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NUCLEAR
Atoll still harbors toxic dangers
Soldiers to sue over new Gulf War syndrome
India test-fires BrahMos cruise missile from warship
US softens hard line on Iran's nuclear issue
U.S. Wants U.N. Resolution to Clearly Warn Iran
Sharon personally heading Israeli efforts to stop Iran nuclear bomb: radio
U.S. may omit N-promise for N. Korea
As Bush Holds Back, Americans Seek N.Korea Dialogue
Livermore Lab Settles $9.7 Million Discrimination Suit
Lawmaker Blasts Bush on Nuclear Project
For White House, 2 Bills Offer Route to Political High Ground
How to Make the Deficit Look Smaller Than It Is
Chart of the Week: Federal Deficits
MILITARY
Violence Shadows Kandahar's Revival
Blair plans new laws to curb civil liberties
EU needs military arm to be taken seriously by US: Belgian FM
Bombers Kill 14 in Iraq; Missile Hits Civilian Plane
17 Killed in Attacks On Police in Iraq
Iraq Picks American as Ambassador to U.S.
Cargo Plane Crew Reported Hit in Iraq
2 Israelis, 2 Palestinians Shot to Death
U.N. Will Seek $300 Million for Reconstruction of Liberia
The Embeds
Democrats insist Republicans pull Bush ad
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Supreme Court Revisits Enemy Combatants
Anti-Terrorism Funds Buy Wide Array of Pet Projects
Disaster Radio Network Closer but Still on Hold
Bank Data For Saudi Embassy Subpoenaed
5 Pakistanis Freed From Guantánamo
ENERGY AND OTHER
NO CRISIS, NO BILL?
ACTIVISTS
Italians protest nuclear waste proposal
Positive Gorleben spin though police hurt more than 85 activists
Why did I march?
Protesters at US army school met with music: report
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
Protesters Storm Georgia Parliament
Famed Nun Keeps Promise to Priest
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Atoll still harbors toxic dangers
By Jan TenBruggencate
Honolulu Advertiser Science Writer
Sunday, November 23, 2003
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2003/Nov/23/ln/ln12a.html
The nerve gas incinerator complex on Johnston Atoll has been dismantled and buried, but pollution threats persist on the remote island, and it may be a long time before it reverts to being a full-time wildlife refuge.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it won't take full control of the atoll until the toxic threats are removed and the military makes a commitment to return to resolve any future toxicity issues that arise.
Johnston is a remote atoll 800 miles southwest of Honolulu, where the military during World War II dredged up coral to create a runway, harbor and base, transforming a former sand bar into a small, rectangular industrial complex.
Over the years, the island has been used for nuclear testing, chemical munitions storage, military herbicide storage and eventually for a prototype facility for the destruction of chemical munitions such as Sarin and VX nerve gas and the blistering agent called mustard.
The chemical weapons and the plant that destroyed them are gone, as are most of the uses for which the military might want the island. But more cleanup is needed. Johnston has an impressive list of toxic contaminants, including dioxin, PCBs and radioactive plutonium.
Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Hostetter, the Johnston base commander, said the Air Force, which has operational control of the island, has contractors busy tearing down barracks, storage buildings and the like. Some solid concrete bunkers that are unlikely to pose a future threat and would be expensive to destroy will remain, he said.
"Our main goal is minimizing dangers to wildlife and people in the future," he said. A building that might weaken and could fall on someone would not be left behind. The concrete bunkers do not appear to pose that kind of threat, he said.
Chemicals are the other threat. Dioxins got into the soil during the storage of Agent Orange when drums rusted, spilling the Vietnam-era herbicide into the island's coral soils. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers dioxin, a contaminant in the herbicide manufacturing process, one of the most powerful known cancer-causers.
The Coast Guard dumped into the Johnston lagoon old transformers full of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. The transformers were later recovered, but not before they had leaked chemicals into the lagoon.
Hostetter said there are about 16,000 tons of soil contaminated with dioxin and 7,000 tons of soil contaminated with PCBs. Both are in sediment in the lagoon, generally in the immediate area where they were spilled.
On land, the Air Force is using a process called thermal desorption to clean the soils. In this process, the soils are excavated and heated, and the chemicals are sucked off and destroyed by heat. In the lagoon, the Air Force and the EPA are monitoring the natural breakdown of the chemicals.
The Air Force hopes to be done with its cleanup and ready to leave Johnston by June, Hostetter said.
The plutonium contamination is another issue. On June 20, 1962, Starfish, a Thor missile with a nuclear warhead, was blown up directly over Johnston when it failed one minute after launch. Metal parts and debris fell back onto the island. A month later, on July 25, 1962, a launch dubbed Bluegill Prime was destroyed on the launch pad, also scattering radioactive material.
Some of the radioactive material was dumped in the deep ocean. Sensitive equipment was used to remove the most highly radioactive particles from the soil in the 25-acre contamination area. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency buried the rest, despite the objections of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which wanted the radioactive material removed from the island.
"The Defense Threat Reduction Agency put a coral cap on it, but we're afraid that could erode over time," said Don Palawski, manager of the Pacific Remote Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex, which includes Johnston as well as Palmyra, Kingman Reef, Howland, Baker, Jarvis, Rose Atoll and the islands from Nihoa to Pearl and Hermes Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
The island was established as a wildlife refuge in 1926, but wildlife uses were made secondary to military applications starting in 1934. The Fish and Wildlife Service has a staff of two on the island, overseeing the well-being of hundreds of thousands of nesting seabirds.
While the pollution issues could prevent the wildlife service from taking total control, there is precedent for the agency "carving out" areas with significant problems and accepting the rest of the atoll, said Barbara Maxfield, spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific Islands Office.
For now, though, no decisions have been made, she said.
Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.
-------- depleted uranium
Soldiers to sue over new Gulf War syndrome
Mark Townsend,
UK Observer
Sunday, November 23, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1091487,00.html
Dozens of soldiers who served in Iraq are to sue the Government, claiming they are suffering from a new form of Gulf War syndrome.
Multiple vaccinations given in the run-up to the conflict are being blamed for chronic pains, stomach problems, rashes, swelling, fever, depression and anxiety.
Lawyers and medical experts say the symptoms are identical to those which affected thousands of veterans after the 1991 Gulf conflict.
The Observer has learnt that 13 soldiers have launched legal actions against the Ministry of Defence over what is being called Gulf War II syndrome. A similar number of 'robust' cases are to be launched in weeks.
In addition, a former MoD employee has obtained the medical records of another 40 Iraq veterans also suffering similar symptoms. Each case could cost the Government £1 million in damages.
Mark McGhee of Manchester-based Linda Myers Solicitors, said servicemen were coming forward all the time. 'Previously healthy servicemen received inoculations and suffered serious reactions. Now their jobs, livelihoods and their families are being affected,' he said.
The allegations come ahead of the inquest tomorrow into the death of Major Ian Hill, former chairman of the National Gulf Veterans' and Families' Association. Hill suffered a severe reaction to vaccinations he was given and was sent home from the Gulf. However, Army doctors were unable to determine what was wrong with him.
The father-of-four subsequently suffered from a range of illnesses including Q fever, an infection that stops the brain producing cells quickly enough to replace those that die. The MoD disputed that his illness was a result of service and he was denied a pension until shortly before his death in March 2001 at the age of 54.
At the two-day inquest in Warrington, lawyers will argue his deployment to the Gulf and subsequent illnesses contributed to his early death. More than 550 veterans have died since the first Gulf war.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said 12 servicemen from the latest conflict had signed up to a health assessment programme while 7,000 former Gulf veterans are to be screened.
-------- india / pakistan
India test-fires BrahMos cruise missile from warship
BHUBANESHWAR, India (AFP)
Nov 23, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031123124531.7n28edno.html
India on Sunday test-fired for a fifth time the BrahMos cruise missile it has developed jointly with Russia, officials said.
The supersonic missile was launched from a warship and it successfully hit a target at sea, defence officials said in Bhubaneshwar off the Bay of Bengal where India conducts its tests.
The BrahMos, a 280-kilometre (173-mile) range missile which will arm Indian warships and submarines, has been tested five times since its development by Indian and Russian experts in 2001.
India, which put the BrahMos on display at its January 26 Republic Day military parade, says an unspecified number of countries are interested in buying the cruise missile, which carries a conventional warhead.
India has developed an array of ballistic missiles in its goal to achieve military self-reliance and eventually become a major player in the international arms bazaar.
-------- iran
US softens hard line on Iran's nuclear issue
2003-11-23
China Daily (Agencies)
http://www1.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-11/23/content_283950.htm
The United States has dropped its demand the U.N. atomic watchdog declare Iran in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, despite its belief Tehran wants to build an atom bomb, Western diplomats said on Saturday.
After two days of talks, the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-member Board of Governors on Friday adjourned until Wednesday to give diplomats a chance to revise a French, German and British draft resolution condemning Iran's 18-year concealment of sensitive nuclear research.
However, Western diplomats said informal talks continued on Saturday between Washington and the capitals of the European Union's "big three" to toughen up the trio's proposal, two drafts of which the Americans rejected as too weak.
"Talks are definitely ongoing, though much of the discussion is taking place in the capitals," a Western diplomat said.
Diplomats close to the talks said U.S. officials had foregone their demand for the resolution to contain an explicit reference to Iran's past "non-compliance" with its NPT obligations and that Tehran be reported to the U.N. Security Council, which could choose to impose economic sanctions.
"I think the U.S. will accept a resolution without an explicit reference to non-compliance," another diplomat said.
Diplomats told Reuters U.S. negotiators had abandoned early last week their demand that Iran be reported to the Council when it became apparent only four other board members -- Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- would support this.
In exchange, diplomats close to the talks said the United States, which is convinced Iran wants nuclear weapons, were now helping Britain, France and Germany revise the resolution to include a timetable to keep pressure on Iran to cooperate.
The French, British and Germans want to encourage Iran to continue with its stated policy of fully cooperating with the IAEA rather than punish it for past failures. Diplomats said Germany especially feared too harsh a resolution would backfire and cause Iran to stop cooperating with the United Nations.
BOMB PLANS HATCHED DURING IRAN-IRAQ WAR
In October, Iran gave the IAEA what is said was a full and accurate declaration of its nuclear program and said it had no more nuclear secrets to disclose. Tehran admits covering up the full extent of its atomic program but denies wanting bombs.
But a senior Western diplomat said there was no question Iran had an atomic weapons program that most likely began during the fierce Iran-Iraq war that lasted from 1980 to 1988. He added that there were suspicions the program still exists.
The United States harshly criticized the IAEA for saying in a recent report on Iran that it had "no evidence" suggesting Tehran had a secret weapons program.
U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA, Kenneth Brill, told the board on Friday the phrase "no evidence" was "highly unfortunate" in the light of revelations about Iran's cover-up and secret experiments with plutonium reprocessing and uranium enrichment. He said the IAEA should have used the words "no proof" instead.
Brill said the IAEA's wording had provoked "expressions of disbelief that the institution charged with... scrutinising nuclear proliferation risks was dismissing important facts."
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei reacted strongly, calling the U.S. statement "disingenuous."
----
U.S. Wants U.N. Resolution to Clearly Warn Iran
November 23, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - Washington wants France, Germany and Britain to agree to warn Iran it will be reported to the U.N. Security Council if any further violations of its nuclear obligations are uncovered, diplomats said Sunday.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency's35-member Board of Governors Friday adjourned talks until Wednesday, to give diplomats a chance to revise a resolution drafted by the three European states condemning Iran's 18-year concealment of atomic research which could be arms-related.
Informal talks were to continue Sunday between Washington and the Europeans to toughen up the proposed IAEA resolution, two drafts of which the Americans have rejected as too weak.
Washington accuses Iran of having a secret nuclear weapons program. But it has dropped its demand that the resolution find Iran in ``non-compliance'' with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and be reported to the Council for sanctions.
One Western diplomat said Sunday the United States was pushing for a ``trigger mechanism'' stating clearly that Tehran would ``be reported'' for any more NPT breaches uncovered by the IAEA -- which could only mean reporting to the Council.
The second draft of the resolution, seen by Reuters, does contain such a ``trigger mechanism,'' but Washington rejected it as too vague and is helping draft a third. But diplomats said the Germans were afraid a strong ``trigger'' would backfire and cause the Iranians to curtail cooperation with the IAEA.
Iran accused Washington of holding up the process of agreeing on an IAEA resolution. U.S. officials have said they would prefer no resolution to a weak one.
``The Americans, who failed to impose their views on the other members of the board, want to create tension and are now wasting time,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference in Tehran.
``Our European friends are convinced that Iran has not violated the international agreements,'' Asefi said.
The resolution will most likely also contain a timetable to keep up the pressure on Iran to cooperate with IAEA inspectors.
Iran denies wanting nuclear weapons but has acknowledged hiding experiments with uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing from the IAEA. Tehran says it has no more secrets.
U.S. CREDIBILITY UNDERMINED BY IRAQ
The struggle to arrive at an agreement on an IAEA resolution on Iran has ignited a war of words between the U.N. body and the United States.
Friday, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, Kenneth Brill, harshly criticized the IAEA for saying in a report on Iran it had ``no evidence'' that Tehran had a secret weapons program. It should have said instead it had ``no proof,'' he said.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei in response accused Brill of making ``disingenuous'' remarks.
Diplomats have said privately that the U.S. failure to get the IAEA board to report Iran to the Security Council reflects the damage done to the credibility of U.S. intelligence by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage rejected this view in an interview on the U.S. broadcaster PBS.
``On the contrary,'' he said. ``Now faced with the admissions of the Iranians themselves, I think that both our intelligence agencies and our political judgments are validated.''
-------- israel
Sharon personally heading Israeli efforts to stop Iran nuclear bomb: radio
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Nov 23, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031123194640.obam0kqy.html
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is personally supervising efforts to stop arch enemy Iran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal, Israeli army radio said on Sunday.
Israel's hardline premier has also instructed the foreign ministry to lobby other countries to act to stop Iran's nuclear activities, the radio said.
Mossad, Israels's overseas intelligence service, which is directly answerably to Sharon, has been put in charge of "all other aspects" of efforts to foil the Islamic republic's alleged covert nuclear programme, it added.
Israel and the United States accuse Tehran of trying to develop nuclear weapons, a charge Iran fiercely denies.
The plan of action was drawn up during a special meeting Sharon convened with Foreign Minister Sylvan Shalom, Defence Minister Shaoul Mofaz and Mossad agents, the radio said.
On November 17 Mossad chief Meir Dagan told MPs that Iran's nuclear programme posed the biggest threat to Israel's existence since the country was created creation in 1948.
Dagan said Israel had discovered Tehran was close to completing a uranium enrichment plant in Kachan, central Iran, which could eventually give it the capacity to build around a dozen nuclear bombs.
Iranian President Mohammed Khatami announced in February that a nuclear power plant would be built in Kachan after the discovery of a uranium mine in the region.
Defence Minister Mofaz later said concentrated efforts were needed "to delay, stop or prevent" Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme.
During a visit to Washington earlier this month, Mofaz also warned that Iran would reach a "point of no return" in its suspected nuclear programme within a year unless there were concerted efforts to stop it.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently released a report accusing Iran of conducting covert nuclear activities over two decades, including manufacturing plutonium, although it said there was no evidence as yet that it was trying to build a nuclear bomb.
There is no love lost between Israel and Iran. Iran does not officially recognise Israel's existence and top officials have advocated the destruction of the Jewish state.
Iran's former foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, now a senior advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was quoted as saying earlier this month that the mere existence of Israel was contrary to Tehran's national interests.
-------- korea
U.S. may omit N-promise for N. Korea
Yomiuri Shimbun
November 23, 2003
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20031122wo41.htm
The United States is considering omitting a clause promising not to use nuclear weapons in a U.S.-written security guarantee to be provided to North Korea in exchange for Pyongyang abandoning its nuclear weapons program, sources close to the U.S. government said Thursday.
In the 1994 Agreed Framework negotiated by the administration of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the United States specified it would not use nuclear weapons. North Korea is expected to show disapproval of the guarantee, saying it does not reach the scope of the 1994 agreement, according to the sources.
Washington's stance apparently indicates that the United States believes it necessary to maintain the option of using nuclear weapons as a deterrent against weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons, which North Korea may possess, even if Pyongyang makes clear its intention to scrap its nuclear weapons program.
The U.S. government will work out the wording of the written security guarantee on the basis of consultations between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and Japanese and South Korean officials involved in the six-nation talks on ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
A security assurance would be omitted from the written security guarantee that the United States would not use nuclear weapons unless the other party uses nuclear weapons first, the sources said.
The U.S. government incorporated into the 1994 Agreed Framework this assurance to provide Pyongyang with an official guarantee that the United States would not threaten to use or use nuclear weapons against North Korea, assuming North Korea freezes its nuclear weapons program and ultimately abandons the program.
Since the start of the 1994 agreement, however, there has been a concern that the clause could weaken the deterrent against North Korea's chemical and biological weapons and damage Japanese security.
The Japanese government conveyed its concern to the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush that if the assurance were to be incorporated into guarantee to North Korea in the six-party talks, it would become an obstacle for the United States to defend Japan in the context of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty.
In 1995, five nuclear powers--the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia--made a nonuse declaration to signatory members of nonnuclear powers to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
However, North Korea announced in January this year it was withdrawing from the NPT.
The security assurance may be irrelevant to these countries because the Bush administration formulated a national security strategy that included a policy of preemption after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Even if North Korea returns to the NPT, the U.S. government will not offer the assurance again to Pyongyang.
Under the Agreed Framework signed in October 1994 between the United States and North Korea, Pyongyang agreed to freeze and scrap its graphite-moderated reactors, which can produce plutonium, in return for two light water rectors. Until the completion of the first light-water reactor, the United States was supposed to supply North Korea with 500,000 tons of heavy oil every year.
The 1994 agreement also specified that North Korea remain would in the NPT and accept inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
--------
As Bush Holds Back, Americans Seek N.Korea Dialogue
November 23, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-dialogue.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Amid a continued Bush administration split on the way ahead, other Americans -- including a congressman, senior Senate aides and former U.S. officials -- are meeting North Koreans at home and abroad to try to facilitate negotiations on nuclear and other issues.
At least six times since last May, these individuals, in various combinations, have come together with North Korean officials in closed-door sessions that participants say have helped clarify positions and advance understanding on both sides of a hostile, suspicious divide.
President Bush has insisted on six-party talks to end the nuclear crisis and refused the kind of direct U.S.-North Korean negotiations Pyongyang demanded.
A first round of official six-party talks was held in Beijing in August and efforts are underway to arrange a second round, perhaps in December.
Meanwhile, the unofficial ``track two'' dialogue, while episodic, has provided a low key, informal way to skirt Bush's ban on substantive bilateral government interaction with the isolated Stalinist state.
The contacts included a recent conference at the University of Georgia; a trip to Pyongyang by key Senate aides last August; a trip to Pyongyang in May by Rep. Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania; a University of California at San Diego conference in June, and a New York University conference in September.
Discussions explored key issues, like the North's demand for a security guarantee in return for dismantling its nuclear programs, and U.S. human rights concerns.
Bush said recently he was willing to give Pyongyang security assurances but his aides remain deeply divided over what that should mean.
SENATE AIDES' TRIP
A U.S. spokesman, while acknowledging there may be slightly more North Koreans visiting the United States in 2003 than before, played down the meetings -- which the administration is usually briefed on and sometimes sends an observer.
The spokesman said they do not reflect a shift toward direct U.S.-North Korea dialogue.
In interviews with Reuters, U.S. participants stressed that their contacts are not part of any official ``negotiations.''
But they believe in the importance of engagement with the North, are deeply worried about the administration's antipathy to direct dialogue and have made a point of reporting their findings to Congress and administration officials.
There is grave concern that even the most proficient North Korean English-speakers -- who take their marching orders from dictator Kim Jong il -- fundamentally misinterpret U.S. positions, making prospects for agreement even harder.
Senior aides Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi were sent to Pyongyang in August by their respective bosses, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the panel's ranking Democrat.
Both senators ``are committed to a peaceful resolution of the nuclear crisis and have been deeply concerned about the possibility of war by miscalculation or misunderstanding or by accident,'' Luse said in an interview.
They ``feel there is a benefit to dialogue in addition to formal talks,'' he said.
Jannuzi said he believes the administration is sincere about a peaceful diplomatic solution with Pyongyang and ``we hope Senator Biden and Lugar's interest, and sending us to the North to visit, will contribute to that.''
Among others, the two aides met in Pyongyang with Kim Gye Gwan, foreign affairs vice minister, a key interlocutor with Washington. They may return to North Korea in January.
GEORGIA CONFERENCE
Luse believes there is ``genuine interest on the part of some in the North Korean government to engage in meaningful dialogue with the United States'' to peacefully end the crisis.
But Pyongyang must be tested on everything, he stressed.
The two aides also attended a conference hosted two weeks ago by the University of Georgia that included former U.S. ambassadors to South Korea Donald Gregg and James Laney, Weldon, U.S. academics and five North Koreans.
The State Department denied this but Weldon said it was significant the North Koreans received visas to attend the conference at the same time the White House prevented Weldon's own second trip to Pyongyang.
Selig Harrison of the Center for International Policy, a thinktank, said he came away from the conference persuaded the North's Aug 27 proposal for reciprocal steps to end the nuclear crisis is serious and should be explored.
Unofficial contacts have been used throughout diplomatic history with mixed results.
Professor Susan Shirk of the University of California at San Diego, who has organized a number of the dialogues with North Korea, said ``It's difficult to single out any particular evidence as to how (these track-two meetings) have made a difference in (U.S.) policy.''
``Track two is useful for clarifying the positions ... of the two sides to one another, especially at a time when there is such little (official) interaction (but) I don't think you should expect any dramatic short-term results,'' she said..
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Livermore Lab Settles $9.7 Million Discrimination Suit
Administrative Changes Being Mandated At Lab
November 21, 2003
Associated Press
http://www.nbc11.com/news/2655623/detail.html
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will pay female employees $9.7 million as part of an $18 million class-action gender discrimination lawsuit settlement, the largest such agreement in lab history.
In addition to the payout, Lawrence Livermore executives agreed Wednesday to end a controversial ranking system for most of the lab's administrators, clerical staff and technicians.
The pact is the largest ever class-action gender discrimination settlement for the University of California, which operates the lab for the federal government.
The settlement provides $9.7 million to 3,200 women who have worked at Livermore lab since 1996, plus a 1 percent raise for about 2,500 women who still work there. The lab will also pay $8.2 million in attorney's fees and give the seven representatives of the class a total of $80,000.
Lawrence Livermore officials said they have already implemented nearly all the changes as part of an overhaul of its pay, promotion and ranking system last year.
More significant than the money is a series of administrative changes that will be mandated at the lab, said the women's attorney. This includes eliminating a ranking system for administrative employees and some technicians, continuing an annual survey of women's pay and promotion, developing a written plan to encourage pay improvements and promotion, and training lab supervisors on gender discrimination.
When the suit was filed in 1998, the lab had only one female associate director in nearly 50 years. Now the lab has three women holding high-level management positions.
Plutonium chemist Mary Singleton and colleagues on the lab's Women's Association began prodding Livermore executives for the changes 15 years ago, after careful analysis of a gap in pay and promotions for the lab's men and women.
In 1988, many of the women hired under 1970s affirmative-action laws, realized they were working longer hours for less pay. They confronted then-lab director John Nucholls, determined to work inside the lab's closed bureaucracy. When little changed after a decade, they sued.
-------- nevada
Lawmaker Blasts Bush on Nuclear Project
November 23, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Democrats-Nuclear.html
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- President Bush broke his campaign promise to Nevadans and rushed ahead with plans to develop a national nuclear waste repository in the state, the speaker of the Nevada Assembly said Saturday in the weekly Democratic radio address.
The decision by the Bush administration to move forward on the Yucca Mountain project has serious consequences not only for Nevada, but for the 38 million Americans who live within a mile of the nation's highways and rail lines, Speaker Richard Perkins said.
``There are a host of questions about the safety of shipping nuclear waste thousands of miles, questions about the safety of the canisters, rail and truck routes and their vulnerability to terrorist attacks,'' said Perkins, who is also a deputy police chief in the city of Henderson.
``There are serious questions about burying nuclear waste ... when exposure to even small amounts will result in almost certain gruesome death.''
Bush signed legislation last year tapping Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the nation's sole nuclear waste repository. The plan is to transport 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste through 43 states to the underground repository beginning in 2010 .
The president and the Energy Department contend the waste can safely be transported and stored at Yucca Mountain.
Perkins said Bush reneged on his promise during the 2000 campaign that he would rely on ``sound science'' to make a decision.
``President Bush broke his promise to us here in Nevada with a speed and arrogance that is astounding,'' Perkins said. ``He short-circuited the research going on at Yucca Mountain. He ignored the concerns of independent scientists and rushed to judgment.''
Perkins called on Bush, who is making his first visit to Nevada next week as president, to ``rebuild his credibility'' by reconsidering his decision. ``You can't build trust based on breaking promises and misleading people,'' he said.
-------- us politics
For White House, 2 Bills Offer Route to Political High Ground
November 23, 2003
New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/politics/campaigns/23STRA.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - As President Bush flew over the North Atlantic on Friday, heading home from three days as the houseguest of Queen Elizabeth, he switched his attention from the glamour of royal Britain to the grit of American politics.
From Air Force One, with his politically critical Medicare bill in precarious straits on Capitol Hill, Mr. Bush placed calls to pressure wavering House Republicans. Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political aide, had already made calls from Buckingham Palace, House Republicans said.
So when the presidential helicopter landed at 6:20 p.m. on the White House South Lawn, it was no surprise that Mr. Bush strode over to the waiting television crews, quickly dispensed with pleasantries about his trip - ``Her Majesty the Queen was a great host'' - and made a pitch for the Medicare and energy bills, his top two legislative priorities, which were at that moment embroiled in frantic negotiations on Capitol Hill.
The normally early-to-bed president made calls to the Hill into the small hours of Saturday morning, White House officials said, and kept up the pressure on Congress to pass the Medicare bill in his weekly radio address. ``I urge all members of Congress to remember what is at stake,'' Mr. Bush said.
What was at stake for the White House was command of the high ground in the 2004 re-election campaign.
The weekend capped an intense, yearlong effort by Mr. Bush's aides to get the Medicare and energy bills passed before the heavy politicking began. (After the House passed the Medicare bill near dawn on Saturday, the Medicare legislation in the Senate moved toward a final vote, probably on Monday. On Friday, Senate opponents blocked the energy bill - ``a minority,'' Mr. Bush noted on the South Lawn - but Republicans said it still had a chance.)
The goal of the White House, administration officials and Republicans said, was to get the two bills off the table and to leave national security and the economy as the chief focus of the president's 2004 campaign. The bills would at the same time help Mr. Bush's appeal to two crucial constituencies, the elderly and the Republican big-business class. Republicans added that the overhaul of Medicare would allow Mr. Bush to make inroads with voters on an issue that Democrats had long considered their own.
``This is the equivalent of what welfare reform did for Clinton,'' said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster. ``Having a Republican president deliver on the largest expansion of Medicare in two generations is an enormous advantage going into the 2004 election. Imagine the ad that says, `Millions of seniors are getting help through the drug card.'''
Democrats countered that they would attack the president for a bill they said was stuffed with giveaways to drug and insurance companies and that in the end would cut benefits to the old people it was designed to help.
``It would be a dagger in the heart of Medicare as we know it,'' Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, said in typical comments on Friday. ``This bill is a backdoor attempt by the Republican Party to privatize Medicare.''
But Republicans close to the White House scoffed at those arguments, saying that the Democratic opposition to giving private insurers a big new role in the program would be too complex for the simple sound bites of a political campaign.
``I don't think that's easily understood by seniors,'' said one Republican close to the president. ``You either have prescription drugs or you don't.''
The White House began focusing on the two bills shortly after the November 2002 midterm elections. Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of the Goldman Sachs investment bank who became the president's chief economic adviser last December, was put in charge of the White House push on Medicare, while Vice President Dick Cheney, with his longtime ties to the nation's oil and gas industry, was in charge of the energy bill.
The Medicare team included Mr. Rove, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson and Thomas A. Scully, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Meetings were held at the White House from December to February every two weeks or so. They died down during the Iraq war from March into the late spring, but picked up in the summer and then increased this fall. Participants said the president presided over some 20 Medicare meetings over the course of the year.
``He was basically rolling the dice that he was going to get it done,'' said Mr. Scully. Participants said Mr. Bush started out intent on ``doing the right thing,'' but as the negotiations intensified late this year he emphasized his desire for a bill to run on in 2004.
People in the meetings said Mr. Bush always arrived precisely on time, demanded cogent updates from the staff, then crisply dispensed new orders before leaving - again, precisely on time. Mr. Bush, his advisers said, had a good knowledge of the substance of the bill, and was always well aware of the political twists and turns on Capitol Hill.
``He clearly understood all the angles,'' Mr. Scully said. ``He could definitely pick every issue in this bill and mix it up with the most intense policy wonk.''
Mr. Thompson, Mr. Scully and a team of White House legislative liaisons made frequent trips to Capitol Hill, trips that intensified over the last month. In recent weeks, Mr. Thompson spent close to 75 percent of his time pushing the Medicare bill, his spokesman said.
``He'd go up to the Hill in the morning, spend hours meeting with members, come back, have lunch, take care of the other business of running the department, then go back up and spend a couple of more hours on the Hill,'' said the spokesman, Bill Pierce.
But both Democrats and Republicans on the Hill said the White House made the real push on Medicare only in the final moments, and kept the president and big hitters like Mr. Rove out of the process until the very end. The heavy lifting, Congressional Republicans said, was left to the Republican leadership - Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader; House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert; and Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.
``The strategy on Medicare was a Congressional strategy,'' said one House Republican aide, who did not want to be identified because he was implicitly criticizing the president's team. ``It really wasn't a White House strategy. It was Hastert, Frist and DeLay who got this done.''
Republicans close to the president maintained that the White House's distance was deliberate in order to keep Mr. Bush inoculated from conservative Republicans agitated over the huge expense of what became a $395 billion bill. For this reason, Republicans said, Mr. Rove never wanted more than a White House statement of principle on the legislation, and left the shaping of the actual bill to Capitol Hill.
``All along Karl knew that any kind of enormous expansion of the entitlement programs was going to be an ideological-philosophical problem with the conservatives,'' said one Republican with close ties to the White House who did not want to be identified because it would hamper his relationship with a president who prefers that his advisers are not named in the newspapers. ``They kept guiding the process but they also had enough distance from it when the president needed it.''
Mr. Cheney, meanwhile, made trips to the Hill to push for the energy bill, and at one critical point ended an impasse on ethanol-based gasoline between Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California.
``Cheney got the two sides talking,'' said an official in the vice president's office.
Now, should the energy bill die after a bipartisan effort to defeat it, Mr. Bush's advisers say that he will simply blame the Democrats in 2004.
--------
ECONOMIC VIEW
How to Make the Deficit Look Smaller Than It Is
November 23, 2003
New York Times
By DANIEL GROSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/business/yourmoney/23view.html
THE news on the federal budget deficit for fiscal 2003 was encouraging, wasn't it? In July 2003, the Office of Management and Budget projected a record deficit of $455 billion. But when the fiscal year ended in October, the shortfall was only $374 billion, equivalent to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product.
"As a percentage of gross domestic product, the deficits are below the historical peaks that we've seen in the past," says J. T. Young, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget. In 1983, for example, the deficit was 6 percent of gross domestic product; in 1992, it was 4.7 percent.
Congratulating the administration for such an achievement, however, would be like raising the allowance of a high school student who brought home a D-minus in math instead of an F.
If we factor out the so-called Social Security surplus - payroll taxes collected by the government but not paid out in benefits - the deficit in fiscal 2003 was actually far larger: $531 billion, or 4.9 percent of gross domestic product. For the current fiscal year, the administration expects that this figure, also called the on-budget deficit, will be even higher: $639 billion, or a whopping 5.4 percent of gross domestic product.
Every year since 1983, workers have paid more in Social Security payroll taxes than Social Security has paid out to beneficiaries. The surplus was supposed to be used to pay down the national debt. "That way, when the baby boomers are retired, our other debt will be lower and we'll be in a better position to borrow funds to pay for benefits," said Richard Kogan, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning group in Washington.
To ensure the proper use of the Social Security surplus, Vice President Al Gore in 2000 proposed segregating the funds into a sort of lockbox. George W. Bush, then the Texas governor, also supported this concept, although his understanding of Social Security was revealed to be something less than complete. (In November 2000, during a campaign speech, he famously accused opponents of wanting "the federal government controlling the Social Security like it's some kind of federal program.")
In the past three years, President Bush and Congress have viewed the Social Security surplus more as a cookie jar than a lockbox. The three budgets that Congress proposed, and President Bush signed - for the fiscal years 2002, 2003 and 2004 - used $480 billion in excess Social Security payroll taxes to fund government programs. According to the budget office, administration policies call for an additional $849 billion of excess Social Security funds to support government operations over the next four years.
Using excess payroll taxes for unintended purposes masks the true size of the operating deficit. The budget office predicts that the net deficit will shrink from $475 billion in fiscal 2004 to $226 billion, or 1.7 percent of gross domestic product, in 2008. Take away the ever-larger Social Security surpluses used in each of those years, however, and the on-budget deficit will stand at $464 billion in 2008.
The reality will likely be far worse, especially if you factor in costs that the White House doesn't include in its projections - like the $87 billion recently appropriated for the war, or the extension of recently enacted tax cuts. In doing so, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the business-oriented Committee for Economic Development, and the anti-deficit Concord Coalition have concluded that next year's on-budget deficit will be $687 billion - not $639 billion, as the administration suggests. In 2008, the groups say, the on-budget deficit will be $692 billion and the net deficit will be $457 billion, or twice the Bush administration's projection.
THE figures show that the personal and corporate income taxes that are supposed to fund government operations no longer come within shouting distance of doing so. And the refusal of the administration or its Congressional allies to acknowledge this reality has left normally mild-mannered deficit hawks on the verge of apoplexy.
"The last time the situation reached this point, in the early 1990's, we had bipartisan agreement that we were reaching a fiscal crisis," said Maya MacGuineas, executive director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington.
The response then was an unpalatable, but ultimately successful, mix of spending restraints and tax increases. But in the past few years - with the sums involved far greater than they were in the early 1990's, and with the baby boomers nearing retirement - Washington has raised spending sharply and cut taxes even more sharply.
It's a fiscal Bizarro world.
Daniel Gross writes the Moneybox column for Slate.com.
--------
Chart of the Week: Federal Deficits
Sunday, November 23, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5595-2003Nov22.html
The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal debt will increase by $1.4 trillion over the next decade. But a study by the Committee for Economic Development, the Concord Coalition, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that, using slightly different political assumptions, that figure could grow to $5 trillion, with an annual deficit in 2013 of $611 billion. This chart shows the cumulative effect if President Bush's tax cuts are extended rather than allowed to expire; if middle-class taxpayers are excluded from the alternative minimum tax; if a drug benefit is added to Medicare; if higher cost estimates are used for the war on terror and the reconstruction of Iraq; and if discretionary domestic spending grows faster than inflation, as it almost always has.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Violence Shadows Kandahar's Revival
Afghan Extremists Force Out Aid Workers
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 23, 2003; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6896-2003Nov22?language=printer
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- The voter registration office was in an uproar. Several hundred turbaned nomads milled noisily in the yard, some complaining they had been falsely promised tents if they participated in the December constitutional assembly, others arguing over who should represent them there.
But the real drama was one of silence and absence. Despite nightly broadcasts urging citizens to run for the assembly, election officials said Tuesday that far fewer people than expected had registered as candidates from the rural districts and provinces surrounding this southern city of half a million. They were simply too afraid.
"People have been threatened by the Taliban and al Qaeda. They have put leaflets in mosques and sent letters saying they will burn down the house and cut off the nose of anyone who tries to participate in the constitution," said Omar Satib, an official at the election office. "We put announcements on the radio, but people are just not ready to come."
Despite its teeming bazaars and taxi-clogged streets, Kandahar is a city at the epicenter of a siege. In an arc of rugged, rural provinces stretching 400 miles along the border with Pakistan, Islamic extremists have staged recurrent, increasingly ruthless attacks on foreign and Afghan aid workers, from well-diggers to refugee counselors to land-mine clearers.
On Nov. 11, a car bomb exploded outside the main U.N. building here, injuring three people. Five days later, Bettina Goislard, a 29-year-old French woman working for the U.N. refugee agency, was slain by two gunmen on motorcycles while she was driving in Ghazni, another provincial capital to the north. She was the first foreign U.N. worker killed here since the defeat of Taliban rule in late 2001.
As a result of the escalating violence, both the United Nations and private foreign charities have drastically scaled back programs that provide more than half a million people in the rural, drought-parched southeast with everything from drinking water and crop fertilizer to tent schools and literacy training.
"If things keep going on like this, we will have to withdraw from high-risk areas and start giving our money back to the donors," said Abdul Raziq Samedi of Afghan Development Assistance, a private aid group that began reducing its work after an Afghan staffer was slain by gunmen in May. "But if we vacate these areas and turn our backs, [the attackers] will start coming after us in our own offices."
Kandahar is the regional headquarters for the United Nations and most aid agencies, but foreigners are now virtually nowhere to be seen. Aid workers spend their days in emergency meetings and their evenings huddled in guarded guest houses. Road travel has been suspended, including visits to villages and weekend highway trips to Kabul, the capital 310 miles north.
Yusuf Pashtoon, governor of Kandahar province, said the attacks on foreigners, the lack of public services and the cutbacks in aid had created a "vicious cycle" in which local Afghans were becoming disillusioned with the government and its foreign backers, and thus more open to the appeal of Islamic extremists, including the Taliban forces who had regrouped along the Pakistan border.
"Where people do not see governance, it creates apathy and grounds for insurgency," he said. "If we are to fight back against terrorism, we have to win our people back first, and now that has become more difficult, because it is not easy to provide the proper security for services." He predicted it would take three to six months before foreign charity groups could resume full operation.
Pashtoon said both Afghan and foreign forces should pursue the armed insurgents more aggressively, but he also noted that this can cause resentment among villagers whose support the government needs. After a U.S.-led operation last month to drive Taliban forces out of neighboring Zabol province, residents complained that Afghan troops had beaten and robbed them.
"We need both carrots and sticks, and neither will work without the other," Pashtoon said. "If there are 30 or 50 Taliban in an area, and we go in with a big force to clean it up, we disturb civil life. We have to be very careful so people don't see us as part of the problem and start listening to the Taliban propaganda."
Although Kandahar was once the religious headquarters of the Taliban movement and an important source of support for its harsh Islamic creed, people here said life had recently become more relaxed and businesses had begun booming with the influx of foreigners and the nearly finished repaving of the Kabul-Kandahar highway.
Maulvi Abdullah Fayyaz, who heads the regional council of Muslim clerics, said the Taliban had "cheated the Afghan people in the name of Islam, but now people have realized that and rejected them." Fayyaz's council has issued a series of religious edicts declaring that there is no need for religious violence or holy war in Afghanistan, and he said 90 percent of local Afghans supported this idea.
But Fayyaz himself was nearly the victim of a terrorist attack in July, when a bomb exploded inside his mosque at prayer time. He was unhurt, but 28 worshipers were injured.
"The Taliban can still make trouble, but they can never come back to power, and they couldn't even make trouble if they were not getting so much help in Pakistan," Fayyaz said. Revived Taliban forces were widely reported to have received money and weapons from Islamic groups and official sympathizers in Pakistan, which supported the rise of the Taliban in the early 1990s but cut ties with the movement in 2001.
On the streets of Kandahar, thick with shoppers poring over caged birds, mountains of raisins and displays of pastel Muslim robes, commerce is still going strong and the air is full of once-banned kites and music. At the weekly city council meeting Monday, the major complaints were about police restricting new car licenses and people bribing their way onto flights to Mecca for the annual Muslim pilgrimage.
But the recent attacks on foreigners, in addition to extremist threats against Afghans who work with them or seek to participate in politics, have cast a new shadow over this fast reviving city. A carpet dealer, who opened his shop last year beside a new guest house that caters to international agencies, wondered forlornly where all the foreigners had gone and said he had not sold a single rug all week.
"Life is good now. No one tells us to grow long beards, and our voices are listened to," said Jabbar, 55, who sells embroidered skullcaps in a market stall. "As long as the foreigners are here, no one is worried that the Taliban will come back. But if the foreigners start to leave, things might change again."
Some Kandahari residents complained that the ability of Afghan authorities to provide regional security had been hampered by internal weaknesses and divisions. They said disappointment with the government, in addition to intimidation by extremists, had dampened public enthusiasm for the constitutional assembly, a crucial step toward holding national elections next year.
In a national public opinion survey released this past week by a group of nonprofit organizations, 80 percent of Kandahari residents said they felt safe in the streets and 90 percent said they planned to vote. But officials of the groups who conducted the survey last summer said such positive attitudes were rapidly eroding in areas where attacks had occurred and foreign aid groups were pulling back.
"We found a lot of optimism in pockets of peace like Kandahar, but now that hope is being sabotaged by insecurity," said James White, an official with the aid group Mercy Corps, whose Kandahar office was heavily damaged by the car bomb.
White and other aid agency officials said they were concerned that U.S. combat forces had not acted more aggressively to fill the gaps left by Afghan security forces, who were poorly trained and few in number. Some border districts, prime targets for Taliban infiltration, have only a handful of police.
Afghan observers in Kandahar expressed outrage over the Nov. 11 car bombing and deep embarrassment that it could have happened in their city. They said Afghans, not foreigners, needed to take action to prevent further terrorist attacks and salvage their waning credibility with the public.
"That bomb was shameful, and it was aimed at showing how weak our government is," said Qader Noorzai, Kandahar representative of the national independent human rights commission. "Foreigners can build schools and train the police, but they cannot help us keep our trust with the people, and we are losing that fast."
-------- britain
Blair plans new laws to curb civil liberties
UK wants similar powers to controversial US Patriot Act
By Westminster Editor James Cusick
23 November 2003
UK Sunday Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/38267
SWEEPING new emergency legal powers to deal with the aftermath of a large terrorist attack in Britain are being considered by the government.
The measures could potentially outlaw participation in a protest march, such as last week's demonstrations during President Bush's state visit, making it, in effect, a criminal offence to criticise government policy.
In an attempt to give the UK government similar powers to those rushed through in the US after the 9/11 attack on New York in 2001, it is understood that a beefed-up version of current civil contingencies law is being considered. It will allow the government to bypass or suspend key parts of the UK's human rights laws without the authority of parliament.
In the US, the Patriot Act has been widely condemned by civil rights groups throughout the US. Many lawyers have blamed the Patriot Act as an excuse for eroding civil rights that dated back to the founding principles of the US constitution.
That the UK government is considering seeking similar power in a crisis situation indicates the heightened level of concern following the terrorist bombings in Istanbul.
The new powers would only come into force if a state of emergency was proclaimed with the authority of the sovereign. The government, if the new measures were introduced, would be able to prohibit any assembly or activity it believed threatened national security. However, government legal sources have urged that any new laws in such a sensitive area would not be forced through without widespread consultation.
Aware of the current level of scare-mongering following the Istanbul bombing and the threats made by al-Qaeda-linked groups that further suicide attacks were being planned on targets both in the UK and abroad, a source close to the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, last night denied his department were seeking a massive and immediate injection of cash from the Treasury. This would be needed to foot the bill if Britain's streets were to be flooded with armed police in an almost constant level of red alert.
Despite Blunkett saying he was "sick and tired" of people pretending there was not a threat from terrorists and insisting only "very, very good intelligence would save us", the Home Office seems to have no plan to boost security spending this or next year.
If "Fortress Britain" were to be achieved, with countrywide security checks, increased police surveillance and widespread detention of any suspect group or individual, the Home Office's annual budget would rocket.
The Home Office source said: "We have absolutely no plans, advanced or otherwise, for seeking a level of increased spending. And we haven't even begun to think about next year."
-------- europe
EU needs military arm to be taken seriously by US: Belgian FM
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Nov 23, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031123122842.uouxr08p.html
The European Union must have an independent military arm if it wants to be taken seriously by the United States as well as to combat terrorism, Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel said Sunday.
The US government has reacted suspiciously to plans by four EU countries that opposed the war in Iraq -- Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg -- to set up a military planning headquarters for the bloc.
Washington fears the drive to bolster the EU's military presence could rival NATO, the bedrock of the transatlantic defence alliance.
But Michel, speaking during a political talk-show on RTBF television, said there were broader issues at stake.
"As long as the European Union lacks an autonomous military capacity to be a major global actor alongside the United States, and to bring about... a real and permanently influential political dialogue with the United States, we will not be able to properly respond to the big questions of this challenge, notably terrorism," he said.
Following talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell in Brussels on Tuesday, Michel said Belgium and the United States had buried the hatchet after months of diplomatic tensions caused by the Iraq war.
The Belgian foreign minister reiterated on RTBF the necessity of "remodelling" transatlantic relations, declaring he was "a very strong supporter of a strategic partnership with the United States".
-------- iraq
Bombers Kill 14 in Iraq; Missile Hits Civilian Plane
November 23, 2003
By IAN FISHER and DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/international/middleeast/23IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
KHAN BANI SAAD, Iraq, Nov. 22 - A missile hit a civilian airplane in Baghdad on Saturday, American military officials said, as suicide attackers exploded huge bombs at two police stations, one of them in this town north of Baghdad, killing at least 14 people, including two young girls, and wounding at least 50.
With the continuing chaos and violence in Iraq, which American soldiers have been unable to snuff out, a top Iraqi politician, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, was attacked by a mortar shell on Friday night at a mosque in Baghdad. But the shell failed to explode and Mr. Hakim, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and brother of the slain pro-American Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, was not hurt.
The airplane, operated by the courier company DHL, was hit by one or two surface-to-air missiles just after taking off from the main airport in Baghdad, the military said. The plane, an Airbus A300 jet, was apparently hit in a wing, an engine caught fire, and it was forced into an emergency landing at the heavily guarded airport that is a major base for United States soldiers in Iraq. None of the three crew members were hurt.
Military officials said there had been at least 12 other attempted attacks on the few civilian flights that operate in Iraq, and this first successful hit of a civilian aircraft might further delay opening the airport to civilian traffic and thus postpone one major marker for stability in Iraq.
Attackers have been increasingly successful in hitting aircraft in Iraq: 39 American soldiers have been killed in four helicopter crashes since Nov. 2, in which enemy fire either brought down the crafts or probably caused them to fall.
Forces hostile to the occupation here apparently intended to show their increasing sophistication and firepower by exploding two huge bombs - reportedly identical devices detonated almost simultaneously - at police stations about 20 miles apart north of Baghdad.
Six police officers and three civilians were killed in this small town about 20 miles north of Baghdad, and in Baquba, a restive city another 20 miles to the north, four policemen were killed along with a girl walking with her father. There were unconfirmed reports of several more dead.
The Iraqi police, trained and paid by the Americans, have been a frequent target, and on Saturday several policemen said they needed more support - in money and equipment - to prevent further attacks and take over, as the Bush administration is planning, more day-to-day security operations in Iraq.
"The American government and the Governing Council - how have they supported us to manage this enormous task of keeping stability?" said Maj. Raed Ali Ismael, head of intelligence for the police department in Baquba. "We don't have proper training. We don't have any support or modern equipment."
Another officer in Baquba, Maj. Hussein Israel Hamed, added, "Our enemy's technology is better than ours."
At the two bomb sites, many people called, in some anger and frustration, for the Americans to curb the violence against innocent Iraqis. "We have to be grateful to the Americans because they liberated us," said Abbas Fadil, 30, as he stood next to a pool of blood left by the small body of Tabarak Rahman, 6, killed at her family's store across the street from the police station here in Khan Bani Saad. "But we need security."
The bomb here went off around 7:30 a.m., as blue-uniformed Iraqi police officers began their shift. Witnesses and the American military said a white Chevrolet Caprice tried to ram into the station, ringed for security with large cloth containers of dirt. "We felt a very warm storm wind, and glass started breaking," said Ibrahim Khemis, 32, a police officer who was washing up inside the building before his shift.
The explosion blasted a deep crater into the asphalt outside the building and ripped away the dirt in the security containers. The Caprice flipped off the ground into the station's yard as glass and concrete spattered around the street.
The bomb in Baquba exploded a few minutes later, with such force that it churned up a 20-foot-by-10-foot crater in the dirt. The police said a Toyota pickup truck loaded with explosives was stopped just short of the gate after an Iraqi police captain raised his gun and threatened to shoot. The captain was killed in the blast, his colleagues said.
"I had just opened up the car door," said one officer, Eisa Abid Hussein, 37, who had been about to step into a taxi, "and I heard a huge explosion. Then it was like someone turned out the lights."
"Why?" he asked as he lay in the hospital, his checked shirt bloody and a hunk of shrapnel in his cheek. "Why did they hurt policemen?"
The police are often considered collaborators with American forces here, something that Mr. Hussein and other policemen say is untrue. At any rate, he said the bombing would not make him quit the force.
"Of course I will go back," he said. "Where else will I go? How can I live without a job?"
The Iraqi police and the American military said the bombs appeared to be identical - half a dozen or so artillery rounds wired into a single bomb. Military officials say many of the attacks have been carried out with explosives looted from ammunition dumps from Saddam Hussein's army, which the American military does not have enough soldiers to guard completely.
With the strike against the DHL plane on Saturday, the guerrilla war here seemed to pass over another threshold. Though Baghdad's international airport has been open for months, civilian traffic there has been minimal, in large part because of fears that planes will be shot down. To date, the civilian traffic has been limited to a handful of courier services and passenger flights.
Military officers refused to say Saturday what altitude the DHL plane was flying at when the missile hit it. The official said the weapon used was believed to be an SA-7, a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile with a range of about 15,000 feet. An American official said Saturday that "thousands" of Iraqi shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles were unaccounted for in the country.
The sense of chaos and random violence in Iraq was underscored this afternoon here in Khan Bani Saad when, hours after the bombing, two men ran past the police station here with two young children in their arms: a limp girl whose face was bloody and a slightly older boy whose legs were mangled.
The children, Wafa Hillal Khemis, 3, and her brother, Hussam, 7, had been walking with their mother, Jaida, 40, near a lake here when an explosion went off next to them. Residents said the American military had bombed an Iraqi military installation nearby, and they believed that the three had stumbled on an unexploded bomb. The mother died, and her two children were gravely hurt.
"I really don't know what to say," said Wissam Duayr, 21, a farmer who had been tending his grapes and dates when the explosion went off. "We have no security. It's a mess."
Ian Fisher reported for this article from Khan Bani Saad and Dexter Filkins from Baghdad.
--------
17 Killed in Attacks On Police in Iraq
Private Cargo Plane Is Hit by Missile
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 23, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5467-2003Nov22.html
BAQUBAH, Iraq, Nov. 22 -- A pair of suicide car bombers attacked police stations in two towns north of Baghdad on Saturday, killing 11 policemen and five civilians in an escalating campaign against Iraqis cooperating with the U.S.-led occupation.
Insurgents also struck yet another blow at Iraq's stumbling moves toward normality by hitting a DHL cargo plane with a surface-to-air missile as it took off from Baghdad's international airport, military officials said. The plane's left wing gave off smoke as the craft returned to the runway safely. There were no injuries. After the incident, Royal Jordanian Airlines, the only company offering commercial service to Baghdad, canceled its flights from Amman.
The scenes of the nearly simultaneous attacks in Baqubah and Bani Sad were horrifically similar. In Baqubah, a bomb packed into a Land Rover blasted a crater 20 feet wide and 12 feet deep in front of the station. Blood from victims stained the entranceway, shoes marked spots where their owners were whipped out of them by the explosion and a dozen cars parked out front were blown into twisted hulks.
In Bani Sad, an explosives-laden Chevrolet Caprice sedan blasted through two trucks and some small stores across the street and sprayed the street with trails of blood, metal shards and broken glass.
"Anyone working with the Americans is under threat. The enemies send letters, they insult you in the street. They make bombs," said Naif Magethi Zaidy, the mayor of Bani Sad and also a physics teacher. Windows in his office, which is across from the police station, were blown in, and furniture was tossed about as if it had been caught in a tornado.
In the northern city of Mosul, assailants shot and killed an Iraqi police colonel who was in charge of a force protecting oil installations, the Associated Press reported. Col. Abdul-Salam Qanbar was heading to a mosque with his 8-year-old son when he was gunned down. His son was not physically injured, Police Lt. Col. Mosaed Nayef said.
Attacks on Iraqis in government, police forces, paramilitary units and pro-American political parties have grown in number and ferocity in recent weeks. On Thursday in the northern city of Kirkuk, 95 miles southwest of Mosul, a suicide bomber in a pickup truck detonated at the local offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, killing five bystanders. In October, eight police were killed in bomb attacks outside Baghdad police stations.
Earlier this month a car bomber drove a truck laden with explosives onto the grounds of the headquarters of the Italian carabinieri, or military police, in the southern city of Nasiriyah, killing 29 people.
In the past month, assassins have targeted government workers and a journalist in Mosul. In Baghdad on Friday, insurgents fired rockets at two hotels housing foreigners and at the Oil Ministry building. No one was killed in the assaults.
U.S. officials regard the Iraqi police as a key to providing stability and have recruited officers rapidly and put them through training to take the burden of fighting crime off U.S. troops. Few of the officers, however, dare to patrol streets on their own. Members of another security unit, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, receive as little as a week of training and are generally employed to guard buildings and utilities.
The incidents have coincided with a new U.S. bombing campaign in central and northern Iraq that is designed to display U.S. military resolve, particularly in the Sunni Triangle, a region of bedrock support for deposed president Saddam Hussein. U.S. commanders, however, regard insurgent attacks as "militarily insignificant," despite U.S. fatalities that have steadily climbed since President Bush declared an end to major combat last spring.
But the landscape in Baqubah indicates the menace felt on the ground by the Americans -- and the mismatch in protection for occupation forces compared with that for the Iraqis who work with them. Across the street from the police station, giant concrete walls, sandbags and barbed wire ring U.S. military civil affairs offices, the bureaucracy meant to work with Iraqi institutions. The police station itself had no such fortress-like defenses, and only coils of barbed wire separated the building from the main road.
In Baqubah, the car bomber drove to the front of the station about 7:45 a.m. No one was manning a checkpoint at one end of the lot in front of the building. Police Capt. Hassan Hadi, standing at the front metal grill gate, reportedly waved for the Land Rover to stop. It exploded, killing five policemen and three passengers in a bus passing by. The driver of the Land Rover wore a baby blue Iraqi police shirt, witnesses said.
"I was getting out of my VW and saw the car arrive," said Rahim Hamid, a police officer who had parked his car to the side of the station. "We are a weak point here. We are patrolling the outside of the city, and the bombers get in anyway."
Hathem Ali, recovering from superficial cuts in the hospital, was in the station when he spied the Land Rover rolling slowly toward the entrance. "Everything went blank," he said. "Pieces of ceiling and lamps fell on me. I shot my pistol off to get someone to come rescue me."
In Bani Sad, about 18 miles southwest of Baqubah, grocery store owner Nasser Abdul Rahman said he saw a man whose head was wrapped in a white scarf drive the Caprice slowly toward the station. "The trunk blew up and the front part kept going," he said. A young girl helping her father open a cigarette store next door was killed, Rahman said at the hospital, where bandages covered his own badly gashed legs. "I don't know what this little girl did to deserve this," he said in a low voice.
Rocket-propelled grenades and explosives filled the Caprice, said Uday Hanoon Zijara, a young father of twins who was manning a checkpoint on the road in front of the station in Bani Sad. A colleague shot at the car when the driver refused to stop. He was hit by the car, and then the blast obliterated him. Usually, Zijara said, the entire force of 250 policemen is lined up for roll call at 7:30 a.m., but because Saturday was payday, muster was delayed for a half-hour. "We were lucky," he said. "Many more might have died." He said that an Oldsmobile sedan accompanied the Caprice and that its driver gave a thumbs-up sign to the bomber before speeding off. In all, six policemen and two civilians were killed.
Police from Baqubah and Bani Sad expressed a mixture of defiance and vulnerability in the wake of the car bombings. "We will insist on staying. The people who did this just want to be free to steal and kill," said Ahmed Sadoon Ahmed, an officer in Bani Sad. "I lost a few feathers," said Haither Mahar, a Baqubah policeman nursing shrapnel wounds at the hospital. "God willing, I will be back at work. I'm okay. We have to defend our country."
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Iraq Picks American as Ambassador to U.S.
November 23, 2003
By SUSAN SACHS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/international/middleeast/23AMBA.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 22 - An Iraqi-American activist whose foundation has spent much of the last decade devising visions of democratic rule for Iraq and lobbying for a war crimes trial of Saddam Hussein, will become the country's diplomatic representative in Washington, Iraqi political leaders said Saturday.
Her appointment will be announced in the next few days by the interim foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, they said.
The activist, Rend Rahim Francke, 54, has directed the Iraq Foundation, which she helped create in 1991, and is a familiar face in Washington from her years lobbying policy makers to provide more muscular support for opponents of Mr. Hussein.
Her new job, she said in an interview here, as a representative of the Iraqi Governing Council, will be a kind of informal ambassadorship.
She said she would represent the emerging Iraqi authority and speak "for the nascent Iraqi government."
"It is awkward," she added, "because technically Iraq is still a country under occupation."
Her appointment reflects the accelerating political developments in Iraq in the past week after the Bush administration said it would turn over control of the nation to a provisional government by June.
"Iraqi officials told us that they intend to get in motion the establishment of sovereign institutions," said Dan Senor, an aide to L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator of Iraq and head of the occupation authority. "Diplomatic relations and re-opening the Iraqi Embassy in Washington were on the Iraqi Foreign Ministry agenda."
The Iraqi Governing Council appointed by Mr. Bremer - whose number was reduced to 24 by the assassination of another prominent Iraqi woman, Akila al-Hashimi - has not had a single personality to represent it, either at home or abroad, because its presidency rotates every month among an inner circle of nine people.
"They wanted to personify this increasing sovereignty, independence and legitimacy, and to make it palpable by the presence of an individual," Ms. Francke said.
While she was born in Baghdad and spent some of her childhood there, Ms. Francke has not lived in Iraq full time since the 1970's. But, she said, she believes that Iraqis who lived under Mr. Hussein's dictatorial rule for those years can create a democratic state.
"It's true we have a generation of people who knew nothing but this terror and this silence," she said. "But I think the human spirit is something that can be resuscitated. It's always there."
The Iraq Foundation represented Ms. Francke's first plunge into political activism after a life in business and finance.
She was inspired, she said, by the immense anger she felt after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when the American-led coalition decided against pursuing and trying to topple Mr. Hussein. "I can't tell you my anger - anger at the U.S., anger at the Arab world - and frustration," she said. "To have Iraq destroyed and the regime preserved was the ultimate tragedy."
Her new role as the voice of an occupied country in the halls of power of the occupier is an odd one, she acknowledges. "It's important to stress that Iraq is a state and has been since 1921," she said. "It's an Iraqi state that temporarily has an abridged sovereignty."
She became a United States citizen in 1987 but held on to her Iraqi passport, which has long since expired. Is she still an Iraqi citizen? She said that in her mind the answer was yes but that she also expected that the Governing Council would adopt resolutions affirming citizenship for the many cases like hers.
Ms. Francke, whose father is a Shiite Muslim and whose mother is a Sunni, went to boarding school in England, studied at Cambridge and at the Sorbonne. She worked as a banker and a currency trader in Lebanon and Bahrain, as well as London, and said she knew she could not survive in her homeland.
The rest of her family followed her, moving to England in 1978. The Iran-Iraq war removed any remaining hesitation about leaving, because the family included young men of military age who faced being drafted into the army or losing their passports.
She and her family emigrated to the United States in 1981.
Each time she had to visit an Iraq Embassy to renew her passport or do other business, she said she felt again the old government's brutality. Once, in Beirut, an embassy official called her a traitor and the "scum of society," she said.
She said she considered moving back to Iraq during a visit with her family in the mid-1970's but realized it would be fatal. "I told my dad that if I stayed," she said, "I'll be in jail and you will be too, because I am very intolerant of authority and I'm very outspoken."
--------
Cargo Plane Crew Reported Hit in Iraq
November 23, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Plane.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The crew of a DHL cargo plane that made an emergency landing at Baghdad's airport reported being hit by a weapon, and ground personnel saw two missiles launched before the plane's wing burst into flames, the U.S. military said Sunday.
Investigations indicate the plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director in Iraq -- the first official confirmation that missiles were involved in Saturday's incident.
On Saturday, a military official said on condition of anonymity that a SAM-7 surface-to-air missile struck the plane.
It was the first time a civilian aircraft flying in and out of Baghdad International Airport has been hit by the shoulder-fired missiles that insurgents have used to down military helicopters elsewhere in Iraq.
The airplane's wing caught fire shortly after takeoff from Baghdad International Airport, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing. All three crew members were unhurt.
DHL, which has been making several flights a day out of Baghdad, suspended its flights after the emergency landing. Royal Jordanian, the only commercial passenger carrier flying into Baghdad, also suspended its flights.
Dan Senor, a spokesman for the U.S.-led civilian administration in Iraq, said Sunday that the suspensions were requested by the administration.
-------- israel / palestine
2 Israelis, 2 Palestinians Shot to Death
November 23, 2003
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/international/middleeast/23MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 22 - Gunmen on Saturday night shot and killed two Israeli security guards near Jerusalem as they were keeping watch near the West Bank barrier that Israel is building, Israeli security officials said.
In other violence on Saturday, Israeli soldiers shot dead two Palestinians, one an 11-year-old boy, in separate confrontations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Palestinians and the Israeli military said.
The two security guards were gunned down near Abu Dis, a suburb on the eastern edge of Jerusalem, where part of the barrier is under construction, said the security officials and Israeli news reports. The guards, who were traveling in a vehicle when they were shot, were employed by a private security firm, Israel radio reported. The gunmen escaped, and there was no immediate claim of responsibility.
In the northern West Bank town of Jenin, Palestinian youths threw stones and firebombs at patrolling soldiers, a military official said. At least one Palestinian in the crowd opened fire, and the Israeli troops returned fire, the official said. Palestinians said Ibrahim Jalamna, 11, was killed, Israel radio reported.
In Gaza, a Palestinian man approached the northern border fence, an area where Palestinians are prohibited, during the night, the military said. Soldiers shot and killed the man, and during a search after daybreak, an automatic rifle was found next to his body, the military said.
-------- un
U.N. Will Seek $300 Million for Reconstruction of Liberia
November 23, 2003
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/international/africa/23NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 21 - The United Nations, despite the drain on donors by Afghanistan and Iraq, hopes to raise at least $300 million in a conference early next year to help with the reconstruction of Liberia after years of civil conflict, officials here said this week.
The donors conference, which is still being planned, is expected to take place in late January or early February. It will be a test of America's commitment to Liberia, analysts and officials said.
"In the eyes of many Africans, particularly in West Africa, it's a test of whether the administration is really serious about Liberia," said Gayle Smith, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, who was senior director for African affairs on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration.
Liberia is trying to rebuild itself after a decade of fighting, which ended in August when President Charles G. Taylor stepped down and two rebel factions signed a peace agreement with the government.
With its founding as a place to settle freed American slaves in the early 19th century, Liberia has historical links to the United States. At the height of the fighting last summer, the Bush administration ordered American warships to anchor off the coast to press Mr. Taylor to step down, and sent a small contingent ashore.
The conflict has left the country in ruins and reduced its three million citizens to among the most impoverished in the world. A United Nations peacekeeping force of 15,000 is scheduled to be at full strength in Liberia by March, making Liberia the organization's largest peacekeeping operation, officials said.
Officials here say they are seeking money to cover only short-term development needs through elections in October 2005. While $300 million is the working estimate, several United Nations agencies will survey of Liberia's needs in December and issue a final figure. Auke Lootsma, an adviser on Liberia at the United Nations Development Program, said in an interview that the survey could push the figure higher.
American officials said the United States had agreed to be a sponsor of the conference, which will probably take place in New York. They say the American commitment is not in doubt and point to the Congressional spending bill for Afghanistan and Iraq signed into law earlier this month, which included $445 million for Liberia: $245 million for the peacekeeping force and $200 million for "peace and humanitarian intervention operations," a State Department spokesman said.
State Department officials said it was too early to say whether the United States would give more than that $200 million in reconstruction aid at the conference. If not, some analysts say, the conference may fall well short of expectations because other donor countries with ties to Africa, like Britain and France, are already stretched by their own aid packages for the region.
"Apart from us and the U.N. secretariat, there's no one else on God's earth who cares about this place" except in terms of how its troubles affect other nations in the region, said Chester A. Crocker, professor of strategic studies at Georgetown University and the assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Ronald Reagan.
Ms. Smith says she is waiting to see not only what the United States does at the conference but what sort of involvement it intends afterward. While $200 million is "a very positive step," she said, the United States will have to maintain its role "to ensure that Liberia doesn't go back over the edge."
The money sought at the conference will be separate from a $177 million appeal for Liberia made this week by Secretary General Kofi Annan as part of the United Nations annual global fund-raising drive, which this year is seeking $3 billion to help 45 million people in 21 of the world's most serious crisis zones.
-------- propaganda wars
The Embeds
November 23, 2003
By H.D.S. GREENWAY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/books/review/23GREENWT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Why do journalists seek out wars? Is it for the glamour, the adventure, the adrenaline? Is it the desire to be in the front-row seat of history? Is it public duty, professional advancement? All of the above, according to four books on war reporting. But what are the ethics? Should journalists take sides? What is the balance between the public's right to know and the government's duty to keep its secrets? What price should a journalist pay for access? And where is the line between spectator and participant in the heat of combat?
''Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq'' and ''Reporting America at War'' are oral histories. ''Embedded'' consists of interviews of reporters from the field. ''Reporting'' is the reflections of 14 famous war correspondents of the 20th century, compiled from a television documentary. ''War Stories'' is breezy, pocket-sized and illustrated, a survey of war reporting from Roman times to the present -- a companion book to an exhibit of the Freedom Forum's Newseum. ''The Media and the War on Terrorism'' consists of a series of conversations and panel discussions involving more than 70 journalists, government officials and knowledgeable notables, put together by the Brookings Institution and Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It takes a more academic and analytical approach.
''Embedded,'' by Bill Katovsky, a magazine editor in Northern California, and Timothy Carlson, a former reporter for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, tells the stories of more than half a hundred journalists who covered the Iraq war, their military minders, even a couple of Arab fixers and translators who, like big-game hunters, are often stuck with danger-prone and careless clients. The interviews are with reporters of several nationalities, most of whom, but not all, were embedded with American or British forces. Most report favorably on the embedding experience, although a correspondent for Al Jazeera complained he was not allowed to attend the same military briefings that his Western colleagues did.
The interviews were made when memories and experiences were fresh, and the accounts crackle with immediacy. Some of the reporters are old hands who have covered many conflicts. Others are newly come to war, experiencing the fear of combat for the first time. Many worried about the whole concept of reporters being so intimately integrated with military units. Could they be objective? ''Unilaterals'' is the word they use for the independent reporters, photographers and television crews who decided to go into the Iraqi desert on their own without the help and protection of the military. There were an estimated 600 ''embeds'' compared to 2,100 or so unilaterals, the book's editors tell us.
Not all the unilateralists knew what they were doing. Many if not most were in the Middle East for the first time. ''When they arrived they didn't know the safety regulations,'' said Hasan Aweidah, a fixer also known as PJ. ''I had to give them the clues how to get past the checkpoints: which way, what time. Then later on, some people got in trouble because things went crazy. . . . Some of them were being shot at by the Iraqis. Other Iraqis had been putting some nails under their tires. . . . The four tires were flat. . . . A crowd of Iraqis would come around us. These people said, 'O.K., we will fix tires for you.' They took tires, they were gone. They were not coming back. So what are the reporters gonna do? When they got stuck, they would call me by Thuraya satphone, 'Please get us, PJ !' ''
I have heard condemnation of the embedding process, which critics say was a masterstroke of manipulation by the Pentagon. ''The Media and the War on Terrorism,'' edited by Stephen Hess of Brookings and Marvin Kalb of the Shorenstein Center, asks: Is there a ''Stockholm syndrome,'' in which the journalists start to ''identify with the soldiers and lose their professional detachment''? Embedding was a public relations success for the Pentagon, but I lose patience with the critics. The press has been complaining since Vietnam that the Pentagon shut it out of the action in Grenada, in Panama, in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, so why object when the Pentagon finally grants near-total access? Reporters had the choice of being embedded or going out on their own. Both options had pluses and minuses, and readers, viewers and listeners were better served for having both. William Branigin's account in ''Embedded'' of how he reported, in The Washington Post, the killing of Iraqi civilians at a checkpoint -- an account markedly different from the Pentagon's -- shows that being embedded does not necessarily lead to lost objectivity.
Up through the Korean War, and to some extent Vietnam, most male reporters had had some military experience, and most war correspondents then were male. With the end of compulsory military service, however, there arose an almost unbridgeable knowledge gap between reporters and soldiers. The public is served if both sides understand each other better, and embedding made reporters more knowledgeable.
One embedded reporter wondered if he had crossed the line between reporter and soldier when he pointed out where enemy fire was coming from. Harold Evans, a former editor of The Times of London, poses the question in ''War Stories'': ''Should a correspondent always keep a professional detachment or has he or she a higher duty when it is possible to intervene and save a life?'' Thirty-five years ago a couple of colleagues and I were criticized for crossing over that line when we pulled a wounded marine out of a firing line in Vietnam. John Laurence of CBS recorded the comments of some of our press peers at the time:
''I don't know, it doesn't seem right. Reporters running around playing soldier,'' one reporter said. ''So what do you do,'' another asked, when ''your unit is down to the last few guys and you're getting overrun? Stand up and say, 'Excuse me, gentlemen, I'm an observer. I think I will go home now?' '' There are no easy answers.
Perhaps the most arresting interview in ''Embedded'' is with John Burns of The New York Times, who covered the war from Baghdad. In a white-hot fury he accuses a majority of correspondents before the war of sucking up to the Iraqis to gain access, and for not reporting on the worst of the Iraqi regime. He scolds his editor during the Bosnian war for asking for less one-sided reporting from Sarajevo. Chris Hedges of The Times takes a differing view in ''Reporting America at War,'' compiled by Michelle Ferrari, the writer of the PBS series of the same name. Sometimes ''we fall into the trap of embracing a cause, of making the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo look like us,'' Hedges says. ''Sarajevo remains a city where Serbs and Croats are not welcome. But you would have never known that from the early reporting of the war.''
There are certain similarities in the accounts of the embeds. I counted more than half a dozen references to movies, and to the feeling of being in a movie, and repeated references to Ernest Hemingway and Ernie Pyle, the renowned World War ll reporter. Nora Ephron, who wrote about war correspondents 30 years ago, is quoted in ''War Stories'' as saying: ''It is impossible to realize how much of Ernest Hemingway still lives in the hearts of men until you spend time with the professional war correspondents. . . . The awful truth is that for correspondents war is not hell. It is fun.''
Gloria Emerson, a reporter in Vietnam, notes in ''Reporting America at War'' that ''men think it's very dashing -- some old movie with Joel McCrea.'' Still, Anna Badkhen of The San Francisco Chronicle tells the authors of ''Embedded'' that ''there can be no good memories from a war.'' Someday someone should analyze whether there is a gender-specific difference between the dispatches of men and women war correspondents.
There may also be clear generational differences. The literary references of the Vietnam correspondents are darker than those of the Iraq reporters. In ''Reporting America at War,'' David Halberstam mentions how important Graham Greene's ''Quiet American'' was to his generation, and Gloria Emerson refers to the grim World War I poems of Wilfred Owen.
Embedding is not all that new. Correspondents in World War II, Korea and Vietnam were also embedded from time to time, either by choice or necessity, although they had more opportunity to switch units or go back to the rear than the embeds had in Iraq. The main fighting of the Iraq war lasted little more than three weeks, less than the single battle for Hue in Vietnam, which in a single week accounted for nearly four times the number of Americans killed in the Iraq campaign. In World War II there were more men killed in the first minutes in some engagements. Yet Iraq was, and is, exceedingly dangerous for journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of last month, 12 reporters had been killed in action in Iraq, 3 of them after President Bush declared an end to major hostilities. Five more died from non-combat-related incidents. Two are still missing. Statistically, it was more dangerous to cover the Iraq war than to fight it. One wonders, however, how the growing insurgency in Iraq will be reported if Americans are still dying there five years from now, dragging the United States farther and farther into its dark hole.
Although television shows war in live time, it still sanitizes it. ''How can you run a video clip of a mother dying, watching the blood spurt out of her arteries?'' Chris Hedges asks, remembering Bosnia in ''Reporting America at War.'' ''You never see any boy with his intestines coming out,'' Gloria Emerson says, remembering Vietnam. Hedges gets it right: ''No one ever sees war except the people who are there.''
When it comes to filing pictures and dispatches, the technological difference between reporting Iraq and reporting Vietnam is greater than between Vietnam and the Civil War. There are reporters today who have never used a typewriter, and cannot imagine the efforts it took to get stories and film out of battle zones, equipped as they are now with satellite telephones. Walter Cronkite, in ''Reporting America at War,'' recalls turning down a chance to go to Bastogne, during the Battle of the Bulge, because of his inability to file the story once he got there. ''But I'm not sure of that,'' he adds. ''I am not sure that a little yellow streak didn't appear.'' No one today would have that excuse not to go.
Yet instant communication has its downside. ABC's Ted Koppel, in ''The Media and the War on Terrorism,'' says that modern journalists have to be prepared to go on the air instantly, around the clock. He says that may seem like an ''evolutionary step forward,'' but in fact it is a step backward because ''they rarely have time to go out and do any reporting. They are almost chained to that satellite relay point, wherever they may be.'' The same is true of newspaper men and women, because they are increasingly asked to feed their Web sites around the clock.
''The Media and the War on Terrorism'' takes on issues like the reasons many major news organizations, including The Times and the networks' evening news, did not report on the findings of the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, led by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, which predicted, in January 2001, a 9/11-type attack. It dissects press issues like covering dissent, the evils of conglomerate ownership and the so-called CNN Effect, the ability of the news media to drive foreign policy. Somalia provides the best example: television coverage of starving people persuaded the first Bush administration to intervene, while a single 2.5-second shot of a dead American being dragged through the streets, played over and over again, caused the Clinton administration to withdraw. The book's discussions of press-Pentagon relations, however, seem a bit dated; many of them took place before the Iraq war, and are limited to Afghanistan.
From the military's point of view, the big no-no is giving out information that can get soldiers killed. Only a very few reporters have been found guilty. Geraldo Rivera was famously expelled from Iraq for drawing a map in the sand -- on camera -- of American positions. ''War Stories'' reminds us of the Chicago Tribune reporter who lifted a document from the desk of a naval officer showing the Japanese battle order at Midway, resulting in the headline: ''Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea.'' One of the top secrets of that war was that the United States had broken much of the Japanese code, and Roosevelt wanted to send the Marines to close down the Tribune Tower. The Japanese, however, never noticed. Also told is the tale of Churchill's famous crackdown on news dispatches from the Anzio beachhead in 1944. ''Such words as 'desperate' ought not to be used about the position in a battle of this kind when they are false,'' the great man said. ''Still less should they be used if they were true.''
A theme running through all four books is the question of taking sides. Is objectivity ever really possible or even desirable? Most reporters and editors would answer yes. Some television stations forbade their reporters to wear American flag pins on the air. On the other hand, Martha Gellhorn never hid her preference for the Loyalist side in Spain or for the Vietcong. ''War Stories'' quotes Christiane Amanpour, perhaps the most famous television correspondent today, as saying, about Bosnia, ''There was no way that a human being or a professional should be neutral.'' Her CNN editor is quoted as saying: ''Any good reporter caught up in a big story will occasionally go a step too far. That is why everybody has an editor.'' I would love to hear Amanpour's retort to that!
My own view of the Iraq war coverage is that Americans, embeds or unilaterals, gave more emphasis to hardware and American successes than did their European and Arab counterparts, who put more stress on war damage and civilian casualties. However, as Ernie Pyle's biographer, James Tobin, says in his introduction to ''Reporting America at War'': ''Every reporter is a citizen of somewhere and a believer in something.'' He quotes the Vietnam correspondent Ward Just as saying, ''The best and most faithful of these characters come to understand that in some profound sense they are owned by their memories, and that in turn their own angle of vision -- in essence, whether they see themselves as insider or outsider, paleface or redskin -- depends on the earliest circumstances of their own lives, their childhood fears and joys, and on how danger was defined.''
H.D.S. Greenway, a retired editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, has covered conflicts in Asia, Europe and the Middle East for Time magazine, The Washington Post and The Globe.
--------
Democrats insist Republicans pull Bush ad
11/23/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/2003-11-23-bush-ad_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle is demanding that Republicans stop showing their first television ad of the 2004 presidential race, which he called "repulsive and outrageous."
The 30-second ad, featuring clips of Bush during his State of the Union address last January, portrays the president as a fighter of terrorism as Democrats retreat from the fight.
"It's wrong. It's erroneous, and I think that they ought to pull the ad," Daschle told NBC's "Meet the Press" program on Sunday.
"We all want to defeat terrorism," the South Dakota senator said. But "to chastise and to question the patriotism of those who are in opposition to some of the president's plans I think is wrong."
The Republican National Committee has no plans to honor Daschle's wishes.
"We have no doubt that Sen. Daschle and others in his party who oppose the president's policy of pre-emptive self-defense believe that their national security approach is in the best interests of the country," RNC spokeswoman Christine Iverson said. "But we also have no doubt that they are wrong about that, and we will continue to highlight this critical policy difference as well as others."
Other Democrats on the Sunday talk shows joined Daschle in his criticism.
Presidential candidate Wesley Clark said the ad is wrong and ought to be pulled. It violates "the pledge the president made to not exploit 9-11 for political purposes," Clark said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy called it an "attempt to stifle dissent." On ABC's "This Week," Kennedy said "dissent is a basic part of what our whole society is about."
Speaking on CNN's "Late Edition," presidential candidate and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman said the ad was misleading, nothing more than an attempt "to get the public's mind off the joblessness in America, the bad prescription Medicare drug bill ... the energy bill, which sells out to lobbyists."
Republicans countered that there was nothing wrong with the ad, which was airing Sunday in Iowa, the day before the Democratic presidential debate in Des Moines.
"It's portraying the president's leadership that he's displayed since Sept. 11, which I support," Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said on ABC. "I think it's a very legitimate statement to be made in the coming presidential election."
The ad will air through Tuesday in Iowa, and then may run again in New Hampshire during the next Democratic debate in December, said the RNC's Iverson. She said the party plans to run ads in conjunction with the Democratic debates, but the decision hasn't been made whether to simply run the current ad or new ones supporting the president.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Supreme Court Revisits Enemy Combatants
Bush Administration Cites 1950 Ruling to Justify Holding Foreign Nationals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 23, 2003; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6601-2003Nov22?language=printer
In the annals of World War II, a German spy named Lothar Eisentrager is barely a footnote. He might be forgotten entirely if not for the fact that, more than half a century ago, he fought his war-crimes conviction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court -- and lost.
Today, the precedent set by Eisentrager's case has emerged as a pivotal factor in a new Supreme Court case that could reshape the Bush administration's legal approach to the war on terrorism.
On Nov. 10, the justices agreed to hear two cases brought by foreign nationals accused of having ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban and being held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The detainees are seeking the right to pursue their freedom in federal court.
The Bush administration says they lack that right because they are unlawful enemy combatants and because Guantanamo, leased from Cuba under a 1903 treaty but still Cuban territory, is outside the reach of U.S. law.
As legal authority, the administration cites the Supreme Court's 1950 ruling in Johnson v. Eisentrager, in which the court denied Eisentrager and 20 other convicted German war criminals the right to seek a writ of habeas corpus. Constitutional protections do not extend to enemy aliens held on foreign soil, the court ruled.
Lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees' families say their case differs from Eisentrager's and that lower federal courts wrongly relied on the administration's reading of it in dismissing their petitions.
Thus, a historic test of the court's ability to rein in executive power during wartime may hinge on the justices' interpretation of events that began in China during the waning days of the war between the United States and Japan.
Eisentrager, using the pseudonym Ludwig Ehrhardt, ran a German intelligence office based in Shanghai known as the Bureau Ehrhardt. After V-E Day, May 8, 1945, Eisentrager and his fellow spies signed deals to help Japan in exchange for money and food. Until Japan surrendered the following Aug. 15, the China-based Germans supplied Japanese forces with intercepts of U.S. naval communications, German-made aircraft parts and thousands of propaganda leaflets aimed at U.S. troops.
By early 1946, Eisentrager and 26 other German intelligence officers, press agents and diplomats accredited to the Japanese puppet government in Nanking had been rounded up by the American military mission in China. On Aug. 26 of that year, a U.S. military commission in Shanghai charged them with continuing to fight against the United States after V-E Day, in violation of Germany's surrender.
The defendants disputed the legitimacy of the military commission: Because China was not under U.S. occupation, they contended, they should be tried in a Chinese court, if anywhere. But the commission overruled that motion.
Eisentrager and other higher-ranking co-defendants argued that they were not guilty because they lacked the authority to issue orders once the Third Reich collapsed. Some lower-ranking officials of the Bureau Ehrhardt, however, said they had been following Eisentrager's orders -- or acting under pressure from the Japanese.
Jesco von Puttkamer, one of the accused authors of the leaflets, would later say he had come to Shanghai only to escape Adolf Hitler's Berlin, where he had worked as an advertising writer but fell out of favor because he had not joined the Nazi Party, according to his widow, Delia von Puttkamer, 80.
She said he told her that "Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese. The Japanese walked in[to his office] and said, 'It's ours now.' "
The commission convicted Eisentrager, von Puttkamer and 19 others; Eisentrager was sentenced to life in prison; von Puttkamer to 30 years and the others, to from two to 20 years. Six were acquitted.
In 1947, the convicted Germans were shipped to a U.S.-run prison for war criminals in Bavaria. With the help of sympathetic American officers there, they enlisted A. Frank Reel, the lawyer who had represented Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita at his 1945 military trial for atrocities in the Philippines and in his failed 1946 bid to overturn his death sentence at the Supreme Court.
Reel would later write a book about what he considered Gen. Douglas MacArthur's manipulation of the Yamashita trial. "It bugged the hell out of my dad," said Reel's son, Tom Reel. "He thought . . . enemies would be less likely to give up if they knew they were going to hang."
On April 26, 1948, Reel filed for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the Germans in the U.S. District Court in Washington -- the same court where the Guantanamo detainees would begin their legal effort. Judge Edward A. Tamm dismissed the case, noting that the prison in Germany was outside his court's jurisdiction.
But in April 1949, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overruled Tamm. For the panel, Judge E. Barrett Prettyman wrote that the Constitution applied not only to U.S. territory as such, but also to the conduct of U.S. government officials anywhere.
The Truman administration appealed to the Supreme Court. In his brief, Solicitor General Philip B. Perlman argued that federal courts were empowered to issue writs of habeas corpus only on behalf of people who were physically present within their jurisdictions. The D.C. Circuit's ruling, Perlman argued, would disrupt "the orderly administration of enemy occupied areas."
In his brief, Reel countered that the Truman administration's position would give the military the power to "destroy rights which this Court has affirmed."
By fighting with an ally after the collapse of their government, Reel argued, the Bureau Ehrhardt members were like "the Free French, Poles, Belgians, Dutch, Filipino guerrillas and others who have not been tried as war criminals, but who have been hailed as heroes."
A significant minority of Americans shared Reel's concerns about the trials of Axis leaders and their subordinates before international and U.S.-run war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and elsewhere; the critics included prewar isolationists, along with such prominent legal figures as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The American Civil Liberties Union backed Eisentrager.
As the Cold War intensified, many argued that the continued pursuit of German war criminals was irritating Germans when their support was needed against the Soviets.
Within the Supreme Court, Eisentrager's strongest supporters were Douglas and Justices Hugo Black and Harold Burton. Douglas's and Burton's notes from the case, on file at the Library of Congress, show that Justice Felix Frankfurter initially supported Eisentrager, as well. But for reasons still unclear, Frankfurter eventually joined the six-justice majority, led by Justice Robert H. Jackson, in favor of the government's position.
Jackson had served as chief prosecutor at Nuremberg. Though there is no written record of his private views of the Eisentrager matter, he may well have been concerned about its potential to unravel the convictions of Nazi war criminals, according to his biographer, John Q. Barrett, a professor of law at St. John's University.
Jackson's opinion for the court in the case begins by noting that since January 1948, the court had received petitions for habeas corpus from more than 200 German enemy aliens detained by the United States -- and that it was time for the court to declare their rights.
Jackson wrote that "it would be difficult to devise more effective fettering of a field commander than to allow the very enemies he is ordered to reduce to submission to call him to account in his own civil courts."
Black's dissenting opinion, joined by Douglas and Burton, contended that the Constitution should follow the flag. "Conquest by the United States, unlike conquest by many other nations, does not mean tyranny," Black wrote.
In the case involving the Guantanamo detainees, their lawyers are asking the court to adopt Black's dissent, just as the White House is relying on Jackson's opinion.
They note three key distinctions between their case and Eisentrager's. The first is that the Germans were tried by a military commission, while the Guantanamo detainees have not yet faced any legal proceeding, military or civilian.
The second is that, while Jackson's opinion hinged on the fact that the Germans, as citizens of a hostile power, were "enemy aliens" under international law, the two Britons, two Australians and 12 Kuwaitis contesting their detention at Guantanamo are citizens of friendly countries.
Finally, they argue, China and Germany were clearly outside U.S. sovereignty, but the Guantanamo lease has given the United States "jurisdiction and control."
If the detainees are not enemy aliens and are not being held on foreign soil, their lawyers argue, they are entitled to constitutional protections, including access to U.S. courts.
Though the Truman administration won the legal principle, Eisentrager and his comrades soon won their freedom.
In 1950, political pressure -- in both the United States and West Germany -- led to a clemency commission to reconsider war criminals' sentences. The government's victory in the Eisentrager case meant the commissioners could deal with German prisoners free of court supervision.
Yet they used that power to commute death sentences and empty the jails. By 1958, there were no Nazi war criminals in U.S. custody.
It appears that Eisentrager and his comrades got out early in the process. Von Puttkamer eventually emigrated to Vancouver, where he ran a resort until his death, in 1973.
Though he "never got over" his time in prison, his widow said, von Puttkamer was pro-American and traveled frequently to the United States. Von Puttkamer's son from a first marriage, also named Jesco, is a senior scientist at NASA.
Reel believed that the government wanted to release the men even sooner. In a memorandum on file in his personal papers, he wrote that their release had been "held up because the Attorney General wanted his appeal to the Supreme Court to be heard. . . . In other words, they would have served less time if they had lost in the circuit court."
The reason, Reel wrote, "was that their 'war crime' was more technical than real."
-------- homeland security
Anti-Terrorism Funds Buy Wide Array of Pet Projects
Some of Region's Unused Millions Could Be Lost
By Jo Becker, Sarah Cohen and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 23, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6311-2003Nov22?language=printer
Two years after Congress approved a massive infusion of cash to help gird the Washington area against terrorism, much of the $324 million remains unspent or is funding projects with questionable connections to homeland security.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, lawmakers doled out the money quickly, with few restrictions and vague guidelines. Left to interpret needs on their own -- and with little regional coordination -- cash-strapped local and state officials plugged budget holes, spent millions on pet projects and steered contracts to political allies.
The District funded a politically popular jobs program, outfitted police with leather jackets and assessed environmental problems on property prime for redevelopment. In Maryland, the money is buying Prince George's County prosecutors an office security system. In Virginia, a small volunteer fire department spent $350,000 on a custom-made fire boat. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments used some of the money for janitorial services.
The Washington Post traced the path of the region's first wave of homeland security aid from its distribution through its final use, a trail that has been largely unexamined by federal regulators. The analysis included a review of contracts, grant proposals and purchasing databases obtained through open records laws as well as more than 100 interviews.
The findings represent the first detailed evidence of how jurisdictions are spending a major new stream of federal dollars. Since that first allotment, Congress has approved at least $180 million in additional grants to the region, and more is on the way.
In many ways, the funds have helped the Washington area become better prepared than it was when terrorists struck. The region has earmarked at least $63 million -- about one-fifth of the total -- for compatible radio systems, long considered critical so rescuers from different jurisdictions can communicate with each other in an emergency.
Police, firefighters and public health workers have undergone disaster training and are better equipped to handle conventional attacks and weapons of mass destruction. They have more gear to protect them, more ambulances and firetrucks and more heavy equipment to defuse bombs or locate victims buried beneath rubble. Local governments have at their disposal new blueprints on how to respond to a terrorist attack.
But critical needs remain unaddressed, according to federal assessments and interviews. Many of the region's hospitals are already strained and, without adding beds and personnel, would be overwhelmed if thousands needed medical attention in an emergency. In the District, hospital officials estimate that just 400 beds could be freed in a disaster.
Some police officers are still waiting for basic protective gear. Public health labs swamped by the anthrax attacks of 2001 have no additional capacity today. Most local governments have no efficient way to give instructions to residents shut off from radio and television, such as a "reverse 911" system that automatically telephones people at home. There is no comprehensive plan to unite families separated in a disaster.
James S. Gilmore III, a former governor of Virginia who heads a congressionally mandated terrorism panel, said better priorities must be set for local jurisdictions.
"If you simply fund every local desire, the demand for money is going to be so great," Gilmore said, "that you are going to break the back of the economy, which is exactly what the terrorists would like."
Congress approved the funds within 100 days of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when lawmakers were shaken by the region's chaotic response and the country and its capital seemed at their most vulnerable. The aid went out with the philosophy that because local governments knew their own needs best, they would be given wide latitude in how to spend their windfall.
But despite the urgency and the historic nature of the new anti-terrorism mission, the undertaking was beset by many of the same problems and inefficiencies as other large government programs. Slowed by inertia, purchasing rules and, in some cases, mismanagement, local and state governments have had difficulty spending the funds.
Overall, nearly 40 percent of the money remains unspent. The District, which received the bulk of the money, has spent the vast majority of it. However, it stands to lose more than $1.1 million of the $168.6 million it received because it failed to spend or sign contracts for the full amount by a Sept. 30 deadline, although city officials say that figure could decrease when a final tally is complete. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments lost $149,000. The suburbs are further behind: In Maryland and Virginia, nearly half of the $101.5 million has not been spent or promised in a contract. Unlike the District, however, Maryland and Virginia jurisdictions will not lose unspent funds because their deadlines are malleable.
District, state and county officials said they did the best they could, with little guidance, to make the region a safer place as quickly as possible. Dennis R. Schrader, who was hired this year to oversee Maryland's homeland security spending, said the money was spent "with good intentions."
"This is a marathon, not a sprint," he said. "It's a learning process -- we're going to make mistakes, and that's okay, but we're also going to be doing good things."
The new federal Department of Homeland Security is attempting to bring more accountability and regional cooperation to the process. But those arguing for much stronger direction from Washington say more money will be frittered away without a clear national plan spelling out what first responders need to be able to do in an emergency and more stringent guidelines on how the money should be spent.
"We're talking billions and billions, and this money ought to be spent according to national, minimum standards," said former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations' homeland security task force. "Unless we get these standards in place, we're going to have money wasted."
Politics and Protection
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, lawmakers settled on money for New York, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania not just because of their proximity to the crash sites, but also because their representatives in Congress sat on the appropriations committees. Members made their own deals and in some cases inserted projects that did not fit into a larger, regional plan.
The politically active Bethesda-Chevy Chase Fire Squad lobbied Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) for protective clothing and equipment above that given to other Montgomery County stations -- and got it.
"Frankly, the county was surprised at some of the political maneuvering we were able to do," Chief Ned Sherburne proudly said of the squad's lobbying effort.
Since the original allotment, Congress has handed out emergency aid in keeping with another time-honored political tradition: Every member's district gets something.
While experts including Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge say more money ought to go where the threat is greatest, Congress this year forced Ridge's agency to dole out the majority of the funds based on a population formula that gives such states as Kentucky and North Dakota more money than the nation's capital.
States and local governments are taking a similar approach. The District of Columbia Hospital Association chose a formula that guaranteed every city hospital a share of an $8 million grant. That meant that the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, a small, private hospital, received money to buy security cameras for its wards, a new van and a garage gate that officials say will help keep out illegal parkers from nearby American University.
This approach won't work in the war on terrorism, said Rep. Christopher Cox, a California Republican who is pushing legislation that would direct money based only on threat and risk assessments. "If we were talking about equipment and training for our armed forces, we wouldn't make the argument that it had to be done on a pork-barrel basis," he said. "The danger is that you solve a political problem but fail to achieve the homeland security mission because you are sending money to the wrong places for the wrong things."
Political considerations also played a role when it came time to award homeland security contracts. In the District, for instance, contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars went to a former mayor and to a close confidant of Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D).
Max Brown, who from 1995 to 2000 served as Williams's legal counsel and then deputy chief of staff, was paid $130,000 as a subcontractor to a team hired to run emergency preparedness seminars. District officials said they knew of Brown's involvement with Kroll Government Services, a consulting firm, when the company won the bid. In its proposal, the company touted Brown's involvement, saying its team included members who "speak with a local accent."
"Was Brown's participation a dealmaker? No," said one senior aide who evaluated the competing bids and spoke on condition of anonymity. "Did it help? Yeah, probably."
Brown's firm, Group 360, also received a noncompetitive $15,000 contract to help the city lobby for changes in federal communications policy. Documents show that Brown initially was paid out of emergency funds, but the city repaid the money after The Post inquired about the contract.
Another Williams supporter, former District mayor Sharon Pratt, was awarded a no-bid bioterrorism consulting contract worth $236,000. Pratt successfully lobbied the city to give another no-bid contract worth $15,880 to a company on whose board she sat. According to e-mail records, the larger contract was made at the explicit urging of Williams's chief of staff, Kelvin J. Robinson.
"Please tell me we've done this contract with Sharon's folks," Robinson wrote Deputy Mayor Carolyn N. Graham in November 2002. In March, Graham told the city's health agency, "We must move it."
Pratt said it was her experience as mayor, not politics, that was critical in winning her the contract. "It requires someone who appreciates how to pull all the players together," she said.
Tony Bullock, a spokesman for Williams, said that there was nothing improper in awarding the contracts and that the work was of high quality.
Outside the District, governments had less to spend, but limited funds still ended up with friends. In Prince William County, for instance, the Occoquan-Woodbridge-Lorton Volunteer Fire Department bought a boat with emergency funds, then loaded it with nearly $44,000 in supplies purchased from a company owned by two of its members.
Not Just Security
Shortly after Sept. 11, Prince George's officials concluded that the county was "unequivocally . . . vulnerable to terrorism" because of Andrews Air Force Base and other high-risk installations. A county assessment found that first responders were unprepared to handle weapons of mass destruction and needed special gas masks and protective clothing.
But when the county received $7.9 million in homeland security funds, instead of buying protective gear for police officers, it chose to purchase a half-million-dollar digital camera system used for mug shots. Officials said that the equipment was a priority because it could photograph terrorist crime scenes and that they relied on a subsequent grant to order biochemical gear. Because of the delay, police are still waiting for the specialized gas masks, according to union officials.
"If you don't have the proper masks, you aren't going to be able to go in and photograph anything anyway," said Cpl. Anthony M. Walker, president of the Fraternal Order of Police lodge that represents county officers, who was interviewed shortly before his death this month. "If there was an attack, police officers and civilians would die because of our lack of preparedness."
Across the region, state and local governments fulfilled long-standing wish lists and used the homeland security funds for projects that were only tangentially related to terrorism.
Officials say they are putting these purchases to "dual use": helping with daily needs and at the same time protecting the region.
As Leslie Hotaling, director of the District's Department of Public Works, said: "If we can tie it to 9/11 and build capacity in our core functions, let's do it!" Her agency spent more than $55,000 on basic employee training courses such as "map reading" and "handling problem employees."
In October, D.C. Council members questioned the use of homeland security dollars to pay for sanitation supervisors to attend a "Dale Carnegie" management course with no disaster preparedness instruction. City officials later relabeled the course on their documents by removing the management guru's name. The routine training helps employees better handle an emergency, Hotaling said.
Her agency used an additional $300,000 to help pay for a computerized car towing system that the mayor had promised for three years to help combat fraud by private towing companies.
The rationale: The city could use the new system to more efficiently clear streets during a terrorist attack and aid with "recovery efforts" by locating towed cars in the aftermath.
Another District agency directed $100,000 to the mayor's politically popular summer jobs program, documents show. Forty low-income young adults were trained in first aid and other emergency skills, then paid to rap and dance about emergency preparedness as part of outreach efforts. The program was nationally recognized and a "brilliant" use of money, said Deputy Mayor Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, who oversaw spending.
The D.C. Department of Mental Health commissioned a $20,000 study to look at whether the 9/11 attacks increased the city's jail population. The study's use: "At this point, we've made the results known, and discussions are continuing," said agency Director Martha B. Knisley.
Her agency also paid a company at least $111,000 to assess environmental problems at the St. Elizabeths Hospital campus. Williams hopes redevelopment will transform the campus, which has commanding views of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers, and planners say cleaning up the property is a critical first step.
Knisley and Kellems denied that the work was related to redevelopment and said it was necessary mostly because the campus is one of several properties that could be used as a mass casualty center. But Barbara Childs-Pair, acting director of the D.C. Emergency Management Agency, said that the city's plan lists no role for St. Elizabeths and that in emergency exercises, the site has been used only as a transfer point for equipment.
Officials in the mayor's office said that most of the money went for major initiatives that made the city safer. They noted that they had put in place an elaborate system to track the funds and that the city was the first jurisdiction in the country to have its emergency response plan nationally accredited.
Kellems said the criteria she used to evaluate projects were strict: "If it wasn't related to emergency preparedness, it was not an option," she said. "Nothing's come to my attention where I've said, 'That was just a really bad idea.' "
The mayor's spokesman also defended the government's choices in using the money. "The District has done a remarkably good job," Bullock said. "We used these federal funds to achieve remarkable progress in preparing the District government's capacity to respond to potential terrorism incidents or similar emergencies."
Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican who is pushing legislation aimed at ensuring that homeland security dollars are spent more strategically, said expenditures like some of those in the District "make me want to scream."
"It's an outrage and a misuse of this money," he said. "The money should be used for things directly related to the terrorist threat."
Plugging Budget Holes
Jack Deboy vividly remembers the chaos during the 2001 anthrax attacks. As acting director of Maryland's public health labs, Deboy had to scramble everyone in his department and train people from other divisions to test the suspicious white powder samples that came into his office.
"If it had been much larger, we would not have been able to respond," he said.
Maryland received more than $22 million in homeland security funds, with nearly $1.3 million going to personnel for Deboy's labs. But he said he is no better equipped to handle an anthrax-type scare than he was two years ago because the state cut his budget by 5 percent and some of the emergency money went to repay the state for overtime during the anthrax attacks.
The intent of the federal emergency funds was to beef up security, not to help states and local jurisdictions tread water. Suburban recipients even signed a pledge: "I hereby certify that Federal funds will not be used to replace or supplant state or local funds . . . that would, in the absence of federal aid, be made available for public safety purposes."
Nevertheless, officials across the region used the federal money to meet routine government responsibilities. Millions were spent buying everyday uniforms for police and firefighters, riot gear and ammunition. School principals got cameras for their hallways. In Manassas Park, the city hired a long-needed deputy police chief by adding emergency preparedness to his regular duties.
Congress gave the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments $5 million to "enhance regional emergency preparedness, coordination and response." The group took a 35 percent management fee and applied it to salaries, fringe benefits and "indirect" costs, including $519,000 for expenses such as rent, insurance and janitorial services at its headquarters.
To some extent, experts say it was a predictable outcome. The huge influx of federal dollars came as the region's governments were grappling with deepening budget gaps and cutting services.
Maryland, for instance, slashed its aid to local health departments, which are getting less this year despite the influx of federal funds, according to a legislative budget analysis. This happened despite repeated warnings from experts that the public health system is unprepared to meet new security challenges.
While such budgetary juggling may be commonplace, it has profound implications, according to Paul C. Light, a government scholar at New York University. "The problem is we're not getting a nickel's worth of extra security," he said.
Differing Visions
Without guidance from federal or regional planners, departments from state to state and county to county have seen their missions -- and their needs -- very differently. Col. Gerald Massengill, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, spent more than $1.4 million to arm every trooper with an M4 fully automatic rifle after he saw his troopers guarding a nuclear power plant armed only with handguns.
"I was afraid they were outgunned," said Massengill, who has since retired. The Maryland State Police superintendent, Col. Edward T. Norris, put his money into intelligence gathering, such as cell-phone tracking and surveillance equipment. He was influenced by his years as a police officer in New York City, where he saw terrorists get away because of lack of intelligence.
Rifles, he said, may be helpful to rural troopers, but they aren't directly related to the war on terrorism: "Our role is to gather intelligence."
Two agencies, two different philosophies. While Congress debates how much money is enough, local spending patterns illustrate the difficulty of pinpointing need.
For Montgomery County, it was an $800,000 mobile police command bus that one official said "will be the talk of the East Coast, with most every conceivable feature." Prince George's County officials figured they could get the same roving command capacity with four Chevy Tahoes that cost $140,000.
"I think there's a perception on the part of the public that government officials and first responders came together and said: 'Damn, here's our strategy. Here are the needs,' " said Michael Knapp (D-Upcounty), who chairs the Montgomery County Council's homeland security committee. "The reality is that we are only just beginning to come to grips with what the priorities are."
Without that strategy in place, the windfall created a culture of one-upmanship and giddy shopping.
As emergency operations centers throughout the region were upgraded, they were filled with new computers and furniture. Montgomery County officials spent $566,380 on audiovisual equipment -- more than twice what Fairfax County spent on similar equipment. Montgomery bought eight large-screen plasma television monitors at $20,000 each, while Prince William County firefighters opted for 36-inch sets at $695 each.
When asked why the city spent $35,000 outfitting health workers with lettered parkas, caps and polo and denim shirts, Deputy Mayor Kellems said there may have been cheaper ways to identify workers -- slip-on plastic vests, for example -- but they wouldn't have been as comfortable or durable for long emergency shifts in varying weather conditions.
The rush to buy the best often led to duplicative efforts. The Virginia State Police, for instance, is spending more than $1 million for seven armored personnel carriers that could be deployed throughout the state. Alexandria, population 128,000, wanted one of its own and is spending $144,000 to acquire it.
No one is "making the tough decisions" about regional coordination, said Jim Schwartz, director of Arlington County's emergency services and a member of a federal board that will put out equipment guidelines for localities.
"Every jurisdiction doesn't need a bomb team, but every jurisdiction needs to know where they are going to get a bomb team," he said. "The real scare for me is down the road, when we have another incident, will we have done the best job by our citizens with these moneys?"
Staff writer Yolanda Woodlee contributed to this report.
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Disaster Radio Network Closer but Still on Hold
By Sarah Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 23, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6697-2003Nov22.html
The attack on the Pentagon reinforced the goal at the top of virtually every emergency preparedness list: Build a communication network that allows firefighters, police and federal agents to talk to one another at the press of a button.
Since 2001, at least 12 agencies in the Washington region have allocated more than $63 million toward upgrading communication systems. But despite the investment -- the single largest allocation of homeland security dollars -- critical gaps remain in the network. Prince George's County lacks the standard 800-megahertz radio technology used by other jurisdictions. Virginia and Maryland state troopers are without the radios. Federal agencies use their own equipment on their own airwaves.
And even if those left out of the 800-megahertz system spent the money to join it, a seemingly insurmountable problem remains: There is no more room in the region's allocated airwaves. Plans made a decade ago to expand capacity by recovering surplus bandwidth from television stations will still take years to complete.
For decades, 800-megahertz radio systems have been viewed as a way to impose order on the chaos that defines communication between first responders at a disaster. The problem came home when an Air Florida jet crashed into the 14th Street bridge in 1982. Almost two decades later, rescuers at the Pentagon were sometimes forced to rely on foot messengers.
"Why is it that so many years later, when we have an event at the Pentagon, we're not prepared to deal with the same issues?" said Michael Mohler, president of the Virginia Professional Firefighters union and a Fairfax firefighter.
The millions allocated to address the communication obstacles after Sept. 11, 2001, have made significant inroads. In the District, which spent $37 million, officials now have a digital network that will allow all responders to communicate with one another on one system. The technology includes towers that can be brought to the scene of a disaster. That should address one problem evident at the Pentagon: The thick walls inhibited radio signals.
But Prince George's still faces twin problems: the lack of funds to buy radios and the lack of airwaves to support them.
Now, when Prince George's police cross into the District, a dispatcher picks up a telephone and calls a counterpart in the city to coordinate between the two departments. Conversations between parties are conducted through a dispatcher on the equivalent of one telephone line.
Officials across the country complain that the federal government is not moving quickly enough to free up space on a compatible band. In the case of Prince George's, getting money wouldn't guarantee a solution because of the shortage of airwaves. "Right now, we couldn't move forward," said Jacqueline Brown, the county's chief administrative officer.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI and other federal agencies at the Pentagon relied on an unexpected stockpile of 800-megahertz radios from Montgomery County to communicate with rescuers. But those radios are now in use in Montgomery. The federal government has plans to stash extra radios in warehouses, but they have not yet been purchased. The District, faced with the bandwidth limitations, invested in alternative technologies for its police department. The system was implemented in September, and officials said it will be integrated with the rest of the region sometime next year.
Expanding the capacity of the airwaves is up to Congress and the Federal Communications Commission. The federal government has promised to deliver more space on the airwaves, but a solution could be a decade away.
-------- police
Bank Data For Saudi Embassy Subpoenaed
FBI Investigating Riyadh's Spending for Terrorist Ties
By Douglas Farah
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 23, 2003; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6898-2003Nov22?language=printer
The FBI, in an unprecedented move that has strained relations with a close ally in the war on terrorism, has subpoenaed records for dozens of bank accounts belonging to the Saudi Embassy, part of an investigation into whether any of the hundreds of millions of dollars Riyadh spends in the United States each year end up in the hands of Muslim extremists, U.S. and Saudi officials said.
The wide-ranging investigation into the $300 million a year the Saudi Embassy spends here was launched this summer, just as the U.S. and Saudi governments were hailing a new era of cooperation in the fight against Muslim terrorism. Earlier this year, U.S. and Saudi officials established the first-ever joint task force to track terrorist financing in Saudi Arabia.
U.S. officials said the FBI's Washington field office subpoenaed the records of dozens of Saudi bank accounts to determine whether Saudi government money knowingly or unknowingly helped fund extremists in the United States. Although many Saudi entities have been investigated in the past, U.S. officials said this was the first investigation to directly probe Saudi government funds.
Senior U.S. officials said they do not recall any other time when the bank records of an embassy were subpoenaed.
The probe, U.S. officials said, was approved by the National Security Council working group on terrorist financing at the request of several congressional leaders. The investigation focuses on the financial activities of the Islamic and cultural affairs office of the embassy as well as the activities of Saudi consulates around the United States, officials said.
The subpoenas outraged Saudi officials, who believe they were unnecessary.
"We became aware of the subpoenas in August, and we immediately said to the American authorities, 'if you want this information, why didn't you just ask us? We would have given it to you,' " one senior official said.
In fact, the official said, the Saudi government subsequently turned over embassy spending records for the past 20 years, including records of Saudi payments for educational expenses and medical attention for Saudi nationals here.
"We have nothing to hide," the official said. "If there is something suspicious, we want to know. But if there is nothing, they owe it to us to say publicly they found nothing."
The investigation of Saudi money was first reported by the Los Angeles Times last week.
U.S. and Saudi officials said the subpoenas strained the complicated relationship between the two countries, which are grappling with mutual distrust and suspicions even as they try to forge an effective alliance in the war on terrorism.
U.S. law enforcement officials have gone out of their way to praise Saudi cooperation in fighting al Qaeda, especially since the deadly May 12 terrorist attacks in Riyadh, but questions remain about whether millions of dollars still flow from the oil-rich kingdom to radical causes.
Saudi officials said they have opened their banking system and intelligence operations to the United States as never before, but are still treated as junior partners in a war in which both nations are targets. Senior Saudi officials strenuously deny any ties between their government and terrorist groups. They say they have moved to control how and where charities spend their money, and have halted the operations of many while their books are examined.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, authorities also have stepped up their interest in the Saudi government's support for the puritanical brand of Islam known as Wahhabism.
Wahhabism eschews what it considers the West's corrupting influence on Islam and often advocates violence against Christians, Jews and the West. Its principles have been embraced by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have documented the flow of money to terrorist groups from organizations affiliated with charities that received funds from wealthy Saudis and the Saudi government. Money for such charities often flows through the embassy's Islamic and cultural affairs bureau.
The subpoenas were issued several weeks after the May deportation of Fahad al Thumairy, who had worked for the Islamic and cultural affairs section of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles since 1996. Thumairy's visa was revoked, and he was deported because of suspected ties to terrorists, according to officials from the Department of Homeland Security.
Law enforcement officials said there was no specific event or transaction that prompted the subpoenas, but noted it also came shortly after a congressional investigation chastised the Saudis for failing to crack down on terrorist financing. In a controversial decision, 28 pages of the report dealing with a possible Saudi role was classified and not made public.
A senior official with direct knowledge of the probe said the FBI was still doing a "preliminary analysis" of the documents. "It is mostly legitimate stuff as far as we can tell so far," the official said, "but there are some things we are following up on."
The Saudi official said that, while large sums of money passed through the embassy, most of it was for scholarships for thousands of Saudi students and government-paid medical treatment for Saudi subjects.
In all, the official said, about $17 million over the course of 20 years, less than $1 million a year, went to supporting Islamic institutions and religious work in the United States. In contrast, he said, each of the estimated 4,000 Saudi students studying here receives about $40,000 a year, a total of $160 million a year.
"The notion that we can send money here and not account for it is preposterous," the official said. "We are not a banana republic."
-------- prisons / prisoners
5 Pakistanis Freed From Guantánamo
November 23, 2003
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/international/asia/23GUAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 22 (Agence France-Presse) - Five Pakistanis held by the American military at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba returned home on Saturday, a senior Interior Ministry official said.
"As a result of persistent efforts by the government of Pakistan and its parleys with the U.S. government, five more Pakistanis detained at Camp X-Ray in Cuba have returned home," said the official, Brig. Iqbal Cheema.
The United States has released 21 Pakistanis since November 2002, while 37 are still being held, officials said.
The Pakistani government will continue to make efforts to secure the release of all Pakistanis, Brigadier Cheema added.
Security officials said the Pakistanis who arrived late on Saturday would be interrogated before they were allowed to rejoin their families.
A total of 58 Pakistanis were captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 after the fall of the Taliban government. They were suspected of being members of the Taliban militia, allied with Al Qaeda.
One Pakistani prisoner, Muhammad Sagheer, was released last November, and more were freed later this year.
Mr. Sagheer, 53, has filed a lawsuit in a local court seeking $10.4 million in damages from the United States for his "illegal detention, torture and humiliation."
Thousands of Pakistanis, many of them students at religious schools in remote rural areas, went to Afghanistan to support the Taliban against the American-led coalition there.
Pakistan abandoned the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks and became a crucial ally in the American-led campaign against terrorism.
The detainees at Guantánamo Bay are denied prisoner-of-war status, and the conditions in which they are being held has raised objections from rights groups and lawyers in the United Nations and Britain.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
NO CRISIS, NO BILL?
At 1,200 Pages, the Energy Plan Weighs Itself Down
November 23, 2003
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/weekinreview/23REVK.html
THE struggle over the first national energy legislation in a decade culminated Friday when the Senate failed by three votes to cut off debate on the bill, leaving the measure - and American energy policy - in limbo.
Supporters of the bill warned of dire consequences should it not pass. "Failing to pass this bill will mean losing every incentive we need to maximize American energy production, to stabilize the energy market, to improve the power grid, and to create jobs," said Senator Peter W. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico.
But the sudden stall came over what appeared to be a relatively minor issue - the costs of a provision protecting oil companies from lawsuits filed over water contaminated with the gasoline additive MTBE. This leads to a question: If the nation were truly confronting an energy crisis, would the first energy bill in years, sought by the White House, Republican leaders and some Democrats, entailing $31 billion in eventual costs, suffer this kind of defeat?
The answer, many supporters and opponents of the legislation acknowledge, is no.
The 1,200-page bill was built on President Bush's 2001 National Energy Policy, which, responding in part to the power shortages that roiled California, spoke of "our nation's energy crisis," and called for large investments in energy of all kinds - old-fashioned, renewable, nuclear, alternative.
But California's problems, like last summer's great blackout, were the result of flawed policies and ineffectual regulation, not a shortage of gigawatts or oil, according to the findings of government commissions and scientists.
The real crises on the horizon are rising dependence on foreign oil, uncertain natural gas supplies and the climate impact of emissions from unabated burning of fossil fuels, say some energy analysts and environmentalists.
To its critics, then, the stalled energy bill is merely a "porkfolio" of special-interest spending that, among many expensive provisions, doubles the amount of ethanol produced from corn, a process that uses far more energy than it provides, and authorizes a uranium enrichment plant in New Mexico that could cost $1 billion.
In addition, there is so much money for boosting the use of coal, the fuel that scientists say contributes the most to global warming, that Jack Gerard, the president of the National Mining Association, issued a statement proclaiming, "The grants, loans, tax incentives and research dollars for coal in this bill will give an unprecedented demand stimulus to coal-based economies."
Through the debate on the bill, Mr. Bush maintained some distance, lauding Congress's efforts to write the energy package, but not embracing the legislation itself. But late Friday, the president told reporters, "For the sake of our national security and economic security, the Senate's got to pass this bill."
But Steven M. Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a private research group, disagrees with the administration's basic approach. The cheapest way to harvest energy, he says, is to use less of it. Indeed, he applauds the conservation measures included in the energy bill, like higher efficiency standards for refrigerators.
"If this was just a bill that contained the efficiency provisions, I'd probably say it's an excellent bill," Mr. Nadel said.
Most advocates of conservation agree, however, that the country will not move in that direction until Americans are faced with a costly energy crisis.
Mr. Nadel noted that the first time Congress wrote bills combining energy conservation and alternatives to fossil fuels was 30 years ago, as Americans sat in blocks-long lines at gas stations.
In large part through measures requiring higher gas-mileage standards for cars, such legislation led to strong economic growth and simultaneous sharp drops in energy use. From 1979 to 1986, while gross domestic product grew 20 percent, Americans cut total energy use 5 percent, said Amory B. Lovins, a founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a private energy analysis group, and an advocate of energy efficiency.
The institute has calculated that the country's biggest new source of energy since the 1970's has been energy saved through efficiency gains - not gleaned through a new oil well or mine.
Administration officials say that new production is essential. Without the new legislation, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said on Friday, "We can't do the sorts of things that we've been talking about to transform our energy dependency into a situation in which America has abundant natural reserves of energy here at home."
Mr. Nadel believes conservation as a national policy will not arrive until it costs too much to avoid it.
"If we truly have an energy squeeze like we did in the 1970's, then it's possible to get a decent energy policy," Mr. Nadel said. "Until then, no one wants to sacrifice their S.U.V.'s or tax breaks for the folks back home and most votes will tend to be on parochial interests rather than the big picture."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Italians protest nuclear waste proposal
ROME (AFP)
Nov 23, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031123112217.b0km61a3.html
Tens of thousands of demonstrators in Basilicata Sunday protested government plans to build Italy's first nuclear waste repository in the region in the extreme south of Italy .
The demonstration was called by Italy's three biggest trade unions, which said more than 50,000 people marched to Scanzano Jonico, the proposed site for the dump, while police estimated the turnout at 30,000.
The unions said in a statement that the demonstration was a "unequival response" against the project from a region that has "made environmental concerns a determining factor in development."
Leaders of local parties joined the demonstration, saying the region depended on agriculture and tourism and did not need a nuclear test dump.
Protests have taken place all week, affecting road and rail transport throughout southern Italy.
The government decreed November 13 that the national nuclear repository would be constructed at Scanzano Jonico. It partly retreated Thursday, saying it was "ready to modify" the decision.
But the demonstrators want the decree annulled.
"It's clear to me that the whole of Basilicata is here, it has made its stand and it wants the decree to be taken back," said Filippo Bubbico, president of the region, who headed the demonstration.
----
Positive Gorleben spin though police hurt more than 85 activists
von Diet Simon (summarising Indymedia inputs) -
23.11.2003
http://de.indymedia.org/2003/11/67094.shtml
Opponents of nuclear waste transports to Gorleben report positively on their latest resistance, although they say police brutality injured more than 85 of their activists. The protesters' umbrella organisation in Luechow-Dannenberg county, where the north German rural village of Gorleben lies, says 6,000 people took part in protest actions, more than double last year's number. Authorities say about 13,000 police were assigned to the transport in the Wendland area alone and the local state government put their cost just in the area at 25 million euros. Twelve so-called Castor containers containing highly The Castor train pulls into Dannenberg, endpoint of the rail journey. Here the Castors, each of which weighs 120 tonnes, are loaded onto heavy-duty, low-loader trucks for the final stretch into the Gorleben storage hall. The caskets reach a temperature of 300°C inside and 80°C outside. [More at http://www.seg-dannenberg.org].
A spokeswoman for the protesters' first aid teams, Kerstin Rudek, says in a media release that indiscriminate police brutality, such as kicks with booted feet into faces and genitals, caused a long list of injuries including bone fractures, torn ligaments, kidney contusions, dog bites, lacerations, sprains and bruises. 85 protesters were treated but carers suspect a much larger number of injured. The statement says police leader Niehörster needs to take disciplinary action against offending officers if he doesn't want the reputation that he encourages or at least condones such actions. Other activists spoke of police kicking and punching and two demonstrators having to be hospitalised with serious knee injuries. Spokesman Wolfgang Ehmke of the Luechow-Dannenberg Citizens Initiative for Environmental Protection (BI) said more than 2,000 protested Tuesday night at Dannenberg and Gorleben, and more than a thousand blockaded roads during the night by sitting down on them.
Gusborn
11 Nov, Grippel, 10.14 p.m. Grippel is about six km from Gorleben and is at the junction of two possible routes for Castor transports. People were on the roads since the previous afternoon and police stopped no one. There was music and food. Some slept on the road, some danced, ate, sat.
Grippel 00.29 am. Police were present but did nothing other than to regulate traffic and make light for the demonstrators.
Grippel 1:19 am About 1 am the police presence becomes markedly stronger. Police come through private properties on both sides of the road. Water cannon trucks are brought into position on both sides of the road, police encircle the people on the road. A voice out of one of the water cannon trucks tells the crowd that they have been collectively placed under arrest. There was no third call to clear the road, which is the normal legal requirement. The reason given for the omission was that it had to be assumed that criminal acts could be perpetrated from out of the crowd. The person who took these pictures says the assessment was completely wrong because there were no signs whatsoever that anything of the sort was planned and did not happen.
Grippel 1:29 The first rows of the crowd under plastic sheeting to protect against the water cannon should they be used. The temperature is below freezing.
Grippel, 02:07 am. Police indiscriminately snatch a small number of individuals out of the crowd and lead them away - the photographer saw three such cases. After a while the police leader at the scene demands that demonstrators clear the road and to go to a pasture paddock at the roadside, surrounded by police. No one obeys. Astonishingly, the police leader sometimes cites an assembly law, sometimes an assembly ban, which was being breached. It has to be noted, though, that the entire crowd has already been declared under arrest. And people under arrest don't actually "assemble" any more. Whatever the case may be, the leader keeps referring to an "assembly".
Grippel 2:50 am Police are massively reinforced. Three calls to clear the road follow. But the assembly has still not been dispersed by the police leader, nor was it in the end.
Grippel 3:25 am Removal of people begins. Within less than an hour an estimated 500 to 900 people were taken like this into the police circle in the paddock. Because of the concentrated media presence, this happens very humanely in most cases. But neither was it exceptional, when no cameras were near, for arms and heads to be twisted, fingers pushed into noses, people's mouths and noses held closed and arms and hands being twisted when people were transported away. The photographer regrets not having been able to capture pictures of such occurrences because they happened when the camera was not ready before four policemen carried him away and dropped him three times, allegedly because they felt weak. "We were held in the police circle until the transport was in Gorleben at about 6.10 am. Four water cannon were aimed at the circle and force was threatened against anyone who tried to break out of it. The drive home was as usual an unjust affair. The many police convoys either parked at the side of the road, which made it hard to get through, or at every red light switched on their blue lights, only to switch them off again the moment they had crossed. A cheeky case of abusing special rights against which one can probably unfortunately do nothing. More pictures, or these in better quality, at the website.e-Mail:: frank@eichi.de ¦ Homepage:: http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0013807/tmp/grippel03/ ."
Speaking for a farmers' protest organisation, Carsten Niemann said police in large measure had worked for de-escalation. Given that 200 farmers had taken part with their tractors, there could be no talk of the resistance crumbling, he said. Lawyer Ulrike Donat criticised the confiscation by police of 50 tractors and a field, as well as the imposition of a night curfew on the village of Laase.
At places along the Castor train's trip through France and Germany, activists held it up by chaining themselves to or sitting on tracks until police removed them. A road close to Gorleben was made impassable for a while by undermining it with water. Other rail traffic was also briefly delayed by protest actions in passenger stations. Elsewhere burning tires were placed on tracks. Activists claim that the Castor train ploughed through a collection of open umbrellas at full speed although there could have been people huddling under them and the authorities had been alerted to the obstruction. Authorities say about 13,000 police were assigned to the transport in the Wendland area alone and the local state government put their cost just in the area at 25 million euros.
This was the seventh transport of Castor containers, each of which weighs 120 tonnes, to the Gorleben compound, bringing the number in it to 44. For the next 10 years 12 to 18 Castor containers a year are to go to Gorleben, "which means state of emergency here twice a year," says a spokesperson. From 2005 waste will also come to Gorleben from the British recycling plant at Sellafield north-west England, whose effluents are polluting the Irish Sea. La Hague, from where most of the German power plant waste now in Gorleben has returned, is also a danger to its environment, including a concentration of leukaemia around the state-controlled plutonium factory, confirmed by a government report. Gorleben is also the site of a mine driven into a salt deposit to explore its suitability as a final storage dump for the highly active nuclear waste. The salt has contact with ground water and opponents fear that every new shipment into Gorleben further firms the mine's role as final dump despite the danger of water and other contamination.
Spokesman Ehmke emphasised the "great influx of young people" to the protests and said the resistance against the rhetoric of the government about abandoning nuclear power was growing. He called for the government to finally declare officially why the Gorleben salt deposit is unsuitable as a final nuclear dump. The opponents claim that the conservative Lower Saxony state government is keen to keep Gorleben as the main option, although exploratory mining has been stopped. The opponents say the electricity companies are arguing that with 1.4 billion euros already spent on it, the exploration should continue. "That makes the question why Environment Minister Trittin hasn't got the courage to abandon a salt deposit in contact with ground water all the more urgent," says the civic action group. Another activist spokesman, Jochen Stay, said deliveries to Gorleben couldn't be stopped, but protests would increase pressure against final dumping there. He said the consensus between the government and industry to end nuclear power production within 30 years doesn't solve the final storing problem. The leader of The Greens in the Lower Saxony parliament, Rebecca Harms, who hails from the county, said enormous enthusiasm was still going into organising the protest and the police approach to try to contain it by large numbers was failing. She demanded that the wrong 1977 decision to name the Gorleben salt deposit as the final dump be rescinded at last.
----
Why did I march?
To give the politicians who failed me a lesson in real democracy
The respected British film director Ken Loach was among the hundreds of thousands who marched against President Bush last week. This is his personal picture of the events of the day
23 November 2003
Independent UK
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=466407
"Proud of my country, shamed by my President," was the banner borne by the tall, young American, smart in a blazer and tie, who stood next to me. As he said, he could have passed for a US Republican.
Contrary to rightist stereotypes, he was not at all incongruous on Thursday's march. Public protest has many faces and many guises.
I asked the artist who designed the vivid blood-splattered posters, David Gentleman, how he thought the mood had changed since February's demo. There was an optimism then, he said, that the war could be stopped. It had become apparent that we had been lied to again and again. People are angrier now, their worst expectations realised. The bombings in Istanbul are a terrible illustration of the cycle of violence the anti-war movement predicted.
One of the stewards was a small woman who belied her size by containing the struggling photographers and journalists. The anti-war movement had to develop, she said: "People are desperate to join together, to co-operate and grow." It is clear that Tony Blair has politicised huge swathes of the population - and not in the way he would like. The lies are now beyond dispute: no weapons of mass destruction, no threat.
Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said as much in May 2001: Saddam Hussein had not been able to "develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years". Two months later Condoleezza Rice, the US NAtional Security Adviser, followed suit: "His military forces have not been rebuilt."
We now know the real reason for the war: the privatisation windfall that is under way in Iraq, with 192 public sector companies being disposed of by the US-imposed Iraqi Governing Council to foreign buyers. Re-ordering the economy of Iraq is well under way. The rip-off has begun.
That is the reason for the harsher mood among this week's protesters. We have seen the shop window smashed and now the thieves are stealing the jewellery.
We lined up in Malet Street, facing the British Museum. We are in danger of forgetting what historic occasions these are. Ghada, an organiser whose energy springs from her like a Catherine-wheel, reckons there were 300,000 there. She has a brightness and good humour that is the fuel that keeps spirits high. "It was the most phenomenal week of my life," she said later. Maybe there's a documentary here, comparing her with the seedy hustlers and PR men surrounding our politicians.
The police play an interesting role. Amiable and friendly en route, their spokesman is used to patronise the marchers in interviews. His assessment of the "trouble", or lack of it, is taken as a measure of the march's success. The policing becomes the story. In fact it was a huge, monumental success, the largest weekday demonstration we can remember, a great peaceful declaration of the people's sense of common humanity with those we are told we should be bombing or invading. Ron Kovic, the American who was paralysed in Vietnam and who led the march, embodies this spirit.
Near Parliament Square we passed three smart-looking gents in suits and ties: disapproving, we thought. As one, they sang: "If you think Bush is a wanker, clap your hands." We clapped.
Beneath Big Ben the chant and response was: "That's not what democracy looks like - this is what democracy looks like." The supine behaviour of most Labour and Lib Dem MPs has sadly borne that out.
On Whitehall roofs, crouching figures who looked like hitmen in a bad film ignored our greetings. In the windows below we got waves and even the occasional supportive fist in the air.
Then to Trafalgar Square and the toppling of Bush's statue. I bet they won't show that much on American TV. We wondered if the Americans would notice the absence of cheering crowds.
My personal campaign had got off to a bad start on Wednesday morning. I was asked to appear on the BBC's Daily Politics. The interview, by Andrew Neil, was a disgrace. Neil, who is to political discussion what Bernard Manning is to Swan Lake, asked me about Stalin and the Chinese leadership and interrupted every few seconds. The reason why half the population are disgusted by the alliance between Bush and Blair was lost, I presume intentionally, in the ensuing confusion.
Those who speak against the war get few opportunities to make their case in the authoritative setting of a TV studio. Searching questions are good. A rabid harangue from a presenter known for his right-wing politics is not. Very discreetly, the broadcasters endorse government policy. The uncritical use of the phrase "war on terror" gives it a status it should not have. The sub-text is that "we" are the good guys and "they" are the terrorists.
No such luck. The state terror sponsored by the US does not need to be rehearsed again. From death squads in Central America, support for the torturers Pinochet and Suharto all the way back to Agent Orange in Vietnam, the US, with our collusion, has an unrivalled reputation as the bully of the world.
Viewers tend to side with the interviewer. He or she stands in for us. So we accept the assumptions that lie behind the questions. Implicit support for America, the identification of "terrorist" with "Muslim", the question "how to deal with the terrorist threat" all create a vague sense that Blair and Bush are, by and large, in the right.
The most subtle propaganda comes in the disguise of objectivity. Since most of us experience politics by proxy, it is no wonder that opposition to the war may gradually erode. So thank you for coming, George. Your presence is the best recruiting sergeant the Stop the War Coalition could have. As usual, the sharpest parliamentary occasion came from Scotland. The Scottish Socialist Party proposed that Bush and Blair should be brought before an international court for war crimes. They are in breach of the UN charter, made war illegally, have used cluster bombs and depleted uranium and are responsible for thousands of civilian deaths. They should be bought to trial. Oh to be in Scotland, now that Tommy Sheridan and his five comrades are there!
It was an extraordinary week: meetings, plays, film shows, the Mayor's party, a veritable festival of dissent. Maybe we reminded Bush that this was a state visit, not a visit to the 51st state. So what are we left with, after the marches, the speeches and the thousands of armed police lining the London streets? The cheers that greeted the fall of Bush's effigy were not only about the war. People are critical of the US government for its opposition to the Kyoto agreement and disregard for the environment, its refusal to support the International Criminal Court and the impoverishment of countries and local communities through unfair trade. There is a growing awareness that the Project for the New American Century is unacceptable, with its intention to subjugate the world and its resources to the demands of US capital.
One impression emerges very strongly: the dislocation between Westminster politics and the people - maybe half the population - who opposed Bush's visit not because they are anti-American but because of the lies and hypocrisy he embodies. They - we - are not represented in our political institutions. No one speaks on our behalf.
A century ago there was a similar problem. The Labour Representation Committee gave rise to the Labour Party. Now that party has become the voice of capital. The New Labour project has been merely the last stage in this transformation. Has the war been the catalyst to bring together all those on the left to fill this vacuum? How long can the political process remain credible when so many have no representation?
It is my guess that most of us on the marches and at the various meetings would agree on a basic programme: no more imperialist wars, an end to privatisation, rolling back the sell-offs that have already happened, reversing the intrusion of private contractors in public services, restoring trade union rights, humane treatment of refugees.
In other words, putting the interests of people before the interests of the large corporations.
I cannot recall a time when the prospects for developing that agreement into an organised grouping have been better. Can we measure up to this opportunity?
----
Protesters at US army school met with music: report
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Nov 23, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031123194655.nmf9y6av.html
Some 8,000 protesters gathered outside the Fort Benning US army base this weekend in an annual protest against a school that trains Latin American military officers, local media reported Sunday.
The protesters, however, were met Saturday by patriotic music blaring from loudspeakers on the base after beginning the two-day program of speeches, music and a mock funeral march, the Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Georgia, reported.
Fort Benning officials later stopped playing the music after police asked for it to stop, the daily said.
SOA Watch, the group organizing the annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, called the move a "psychological operation," and said it planned to file a lawsuit.
"There's a lot of ill will being caused that's not necessary," the Reverend Roy Bourgeois, SOA Watch's founder, told the daily. "The closer we get to shutting that school down, the meaner they get. We see this as a form of psychological violence."
Fort Benning spokesman Rich McDowell responded by saying, "Why can they play music and we can't? We're not participating in political action; we're playing patriotic music."
Police estimated the number of protesters at about 8,000. Four protesters were arrested trying to enter the base, the daily said.
----
F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
November 23, 2003
New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/national/23FBI.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.
The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site.
F.B.I. officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.
The initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the F.B.I.'s approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption.
But some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the abuses of the 1960's and 1970's, when J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I. director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"The F.B.I. is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we're going back to the days of Hoover."
Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University who has written about F.B.I. history, said collecting intelligence at demonstrations is probably legal.
But he added: "As a matter of principle, it has a very serious chilling effect on peaceful demonstration. If you go around telling people, `We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations,' that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in F.B.I. files."
The abuses of the Hoover era, which included efforts by the F.B.I. to harass and discredit Hoover's political enemies under a program known as Cointelpro, led to tight restrictions on F.B.I. investigations of political activities.
Those restrictions were relaxed significantly last year, when Attorney General John Ashcroft issued guidelines giving agents authority to attend political rallies, mosques and any event "open to the public."
Mr. Ashcroft said the Sept. 11 attacks made it essential that the F.B.I. be allowed to investigate terrorism more aggressively. The bureau's recent strategy in policing demonstrations is an outgrowth of that policy, officials said.
"We're not concerned with individuals who are exercising their constitutional rights," one F.B.I. official said. "But it's obvious that there are individuals capable of violence at these events. We know that there are anarchists that are actively involved in trying to sabotage and commit acts of violence at these different events, and we also know that these large gatherings would be a prime target for terrorist groups."
Civil rights advocates, relying largely on anecdotal evidence, have complained for months that federal officials have surreptitiously sought to suppress the First Amendment rights of antiwar demonstrators.
Critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, for instance, have sued the government to learn how their names ended up on a "no fly" list used to stop suspected terrorists from boarding planes. Civil rights advocates have accused federal and local authorities in Denver and Fresno, Calif., of spying on antiwar demonstrators or infiltrating planning meetings. And the New York Police Department this year questioned many of those arrested at demonstrations about their political affiliations, before halting the practice and expunging the data in the face of public criticism.
The F.B.I. memorandum, however, appears to offer the first corroboration of a coordinated, nationwide effort to collect intelligence regarding demonstrations.
The memorandum, circulated on Oct. 15 - just 10 days before many thousands gathered in Washington and San Francisco to protest the American occupation of Iraq - noted that the bureau "possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests" and that "most protests are peaceful events."
But it pointed to violence at protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as evidence of potential disruption. Law enforcement officials said in interviews that they had become particularly concerned about the ability of antigovernment groups to exploit demonstrations and promote a violent agenda.
"What a great opportunity for an act of terrorism, when all your resources are dedicated to some big event and you let your guard down," a law enforcement official involved in securing recent demonstrations said. "What would the public say if we didn't look for criminal activity and intelligence at these events?"
The memorandum urged local law enforcement officials "to be alert to these possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts" to counterterrorism task forces run by the F.B.I. It warned about an array of threats, including homemade bombs and the formation of human chains.
The memorandum discussed demonstrators' "innovative strategies," like the videotaping of arrests as a means of "intimidation" against the police. And it noted that protesters "often use the Internet to recruit, raise funds and coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations."
"Activists may also make use of training camps to rehearse tactics and counter-strategies for dealing with the police and to resolve any logistical issues," the memorandum continued. It also noted that protesters may raise money to help pay for lawyers for those arrested.
F.B.I. counterterrorism officials developed the intelligence cited in the memorandum through firsthand observation, informants, public sources like the Internet and other methods, officials said.
Officials said the F.B.I. treats demonstrations no differently than other large-scale and vulnerable gatherings. The aim, they said, was not to monitor protesters but to gather intelligence.
Critics said they remained worried. "What the F.B.I. regards as potential terrorism," Mr. Romero of the A.C.L.U. said, "strikes me as civil disobedience."
----
Protesters Storm Georgia Parliament
Shevardnadze Flees but Vows Not to Resign
By Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 23, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6093-2003Nov22?language=printer
MOSCOW, Nov. 22 -- The opposition in the former Soviet republic of Georgia launched what it called a "velvet revolution" Saturday as protesters stormed Parliament, occupied President Eduard Shevardnadze's headquarters and declared their leader the acting head of state.
Armed guards whisked Shevardnadze away from the Parliament building after demonstrators broke into the chamber while he was speaking. Fleeing to a government residence, he called the revolt an "armed coup d'etat," declared a state of emergency and gave the opposition 48 hours to clear out of government buildings.
Armored vehicles surrounded the Interior Ministry late in the evening, but riot police in the streets largely refused to intervene, allowing protesters free rein in the capital of Tbilisi, suggesting that Shevardnadze no longer had full control. Hours after demonstrators took over Parliament, security guards permitted them to enter the government seat of power at the State Chancellery, snatch Shevardnadze's chair from his office, move it outside and burn it.
"We're making a revolution," Zurab Zhvania, a former Parliament speaker and one of three main opposition leaders, said in a telephone interview from Tbilisi. "It was an incredible day. We were not expecting such an outcome, but people were completely galvanized."
Zhvania's successor and ally, Parliament speaker Nino Burdzhanadze, declared herself the country's interim leader until the situation cleared up and called on Shevardnadze to peacefully step aside. As tens of thousands of flag-waving protesters surged through the streets of Tbilisi on Saturday evening, she pledged to guarantee security for Shevardnadze and his family if he resigned.
The dramatic confrontation culminated three weeks of street protests against parliamentary elections that opposition leaders considered rigged. There were no reports of serious violence Saturday, and, contrary to Shevardnadze's claim, no evidence that the opposition was armed. Opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili and his colleagues entered the Parliament chamber with flowers, according to witnesses.
Shevardnadze took a tough line after being evacuated from Parliament. "If I prove weak now, the people won't forgive me," he told reporters, flanked by the interior minister, who commands domestic troops. "We will restore order and punish the criminals. They will be arrested."
Shevardnadze concluded that he had been too lenient with his opponents. "I'm to blame for much of what's happened, as there's too much I've let them get away with. That is a crime in regard to the people and country. I won't let any of this happen anymore."
He rejected demands that he quit. But he left open the prospect of surrendering his office before his final term expires in 2005. "I can step down only within the framework of the constitution. It will depend on the Parliament and the population, but everything has to happen within the constitutional framework."
Shevardnadze, 75, who earned international renown for his role in ending the Cold War during his days as Mikhail Gorbachev's silver-haired Soviet foreign minister, has become reviled at home after a decade-long tenure spoiled by civil war, poverty and corruption. After years of propping him up with generous financial aid, the United States lately has soured on him for failing to tackle the systemic problems in the nation of 5 million in the Caucasus Mountains.
The U.S. State Department called on all sides Saturday "to refrain from the use of force or violence and to enter a dialogue with a view to restoring calm and reaching a compromise solution acceptable to all and in the interest of Georgia."
The beleaguered Georgian leader appealed to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to travel to Georgia to help resolve the crisis, U.S. officials confirmed.
The overture came during a telephone call organized by Powell that included U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in a bid to help prevent the crisis from deteriorating into violence, according to the State Department.
Powell kept Shevardnadze at arm's length, however. Powell said he would try to visit the former Soviet republic someday, but U.S. officials insisted that he does not currently have travel plans. Powell and Annan instead urged Shevardnadze to peacefully work with the opposition.
U.S. diplomats in Tbilisi also urged the opposition to use restraint, said Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman. The United States will be "coordinating" with the Russians. he added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin also spoke with Shevardnadze and dispatched Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov to Tbilisi to help mediate. Ivanov arrived in the Georgian capital early Sunday and consulted with government officials, then proceeded to the Parliament building where he met with opposition leaders and addressed their supporters before dawn.
Years of domestic frustration with Shevardnadze finally erupted after parliamentary elections on Nov. 2 were marred by widespread reports of fraud. U.S. and European observers denounced the vote as rigged and opposition supporters have taken to the streets for demonstrations nearly every day since then.
The government election commission took 21/2 weeks to count the votes, finally giving Shevardnadze's party, For a New Georgia, the most votes, or 21 percent. Shevardnadze moved to form a coalition with the second-place finisher, the Revival party, led by a regional chieftain allied with Russia.
Shevardnadze was trying to convene the newly elected Parliament Saturday when demonstrators gathered outside burst into the chamber. As Saakashvili and hundreds of protesters rushed in from one side, security guards grabbed Shevardnadze and moved him out a back door. Appearing disoriented and still clutching his unfinished speech in a shaking left hand, Shevardnadze was put into an armored car and rushed away, flanked by pickup trucks with armed militia.
"It was really spectacular," Georgi Kandelaki, 21, who was one of the first protesters inside the building, said by telephone from Tbilisi. "The army, the police, they were stepping aside at every step. They just said, 'Go ahead, go in.' "
Shevardnadze's office accused the opposition of trying to harm him. "They wanted to attack the president but didn't succeed," his deputy spokesman, Bondu Zenarashvili, said by telephone.
The developments met with approval among some ordinary Georgians, according to interviews from the capital. "We voted for the opposition and most Georgians are for the opposition, but the elections were blocked," said Josef Kumaritov, 24, a recent college graduate. He added, however, "there's still a lot of danger here."
Opposition leaders tried to forestall violence and embraced the language and tactics of peaceful revolutions in Czechoslovakia and Serbia. "The velvet revolution in Georgia has become a fact," Saakashvili told supporters outside Parliament, adopting the name of the 1989 uprising in Prague, the Czech capital. "We don't need any bloody revolution in the country," Burdzhanadze said.
Saakashvili and Burdzhanadze both told CNN that they would guarantee Shevardnadze's safety if he did not respond with force and suggested they would let him remain in office as long as he called presidential and parliamentary elections.
Under the constitution, Burdzhanadze, as Parliament speaker, would succeed Shevardnadze for 45 days if he resigned, pending a new presidential election.
Staff writers Robin Wright in Washington and Colum Lynch in New York contributed to this report.
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Famed Nun Keeps Promise to Priest
'Dead Man Walking' Author Gives Rousing Speech at Rally
by Mick Walsh
Sunday, November 23, 2003
by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer (Georgia)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1123-10.htm
Sister Helen Prejean on Saturday kept a promise she made to fellow Louisianian Roy Bourgeois 13 years ago: She took part in the annual SOA Watch demonstration outside the gates of Fort Benning.
Also See: School of the Americas Watch
SOAW Protest News via Atlanta Indy Media Sister Helen, a staunch opponent of the death penalty and author of "Dead Man Walking," was on a walk of her own -- from Florida's death house in Starke to Georgia's in Jackson -- the very weekend in 1990 when the first protest against the School of the Americas was conducted.
"I told him I'd try to make the next one," she said Saturday, soon after delivering a rousing 10-minute speech to a crowd ranging from college students to World War II veterans. "But the opportunity simply didn't exist until now."
The 64-year-old Roman Catholic nun, who is based in New Orleans but whose stage is the world, condemned the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, calling it "a killing machine" and comparing it to government-sanctioned executions.
"I'm a critic of the death penalty," she said, her voice a bit rough after having to shout her speech over piped-in noise from Fort Benning, "but I don't prioritize my objections. If I perceive something as injustice, I address it."
During her speech, she quoted from a letter by actress Susan Sarandon, who played Sister Helen in the 1995 film "Dead Man Walking" and who won a Best Actress Oscar for the portrayal.
"I am Susan Sarandon," laughed the nun, "and she's me. The only way you can tell us apart is by our wardrobes." Sister Helen was dressed in faded jeans, a pink sweatshirt and a crucifix hanging from her neck.
The diminutive sister, who began her prison ministry in 1981, may have a following as big as Sarandon's.
"I came all the way down from Atlanta just to get my picture made with Sister Helen," said college student Sean Massey. And he did. Many old friends from New Orleans and its Loyola University were in the audience.
She passed out hugs and autographs to anyone who asked.
"I just love this crowd of people," she said, looking down Benning Road.
"You know, these people get it. You can feel it. They know what is important in life. They know the truth when they hear it, and they're prepared to act on it. I'm particularly heartened to see so many young people here."
The tireless nun, who is wrapping up her second book, showed she was nifty on her feet, clapping and tapping as the hip hop group Kuuma Lynx performed on the stage. This came just two days after she traveled from her home to the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana to visit death row inmates.
"I really don't have much free time at all anymore," she said. "My speaking engagements are booked a year in advance. But I'm certainly happy I was able to come down here this weekend and lend my voice to the real heroes of this movement, the men and women who suffered so much abuse from soldiers trained at this school."
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