state of the union address.
When it comes to responsibility for the degradation of intelligence in developing rationales for the war, Bush is energetically trying not to get the bottom of anything. While he has asserted the White House is cooperating with the investigation into the felony of outing Mrs Wilson, his spokesman has assiduously drawn a fine line between the legal and the political. After all, though Karl Rove - the president's political strategist and senior adviser, indispensable to his re election campaign - unquestionably called a journalist to prod him that Mrs. Wilson was "fair game", his summoning of the furies upon her apparently occurred after her name was already put into the public arena by two other unnamed "senior administration officials".
Rove is not considered to have committed a firing offence so long as he has merely behaved unethically. What Bush is not doing - not demanding that his staff sign affidavits swearing their innocence, or asking his vice-president point-blank what he knows - is glaringly obvious. Damaging national security must be secondary to political necessity.
"It's important to recognise," Wilson remarked to me, "that the person who decided to make a political point or that his political agenda was more important than a national security asset is still there in place. I'm appalled at the apparent nonchalance shown by the president."
Now, postwar, the intelligence wars, if anything, have got more intense. Blame shifting by the administration is the order of the day. The Republican senate intelligence committee report will point the finger at the CIA, but circumspectly not review how Bush used intelligence. The Democrats, in the senate minority, forced to act like a fringe group, held unofficial hearings this week with prominent former CIA agents: rock-ribbed Republicans who all voted for and even contributed money to Bush, but expressed their amazed anger at the assault being waged on the permanent national security apparatus by the Republican president whose father's name adorns the building where they worked. One of them compressed his disillusionment into the single most resonant word an intelligence agent can muster: "betrayal".
· Sidney Blumenthal is former assistant and senior adviser to president Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars. He has been a staff writer on the New Yorker, Washington Post and New Republic. He will be writing a regular column on US politics from Washington
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Gives Senate Panel Some Intelligence Data
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 1, 2003; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48817-2003Oct31.html
A number of documents on prewar Iraq intelligence requested by a Senate committee were turned over by the government yesterday, but the White House balked, saying it was discussing them with the panel.
Officials of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who this week gave the CIA, the National Security Council, and the departments of State and Defense a noon deadline yesterday to comply with requests for information and interviews that it made in July, said they were generally pleased with the response.
"The CIA has complied quite substantially," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), the panel's ranking Democrat. The others, he added "are taking a little longer, but we want them to understand we are extremely serious about this."
The committee this week sent the agencies an unusually stern letter demanding the information as it seeks to determine the quality of prewar intelligence on Iraq and to square it with the lack of weapons of mass destruction after months of searching. Rockefeller and his Democratic colleagues also want to investigate how the administration used or misused the information it was given in making the case for invading Iraq.
The White House has refused to turn over copies of the daily intelligence briefings President Bush receives from a top CIA official and internal communications at the NSC on Iraq that the committee wanted. Like other administrations, the White House is likely to assert they are protected by executive privilege when declining to respond further.
Rockefeller has said it is impossible to do a thorough inquiry without the White House material.
A Defense Department spokesman said "we are still working" on outstanding questions from the committee, including details about the activities of the Office of Special Plans.
The State Department scheduled six interviews the committee had been requesting and turned over all but two of the documents requested in July. "We have been, we think, very responsive to their requests," State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said. "We have completed or made arrangements now for all of the interviews or briefings." He said the remaining two documents would be handed over soon.
At the CIA, spokesman Mark Mansfield said, "we are working hard to respond to the committee's request. We will be providing a significant amount of material today and more will be forthcoming."
-------- homeland security
Cronkite: The new Inquisition
By Walter Cronkite
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%7E29003%7E1640999,00.html
President Bush's televised answer to the growing concerns of many - including some Republicans - about the powers granted to him in the USA Patriot Act was to ask for even stronger measures, particularly the expanded use of "nonjudicial subpoenas." That means a federal agency such as the FBI can write its own subpoenas to conduct a search - no judges needed.
Unfortunately, security and liberty form a zero-sum equation. The inevitable trade-off: To increase security is to decrease liberty and vice versa. In the past, such trade-offs have been temporary - for the duration of the crisis of the moment. But today, we cannot see an end to the War on Terrorism, and that forces us to decide how secure we have to be and how free we want to be.
By delivering the speech last week himself, Bush added presidential heft to the issue and took some of the heat off of his attorney general, who is seen by many as the heedless champion of security at any price.
In his 2 1/2 years in office, Attorney General John Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as the Torquemada of American law. Tomas de Torquemada was the 15th century Dominican friar who became the grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He was largely responsible for its methods, including torture and the burning of heretics - Muslims in particular.
Now, of course, I am not accusing the attorney general of pulling out anyone's fingernails or burning people at the stake (at least I don't know of any such cases). But one does get the sense these days that the old Spaniard's spirit is comfortably at home in Ashcroft's Department of Justice.
The Patriot Act is much in the news, as Ashcroft and his minions seek both to justify its excesses and strengthen them, thus intensifying its dangerous infringements on the Bill of Rights.
There was something almost medieval in the treatment of Muslim suspects in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Many were held incommunicado, without effective counsel and without ever being charged, not for days or weeks, but for months or longer, some under harsh conditions designed for the most dangerous criminals.
It was in the spirit of the Inquisition that the Justice Department announced recently that it would begin gathering data on judges who give sentences lighter than called for by legislative guidelines.
Nothing so clearly evokes Torquemada's spirit as Ashcroft's penchant for overruling U.S. attorneys who have sought lesser penalties in capital cases. The attorney general has done this at least 30 times since he took office, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel. In several cases, Ashcroft actually has overturned plea bargains negotiated by those government prosecutors.
The New York Times editorialized that the attorney general seems to want the death penalty used more often.
Ashcroft is not alone in this. His boss, while governor of Texas, seemed never to have met a death sentence he didn't like. The two of them represent a subdivision of the Republican Party known as the "social conservatives," who often have favored the use of government power to police moral issues they view as modern heresies, such as abortion, homosexuality and obscenity. They contrast with those Republicans who tend to resist such uses of federal power and can generally be counted on to defend individual rights.
What makes this administration's legal bloodthirstiness particularly alarming is the almost religious zeal that seems to drive it. So, what we are seeing now is a confluence of two streams of American thought. One of those streams represents those who believe security must have priority over civil rights. The other stream represents those who believe that civil rights must be preserved even as we prosecute to the hilt the war on terrorism.
Our liberty could drown in the resultant turbulence of these colliding currents.
Walter Cronkite has been a journalist for more than 60 years, including 19 as anchor of the CBS Evening News.
----
Car Bursts Through Bush's Security Cordon
November 1, 2003
New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/national/01CND-BUSH.html?hp
SOUTHAVEN, Miss., Nov. 1 - A driver sped a car through a security cordon Saturday morning toward where President Bush was boarding his limousine after attending a political rally here. Mr. Bush was not harmed.
The driver was apprehended by police officers and Secret Service agents after the car, which appeared to be a Toyota sedan, crashed into a building near where Mr. Bush was leaving the DeSoto County Civic Center.
Trent Duffy, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, said the driver "wasn't close at all" to the president.
Mr. Bush's car was on a ramp below ground level next to the civic center at the time of the incident. The ramp was adjacent to the parking lot through which the car drove before hitting the building.
The driver, who had been pursued by police officers on motorcycles as the car approached the building, was dragged out of the vehicle and placed in a police car, which then drove away.
A television producer with the pool of reporters at the scene said that the driver appeared to be a woman and that three children were in the car.
Mr. Bush's motorcade left for the airport in nearby Memphis, Tenn., several minutes later.
Mr. Bush had just finished speaking to a campaign rally for Haley Barbour, the Republican candidate for governor in Mississippi. About 8,000 people had been inside the civic center for the event, and many more were outside.
The civic center was ringed by police officers, as is customary at any place where Mr. Bush makes a public appearance.
It is not clear how the car got past police blockades around the site.
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Capitol Police Admit Failures
Gun Scare Prompts Vow to Improve Security and Alerts
By Carol D. Leonnig and Serge F. Kovaleski
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 1, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49150-2003Oct31.html
The chief of the U.S. Capitol Police acknowledged yesterday that a staff member bringing a toy gun into a congressional office building on Thursday exposed serious security and communication failures, and he pledged immediate changes to shore up protection.
After meeting most of the day with House and Senate leaders appalled that someone with a real gun could have easily bypassed a checkpoint and started shooting or taking hostages, Chief Terrance W. Gainer said he had recalled more than 200 supervisors of his police force to an all-weekend work session. They will analyze what went wrong in the scare that forced a brief recess of the House of Representatives.
"There were some command failures, no doubt," Gainer said in an interview. "We weren't nearly as sharp as we could have been, but we will be much better. We're correcting that."
Some changes were apparent yesterday at the entrance to the Cannon House Office Building, where the scare occurred. A fourth officer was on guard with the typical staff of three at the security checkpoint. One officer kept his eyes trained on the screen of an X-ray machine and a conveyor belt carrying people's bags and briefcases, and those entering were barred from passing through the magnetometer until their items were fully screened.
The episode raised questions about a police force that has been given extra money and equipment to protect the Capitol in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The year before the attacks, Congress spent $104 million on the Capitol Police. In the three years since, Congress has approved $777 million for the department, plus an additional $225 million for anthrax and security-related expenses. Yet the problem on Thursday took place on the front lines -- a security checkpoint at the door. It wasn't until the staff member with the toy gun came forward that the ordeal was over.
The heightened security and congressional handwringing focused on what happened after the legislative assistant brought a Halloween costume and a plastic .38-caliber revolver in her bag as she returned from lunch just before 1 p.m. to her job in the office of Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.).
A police officer who had been distracted by a man seeking directions noticed what appeared to be a real gun on the screen of the X-ray machine, but not until its owner had passed through security into the building. Her concern about a gunman in the building where more than 100 members of Congress work led to a 90-minute uproar, with the Cannon Building put on lockdown and armed SWAT team members conducting a floor-by-floor search.
Yesterday, several lawmakers said the problems continued after the lapse at the checkpoint. They said police did not strictly follow the basic security procedures instituted after Sept. 11. Although Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), who oversees House security, told police to immediately notify each House member's office by e-mail or page -- using a new security paging device -- many members said they were not alerted for at least 40 minutes to an hour. By then, they were finding out, via live television reports, that the "gunman" was a staffer with a plastic prop she hoped to use when she dressed as a double agent at a Halloween party.
"There is no sugarcoating this. Something failed on a human level to get that alert out," Ney said.
Gainer said the slip-up happened because many commanders were handling several tasks during the unfolding events and some equipment may have failed. "We should have gotten more information out quickly, and we will," he said.
Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.) said the delay in alerting offices fueled panic in some congressional offices that learned of the security breach mainly from television or staffers who were kept outside.
But Larson and others said the fact that it was a toy gun may have been an educational blessing that saves lives in the future.
Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.) said he understands that an officer at the Cannon security post notified headquarters about the incident at 12:47 p.m., but Simmons did not get the alert until 2:12 p.m.
"If in fact a real gunman had come into the building with the intent of taking hostages or shooting somebody, nobody would have known to lock their doors," Simmons said. "Therefore, every office could have been accessed."
Simmons also faulted the officers at the checkpoint, saying: "They are not there to give directions. They are there to provide security."
Chiefs of staff for each House office member met early yesterday morning to hash through the mistakes. They repeatedly questioned why Congress had just spent $7 million on security communication devices and protocols for the Capitol complex if equipment wasn't used correctly or didn't work.
Gainer said he held some commanders "by the nape of the neck" for the communication problem and for poor placement of officers at checkpoints. Yesterday he put one commander in charge of alerting Congress members to security threats. "Ultimately, though, I and the commanders are responsible for this," he said. "It's pretty easy to jump on the officer, but we have to lead."
Police made other mistakes. At first they put out a lookout for a man with a backpack, who they said had raced off. Later they said they were looking for a man and woman.
At the Cannon office of Rep. Richard H. Baker (R-La.), four staff members were recovering from having police with pistols drawn swarm their office, based on an erroneous tip that a gunman was hiding out in their third-floor suite. Administrative assistant Paul Sawyer remembered being frightened while he walked slowly out of a back office with his hands up as police shouted, "He's in here!" and "Get back!"
Sawyer said he still had confidence in the police. "Despite what happened yesterday, we feel really secure here," he said.
Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu and researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
-------- justice
INTELLIGENCE
Panel Waiting for Iraq Data
November 1, 2003
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/politics/01PANE.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 - As a deadline imposed by Republicans and Democrats passed, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday that the Bush administration had yet to provide all of the information the panel was seeking for its review of intelligence before the war about Iraq's illicit weapons program.
But the senator, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, said he and the committee chairman, Pat Roberts of Kansas, a Republican, would appeal directly next week to senior administration officials for further help before weighing whether to issue a subpoena or take some other action.
Mr. Rockefeller said the Defense Department and the White House in particular had yet to authorize the release of documents that the panel believes could shed light on how the C.I.A. reached its assessment that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and had reconstituted its nuclear program. Still, after months in which requests by the panel have gone unanswered, Mr. Rockefeller said in a telephone interview that he was "satisfied that we have caught the attention" of Bush administration officials by imposing the deadline, which passed at noon on Friday.
Mr. Roberts's office did not reply to requests for comment on Thursday, but Mr. Rockefeller said he and Mr. Roberts were "on the same page