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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 Californ