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NUCLEAR
Iran to Open Nuclear Facilities to U.N.
Israel announces successful test of anti-missile missile
Nuclear-Powered Spacecraft Is Proposed for Voyage to Jupiter
The Complex Metamorphosis of American Foreign Policy
MILITARY
Afghanistan Opens a Rebuilt Road to Unite North and South
Classified Look at U.S. Biodefense Nearly Finished
Halliburton handed Iraq contract
Patriots and Profits
New Navy Contract Trims Northrop's Profit
Trial could give Saddam powerful platform
U.S. Seeks Compromise Plan for Iraqi Political Transition
Suicide Blasts in Baghdad Kill 8 As Hussein Allies Are Arrested
Israel Devised Then Dropped Plot to Kill Hussein, Reports Say
Bomb Aimed at Pakistani Leader Weighed Nearly Half a Ton
C.I.A. Will Lead Interrogation of Hussein, Rumsfeld Says
Security Council to Discuss a Possible New Role in Iraq
Lawmaker Criticizes Capture Of Hussein
Clark Testifies Against Milosevic at Hague Tribunal
Bush Says Iraqis Will Try Hussein
Iraqi Planners Hope To Start Trial by Spring
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Panel on Terror Calls for Board on Protecting Civil Liberties
Justices Will Hear Appeal on Cheney's Energy Panel
High Court Will Review Ruling On Cheney Task Force Records
Texas's Death Row in a Momentary Lull
Justices' Ruling Sets Broad 'Probable Cause' Standard in Drug Arrests
U.S. Is Losing Focus on Terror Fight, Panel Says
ENERGY AND OTHER
Federal Agencies Would Turn Woody Biomass into Energy
Listening to the Climate Models, and Trying to Wake Up the World
New Policy on Mercury Pollution Was Rejected by Clinton E.P.A.
EPA Announces 'Cap and Trade' Plan to Cut Mercury Pollution
ACTIVISTS
Enola Gay display angers victims
The Biggest Arrival at Dulles
A Big Museum Opens, to Jeers as Well as Cheers
Protests disrupt museum opening
Grief overflows, anger flares as Hiroshima bomber goes on display
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- iran
Iran to Open Nuclear Facilities to U.N.
By VANESSA GERA
Associated Press Writer
Dec 18, 2003 2:55 PM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_IRAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Iran signed an accord Thursday that gives U.N. experts full access to its nuclear facilities, yielding to international pressure to end two decades of secrecy and prove it has not tried to build atomic weapons.
But while Iran called the agreement "historic," the United States played down its importance of the signing, saying it was "a useful step in the right direction," but would require monitoring to ensure Tehran does not break promises.
Washington, which has accused Tehran of trying to develop nuclear weapons in secret, said it would take several years before the world gains confidence that Iran is being truthful about its atomic program. Iran insists its program is peaceful and geared only toward producing electricity.
"My country has taken a great and important step towards revealing its attitude of transparency and its full commitment to international confidence-building," said Ali Akbar Salehi, the Iranian representative to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.
"I ardently hope that the new stage is set and that my country shall no more be subject to unfair and politically motivated accusations and allegations," he said, after he and the IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei signed the accord. The agreement, tacked on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, requires Iran to submit to intrusive, surprise U.N. inspections of its nuclear complexes and research facilities. The treaty, which Iran has endorsed, forbids it from developing atomic weapons.
ElBaradei called the signing "an important building block toward establishing confidence that Iran's program is exclusively for peaceful purposes."
While he called on Tehran to ratify the agreement quickly, he also praised the government for beginning in October to open up suspect sites that were previously off-limits and let agency inspectors conduct unannounced checks - effectively acting as if the accord is already in force.
ElBaradei said inspections so far have not proved or disproved Iran's claims that it has not tried to develop nuclear weapons.
But if subsequent inspections dispel suspicions about Iran's activities, the U.N. nuclear agency will have broken "a vicious cycle which has been going on for over 20 years," he said.
Kenneth Brill, the U.S. envoy to the IAEA, called Thursday's signing "a useful step in the right direction," but said only aggressive inspections would erase doubts sown by Iran's "nearly two decades of deception."
Iran is still seeking new weapons, a senior Bush administration official said Thursday in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official told The Associated Press that the United States would be watching closely to see if Tehran complies with the inspection accord.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush labeled Iran part of an "axis of evil" along with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea, which Washington also suspects of developing weapons of mass destruction.
The European Union welcomed the new agreement, saying "it will help in establishing the international community's confidence in Iran's assurance about the peaceful nature of its nuclear program."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said his country also was pleased with the agreement but added that "much remains to be done," urging Iran to ratify it "as soon as possible."
Although Iran repeatedly had said it would sign the accord, its failure for weeks to follow through had led to speculation that it might be stalling.
The IAEA's 35-nation board of governors censured Iran in November for its past secrecy in a resolution that warned Tehran to stay in line with international efforts to make sure the country has no nuclear weapons ambitions.
Although the resolution did not threaten to send the matter to the U.N. Security Council - a tougher approach that Washington had sought - it warned Tehran that the IAEA would consider further action if "serious Iranian failures" arise.
Under international pressure, Iran also has agreed to suspend its enrichment of uranium, which it says had been confined to non-weapons levels anyway.
On the Net:
IAEA, http://www.iaea.org
-------- missile defense
Israel announces successful test of anti-missile missile
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Dec 16, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031216070149.08quf65i.html
The Israeli army on Tuesday carried out a new test of a missile designed to shoot down ballistic missiles in flight, the defence ministry said, adding that the operation was successful.
The ministry said that the missile, named Hetz (arrow) was fired from an aircraft and successfully intercepted and destroyed another missile which was similar to the Soviet-made Scud missiles that have been widely used in the region, notably by the ousted Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.
The statement said the test, the 11th of the Hetz system to date, involved hitting an incoming missile at high altitude.
The Hetz programme was launched in 1988 as part of a US programme to develop an anti-missile defence system, nicknamed "Star Wars" after the film of that name.
-------- space
Nuclear-Powered Spacecraft Is Proposed for Voyage to Jupiter
December 16, 2003
By KENNETH CHANG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/science/space/16JUPI.html?pagewanted=all&position=
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 12 - The nuclear power industry may find its revival in space - on the way to Jupiter.
Development of nuclear energy has been stymied for decades on Earth because of high costs, the fear of another accident like those at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, and the problem of how to deal with radioactive waste. But NASA and planetary scientists see it as opening a new era of research in space by providing a plentiful power source for deep space probes, which has been lacking so far.
"This is an unprecedented opportunity for exploration," said Dr. Ronald Greeley, a professor of geological sciences at the Arizona State University. Dr. Greeley is co-leader of a team of 38 scientists who have been working with NASA since February to define what kind of science could be pursued by a nuclear-powered spacecraft at Jupiter.
The proposed spacecraft, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, would be able to carry new and more powerful instruments and would be able to move in and out of orbit of different Jovian moons.
The team of scientists presented its recommendations at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union here last week. Still in the preliminary planning stages, Jimo would cost several billion dollars, which includes developing a space-worthy nuclear reactor. The earliest launch date would be 2011, and, Dr. Greeley said, "None of us will be surprised if it launches later than 2011."
Jimo would also have to overcome concerns about what could happen in case of an accident.
As many as 1 in 10 rocket launches still fail, opening the possibility of a nuclear reactor exploding high in the atmosphere and dispersing radioactive material. "As you introduce more nuclear power into space missions, you're looking for trouble," said Bruce K. Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
A space probe like Jimo would also be "an icebreaker to institutionalize nuclear power in space," Mr. Gagnon said. "Later it would be used for military purposes" like powering space-based lasers, he said.
NASA officials said the nuclear reactor would not be turned on until after the spacecraft reaches orbit and that safety would be a primary design concern. The nuclear fuel will be designed not to break up even if the rocket explodes.
The appeal of a small nuclear power generator for propulsion in space is that power becomes more precious with distance from the Sun. In the outer solar system, sunlight is too dim for solar panels and technologies like fuel cells are not reliable enough for the years-long voyage to distant plants. Until now, NASA has used hunks of radioactive plutonium that generate heat as they decay, and the heat is converted into modest amounts of electricity.
NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which in September concluded a hugely successful 14-year mission with a deliberate plunge into Jupiter, subsisted on an electrical diet of a few hundred watts - which would light up a handful of light bulbs.
That was still enough for Galileo to produce a wealth of discoveries, especially about Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Cameras captured up-close images of Europa's exquisitely cracked crust of ice, and magnetic field measurements indicated that beneath that ice is a layer of electrically conductive material - what planetary scientists believe is a liquid ocean and possibly the most likely place in the solar system to find life. Because Galileo had only small maneuvering thrusters, it could not enter orbit around any of the moons. Galileo's brief flights past Europa produced high-resolution images of less than 0.1 percent of the surface.
With nuclear propulsion, mission controllers would be able to drop into orbit around one moon for several months, then restart the engine to propel the probe to the next destination. "You are in the driver's seat," said Raynor L. Taylor, program executive for icy moons orbiter project. "You can control where you can go."
With a reactor on board, the spacecraft would also have perhaps a thousand times more power available. That would make possible power-hungry instruments like ground-penetrating radar to look at what lies beneath the surface. Scientists would like to investigate the geological history of the moons' surfaces and identify the types of molecules there, especially ones that might indicate life.
Nuclear propulsion is an old idea. In the 1950's, the United States attempted to develop a rocket propelled by small atomic bombs tossed out the back. NASA now envisions something less dramatic.
A uranium fission reactor, which would not be turned on until the probe reaches space, would generate heat that would be converted into electricity to power an ion engine. Ion engines use electric fields to accelerate ions to very high speeds, producing thrust.
NASA successfully tested a nonnuclear ion engine on an experimental spacecraft called Deep Space 1 in 1998. The ion engines in Jimo would have to be at least 10 times more powerful. NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland announced last month a successful test of one possible design.
Sean O'Keefe, NASA's administrator, originally pushed for sending a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Pluto, the only planet not yet visited close-up. However, planetary scientists rallied to the defense of a lower-cost, conventional space probe already in planning. There is a rush to reach Pluto, which is cooling as it moves away from the Sun, before its atmosphere freezes and disappears.
The scientists working on Jimo are much more enthusiastic about the promises of nuclear propulsion. "This would be taking steps in leaps and bounds potentially," Dr. Greeley said.
Conceptual designs envision a spacecraft about 100 feet long with the nuclear reactor at one end and the scientific instruments at the other. Three studies for more detailed designs are under way.
"We have been surveying industry for their technology and capabilities," said Mr. Taylor of NASA. "We see no roadblocks."
-------- us politics
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
The Complex Metamorphosis of American Foreign Policy
December 16, 2003
By JAMES CHACE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/books/16CHAC.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1071700262-IZ8mtdhyRTdE3kVAZ6Doww&pagewanted=all&position=
It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters," Woodrow Wilson remarked as he left his home in Princeton, N.J., for his inauguration as president in 1913. But that was precisely what fate had in store for him. The same might be said for George W. Bush, who has become a war president, determined to imprint democratic values in the Middle East while wiping out terrorism in that region and then worldwide. At best the Americans will be seen as "democratic imperialists," struggling in a quixotic crusade to make the world safe for democracy.
In "America Unbound," two highly respected foreign policy experts, Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and James M. Lindsay, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, have written a splendidly illuminating book on "the Bush revolution" and the doctrine of unilateral intervention and pre-emptive war.
Buttressed by extensive research, the authors demonstrate convincingly that Mr. Bush is not the puppet of the vice president or the Defense Department hawks. He has fundamental beliefs that have reversed America's six-decade commitment to internationalism. His foreign policy for the 21st century marks a decided preference for unilateralism.
As the authors describe it, his policy rests on two beliefs: "The first was that in a dangerous world the best - if not the only - way to ensure America's security was to shed the constraints imposed by friends, allies, and international institutions." The second belief was that "an America unbound should use its strength to change the status quo in the world."
This does not mean that America need always act alone. When unilateral actions seem impossible or unwise, Mr. Bush will seek allies, but not to make decisions that would require their approval. His preferred approach is to seek ad hoc "coalitions of the willing," what Richard Haas, a former adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has called "à la carte multilateralism."
What Mr. Daalder and Mr. Lindsay document is the change from Mr. Bush's "realist" vision of the uses of American power to an ideologically driven policy, a kind of muscular Wilsonianism. The idea that power dictates a nation's interests is central to realist theory. Since we live in a dangerous world, defined as one close to Thomas Hobbes's view of life as a "war of all against all," the realist sees policy as dealing with the world as it is rather than as it ought to be. Power, in the hegemonists' view , is "the coin of the realm even in a globalized world." The nation-state is still alive and well, and great powers matter the most.
As Mr. Bush once argued, "The big issues are going to be China and Russia." With the unrivaled military and economic power of the United States, "security in the world is going to be how do we deal with China and how do we deal with Russia." American power would allow the United States to act unilaterally without fear or favor as long as other powers were not capable of seriously challenging it. These views, the authors say, were held by advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice: the "assertive nationalists."
Mr. Daalder and Mr. Lindsay single out the deputy secretary of defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board, often referred to as leaders of the neoconservative wing of the administration, as arguing that America should "actively deploy its overwhelming military, economic, and political might to remake the world in its image - and that doing so would serve the interest of other countries as well as the United States."
The "assertive nationalists," on the other hand, were "deeply skeptical of nation-building," and scorned the notion "that American power could create what others were unable to build for themselves." After the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, this policy changed and came to reflect the notion that America had to fight terrorism by changing the hearts and minds of those who supported the terrorists, and that nation-building might, after all, be required in order to accomplish this. Hence the emergence of democratic imperialism, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.
What also emerged was the so-called Bush doctrine of "pre-emption." In his commencement address at West Point on June 1, 2002, Mr. Bush laid to rest the hallowed policy of deterrence, which had emerged from America's struggle to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union in the nuclear age. In combatting terrorism, "deterrence - the promise of massive retaliation against nations - means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend."
Containment therefore was dead. Now there was a need to "confront the worst threats before they emerge," Mr. Bush said. "In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act."
The doctrine of pre-emption represented a major departure in American foreign policy. As Mr. Daalder and Mr. Lindsay, as well as Noam Chomsky in his book "Hegemony or Survival," warn, the Bush strategy has conflated the idea of preventive and pre-emptive war. Preventive wars are initiated by countries against states that have not yet been attacked. Israel's strike against Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 is an example of this. There was no evidence that Iraq was about to strike Israel. Pre-emptive wars are begun when another country is clearly about to attack. Israel's war in June 1967 against its Arab neighbors was just such a war. Mr. Bush's oratory - and his justification for the Iraq War - is an example of a preventive war, not a pre-emptive one. Mr. Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has written widely on foreign affairs, exaggerates his portrait of America as an evil empire; nonetheless, he is acute in his conclusion that pre-emptive or preventive wars can encourage smaller nations to protect themselves from an American attack by acquiring their own weapons of mass destruction, and particularly nuclear ones.
Rather than turning away from international agreements to curb nuclear proliferation (for example, blocking negotiations at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in 2001), the Bush administration, he says, would be well advised to concentrate its efforts on controlling the militarization of space. Such a policy shift, however, seems hardly likely for a president less disposed to being a sheriff leading a posse than a lonely gunslinger riding off to seek another showdown with the enemy.
James Chace teaches international relations at Bard College. His new book, "1912 - Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs: The Election That Changed the Country," will be published in May.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghanistan Opens a Rebuilt Road to Unite North and South
December 16, 2003
By AMY WALDMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/international/asia/16CND-AFGH.html
DURANI, Afghanistan, Dec. 16 - The presidential special envoy and American ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, did not begin his remarks here today with the words "We did it," but he might as well have.
Two days after American officials celebrated their triumphant capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq with the phrase "We got him," the Bush administration met a key goal in in its parallel effort to secure and rebuild Afghanistan.
The once-torturous but now silkily reconstructed road between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar was formally completed today, just as President Bush had promised President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan more than a year ago that it would be.
"We are standing - literally - on the road to Afghanistan's future," Mr. Khalilzad said, speaking to a group of dignitaries gathered for an inauguration ceremony at kilometer 43 of the seductively smooth strip of gray. "It is a future of national unity. It is a future of prosperity. It is a future of peace."
The resurfacing of the road, which has reduced the travel time on its 300-mile distance from as much as 30 hours to 6 hours or less, has become the most visible sign of Afghanistan's postwar reconstruction, which many Afghans say has otherwise been frustratingly slow. It has given the Afghans who live nearby easier access to health care and markets and linked the Pashtun-dominated south with the north.
It is also the most visible evidence of the United States' commitment to that reconstruction, with America providing $190 million to complete the highway, the first phase of an effort to rebuild the ring road that circumnavigates Afghanistan. The highway had originally been built with United States government financing in the 1960's. The reconstruction began in January of this year.
"President Bush personally committed himself to the success of this project and he is a man who keeps his promises," Mr. Khalilzad said, referring to Mr. Bush's determination that the highway be finished before the end of the year.
In truth, the road, whose reconstruction was overseen by the Louis Berger Group, is not totally done: it has only a single layer of asphalt, with additional layers to be laid next spring, when shoulders will be built and signs placed.
But even as is, the road will allow for easy travel in winter, and it allowed two presidents to fulfill their pledges.
For Mr. Karzai, who has been defending the achievements of his presidency this week at an assembly to ratify a new Afghan constitution, today's inauguration was a way to show that his government can deliver development and security.
"This is bringing back to us the life that we all desired," Mr. Karzai said. He noted that the reconstruction of Afghanistan's shattered roads and highways "was something asked of me every day, every hour, by the people of Afghanistan."
The pressure to complete the road quickly had not just come from Mr. Bush, Mr. Karzai made clear, apologizing to his minister of public works, "Every day, without asking after your health, I asked: how is your road?"
The road's rapid reconstruction, and the urge to finish it before year-end, was part of a new drive to "accelerate success" in Afghanistan, ahead of elections scheduled for both Afghanistan and the United States next year.
The United States has budgeted $2 billion for fiscal year 2004 in Afghanistan. Part of the money will go to further road-building, including the road from Kandahar to Herat, and more than 1,000 kilometers of small feeder roads.
The road's potential to transform Afghan lives is already clear. A mechanic, Hamayoun, at a nearby bazaar said the road had made it easier to get help for sick people - and reaffirmed his faith in his government. "Now we realize our government will go forward for reconstruction," he said.
But the road's inauguration was marred by the fact that not everyone feels secure enough to use the road. As construction on the road proceeded, so did attacks by a resurgent Taliban, who killed four Afghans securing the road and seriously wounded 15 people. Eventually almost 1,000 guards had to be deployed to protect construction work.
Mr. Karzai prayed at a plaque to memorialize the dead, calling them "the martyrs of the reconstruction of Afghanistan." He and others spoke of a Turkish engineer who was kidnapped and then released by the Taliban, and of two Indian engineers who are still being held.
"They will fail in their attempts to stop Afghanistan's progress," Mr. Khalilzad said of those launching the attacks.
But some southern delegates for the constitutional assembly who attended today's road opening said they had been to flown to Kabul for the assembly, or avoided the road, out of concern for their safety.
The continuing threats were underscored by the huge security presence on the stretch, lined with snow-dusted hills and barren poplars, between Kabul and the dedication site. Mr. Karzai's American-guarded convoy drove down a road cleared of traffic, lined with armored personnel carriers and troops, and watched over by Apache helicopters.
Mr. Karzai did not drive back to Kabul, instead flying back in a Chinook helicopter. After his departure, the road opened again, with packed taxis and overloaded trucks speeding along its smoothness.
-------- biological weapons
Classified Look at U.S. Biodefense Nearly Finished
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3082-2003Dec15.html
Senior White House officials are nearing completion of a classified "Biodefense End-to-End Assessment" that systematically catalogues the gaps in the nation's safeguards against biological attack and begins to develop strategies for filling them, say bioterrorism experts in and out of government.
The effort is being spearheaded by retired Gen. John Gordon, President Bush's homeland security adviser, who surveyed domestic security "from 30,000 feet," said one administration aide, with the intention of better prioritizing nearly $6 billion in annual biodefense spending.
The White House timed completion of the assessment to the budget process, intending to shift more money to areas of weakness or projects that hold special promise of improving security. A few people said Bush may also tout the project in his State of the Union address next month.
In response to inquiries, Gordon released a statement yesterday confirming the effort, which had been so secret that even some of the individuals contributing to it were not aware of the scope of the project.
"This is the first time anybody tried to look at the whole bio problem across the board," said one participant. This person said biological warfare continues to be a top concern because of the ever-changing, increasingly sophisticated nature of science. Genetic engineering and technological advances mean a never-ending supply of new, unanticipated threats, he said.
"It's easy to hypothesize an infinite variety of science-fictiony threats," he said, "but we need to focus on what's realistic."
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, for instance, have been developing a foam that neutralizes anthrax spores. Pentagon officials continue work on detection systems for potentially lethal biological agents such as smallpox, anthrax or ebola. And several agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services are researching new antidotes and vaccines.
For some time, security experts have fretted that the nation's biological defense programs were spread out over too many agencies, often consumed by infighting over staff, money and prestige. Even with the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in early 2003, there was still a sense among some that no one in the administration had a complete picture of what has been done and what needs to be done to strengthen defenses against a biological attack.
A fresh iteration of those concerns was released yesterday by the homeland security commission chaired by former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III. In its report, the commission warns that anti-terrorism "momentum appears to have waned" and efforts are often hampered by "the lack of a clear, articulated vision from the federal level."
George Foresman, a commission member and deputy director of Virginia's Office of Preparedness, said he would welcome a comprehensive review and recommendations by the White House. He worries that the Department of Homeland Security has focused too heavily on immediate crises and protecting physical assets -- "gates, guns and guards," as he put it.
"There needs to be an entity outside DHS at a high enough level that in the quiet of the moment can look ahead, whether it's six months or 10 years, and be sure our activities are correctly synchronized," Foresman said.
Military personnel and advisers to Vice President Cheney have been integrally involved in the assessment, though the project has stretched far beyond typical national security experts to include food safety staff in the Agriculture Department, scientists at the National Institutes of Health and officials from the Office of Management and Budget. A half dozen people involved with the assessment spoke on condition of anonymity.
"There are things going on in various pockets of the government that other agencies don't know about," said one outside consultant who has contributed ideas. "General Gordon's office is looking at this very holistically."
In his statement acknowledging the effort, Gordon said: "Working with all government agencies responsible for biodefense issues, the Homeland Security Council is leading and coordinating an assessment of U.S. preparedness, vulnerabilities, and capabilities for defending against bioterrorist attack. This assessment will enable us to evaluate the wide range of biodefense activities throughout the government and further improve our ability to protect the American people against this threat."
The assessment is divided into six main categories -- threat assessment and awareness, prevention, protection, surveillance and detection, response and recovery, and response to future threats. It places heavy emphasis on developing new "countermeasures" such as vaccines and antidotes to protect civilians from a host of existing and future biological agents, said one top official.
In many instances the report "redirects agencies and redirects priorities," said one author. Some gaps identified by Gordon's group, such as the need for more sensitive detection systems, will receive additional money, said one adviser. Other problems, such as how to respond to mass casualty disasters, cannot be solved with cash, the source said.
"There is no silver bullet to that problem," the adviser said. "We need to encourage smart people who really know the problem to continue to explore the options."
Gordon, former administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration and former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took over the Homeland Security Council at the White House after Tom Ridge was elevated to the Cabinet.
Bush allies hope Gordon's assessment will quell some critics. One administration official said the average citizen would be "amazed" at the progress that has been made since Sept. 11, 2001. Among the accomplishments are: a vastly expanded pharmaceutical stockpile; modernizations at most state laboratories; the "Bio-Watch" network of sensors capable of detecting dangerous biological agents; and plans for handling quarantines.
"We've made significant progress on biodefense since 9/11 and the anthrax attacks of 2001," Gordon said. "These are important first steps, but we are constantly evaluating the threats we face and the new technologies and methods for addressing those threats."
-------- business
Halliburton handed Iraq contract
Richard Thomson in New York,
Evening Standard
16 December 2003
http://www.thisismoney.com/20031216/nm71939.html
S Vice-President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, facing demands to pay back the money it has overcharged the American government for petrol in Iraq, has won a $222m (£127m) contract for work without competitive tender.
The contract was awarded to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root last week at the same time as a Pentagon audit showed it had charged $61m more than the market rate for fuel in Iraq.
To avoid having to put the work out to tender, the contract is being funded from the Development Fund for Iraq.
Contracts paid for out of the $18.6bn recently approved by Congress may only be awarded after a competitive tender, a stricture that doesn't apply to the Development Fund.
So far Kellogg Brown & Root has been awarded a total of $2.3bn without competitive bidding. The new contract is for the restoration of essential infrastructure of the Iraqi oil industry, the US Army Corps of Engineers said.
Halliburton again denied yesterday that it was guilty of over-billing for oil and gas that it has been bringing into Iraq from Kuwait and Turkey. It welcomed further reviews and audits of its work.
The imports are necessary because war-torn Iraq, despite huge oil reserves, is not yet producing enough for itself. Most of the funds to pay for the imported oil come from the Development Fund.
Pentagon auditors say it is charging an average of $2.64 a gallon for the imported fuel - roughly twice as much as local Iraqi importers charge.
According to Press reports, the company was urged by the US government to maintain contracts with Kuwaiti suppliers despite the high costs and against KBR's own suggestions.
But the affair has raised wider questions about the handling of post-war contracts which led yesterday to the news that the Bush administration plans to appoint Robert 'Moose' Cobb, inspector general of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad to oversee investigations of any alleged abuses.
Cobb will co-ordinate audits and investigations, and monitor and review reconstruction contracts.
Bush is under mounting pressure from both his political rivals and Republican insiders to crack down on any abuses.
Bush sent Cobb, a lawyer in the White House, to Nasa in April last year to tackle waste and fraud and help Administrator Sean O'Keefe restore credibility to an agency plagued by budgetary troubles.
--------
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Patriots and Profits
December 16, 2003
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/opinion/16KRUG.html
Last week there were major news stories about possible profiteering by Halliburton and other American contractors in Iraq. These stories have, inevitably and appropriately, been pushed temporarily into the background by the news of Saddam's capture. But the questions remain. In fact, the more you look into this issue, the more you worry that we have entered a new era of excess for the military-industrial complex.
The story about Halliburton's strangely expensive gasoline imports into Iraq gets curiouser and curiouser. High-priced gasoline was purchased from a supplier whose name is unfamiliar to industry experts, but that appears to be run by a prominent Kuwaiti family (no doubt still grateful for the 1991 liberation). U.S. Army Corps of Engineers documents seen by The Wall Street Journal refer to "political pressures" from Kuwait's government and the U.S. embassy in Kuwait to deal only with that firm. I wonder where that trail leads.
Meanwhile, NBC News has obtained Pentagon inspection reports of unsanitary conditions at mess halls run by Halliburton in Iraq: "Blood all over the floors of refrigerators, dirty pans, dirty grills, dirty salad bars, rotting meat and vegetables." An October report complains that Halliburton had promised to fix the problem but didn't.
And more detail has been emerging about Bechtel's much-touted school repairs. Again, a Pentagon report found "horrible" work: dangerous debris left in playground areas, sloppy paint jobs and broken toilets.
Are these isolated bad examples, or part of a pattern? It's impossible to be sure without a broad, scrupulously independent investigation. Yet such an inquiry is hard to imagine in the current political environment - which is precisely why one can't help suspecting the worst. Let's be clear: worries about profiteering aren't a left-right issue. Conservatives have long warned that regulatory agencies tend to be "captured" by the industries they regulate; the same must be true of agencies that hand out contracts. Halliburton, Bechtel and other major contractors in Iraq have invested heavily in political influence, not just through campaign contributions, but by enriching people they believe might be helpful. Dick Cheney is part of a long if not exactly proud tradition: Brown & Root, which later became the Halliburton subsidiary doing those dubious deals in Iraq, profited handsomely from its early support of a young politician named Lyndon Johnson.
So is there any reason to think that things are worse now? Yes.
The biggest curb on profiteering in government contracts is the threat of exposure: sunshine is the best disinfectant. Yet it's hard to think of a time when U.S. government dealings have been less subject to scrutiny.
First of all, we have one-party rule - and it's a highly disciplined, follow-your-orders party. There are members of Congress eager and willing to take on the profiteers, but they don't have the power to issue subpoenas.
And getting information without subpoena power has become much harder because, as a new report in U.S. News & World Report puts it, the Bush administration has "dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government." Since 9/11, the administration has invoked national security to justify this secrecy, but it actually began the day President Bush took office.
To top it all off, after 9/11 the U.S. media - which eagerly played up the merest hint of scandal during the Clinton years - became highly protective of the majesty of the office. As the stories I've cited indicate, they have become more searching lately. But even now, compare British and U.S. coverage of the Neil Bush saga.
The point is that we've had an environment in which officials inclined to do favors for their business friends, and contractors inclined to pad their bills or do shoddy work, didn't have to worry much about being exposed. Human nature being what it is, then, the odds are that the troubling stories that have come to light aren't isolated examples.
Some Americans still seem to feel that even suggesting the possibility of profiteering is somehow unpatriotic. They should learn the story of Harry Truman, a congressman who rose to prominence during World War II by leading a campaign against profiteering. Truman believed, correctly, that he was serving his country.
On the strength of that record, Franklin Roosevelt chose Truman as his vice president. George Bush, of course, chose Dick Cheney.
--------
New Navy Contract Trims Northrop's Profit
Unhappy With Contractor Bonus System, Service Renegotiates Overhaul Accord
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3163-2003Dec15.html
After months of discussions, the Navy has renegotiated an aircraft carrier contract with Northrop Grumman Corp., trimming the company's profit and making it more difficult for it to get some bonuses.
The contract to overhaul the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower reflected the Navy's campaign to revamp the ingrained bonus system that some critics say rewards contractors even when their projects run over budget or fail to meet deadlines.
Under the new contract, the company will receive its $10 million bonus only if the project is completed on time and meets other targets. Northrop also had its guaranteed profit margin cut to 5.5 percent from 7 percent. In addition, Northrop agreed to pick up 30 percent of the cost, instead of 25 percent, if the program exceeds its budget. If the program comes in under budget, the company would get to keep some of the windfall. The program's cost has increased to $1.49 billion, from the $1.36 billion specified in the original contract.
"The new contract structure creates a win-win opportunity that is fair, reasonable and achievable for both the Navy and Northrop," said John Young, chief weapons buyer for the Navy.
A Northrop spokesman said the renegotiated contract "better recognizes the enormity and the complexity of the task on Ike and the resources required to execute it. We will work closely with the Navy . . . to ensure an on-time and cost-efficient redelivery to the fleet."
Navy officials have said the Eisenhower program exemplified its concerns with contracts that guarantee companies profit and do not correctly use bonuses, also known as award fees and incentive payments. The Air Force estimates that its contracts typically run 18 percent over budget, while contractors collect 90 percent of the bonuses for which they are eligible.
Companies have come to expect bonuses as the normal course of business instead of as a reward for surpassing terms of a contract, government officials said.
Industry officials have complained that changing the system could hurt cash flow and profit, cut into research funds, and limit bids on experimental contracts that offer little or no profit margin. Contractors might be encouraged to cut corners to meet cost and schedule goals, possibly hurting quality, if bonuses are withheld until the end of a contract, industry officials said.
The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which was commissioned in 1977, is undergoing a midlife overhaul at Northrop's Newport News, Va., shipyard. Under the renegotiated contract, the completion date was moved back nearly three months, to Nov. 6, 2004.
The Navy and Northrop "have created a better incentive contract structure to contain cost risk and schedule adherence, and we expect this model to be used in future contracts for aircraft carrier construction and overhaul," Young said.
-------- iraq
Trial could give Saddam powerful platform
By Alan Elsner
(Reuters)
17 Dec 2003 00:20
http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp?type=worldNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4004415
WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein could use a war crimes trial as an opportunity to send an anti-American message to the Arab world and to embarrass the United States by bringing up its past support for his government, legal experts said on Tuesday.
Michael Scharf, who heads an office of war crimes research at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said Saddam was likely to copy the strategy of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose war crimes trial in The Hague has already lasted for almost two years.
"Saddam could represent himself and spend years blasting anti-American rhetoric to the Middle East," said Scharf, author of a book on the Milosevic trial.
"He could also try to ensure that the trial turns into a big embarrassment for the United States. He'd try and call all kinds of dignitaries as witnesses, including people like Donald Rumsfeld," Scharf said.
Rumsfeld, now U.S. defense secretary, visited Iraq and met with Saddam 20 years ago as a special envoy from then-President Ronald Reagan, promoting a close military and commercial relationship that only ended when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Washington helped Saddam obtain intelligence and military equipment and, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control Document placed in the Senate record last year, Iraq also obtained from the United States biological agents that could have been turned into weapons.
The United States at the time was supporting Iraq in its war against the old U.S. nemesis Iran, and Washington stood mutely by when Saddam used chemical weapons both against Iranian forces and against Kurdish people inside Iraq.
EMBARRASS WORLD LEADERS
Saddam could also embarrass other world leaders. French President Jacques Chirac established a close relationship with Saddam dating back to 1974 and helped negotiate the sale of nuclear reactors to Iraq.
Britain, Germany, Italy and especially the former Soviet Union also supplied Iraq with much equipment, expertise and funding over the years.
The format of any trial is still far from clear but Saddam could face broad-ranging charges of crimes against the Iraqi people, war crimes and crimes against humanity. President George W. Bush said on Monday it should be fair and public and be organized jointly by the United States and Iraqis.
According to Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think-tank, the trial offered an opportunity not just to hold Saddam accountable but to examine the broader record of the past 40 years of Iraqi history.
Bennis suggested that any trial of Saddam should go beyond just the issue of Saddam's behavior and "ask who were the enablers, who funded those weapons of mass destruction, who provided the support and the intelligence?"
That's precisely the kind of process that Bush, facing an election campaign next year, would be anxious to avoid, and Bennis said she expected Washington to maintain tight control over the process and lay down procedures that minimize Saddam's opportunities to grandstand.
Some believe expectations of what such a trial may achieve in terms of providing Iraq with a national catharsis are already exaggerated.
"History has shown that all the big war crimes trials from Nuremberg on are so complicated and so drawn out that the public very quickly loses interest," said David Cesarani, a British historian and biographer of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who was tried in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity in 1961 and 1962.
"The way things are done in court is not conducive to telling a complete story from beginning to end," he said.
--------
U.S. Seeks Compromise Plan for Iraqi Political Transition
By Robin Wright and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3046-2003Dec15?language=printer
The Bush administration is scrambling to negotiate a compromise with Iraq's two main religious strains in an effort to keep alive its plan to transfer political power to a new Iraqi provisional government in less than seven months, according to senior U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The compromises would be aimed at satisfying Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who has rejected a U.S. plan to choose an Iraqi government through regional caucuses and insisted that popular elections are the only legitimate method of selection.
In an attempt to broker a deal, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has privately asked intermediaries to speak with Sistani to convey the administration's view that early elections could result in violence and manipulation by Baath Party loyalists, the officials said. Although Bremer and Sistani have not met or spoken directly, the officials said the two recently exchanged letters on the issue of elections in a bid to untangle the political transition.
The urgent effort to rework a political transition plan agreed to only a month ago by Bremer and the U.S.-appointed Governing Council reflects a growing concern among senior U.S. officials that failing to address Sistani's demand could imperil President Bush's goal of establishing a provisional Iraqi government by July 1.
While it seeks to appease Sistani, the Bush administration also wants to ensure that whatever changes it makes would be supported by Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority and not dismissed as favoritism to the country's Shiite majority. U.S. officials have been trying to develop a strategy to win over local leaders in Sunni-dominated areas, where attacks on occupation forces have been most frequent. With the capture of former president Saddam Hussein, who favored fellow Sunnis with power and influence, Sunni foes of the U.S. occupation have lost their putative figurehead, giving added importance to U.S. contacts at local levels.
So far, most of the compromises under discussion by U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington fall short of direct elections, officials said, prompting concern among some American policymakers that the changes would not satisfy Sistani. The officials said the revisions being debated in high-level planning meetings generally stick to the principles and timetable of the current U.S. handover plan. Under that plan, agreed to on Nov. 15, Iraqis would hold regional caucuses to select representatives who would form a provisional government by July 1.
Bremer was due to return to Washington late last week for consultations, but his trip was postponed at the last minute to allow him more time to discuss various options with Iraqi leaders, a senior U.S. official said.
U.S. officials said they have been somewhat encouraged by the first contact with Sistani. After refusing to talk with occupation authorities, the reclusive grand ayatollah recently wrote to Bremer -- and Bremer replied. Sistani was "conciliatory," although he did not budge on elections, U.S. officials said.
Yet U.S. and Iraqi officials said that Sistani does want to find a way to prevent a blowup that would undermine the political transition. "Sistani has left enough wiggle room, as long as the process is grounded and reflects popular will," a senior State Department official said.
"There's a negotiation going on, an exchange of views, and we'll find our way through it," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said in an interview on Friday with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp.
"What seems to be a source of controversy is the manner in which people are chosen for the transitional assembly, whether to do it by caucuses, by appointment or by direct vote," he said. "And there are many voices who want to have this done by direct vote, but they also recognize that between now and June 30th, to find a proper and fair way to register people for that vote will be a very difficult process."
In the search for common ground, however, the administration is also trying to assuage Sunni concerns to ensure that a new Iraqi government does not fall apart because of Sunni opposition in the months after a political transition.
"Our job and the coalition's job is to reach out to Sunni tribal leaders, make it very clear, in word and deed, that they do have a future in the political system of the new Iraq, that they do have a future in the economic vitality of the new Iraq, and that minority rights will be protected by the fundamental law and the new constitution," Armitage said.
Armitage called the quest for compromise a "very time-consuming and arduous process," but "a most worthy one."
Because Sunnis have long led Iraq, Sunni opposition to either the U.S. transition plan or the new provisional government that emerges from it could seriously destabilize the new Iraq, U.S. officials said.
"The Sunnis, for not just 35 years, but I think one could say for 300 or 400 years, have held the dominant position in Iraq, and all of a sudden, in the space of a month, they find themselves in an inferior position. So this has to be very destabilizing for them," Armitage said.
In searching for compromises with both Shiites and Sunnis, there is a growing sense of urgency because the initial phase of the complicated multi-phase U.S. plan is due to begin the first week of January with the appointment of coordinating committees. "We're running out of time to find answers," a senior U.S. official conceded.
"The Americans are very nervous," said a senior Iraqi political figure who meets regularly with Bremer and other occupation officials. "They know they need to make changes but they don't know what those changes should be."
U.S. officials said they are now focusing, in consultation with the Governing Council, on ways to be flexible with the implementation of the Nov. 15 accord. But unlike the latest plan, which is widely seen as a U.S. formula, occupation officials this time are letting the Iraqi Governing Council take the lead in crafting compromise proposals. A council committee is addressing the issue.
Bremer and a few senior aides are also starting to look at alternatives, in part out of concern that the council may put its own political survival ahead of forging compromises with Sistani or the Sunnis.
The situation is still "very fluid" and "nothing has coalesced," the senior administration official said. The Nov. 15 plan has been in trouble almost since it was agreed to. Approaches under consideration since then have ranged from doing nothing to scrapping the plan entirely and holding general elections using a nationwide food-ration database as a voter roll, as suggested by several Iraqis.
Options now under discussion by the council and U.S. officials include adding a local electoral component to the process, possibly by holding a limited number of elections for new city councils in relatively peaceful Shiite areas of the country. But the officials expressed concern that holding elections only in Shiite areas would alienate Sunnis.
Another option would be to convene an early round of town meetings to reconstitute the local councils, which are supposed to participate in screening delegates to the caucuses. Many Iraqi political leaders have complained that the councils do not always reflect the demographics of their communities. But two Shiite leaders who meet regularly with Sistani said they do not believe he would support a process that does not include some form of elections.
A further compromise, pushed by Shiite council member Mowaffak Rubaie, would scrap the caucuses and allow the Governing Council and local leaders to select representatives to the national assembly. Residents in each of the country's 18 provinces would then approve or reject the list in a referendum.
Sistani "may well consider favorably the issue of a referendum," said Rubaie, who briefed the grand ayatollah on the proposal on Thursday.
Sunni leaders are increasingly anxious as various council members stream in to consult with Sistani and other top Shiite religious figures in the holy city of Najaf. One Sunni council member accused the Shiite religious leaders of meddling in the political process.
"They have every right to have a voice, but I think Najaf is perhaps involved too overtly," the Sunni member said. Their interests, he said, "must not become an overriding stipulation. They should not dictate terms."
At the same time, some influential Sunnis not on the Governing Council are also expressing an interest in elections. Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumaidy, one of the council's 12 Sunni members, said he recently met with a delegation of tribal leaders from western Iraq who expressed "openness to the idea of an election using ration cards."
"The situation is not as closed as it was thought to be," Sumaidy said.
Sumaidy said he is "now much more open to all the possibilities" than he was a month ago. The Governing Council, he said, has "gone from opposite ends and everyone is moving closer to the middle."
Chandrasekaran reported from Baghdad.
--------
The Aftermath
Suicide Blasts in Baghdad Kill 8 As Hussein Allies Are Arrested
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3045-2003Dec15.html
BAGHDAD, Dec. 15 -- A day after U.S. forces announced the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, suicide bombers attacked two police stations in the Baghdad region and soldiers arrested several associates of Hussein's who military officials said had been identified from documents found in his briefcase.
The attacks and arrests Monday matched the expectations of U.S. military commanders, who had predicted that the seizure of Hussein would lead to a short-term spike in insurgent activity as well as information enabling the capture of loyalists of the former president.
As news of the detention sank in, Baghdad residents ceased firing weapons in celebration and began debating whether Hussein would be brought to trial, whether the insurgency would weaken and whether the capture would mean a quicker end to the U.S. occupation.
But in the former president's strongholds to the north and west of the capital, some residents took to the streets to show solidarity with Hussein, who has gone from living in lavish palaces to a tiny farming hut and now a jail cell. In Tikrit, the nearest city to Hussein's home village, U.S. soldiers broke up a pro-Hussein protest at a university. In Fallujah and Ramadi, crowds spilled into the streets in celebration after hearing a rumor that he was not really in U.S. custody.
The car bombs, which detonated in the morning as police personnel were arriving for work, killed eight people and wounded more than 20. The explosions ripped through the fronts of both stations, leaving scenes of destruction that have become grimly common at police facilities in Iraq. Mangled cars and shards of broken glass lined the street as bloodied survivors waited for ambulances.
In the first attack, a four-wheel-drive vehicle packed with explosives drove through razor wire protecting the station in Baghdad's northern Husainiyah district. The explosion killed eight police officers and wounded 15 people.
A few hours earlier, residents near the station had celebrated Hussein's capture. Although U.S. commanders and President Bush had warned of more attacks as a result of the detention, Iraqi officers said they had been anticipating the opposite.
"No one expected this," said Lt. Col. Amer Ali. "We thought there would be peace, no more bombings, because Saddam is gone."
Ali said that the police station had received threats of attacks for months but that he did not think they would be carried out after Hussein's capture Saturday night in the village of Dawr, about 75 miles north of the capital.
Witnesses said the bomb-laden vehicle, painted white and red like a taxi, had been building up speed as it made its way along the road in front of the police station around 8:15 a.m. When it jerked toward the front entrance, four police officers opened fire on the car. But it was too late.
The vehicle stopped and blew up, killing four men who had been trying to defend the station, as well as an officer who had been sitting in his car a few yards away, witnesses said. Three others who had been working near the front of the building also died, the witnesses said.
"Before I could do anything it was over," said Aayad Hamad, 31, a police officer who had been on his way to work and was across the street when the attack occurred.
The second car bomb exploded in front of the Ameriyah station in western Baghdad. That blast wounded seven officers, police officials at the scene said. Shortly afterward, another explosives-packed vehicle drove toward the same station but Iraqi police officers and U.S. military police fired on that car, causing the driver to flee without triggering the bomb. "We were very lucky," said Capt. Saad Abdul Hamid.
U.S. military officials said that on the basis of documents in Hussein's briefcase, several people, including two former Iraqi army generals, had been arrested for links to resistance activity. Neither of the generals was identified.
But U.S. intelligence officials said they had no indication that Hussein was giving interrogators useful information. "When they talk to him about anything substantive, he hasn't been particularly helpful," an official said.
Staff writer Dana Priest in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Devised Then Dropped Plot to Kill Hussein, Reports Say
December 16, 2003
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/international/middleeast/16CND-PLOT.html
JERUSALEM, Dec. 16 - Israel developed a risky plan in 1992 to assassinate Saddam Hussein at a funeral but shelved it after five Israeli soldiers were killed while training for the mission, according to news reports today.
Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel in the 1991 Persian Gulf war but Israel, under strong pressure from the United States, refrained from striking back.
Shortly after the war, Israel began investigating the possibility of killing Mr. Hussein, and Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, approved a detailed study in 1992, according to the reports in the country's leading newspapers, including Maariv and Yediot Ahronot.
That same year, one of Mr. Hussein's closest relatives, his uncle - and father-in-law - Khairallah Tilfah, became terminally ill. According to the Israeli newspaper reports, Israel's military believed Mr. Hussein could be targeted at Mr. Tilfah's funeral, because the Iraqi leader would not consider sending one of his doubles to such an event.
The plan, codenamed Operation Bramble Bush, called for helicopters to drop members of an elite military unit, Sayeret Matkal, outside Mr. Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, where the funeral was likely to take place. They were to dig in and camouflage themselves a few hundred yards from a spot where Mr. Hussein was considered likely to travel.
At an Oct. 2, 1992, meeting on the plan, Mr. Rabin "went into the tiniest details," according to Nadav Zeevi, a major in the Army reserves, who was quoted by Yediot Ahronot. "He checked and questioned and investigated and was very interested. At the end of the meeting he demanded certainty of at least 98 percent before he would approve the operation."
The Israelis subsequently staged a simulation in the country's southern desert on Nov. 5, 1992. But in a deadly mixup, the unit that was to carry out the attack fired a real missile at Israeli soldiers serving as stand-ins for Mr. Hussein and his bodyguards, the reports said.
Following the 1992 disaster, the plan was dropped without ever being presented to the government for approval, the reports added.
The deaths of the five soldiers were reported at the time simply as a training accident. Israel's military censor did not lift a ban on publication of the full story until after Mr. Hussein's capture by American troops on Saturday.
Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and a member of parliament with the left-leaning Labor Party since 1992, said he learned about the plan after the training accident. "I think it was a good idea," he said. "Eleven years later, the United States was trying to do the same thing."
The military declined any formal comment on the reports, which dominated Israeli newspapers and broadcasts today.
But the army's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, was asked about the reports while attending a conference near Tel Aviv.
"The publication is irresponsible," the general said. "I think there are things that are right to keep to ourselves for security reasons and not bring them out for the whole world."
-------- pakistan / india
Bomb Aimed at Pakistani Leader Weighed Nearly Half a Ton
December 16, 2003
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/international/asia/16STAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Dec. 15 - A powerful remote-controlled bomb that exploded seconds after President Pervez Musharraf's motorcade passed it on Sunday night was made of 800 to 1,000 pounds of high explosives, the interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, said Monday.
He said that the authorities were questioning several policemen guarding the bridge in Rawalpindi where the bomb detonated, but that it was improbable that they were involved. "This device was obviously planted much before the police were posted there," he said. "The weight of the explosive materials, it can't be placed in a few minutes."
No group claimed responsibility, and no one was injured.
A Western diplomat and a senior retired military officer said Monday the bomb went off only seven to eight seconds after the motorcade passed, rather than the 30 to 60 seconds the president had estimated.
The assassination attempt sent shock waves through Pakistan's security and political establishment. The attackers somehow managed to plant the bomb in the center of Rawalpindi, a web of army bases and military headquarters considered one of the safest communities in the country. It exploded only a half a mile from the headquarters of the Pakistani Army's 10th Corps.
Rasul Baksh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Science, said chaos could have ensued in Pakistan if General Musharraf had been killed. He criticized the United States for focusing too much on strengthening General Musharraf, a military ruler who is a crucial ally in the campaign against terrorism, instead of strengthening democratic institutions here.
"A benign military dictator is no substitute for a participatory democratic process," he said.
The volatility of Pakistan, the only Muslim country known to have nuclear weapons, has long been a concern to the West. General Musharraf, who is chief of staff of the army, seized power in 1999. Military dictators have ruled the country for most of its modern history.
General Musharraf carried on his official functions on Monday as if nothing had happened. He met with the visiting Indonesian president, Megawati Sukarnoputri.
In an interview on state television after the attack, he said the "greatest danger" to the country was religious and sectarian extremists. "This is a typical example of that," he said, apparently referring to the bombing.
Pro-democracy activists say General Musharraf has weakened the country's Parliament, Supreme Court and other government institutions, as well as its two main secular parties.
"There is a lesson to be learned from this," said Talad Masood, a retired Pakistani Army general and political analyst. "Pakistan needs to develop its institutions and not be so dependent on one person."
-------- spies
C.I.A. Will Lead Interrogation of Hussein, Rumsfeld Says
December 16, 2003
By BRIAN KNOWLTON and DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/international/middleeast/16CND-MILI.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that the Central Intelligence Agency would be in charge of interrogating Saddam Hussein, and he strongly defended the treatment of the former Iraqi leader since his capture Saturday as legal, proper and humane.
The decision to entrust the C.I.A. with Mr. Hussein's interrogation was an easy one, Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It was a three-minute decision," he said, "and the first two were for coffee."
Mr. Rumsfeld did not rule out a Pentagon role for keeping the deposed dictator in custody, or for questioning him. But he said he and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, had agreed that the C.I.A. should be the agency to decide just who questions Mr. Hussein, and where and when.
"They have the competence in that area, they have professionals in that area, they know the means that we have in terms of counterterrorism, they know the threads that have to come up through the needlehead," he said.
The intelligence agency will serve as "the regulator" of information flowing from the questioning, Mr. Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news briefing. The secretary strongly defended the treatment of the captive, declaring that it has been humane and that showing pictures of the bedraggled ex-dictator to the world in no way violated international standards on handling prisoners.
Noting the fear that Mr. Hussein and his cronies inspired in their decades of rule, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "It's terribly important that he be seen by the public for what he is: a captive" and thus a man unable to claw his way back to power, Mr. Rumsfeld said.
After the dramatic capture on Saturday, some critics had suggested that the disturbing images of a wild-looking Saddam Hussein being examined by an Army medic - televised around the world - or the fact that his captors had permitted four Iraqi officials to question him, might constitute banned acts of "parading" or humiliating prisoners of war.
No aspect of Mr. Hussein's handling came even "up on the edge" of violating the Geneva conventions, said Mr. Rumsfeld, adding that he was being treated "professionally" and "humanely."
Mr. Rumsfeld said that while Mr. Hussein was being afforded full protection matching Geneva convention standards, he had not been classified as a prisoner of war. That could change, he suggested, if it is learned that Mr. Hussein had helped guide the Iraqi insurgency since the end of major combat in Iraq.
So far, Mr. Rumsfeld said, he could not say whether documents found with Mr. Hussein showed that he had held such a role in guiding the insurgency. In any case, the defense secretary said, if there was any prospect whatsoever that the televising of images of Mr. Hussein in captivity would help deflate or discourage those fighting against the coalition led by the United States, "then we opt for saving lives."
"He has been handled in a professional way," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a Pentagon news briefing. "He has not been held up as a public curiosity in any demeaning way."
Regardless, he said, "It's terribly important that he be seen by the public for what he is."
Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that American forces had temporarily slowed the pace of patrols immediately after Mr. Hussein's capture, in hopes that it might inspire other high-ranking Iraqis to surrender. He would not say whether he was referring to specific Iraqis.
Now, he said, the pace of patrols had returned to its previous average of about 1,000 a day.
Mr. Rumsfeld said American soldiers had been given no special instructions on what to do if and when they came across Saddam Hussein. "No one was told, `Don't kill him.' No one was told, `Kill him,' " Mr. Rumsfeld said. But unlike his sons, Uday and Qusay, who went down shooting, Mr. Hussein chose to surrender.
The secretary offered a bit of new information on Mr. Hussein's days as a fugitive, disclosing that for at least one stretch Mr. Hussein spent several hours in what appeared to be a taxi. "He didn't have the meter running," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
-------- un
UNITED NATIONS
Security Council to Discuss a Possible New Role in Iraq
December 16, 2003
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/international/middleeast/16NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 15 - The Security Council is to discuss Iraq on Tuesday, and the United States ambassador, John D. Negroponte, said Monday that he hoped the capture of Saddam Hussein would spur member states to close ranks behind American plans to transform the country.
The 15-nation Council, which was deeply divided over the war, will consider a report from Secretary General Kofi Annan on what role the United Nations can play in Baghdad. The diplomats will also have the chance to question Iraq's interim foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, about progress toward establishing a provisional government by July.
Mr. Annan, a critic of the war, issued a brief statement on Sunday calling the arrest "an important event" that he hoped would speed the search for peace and stability based on "an inclusive and fully transparent process." Most Council members want that process to be more international than the Bush administration has permitted.
In his report to the Council last week, Mr. Annan ruled out a swift return to Iraq because of the dangers there. He had withdrawn all international staff members from the country in October after attacks on relief workers and diplomats, and the bombing of the United Nations offices in Baghdad.
Mr. Annan met Monday with Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations and a prominent figure in the failed search for consensus to support the United States-led action. He is now Prime Minister Tony Blair's envoy to Baghdad.
Sir Jeremy said he believed that the United Nations could not step up its involvement inside Iraq until the summer, when the process of transition to Iraqi rule begins and security may have improved.
Sir Jeremy said he hoped the certainty that Mr. Hussein was not coming back to power would speed reconciliation within Iraq and attract into government people who had been associated with Mr. Hussein but who had not actually committed crimes.
Cleric Backs U.S. Voting Plan
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, has agreed to an administration proposal for the establishment of a new Iraqi government next year, but with certain conditions, a Bush administration official said Monday.
The official said the ayatollah had tentatively approved a plan to chose a transitional administration next year by a combination of elections in some parts of the country and caucuses in others, but only if the United Nations supervised the process and certified the result.
The official said it was not clear whether the United Nations could do that or whether the administration would accept the idea.
In recent weeks he has demanded that the transitional government be chosen by elections only.
-------- us
Lawmaker Criticizes Capture Of Hussein
Associated Press
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3209-2003Dec15.html
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), who earned headlines across the globe last year for criticizing President Bush while in Baghdad, is enmeshed in a new controversy over remarks he made about the capture of Saddam Hussein.
In an interview yesterday with a Seattle radio station, McDermott said the U.S. military could have found the former Iraqi dictator "a long time ago if they wanted."
Asked if he thought the weekend capture was timed to help Bush, McDermott chuckled and said, "Yeah. Oh, yeah." He added, "There's too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing."
When the interviewer asked again if he meant to imply the Bush administration timed the capture for political reasons, McDermott said: "I don't know that it was definitely planned on this weekend, but I know they've been in contact with people all along who knew basically where he was. It was just a matter of time till they'd find him."
State Republicans immediately condemned McDermott's remarks, saying the Seattle Democrat again was engaging in "crazy talk" about the Iraq war.
"Calling on him to apologize is useless, but I call on other Democrats to let the public know if they agree with McDermott -- and Howard Dean, who recently said he thought it was possible that President Bush had advance knowledge about 9/11," said state Republican Chairman Chris Vance. "The voters deserve to know if the entire Democratic Party believes in these sorts of bitter, paranoid conspiracy theories."
Democrats joined the criticism of McDermott.
"With all due respect to my colleague, that is a fantasy," Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.) said of McDermott's comments. "That just is not right. . . . It's one thing to criticize this administration for having done this war. I mean, that's a fair question. But to criticize them on the capture of Saddam, when it's such a big thing to our troops, is just ridiculous."
McDermott, in a telephone interview, called the timing of Hussein's capture suspicious but said he was not alleging it had been intentionally delayed.
"Everything was going wrong, and they got a real Christmas gift, if you will, in that the troops did a magnificent job and found" Hussein, he said.
-------- war crimes
Clark Testifies Against Milosevic at Hague Tribunal
December 16, 2003
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/international/europe/16TRIB.html?pagewanted=all&position=
THE HAGUE, Dec. 15 - In a grenade-proof courtroom far from the battlefields of the Balkans, Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, came face to face on Monday with Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO supreme commander who waged war against him.
For nearly five hours, General Clark, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, testified in closed session in a trial against the Balkan strongman, whose intransigence brought on NATO's 11-week bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and added to the long list of criminal charges he is facing.
It was the first encounter between the two men since January 1999, when General Clark warned Mr. Milosevic in a tense session in Belgrade to either end his terror campaign against the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo or be bombed. Mr. Milosevic replied by calling the general a "war criminal." The bombing started two months later.
Now it is Mr. Milosevic who is on trial as a war criminal. In the most important war crimes trial since those of the Nazis at Nuremberg, he faces 66 charges stemming from his role in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's.
"Today Milosevic is delivered by his own people to the hands of justice in The Hague," said General Clark in an interview. "It's a powerful testament to the rule of law and the force of ideas."
The 281st witness to be called before the special court, formally known as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, General Clark is also one of the most important. He is the most senior official from the Clinton administration to testify against Mr. Milosevic in a trial heard before three judges in black silk-trimmed robes: an Englishman, a South Korean and a Jamaican.
He served as a military representative in Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke's delegation at Balkan peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, that led to an agreement to end the Bosnia war and has spent more than 100 hours with Mr. Milosevic. The Serbian leader figures prominently in General Clark's 2001 memoir, "Waging Modern War," an account of the planning and conduct of the war in Kosovo and the diplomacy that preceded it.
Prosecutors were expected to follow the same line of questioning they have used with many other witnesses to prove that Mr. Milosevic was aware of Serbian wartime atrocities and failed to prevent them or punish those responsible.
But the historic significance of the day was undercut by the fact that General Clark's testimony was delivered in secret, an unusual step in a tribunal that has prided itself on its openness.
The Bush administration has invoked a rule under the tribunal to allow State Department lawyers to review and edit the testimony to ensure that it does not violate American national security or intelligence sources and methods. Under universal rules of the tribunal, all witnesses are precluded from talking about their testimony until it is over.
Adding to the drama and disarray, Mr. Milosevic, who studied law but never practiced it, is serving as his own lawyer.
The former Serbian leader has tried to use his trial, which is televised in Serbia, to his political advantage at home. Throughout the trial, he has been chided by the chief judge for grandstanding and pontificating and was expected to challenge General Clark's credibility under cross-examination, which began Monday.
From his detention cell near The Hague, Mr. Milosevic, who was removed from power in 2000 and later extradited to the tribunal, is also running his own political campaign as head of his Socialist Party of Serbia's electoral list for parliamentary elections planned for Dec. 28.
In Belgrade on Monday, the European Union foreign policy envoy, Javier Solana, condemned the inclusion of Mr. Milosevic and three other suspected war criminals on the lists of candidates in Serbia's parliamentary elections.
"It is not a good idea to have on the list people who are indicted" by the tribunal, Mr. Solana told reporters before heading to The Hague on Monday evening.
A videotape of General Clark's testimony will be shown perhaps in an edited form on Friday, both at The Hague tribunal and on its Web site.
General Clark said he did not object to the delay in his testimony and was not concerned that he could be censored.
General Clark's two-day appearance in The Hague tribunal, which was paid for by the tribunal, was called a break from his campaign activities and he did not travel with his campaign staff. He was assisted by James P. Rubin, who was a senior aide to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and is serving as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to his campaign.
But the trial has thrust General Clark, a retired four-star general, back into the foreign policy and national security world that defined him, far away from the messiness of the political campaign
In addition, the timing of his testimony - a day after the Bush administration announced the capture of Saddam Hussein - allowed General Clark to draw attention to his own tough treatment of a dictator who was forced to back down by the first military campaign in NATO's history, and without a single American combat casualty.
"This is an important day for me but it is far more important for the people of the region," he said in the interview. "For men and women and children who were tortured, imprisoned and run out of their homes, who lived in fear because of the thugs and the paramilitaries and the heartless coercion of the Serb armed forces, the world listened. And led by the United States, we took action."
Mr. Hussein's capture also required General Clark, who has been highly critical of President Bush for conducting what he has called the wrong war at the wrong time and diverting resources from the pursuit of Al Qaeda, to adjust his message.
In the interview on Monday, General Clark called the capture "an amazing sort of coincidence in time" that Mr. Hussein was captured while Mr. Milosevic was on trial for war crimes. "This is the precedent, the first case in which we've tried a head of state for war crimes," General Clark said.
On Sunday and again on Monday he said Mr. Hussein must be brought to trial, but noted that The Hague tribunal does not allow for the death penalty and that "all options have to be on the table."
General Clark, with Mr. Rubin's help, rewrote a major foreign policy speech delivered to the Netherlands Institute for International Relations on Monday evening to include his reaction to Mr. Hussein's capture.
Calling the capture "good news" but not sufficient, he charged that Iraq "is still in danger of becoming a failed state."
--------
Bush Says Iraqis Will Try Hussein
President Opposes International Tribunal For Captured Dictator
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3030-2003Dec15.html
President Bush, savoring Saddam Hussein's capture by U.S. troops, said yesterday in a White House news conference that the United States would arrange for the former Iraqi leader to be judged by his fellow countrymen in a public trial that details his many atrocities.
Bush dismissed the notion of an international tribunal but said the trial, under an emerging Iraqi justice system, would withstand international scrutiny. Though he said he expects little from the interrogation of Hussein, he said the arrest "changed the equation" as the U.S. military tries to quell an insurgency in Iraq.
Bush's endorsement of a trial by Iraqis dovetailed with plans being made by U.S.-appointed Iraqi leaders to begin proceedings against Hussein -- perhaps as early as the spring -- on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. But the president's willingness to let Iraqis decide whether to execute Hussein -- Bush seemed to suggest the death penalty was his own preference -- put him at odds with Britain, the United States' chief ally in the Iraq war.
The president, who spoke only briefly Sunday after Hussein's capture was announced, elaborated with more emotion yesterday on the imprisonment of the man who Bush has said tried to kill his father. "Good riddance," Bush replied when asked what message he would send the famous prisoner. "The world is better off without you, Mr. Saddam Hussein. I find it very interesting that when the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole and you crawled in it."
But Bush was cautious about the prospects for an immediate improvement in the nine-month U.S. occupation of Iraq. On a day that saw two more car bombings there, he predicted there will be more violence in the country and said the United States would not use the occasion to pull back its forces. The circumstances of Hussein's capture, he said, demonstrate there is "a long process" ahead in Iraq.
"When there's a hole in the ground and a person is able to crawl into it in a country the size of California, it means we're on a scavenger hunt for terror," Bush said.
Questions about Hussein dominated the 48-minute news conference, but the president also said his administration was working to revive an immigration liberalization plan that was dropped after the 2001 terrorist attacks. He cast doubt on the notion of a new tax cut in 2004 and voiced optimism that his administration would be able to control spending increases that are swelling the federal deficit.
Asked about possible capital punishment for Hussein, Bush said: "This is a brutal dictator; he's a person who killed a lot of people. But my views, my personal views, aren't important in this matter."
Bush, whose administration has long opposed the International Criminal Court, said: "We will work with the Iraqis to develop a way to try him that will stand international scrutiny." Regarding Hussein's punishment, he said, "It's going to be up to the Iraqis to make those decisions." He stipulated, however, that "there needs to be a public trial, and all the atrocities need to come out, and justice needs to be delivered."
The president appeared increasingly optimistic that seizing the ousted leader will weaken the anti-American insurgency. Though he cautioned that foreign terrorists remain in Iraq and "there will be more violence because I believe there's holdovers of Saddam that are frustrated," Bush said in his prepared remarks. "The enemies of a free Iraq have lost their leader, and they've lost any hope of regaining power. The nightmare of the Baathist tyranny is finally over."
Bush said the most important result of Hussein's capture is that there is no longer a reason for Iraqi "fence sitters" not to work toward a free society. "The arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq," he said. "Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq."
He said Hussein's arrest would not alter the timetable for a U.S. withdrawal or the bid for more foreign troops. As for interrogating the captive leader, he said, "I'd be very cautious about relying upon his word in any way, shape or form."
Though Bush has previously said there was no link between Hussein's Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he repeatedly invoked those attacks yesterday when discussing Iraq. He said France and Germany "didn't see" how Sept. 11 changed Bush's calculations, and, asked about not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he mentioned Sept. 11 twice more.
On domestic matters, Bush appeared to dismiss the idea of a tax cut in 2004 after cuts in each of his first three years in office. "What I've been referring to, in terms of pro-growth, are an energy bill, good tort reform coming out of the Congress," he said. But he defended a previous tax cut by using a widely disputed theory that the cut "was necessary to make sure that we had ample revenues coming into the treasury in the first place."
Asked about the deficit, which has caused concern among some Wall Street economists and has contributed to the dollar's decline against the euro, Bush mentioned no specific plans for controlling spending. "We're working with Congress to hold the line," he said, adding that for the current fiscal year, the administration and Congress "will have held discretionary spending to 4 percent" above the previous year. He said "nonmilitary, non-homeland security discretionary spending" grew at 15 percent in President Bill Clinton's final year and was reduced to a growth rate of 3 percent.
Independent budget analysts said Bush's figures rely on some extraordinary steps taken by Congress to manipulate spending numbers. For instance, lawmakers declared that $2.2 billion in education spending for 2004 should be added to the 2003 tally -- thus making the 2004 increase appear artificially smaller, said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "It seems like there's some misleading information out there," Riedl said.
Similarly, lawmakers hid spending in 2000 to abide by spending caps. Those moves made the increase in the budget negotiated in Clinton's final year artificially high, said Richard Kogan, a budget analyst at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Bush gave new life to an immigration proposal that has languished for two years. Such a plan would allow some Mexicans and others in the United States to work toward legal status. "It makes sense that that policy go forward, and we're in the process of working that through now so I can make a recommendation to the Congress," the president said. But he said he remains "firmly against blanket amnesty" for undocumented immigrants.
Even as he outlined many of his reelection campaign themes, Bush repeatedly said it was not yet "time for politics." He labeled as "an absurd insinuation" a hint by Democratic candidate Howard Dean that Bush may have had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. Dean later discounted the suggestion.
Also yesterday, Bush spoke for 15 minutes by phone with new Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. Martin told the president he intends to improve Canada-U.S. relations since tensions arose after Canada decided not to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the prime minister told reporters. Martin said he talked with Bush about allowing Canadian contractors to bid on reconstruction contracts in Iraq, adding: "It's still early days in terms of saying there can be any kind of solution to this."
Staff writers Mike Allen, DeNeen L. Brown and Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.
--------
Iraqi Planners Hope To Start Trial by Spring
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2748-2003Dec15.html
BAGHDAD, Dec. 15 -- An Iraqi-run tribunal could begin proceedings against former president Saddam Hussein on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity as early as next spring, Iraqi political leaders and officials responsible for the court said Monday.
One of the architects of the tribunal, Salem Chalabi, said political leaders and legal specialists had already begun discussing the best prosecutorial strategy to employ against Hussein. Chalabi said there was growing agreement that Hussein should be charged with perhaps only a dozen specific atrocities in an effort to keep a trial from bogging down. The charges would include the use of chemical weapons against ethnic Kurds in 1988, the execution of prominent Shiite Muslim clerics and the killing of hundreds of Sunni Muslim tribesmen after a coup attempt, he said.
The political leaders and court officials said they would be able to accomplish two key tasks required to start a trial -- constructing a secure detention facility and hiring judges, prosecutors and investigators -- over the next three to four months. "We'll be ready soon," Chalabi said. "We're moving very quickly."
That timetable is significantly faster than American officials had anticipated, increasing the chances of a dispute between Iraqi leaders eager for justice and U.S. intelligence officials, who hope to elicit detailed information from Hussein about weapons of mass destruction, links to international terrorism and the ongoing insurgency.
Depending on Hussein's willingness to talk, intelligence analysts said, interrogations could continue well beyond the spring. The U.S. occupation authority also is reluctant to hand Hussein over to the Iraqis too quickly, wanting to ensure that the new court's staff and detention facilities are ready to weather the international attention that will surround the former president's case.
Unlike the special courts established to prosecute war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, which operate under the sponsorship of the United Nations and involve international jurists specializing in human rights law, the Iraqi tribunal will be run by Iraqis and will employ foreign experts only as advisers. Iraqi leaders had asked for the right to conduct war crimes trials themselves, a request that the Bush administration supported despite assessments by international human rights organizations that Iraq's legal system is corrupt and inexperienced.
When the United States agreed to an Iraqi-run process, administration officials and legal specialists working for the occupation authority said they did not expect Hussein to be brought before the tribunal. "Are we going to catch Saddam Hussein alive? I think that's unlikely," a senior official with the authority said last week.
U.S. officials said they were confident the tribunal would be able to conduct a fair trial of the former president. Although the law authorizing the tribunal was passed only last week by Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, it was vetted by the occupation authority, the Pentagon and the White House, according to officials involved in the process.
"We think it will work," said a senior U.S. official familiar with the tribunal.
At a White House news conference on Monday, President Bush pledged that the United States would "work with the Iraqis to develop a way to try him that withstands international scrutiny."
"They need to be very much involved in the process, and we will work with the Iraqis to develop the process," Bush said.
The prospect of a Hussein trial would require more U.S. involvement in training and monitoring judges, lawyers and investigators -- and potentially more financial support, the senior official noted. The Bush administration has earmarked $75 million to fund investigative work, but the cost of operating the tribunal is supposed to be funded with Iraqi assets.
The Defense Department's Institute for International Legal Studies is already running a two-week workshop for more than 80 judges and lawyers to refresh their knowledge of basic legal principles in a free society. At a session last week, the occupation authority's general counsel talked about the different ways the U.S. Constitution protects the rights of the accused.
But in Baghdad, speed is an important criterion. There is a keen desire among all manner of Iraqis, from Governing Council members to street vendors, to bring Hussein to trial quickly.
"We can't delay this," said Mowaffak Rubaie, a council member who had been arrested and tortured by Hussein's secret police. "It's an integral part of national reconciliation. We can't begin the process of reconciliation until we show the people that the man at the top, who was responsible for unspeakable terror, is brought to justice."
Bakhtiar Amin, a former exile who founded the International Alliance for Justice to expose human rights abuses committed by Hussein's government, said Iraqis want a fair trial -- but one that starts soon. "There is a thirst for justice," he said.
Rubaie said he and other council members want Hussein to be tried before anyone else. "He must be tried first -- and executed first," he said.
Although international legal specialists acknowledged the importance of trying Hussein first, they expressed concern about making the tribunal's initial case one that would be so complicated and closely watched.
Chalabi, a nephew of the Iraqi political leader Ahmed Chalabi, said legal specialists involved in setting up the tribunal would have to "tread a line between moving quickly to appease Iraqi political pressure and slowly enough to make sure we don't stray outside the scope of internationally recognized due process of law."
Council members said they raised the timing of Hussein's trial during a meeting on Monday with the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. They said Bremer told the group that the court and appropriate detention facilities would have to be established before Hussein would be handed over.
Iraqi officials involved in setting up the tribunal said they expected to reach agreement with the occupation authority in the next few weeks on using an existing jail to house detainees. Judges for the tribunal will be nominated by an independent judicial council and approved by the Governing Council, a process that could take several weeks. Investigators and prosecutors also must be hired, but court officials said they have identified numerous candidates.
Ahmed Chalabi said Bremer told the council that once it had appointed investigating judges and Hussein had been arraigned, the judges could have access to the former president. Chalabi said the council intends to appoint a panel of three investigating judges in the coming days.
Spokesmen for Bremer did not return calls seeking a response to Chalabi's statement.
Currently, the only thing the tribunal has is a building in a highly fortified part of Baghdad near the occupation authority headquarters. Even so, political leaders and others involved with the tribunal have started to map out prosecution strategies. "For someone like Saddam Hussein, we clearly need to think through how we approach the case," Salem Chalabi said. "We don't want to try him for every offense, because that could take years."
In building a case for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, Chalabi said, prosecutors likely would focus on only about a dozen of the most significant atrocities committed while Hussein was president. To satisfy various political constituencies, the cases would involve victims from the country's major ethnic and religious groups.
"It's a very delicate balance we have to find," Chalabi said. "We're not going to build a case against him for everything that happened. That would drag the trial on for years."
But he added, "We're not going to finish off the trial in a week or two."
"We're not going to hold a kangaroo court," he said.
Staff writer Barton Gellman contributed to this report.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Panel on Terror Calls for Board on Protecting Civil Liberties
December 16, 2003
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/politics/16TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - A federal commission on terrorism recommended on Monday that the White House establish an independent bipartisan panel to review whether new laws and regulations proposed by the government might infringe on civil liberties.
While not directly criticizing the Bush administration for antiterrorism policies that have been widely condemned by civil liberties advocates, the panel said the federal government needed to "make special precautions, take extra steps, to ensure that we do not cross the line" in the name of defeating terrorism.
The four-year-old federal commission, led by James S. Gilmore III, a former Republican governor of Virginia, said in a final report issued on Monday that President Bush should create a "civil liberties oversight board" with a bipartisan membership that would "provide advice on any change to statutory or regulatory authority" that might infringe on civil liberties.
The creation of a civil liberties panel was one of dozens of recommendations in the final report of the 17-member commission, known formally as the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, which was assisted by the RAND Corporation.
The panel, created by Congress in 1998, is scheduled to go out of business early next year. Its mandate is similar in many ways to that of another federal commission created last year by Congress to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks. That commission, led by former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, is also reviewing broad issues of federal counterterrorism strategy and is expected to issue a final report in May.
The so-called Gilmore commission said it was especially concerned about the civil liberties implications of the growing domestic use of the military and its surveillance technology in counterterrorism operations within the nation's borders.
"It now becomes essential for the Congress to legislate and for the Department of Defense to implement through clear procedures the limitations on the use of satellite imagery and other advanced technology monitoring in the United States," the panel said, adding that the government had an "increasing reliance on more sophisticated technology that has vast potential for invading our privacy."
"As more terrorist attacks occur, the pressure will rise to lessen civil liberties, albeit with different labels," the report said.
Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said that in responding to the Sept. 11 attacks, "the protection of civil liberties has been a fundamental mission; it's one we take seriously."
Asked whether the White House would support the Gilmore commission's call for a special oversight panel, he said, "We wouldn't want to rule anything in or out."
The commission had praise for elements of the government's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which it said had led to improved counterterrorism planning. But the report said that the commitment of the government and the public to combating the possibility of terrorist attacks on American soil "appears to have waned."
"The Department of Homeland Security and other governmental agencies at all levels are working diligently to prevent future terrorist attacks," the report said, but it added that the federal government lacked a "clear prioritization for the use of scarce resources against a diffuse, unclear threat."
A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, Brian Roehrkasse, said that the government's antiterrorism efforts had not faltered and that the new department had "already initiated a lot of what is recommended in this report."
-------- courts
SUPREME COURT ROUNDUP
Justices Will Hear Appeal on Cheney's Energy Panel
December 16, 2003
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/politics/16SCOT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear an appeal by Vice President Dick Cheney from a lower court's order requiring limited disclosure of the identities of participants in the task force that developed an energy policy under his leadership early in the Bush administration.
More than two years after the National Energy Policy Development Group completed its work and shut down, the administration has continued to guard the secrecy of its operations, including the names of energy industry representatives who consulted with the cabinet members and other federal officials who made up the task force's official membership.
Lawsuits filed by two organizations, the conservative Judicial Watch and the liberal Sierra Club, challenged the secrecy as a violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires committees that meet the law's definition to conduct their business in public. The question for the Supreme Court now is whether the vice president's office must submit to limited pretrial discovery sufficient to allow the Federal District Court here to decide whether the advisory committee law applies to the task force.
The legal question is a complicated amalgam of jurisdictional and procedural issues, but the stakes, as framed in Mr. Cheney's Supreme Court appeal, are quite high. His appeal argues that the district court's order for limited discovery, and a decision by the federal appeals court here not to block that order, "present fundamental separation-of-powers questions" and "threaten substantial interference with vital executive branch functions."
"Any discovery" would be improper, the appeal filed for Mr. Cheney by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson asserts.
Under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, committees set up by the president or by federal agencies to provide advice must generally conduct their business in public. Committees composed entirely of federal officials and employees are exempt from this requirement. The formal membership of the National Energy Policy Development Group was composed entire of cabinet members and other federal officials, and on this basis, the vice president's office resisted making any disclosures in response to the lawsuits.
However, in a decision 10 years ago involving a somewhat similar effort to obtain information about the health care task force that Hillary Rodham Clinton ran when she was first lady, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that a formal membership limited to federal officials would not necessarily entitle a task force to the exemption if other people acting as consultants or advisers were the equivalent of "de facto members."
Ruling in the Cheney case in July 2002, the district court said the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch were entitled to discovery to find out whether private people had taken part in the work of the energy task force to a degree sufficient to bring the task force within the coverage of the law. The district judge, Emmet G. Sullivan, said that if this limited discovery showed that the law did not apply, the suits would be dismissed and there would be no need to address the separation of powers or other potentially difficult issues.
Rather than proceeding under this ruling, the vice president appealed it, arguing that complying with the order would require him to make some of the same disclosures that it was his position he should not ever have to make.
Citing the Supreme Court's 1997 decision requiring President Clinton to submit to discovery in the lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones, the appeals court said: "Indeed, the Supreme Court has consistently held that because the president is not `above the law,' he is subject to judicial process."
Judicial Watch, in urging the justices to reject the vice president's appeal, Cheney v. United States District Court, No. 03-475, said that through multiple appeals, the administration had "succeeded splendidly in delaying the advancement of this case" while the task force's proposals were being presented to Congress. "This transparent strategy of `running out the clock' should not be tolerated," Judicial Watch said.
These were among the other developments as the court began a four-week recess.
Mexican Trucks
Accepting another administration appeal, the court agreed to review a ruling requiring an extensive review of the environmental consequences of opening all American highways to Mexican trucks.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled last January that the administration had acted "arbitrarily and capriciously" by conducting only a limited rather than a full environmental impact review of the consequences of lifting a 21-year-old policy that restricted Mexican trucks to a 20-mile-wide border zone.
The appeals court's decision blocked the change. President Bush had announced his intention to open the border after an international arbitration panel ruled in early 2001 that the policy violated the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The environmental lawsuit was brought by a consumer and labor coalition. They argued that bringing in an estimated 30,000 Mexican trucks annually, many built with poor emissions controls, would seriously hurt air quality, especially in California and Texas.
In its appeal, United States Department of Transportation v. Public Citizen, No. 03-358, the administration said the Ninth Circuit's decision was causing "serious and ongoing harm" to relations with Mexico, which had brought the case under Nafta. "The president of the United States must be able to act quickly and with assurance to implement the decisions that are entrusted personally to him," said Mr. Olson, the solicitor general.
Car Search
In a case from Maryland, the court ruled unanimously that the police had constitutional authority to arrest all three occupants of a car they had stopped for speeding, after a search found five bags of crack cocaine, for which none of the three men admitted ownership.
One man, Joseph J. Pringle, who had been in the passenger seat, confessed that the drugs were his, but then argued that his confession was inadmissible at trial. He said the arrest had been illegal because the officers lacked probable cause to suspectcq him of owning the drugs, which were out of his reach behind a back armrest. The Maryland Court of Appeals overturned the conviction by a vote of 4 to 3.
The justices in turn reversed that decision with an opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Writing in Maryland v. Pringle, No. 02-809, he said the police had acted on "an entirely reasonable inference" that any or all of the three might have been involved in the crime.
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High Court Will Review Ruling On Cheney Task Force Records
Decision a Blow to Groups Seeking Information on Energy Policy
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1591-2003Dec15?language=printer
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will intervene in a dispute between Vice President Cheney and two nonprofit organizations seeking information about the internal operations of the controversial White House energy policy task force he headed in 2001.
Setting up a high-stakes clash at the court over the Bush administration's tight-lipped approach to information, the court granted Cheney's request to review a lower court's order requiring him to show some of the material to the groups.
The court's action came in response to a petition on Cheney's behalf by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, who told the justices that the lower court's order involves "fundamental separation-of-powers questions" and threatens to "generate the kind of intrusions into the Executive Branch that this Court has sought to avoid."
The court's action was a blow to the organizations -- Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, and the Sierra Club, a liberal environmental group -- that are seeking access to task force documents. The Sierra Club's brief had told the justices that the White House was stalling and that the Supreme Court should not help it by hearing the case.
"By the time the court decides this [July or sooner] it will be two years of complete stoppage that they've won," said Alan B. Morrison of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, who represents the Sierra Club. "In that sense, they've succeeded."
The task force, known officially as the National Energy Policy Development Group and made up of several Cabinet officers and White House aides, was set up on Jan. 29, 2001, and issued its report on May 16 of the same year.
The report included recommendations favored by industry, such as opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The administration has since dropped its insistence on drilling in the refuge, but has failed to win passage of any energy legislation nevertheless.
From the beginning, the task force has been the focus of criticism from environmental and consumer organizations, as well as congressional Democrats, who say the White House shut them out while throwing its doors open to industry lobbyists.
The White House, in turn, has seen the task force case as a key front in its broader battle to preserve control over internal information. To Bush administration officials, a win in the case is vital to establish the principle that the president should be able to receive candid advice in private -- and cannot do so if his advisers, up to and including the vice president, know that their deliberations will eventually be made public.
"We are pleased that the Supreme Court will consider issues critical to the effective functioning of the presidency and the vice presidency," Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said.
However, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said he was confident the court would "reject the Bush administration's unprecedented assertion of unchecked executive power."
The twin lawsuits brought by Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club contend that lobbyists were so close to the energy task force that they were de facto members of it. As a result, the groups argue, the task force is subject to the provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires policy-development committees that consist at least in part of nongovernmental personnel to be balanced and open.
Energy lobbyists "got to work on a draft of the task force's report," Morrison said.
Olson's petition called this an "unsupported allegation." Statements by the White House listing the official members of the task force and vouching for the fact that they were all government officials should be sufficient to settle the issue, Olson wrote.
In 2002, U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan ordered the administration, including Cheney's office, to turn over documents that would help prove or disprove the role of lobbyists in a trial.
The administration consented to turn over about 39,000 pages of material from federal agencies, but balked at giving anything from Cheney's task force itself. The administration argued that this would have effectively authorized Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club to conduct the fishing expedition through Cheney's files to which they are not entitled under the advisory committee law.
But Morrison said the groups want only a list of the people who were invited to attend, and who actually attended, meetings of the task force and its subcommittees.
"What are they hiding?" he asked.
The General Accounting Office, at the request of leading congressional Democrats, also tried to gain access to internal records of the task force, but lost in federal court.
The administration asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to throw out Sullivan's order. But by a vote of 2 to 1, the D.C. Circuit ruled last July that it had no jurisdiction in the case, because Cheney could address the same issues on appeal once the trial in the district court was over.
Writing for the majority, Judge David S. Tatel noted that the case was controlled by two precedents from the administration of President Bill Clinton. The D.C. Circuit had ordered document disclosure in a similar case brought by a physicians group against the health care task force headed by then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tatel wrote, and it had refused a Clinton White House request to keep documents secret in the case of alleged abuses of FBI files by Clinton staff.
Olson's petition said the Clinton health care task force was different because it was designed to include nongovernmental members, while the Cheney-led energy task force was not.
The case is Cheney v. U.S. District Court, No. 03-475. Oral arguments will take place in the spring, and a decision is expected by July.
-------- death penalty
Texas's Death Row in a Momentary Lull
3 Men Granted Stays Hours Before Execution After Suit Asserts Cruelty of Injections
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3218-2003Dec15.html
AUSTIN, Dec. 15 -- Before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened last Wednesday, Kevin Lee Zimmerman came so close to being executed in Texas's death chamber that he was served a "last" meal of his choosing: fried pork chop; fried chicken; french fries; a scrambled eggs and sausage sandwich; ketchup; six half pints of milk; and a chocolate cake.
Now it seems Zimmerman will have one more last meal.
A divided Supreme Court on Monday lifted its eleventh-hour stay that spared the life of Zimmerman, a 42-year-old Louisianian who is facing the death penalty for the 1987 robbery and stabbing death of a man in a Beaumont, Tex., motel. The court's 5 to 4 ruling means that a Texas judge can now set a fresh date for Zimmerman's execution.
Zimmerman is one of three Texas death row inmates who were scheduled to die by lethal injection last week until last-minute court action -- or in one case, inaction -- spared their lives. The others are Billy Frank Vickers, 48, convicted of shooting a grocer carrying a bag of money home in 1993, and Bobby Lee Hines, 31, convicted of stabbing and strangling a woman to death during a robbery at her apartment in 1991.
All three were part of a federal lawsuit, filed Dec. 8 by the Texas Defender Service and the Texas Innocence Network, asserting that the cocktail of three drugs used in Texas's death chamber -- particularly pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the muscles -- constitutes unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. The lawsuit notes that pancuronium bromide, which some veterinarians shun to euthanize pets, hides pain and suffering rather than eases it.
On Dec. 9, Vickers's execution, which had been scheduled for 6 p.m., was scratched because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans failed to rule on a last-minute appeal based on the lawsuit. In the absence of any ruling from the court -- an unprecedented situation in Texas, death penalty lawyers said -- Texas officials called off the execution, and the warrant for his death expired at midnight. It could be reissued as soon as next year.
On Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia issued a brief order halting the scheduled execution of Zimmerman that day so the high court could study the case. The same day, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the scheduled Thursday execution of Hines on the grounds that he may be mentally retarded.
The stay for Zimmerman was vacated Monday over the objections of the court's liberal wing -- Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. The four said the court should not rule in Zimmerman's case until it resolves a separate case next year involving an inmate on Alabama's death row who contends that execution by lethal injection would be cruel because of his medical condition, collapsed veins from heavy drug use.
Zimmerman had been scheduled to die about 20 minutes before Scalia's order last week. At the time, he told Texas corrections officials: "I'm disappointed. I was ready to go. The stay only means 18 more months of this crap."
Texas, the first state to execute condemned inmates by lethal injection, has put to death 24 inmates this year, nearly twice as many as any other state. Before the reprieves for the three inmates last week in Texas, six others here had successfully delayed their executions, sometimes with just a few hours remaining until the appointed hour, on grounds of mental retardation.
Last week's flurry of activity captured more attention than death penalty matters generally do here. This fall, a two-month lull in death chamber activity prompted an Associated Press article to note that in Texas, it is news when executions do not take place.
-------- drug war
Justices' Ruling Sets Broad 'Probable Cause' Standard in Drug Arrests
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2980-2003Dec15.html
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that Baltimore County police acted properly four years ago when they arrested all three occupants of a car after the officers discovered drugs and cash inside and everyone denied owning them.
By a vote of 9 to 0, the court said that such an arrest was consistent with the constitutional requirement that arrests be based on "probable cause," because under the circumstances it was reasonable to assume that one, some or all of the people in the car were involved in illegal activity.
The decision reversed the judgment of Maryland's highest court, which last year overturned the conviction of the one occupant of the car who was eventually tried in the case, Joseph Jermaine Pringle. The Maryland court ruled that his arrest was unconstitutional because the police had lacked a reason to think he was individually involved in a crime.
"We think it an entirely reasonable inference from these facts that any or all three of the occupants had knowledge of, and exercised dominion and control over, the cocaine," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the court. "Thus a reasonable officer could conclude that there was probable cause to believe Pringle committed the crime of possession of cocaine, either solely or jointly."
The case called on the court to apply the concept of probable cause to a situation in which the police were bound to err in one of two ways: either by sweeping up several innocent people in pursuit of one guilty party or by letting a guilty individual go free for fear of infringing the rights of his companions.
Yesterday's decision means that, in such cases involving drugs, officers may now err on the side of arresting the innocent without violating the Constitution.
"With this decision, the court has reaffirmed the necessary flexibility of the probable cause standard, which allows police to deal appropriately with the varying circumstances associated with encounters with criminals on the street," said Charles Hobson, an attorney with the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices to uphold Pringle's arrest.
But Tracy Maclin, a professor of law at Boston University who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief on Pringle's behalf, said the court had written a sweeping opinion that could expose innocent people to arrest in a wide variety of situations.
"It's going to be easier to arrest people, and there is . . . nothing in this opinion to cabin this rationale," Maclin said. "If someone has 20 friends over, and a cop comes to the house and finds contraband under the couch pillow, what's to prevent the police from arresting everyone in the house?"
The case, Maryland v. Pringle, No. 02-809, began at 3:16 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1999, when a Baltimore County police officer stopped a Nissan Maxima for speeding and, upon searching the vehicle, found $763 in cash wadded up in the glove compartment and five small plastic bags containing crack cocaine stuffed behind a back-seat armrest.
The officer, Jeffrey Snyder, told the driver and two passengers that if none of them confessed to ownership of the drugs, he would arrest all three. They kept silent, and he made good on his threat.
The front-seat passenger, Pringle, eventually admitted that the contraband was his and was convicted of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute; he is serving a 10-year sentence. The other two men were quickly released.
But last year, the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, reversed Pringle's conviction, ruling 4 to 3 that "a policy of arresting everyone until somebody confesses is constitutionally unacceptable."
-------- terrorism
U.S. Is Losing Focus on Terror Fight, Panel Says
Associated Press
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2976-2003Dec15.html
The effort to protect Americans from terrorism "appears to have waned" since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as both the government and its citizens worry more about the latest disaster or health crisis, a federal commission said yesterday.
In calling for the government to refocus on anti-terrorism efforts, the advisory panel also backed an independent board to make sure that efforts to monitor suspected terrorists do not infringe on Americans' civil liberties. The commission is chaired by former Virginia governor and Republican Party chairman James S. Gilmore III.
The report was the last of five by the nonpartisan panel created by Congress in 1998. L. Paul Bremer was a member until he was named the U.S. Iraq administrator, as was Donald H. Rumsfeld until he became defense secretary. The commission, whose efforts were supported by the Rand Corp. think tank, is to go out of business early next year.
Events such as Hurricane Isabel in September and the current flu epidemic have diverted the government's attention from anti-terrorism efforts, said the commission, officially known as the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction.
"Americans have very short-term memories," said commission vice chairman George Foresman, deputy director of Virginia's office of preparedness. "People are dealing with the reality of their lives today."
Commission members outlined several problems: The Homeland Security Department is trying to merge 22 agencies. Federal officials have not given clear directions to state and local governments on what they need to do in the anti-terrorism effort. And the private sector, which owns many power plants, the nation's commercial air fleet and other critical elements of the infrastructure, needs to be brought into the planning.
"The momentum appears to have waned as people, businesses and governments react to the uncertainties in combating terrorism and to the challenge of creating a unified enterprise," the report said.
Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the effort to protect Americans has not faltered. Homeland security professionals, he said, "are more focused then ever on their task of reducing our vulnerabilities, building in new layers of protection and enhancing our capabilities to respond to terrorism."
The commission also said government should balance the need to prevent terrorism with the need to preserve civil liberties. The panel called for an independent, bipartisan board to make sure that techniques used to fight terrorism, such as using military satellites, allowing law enforcement authorities to monitor lawful protests and following suspects through computer databases and traffic cameras, are not also used to spy on Americans.
"We are expressing concern and a simple warning that this must be constantly thought about," Gilmore said. "We should not fall into the pattern of suggesting that the freedoms of the American people should be traded off for their security."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Federal Agencies Would Turn Woody Biomass into Energy
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
December 16, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2003/2003-12-16-09.asp#anchor2
A conference to address the barriers to utilization of forest and woodland biomass for energy and small diameter wood products is planned for January. Now that Congress has passed the Bush administration's plan for forest thinning, this conference is designed to find ways to utilize the woody biomass that is removed.
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton announced today that three federal departments - Interior, Energy and Agriculture together with the Western overnor's Association, the National Association of Counties and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes will meet to discuss bioenergy and wood products January 20-22, 2004, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Denver, Colorado.
In June, the heads of Interior, Energy and Agriculture signed a memo of understanding to encourage utilization of woody biomass by-products that result from forest, woodland, and rangeland restoration and fuel treatments. When forests are thinned to reduce the likelihood of wildfires, instead of burning or other on-site disposal methods, the small wood and brush that is removed could be used to produce energy, the memo provides.
Together the agencies involved in the conference manage more than 1.2 billion acres of U.S. public and private lands. The Agriculture Department is responsible for the management of 192 million acres of National Forest System lands and for assisting in the management of 430 million acres of state and private forest lands. The Interior Department is responsible for the management of 507 million acres of surface lands, of which some 120 million acres are forest and woodlands.
Energy is "a key market for low-value woody biomass," the memo of understanding states, and the Energy and Agriculture Departments fund, support, and/or conduct a major share of the research concerning biomass energy alternatives.
"Woody biomass utilization can help reduce or offset the cost and increase the quality of the restoration or hazardous fuel reduction treatments," the memo states.
Utilization of woody biomass utilization may result in "more diverse forest ecosystems, characterized by native flora and fauna, healthy watersheds, better air quality, improved scenic qualities, more fire resilient landscapes, and reduced wildfire threats to communities, and may provide an alternative waste management strategy," the three agencies agreed in their memo.
The conference includes speakers from industry such as W. Henson Moore who heads the American Forest & Paper Association, and a few representatives of conservation organizations such as Ed Brunson from The Nature Conservancy in Boise, Idaho, who will moderate a panel called Collaborative Efforts to Restore Forest Rangeland Health. Many speakers are state and federal foresters.
The conference will consider some practical methods of developing a sustainable market for woody biomass. According to the three agencies' memo of understanding, the goverment would like to "promote renewable energy marketing strategies to stimulate investments in woody biomass utilization."
The scenario might include an option for retail electric power customers to pay a premium to purchase electricity generated from woody biomass gathered from restoration or hazardous fuels treatments.
-------- environment
A CONVERSATION WITH | JERRY MAHLMAN
Listening to the Climate Models, and Trying to Wake Up the World
December 16, 2003
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/science/earth/16CONV.html?pagewanted=all&position=
DENVER - In the stormy world of climate science, Dr. Jerry D. Mahlman, 63, is considered a giant.
Until three years ago, Dr. Mahlman, now a senior researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research here in Colorado, headed the federal Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J.
There he studied how the earth's troposphere and stratosphere work. To that end, he developed mathematical models showing how natural forces and chemicals interact in the atmosphere. The models consistently show that carbon dioxide emissions are likely to heat up the air, water and land.
It was this prediction of an overly warm future that transformed Dr. Mahlman into a reluctant activist. He travels the country on his own time, warning religious, civic and educational groups about the dangers of global warming.
"I don't like having to talk to people about something they don't particularly want to hear," he said in an interview, "but I see what the climate models are telling us. I think by ignoring projections on global warming, we are making a negative gift to our successors - human, animal and plant - of enormous dimension."
Q. Let's begin with basics. Is there actually a global warming phenomenon?
A. Yes, there really is. We know that the earth's climate has been heating up over the past century. This is happening in the atmosphere, ocean and on land.
Q. People often make off-the-cuff jokes about global warming, but why would a warmer earth be such a terrible thing?
A. The serious heat wave in Europe last summer is one example of how warming can affect people. Also, if the climate model projections on the level of warming are right, sea level will be rising for the next thousand years, the glaciers will be melting faster and dramatic increases in the intensity in rainfall rates and hurricanes are expected.
It means a summer drying out of the interiors of continents, with a threat to agriculture systems, planetwide. In the winter, it will rain more in our latitudes. There will be a major melting of Arctic Sea ice, and therefore a megathreat to life there. That is already happening.
If sea levels rise as fast as we think they will, the Florida Everglades are doomed. Low-lying countries like Bangladesh and Holland will be in serious trouble. And you can say goodbye to any islands that were formed by corals.
In 1979, a National Academy of Sciences report said the climate was likely to warm if you keep putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Though in the intervening years, we've gotten much more information proving this, little has been done since on the policy side of reducing CO2 emissions. All of this raises deep ethical questions. For me, the biggest one is, Do we accept a responsibility for the welfare of our descendants and for life in general 100, 200, 1,000 years from now?
Q. With many forecasters unable to predict if it is going to rain on Thursday, how can you predict the weather in a hundred years?
A. In some ways, weather prediction is harder because we are forecasting detailed short-term events that depend in detail upon our current weather. Climate projections are mathematically easier because we can only identify changes in averaged weather in the far future.
I've spent most of my professional life using mathematical models to calculate weather and climate all over the earth using the basic laws of physics. We solve those equations on supercomputers to evaluate future climate over many, many places on the world. And we check what the climate models give us against data from the real world. These models give us the future climate projections I'm speaking of here.
Q. How did the weather become such an important part of your life?
A. I grew up in the high plains of Nebraska, and we had severe hailstorms and blizzards. They were a source of fascination to me as a kid. On the prairie, you are marked by the weather. I never took weather for granted. I wanted to understand it.
Q. Could you be wrong with your predictions on global warming?
A. It would be wonderful to be wrong. Unfortunately, these projections are based on strong science that refuses to go away. Oh sure, there are people insisting that warming is just a part of natural weather cycles, but their claims are not close to being scientifically credible. And while there certainly are long climate cycles, the fact is that the strong warming we are seeing is happening in an era of ever increasing CO2 emissions.
These people remind me of the folks who kept trying to cast doubt on the science linking cancer to tobacco use. In both situations, the underlying scientific knowledge was quite well established, while the uncertainties were never enough to render the problem inconsequential. Yet, this offered misguided incentives to dismiss a danger.
Global warming is unpleasant news. The costs of doing something substantial to arrest it are daunting, but the consequences of not doing anything are staggering.
Q. One attempt by the international community to get a handle on global warming was the so-called Kyoto accords, which the Clinton administration supported tepidly, the United States Senate refused to ratify and the Bush administration openly opposed. The core of the treaty involved a national quota system for fossil fuel use. You've said elsewhere that Kyoto wouldn't have solved the global warming problem. Why?
A. Because it was a valid first step, and only that. The best Kyoto could have done was lower the increase rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, somewhat. Thirty Kyotos might do the job. The real value of Kyoto was to start the process of putting a brake on fossil fuel use.
Q. Did you ever see Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," about a health worker whose life is destroyed after he tells his community about typhoid in its water supply?
A. I am familiar with the story. I too have been under tremendous pressure at times to tone down my message, to make the science appear less alarming. When I was head of my laboratory at Princeton, I was often asked to give Congressional testimony.
In three events, two senators and a congressman - I won't give you their names because I consider that cheap - attacked me in the most personal way. They were trying to intimidate me into denying my testimony. Also, during my tenure in government, there were three instances where people in the government attempted to alter my prepared testimony. In each instance, I successfully challenged the requested changes as being scientifically insupportable.
Q. Nonscientists often say that science will come up with something to counter global warming. Is this wishful thinking?
A. So far, most of the alternatives that people are talking about have their own problems. We should start by curbing some fossil fuel use, of course. One idea you hear a lot about is called capturing carbon, where you burn coal and then sequester the CO2 deep under the earth. But if you start burying the stuff, you might be inviting other environmental problems. Does the CO2 ooze out? Does it leak into water systems? People have said, "how about putting the CO2 at the bottom of the ocean?" Well, what about the ecosystems there? Yet another strategy is nuclear energy, but the reactors can be used for making weapons of mass destruction.
Frankly, I don't have a quick-fix answer. I do know we have a very serious problem, but one that won't impact our entire planet dangerously until you and I are safely dead - which is perhaps why so few people care about it.
--------
New Policy on Mercury Pollution Was Rejected by Clinton E.P.A.
December 16, 2003
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/politics/16MERC.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The Bush administration's new proposal to regulate mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants is essentially the same as one discussed and rejected by the Clinton White House, former Clinton Environmental Protection Agency officials said Monday.
E.P.A. officials ruled in December 2000 that since mercury was a human neurotoxin, it had to be regulated as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That decision meant that individual power plants needed to be regulated.
The Bush proposal that was introduced on Monday would allow companies to buy and sell the right to emit mercury pollution, without any mandatory controls on individual plants. The administration and industry groups have pushed for a market-based approach to reducing mercury because they say it would be more flexible and cost effective.
Critics were skeptical.
"The Clinton administration evaluated the same approach that the Bush administration is now relying on and found that it was not legally supportable under the Clean Air Act," said Gary Guzy, an E.P.A. general counsel under Mr. Clinton.
The Clean Air Act lists 189 hazardous air pollutants, including asbestos, lead and mercury, and requires the environmental agency to design strict rules limiting their emissions. Coal-burning power plants currently release 48 tons of mercury a year, or about 40 percent of all the mercury emissions produced by humans in the United States.
"Because of the specificity of the Clean Air Act provision on mercury and power plants, we concluded that there was not a legal basis for this approach," Mr. Guzy said.
In 2000, officials at the White House Office of Management of Budget brought a pollution-trading proposal to John Podesta, the White House chief of staff under Mr. Clinton. Mr. Podesta ultimately sided with Carol M. Browner, the administrator of the E.P.A., who argued that such a proposal would not be legal under the Clean Air Act.
To create a trading system, the Bush administration is now reclassifying mercury to a less stringently controlled pollutant.
Internal White House documents provided by administration officials say the use of the Clean Air Act to create a mercury trading is "innovative" and "poses legal risks." Lawyers in the general counsel's office at the environmental agency also cautioned a top official, Jeffrey R. Holmstead, that the mercury trading proposal might not hold up in court, senior officials at the agency said.
In 2001, industry groups sued the agency for categorizing mercury as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
"From Day 1, it's been our view that E.P.A. has ample authority under the Clean Air Act to develop a cap-and-trade program to regulate the mercury utility emissions," said Dan Riedinger, an industry spokesman with the Edison Electric Institute, which took part in the lawsuit.
The court put the case aside because the agency had not created any final regulation at the time.
Former Clinton officials say their decision was based in science.
"We made a determination that mercury needed to be regulated based on the criteria in the Clean Air Act based on public health and available technologies," said Robert Perciasepe, who headed the agency's air office and now works at the Audubon Society.
--------
EPA Announces 'Cap and Trade' Plan to Cut Mercury Pollution
Agency Bowed to Utility Industry Pressure, Critics Charge
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3019-2003Dec15.html
Mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants would be regulated for the first time with the goal of cutting the total by more than two-thirds under a rule formally announced yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, who signed the proposed rule, said it is part of a larger Bush administration initiative to provide "the largest air pollution reductions of any kind not specifically mandated by the Congress." But critics said the mercury proposal would achieve far less than what is possible under the Clean Air Act.
The administration plan is certain to trigger a vigorous election year debate over the best way to regulate the toxic mercury emissions, which cause severe neurological and developmental damage.
"When it comes to the risks of mercury exposure, the administration just doesn't get it," said Angela Ledford, director of Clear the Air, an environmental advocacy group. "Despite mounting scientific evidence, the Bush EPA is still trying to pretend mercury is not as dangerous as it really is."
The outlines of the proposal were revealed last week; yesterday's action marked the formal publication of the proposed rule.
Also yesterday, scientists released a new study of air pollution in urban areas that found a strong connection between fine particle emissions and fatal heart disease. The administration has pledged to address, in another air pollution initiative later this week, the public health problems caused by tiny particles of pollution from power plants.
Coal-fired power plants are the nation's largest source of unregulated airborne mercury pollution, sending an estimated 48 tons into the atmosphere annually. The mercury can enter the food chain and threaten public health, especially for children and pregnant women who eat tainted fish.
Until recently, the EPA appeared on track to issue new rules this month requiring the nation's 1,100 coal- and oil-fired power plants to meet a "maximum achievable control technology" (MACT) standard to sharply reduce the mercury pollutants within three years. That approach had run into strong resistance from industry groups, which say the regulations would be excessively costly and would be impossible to meet with existing anti-pollution technology.
Instead, the administration embraced a mandatory "cap and trade" program, similar to the successful program to combat acid rain that was begun in 1990. The new program, which would reduce mercury emissions by nearly 70 percent by 2018, would allow utilities to buy emissions "credits" from cleaner-operating plants to meet an overall industry target without having to install new scrubbers or anti-pollution equipment on every plant.
Complying with a consent agreement, the EPA yesterday also proposed a modest MACT standard to reduce mercury emissions by 29 percent by the end of 2007. But officials made it clear they were not interested in that approach and would press for public approval of the cap and trade plan during public hearings. The administration hopes to issue a final regulation within a year.
"Cap and trade for mercury allows you to get substantially greater reductions for less cost," said Jeffrey Holmstead, assistant EPA administrator for air quality. "Cap and trade enables you to get the most stringent controls on the biggest sources."
Frank O'Donnell of the Clean Air Trust and other environmentalists said EPA officials were considering much tougher cuts two years ago, but the agency and White House officials backed off under pressure from the industry -- a charge the administration disputes. "The proposal they've come out with is virtually a joke because it does not represent the maximum cleanup that could be achieved with technology, which is the legal test of what they're supposed to do under the Clean Air Act," O'Donnell said.
Later this week, Leavitt plans to sign related rules that would set new targets for the utility industry to reduce other major air pollutants within 15 years using the cap and trade approach.
Those rules, largely targeted to 30 northeastern and midwestern states with the worst smog and acid rain, closely match President Bush's "Clear Skies" legislation, which has languished in Congress for a year. Leavitt and White House officials have decided to take a regulatory approach to reducing sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and fine particle emissions, which are responsible for ground- level smog and for tens of thousands of illnesses and premature deaths each year.
The government action coincides with yesterday's publication of a study showing that people who live in more polluted cities have an 18 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease than people in less polluted areas.
A team of scientists headed by Brigham Young University epidemiologist C. Arden Pope studied more than 50 cities across the country, including the Washington area, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland and Los Angeles, using data on the lifestyles, occupations and deaths of 500,000 individuals gathered by the American Cancer Society from 1982 to 1998. The scientists fed the data into a model that estimated the effects of air pollution while controlling for other factors, including smoking habits, diet and occupational exposures.
Since the early 1980s, the average U.S. level of fine particle emissions has dropped from 21 to 14 micrograms per cubic meter, slightly below the danger level set by the EPA. However, some areas, including cities in Southern California, continue to register levels of 20 micrograms per cubic meter.
Pope's study found that each 10 micrograms-per-cubic-meter increase was accompanied by an 18 percent increase in risk of death from ischemic heart disease and a 13 percent increase in risk of death from altered heart rhythm, heart failure or cardiac arrest, according to the report.
The new research, published online in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, also suggests biological pathways through which pollution might cause these diseases -- primarily inflammation and nervous system aberrations.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Enola Gay display angers victims
Tuesday, 16 December, 2003
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3315729.stm
Protests have interrupted the opening of a new US museum display which includes the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.
Two men were arrested after red paint symbolising blood was thrown at the Enola Gay, a World War II B-29 bomber.
Survivors of the bombing are angry that the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum is not displaying casualty figures from the US-led attack.
About 140,000 Japanese died in the bombing itself, and many others later.
Around six survivors and 50 peace activists visited the new annex to the museum, some holding pictures of burned victims of the blast.
Thomas K Siemer, 73, of Columbus, Ohio, was charged with felony destruction of property and loitering, while Gregory Wright of Hagerstown, Maryland, faced a misdemeanour loitering charge.
A panel of the Enola Gay was dented in the fracas.
However the museum's director, retired general John Dailey, has resisted calls for the death toll to be included.
"We don't do it for other airplanes," he told French agency AFP.
"From a consistency standpoint, we focus on the technical aspects."
The text accompanying the plane talks about its technological prowess and how it "found its niche on the other side of the globe".
"This is the second time I have seen the Enola Gay," said Hiroshima survivor Minoru Nishino, 71, who was two kilometres (miles) from the epicentre of the blast, and still bears scars.
"The first time was on August 6, 1945, when I saw it flying high in the sky.
"When I saw the Enola Gay today, I was overcome by anger," he said.
Debate
The museum has spent months restoring the B-29 bomber for display in a giant hangar at its Steven Udvar-Hazy Center, near Dulles International Airport in Washington DC.
The Enola Gay has proved contentious for the museum before, when in 1995 portions of its fuselage, undercarriage and engines went on display as part of an exhibition about the atomic bomb, leading to protests.
Three days after the 1945 Hiroshima bombing, the US dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki.
Within days the Japanese officially surrendered and World War II ended, although debate has raged ever since over whether the act hastened the war's end and saved thousands of lives or was one of the world's worst war crimes.
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The Biggest Arrival at Dulles
Flight Fans, Protesters Come for Museum Opening
By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 16, 2003; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2994-2003Dec15?language=printer
As a boy, Ron York spent hours crafting 10-cent model planes from balsa and glue. He suspended his creations from his bedroom ceiling, a private fleet that helped his imagination soar.
The magic of airplanes never faded for York, now a 62-year-old retiree who lives in Haymarket. And yesterday, thrilled about a chance to see the real things, he was among the first visitors at the Smithsonian Institution's new companion to the National Air and Space Museum, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.
"This is magnificent," York said as he wandered through the immense museum at Dulles International Airport. "I've always been fascinated with everything about planes and aviation."
For months, aviation and space enthusiasts have waited eagerly as historic machines -- including the sleek Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, an Air France Concorde and the Enola Gay, the World War II plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima -- made their way into the 10-story hangar. Yesterday was the first day the museum opened its doors to the public, and officials said 7,083 people visited.
A group of protesters, including elderly atomic bomb survivors and other activists, also came to the museum yesterday to express outrage that the Enola Gay exhibit does not include details about the devastation wrought by the 1945 blast. Most of the protesters were peaceful, holding hands and singing, Smithsonian officials said, but others became disruptive, and two were arrested after a protester threw a bottle of red paint at the Enola Gay.
The bottle, which was tossed from an overhead walkway, struck and dented the plane and then shattered on the floor, officials said. No paint got on the plane.
Thomas K. Siemer, 73, of Columbus, Ohio, was charged with destruction of property and loitering, according to Tara Hamilton, spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. She said Gregory Wright, 55, of Hagerstown, Md., was charged with loitering.
But for the most part, visitors from as far away as Scotland marveled at the approximately 80 aircraft, some suspended from the hangar ceiling, others on the floor. It was a chance to get close to the aircraft they've seen in the news and in history books, a chance to explore.
Mattson Heiner, 12, and his brother Chase, 8, of Clifton, cut school to go to the museum. It was hard to tell who was more excited, the boys or their father, Ron Heiner, who has bought a year-long parking pass.
"Everything about space and flying is just the greatest," Mattson said. "It's cool stuff."
The first stop for the Heiners was the space shuttle Enterprise, which never made it into space but was used by NASA for approach and landing test flights.
Although the biggest displays, such as the Enterprise, are expected to be the biggest draws for the 3 million visitors expected each year, the museum also holds more than 1,000 smaller bits of aviation history. For example, one case displays Charles Lindbergh's flight suit and goggles. Another, dedicated to the Vietnam War, had a "dog doo" transmitter like the ones dropped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail by air to alert the United States to supply movements.
Dwayne "Louie" Paquin of Alexandria, Minn., said he arrived with 17 other guys who flew into the nearby Leesburg airport in a friend's restored Douglas DC-3, a World War II-era plane named Minnie. Eventually, the men are headed to North Carolina to celebrate the Wright brothers' maiden flight in 1903.
Back in 1952, Paquin said, he made a deal with a friend to buy an airplane together and sold five head of cattle to come up with his share. "He never showed up with his $900, and that's probably why we're still alive," Paquin said.
Paquin said he never lost that desire to fly but, at his wife's insistence, had to settle for motorcycles. This trip, he said, was the next best thing.
"Being it's my 70th birthday, I thought it would be real nice to cap it off with the 100th anniversary of flight," Paquin said. "I've always wanted to be a flier."
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A Big Museum Opens, to Jeers as Well as Cheers
December 16, 2003
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/national/16MUSE.html
CHANTILLY, Va., Dec. 15 - The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum opened a vast, gleaming new building on the edge of Dulles International Airport here on Monday, filled with aircraft of every description, including the B-29 that carried the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan.
The opening was mobbed not only by tourists and aviation buffs but also by several dozen protesters, who said the bombing of Hiroshima should have been better described. A plaque in front of the B-29, the Enola Gay, describes it as "the most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of World War II" and notes that it dropped the bomb, but tells little more.
"If you're going to display it at all, you have to display it with what it did to human beings," said Joseph Gerson, program coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee.
But Gen. John R. Dailey, director of the Air and Space Museum, said the purpose of his institution was to stimulate interest in technology and science. "The political aspects are more difficult to cover in three paragraphs," said General Dailey, a retired Marine pilot. The plaque has 14 lines of text, similar in length to the descriptions of other historic craft here.
For three years in the mid-1990's, the Enola Gay's fuselage was displayed at the Air and Space Museum's main building, on the Mall in Washington, where it created clashes between veterans' groups and antinuclear activists over how it should be described. But this is the first time the entire plane has been on display; an elevated walkway allows visitors to peer through the cockpit windows.
Mr. Gerson said setting up the plane for public view "builds cultural and political forces in this country for use of nuclear weapons again." Protesters chanted, "No more war!" In response, some visitors shouted, "Go home!" and other, less polite demands.
Among the protesters today were six Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima bombing and the child of a seventh. Though noisy, the demonstrators were mostly peaceful. In one exception, a container of red paint was thrown against the polished aluminum fuselage, bounced off and broke on the concrete floor. The airport police arrested Thomas K. Seimer, 73, of Columbus, Ohio, and charged him with destruction of property, a felony, and loitering, a misdemeanor. A second protester, Gregory Wright, 55, of Hagerstown, Md., was arrested on a loitering charge.
Most visitors seemed to take the protest in stride. Sequined drum majorettes from Stone Bridge High School in the nearby community of Ashburn, who had come with their marching band to perform at the opening, whipped out cameras to record the scene.
By day's end, the museum said, more than 10,000 people had toured the new center. Many were aviation buffs, from near and far. Ray Appleby said he had come from Gloucestershire, England, to see the Concorde, whose autopilot, he said, he helped develop. The Smithsonian has an Air France model, its narrow neck rising above a walkway. It is parked at right angles to the prototype of the Boeing 707.
Tim and Liz Dennison of Herndon, a stone's throw from Dulles Airport, brought their son Justin as a present for his 10th birthday. The Dennisons, both of them stunt pilots, were impressed that a tourist attraction on par with those in Washington, 28 miles away, had opened near their home in the suburbs.
The Smithsonian expects to attract about three million visitors a year to its new building, named the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in honor of the aircraft leasing magnate who pledged $65 million for its construction.
The complex, not quite finished, will ultimately hold more than 200 aircraft and 135 space artifacts. It is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily. Admission is free, as with all Smithsonian museums, but parking is $12. A bus runs hourly from the Air and Space Museum's flagship building on the Mall for $7 round trip.
The museum on the Mall gets about nine million visitors a year but houses only some 10 percent of the Smithsonian's aviation collection. The Udvar-Hazy Center will have nearly all the rest. Many of the smaller planes are already suspended from its arches, quite a few visible up close from elevated walkways.
Perhaps more than museums of art or natural history, the Air and Space Museum offers a vicarious pleasure to visitors, who can contemplate flying the craft on display. Not all of them would find that a treat, though.
In the Space Hangar, which is dominated by the Enterprise, a prototype of the space shuttle, a group of students visiting Washington from the Saklan Valley School in Moraga, Calif., near San Francisco, clustered around the Gemini VII capsule. Frank Borman and James A. Lovell were aloft in Gemini VII for 14 days in December 1965 to demonstrate that astronauts could endure in space long enough to get to the moon and back.
Alison Tokar, 13, looked skeptically at the tiny interior and doubted that she could have lasted that long.
"I can't spend an hour in the car," she said. "And they eat like, toothpaste, right?"
Jon Marino contributed reporting for this article.
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Protests disrupt museum opening
December 16, 2003
By Derrill Holly
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20031215-100739-3352r.htm
A small group of protesters briefly disrupted the official opening of the National Air and Space Museum's new annex at Washington Dulles International Airport yesterday, spilling a red liquid supposed to resemble blood near the Enola Gay exhibit and throwing an object that dented the airplane.
Two men were arrested after security broke up the demonstration, which in one instance involved a shouting match between the protesters and museum visitors. Thomas K. Siemer, 73, of Columbus, Ohio, was charged with felony destruction of property and loitering, while Gregory Wright of Hagerstown, Md., faced a misdemeanor loitering charge.
Several elderly atomic bomb survivors from Japan also expressed dismay that information on the effects of the bomb dropped by the Enola Gay on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, was not included in the exhibit.
"If they want to show these planes, that's fine, but we can't help but also demand that they show the damage and the stories that take place behind these weapons," said Terumi Tanaka, 71, a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb attack, which occurred three days after Hiroshima.
A total of 230,000 people were killed in the two attacks. Japan surrendered unconditionally six days after the Nagasaki bombing.
Some visitors at the opening of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center said, however, they considered the Enola Gay an important part of aviation history.
"The Hiroshima bomb started the whole nuclear age, that's why I wanted to see it," said Philip Wheaton, 78, of Takoma Park.
The Enola Gay is one of 82 racers, gliders, helicopters, warplanes and airliners on display in the Smithsonian Institution's nearly 294,000-square-foot aviation exhibit hangar. Other notable exhibits include the SR-71 Blackbird, an American spy plane that still holds the record as the fastest plane ever built; and the Space Shuttle Enterprise, which was used by NASA to test various concepts during the development of reusable spacecraft.
The Smithsonian's aerospace collection eventually will be displayed in the 53,000 square-foot James S. McDonnell Space hangar.
"This is the largest air-and-space exhibition complex in the world," said retired Gen. John R. Dailey, director of the museum. "We have about 40 percent of the aircraft in here today, and over the next three years we'll be moving more in."
Visitors, for the most part, said they were impressed with the new annex.
"Seeing all of these aircraft fully assembled is getting to see history," said Ray Kimball, 30, of Menlo Park, Calif. The Army helicopter pilot toured the facility with his 3-year-old son. "I'll have to bring him back when he's older."
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Grief overflows, anger flares as Hiroshima bomber goes on display
CHANTILLY, Virginia (AFP)
Dec 16, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031215231022.xo46ieil.html
Grief stricken Hiroshima survivors on Monday confronted the Enola Gay, the American warplane which unleashed the world's first atomic bomb in 1945, in a visit which jarred raw US emotions over Japan's role in World War II.
Six survivors and around 50 peace activists visited a new museum where the shiny, restored Boeing B-20 Superfortress has just gone on public display, holding pictures of hideously burned victims among tens of thousands killed or injured by the blast.
Two men were arrested after a bottle of red paint, meant to symbolise blood, was thrown, denting a panel on one side of the plane, parked in a new annex to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
One was charged with destruction of property, the other man faces loitering charges, police said.
"This is the second time I have seen the Enola Gay," said Hiroshima survivor Minoru Nishino, 71, who was two kilometres (miles) from the epicentre of the blast, and still bears scars.
"The first time was on August 6, 1945, when I saw it flying high in the sky.
"When I saw the Enola Gay today, I was overcome by anger."
Another survivor, Tamiko Tomonaga, 74, said she had travelled from Japan in memory of the dead.
But their act of remembrance beside the plane, was too much for some museum visitors, who angrily chanted ""Remember Pearl Harbor" and "What about the Nanjing massacre?" referring to actions of imperial Japanese forces.
"My Dad fought in the war -- go home" shouted another man.
Fifty-eight years after Hiroshima bombing, and a second atom bomb strike on Nagasaki, opinion here on the first nuclear strikes is still sharply divided.
Opponents argue the action, which killed up to 230,000 people if those who died from radiation sickeness are included, was nothing short of a war crime.
Some historians contend however, that despite the horror of the bombings, they shortened the war with Japan, thus saving untold lives.
Both viewpoints vied for prominence at the museum on Monday, just under the flightpath of Dulles international airport outside Washington, which also houses a retired Air France Concorde and a space shuttle prototype.
Survivors are disappointed the plane is being displayed with no reference to casualty figures at Hiroshima.
"We would not mind the plane going on display if they showed the tragedy they caused," said Tomonaga, a Red Cross nurse at the time of the bombing.
The Enola Gay bears a label describing it as the "most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of World War II."
The text mentions the technological prowess of the aircraft and how it "found its niche on the other side of the globe."
"On August 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan."
"They (Japan) started the war by bombing our servicemen in Pearl Harbor, they should go and stand on the deck of the Arizona," said one man who refused to give his name, referring to a US ship sunk in the raid, now a memorial.
Another visitor to the museum, Joe Lassals, said, "I am thinking of all the American soldiers who were killed -- why don't they remember them?"
The museum's director, retired general John Dailey, has resisted groups who want the death toll from the Hiroshima bombings included.
"We don't do it for other airplanes," he told AFP. "From a consistency standpoint, we focus on the technical aspects."
The museum says its stance is consistent with the mission entrusted to it by US Congress, which is to display and preserve historic and technologically significant air and space craft.
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