Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Company Sends Uranium to Wrong Site
Malaysia Helps U.S., Britain Probe Libya Nuclear Link
Anger over issue of anti-radiation pills
Who's Got the Best Tank?
German nuke waste to Sellafield by 15 March
India's Supreme Court keeps nuclear safety documents secret
EU's Solana to maintain pressure on Iran over nuclear program
Russia-Iran talks on spent nuclear fuel accord set for February
Think Tank Report: Iraq WMD Not Imminent Threat
Report Criticizes U.S. on Iraq
U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq
U.S. cuts back crew searching for Iraq weapons
Lockheed Martin To Develop New Next Generation Missile Defense
Missile response to be investigated
Swedish defense agency says "terrorists" could easily make nuclear bomb
Undercover Experts Look for 'Dirty Bombs'
Experts Seeking 'Dirty Bombs' in Cities
Company Sends Uranium to Wrong Site
Ohio Nuclear Plant Inspection Delayed
US neo-cons forced to take a back seat for now
MILITARY
Hong Kong Postpones Timetable For Reforms
Poland offering to host major US military base: report
US set to back state control of Iraqi oil
U.S. Helicopter Crashes in Iraq, Killing at Least 9
U.S. Presses Iraqi Kurds to Compromise on Issue of Autonomy
U.S. Soldier Dies in Iraq Mortar Attack
Israeli army faces reforms as defence budget slashed
3 Palestinians Slain During Israeli Raids In West Bank
US Wants Taiwan To Bolster Intelligence Gathering: Jane's
U.S. wants to tap VoIP
Chicago Jury to See Iraqi Intelligence Papers
Wounded "Held Captive" at Walter Reed
US marines anger army over Iraq tactics
Troops in Iraq suffer huge risk of injury
U.S. Spyplanes, Anti-Explosion Unit Going to Iraq
Judge Decides Pentagon Can Resume Anthrax Vaccinations
Judge Reverses Anthrax Ruling
Report says Bush administration exaggerated Iraq's weapons threat
For Many Iraqis, U.S.-Backed TV Echoes the Voice Of Its Sponsor
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Showdown on Terrorism Case
Interruption of Effort to Down Drug Planes Is Disclosed
Bush Proposes Legal Status for Immigrant Labor
Plan for Illegal Immigrant Workers Draws Fire From Two Sides
Border Politics as Bush Woos 2 Key Groups With Proposal
U.S. Halts Cuban Immigration Talks;
Miami federal court has 'secret docket' to keep some cases hidden
U.S. Reasserts Right to Declare Citizens to Be Enemy Combatants
OTHER
Climate Change Forecast to Extinguish One Million Species
Scientists Predict Widespread Extinction by Global Warming
Warming May Threaten 37% of Species by 2050
I.M.F. Says U.S. Debts Threaten World Economy
ACTIVISTS
Protesters greet shipment to WIPP
Radioactive Shipment Heads Through Albuquerque
Wyoming digest County commission criticizes Patriot Act
Caged dove
Civil rights advocates protest FBI almanac warning
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Company Sends Uranium to Wrong Site
(AP)
Thursday January 8, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3602354,00.html
PADUCAH, Ky. - A trucking company accidentally sent a shipment of diluted weapons-grade uranium to a North Carolina nuclear plant instead of its intended destination in Kentucky, but the mix-up posed no risk to anyone, officials said.
The federal government is investigating how six metric tons of blended Russian uranium went to a nuclear fabrication plant in Wilmington, N.C., instead of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Transport Logistics International sent the load on Dec. 19 - along with a similarly numbered load from a dock in Norfolk, Va. - to Global Nuclear Fuel LLC in Wilmington, N.C. Rod Fisk, the trucking company's chief executive officer, said that the error was quickly spotted, and that Global was notified.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission believes the mistake posed no risk to anyone, a spokesman said Wednesday.
``It was received at a facility authorized to take it,'' agency spokesman Roger Hannah said.
USEC, the company that operates the plant in Paducah, has bought or agreed to buy $7.5 billion worth of uranium from Russia. The Kentucky plant enriches uranium for use as fuel for nuclear power plants.
The weapons-grade uranium is diluted before being shipped to the United States.
-------- asia
Malaysia Helps U.S., Britain Probe Libya Nuclear Link
January 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-malaysia-libya.html
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysian police are working with U.S. and British intelligence services on an investigation into the supply of parts crucial to Libya's secret nuclear weapons program, a government official said on Thursday.
Centrifuge parts from Malaysia were found aboard a cargo ship bound for Libya last October, he said.
Centrifuges are used for enriching uranium for nuclear reactors or fissile material for bombs.
``I believe the police are investigating, and they are working with the CIA and MI6,'' said the Malaysian official, referring to U.S. and British intelligence agencies.
Other countries would inevitably be implicated as the story unfolded, the official told Reuters.
He declined to divulge more details of the investigation into the sale of the equipment, which is available through middlemen on the black market.
Libya said last month it would abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs and would allow snap inspections of its atomic facilities.
Britain says Libya was close to making a nuclear bomb and U.S. officials have described its program as ``much further advanced than believed.''
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said this week Libya had obtained its nuclear know-how from Pakistan -- the only country in the Islamic world with nuclear arms.
The Libyan announcement it was abandoning its weapons program came after the United States and its allies seized the centrifuge parts from a German-owned freighter, intercepted in October on its way from a Gulf port to Libya.
A U.S. official said last month it was unclear what effect the seizure had on Tripoli's decision to abandon its nuclear arms program.
Malaysia does not have a nuclear power program. The government run Malaysian Institute for Nuclear Technology and Research is primarily focused on industrial and medical applications.
-------- britain
Anger over issue of anti-radiation pills
JOHN ROSS,
The Scotsman (UK)
Thu 8 Jan 2004
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/scotland.cfm?id=23332004
MORE than 2,000 residents of Skye and Wester Ross will be issued with anti-radiation pills later this month to counter any hazards from nuclear submarines mooring in their area.
Public meetings will be held to explain the reasons behind the issuing of the potassium iodate tablets which will be sent to every household within a 2km radius of the Ministry of Defence emergency submarine moorings in Loch Ewe and Aultbea, in Wester Ross, and Broadford, in Skye.
The tablets have previously been sent out to residents living near the Vulcan Naval Reactor Test Establishment, in Caithness, as well as at the Torness Power Station, East Lothian.
A recent risk assessment required NHS Highland and the Highland Council to put in place appropriate plans and counter-measures to offset any potential hazard at the so-called "Z berths" - emergency moorings for the subs.
A council spokesman said: "Previous plans assumed that the tablets could be rapidly distributed to all residents within the 2km zone following the release of radiation. However, changes to health and safety legislation and a recent review of procedures has highlighted that it will not be possible to rely on police, health or council employees or volunteers to distribute the tablets within the required timescale.
"NHS Highland and the Highland Council have agreed that the most prudent but effective course of action is to pre-distribute the tablets, as this will ensure access to the tablets for the majority of people within 2km of the moorings."
The spokesman added: "The council wish to stress that there is no increased risk of a nuclear accident at any of the three Highland sites, which have been in use for 20 years.
"Indeed, the council have been reassured by the MoD that the possibility of such an accident occurring, let alone having adverse consequences for the local population is extremely unlikely."
From Monday, Royal Navy officers will hand-deliver information material explaining the situation and inviting residents to public meetings.
NHS Highland says the tablets minimise the effects resulting from inhalation of radioactive iodine released into the air and can also help prevent subsequent cancer of the thyroid gland.
However, the plan has been attacked by a local action group, Wester Ross Against Radiation (WAR), which says not enough is known about the impact of a potential accident or the effectiveness of the anti-radiation pills.
Gordon Harrison, a member of the group, said: "The number of local people who are concerned about the emergency planning, and the way it is being foisted on the communities affected, is fostering a growing sense of anger."
Mr Harrison said residents have not been told when to take the tablets in the event of an accident, or how they will be informed that they need to take them. He said that he has been told by NHS experts that there have been no clinical trials measuring the effectiveness of the potassium iodate tablets.
He added: "This is quite astonishing. I cannot imagine any other situation where medication would be routinely issued without a comprehensive clinical trial to assess the effectiveness of such medication."
He said there is also concern that some information will not be made public.
"Frankly, the more I learn about this subject the more angry I and my colleagues become," said Mr Harrison.
"I have noticed how every letter or press release from the authorities always use the phrases 'extremely unlikely' and 'there is no increased risk'. Extremely unlikely things happen all the time all over the world, so that assurance is worthless."
-------- depleted uranium
Who's Got the Best Tank?
by James Dunnigan
January 8, 2004
StrategyWorld.com
http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/200418.asp
Most people would say it's the American M-1 Abrams. Their reasoning would be simple; the M-1 has actually fought in two wars since 1991 and handily defeated whatever was sent against it. Tank buffs, however, tend to look more closely at details casual observers ignore. The buffs tend to consider the German Leopard 2A6 as superior to the latest model M-1A2. The Leopard 2A6 has a longer 120mm gun barrel, giving it's shells greater penetration. The Leopard also has reactive armor for the top of the tank, where the latest top-attack missiles seek to penetrate the thinner armor there. The Leopard also has a number of other novel touches, like a video cam facing to the rear of the tank, and hooked up to a screen in the drivers compartment. This allows to driver to go into reverse more quickly and confidently. Backing up quickly is a frequently used combat maneuver. The Leopard also has a diesel engine, rather than the fuel guzzling gas turbine (jet engine) of the M-1. Thus the M-1 has a little more zip, but the Leopard gets much better gas mileage.
But a tank does not stand by itself. It is part of a combat force, and the most important component is the crew. In this department, the M-1 has several advantages. Most importantly, American tank crews have had a lot of combat experience since World War II, German crews have had none. While German training is good, they are still using conscript crews, while U.S. tankers are all volunteers and in service longer. American combat doctrine has also developed more rapidly than Germany's and currently makes heavy use of the battlefield Internet and superior situational awareness. All of this makes an enormous difference. A tank is not the sum of all it's parts, it's only as good as the system it operates within. Here the M-1 has a big edge. Moreover, the Americans get an additional slight edge because of their willingness to use depleted uranium in their composite armor, and tank shells. Then again, if the U.S. and German switched tanks, the Leopards with American crews would be superior.
The other tanks in the "top ten" are remarkably similar. Most have composite armor, and often reactive armor as well. All have guns similar to the M-1 and Leopard's 120mm smoothbore. The British Challenger 2 is usually ranked third. But, again, because the British armor units have had combat experience since World War II and use volunteers, they have an edge. Because the Americans have more proven combat technology, the M-1 would still be first, but the Challenger 2 would be second and the German Leopard third.
Things really get interesting when you try to fill the fourth place slot. There are a lot of high tech tanks out there. The French have the LeClerc, the Japanese have the T-90, the South Koreans have the Type 88/120 and Israel has the Merkava 4. Again, the edge should go to the tank that has the best crews and the most combat experience. That would be the Merkava 4. While lacking a lot of the gadgets of the other tanks mentioned above, the Merkava has an edge because of combat experience and crews with years of working together. Although most Israeli tank crews are reservists, many of the troops have combat experience and the crews often stick together for decades. This makes for very effective crews and tank units.
Fifth place belongs to the South Korean Type 88/120. This tank was developed by the same people who created the M-1. Some call it the "Baby M-1", as it is a bit lighter than the M-1 (51 tons versus nearly 70 tons), but otherwise uses the same design principles. Most important is the fact that the South Korean crews know that they have a deadly foe just to the north. This provides a little pucker factor to the training, which is run using a lot of American techniques.
Sixth place is tricky and is a toss up between the French LeClerc and the Japanese Type 90. The edge goes to the Japanese tank. Both vehicles weigh about the same and use similar weapons. But the Japanese have better electronics and crews that have been together longer. Plus, all things considered, I be a little more fearful of a bunch of Japanese crews in their Type 90s than French crews in their LeClercs.
Seventh place, by default, goes to the LeClerc.
Eighth place would be the Russian T-80UM2. This tank uses a lot of new protective technology (to detect and defeat anti-tank missiles), several armor systems and lots of electronics. Unfortunately, the workmanship is slipshod and the crews mostly conscripts and poorly led.
Ninth place goes to the new Chinese Type 98. This is another of those "improved T-72s." Lots of improvements, though, many of them similar to what's found in the Russian T-80UM2. The workmanship on these vehicles is a little better than on the T-80UM2, but the Chinese don't have as much experience building tanks. This has shown itself in the numerous technical glitches that have shown up. The Chinese are moving to volunteer crews and more intensive training.
Tenth place goes to the Russian T-90, which is actually an upgraded T-72. Not as effective an upgrade as the T-80UM2 or the Chinese Type 98.
Most of the remaining tanks in the world are Russian T-72s and T-55s, and US M-60s and M-48s. China builds clones of these Russian tanks, and other countries build variations on the T-72 and older British tanks. The M-60s, with the latest upgrades (thermal sights and computerized fire control systems) and well trained crews could be contenders for the 8-10 positions. But all those T-72s and T-55s serve largely as targets. However, as experience in the Arab-Israeli wars and World War II amply demonstrated, technically "inferior" tanks with superior crews will rule the battlefield.
-------- europe
German nuke waste to Sellafield by 15 March
von Aktionsbuendnis CASTOR-Widerstand Neckarwesth -
08.01.2004 15:07,
IndyMediaDE
http://de.indymedia.org/2004/01/71364.shtml
The anti-nuclear transports group Aktionsbuendnis CASTOR-Widerstand Neckarwestheim reports that the ?Federal Radiation Protection Agency? (BfS) has licensed another nuclear waste consignment from the Neckarwestheim power station (about 45 km north of Stuttgart) to the plutonium factory at Sellafield in northwest England. The group says the licence is for two Castor caskets containing a total of 14 spent fuel rods and is valid until 15 March. Also valid to that date is the transportation from the Krümmel nuke in northern Gerrmany of eight caskets to Sellafield.
-------- india / pakistan
India's Supreme Court keeps nuclear safety documents secret
Thursday, January 08, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-01-08/s_11841.asp
NEW DELHI - Safety reports on India's nuclear power plants can be withheld from the public by the government in the interest of national security, the country's Supreme Court has ruled.
The court dismissed appeals by two public interest groups, which sought access to all government safety reports pertaining to India's 12 nuclear installations.
The groups said they wanted to verify whether adequate safety precautions had been adopted to protect lives and the environment in case of nuclear plant accidents, The Hindu newspaper reported Wednesday.
Chief Justice V.N. Khare and Justice S.B. Sinha said citizens had a right to access government information under the constitution, but such a right was subject to reasonable restrictions in the interest of national security, the newspaper reported.
Of India's 12 nuclear power reactors, only two in Tarapore - near the western Indian city of Bombay - meet international safety guidelines.
India's nuclear reactors are not bound to follow international standards, as the country is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The public petitioners - the People's Union for Civil Liberties and the Bombay Sarvoday Mandal - were not entitled to receive documents declared "secret" under the Atomic Energy Act of 1962, the judges ruled. India declares its nuclear plant safety reports secret documents.
In 1999, six tons of heavy water leaked from a coolant channel at the Atomic Power Station at Kalpakkam, near the southern city of Madras, exposing four workers to mildly radioactive tritium.
The government said after the accident the area was safe, as radioactivity had not risen to abnormal levels.
Anti-nuclear activists highlight the fact that 10 nuclear plants do not conform to international safety standards, and claim many safety breaches go unreported because of the secrecy that surrounds the country's nuclear establishment.
-------- iran
EU's Solana to maintain pressure on Iran over nuclear program
DUBLIN (AFP)
Jan 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040108144452.sbfvqym8.html
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Thursday he will maintain pressure on Iran to continue cooperation with the UN's atomic watchdog over its nuclear program in a forthcoming visit to Tehran.
Solana, who travels to Vienna Sunday for talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), wants to put dialogue with Iran back on track after Tehran last month ended months of wrangling by signing a key UN treaty protocol allowing surpise inspections of its nuclear facilities.
"I would like very much to reestablish a climate of dialogue with Iran," he said, adding that the nuclear row meant that EU-Tehran relations "have been going through a dip. I would like to try to see if we can recuperate that."
"Recuperating that ... means also that the Iranian government has to continue working efficiently and cooperating with (the IAEA)," added Solana, who will travel to Tehran on Monday.
Iran last month signed the additional protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), following months of intense diplomacy to pressure Tehran into placing its nuclear facilities under greater international supervision and prove that it is not seeking to develop atomic weapons.
Despite EU heavyweights Britain, France and Germany helping persuade Tehran to sign the protocol, the nuclear row severely strained ties.
The EU, unlike the United States which has labelled Iran part of an "axis of evil", has pursued a policy of constructive engagement with Tehran.
----
Russia-Iran talks on spent nuclear fuel accord set for February: official
MOSCOW (AFP)
Jan 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040108131633.fp7yeauo.html
Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev is to travel to Iran next month to discuss speeding up the construction of a nuclear plant at Bushehr, in the south of the country, a ministry spokesman said Thursday.
The visit had been scheduled for this month but was put back to the second half of February because of an earthquake last month at Bam that killed some 30,000 people and left an estimated 75,000 others homeless, Nikolai Shingarev told the ITAR-TASS news agency.
The two sides are to "discuss accelerating the construction of the Bushehr power plant and a protocol on the return of spent fuel that could be signed at this time," Shingarev said.
Russia has made completion of the Bushehr nuclear plant conditional on Iran signing an undertaking to return the spent fuel.
The signature was due to take place last year but was postponed by Tehran on several occasions for "technical reasons."
On December 18, after strong Western pressure, Iran signed up to a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty additional protocol providing for surprise UN inspections of its nuclear sites to fend of US accusations that it is preparing a nuclear weapons programme.
Shingarev said the Russian firm TVEL "has produced fuel that will be sent to the Bushehr plant after the signing" of the Moscow-Tehran accord on the return of spent nuclear fuel.
Iran last October agreed to make a full declaration of its nuclear activities and temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, though it stressed that the suspension was "provisional and voluntary."
Uranium enrichment is at the centre of international concern that Iran may be capable of building an atomic bomb. Tehran has said it reserves the right to restart enrichment "at any moment."
Russia has overridden strong objections from the United States to maintain its nuclear cooperation with Iran.
-------- iraq / inspections
Think Tank Report: Iraq WMD Not Imminent Threat
January 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-usa-weapons.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration officials ``systematically'' misrepresented the danger of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, which were not an immediate threat to the United States and the Middle East, a report from a U.S. think tank said on Wednesday.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in its study, ``WMD IN IRAQ: Evidence and Implications,'' that there was ``no convincing evidence'' Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program and that U.N. weapons inspectors had discovered that nerve agents in Iraq's chemical weapons program had lost most of their lethal capability as early as 1991.
There was greater uncertainty about Iraq's biological weapons, but that threat was related to what could be developed in the future rather than what Iraq already had, the study by the liberal-leaning think tank said.
The missile program appeared to have been in active development in 2002 and Iraq was expanding its capability to build missiles with ranges that exceeded U.N. limits, it said.
The United States justified going to war against Iraq last year citing a threat from Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction.
Since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, American forces hunting for weapons of mass destruction have not found any stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons or any solid evidence Iraq had resurrected its nuclear weapons program.
It was unlikely Iraq could have destroyed, hidden, or moved out of the country hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of SCUD missiles, and facilities producing chemical and biological weapons without the United States detecting some sign of that activity, the report said.
``Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs,'' the report said.
They lumped nuclear, chemical and biological weapons together as a single threat, despite the ``very different'' danger they posed, which distorted the cost/benefit analysis of the war, the study said.
Administration officials also insisted without evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, the report said.
``There was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to al Qaeda and much evidence to counter it,'' the report said. There was also no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, it said.
'UNDULY INFLUENCED'
Prior to 2002, intelligence agencies appeared to have overestimated the chemical and biological weapons in Iraq but had a generally accurate reading of the nuclear and missile programs, the study said.
But from 2002 until the war in Iraq, there appeared to have been an environment of intense political pressure in which an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's banned weapons was hurriedly put together and included a high number of dissents in what was supposed to be a consensus document of the various intelligence agencies, the study said. The Pentagon created a separate intelligence office during that time. Those factors suggested ``the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views,'' the study said.
Stuart Cohen, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which produced the National Intelligence Estimate, told ABC's ``Nightline'' on Tuesday, ``Assertions, particularly that we had shaded our judgments to support an administration policy, were just nonsense.''
--------
Report Criticizes U.S. on Iraq
U.N. Should Be Part of Weapons Program Probe, Group Says
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63272-2004Jan7.html
The United States should bring U.N. inspectors into the probe of Iraq's weapons programs to accurately understand how effective the United Nations was in using inspections, sanctions and monitoring to constrain Saddam Hussein, concludes a new study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The report, to be released today, also criticizes the Bush administration's public assessments of the danger posed by Hussein's Iraq in the months leading to the war. It describes as "questionable" and "unexamined" the threat cited by administration officials that Iraq or another rogue state would turn over chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to terrorists.
More logical, the Carnegie report said, is the possibility that terrorists could get such weapons from "poorly guarded stockpiles in Russia and other former Soviet states" or countries such as Pakistan and North Korea, where "instability, corruption or a desperate need for cash could allow terrorist groups to gain access to nuclear weapons or materials."
The solution Carnegie proposes is to make security of nuclear weapons and materials "a much higher priority" for U.S. national security policy.
Much of the Carnegie report examines prewar intelligence reports and statements by administration officials about Hussein's Iraq.
For example, the report said that in mid-2002, "official statements of the threat shifted dramatically toward greater alarm regarding certainty of the threat and greater certainty as to the evidence." The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced by the administration for Congress in October 2002, it said, "went far beyond the consensus intelligence assessments of the preceding five years." It adds, "The declassified NIE contained 40 distinct caveats or conditions usually dropped by officials" in their public statements.
On ABC's "Nightline" program last night, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was asked about the administration's prewar statements and about the failure of the United States' Iraq Survey Group, led by David Kay, to find weapons of mass destruction.
Powell said he had worked to convey as accurate a picture as possible in public comments, given the limited information available before the war. He emphasized that intelligence, and the fact that Hussein's government had used chemical weapons in the late 1980s, "led us to the conclusion, led the intelligence community to the conclusion that they still had intent, they still had capability and they were not going to give up that capability." How many weapons were there, he said, "we'll find out when Dr. Kay finishes his work."
The Carnegie report noted that the United States has resisted allowing U.N. weapons inspectors -- who have seven years of experience in Iraq -- to participate in the work of its Iraq Survey Group. That resistance, the report said, interferes with the goal of figuring out whether years of sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections worked, and might work again in another country.
"The role and impact of each of the several constraints imposed on Iraq need to be isolated and clarified so that useful lessons can be drawn," the report said. "The United States and the United Nations should collaborate to produce a complete history of Iraq's WMD and missile programs."
The report urges U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to study the U.N. inspection history in Iraq to determine the success of visits to suspected weapons sites, and to investigate better ways to use technology and intelligence. Both these areas were problematic while U.N. inspectors were operating in Iraq before the war.
Results of such a study could help in carrying another of the report's recommendations to the U.N. Security Council: consideration of creating a permanent inspection agency to monitor proliferation of chemical and biological weapons material.
Currently, the International Atomic Energy Agency studies nuclear weapons issues, but only in countries that have signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. The U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission was established to look into Iraq's chemical and biological programs and its missile systems. Some nations believe that agency should be retained and given a broader mission.
The Carnegie report also urges the Security Council to make it a violation of international law for any nation to transfer weapons of mass destruction to any other government, regardless of whether those nations have signed nonproliferation treaties.
---------
ARMS SEARCH
U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq
January 8, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/international/middleeast/08WEAP.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.
The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.
A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.
Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated.
A report published Wednesday in The Washington Post cited a previously undisclosed document that suggested that Iraq might have destroyed its biological weapons as early as 1991. The report said investigators had otherwise found no evidence to support American beliefs that Iraq had maintained illicit weapons dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or that it had advanced programs to build new ones.
The report also documented a pattern of deceit that was found in every field of special weaponry. It said that according to Iraqi designers and foreign investigators, program managers exaggerated the results they could achieve, or even promised results they knew they could not accomplish - all in an effort to appease Saddam Hussein. In some cases, though, they simply did it to advance their careers, the report said, or preserve jobs or even conduct intrigues against their rivals.
Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days that the weapons hunters still had not found weapons or active programs, but in interviews, they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons surfaced in a future attack.
"We worry about what may have happened to those weapons," Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview broadcast late Tuesday on the ABC News program "Nightline." "Theories abound as to what may have happened."
The search for Iraqi weapons remains "the primary focus" of the survey group, a senior Defense Department official said. But he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts to join the team had recently been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search.
David Kay, the head of the survey group, made it known last month that he might leave his post. Government officials said Wednesday that he had not reached a decision but that both he and his top deputy, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, were in Washington, in part to discuss what direction the hunt should take.
"I am sure that if they had found important evidence, we would know about it," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has said the administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat.
Bill Harlow, the top spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said Wednesday that "the team needs to compete its work, and no one should jump to any conclusions before it has an opportunity to examine all of the circumstances."
American intelligence officials who described the seized documents said they hoped the documents might eventually help to unravel the mystery of whether Iraqi weapons remained hidden or whether they were destroyed long before what the Bush administration initially portrayed as a mission "to disarm Iraq."
In the television interview, Mr. Cohen, who as vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council led the team that formally concluded in October 2002 that Iraq possessed both chemical and biological weapons, insisted that "it is too soon to close the books on this case."
A report to be released Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that it was unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons and related production facilities that American officials claimed were present "without the United States detecting some sign of this activity."
Through their spokesmen, Dr. Kay and General Dayton have declined repeated requests for interviews.
The cache of Iraqi documents cover subjects extending far beyond illicit weapons, according to senior military officials, and are so voluminous that, if stacked, they would rise 10 miles high, according to estimates by senior government officials.
The warehouse in Qatar has become the center of work by the Defense Intelligence Agency to translate and analyze the documents, the officials said.
The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured Matériel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defense Department officials said. Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons, the officials said, and it was withdrawn "because its work was essentially done."
"They picked up everything that was worth picking up," one official said. The weapons disposal team still in place, known as Task Force D/E, for disablement and elimination, has been used to collect suspicious material, although none has proved to be part of any illicit weapons program.
In an interim report in October, Dr. Kay acknowledged that his team had failed to find illicit weapons or active weapons programs in Iraq, but said they had discovered evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to develop such weapons and might have retained the capacity to do so.
Dr. Kay has not said when he intended to issue his next report, and that remains a subject of debate within the administration, government officials said.
American intelligence officials, including Mr. Cohen, have vigorously defended their estimates of Iraq's weapons program, saying the evidence was strong, credible and backed up by a number of sources. But staff members of the Senate and House intelligence agencies are preparing reports suggesting that the administration and intelligence agencies had seriously overestimated the nature of the threat posed by illicit Iraqi weapons.
Ms. Harman said in a telephone interview that she expected that Dr. Kay, appointed last June 11 as a special adviser to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was probably stepping down, a development that she said would be "very disappointing."
"I have to believe that if they were about to pounce on a large stockpile of chemical or biological weapons, he would be there for the announcement," Ms. Harman said.
--------
U.S. cuts back crew searching for Iraq weapons
Hint that Bush team may no longer hope to find banned arms
Douglas Jehl,
New York Times,
Thursday, January 8, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/08/MNGGL45PMN1.DTL
Washington -- The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.
The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.
A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.
Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction has been translated.
Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days that the weapons hunters still had not found weapons or active programs, but in interviews they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons surfaced in a future attack.
The search for Iraqi weapons remains "the primary focus" of the survey group, a senior Defense Department official said. But he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts to join the team recently had been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search.
David Kay, the head of the survey group, made it known last month that he might leave his post. Government officials said Wednesday that he had not reached a decision, but that both he and his top deputy, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, were in Washington, in part to discuss what direction the hunt should take.
"I am sure that if they had found important evidence, we would know about it," said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Rancho Palos Verdes (Los Angeles County), the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. She has said the administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat.
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said Wednesday that "the team needs to complete its work, and no one should jump to any conclusions before it has an opportunity to examine all of the circumstances."
U.S. intelligence officials who described the seized documents said they hoped the documents might eventually help to unravel the mystery of whether Iraqi weapons remained hidden or whether they had been destroyed long before what the Bush administration initially portrayed as a mission to disarm Iraq.
A report to be released today by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that it is unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons and related production facilities that U.S. officials claimed were present without the United States detecting it.
Through their spokesmen, Kay and Dayton declined requests for interviews.
The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defense Department officials said.
Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons, the officials said, and it was withdrawn "because its work was essentially done."
"They picked up everything that was worth picking up," one official said. The weapons disposal team still in place, known as Task Force D/E, for disablement and elimination, has been used to collect suspicious material, although none has proved to be part of any illicit weapons program.
-------- missile defense
Lockheed Martin To Develop New Next Generation Missile Defense
Sunnyvale
Jan 08, 2004
SpaceDaily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/bmdo-04a.html
Lockheed Martin has won a contract from the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to further develop and demonstrate the first system capable of destroying multiple ballistic missile threats and decoys with a single launch. The system will carry multiple small kill vehicles that will destroy adversarial missiles and decoys by colliding with them in space.
The eight-year contract is valued at approximately $760 million; the initial 11-month contract is valued at $27 million. The U.S. Army Space & Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala., manages the program for the MDA.
"We are excited and proud that the Missile Defense Agency has selected us to develop and demonstrate this promising capability," said G. Thomas Marsh, executive vice president, Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
The Miniature Kill Vehicle (MKV) concept holds the potential to provide a more cost-effective approach to countering complex missile threats with a single launch. MKV will employ multiple small kill vehicles housed within one carrier vehicle, and would be used against ballistic missiles in the midcourse stage of flight. The system will identify all credible threat objects and will destroy them using individual kill vehicles.
"MKV represents a potential game-changing capability for missile defense. It is designed to counter future threats where it is hard to differentiate between threat objects. In such scenarios, MKV would address all credible threat objects with a single launch," said Doug Graham, vice president, Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
The selection of Lockheed Martin follows a 19-month concept development phase in which the company defined its MKV design, including the carrier vehicle and the kill vehicle subsystem; as well as the program plan, schedule and cost estimates for development and production.
Lockheed Martin's modular design approach can be configured with varying quantities of kill vehicles per carrier vehicle in order to address the full range of operational scenarios. The design is also flexible to allow its MKV system to be used with the variety of missile defense boosters being used and developed by the Missile Defense Agency.
Lockheed Martin is a leader in systems integration and the development of air and missile defense systems and technologies. These include the world's first successful hit-to-kill intercept with the Homing Overlay Experiment in 1984, the successful demonstration of the first complete weapon system using hit-to-kill technology with THAAD, as well as the world's first operational hit-to-kill missile defense system, PAC-3.
It also has experience in interceptor systems; kill vehicles; battle management command, control and communications; precision pointing and tracking optics; as well as radar and other sensors that enable signal processing and data fusion. The company makes significant contributions to all 10 major U.S. Missile Defense Systems and participates in several global missile defense partnerships.
----
Missile response to be investigated
Thursday, January 8, 2004
Billings Gazette
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?tl=1&display=rednews/2004/01/08/build/wyoming/90-digest.inc
CHEYENNE - The military will examine F.E. Warren Air Force Base's nuclear missile response capability beginning today.
Inspectors from Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in Washington, D.C., will test the 90th Space Wing's response to scenarios involving maintenance, operation and security of its Minuteman III and Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile force.
"Our mission is to ensure our nation's ICBM force is safe, secure and reliable," said Col. Evan Hoapili, 90th Space Wing commander. "We're inspection-ready every day, and this is an opportunity to show we're prepared to defend the United States and its allies if called upon by the president."
The inspection, which lasts through Jan. 16, may cause temporary traffic delays near the base's front gate, officials said.
-------- terrorism
Swedish defense agency says "terrorists" could easily make nuclear bomb
STOCKHOLM (AFP)
Jan 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040108202931.f2jatn6z.html
Terrorists with access to nuclear material could make a nuclear bomb big enough to lay waste to a vast area, a report published Thursday by a Swedish defense agency researching the matter for the past two years said.
"The most difficult thing is to get hold of the nuclear material, but once they have that, it wouldn't be too hard for terrorists to make a nuclear weapon... and there is a certain chance that it would cause an explosion almost as big as the one we saw in Hiroshima," Gunnar Arbman, the head scientist at the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI), told AFP.
FOI, a branch of the Swedish Defense Department, has since 2002 been researching how likely it is that terrorists could create and use nuclear weapons.
While Sweden may not seem like the most likely place to look into the production of nuclear weapons, Arbman insisted that the country still has a lot of useful expertise in the area dating back to the 1950s, when it launched a later abandoned programme to acquire nuclear weapons.
Perhaps the most reassuring conclusion reached in the report is that actually producing the nuclear material needed to make such weapons would be far too difficult for any terrorist group.
"But it is not impossible to steal or to buy the material illegally," Arbman pointed out.
"The greatest risk is inside nuclear powers... like Russia, Pakistan, India and Iran. The United States, England and France seem to have very good security," he said.
Even with the material in hand, though, not just anyone has the know-how to put together a nuclear device.
"The people doing this couldn't just be car repairmen. They would probably have to be educated physicists or chemists," Arbman said."
-------
Undercover Experts Look for 'Dirty Bombs'
January 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Dirty-Bombs.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two days before New Year's Eve, Energy Department nuclear experts detected radiation coming from a storage rental building near downtown Las Vegas. The White House was called. FBI agents secured the site.
Scientists sent a robot into the building, and it retrieved a duffel bag with a stainless steel capsule of radium used for treating cancer. The homeless man who provided them with a key to the storage site said he'd found the capsule a few years earlier. Officials breathed easier.
Government nuclear experts last month began working undercover in major U.S. cities, using high-tech equipment hidden in briefcases and golf bags, to hunt for radiological ``dirty'' bombs and other weapons terrorists might use, according to three government officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. So far, the Las Vegas incident is the only one in which any worrisome levels of radiation were found, said one official.
The Energy Department's Nuclear Incident Response Teams were sent to scour Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington immediately after the nation's terror alert status was upgraded on Dec. 21 to orange, or high risk. They began working 24 hours a day, and more teams were later sent to other cities, which the officials declined to identify.
The Homeland Security Department also has provided detection equipment for police to use in Chicago, Detroit, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle. It also sent radiation pagers for police to use in patrolling the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on Sunday.
Agency spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Wednesday there was no specific intelligence pointing to a dirty bomb -- which authorities believe might use conventional explosives to disperse a plume of radioactive dust over several city blocks -- or plots involving chemical, biological or nuclear devices.
But security officials were particularly concerned that cities planning large public events, including holiday gatherings with big crowds, could serve as targets for terrorists.
The teams took readings ahead of New Year's celebrations at New York's Times Square and the Las Vegas strip, and for the Rose Bowl Parade on New Year's Day in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena.
The nuclear experts, drawn from the Energy Department's national labs, use detection equipment concealed in briefcases, golf bags and other items. Officials declined to provide specifics, saying much of the information is considered classified.
But among the tools the experts might use is a Palm Pilot with a cadmium-zinc-telluride crystal that can detect radiation, and a handheld advanced nucleic acid analyzer, about the size of a video game, that can identify pathogens based on their DNA within 15 minutes.
The government officials did not disclose how many experts are on the teams.
David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said sending these teams of Energy Department experts to cities for unspecified threats represents a new mission.
``Our teams are typically on call for accidents to react to possible incidences, but we're on new ground when we deploy them for countering unexpected threats,'' Heyman said.
Unlike a nuclear weapon, a dirty bomb would not ignite an atomic chain reaction and would not require highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are normally heavily guarded and hard to obtain. The materials could be a lower-grade isotope, like those used in medicine or research.
The al-Qaida terrorist network is known to have sought such a weapon, which experts say would be most effective at spreading fear and panic but probably would not cause many casualties.
According to U.N. documents, a dirty bomb has been used at least once, in 1987, when Iraq tested a one-ton device. Weapons inspectors said Iraq gave up its dirty bomb project because the levels of radiation released were not considered deadly enough.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it receives an average of 300 reports a year of small amounts of radioactive materials missing from various users, but has no evidence that anyone is systematically collecting it to use in a dirty bomb.
About 50 soil-testing gauges used for construction and road-building that contain small amounts of highly radioactive Cesium-137 and Americium-241 are reported stolen each year, and many are never recovered, the NRC has said. A dirty bomb could be made from the radioactive material, though it would take hundreds of the gauges to supply enough.
Commission spokesman Dave MacIntyre said there is no evidence the thefts are coordinated.
On the Net:
Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic
Energy Department: http://www.doe.gov
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
-------
Experts Seeking 'Dirty Bombs' in Cities
January 8, 2004
Associated Pres
http://www.insidebaltimore.com/news/national/04-01-08-dirtybomb.shtml
WASHINGTON - Government nuclear experts are working undercover in major U.S. cities, using high-tech equipment hidden in briefcases and golf bags to hunt for radiological "dirty" bombs and other weapons terrorists might use.
The Energy Department's Nuclear Incident Response Teams were in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington last month, according to three government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Later, more teams went to other cities, which the officials declined to identify.
The Homeland Security Department also has sent detection equipment for police to use in Chicago, Detroit, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.
Agency spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said there is no specific intelligence pointing to a dirty bomb - which uses conventional explosives to disperse a plume of radioactive dust over several city blocks - or plots involving chemical, biological or nuclear devices.
The federal action came as the nation's terror alert status was upgraded just before Christmas to orange, or high risk. Security officials were particularly concerned that holiday gatherings with large crowds could serve as targets for terrorists.
The teams took readings ahead of New Year's celebrations at New York's Times Square and the Las Vegas strip, and for the Rose Bowl Parade on New Year's Day in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena, Calif.
The only detection of radiation so far was on Dec. 29 at a rented storage locker near downtown Las Vegas, one government official said. The White House was told, the FBI called in, and a robot was used to retrieve a duffel bag. In it was a stainless steel capsule of radium used for treating cancer.
A homeless man who provided the key to the locker told government officials he had found the capsule several years earlier. Officials said the man is not a terrorism suspect.
The nuclear experts, drawn from national labs, use detection equipment concealed in briefcases, golf bags and other items. Officials declined to provide specifics, but among the tools the experts might use is a Palm Pilot with a cadmium-zinc-telluride crystal that can detect radiation.
The government officials did not disclose how many experts are on the teams.
David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said sending these experts to cities for unspecified threats is a new mission.
"Our teams are typically on call for accidents to react to possible incidences, but we're on new ground when we deploy them for countering unexpected threats," Heyman said.
Unlike a nuclear weapon, a dirty bomb has no atomic chain reaction and does not require highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are normally heavily guarded and hard to obtain. It relies on a lower-grade isotope, like those used in medicine or research, for its radioactive component.
The al-Qaida terrorist network is known to have sought such a weapon, which experts say is most effective at spreading fear and panic but probably would not cause many casualties.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it receives an average of 300 reports a year of small amounts of radioactive materials missing from various users, but has no evidence that anyone is systematically collecting it to use in a dirty bomb.
Each year about 50 soil-testing gauges used for construction and road-building that contain small amounts of highly radioactive Cesium-137 and Americium-241 are reported stolen, and many are never recovered, the NRC has said. A dirty bomb could be made from the radioactive material, though it would take hundreds of the gauges to supply enough.
Commission spokesman Dave MacIntyre said there is no evidence the thefts are coordinated.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Company Sends Uranium to Wrong Site
January 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Uranium-Shipment.html
PADUCAH, Ky. (AP) -- A trucking company accidentally sent a shipment of diluted weapons-grade uranium to a North Carolina nuclear plant instead of its intended destination in Kentucky, but the mix-up posed no risk to anyone, officials said.
The federal government is investigating how six metric tons of blended Russian uranium went to a nuclear fabrication plant in Wilmington, N.C., instead of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Transport Logistics International sent the load on Dec. 19 -- along with a similarly numbered load from a dock in Norfolk, Va. -- to Global Nuclear Fuel LLC in Wilmington, N.C. Rod Fisk, the trucking company's chief executive officer, said that the error was quickly spotted, and that Global was notified.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission believes the mistake posed no risk to anyone, a spokesman said Wednesday.
``It was received at a facility authorized to take it,'' agency spokesman Roger Hannah said.
USEC, the company that operates the plant in Paducah, has bought or agreed to buy $7.5 billion worth of uranium from Russia. The Kentucky plant enriches uranium for use as fuel for nuclear power plants.
The weapons-grade uranium is diluted before being shipped to the United States.
-------- ohio
Ohio Nuclear Plant Inspection Delayed
January 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Plant-Inspection.html
OAK HARBOR, Ohio (AP) -- A utility asked federal regulators to delay a final inspection of a shutdown nuclear reactor, saying a minor incident suggested some workers aren't fully prepared to restart it.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed to put off inspection of the Davis-Besse plant -- which had been set to begin Monday -- for about a week.
The NRC said the move quashes FirstEnergy Corp.'s plans to seek a Jan. 21 meeting with NRC officials to discuss restarting the reactor. No new meeting date was set.
The reactor at the plant along Lake Erie near Toledo has been shut down since February 2002. An inspection after the shutdown revealed a pineapple-sized hole in the reactor's lid.
In the incident Tuesday, technicians testing a pressure gauge in an emergency safety system failed to tell the control room that the safety system would be off-line, First Energy spokesman Todd Schneider said.
That mistake meant the emergency system was off-line for two hours without operators shifting to a backup.
Schneider said the incident was minor but that managers believed the plant needed to do a better job of following the rules.
On Dec 19, the NRC's restart readiness inspectors and a second team looking at the plant's safety environment said they could not recommend allowing the plant to restart. Managers spent the next 10 days retraining workers.
On the Net:
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
FirstEnergy Corp.: http://www.firstenergycorp.com
-------- us politics
US neo-cons forced to take a back seat for now
Nothing they said about Iraqis turning out the way they envisaged. So Bush has to rely on 'realists' now to fix things
By LEON HADAR IN TOKYO
January 8, 2004
http://business-times.asia1.com.sg/story/0,4567,104659,00.html
THE neoconservative intellectuals who were the driving force behind the Bush administration's Iraq adventure, its alliance with Israel's Likud government and the ambitious US-led 'Democratic Empire' project are being forced to play defence these days. The face of experience: former State secretary James Baker's help has been enlisted to persuade US allies to agree to forgive tens of billions of dollars of Iraq's foreign debt
Indeed, the grand designs that the neocons had cooked in their Washington think tanks and the expectations raised by the editorials published in their glossy magazines - that American would be welcomed as 'liberators' in Iraq, that Mesopotamia would be transformed into a liberal democracy, and that it would become a model for the entire Arab Middle East - are proving to be nothing more than intellectual fantasies.
According to a report in the Washington Post, the escalating attacks by insurgents against US troops have forced the Bush administration to back away from several of its more ambitious initiatives to remake Iraq's political and economic system and to accelerate the timetable for ending the civil occupation of that country.
Hence, the Americans have dropped plans to privatise Iraq's state-owned businesses and to write a Constitution before a transfer of sovereignty.
Moreover, the demands by the Kurds in northern Iraq for the creation of a semi autonomous governing body to represent them and the expectations that a general election in the country would bring to power Shiite Islamic figures hostile towards the West suggest that Iraq could be drawn into a bloody civil war and be torn into three separate mini-states, representing the Arab Shiites, Sunnis and the Kurds.
The mess that the neocons, led by Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, have created in Iraq explains the return to Washington of the realpolitik types that had played the leading role in the making of foreign policy of the Elder George Bush.
'The grown-ups are being recalled to clean up and put things back in order' is the way one Washington insider put it, referring to the decision by the White House to send former secretary of state James Baker on a diplomatic mission to persuade America's allies to agree to forgive tens of billions of dollars of Iraq's foreign debt.
Another foreign policy 'realist' who came back to Washington is the former US ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, who has been asked to serve as the National Security Council's (NSC) coordinator for strategic planning, with his chief responsibility being US policy in Iraq.
Press reports also indicate that Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief, Ambassador L Paul Bremer, has been distancing himself from the neoconservative cadre in the administration. At the same time, Wolfowitz is planning to leave the administration and return to academia early this year, according to Newsweek magazine.
But the collapse of the neoconservative project goes beyond Iraq. After all, the chicken hawks from the American Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard who now dominate top foreign policy jobs in the Pentagon and the vice-president's office have proposed that 9/11 and the ensuing war on terrorism would permit the United States to formalise its global dominant position.
Hence, the establishment of the 'Democratic Empire' in the Middle East would lay the foundations for a global imperial scheme in which US military power would leave other players - ranging from 'rogue states' like North Korea and Iran to major powers like the European Union and China - no choice but to bow to American dictates.
Even before 9/11, the neocons were arguing that Washington should adopt a strategy of 'containing' China and forcing it to accept the reality of an independent and democratic Taiwan.
Instead, Bush rolled out the red carpet in Washington for Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and warned Taiwan to refrain from antagonising Beijing by challenging the 'One China' policy. China has also been playing a leading role in a multilateral effort to defuse the North Korean nuclear crisis.
And a similar multilateral strategy has been advanced by Washington in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions - that is, when it comes to the other two members of the 'Axis of Evil', Bush has rejected the neoconservative unilateral approach. Or, to put it differently, he is recognising the limits of US military power and is not prepared to do a 'regime change' in Teheran, Pyongyang or Damascus.
And while the neocons are 'spinning' the recent move by Libya's Gaddafi to open its weapons-production facilities to international inspection, that development should be regarded as another example of the Bushies adopting a more realistic foreign policy by agreeing to make a deal with a military dictator committed to radical Arab nationalism.
Well, the neocons are not 'out' yet, although they are certainly starting to lose some of the political battles in the US capital. But the only figure who could strike a real and final blow to their influence in Washington is the occupant of the White House. And it's not clear yet whether he is ready to do that.
The writer is BT's Washington correspondent
-------- MILITARY
-------- china
Hong Kong Postpones Timetable For Reforms
Beijing's Request for Talks Forced Delay, Officials Say
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62649-2004Jan7.html
BEIJING, Jan. 7 -- Hong Kong's chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, indefinitely postponed plans Wednesday to set a timetable for democratic reform, breaking a promise made after huge street demonstrations last summer. Senior aides blamed the delay on a last-minute request from Chinese leaders for consultations on "matters of principle and legislative process."
The postponement, announced by Tung in his annual policy address, prompted an immediate outcry from the territory's pro-democracy opposition, which threatened a new round of protests demanding direct elections to choose Tung's successor and the city's lawmakers. At least 500,000 participated in a rally on July 1, forcing Tung to withdraw a strict internal security bill backed by Beijing, and as many as 100,000 people took part in a march on New Year's Day.
By requesting the delay and asking for talks just before preliminary discussions about political reform were to be scheduled in Hong Kong, China's Communist leaders signaled a new willingness to intervene openly and directly in the affairs of the former British colony, which was promised a high degree of autonomy after its handover to Chinese rule in 1997.
"I think it's a very bad scenario for the Chinese government. I think it will upset the Hong Kong people again," said Richard Tsoi, one of the protest organizers. "It sets the people of Hong Kong more against Beijing now, not just the chief executive."
Tung's administration promised in September to set a timetable by the end of 2003 for deliberations about constitutional changes that could lead to direct elections in 2007. He had been expected to announce the schedule in his televised address on Wednesday.
Instead, Tung said Chinese President Hu Jintao "pointed out to me the serious concern and principled stance of the Central People's Government toward the development of Hong Kong's political structure" during a meeting on Dec. 3. As a result, he said, a task force of three senior Hong Kong officials will reexamine the issue and meet soon with government authorities in Beijing.
Many in Hong Kong and on mainland China had expressed hope the new Communist Party chief might be more open to political reform than his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who appointed Tung. Hu remains far more popular in Hong Kong than Tung, whose job approval ratings are in the teens.
Donald Tsang, Hong Kong's chief secretary and the official named to lead the task force, said the group will travel to Beijing as soon as possible, seek "to understand their specific areas of concern" and clarify legislative procedures for changing how the territory selects its chief executive and its legislature.
Stephen Lam, the secretary for constitutional affairs, said the government was prepared to set the timetable when Beijing asked for talks in late December. "The central government expressed to the chief executive that it hoped there would be a thorough discussion with the mainland authorities . . . before Hong Kong finalized the related work arrangements," he said.
Hong Kong's chief executive is now elected by an 800-member committee appointed by Beijing, and 36 of the 60 members of its legislature are chosen by business and professional groups that also tend to favor the Chinese government. Direct elections have been permitted for the other 24 lawmakers.
Under Hong Kong's constitution, agreed to by China and Britain, changes to election procedures can take place "subsequent to the year 2007" if two-thirds of the legislature, the chief executive and the government in Beijing agree.
The pro-democracy movement says that means direct elections can be introduced to choose Tung's successor when his term ends in 2007; others argue any change would have to wait until the next executive's term ends in 2012. The Hong Kong government endorsed the democracy activists' position two months ago, but backtracked Wednesday and said the issue would be discussed with Chinese officials.
"At the most basic level, this will avoid the central authorities and the Hong Kong community reaching different understandings," Tsang said. "Such a scenario could cause serious confrontation between the Hong Kong community and our sovereign government. Obviously, we do not want to precipitate such a situation."
Legislator Martin Lee, one of the leaders of the Democracy Party, said Tung should have resisted discussions with Beijing until after Hong Kong had reached a decision on reform.
If the legislature and the chief executive had agreed on direct elections in 2007, he said, it would have been politically difficult for Beijing to reject the measure.
"But if you go to Beijing now, it's easy for them to use the veto," he said. "This is a great disappointment."
-------- europe
Poland offering to host major US military base: report
WARSAW (AFP)
Jan 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040108085827.x0sh198u.html
The Polish government has offered to let the United States build a major military base on its territory, although to ease worries about the move in neighbouring Russia the facility is likely to be build in the west of the country, the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza said on Thursday.
A spokesman for the defence ministry, which the paper said had made the offer, refused to comment but did not deny the report.
"No decision has been made and it is too soon to talk about it," spokesman Adam Stasinski told AFP.
Gazeta Wyborcza said the ministry had proposed the small western Polish town of Powidz, already the site of a military airstrip, as the site for the future base.
It also quoted an unnamed Polish civil servant as saying that a delegation from the US State Department which had recently visited Moscow had sought to allay Russian fears about the building of a base in Poland, and had noted Russia's desire to not see the base sited to the east of the River Vistula, which runs south-north through the capital Warsaw to the Baltic Sea port of Gdansk.
"The United States has submitted an overall plan for a new deployment of their armed forces, and we are drawing up proposals which meet their expectations," the Polish official was quoted as saying.
Powidz, which is 50 kilometres (30 miles) east of the city of Poznan, already hosts a large military air base, which the unnamed official said was "comparable to the US base at Ramstein in Germany."
Polish officials, including Prime Minister Leszek Miller, have on several occasions said they are in favour of hosting US military bases.
The issue was discussed with US Deputy Defense Secretary Douglas Feith when he visited Warsaw on December 8 last year.
Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Poland was part of the communist bloc. It joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999, and is due to become a member of the European Union in May this year.
-------- iraq
US set to back state control of Iraqi oil
David Teather in New York
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1118077,00.html
Officials are likely to recommend the creation of a state-run company to own and manage the Iraqi oil industry, shutting out foreign investment and countering, in part, allegations that the US-led invasion of the country was merely an oil grab.
But as one door closed on foreign investment another opened yesterday when the Pentagon invited bids for contracts worth $5bn (£2.75bn) to rebuild Iraq, the first in a string of deals funded by $18.6bn allocated for the reconstruction effort.
Both American and Iraqi oil officials are proposing a state-owned business model based on similar arrangements in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
This approach differs markedly from America's desire to liberalise other parts of the Iraqi economy, where policy makers are investigating wide-scale privatisation of state-owned enterprises.
Advisers believe the politically charged oil industry, where there are fears of inflaming nationalist anger, is a special case.
They suggest a professional management team be installed to run the national oil company, which should be protected from political interference on a day-to-day basis but answer to a government oil minister.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Robert McKee, the senior oil adviser to the occupying coalition provisional authority, said: "Our preference is definitely in that direction. It is just pragmatism." A report being prepared for the interim oil minister would be highlighting "best practice" from other state-run oil firms, he said.
Both the Americans and the Iraqis say a state-run oil company could still attract massive foreign investment. In practice, however, the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti examples suggest there is unlikely to be much opportunity for US, British and other international oil companies.
One British oil industry executive said: "There is no indication that the Iraqis will behave any differently from the rest of the Middle East, which steadfastly refuses to offer any investment opportunities with a real return to foreign investors."
But the gas-guzzling Americans know the creation of a stable state-run oil industry would still be in their best interests. Iraq has proven oil reserves of 112bn barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia. With the Saudi kingdom displaying signs ofincreasing instability, the US needs an effective replacement on hand.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon invited tenders for 17 construction projects yesterday, promising an open and transparent bidding process. There are 63 eligible countries, excluding those that did not support the US invasion of Iraq such as France, Russia, Germany and Canada.
The expected flood of western companies entering the Iraqi market began yesterday when PepsiCo signed a deal to bottle and distribute its products. The move is expected to create 2,000 local jobs.
----
U.S. Helicopter Crashes in Iraq, Killing at Least 9
January 8, 2004
By NEELA BANERJEE and KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/international/middleeast/08CND-IRAQ.html?hp
JUMAYLA, Iraq, Jan. 8 - An American military helicopter crashed in farmland here today killing all nine people on board, the American military said.
The helicopter, a UH-60 Black Hawk, came down in a patchwork of potato fields in this tiny village about 6 miles south of Falluja, a city west of Baghdad that has been the scene of heavy resistance to the American-led occupation.
"We do not have any information on the cause of the crash at this time," Specialist Nicci Trent, a military spokeswoman in Baghdad, said.
The helicopter was on a medical evacuation mission when it crashed, Specialist Trent said, though she provided no further details about the mission.
Several villagers in Jumayla said they saw the aircraft catch fire in the air and fall to the ground. At least two witnesses said they saw some sort of projectile hit the helicopter, igniting the fire.
American troops immediately cordoned off the area and did not allow reporters to get near the wreckage.
The military originally reported this morning that the helicopter was carrying eight people - four crew members and four passengers - but later amended the number to nine, all of whom died. Military officials said they did not know how many of the nine were crew members or whether the helicopter was heading toward or returning from the medical evacuation.
Insurgents have shot down several American military helicopters, most recently on Jan. 2, when they downed an OH-58 Kiowa Warrior observation copter, also near Falluja, killing one crewman. In November, four helicopters were downed, killing more than 40 soldiers.
Helicopters are a frequent sight above Jumayla and its environs as they fly from a nearby military base to Baghdad.
The crash came a day after insurgents fired six mortar rounds at an American military camp about 50 miles northwest of Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding 33 in an area used for living quarters, the military said.
The military originally announced 35 casualties in the attack, but lowered that number to 34 today. The Associated Press reported that a civilian was also wounded in the barrage, which would account for the 35th casualty.
A Pentagon spokesman quoted by The Associated Press, Lt. Col. James Cassella, said some of the wounded returned to duty shortly after the attack, while others remained in the hospital. The military provided no further details on the severity of the injuries.
The attack came at 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday, another day of fluctuating events for civilian and military authorities.
In Baghdad earlier, the chief United States administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, formally announced a plan to free about 500 of the 9,000 Iraqis held in American camps in Iraq, beginning with an initial release of about 100.
But American plans to formally return sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 were jarred by a statement from the country's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Mr. Sistani said the plan to install a transitional government by June, to be followed by indirect elections next year to choose delegates to a constitutional convention, would not "ensure in any way the fair representation of the Iraqi people."
The reclusive cleric said he preferred that elections be held before the transfer of sovereignty in June. But he said that he had been told by the Americans that this was not feasible - a stand that Mr. Bremer has explained by saying there is not time to prepare accurate and comprehensive voter rolls in Iraq, which has 25 million people and no history of free elections.
There had to be "another solution that is honest to the Iraqi people's demands," the cleric said.
Mr. Sistani's statements have been closely watched by Americans for signs of whether Iraq's Shiite majority, about 60 percent of the population, will accept the longer political process favored by the Bush administration, which endeavors to win wide assent to a constitution that guarantees minority rights.
The Americans' fear is that Shiite clerics will push for a quick transition to majority rule, heightening the risk of violent clashes, even a civil war, between Shiite militants and the Sunni Muslim minority, to which Saddam Hussein and many in his former inner circle belong.
The United States command in Iraq said the mortar attack Wednesday night occurred at Logistical Base Seitz, near Balad. The city is the site of an Iraqi air base that has been converted into the largest American air base in Iraq.
The attack appeared to be similar to one on Saturday at another American camp near Balad, in which an American soldier standing at the door of his living quarters was struck and killed by a mortar shell fired from outside the base.
Such attacks reflect a changing pattern in the war, senior American officers say. In mid-November, the United States command began major offensives using much of the powerful weaponry at its disposal - sustained artillery barrages, aerial bombing and airborne assaults with large numbers of helicopters. That, in turn, has led the insurgents to shift tactics and an increasing tendency to attack "soft" targets, American commanders say.
Mortars have been an increasingly favored weapon, commanders say, because they allow the attackers to remain miles from the targets. Shrapnel from exploding mortar shells can inflict severe injuries, often to the lower part of the body.
Nearly 500 American soldiers have died from war wounds or accidents since United States forces invaded Iraq in March, and several thousand have been wounded, many severely, according to Pentagon statistics.
Nonetheless, American commanders have over all begun to sound far more upbeat about the conflict since the capture of Mr. Hussein near Tikrit on Dec. 13.
Neela Banerjee contributed reporting for this article from Jumayla, John F. Burns from Baghdad and Kirk Semple from New York.
----
U.S. Presses Iraqi Kurds to Compromise on Issue of Autonomy
January 8, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/international/middleeast/08KURD.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - The Bush administration, increasingly fearful of Iraq's breaking up along ethnic lines after the American occupation ends, is urging Kurdish leaders to compromise in their demand for a fully autonomous state in the north, administration officials said Wednesday.
The officials said that L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, met Friday with top Kurdish leaders to convey the concerns of senior members of the administration that a Kurdish state with all its current powers, plus some authority that it does not have now, posed a threat to the future unity of Iraq.
American officials said the Kurdish reaction was not conveyed back to Washington by Mr. Bremer.
But a Kurdish representative said the Kurdish leaders were adamant in rejecting Mr. Bremer's request. Kurds, the spokesman said, will continue to demand nothing less than the autonomy that the Kurdish area has had since 1991, when the United States decided to protect it as a breakaway part of Iraq.
"It was totally rejected," said the Kurdish representative. "Bremer's proposal didn't even meet the minimal things that the Kurds have been fighting for all these years."
The official said that Mr. Bremer held a second meeting with Kurdish leaders on Wednesday and backed off considerably on his own demand for a less than autonomous Kurdish state. "It was a real turnaround," the Kurdish official said.
The varying comments about American negotiations reflected what administration officials said was a fast-moving and fluid situation among aides to President Bush, and between Mr. Bremer and Iraqi leaders.
Rather suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly, administration officials say that the issue of Kurdish autonomy has risen to the top of the list of difficulties that the United States is struggling to resolve as it returns Iraq to self-rule under a tight deadline. The target for Iraq regaining sovereignty is June 30.
Last week, administration officials said there was a growing recognition in the administration that some form of Kurdish autonomy was inevitable, if only because it was impractical to devise a new law to change the status quo in the next two months, the deadline for writing a new interim constitution for Iraq.
That view, reported in an article in The New York Times on Monday, has been modified, with at least some in the administration saying that the Kurds needed to be advised that their demands for the greatest possible autonomy had gone much too far.
Kurds wish to retain not only their own armed forces, the pesh merga, but also control over taxing power and oil revenues in Kirkuk and Khanakin, two oil-producing centers that the American occupation does not view as part of the traditional Kurdish region.
In a memo to top administration officials, Mr. Bremer recently advised that fighting the Kurds over their demand for the greatest possible autonomy might infuriate them and upset political stability in the north. But in Washington, officials reacted by insisting that the Kurds be told of American opposition to a separate Kurdish state in Iraq.
"Bremer really lowered the boom on them," an American official said of Mr. Bremer's first meeting with the Kurds. "He told them they're going to have to be flexible, and to recognize the existence of a federal state of Iraq and to disband their militias."
----
U.S. Soldier Dies in Iraq Mortar Attack
January 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) -- A U.S. Black Hawk medivac helicopter crashed Thursday near this stronghold of the anti-American insurgency, killing all nine soldiers aboard, the U.S. military said. A witness said the helicopter, which bore red crosses, was hit in the tail by a rocket.
Also Thursday, about 80 prisoners were released from Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, but they were not the detainees that U.S. authorities had promised would be freed under a special amnesty.
At Baghdad International Airport, meanwhile, an Air Force C-5 transport plane with 63 passengers and crew aboard made an emergency landing, and a senior official at the Pentagon said the plane was hit by hostile fire.
The military also said a U.S. soldier died Wednesday of injuries suffered in a mortar attack that wounded 33 other troops and a civilian west of Baghdad.
The deaths brought to at least 495 the number of Americans killed in Iraq from hostile and non-hostile causes since the start of the war in March, according to the U.S. Central Command and the Department of Defense.
There were no survivors among the nine American soldiers aboard the helicopter that crashed about four miles south of Fallujah, the 82nd Airborne Division said.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt initially said the aircraft crashed while making an ``emergency landing'' about 2:20 p.m., adding that the cause was unknown.
Mohammed Ahmed al-Jamali, a farmer who lives close to the crash site, said he heard the whoosh of a rocket, saw it hit the helicopter in the tail and watched the chopper crash in flames.
Al-Jamali, 27, said he rushed to the scene but found all aboard dead.
``I was in the farm, I heard the sound, looked up and I saw the rocket hit. It hit it in the tail,'' al-Jamali said.
He said there were two helicopters in the air, both with the distinctive red crosses of medical evacuation craft, and that the second one was hit.
The helicopter was a medical evacuation aircraft but it was unclear if it was carrying patients, a military official said on condition of anonymity.
Student Waleed Kurdi, 23, said he heard ``a loud explosion and I saw the fire in the air.'' He said the aircraft exploded in two before it hit the ground.
American troops arrived about an hour later, while a helicopter patrolled above, al-Jamali said.
Fallujah, west of Baghdad, is a flash point of the resistance against the U.S. occupation where rebels previously have shot down U.S. helicopters.
In the incident at Baghdad airport, the Air Force said the transport plane landed safely after declaring an in-flight emergency because of ``excessive engine vibrations'' in the No. 4 engine. It made no mention of hostile fire, but the defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details were classified secret, said the engine was hit by hostile fire.
It was not immediately clear what type of weapon was used. The plane had just taken off from their airport when the incident happened. No injuries were reported.
A U.S. helicopter was shot down Jan. 2 in the Fallujah area, killing one soldier, and military officials said it almost certainly was shot down by rebels.
In the deadliest single attack on U.S. forces since the Iraq invasion began in March, 17 soldiers were killed Nov. 15 when two Black Hawk helicopters collided above Mosul in what the military called a likely grenade attack.
On Nov. 2, a Chinook helicopter was shot down near Fallujah, killing 16 American soldiers and injuring 26. The military believes a SA-7 shoulder-fired missile slammed into one of the chopper's rear-mounted engines.
Wednesday's mortar attack occurred at Logistical Base Seitz about 12 miles west of Baghdad in the tense ``Sunni Triangle'' that is home to hard-line supporters of ousted leader Saddam Hussein.
The mortars hit ``a living area where they have their sleeping quarters,'' a military spokesman said.
Seven of the wounded were treated and returned to duty and the others were hospitalized at the base, the military said.
Also Thursday, an attack was foiled on Baghdad's police headquarters by chasing away men preparing to launch rockets near a soccer stadium, according to Maj. Roger Hedgepeth of the 18th Military Police Brigade. Authorities confiscated the rockets.
At Abu Ghraib, hundreds of people waited in frustration for hours, hoping relatives would be among the first detainees that coalition officials said would be freed in what U.S. officials portrayed as a goodwill gesture.
U.S. guards said they had no orders to release anyone, and an Iraqi lawyer, Mohammed al-Tamimi, expressed doubt anyone would be freed Thursday from Abu Ghraib, where Saddam's regime tortured and murdered political opponents.
There was more confusion when three truckloads of prisoners were driven out of the prison and those waiting rushed out into the street after them, stopping traffic.
But an official said it was a routine release of about 80 prisoners that had nothing to do with the amnesty announced Wednesday by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer.
``This has nothing to do with Bremer's announcement. These are the ones who are routinely released every week,'' said Lt. Col. Roy Shere, a spokesman for the 800th Military Police Brigade that operates prisons in Iraq.
Bremer had said 506 of some 12,800 detainees would be released and that the first 100 would be freed Thursday from Abu Ghraib.
The rest were expected to be freed from camps all over the country in the coming weeks.
Bremer said that before they are released, the prisoners must first renounce violence and have a community or tribal leader accept responsibility for their conduct.
U.S. and coalition troops have rounded up thousands of people suspected of attacks or of funding the anti-American insurgency in Iraq.
Relatives at the prison said people were being arrested unjustly and there were dozens of tales of men detained because they were near the scene of an attack.
Coalition officials said those to be released were low-level ``associates'' of insurgents who had not been directly involved in any attacks.
The release of detainees has been a top demand of the country's community and tribal leaders, as well as human rights advocates.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli army faces reforms as defence budget slashed
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Jan 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040108131404.iib1tbqo.html
Shortchanged by the 2004 budget, the Israeli army is being forced to streamline its unwieldy structure and adapt to the changes in its strategic environment.
Accustomed to getting the lion's share of the Jewish state's resources, the army shared with social welfare the brunt of the cuts in the austerity budget passed late Wednesday.
With 32.4 billion shekels (7.3 billion dollars) excluding US aid, the defence ministry retains around 13 percent of the entire 2004 budget but feels it has been hard done by, describing the slashing of its resources as an "earthquake".
The army claims it was initially promised another four billion shekels and has warned that the extra cuts will affect vital operations and potentially harm the state's security.
But according to military expert Martin Van Creveld, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's otherwise decried ultra-liberal approach to solving Israel's economic woes heralds long-awaited and much-needed reforms in the army.
"It is natural that the generals try to hang on to their money but Netanyahu deserves the credit for forcing a string of changes in the military which make a lot of sense," the Hebrew University professor said.
"We have no conventional enemy left. We are at peace with Egypt, Iraq is gone and the situation with Syria is under control. What more security can a state require?" he said.
Israel has taken heart from recent regional developments which have seen war clouds clear.
Saddam Hussein's regime was ousted by the US invasion of Iraq, putting pressure on its Syrian neighbour, while the nuclear threat from Iran and Libya also receded.
"A lot of people, probably including (Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon are still functioning on the mode of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. We have built a military completely out of proportion," Van Creveld said.
According to military sources, the fat-cutting will first and foremost affect the heavy ground forces deployed to fend off a threat of conventional warfare which no longer exists.
Manpower management is the other major area of the military's organisation which needs to be revolutionised, doing away with the outdated model of the "people's army".
The army will have to follow patterns applying to the civilian population on pensions and thousands of career soldiers can also expect to be pushed towards early retirement.
"The manpower instituted by (former Defense Minister) Moshe Dayan in 1967 will have to change. We have two armies in Israel, one of active soldiers and another one of retirees. And this is costing a lot of money," Van Crefeld said.
He explained that retiring soldiers would no longer be automatically entitled to a pension based on their latest wages and would have to feed a special fund throughout their career.
These reforms mirror a law which was coupled to the budget approved by parliament for raising retirement age by at least two years for both men and women.
Netanyahu promised that if his attempts to alleviate the social welfare burden were successful, lower income groups would subsequently benefit from tax cuts, but the army looks set to undertake long-tern changes.
The Israeli army also plans to boost its technology department and within the next few years, several reservist units could be replaced by digital surveillance and reconnaissance devices.
Among the reforms also on the table are plans to shift "non-essential activities" of the army to private companies.
--------
3 Palestinians Slain During Israeli Raids In West Bank
Associated Press
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63279-2004Jan7.html
JERUSALEM, Jan. 7 -- The Israeli army stepped up raids in the West Bank on Wednesday, killing three Palestinian militants and arresting 19, as efforts to end 39 months of Palestinian-Israeli violence remained stalled.
Israeli forces in Nablus, the largest city in the West Bank, killed two members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militia loosely affiliated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. The military said troops killed one Palestinian who drew a pistol and threatened to fire on them and a second who refused repeated commands to surrender.
In Tulkarm, a town just inside the West Bank's western edge, troops shot and killed a militant with the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, after he fired on troops during an arrest operation, the Israeli military said.
Soldiers have killed 14 Palestinians in three weeks of nightly sweeps through West Bank towns and villages, and a concentrated series of raids in Nablus.
Yasser Abed Rabbo, a Palestinian official, accused Israel of trying to stir up trouble. In a statement, he contended the raids were "crimes aimed at foiling international and regional efforts toward calming the situation down and provoking a Palestinian reaction in order to renew the cycle of violence."
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, has been trying for weeks to broker a Palestinian truce agreement to present to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to put pressure on the Israelis to halt their military operations.
Egypt has joined the effort, sending envoys to the West Bank and Gaza Strip to meet with factional leaders. Palestinian officials said Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman would be the next envoy, but no firm date had been set for his arrival.
-------- spies
US Wants Taiwan To Bolster Intelligence Gathering: Jane's
Taipei (AFP)
Jan 08, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/taiwan-04a.html
The United States is pressing Taiwan to procure two intelligence-gathering devices to correct an intelligence "blind spot" over the activities of China's army, the authoritative Jane's Defense Weekly (JDW) says.
The facilities include a synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) satellite and a signals intelligence (SIGINT) aircraft, it says in an article to be published on January 14.
"Taiwan has a major intelligence blind spot regarding what the ground forces of the People's Liberation Army does," a US defense department source told the magazine.
"The procurement (from the US) of a SAR satellite is highly encouraged by the US military," the source said.
Taiwan's existing satellite reconnaissance capability is limited, depending largely on commercially obtained imagery, with the sources including the Canadian RADARSAT, French SPOT, Israeli EROS and US Ikonos, the magazine says.
However this will be boosted when Taiwan launches its own ROCSAT-2 research satellite early this year, it says.
The 750-kilogram (1,650-pound), remote-sensing satellite will operate at an altitude of 891 kilometers (535 miles) and should provide imagery with a two-meter resolution, but its level of precision is unknown.
Without an airborne SIGINT platform, Taiwan cannot intercept high frequency communication signals from China as its own ground SIGINT facilities are hindered by the curvature of the earth and the line-of-sight propagation of the signals, JDW says.
Responding to a request from Taiwan in 2002, Washington has supplied Taipei with details of two airborne SIGINT options based on a Raytheon or Cessna aircraft, but Taipei has yet to pursue an acquisition.
"Significant elements within Taiwan's air force were interested in these aircraft but met with opposition from within the Ministry of National Defense... As a result, neither program has gone through," the US source said.
China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan, which it claims as a renegade province, prompting the island to seek more sophisticated weaponry.
In terms of the Taiwan Relations Act passed by the US Congress when Washington switched its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, the United States is obliged to provide the island with sufficient weapons to defend itself.
----
U.S. wants to tap VoIP
By DECLAN McCULLAGH Staff Writer,
CNET News.com
Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040108.gtvoip0108/BNStory/Technology/
The FBI and the U.S. Justice Department have renewed their efforts to wiretap voice conversations carried across the Internet.
The agencies have asked the Federal Communications Commission to order companies offering voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service to rewire their networks to guarantee police the ability to eavesdrop on subscribers' conversations.
Without such mandatory rules, the two agencies predicted in a letter to the FCC last month that "criminals, terrorists, and spies (could) use VoIP services to avoid lawfully authorized surveillance." The letter also was signed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
This is not the first time the Bush administration has expressed concern about terrorists and other lawbreakers using VoIP to avoid wiretaps. As previously reported by CNET News.com, a proposal presented quietly to the FCC in July sought guaranteed surveillance access to broadband providers. But the latest submission, which follows a recent FCC forum on Internet telephony, is more detailed than before and specifically targets VoIP providers as a regulatory focus.
In general, VoIP providers have pledged to work with police, and some, like Level 3 Communications, do not oppose the regulations the FBI is seeking. Others, like a coalition of 12 smaller VoIP providers including BullDog Teleworks and PingTone Communications, have told the FCC that "there are various industry initatives under way and the commission should allow those initiatives time to succeed before preemptively regulating."
Federal and local police rely heavily on wiretaps. In 2002, the most recent year for which information is available, police intercepted nearly 2.2-million conversations with court approval, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Wiretaps for that year cost taxpayers $69.5-million, and approximately 80 per cent were related to drug investigations. Those statistics do not include approximately the same number of additional wiretaps authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
When weighing the FBI's request, the FCC will have to decide whether a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) applies to VoIP providers. The law is ambiguous. It clearly requires "telecommunications carriers" to provide ready wiretapping access while explicitly exempting "information services." If the FCC decides CALEA does not apply, the debate would shift to Congress, which could decide to amend the law.
When Internet links are used to carry voice calls that begin and end in the traditional, circuit-switched network - a move that Verizon Communications announced Wednesday - that would easily fall within CALEA's existing definitions. But Internet-to-Internet voice links like those offered by VoIP companies Vonage and Skype are closer to information services and fall into a regulatory gray area. The status of voice conversations carried through instant-messaging programs is even more unclear, as is the FCC's ability to compel overseas VoIP providers to comply with U.S. rules.
"The FCC should ignore pleas about national security and sophisticated criminals because sophisticated parties will use noncompliant VoIP, available open source and offshore," said Jim Harper of Privacilla.org, a privacy advocacy Web site. "CALEA for VoIP will only be good for busting small-time bookies, small-time potheads and other nincompoops."
One unusual section of the FBI letter is that it claims the bureau is seeking to protect Americans' privacy rights: "Mandatory CALEA compliance by VoIP providers would better protect the privacy of VoIP users than a voluntary approach. CALEA protects the privacy of surveillance suspects by requiring carriers to provision the surveillance in a confidential manner." Otherwise, the FBI argues, a VoIP company might turn over a "full pipe" to police that would include conversations of more people than necessary.
At least one FCC commissioner has expressed strong support for sweeping VoIP into CALEA's requirements, which currently apply only to telephone companies.
"We must understand the concerns raised by DOJ and FBI that classifying Vonage's VoIP as an information service severely undercuts CALEA," Jonathan Adelstein said last month. "VoIP jeopardizes the ability of federal, state and local governments to protect public safety and national security against domestic and foreign threats. Public safety is not negotiable."
----
Chicago Jury to See Iraqi Intelligence Papers
January 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/national/08TRIA.html
CHICAGO, Jan. 7 - Intelligence documents shown to a federal jury on Wednesday portray a newspaper publisher in the Chicago area as starved for cash and eager to spy on opponents of Saddam Hussein.
The publisher, Khaled Dumeisi, is accused of spying on critics of the Iraqi government living in the United States and giving the information to the Iraqi intelligence service. "He stated that he owes approximately $15,000 accumulated on account of the newspaper," says one memorandum, part of a file given to an American counterintelligence officer in Baghdad.
Mr. Dumeisi is charged with failing to register as an Iraqi agent, conspiracy not to register, lying to a federal grand jury and lying to an immigration officer.
Judge Suzanne B. Conlon of Federal District Court allowed the Baghdad papers into evidence, saying three pages were identified "as being in the defendant's own handwriting."
He is not charged with espionage, a crime that involves theft of classified American defense secrets but not spying on dissidents. There are no accusations that Mr. Dumeisi was involved in terrorism.
-------- us
Wounded "Held Captive" at Walter Reed
Disabled Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
By DAVID VEST
January 8, 2004
CounterPunch
PO BOX 228,
Petrolia, CA 95558
1-800-840 3683
http://www.counterpunch.org/vest01092004.html
The organization known as Disabled American Veterans has been helping U.S. combat casualties figure out what benefits they have coming to them and how to apply for them since 1920. Lately the Bush administration has been going out of its way to make the DAV's job harder.
Their job would be hard enough even if the government appreciated their efforts and was glad to see them coming. Incredibly, it doesn't and it isn't. Not any more.
An army of U.S. veterans more than twice the size of Operation Iraqi Freedom have lost their health insurance benefits since Bush took office. As many as half a million vets are homeless. Seven VA hospitals are being closed as part of an effort to "restructure" the Department of Veterans Affairs. Meanwhile, veterans of the Iraq campaign can fall in line with over 250,000 U.S. veterans who are already waiting at least six months to see a doctor.
Although it hasn't hesitated to send them to face death in Iraq, the administration has consistently opposed any attempt to extend full benefits to Reservists and National Guardsmen, twenty percent of whom have no health insurance by General Accounting Office estimates.
It was one thing when the White House tried to roll back increases in monthly imminent-danger pay and family separation allowance, and another when it called a modest proposal to increase the sum given to families of soldiers who die on active duty "wasteful and unnecessary."
Finally, it occurred to the firm of Bush Cheney Rumsfeld Rice Minions and Myrmidons to wonder how much money the country would save (and how much more could be diverted to Bechtel and Halliburton contracts) if veterans couldn't even find out what their benefits are.
And so now we learn that ever since Operation Iraqi Freedom got underway, it has been easier for a terrorist to get into the United States legally than for a DAV representative to get into a military hospital to help wounded soldiers with their benefit applications. Sickeningly, the Pentagon has been severely limiting DAV access to wounded veterans and doing it on grounds of "security." Oh, yes, and protecting "privacy."
It protects the veterans' privacy by not allowing them to speak with DAV representatives "unmonitored."
Fortunately someone blinked and it wasn't the Disabled American Veterans.
When he got back to the office after celebrating New Year's and opened his mail, Donald Rumsfeld found a letter informing him that he had messed with the wrong people this time.
Here's part of what DAV Washington Headquarters Executive Director David W. Gorman had to say to the Secretary of Defense:
"At one facility in particular [Walter Reed Army Medical Center] our efforts to visit with wounded patients have been severely restricted. For example, all requests to visit patients must now be made through the WRAMC headquarters office, which then selects the patients we may visit and strictly limits information about the patients, even the patient's name and the nature of the injury is withheld without express permission. The DAV's representatives also are escorted at all times while in the facility, and all contact with patients is closely monitored by the escort. This is particularly unnerving and inappropriate as all conversations between a representative and client are confidential in nature.
"I believe these overly broad restrictions on patient access inhibit the ability of our professional accredited representatives to help ensure these wounded service members have the vital information they and their families need in order to obtain the medical care and benefits many of these veterans will depend on for decades to come.
"The American public would be outraged if these restrictions became public knowledge."
[Would they? Hard to tell. There has been little or no coverage in the mainstream media since the DAV released the letter.]
Gorman goes on to say:
"The record of benefits awarded by the VA shows our honored wounded and injured are getting less than they are rightfully entitled. Those wounded and disabled in service to our nation should not be held captive and deprived of the knowledge that would allow them to receive all their rightful benefits, earned on a battlefield half a world away. It brings great dishonor to our nation to learn of disabled veterans suffering physical and economic hardships following their release from medical treatment solely because they are unaware and uninformed of their rightful benefits."
Think of it ... wounded veterans "held captive" ... prevented from seeing people who have a congressional charter to serve them ... not allowed to speak with DAV reps in private, lest their "privacy" be violated ... an administration that regards Disabled American Veterans as security risks.
A government increasingly unable to tell the difference between terrorists and its own citizens.
David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band, The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way Down Here.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
----
US marines anger army over Iraq tactics
By Robin Gedye
08/01/2004
Telegraph Group
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$EHG4HHUPL1YCNQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2004/01/08/wirq108.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/08/ixnewstop.html
The US Marine Corps has angered the American army by suggesting that it could do a better job in Iraq than the soldiers already on the ground.
An internal document leaked yesterday showed that the "Corps", not renowned for its subtlety in warfare, is emphasising restraint in the use of force, cultural sensitivity and a public message that it does not belong to the army.
Some army officers are angry that the document, seen by the Washington Post, has broken an unwritten military code by implying that a replacement unit or force could do a better job than the one it is relieving.
The marines are preparing to patrol the volatile Sunni Triangle area of western Iraq, currently occupied by the 82nd Airborne Division, and due to take over by the end of next month.
Maj-Gen James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, said he planned to lead a two-pronged effort in an area that has proved by far the most hostile towards coalition forces.
While targeting insurgents who attack marines, he intends to run a campaign that will reduce support for terrorists among Iraqis.
In what is, at the very least, a recognition that US military tactics in Iraq have been heavy-handed, marine officers said they intended to use heavy weapons and bombs only as a last resort.
Air strikes and artillery have sometimes been deployed by the army to intimidate the population before ground troops move in for searches.
Marines, who will be taught a few words of Arabic, will be encouraged to interact with the local population, counselled on religious etiquette and forbidden from wearing sunglasses when talking to Iraqis.
In a tactic used by marines in Vietnam, platoons will live in Sunni towns and villages to train Iraqi police.
• In a goodwill gesture, the US-led administration in Baghdad is to free 500 prisoners detained as low-level security threats, with the first batch released today.
----
Troops in Iraq suffer huge risk of injury
Deaths hold steady, but rate of postwar wounded soaring
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER NEWS SERVICES,
Thursday, January 8, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/155731_iraq08.html
WASHINGTON -- Nearly as many U.S. soldiers were wounded in Iraq last month as during the entire six-week period of major combat operations, according to Defense Department statistics tracked by a leading research organization.
The figures illustrate the ongoing danger faced by U.S. forces, even as the frequency of insurgent attacks appears to be declining and the number of soldiers killed has mostly held steady.
"That's a lot of pain," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense-focused think tank that compiled the figures. "It suggests that the level of intensity of operations over there is a lot higher than would be suggested by the 'killed in action' numbers. ... The 'killed in action' numbers suggest that we're winning the war, and the wounded in action numbers suggest that we're losing."
Last night, in a more vivid reminder of the dangers facing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, anti-American insurgents fired mortar rounds at a military camp, wounding 35, the U.S. command said.
Six mortar rounds exploded about 6:45 p.m. at Logistical Base Seitz west of Baghdad, a U.S. military spokesman said in a statement. The camp is in the so-called Sunni Muslim triangle that is a stronghold of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
"The wounded soldiers were given first aid and have been evacuated from the site for further medical treatment," the statement said. The Pentagon added the soldiers were from the Army's 541st Maintenance Battalion, based in Fort Riley, Kan., and part of the 3rd Corps Support Command.
A Pentagon spokesman said some of those wounded returned to duty shortly after the attack, while others were hospitalized.
The spokesman, Lt. Col. James Cassella, said he did not know how many were seriously or slightly wounded.
According to the Defense Department figures that Pike's group compiled, 530 U.S. troops were wounded in December, only slightly fewer than the 550 wounded during combat operations last spring.
It was impossible to track month-by-month wounded statistics before December, Pike said, because the Pentagon only started releasing daily tabulations of them in late November.
But he said that according to previous news reports of Pentagon figures, 570 U.S. troops were wounded in combat from May through August, while from September through November, 1,052 soldiers were wounded.
The number of U.S. troops killed in action has held fairly steady each month since the end of major combat was declared on May 1, varying from 29 to 46.
The exception came in November when successful attacks on U.S. forces, especially on helicopters, resulted in 81 deaths.
U.S. military officials and national security specialists said the high number of injuries could reflect December's stepped-up anti-guerrilla activities.
Military specialists said that explanation seemed plausible given the lack of a corresponding rise in the number of troops killed, as insurgents would be more deadly in ambushes prepared against U.S. troops than if they were caught by surprise.
"There is some intuitive logic to the idea that if they're ambushing us, they're going to be more apt to kill us," said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution.
O'Hanlon also said that the number of daily attacks against U.S. forces declined in the last few months of 2003, from 30 to 35 in October to 22 per day in November to fewer than 20 daily in December.
Major General Charles Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, which is responsible for western Iraq, said there has been a 60 percent decrease in attacks on U.S. forces over the past month and that the attacks that have occurred are "less effective."
Most attacks have come in the Sunni-dominated region north of Baghdad.
But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was more cautious. "I see numbers that drop down, and the question is, when is it a trend and when might it turn and go up again?" he told reporters Tuesday. "It's different in different parts of that country. It's not a uniform pattern in that country. It may be down in one region and up in another."
Jack Spencer, a defense analyst with the Heritage Foundation, said the figures showed the importance of U.S. forces transferring security duties to Iraqis.
"At the end of the day, that's the only way Iraq will be stabilized and pacified in the long term."
Meanwhile, at a checkpoint on the barren plain east of Baqouba, word of a new Army plan to pay soldiers up to $10,000 to re-enlist evoked laughter from a few bored-looking troops.
"Man, they can't pay me enough to stay here," said a 23-year-old specialist from the Army's 4th Infantry Division as he manned the checkpoint with Iraqi police outside this city 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.
His comments reflect a sentiment not uncommon among the nearly two dozen soldiers in Iraq who have spoken with The Associated Press since the Army announced the increased re-enlistment bonuses for soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait on Monday.
Other soldiers at home were divided about the offer.
Those in Iraq who spoke about the bonuses were serving in a range of assignments, from training the new Iraqi army at a base east of Baqouba to patrolling some of the most dangerous roads in the country, such as those leading north from Baghdad.
Some cited the monotonous routine of a lonely life spent thousands of miles from loved ones. Others, like the young specialist who didn't want to be identified, offered simpler reasons -- such as the fear of an early death.
This report includes information from The Boston Globe and The Associated Press.
----
U.S. Spyplanes, Anti-Explosion Unit Going to Iraq
Thu January 8, 2004
By Charles Aldinger
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=4097568
WASHINGTON - In the face of sophisticated attacks on U.S. forces, the Pentagon is sending flocks of unmanned spyplanes and a new unit formed to deal with deadly explosive devices to Iraq in the biggest rotation of its forces since World War II, a senior Army official said on Thursday.
"It has started," the official said in a briefing for reporters on the new-year rotation in which a U.S. force of more than 120,000 in Iraq and another 11,000 in Afghanistan will be replaced by fresh soldiers by the end of May.
The official, who asked not to be identified, said troops from the 82nd Airborne Division began flying to Iraq from North Carolina on Wednesday and some equipment from other Army units began flowing on ships as early as last week.
"This is the biggest move we've done ... since World War II," the official said of the massive flow of soldiers and Marines. "We're moving 240,000-plus" back and forth.
Emphasis in the new Iraq force will be put on troop mobility, aerial reconnaissance and more effectively dealing with remote-controlled "improvised explosive devices" (IED) that are being used against U.S. troops by supporters of the deposed Iraqi regime.
"We are deploying a lot of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) with this formation." the official said, telling reporters that the Iraq force will include Army "Predator," "Shadow" and tiny "Raven" unmanned, remotely-guided drones to spy on guerrillas day and night.
Dozens of American troops have been killed by home-made explosive devices attached to roadside posts and buildings in Iraq.
'TASK FORCE IED'
A small advance contingent of what the Army calls "Task Force IED" has already been sent to Iraq and will grow to 200 or 300 troops in the coming months, the official told reporters.
"We are flowing with this next force that is going in a lot of IED technology" to help detect, neutralize and disarm explosive devices and deal with car and truck bombs, another weapon favored by guerrillas in Iraq, the official said.
He declined to say whether or not the equipment included technology designed to jam explosion-triggering radio signals, but said promising defenses will be quickly tested in Iraq and put into the military acquisition pipeline if they are effective.
"I can't talk much more about it, quite frankly, because we want to stay ahead and keep ahead of the enemy ... We are leveraging an awful lot of technology as well as studying the forensics of all of these attacks and developing tactics, techniques and procedures," the official said.
Pentagon officials have refused to provide details of how troops will be protected in a more-vulnerable transition phase of operations in a country where helicopters have been shot down by missiles and a big Air Force cargo plane with 63 military crew and passengers was forced to land in Baghdad on Thursday after its engine was hit by groundfire.
"We've got to do this thing right. It is still a dangerous place," the Army official said.
----
Judge Decides Pentagon Can Resume Anthrax Vaccinations
January 8, 2004
New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/national/08ANTH.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - A federal judge on Wednesday lifted his injunction halting the military's mandatory anthrax vaccination program, and the Pentagon swiftly ordered the resumption of shots for all its personnel except the six anonymous people who brought the suit.
The judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered lawyers for the government and the plaintiffs to return in a week for a "status hearing" to discuss the next steps in what promises to be a protracted legal fight.
"We are disappointed, but not surprised that the injunction has been stayed for all but the six plaintiffs," said Mark S. Zaid, a lawyer for the six "John Doe" military or Pentagon personnel who brought the suit.
Mr. Zaid pledged further legal action to challenge the effectiveness of the vaccine, the way it is administered and the scientific basis cited by the Bush administration for its approval. "The government's victory today may only be fleeting," he said.
David S. C. Chu, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, signed a memorandum late Wednesday ordering the resumption of the vaccination program.
Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon's deputy spokesman, said after the court action that "the Department of Defense believes this is a safe and effective vaccine" and that "it is an important force-protection measure for our troops" who may be faced with such an unconventional threat.
"It would be irresponsible not to provide the maximum amount of protective measures available to keep our service members safe," Mr. Whitman added.
Though Judge Sullivan was swayed by arguments put forth by government lawyers in staying his injunction, he wrote that the timing of a new Food and Drug Administration rule declaring that the anthrax vaccine was effective against the greatest potential danger raised suspicions.
In issuing his preliminary injunction on Dec. 22, Judge Sullivan accepted the plaintiffs' arguments that the vaccine used in the Pentagon's mandatory program had been approved by the F.D.A. to protect against skin exposure to anthrax - but not against anthrax that is inhaled, the far greater battlefield threat. Thus, the judge said, the vaccine was an "investigational" drug being forced on the troops for an unapproved purpose.
The Pentagon halted the program the next day, pending clarification of the legal issues, and the day after that the Justice Department filed a motion asking the judge to withdraw the injunction - or at least limit his ruling solely to the six plaintiffs whose suit prompted it.
On Dec. 30, the F.D.A. announced a new "final rule and order," which officially declared the anthrax vaccine effective against the inhaled form of the bacteria.
The Justice Department immediately moved to capitalize on the new rule, filing an emergency motion later that day asking Judge Sullivan to vacate the injunction, writing, "There can be no doubt that the F.D.A. order removes the legal basis upon which relief was sought and granted."
In his two-page order issued on Wednesday, Judge Sullivan wrote, "Although the timing of the issuance of the rule is arguably highly suspicious, nevertheless, the rule has been issued and the principle reason for the issuance of the injunction has been addressed by the government."
Mr. Zaid, a plaintiffs' lawyer, said after the court action that the agency's rule should be interpreted as an admission that the vaccine "was being used illegally by the Department of Defense before that time." He said any military personnel or Pentagon civilians penalized for refusing the mandatory vaccine "were unjustly punished." The plaintiffs' lawyers challenged the rule as "primarily based on animal studies that have no proven correlation to human efficacy." They also filed documents on Tuesday asking the court to consider the anthrax case as a class action, to include all military personnel and Pentagon civilians.
--------
Judge Reverses Anthrax Ruling
Pentagon May Resume Vaccinating Members of Military
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63161-2004Jan7.html
A federal judge in Washington lifted a preliminary injunction yesterday and told the Pentagon that it may resume a program of mandatory anthrax inoculations for all U.S. service members except six plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the legality of the government's anthrax vaccine.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled after the Food and Drug Administration issued a formal determination last week that the vaccine provides effective protection against deadly anthrax bacteria, whether they are inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
In issuing his injunction on Dec. 22 blocking mandatory anthrax inoculations, Sullivan ruled that the vaccine is an experimental drug "being used for an unapproved purpose" because the FDA has formally authorized its effectiveness only against anthrax spores absorbed through the skin.
With a court date in the case set for next week, neither the Justice Department nor the Pentagon had any immediate comment on Sullivan's latest ruling or the status of the vaccine program, which the Defense Department suspended pending further action by Sullivan.
Mark S. Zaid, a Washington lawyer who filed the suit challenging the program, called Sullivan's decision lifting the preliminary injunction a temporary setback and said his clients would prevail at trial in challenging the anthrax vaccine.
Zaid said he will soon ask Sullivan to reissue an order blocking mandatory anthrax inoculations because the FDA's approval of the vaccine was itself flawed, based only on animal research. Another government investigation of the vaccine, being carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and based on human research, will not be completed until 2007, he said.
Zaid said he will also soon introduce evidence in court to bolster his argument that, even with the new FDA approval, the anthrax vaccine should still be considered illegal because it is being improperly administered by the military.
While the FDA maintains that the vaccine is safe and effective if service members receive a total of six injections over an 18-month period, the military does not follow the proper injection schedule and often administers two or three shots, instead of the required six, Zaid said.
In defending the program and asking Sullivan to lift his preliminary injunction, senior defense officials said the anthrax vaccine is safe and effective for military personnel. Before the FDA's determination last week, they cited a March 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine concluding that the vaccine is effective "for the protection of humans against anthrax, including inhalation anthrax, caused by all known or plausible engineered strains of Bacillus anthracis."
At the time, defense officials bristled at Sullivan's conclusion that service members receiving the anthrax vaccine were serving as "guinea pigs for experimental drugs."
A million service members have received the vaccine since the Pentagon began a program for mandatory inoculations in 1998, including 600,000 to 700,000 who received the vaccine since June 2002 as the military prepared for war in Iraq. Hundreds of other service members have refused to take the vaccine out of concerns about its safety, and many have been court-martialed for refusing the vaccine, forced out of the military and, in some cases, imprisoned.
-------- propaganda wars
Report says Bush administration exaggerated Iraq's weapons threat
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040108195010.y5zvtuyt.html
President George W. Bush's administration "systematically" exaggerated the threat presented by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), according to a report released Thursday by an influential Washington think-tank.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said the United States also misrepresented the findings of UN weapons inspectors in a bid to justify its case for war against Iraq last year.
Bush used Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes as the main case to the United Nations for military action against Iraq. Several countries, led by France, Germany and Russia opposed the US-led war and the divisions have left deep diplomatic scars.
"Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programmes," said the report entitled "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications".
Secretary of State Colin Powell said in reaction that he remained confident in the case against Iraq he put to the UN Security Council.
"I am confident of what I presented last year, the intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me," Powell told a press conference.
The Carnegie foundation said however that the US intelligence community "appears to have been unduly influenced by policymakers' views."
The foundation said the US government should enlist United Nations help to draw up "a complete history and inventory" of Iraq's WMD and missile programmes and establish an independent commission to establish what intelligence services knew about Iraqi weapons.
It said the United States should also revise its national security strategy allowing pre-emptive wars.
The 100-page report took six months to compile and examined claims made by the White House in the run up to the March 20 invasion that ousted former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The Carnegie said the US administration misrepresented UN "inspectors findings in ways that turned threats from minor to dire."
It said inspections by UN weapons experts "were on track to find what was there" and that international sanctions and import/export controls were "considerably" more effective than was thought.
The foundation said there was "no solid evidence" to back administration claims of a close relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
In launching the war, Bush had said Saddam's former government had presented a direct threat to the United States and the world.
The United States has failed to uncover any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons since the war. Hundreds of experts are still scouring Iraq in the hunt. But media reports have said the head of the US Iraqi Survey Group, David Kay, plans to stand down this year.
The foundation said there were at least two options "preferable to a war undertaken without international support."
The United States could have allowed inspections by the United Nations to continue until completed or imposed "a tougher programme of 'coercive inspections'."
The foundation said that on top of revising the national security policy to eliminate the possibility of more pre-emptive wars, the United States should also "make the security of poorly protected nuclear weapons and stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium a much higher priority."
Powell reaffirmed that the US administration believes it prepared a solid case against Iraq with the Central Intelligence Agency to present to other nations.
"I'm confident of what I presented last year. The intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me; I was representing them. It was information they presented to the Congress. It was information they had presented publicly and they stand behind it. And this game is still unfolding."
The secretary of state highlighted that even the Carnegie report did not say there were no WMD in Iraq. He said the weapons experts must be allowed to finish their work.
--------
For Many Iraqis, U.S.-Backed TV Echoes the Voice Of Its Sponsor
Station Staffers Acknowledge Their Reluctance to Criticize
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63166-2004Jan7?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- In gasoline lines stretching up to half a mile and coffeehouses darkened by power outages, the questions flow steadily:
When will there be enough electricity for hot water to shave?
Who's to blame for a fuel shortage in a country with some of the world's richest oil reserves?
Will it ever be safe enough to send our children to school?
Yet when the current president of Iraq's Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi, went on national television last weekend to face reporters, those were not the questions posed by the staff at the station, al-Iraqiya. They asked about the trip by an Iraqi delegation to the United Nations and plans to train some police outside the country.
Nine months after U.S. forces closed Iraq's state-run television stations and subsequently launched the new channel with promises of a democratic dawn for the country's news media, the Pentagon-sponsored station has not won the trust of many Iraqis. By seeking to cast the U.S. occupation in the most favorable light, al-Iraqiya may actually be losing the war for viewers' hearts and minds.
"Al-Iraqiya is failing," said Jaafar Saddiq, assistant dean at Baghdad's College of Media. "It's technically backward. Its message is not convincing. It can't compete with other stations."
Executives and journalists at al-Iraqiya say there are few taboos in their coverage and that they are free to address the everyday concerns of Iraqis. But many Iraqis say that those assertions have no more credibility than al-Iraqiya's nightly newscasts, which fuel the widespread conviction that al-Iraqiya is the mouthpiece for the U.S.-led military alliance and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi leadership.
"We're concerned about the difficulties of the people, about the promises that the coalition made that they haven't fulfilled. We don't see much about that," said Basseem Sattar, 31, a Baghdad taxi driver sipping sweet tea in a spartan cafe.
Mehdi Sawawi, 45, a retired government employee, put aside his newspaper and agreed. "Up until now, we're not sure who is running al-Iraqiya. Is the coalition or the Governing Council or somebody else?"
The station operates under the authority of the U.S. provisional administration in Iraq and has been managed by Science Applications International Corp., a California-based defense and technology contractor picked by the Pentagon to run Iraqi Media Network, which also includes two radio stations and a newspaper.
Al-Iraqiya's employees are paid by the Iraqi Finance Ministry according to wage scales set for civil servants across the government, station officials said.
But Shameem Rassam, the station's general director, said ties with the government end with the paycheck. "We are independent in our editorial policy. Nobody dictates to us about what to do," said Rassam, who hosted programs on Iraqi state television before emigrating to the United States 13 years ago and ultimately settling in Arlington County.
Al-Iraqiya is one element in the occupation authority's public relations campaign, which includes frequent news conferences by U.S. and allied officials, usually covered live on al-Iraqiya with Arabic translation, and private briefings for groups of Iraqi journalists. From the back of military trucks rolling slowly through traffic, troops distribute copies of Baghdad Now, a biweekly tabloid in Arabic and English covering the activities of the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division. Other U.S. soldiers walk the streets in full combat gear, handing out pamphlets calling on residents to oppose terrorism and provide information about insurgents.
Independent sources of news in Iraq remain limited. Of the six daily newspapers, the most widely read is Zaman, an independent publication that prints separate editions for Baghdad and the south and the north of the country.
Four of the other daily papers are issued by political parties and openly promote their interests. The sixth, Sabah, a publication of the U.S.-led provisional authority, offers a wider range of news coverage than its sister television station, al-Iraqiya. Several other television stations broadcast in Iraq, but they are clearly identified with political parties or neighboring countries, particularly Iran.
Arabic-language satellite channels based outside Iraq are winning an ever-widening audience as satellite dishes, banned under the government of deposed president Saddam Hussein, proliferate. But U.S. officials have repeatedly accused them of anti-American bias, and some Iraqis agree that the stations are unduly critical of U.S.-led forces.
During its first eight months of operation, al-Iraqiya has had a stream of managers and news directors. Rassam herself joined only two months ago after working at one of the affiliated radio stations.
Rassam supervises a staff of about 300 employees, many of them energetic but green journalists. They have taken up quarters in cramped, windowless rooms behind the razor wire and sandbags of the Baghdad Convention Center, a heavily guarded building that the Governing Council calls home. The carpets are tattered and the clocks on the walls stopped long ago. Employees say they are short of cameras, editing equipment and computers, but much of what they do have is brand-new, compliments of the U.S. government.
Current and former employees of al-Iraqiya, including several who are highly critical of its operations, echoed Rassam's assertion that there has been no interference by U.S. officials in daily decisions about news programming. But some said they were reluctant to air reports that could antagonize U.S. officials. In part, they said, they have yet to shake the media culture of the Hussein era.
"For those of us who were working in the previous Iraqi media, there is some kind of fear about whether the Americans will agree or not agree with what we do. The longer you worked in the previous state media, the more fear you have," said Abdel Salam Dhari, 43, the station's news director, who had been a translator at the official Jumhuriyah newspaper.
For months, al-Iraqiya declined to broadcast reports about attacks by Iraqi insurgents on U.S.-led forces, Dhari said. He noted that the station in recent weeks had begun to cover such violence. But the reports are often less detailed and more sporadic than those in the Western news media and on the Arabic satellite television channels.
The station has also refrained from airing some dispatches because of concerns they could incite anti-American feelings, current and former employees said. Rassam said Iraqis, after years of dictatorship, are not ready for the freewheeling media prevalent the West. "Iraq is going through a phase, opening its eyes for the first time," she said.
Al-Iraqiya's management has banned newscasters from using the word "occupation" to describe the presence of U.S.-led forces in the country, though the term is common in the Western media and acknowledged by U.S. officials to accurately describe the current situation. Station employees said the term casts U.S. forces in a negative light.
"For us Iraqis, we have to cool down the passions," said Ali Karim Shamari, 24, a reporter at the station.
But some Iraqis said they resented what they called a dumbed-down version of the news prepared by outsiders, including exiles returning to Iraq for the first time in years.
"The people of Iraq are not as simple-minded as they believe," said Ahmed Abdul Majid, chief editor of Zaman. "They don't give us an accurate picture. It's not complete, and they're still too cautious."
Media critics and many ordinary Iraqis agree that the station has yet to seriously tackle many problems now bedeviling everyday life, such as gas lines, electricity shortages and street crime. Alaa Juburi, a correspondent and producer who recently left al-Iraqiya to work for a U.S. television network in Baghdad, said local reporters should be grilling Iraqi ministers about these problems but are reluctant to challenge them.
Instead, the station provides an open forum for U.S. and Iraqi officials. In a program that aired several times last week, two spokesmen from the U.S. provisional administration and the Governing Council were shown over coffee at a local restaurant, talking for a half-hour about U.S. plans to transfer political control this year. Station officials said this was part of al-Iraqiya's mission to inform the public.
Coupled with a flat, drab presentation that Iraqis say is reminiscent of the grim newscasts of the Hussein era, al-Iraqiya's staid news judgment is costing it viewers. An October survey conducted for the State Department in seven cities found that 63 percent of Iraqis with satellite dishes preferred getting their news from either al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya -- the leading Arabic satellite channels -- while only 12 percent chose al-Iraqiya.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Showdown on Terrorism Case
Administration Seeks Fast Track for High Court Appeal
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63262-2004Jan7.html
The Bush administration announced yesterday that it will ask the Supreme Court to put its appeal of a key terrorism case on a fast track -- a proposal that, if accepted by the court, would enable the justices to decide on almost all the major pending civil liberties cases related to the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban by summer.
In a brief filed with the court and simultaneously released to the media, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson informed the justices that by Jan. 20 he will file his appeal of a New York-based federal appeals court's ruling last month ordering the government to either charge or free Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen allegedly linked to al Qaeda who has been held incommunicado as an "enemy combatant" since shortly after his arrest in Chicago 19 months ago.
Olson added that he will contact Padilla's lawyers to reach agreement on a schedule that would let the Supreme Court hear the oral argument by the end of April and issue a ruling before its recess in early July.
The administration made its request, which skips a possible appeal to the full membership of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, Olson wrote, because that court's "decision . . . incorrectly resolves issues of extraordinary public significance."
The request comes in the wake of lower courts' rulings rejecting the Bush administration's assertions of executive authority in the war on terrorism, on the grounds that they threaten civil liberties. The Supreme Court itself recently rebuffed the administration by agreeing to hear an appeal by foreign terrorism suspects detained on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Thus, the administration may believe that its best hope of legal vindication lies in quickly concentrating terrorism-related issues at a right-of-center Supreme Court, where it is at least likely to win more cases than it will lose, legal analysts said.
"There are both tactical and strategic reasons to have them considered all in one shot," said David Rivkin, an official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations who has written friend-of-the court briefs supporting the current administration's positions in the lower courts.
Olson's request came just two days before the justices were scheduled to hold their first conference on whether to hear an appeal similar to Padilla's by Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Hamdi has also been detained for more than a year without access to a lawyer in the South Carolina naval brig where Padilla is being held.
Last year, the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld President Bush's authority to declare Hamdi an enemy combatant, based largely on the fact that, unlike Padilla, he had been detained on a foreign battlefield. The Bush administration has strongly urged the Supreme Court not to accept his appeal.
The administration has maintained that the 2nd Circuit's ruling in Padilla's case does not undercut its position in Hamdi, but a brief filed Monday at the court by Hamdi's lawyers argued the opposite.
In his brief yesterday, Olson again argued that the 2nd Circuit's ruling did not weaken his case in Hamdi, but seemed to acknowledge that the price of getting expedited consideration of his Padilla appeal would be some form of joint review of the two cases.
He suggested that the court defer consideration of the Hamdi appeal until the government's Padilla brief comes in, then look at both cases at the same conference, adding that the government's brief will "address the interrelationship between the questions presented by the government's petition in Padilla and the Fourth Circuit's decision in Hamdi."
Critics of the administration's legal approach to the war on terrorism said Olson's brief is the latest signal -- together with its decisions to offer Hamdi a visit with his lawyer and to release certain Guantanamo detainees -- that pressure from the courts and the public is forcing the administration into a series of tactical retreats.
"They have abandoned, in essence, their opposition to [the court hearing] Hamdi," said Joseph Onek, senior counsel and director of the Liberty and Security Initiative of the Constitution Project, a Washington-based nonprofit group that opposes the administration's legal policies.
"There was at least the possibility that the court would deny Hamdi and deny Padilla," the latter being a major defeat for the administration, Onek said. "All the things they're doing -- offering counsel to Hamdi, releasing some people from Guantanamo -- shows they're obviously very, very nervous. Now they've gotten even more nervous."
But John C. Yoo, a former Justice Department official who helped design much of the administration's policy, said Olson's brief reflected "sharp lawyering," designed to preserve the administration's lower court victory in Hamdi while ensuring that the review of Padilla takes place under the most favorable conditions.
Whoever wins, Supreme Court rulings on these issues would present the most significant wartime exercise of judicial power vis-à-vis the executive branch since World War II.
The Bush administration's assertion of executive authority to declare both citizens and noncitizens enemy combatants and to hold them in secret indefinitely is a cornerstone of its approach to protecting against a repeat of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it has proven increasingly controversial as the war on terrorism has ground on. International human rights organizations, U.S. civil libertarians and several federal courts have warned that Bush's policy risks trading too much liberty for security.
The administration says that Padilla's case illustrates the unprecedented risk the country faces. A confirmed al Qaeda member, he came to the country to help a plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb," and his continued detention without access to an attorney or others is critical to his interrogation, the administration argues.
"Padilla is a hard-core operative," Yoo said. "He was coming to the U.S. to carry off a destructive attack, and it would be foolish to think he was doing it on his own. It is important to know who he was going to meet."
-------- drug war
Interruption of Effort to Down Drug Planes Is Disclosed
January 8, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/politics/08DRUG.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - A United States program to shoot down airplanes in Latin America that are suspected of ferrying drugs was suspended this fall for a second time, after the Colombian military forced down a plane and then strafed it without United States approval, current and former American officials have disclosed.
The program, originally operated by the Central Intelligence Agency but turned over to the State Department, had resumed in August after being halted for a little over two years after the mistaken 2001 downing of a plane carrying American missionaries in Peru.
But problems arose almost immediately. During the first air interdiction in early September, according to the officials, the Colombian Air Force forced down a civilian plane and then destroyed it on the ground. The attack was undertaken without authorization from United States personnel monitoring the operation.
American officials said that Colombian officials told them that the plane was completely destroyed. The American officials said they had no indication that drugs were found at the remote site where the plane was forced down. The Colombians said the pilots were seen running from the plane, and then disappeared. American officials said they did not believe there were any casualties in the incident.
The air interdiction program has now been resumed, after a suspension of a few days. But the incident revealed a little-understood feature of the way the new air interdiction program has been structured.
Under the rules negotiated by Colombia and the United States, Colombian air crews are not required to gain approval before firing on suspected drug planes, according to State Department officials. Instead, they are encouraged to seek United States approval, but can proceed even if the Americans disagree with the decision, the officials said.
In the September case, American officials monitoring the interdiction from a ground station in Key West were not certain that it was right to attack. But when a communications problem prevented the United States personnel monitoring the operation from giving their authorization, the Colombians went ahead anyway.
Afterwards, the United States briefly halted the program and privately complained to the Colombian government. The program has since resumed after a review of the incident, but American officials said no planes had been shot down or forced down since.
"The Colombians received a very stern message," said Bobby Charles, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. "A very clear message was sent by us to them." The Colombians were told that "they had to get serious, or the program would hang in the balance," said Mr. Charles. "That was a pivotal moment."
State Department officials said recently that the problems in the September incident occurred because of communications mix-ups between the Colombian Air Force and the United States Joint Inter-Agency Task Force-South, the American unit monitoring the operation from Key West. Because of a confusion over the proper communication frequencies, the United States personnel were not clearly receiving information about the situation, officials said. The Americans in Key West refused to give their approval because they were not certain what was going on, but the Colombians decided to go ahead anyway because they were afraid the opportunity to down the plane was about to slip away.
The Bush administration suspended the air interdiction program following an April, 2001 incident in Peru, in which Veronica Bowers, an American missionary, and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, were killed when their plane was forced down. Her husband, Jim Bowers, and their son, Cory, survived. The pilot of the small Cessna plane in which they were traveling, Kevin Donaldson, was able to crash-land the plane along the Amazon River despite his own wounds from the attack.
After that incident, the C.I.A. came under heavy fire for its handling of the program, and the agency's director, George J. Tenet, made it clear to the White House that his agency no longer wanted any part of it. The State Department agreed to take it over, and hired an outside contractor to manage it on a day-to-day basis.
So far, the air interdiction program has resumed only in Colombia, although the Bush administration is still considering whether it should be restarted in Peru as well, officials said. Brazil is also considering whether to start its own air interdiction program, but the Bush administration is not planning to provide support for that effort, State Department officials said.
In the past, American officials have defended the air interdiction program, saying that it has had a major impact on cocaine trade patterns in Latin America. Before the missionary plane was shot down, the Peruvian Air Force, working with United States surveillance aircraft, shot down, grounded or strafed at least 30 aircraft suspected of ferrying drugs.
Under that threat, pilots demanded huge fees to fly drugs, or refused to fly at all. The price of raw coca began to plummet in Peru because it became harder to transport to Colombia for processing into cocaine, prompting farmers to switch to other crops and drug traffickers to seek out alternative routes and forms of transportation. American officials believe traffickers rely more on river boats than aircraft to move raw coca now, and depend much less on aircraft that are vulnerable to air interdiction efforts.
"There basically is not much moving by air now," said one former intelligence official familiar with the air interdiction program.
Under the new State Department program, Americans in Key West, working for the Joint Interagency Task Force-South, help the Colombians track and monitor suspected drug flights, particularly along the Colombian-Peruvian border. When a suspected flight is detected, a surveillance plane, with a Colombian crew and an American observer, is sent in to intercept. The Colombian air force can then send in a military jet to interdict and shoot down the suspect plane or force it down.
Mr. Charles said that since the September incident, he believes that the Colombians understood that the United States could not tolerate mistakes in this high-risk program.
"They need to be really thoughtful, this has to be done right," he said. "There can't be any slip-ups." After receiving the American message following the September incident, he said, "they did get serious."
Mr. Charles added that he believed the program was working well.
-------- immigration / refugees
Bush Proposes Legal Status for Immigrant Labor
Workers Could Stay Six Years or More
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63428-2004Jan7?language=printer
President Bush, saying the nation has failed millions of illegal immigrants who live in fear of deportation, yesterday proposed an ambitious plan that would allow undocumented workers to legally hold jobs in the United States for the first time.
Taking on an issue he shelved after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush proposed a program that would make the 8 million undocumented immigrants in the United States eligible for temporary legal status for at least six years, as long as they are employed. But it would not automatically put them on a path to obtaining citizenship or even permanent resident status.
"We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane," Bush told 200 Latino supporters attending his first White House announcement of the election year. "I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens."
What Bush calls his "temporary worker" program was eagerly embraced by business groups but condemned as stingy and impractical by advocates for immigrants. The administration hopes the plan will appeal to Hispanic voters and expand the Republicans' base, and strategists in both parties described it as politically shrewd. But many said it has little chance of passing Congress in the form Bush described.
A presidential adviser said the immigration plan appeared to be the opening chapter of an agenda being designed by Bush aides who are planning for a general election race against former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who has sprinted to the front among Democratic contenders. Dean said in a statement that Bush's plan "would create a permanent underclass of service workers with second-class status." Other elements are likely to include proposals to limit lawsuits and add private accounts as part of the Social Security system.
Labor advocates warned that the president's proposal to have workers sponsored by employers to obtain legal status would prevent them from complaining about job conditions, out of fear that the employer would revoke the relationship and have them deported. Others cautioned that employers could use the threat of recruiting low-wage, legal immigrants to threaten existing U.S. employees and prevent them from seeking better working conditions.
Bush is scheduled to meet Monday in Mexico with President Vicente Fox, who has been prodding the White House to make changes in border policy. Bush called his Mexican counterpart yesterday morning, and Fox saidthe two spoke for about 15 minutes.
"He sent warm greetings to all Mexicans, particularly to those Mexicans who are there, in the United States," Fox told reporters at the opening of a primary school in Mexico City. "It's a very interesting program. We are going to wait for details."
In addition to conferring temporary legal status on undocumented workers now in the country, Bush's program would allow an unlimited number of new immigrants to enter as long as they obtain jobs through a database that would be run by the government and would offer the openings first to U.S. citizens.
Under Bush's plan, foreign workers would be legal for three years and then could renew their status at least once. The White House plans to negotiate the number of renewals with Capitol Hill, but Bush said "it will have an end." The plan would include financial incentives for temporary workers to return to their home countries.
The temporary workers -- administration officials anticipate most would be Mexican -- would be given biometrically encoded cards. They would allow the workers to come and go legally to their home countries, a trip now difficult and occasionally dangerous for illegal workers who must sneak back into the United States.
Workers entering the country would not be charged a fee for the temporary status. Illegal immigrants now in the United States would pay an unspecified fee but would not be prosecuted or expelled.
Some members of Congress said that would have the effect of rewarding people who had broken the law by using phony documents to obtain jobs. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said he believes Congress can come up with "a strong and compassionate policy" on immigration but said he has "heartfelt reservations about allowing illegal immigrants into a U.S. guest-worker program that seems to reward illegal behavior."
House Republican officials described the guest-worker issue as a low priority for GOP lawmakers, many of whom have expressed concern that a new program would take jobs from constituents.
Opponents derided Bush's proposal as an "amnesty," a politically charged term that causes conservatives to recoil. Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), a member of the House subcommittee that would consider the bill, said it "amounts to the forgiveness of a criminal act, no different under the law than printing hundred-dollar bills in your garage."
Bush said in his remarks that he opposes "amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path to citizenship." The White House said the plan is not an amnesty because it is temporary and does not lead to a green card, or lawful permanent residency.
Bush said in the future, enforcement would be stepped up against companies that hire illegal workers.
"Our homeland will be more secure when we can better account for those who enter our country, instead of the current situation in which millions of people are unknown to the law," he said. "Law enforcement will face fewer problems with undocumented workers and will be better able to focus on the true threats to our nation from criminals and terrorists."
Business groups, made up of some of Bush's biggest financial backers, welcomed the plan as a way to create a stable workforce and alleviate labor shortages for low-wage and dangerous jobs that Americans disdain in agriculture and the hotel, health, restaurant and construction industries.
"We have a problem with projected job growth and a diminishing workforce, and the economy can't expand unless we have workers to fill available jobs," said Randy Johnson, vice president for labor and employee benefits at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Advocates for immigrants complained that Bush's proposal does not provide an automatic route for temporary workers to become citizens and said it was designed instead as a path to deportation after the expiration of a worker's temporary legal status.
"We're going to be creating, under this type of legislation, a large number of basically indentured servants," said Susan F. Martin, an immigration expert at Georgetown University who was executive director of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, a government panel that examined the issue in the 1990s. She called Bush's plan "as troubling an immigration proposal as I've seen in the past 25 years."
Martin said the program was unlikely to persuade immigrants to go home when their guest-worker visas expired, especially those who have spent years in the United States.
Even some immigration officials privately expressed concerns about how the new system would be administered, noting there is a backlog of 5.5 million people who have applied for immigration benefits.
Bush's plan is similar to legislation introduced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who said in a telephone interview that the president should use his State of the Union address this month to set a deadline for Congress to act before the August recess. "I worry about it just being an issue that is talked about, when we need to act," he said.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said in Mexico that he is confident an immigration plan will make it through Congress "because it is a security issue."
But a House leadership aide said that at least 50 Republicans would be unlikely to vote for such a measure, and most Democrats would probably reject it to avoid giving Bush a victory during his reelection campaign.
Bush told the East Room audience that many undocumented workers had "entrusted their lives to the brutal rings of heartless human smugglers" only to be cut off from their families as they lived in "the shadows of American life -- fearful, often abused and exploited."
"As a nation that values immigration, and depends on immigration, we should have immigration laws that work and make us proud, yet today we do not," Bush said. "The system is not working. Our nation needs an immigration system that serves the American economy, and reflects the American dream."
Correspondent Kevin Sullivan in Mexico City and staff writers Mary Beth Sheridan and Greg Schneider in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
Plan for Illegal Immigrant Workers Draws Fire From Two Sides
January 8, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/national/08BUSH.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to pass his plan to give illegal immigrant workers temporary legal status. The proposal drew criticism from some groups involved in the issue for not going far enough to help immigrants and from others for rewarding people who had entered the country illegally.
The proposal would let millions of illegal immigrants obtain work visas for three years, renewable for an unspecified period, if they can show that they have jobs and if their employers certify that no Americans can be found to perform the work. The plan would also let employers import new workers on the same temporary basis to work at jobs that they cannot fill with Americans.
Announcing the plan in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Bush said it made economic sense to allow employers to find willing workers for jobs that Americans did not want. He cast the proposal as part of a tradition of welcoming immigration. The United States has an estimated eight million or more illegal immigrants.
"Reform must begin by confronting a basic fact of life and economics - some of the jobs being generated in America's growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling," Mr. Bush said to cheers from an audience that included cabinet members and representatives of Hispanic groups. "Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans are not filling. We must make our immigration laws more rational and more humane, and I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens."
Mr. Bush said he was not offering amnesty to illegal immigrants already here. He emphasized that the status for workers who entered without visas or work authorizations would be temporary and would end with most of them leaving.
"This program expects temporary workers to return permanently to their home countries after their period of work in the United States has expired, and there should be financial incentives for them to do so," Mr. Bush said.
He was alluding to his proposal that workers in the program be allowed to benefit, after returning home, from their payments to Social Security and individual retirement programs that could be set up for them while here.
Mr. Bush announced the plan on Wednesday so he could present it to President Vicente Fox of Mexico when the two leaders meet next week in Mexico. Mr. Bush had been working on a similar package soon after taking office three years ago, but delayed it after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The announcement represented his first big election year policy initiative, one intended in part to appeal to Hispanics, a particularly fast-growing sector of the electorate. It also sought to satisfy a longstanding demand by employers that Washington make it easier to hire foreign workers for jobs in hotels, on farms, in construction and in other generally low-wage unskilled positions that Americans have reportedly been reluctant to take, even in the economic downturn.
The plan drew criticism from Democrats for hurting American workers and not doing enough to help immigrants.
"The president's proposal will help big corporations who currently employ undocumented workers," Howard Dean, the Democratic presidential hopeful, said in a statement. "But it does nothing to place hard-working immigrants on a path to citizenship and would create a permanent underclass of service workers with second-class status."
John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the plan deepened "the potential for abuse and exploitation of these workers while undermining wages and labor protections for all workers."
The view that the proposal would hurt American workers was shared by one of the leading groups that want to keep strict limits on immigration, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
"With nine million unemployed Americans and the nation in the midst of a jobless recovery," a spokesman for the federation, David Ray, said, "we need a foreign guest worker program like we need a hole in the head. It's going to have a huge downward pressure on wages and working conditions. It will basically allow employers unfettered access to cheap exploitable workers. If they claim they can't fill a job with an American, they can fill it with a foreign worker."
Business groups said the plan would help the economy by ensuring employers access to needed workers.
"We're extremely pleased that the president has gotten engaged in the immigration debate strongly now, because this will move the issue forward, generally and on Capitol Hill," said Randel Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the United States Chamber of Commerce, which has been pushing for a temporary-worker program. "We are supportive of the proposal but also recognize that there are many details that have to be worked out."
In political terms, Mr. Bush is walking a thin line between offering a program generous enough to immigrants that it can win Democrats' backing in Congress while avoiding anything that looks like an amnesty, an approach that many conservatives oppose. As a result, the White House was vague about many details, saying it would work with Congress to fill in the blanks.
Mr. Bush said he would support increasing the number of people who can obtain permanent residency status and start on a path toward citizenship. He said that increase would not be reserved for people in the temporary-worker program and that workers in the program would receive no special consideration for permanent residency.
"They will not be given unfair advantage over people who have followed legal procedures from the start," he said.
Some critics said the plan would not work because most workers would not want to risk being deported after their temporary legal status expired. White House officials said they would negotiate with Congress to determine how long renewals should be.
"If the offer is a temporary visa with uncertain prospects for renewal and no path to permanent residency, you won't have a lot of takers from the undocumenteds here," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which seeks to liberalize immigration. "And you'll probably have a lot of people who come into the country to participate in the temporary program and then jump the program."
Mr. Bush said the program should be accompanied by an increase in the number of people granted permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship.
"America's a welcoming country, but citizenship must not be the automatic reward for violating the laws of America," Mr. Bush said. "The citizenship line, however, is too long. And our current limits on legal immigration are too low. My administration will work with Congress to increase the annual number of green cards that can lead to citizenship."
He did not provide details. Critics said the plan would have to include an extremely large increase in green cards to allow even a fraction of the millions of people eligible for the temporary-worker program to have a chance at permanent residency and citizenship.
A spokesman for the Citizenship and Immigration Services, Chris Bentley, said the United States issued 475,000 new green cards a year, with 144,000 going to people being admitted specifically to work.
The United States also admits many people on temporary work visas without permanent residency rights. In 2002, nearly 1.3 million people were admitted on temporary visas, including 102,000 for nonskilled agricultural and nonagricultural posts, the immigration agency says.
--------
NEWS ANALYSIS
Border Politics as Bush Woos 2 Key Groups With Proposal
January 8, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/politics/08ASSE.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - President Bush's sweeping proposal on Wednesday to give legal status to millions of illegal workers was a political document as well as an immigration policy and sought to re-establish his credentials as a compassionate conservative at the starting gate of an election year.
White House political advisers have long talked of the critical importance of Hispanics to Mr. Bush's re-election. But political analysts said that his latest proposal was also designed to appeal to a much larger political prize, suburban swing voters, who might see the plan as evidence of a gentler Republican Party.
"For a party that's trying to look more inclusive and welcoming, the proposal has broader thematics that show an openness to America's new immigrants," said Bill McInturff, a leading Republican pollster.
Mr. Bush's speech carefully hit the emotional notes about opening the United States' borders at a time when the administration has spent more energy securing them. "Many of you here today are Americans by choice, and you have followed in the paths of millions," the president told the crowd. Every generation of immigrants, he added, "has reaffirmed the wisdom of remaining open to the talents and dreams of the world."
Behind the poetic language, analysts said, lay a prosaic White House calculation: That it was more important to reach toward the political middle than to worry about placating Mr. Bush's conservative base. Many conservative Republicans called Mr. Bush's plan nothing more than amnesty for lawbreakers but moderate Republicans said the White House had enough political capital with the conservatives to make it worth risking their ire.
Certainly Mr. Bush's speech announcing the proposal, in the East Room of the White House, came with the kind of political noise not normally heard in the formal splendor of the executive mansion's state floor.
Hispanic leaders invited by the White House jammed the room, cheering and chanting. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, had a front-row seat.
The real political risk to the White House, moderate Republicans said, was whether the proposals would be as welcomed by Hispanics as Mr. Bush and his political advisers expected. Many Hispanic leaders quickly heaped criticism on an immigration plan that they said did not go far enough, and asserted that the White House was cynically chasing their votes with an empty plan that would do them no good in the end.
"The notion that there is a green card at the end of this process is an illusion, and that's the crux of the matter," said Cecilia Muñoz, a vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy organization. "The headlines today suggest that he's providing legal status. But the bottom line is when people learn the details of this proposal and what it does and doesn't do, it's likely to seem less appealing."
The White House left many details of the proposal vague, including a critical one at the heart of the plan. Under Mr. Bush's proposal, an illegal worker with a job in the United States could apply to be a three-year guest worker, a status that would provide full employee benefits, the ability to move freely in and out of the United States and the right to apply for a green card. In his speech, Mr. Bush said that an immigrant could renew participation in the guest worker program - but he did not say for how long, leaving it up for Congress to decide.
The tactic is one Mr. Bush has used before, most recently on the Medicare bill, which allows him, Democrats say, to take credit for proposing reforms while leaving Congress to work out the details.
For now, analysts of Hispanic voting trends said it was too early to tell how much the proposal would help Mr. Bush. His advisers have said the president needs 40 percent of the Hispanic vote to win. Mr. Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000, a significant showing for a Republican. For the past three years, the White House has been aggressively trying to encroach on a traditionally Democratic and rapidly growing voting group.
"The plan is still too vague to say how it will fare among Latino organizations and the Latino community," said John A. Garcia, a political professor at the University of Arizona and the author of the book "Latino Politics in America." But at the least, Mr. Garcia said that it "puts the spotlight back on Bush and the Latinos" and gets Latinos re-engaged in a national conversation with the president and his policies.
But pollsters and political strategists said that Mr. Bush did not have to persuade every Hispanic voter of the value of his plan, and that just improving his standing on the margins could make a difference in the 2004 election.
Andrew Kohut, the director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, noted that Republicans have been gaining significant ground with Hispanic voters in the last decade, and that Mr. Bush's immigration proposals could exploit those gains. Pew surveys in Florida in the late 1990's, Mr. Kohut said, showed that 36 percent of Hispanic voters were Democrats while 24 percent were Republicans. But surveys in more recent years showed that 30 percent of Hispanic voters were Democrats while 32 percent were Republicans.
"So think about the advantage that could be for Bush in a close election, and it gives you some indication of the potential for this proposal to help him politically," Mr. Kohut said.
John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster and a partner in Opiniones Latinas, a firm in Alexandria, Va., that conducts national surveys among Spanish-speaking adults, said that many legal Hispanics were interested in overhauling immigration laws for national security reasons, and also to make it easier for them to travel to and from the United States.
"Their family and friends, even in the legal immigration system, are running into increased barriers," Mr. McLaughlin said.
--------
U.S. Halts Cuban Immigration Talks;
Worsening of Ties Seen
January 8, 2004
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/international/americas/08CUBA.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - The Bush administration has suspended semi-annual immigration talks with Cuba, saying that Havana has repeatedly refused to discuss certain technical and political issues, officials said Wednesday.
The suspension did not appear to immediately threaten the immigration agreement between the countries, which sets the rules for the arrival of more than 20,000 Cuban immigrants to the United States every year, as well as for hundreds of political refugees.
But the administration's move appeared to signal a further hardening of relations with Cuba by effectively shutting down one of its few avenues for regular communication with the Marxist government. The United States cut off diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba in the early 1960's.
Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said the United States had repeatedly sought in recent years to address issues related to exit visas, monitoring of dissidents and other matters, only to be rebuffed by Cuban officials.
"We have told Cuba that we're ready to go to talks when they're ready to discuss the serious issues that need to be discussed," Mr. Boucher said.
The talks have been a fixture of United States-Cuban relations since accords in 1994 and 1995 brought an end to an exodus of Cuban trying to reach South Florida on rafts and other small craft. The administration is insisting on discussing five issues: Cuban delays in issuing exit permits to American-approved migrants; cooperation in staging a new lottery for visa seekers; access to a deeper Cuban port so large Coast Guard cutters can repatriate illegal migrants; obstacles placed in the path of American officials seeking to monitor the fate of returned migrants and others affected by mass arrests of dissidents last spring; and Cuba's refusal to accept the return of migrants who have committed crimes in this country and are, in immigration parlance, excludable.
Dagoberto Rodríguez, the chief of mission of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, said the administration's position was surprising because in the past it has been Cuban officials who have sought to widen the scope of the talks, while the Americans hewed strictly to the accords.
Mr. Rodríguez said the United States had failed to live up to its pledge to end the practice of giving people fleeing Cuba on rafts a warm welcome if they reach United States shores. He portrayed the administration's move as an election-year ploy to appease Cuban-American voters.
"What they're doing is a political maneuver to calm the insatiable demands of the extreme right in Miami," Mr. Rodríguez said in an interview.
Wayne Smith, a former chief of the United States mission in Havana, charged that hard-liners within the administration were eager to see an end to the talks, and favor a more confrontational approach toward the government of the Cuban president, Fidel Castro.
"I sense we're moving away from any kind of constructive contacts with the Cuban government and more and more in the direction of regime change," Mr. Smith said. "The issues they put forward are by and large a sham."
In October, President Bush announced steps that he said would "hasten the arrival of a new, free democratic Cuba." He tightened restrictions on travel to Cuba for most Americans and announced the creation of a commission to plan for a political transition on the island.
-------- justice
Miami federal court has 'secret docket' to keep some cases hidden from public
By Ann W. O'Neill
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
January 8 2004
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-csecret08jan08,0,2167647.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
A secret docketing system hiding some sensitive Miami federal court cases from public view has been exposed and is being challenged in two higher courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
"We don't have secret justice in this country," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The Washington-based journalists watchdog group is asking the appellate courts to open up two Miami federal cases it says were litigated in secret.
The group has filed briefs in the Supreme Court and in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Representing two dozen media and legal organizations, it is mounting the stiffest challenge yet to a practice legal experts say violates free speech rights and ignores established court decisions favoring open records and courtrooms.
The legal challenges are emerging as the higher courts are taking a long look at the government secrecy surrounding the detention of more than 1,000 Muslim and Middle Eastern men in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"In recent months, it has become evident that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida maintains a dual, separate docket of public and non-public cases," Dalglish wrote in a brief filed late last month in the 11th Circuit appeal of convicted Colombian drug lord Fabio Ochoa Vasquez.
In its Supreme Court brief, the media group called the secret jailing of an Algerian-born waiter "perhaps the most egregious recent example of an alarming trend toward excessive secrecy in the federal courts, particularly in cases that bear even a tangential connection to the events of Sept. 11." Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel, 34, of Deerfield Beach, was arrested for a violating his student visa a month after the terror attacks. Although he sought his release in the District Court and appealed to the 11th Circuit, no public record of his case existed until his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The media group last week asked to join the case as a party, a request the high court rarely grants.
In Ochoa's 11th Circuit appeal, the media group is challenging a secret plea bargain and sentencing involving Nicolas Bergonzoli, a Colombian drug smuggler who had business dealings with Ochoa. The case suggests the secret docketing system predates the Sept. 11 attacks.
Both men were potential witnesses.
Bergonzoli was indicted in Connecticut for drug trafficking in 1995. Four years later his case, still open, was transferred to Miami. No record of it existed until Ochoa's lawyers were able to unseal parts of the file in May. At the time, Ochoa was on trial and prosecutors were resting their case. Bergonzoli entered a secret plea bargain and was never called to testify at Ochoa's trial.
Neither case appeared on the court's public docket, where it would have been assigned a number and scanned into a computer file. As a result, the public had no way of knowing they existed. Hearings were conducted behind closed doors, and all documents and legal motions were filed under seal. The sensitive court papers were kept separately in a vault at the court clerk's office in Miami, according to attorneys familiar with the practice.
U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch, chief judge for the South Florida district, and Clerk of Courts Clarence Maddox were out of the office and unavailable for comment on Wednesday.
Attorney Floyd Abrams, a nationally recognized expert on free press and court access issues, said sealed documents and closed courtrooms are nothing new and are sometimes necessary to protect national security or investigations. But, he said from his New York office, he was "very surprised" to learn about cases that were fully litigated with no public record.
"Without public docket sheets, there is no way for the public to even know that a case has been brought or resolved," Abrams said. "It's a significant infringement of the genuine public interest in knowing what is going on in its judicial system."
Bellahouel's case accidentally came to light when a clerk's mistake made his name and case number public for a few hours. A reporter for The Daily Business Review, a South Florida legal newspaper, picked it up.
According to the newspaper, the case to detain Bellahouel was laid out in an FBI agent's affidavit. The FBI reportedly said Bellahouel served two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Delray Beach. He also reportedly was seen at a nearby movie theater with a third hijacker, Ahmed Alnami.
Bellahouel was held at Krome detention center in southwest Miami-Dade County, testified before a federal grand jury in Virginia, and was released in March 2002 on a $10,000 immigration bond.
Bellahouel's appeal to open his files was denied by the 11th Circuit, which issued its decision -- under seal -- on March 31. Attorneys involved in the case are under a gag order and can't comment.
Kathleen M. Williams and Paul M. Rashkind, Bellahouel's federal public defenders in Miami, then turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, where their papers refer to their client by his initials, MKB. The petition, the first official public record of the case, is heavily edited, with blank pages and huge gaps of white space.
"The world has changed since 9/11," the lawyers argue. "But the common-law and First Amendment rights to discuss and debate those changing events remain alive ... The blanket sealing utilized in this case and appeal, however, hides everything."
The Supreme Court asked the government to defend the secrecy. Late Monday, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson filed the government's response -- under seal. The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to take the case.
Ochoa's lawyers, G. Richard Strafer and Roy Black, had heard rumors about Bergonzoli, ran a name search and discovered a federal case filed in Connecticut. The file included a letter to the court clerk, transferring the case, and a new Miami docket number. But when Strafer plugged the number into the court's computer system, he found nothing. The court clerk told him no such case existed, he said.
He found Bergonzoli in a federal prison, serving 37 months.
Strafer and Black have long argued that government secrecy hampered Ochoa's defense. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union and the media group, representing The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CNN and other news organizations, are objecting, saying it hampers their ability to inform the public.
"We're happy that the cavalry is coming to the rescue," Strafer said. "This is a dangerous precedent. The media and the public should be alarmed that people can be sent to prison without anyone even knowing they had a case."
Ann W. O'Neill can be reached at awoneill@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4531.
-------- prisons / prisoners
U.S. Reasserts Right to Declare Citizens to Be Enemy Combatants
January 8, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/politics/08COMB.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - The Bush administration on Wednesday reasserted its broad authority to declare American citizens to be enemy combatants, and it suggested that the Supreme Court consider two prominent cases at the same time.
The Justice Department, in a brief filed with the court, said it would seek an expedited appeal of a federal appeals court decision last month in the case of Jose Padilla, jailed as an enemy combatant in 2002.
The divided Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled on Dec. 18 that President Bush lacked the authority to indefinitely detain an American citizen like Mr. Padilla who was arrested on American soil simply by declaring him an enemy combatant. Mr. Padilla has been held incommunicado at a military brig in South Carolina. American authorities say he plotted with operatives of Al Qaeda overseas to detonate a "dirty" radiological bomb in the United States.
But the Justice Department said in its brief that the ruling was "fundamentally at odds" with court precedent on presidential powers.
The decision "undermines the president's constitutional authority to protect the nation," Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson wrote.
The Justice Department said it hoped the Supreme Court would consider an appeal in April.
The court is also expected to decide in coming days whether to consider an appeal involving an enemy combatant, Yaser Esam Hamdi, who has been held alongside Mr. Padilla in the Navy brig. Mr. Hamdi, an American citizen, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 while fighting with Taliban troops. The administration's decision to declare him an enemy combatant was upheld by a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va.
Frank W. Dunham Jr., who is representing Mr. Hamdi, said in a brief to the Supreme Court that the Padilla decision "clearly conflicts" with the decision in the Hamdi case.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Climate Change Forecast to Extinguish One Million Species
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
January 8, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-08-01.asp
Climate change could drive more than a quarter of all land animals and plants into extinction, a new study published today has determined. The Earth's warming climate could extinguish the existence of more than one million species, the researchers estimate.
The largest collaboration of scientists to ever investigate this issue used computer models to simulate the ways species' ranges are expected to move in response to changing temperatures and climate. Their findings are published in today's edition of the journal "Nature."
"This study makes it clear that climate change is the most significant new threat for extinctions this century," said co-author Lee Hannah, climate change biology senior fellow at the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International. "The combination of increasing habitat loss, already recognized as the largest single threat to species, and climate change, is likely to devastate the ability of species to move and survive."
The study estimates that climate change projected to take place between now and the year 2050 will place 15 to 37 percent of all species in several biodiversity-rich regions at risk of extinction. The scientists believe there is a high likelihood of extinctions due to climate change in other regions, as well.
It is inevitable that at least 18 percent of all land plants and animals now on Earth will be on their way to extinction by 2050, the study finds, based on the climate changes that have already taken place.
But 15 to 20 percent of all land species could be saved from extinction if the minimum scenario of climate warming occurs.
South Africa's national flower, the King Protea, could become extinct if climate warming is not halted. (Photo courtesy South African Crystallographic Society) For this study, scientists from the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science worked with their counterparts at the National Botanical Institute of South Africa to model more than 300 plant species in South Africa's Cape Floristic Region, located on the country's southern tip.
In that region, 30 to 40 percent of South African Proteaceae is forecast to go extinct as a result of climate change between now and 2050. Proteaceae is a family of flowering plants that includes South Africa's national flower, the King Protea.
The Cape Floristic Region is considered one of the world's 25 biodiversity hotspots, areas with a large number of unique species under tremendous threat.
In all, scientists studied six regions around the world representing 20 percent of the planet's land area and projected the future distributions of 1,103 animal and plant species.
Three different climate change scenarios were considered - minimal, mid-range and maximum, as was the ability of some species to successfully "disperse," or move to a different area, preventing extinction caused by climate change.
The mid-range projection is that 24 percent of species will become extinct, and under maximum expected climate change, 35 percent of all land species will cease to exist.
"If these projections are extrapolated globally and to other groups of land animals and plants, our analyses suggest that well over a million species could be threatened with extinction as a result of climate change," said study lead author Chris Thomas of the University of Leeds.
The critically endangered Ethopian wolf (Photo courtesy Africa Environment Outlook) These forecasts are for species predicted to go extinct eventually based on climate change between now and 2050, but do not suggest that these species will go extinct by 2050.
Small fluctuations in climate can affect a species' ability to remain in its original habitat. Slight increases in temperature can force a species to move toward its preferred, usually cooler, climate range, the scientists explain. If development and habitat destruction have already altered those habitats, the species often have no safe haven.
Hannah says the findings underscore the need for a two part conservation strategy.
"First, greenhouse gases must be reduced dramatically, and a rapid switch to new, cleaner technologies could help save innumerable species," he said.
"Second, we must design conservation strategies that recognize that climate change is going to affect entire ecosystems, and therefore have to prepare effective conservation measures immediately."
Global mean temperatures have increased about one degree Fahrenheit over the past century with accelerated warming over the past two decades.
Scientists attribute the recent rise of global temperature to human induced activities that have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The buildup of greenhouse gases - primarily carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide - traps heat, acting like a greenhouse in the atmosphere.
--------
Scientists Predict Widespread Extinction by Global Warming
January 8, 2004
By JAMES GORMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/science/08CLIM.html?pagewanted=all
An international group of 19 scientists, analyzing research around the globe, has concluded that a warming climate will rival habitat destruction in prompting widespread extinctions in this century.
By 2050, the scientists say, if current warming trends continue, 15 to 37 percent of the 1,103 species they studied will be doomed.
They did not extend their prediction to all species worldwide, but they said that the sample was large enough to show that climate change could be disastrous. In addition to current efforts to create parks and reserves, they added, efforts to decrease global warming will be necessary to reduce rates of extinction.
The analysis is built on layers of computer models of climate change and other models of the ways species become extinct, each having varying degrees of uncertainty. Consequently, the authors say, the numbers cannot be taken as precise. They are described in the paper as a "first pass" at quantifying the extinction threat posed by a global warming trend.
"There's a huge amount of uncertainty," said the primary author of the paper, Dr. Chris D. Thomas, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Leeds in England.
Dr. Daniel B. Botkin, professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara, an ecologist who has done extensive research on climate change, said the paper was "a valiant effort" to address the effect of warming trends on living things, an area of research he said had been slighted in favor of creating climate models. And he acknowledged that the authors themselves presented their numbers as a beginning and a spur to further research.
He said, however, that the analysis was based on "a lot of steady state assumptions that lead it to the most pessimistic forecast," including the notion that things will stay as they are in terms of the ways animals migrate and respond to temperature change.
Scientists have been predicting drastic extinctions for years, largely because humans are steadily taking land that other creatures live on and turning it to their own purposes.
By different estimates species are now becoming extinct at rates 100 to 1,000 times as great as would be expected without human interference or a catastrophic event.
The analysis, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, raises the status of global warming from that of contributor to habitat loss to full-fledged force for extinction.
Dr. Thomas said that despite the significant uncertainties, the researchers assessed the raw data on species numbers, current habitats and past extinctions from as many angles as possible. They included species in different terrestrial environments around the world - in Central America, South America, Australia and Africa.
They used predictions of increased temperature ranging from mild to extreme and applied three different methods for predicting extinction, all based on the relationship of species disappearance to loss of livable habitat. They also considered two different possibilities for gauging how well the different species would be able to disperse as temperatures at home became uncomfortable.
Although the results vary widely, Dr. Thomas said, even the most conservative estimates show that global warming, which he and most other scientists attribute to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the burning of fossil fuels, presents a "very serious risk to huge numbers of species and at least ranks alongside habitat destruction" as a threat.
The paper does not predict that all the extinctions will occur by 2050, but that by that time these species will have reached the point of no return.
--------
Warming May Threaten 37% of Species by 2050
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63153-2004Jan7.html
In the first study of its kind, researchers in a range of habitats including northern Britain, the wet tropics of northeastern Australia and the Mexican desert said yesterday that global warming at currently predicted rates will drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.
Dismayed by their results, the researchers called for "rapid implementation of technologies" to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and warned that the scale of extinctions could climb much higher because of mutually reinforcing interactions between climate change and habitat destruction caused by agriculture, invasive species and other factors.
"The midrange estimate is that 24 percent of plants and animals will be committed to extinction by 2050," said ecologist Chris Thomas of Britain's University of Leeds. "We're not talking about the occasional extinction -- we're talking about 1.25 million species. It's a massive number."
The study marks the first time scientists have produced a global analysis with concrete estimates of the effect of climate change on habitat. Previous work -- much of it by the same researchers -- focused on smaller regions or limited numbers of species.
Thomas led a 19-member international team that surveyed habitat decline for 1,103 plant and animal species in five regions: Europe; Queensland, Australia; Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert; the Brazilian Amazon; and the Cape Floristic Region at South Africa's southern tip. The study is being published today in the journal Nature.
The five regions encompass 20 percent of Earth's surface and "include a fair range of terrestrial environments," Thomas said in a telephone interview from Leeds. "Obviously, it would be valuable to expand the scope, but there's no reason to think that doing so would change our results tremendously."
Researchers said the wide geographical scope also overcame outside factors that might affect a single region only. "A prolonged drought might cause one instance of a dieback" but be offset by changes elsewhere, acknowledged climate change biologist Lee Hannah, who worked in South Africa. "When you see the broader context, the regional blips drop out."
Although there is little dispute that Earth's temperature is rising, debate over the reasons and speed of change remains contentious. Still, most scientists accept that much of the warming is caused by the cumulative effects of human-produced emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" -- from power plants and other industries -- that trap and hold heat in the atmosphere.
One skeptic, William O'Keefe, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative science policy organization, criticized the Nature study, saying that the research "ignored species' ability to adapt to higher temperatures" and assumed that technologies will not arise to reduce emissions.
Climatologists have developed models that describe the temperature changes that specific regions have undergone over periods of as long as 30,000 years. The Nature study used U.N. projections that world average temperatures will rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
The trick for the study, Thomas said, was to marry the maps of projected climate change in particular regions with maps describing the habitat -- especially the climate needs -- of plants and animals in the same area.
For this, "we needed to get the people together who knew where the species lived," Thomas said. These were the conservationists on the research team -- ecological experts who study extinctions by looking at traditional culprits: destruction of habitat through agriculture, industry or human settlement; invasive species shoving aside native plants and animals; and hunting and extermination of pests.
"Obviously, plants and animals depend on climate for survival, but we figured that if we protect them in place, they would be all right," Hannah said in a telephone interview from his home in California. "But now we realize that we have to take care of them not only where they are now, but where they might have to go."
The team calculated the effects of climate change on extinctions by using what ecologists J. Alan Pounds and Robert Puschendorf, in an article accompanying the study, called "one of ecology's few ironclad laws" -- that shrinking habitat supports fewer species.
The study considered a range of possibilities based on the ability of each species to move to a more congenial habitat to escape warming. If all species were able to move, or "disperse," the study said, only 15 percent would be irrevocably headed for extinction by 2050. If no species were able to disperse, the extinction rate could rise as high as 37 percent.
"Reality, of course, will fall somewhere in between," Thomas said.
As an example, he cited Britain's comma butterfly, a robust flier that hopscotched 160 miles north from 1982 to 1997, feeding all the way -- in its caterpillar phase -- on stinging nettles. By contrast, the silver-studded blue butterfly needs to move north but cannot, because it needs lowland heath to survive, and the gaps between patches of habitat are too large for this weak-winged flier to overcome. As a result, "it has continued to decline," Thomas said.
Pounds, speaking by telephone from his office in Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, called the study's results "ironclad" and "if anything, too conservative." The adverse effects of natural roadblocks would be compounded by "interaction with other changes" such as agriculture, human settlement or invasive species, he said.
"There are different ways you can lose area," Pounds said. "One is to have the habitat directly destroyed. Climate change does the same thing."
-------- imf / world bank / wto
I.M.F. Says U.S. Debts Threaten World Economy
January 8, 2004
By ELIZABETH BECKER and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/business/08FUND.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report released Wednesday by the International Monetary Fund.
Prepared by a team of I.M.F. economists, the report sounded a loud alarm about the shaky fiscal foundation of the United States, questioning the wisdom of the Bush administration's tax cuts and warning that large budget deficits pose "significant risks" not just for the United States but for the rest of the world.
The report warns that the United States' net financial obligations to the rest of the world could be equal to 40 percent of its total economy within a few years - "an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country," according to the fund, that could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.
The danger, according to the report, is that the United States' voracious appetite for borrowing could push up global interest rates and thus slow global investment and economic growth.
"Higher borrowing costs abroad would mean that the adverse effects of U.S. fiscal deficits would spill over into global investment and output," the report said.
White House officials dismissed the report as alarmist, saying that President Bush has already vowed to reduce the budget deficit by half over the next five years. The deficit reached $374 billion last year, a record in dollar terms but not as a share of the total economy, and it is expected to exceed $400 billion this year.
But many international economists said they were pleased that the report raised the issue.
"The I.M.F. is right," said C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington. "If those twin deficits - of the federal budget and the trade deficit - continue to grow you are increasing the risk of a day of reckoning when things can get pretty nasty."
Administration officials have made it clear they are not alarmed about the United States' burgeoning external debt or the declining value of the dollar, which has lost more than one-quarter of its value against the euro in the last 18 months and which hit new lows earlier this week.
"Without those tax cuts I do not believe the downturn would have been one of the shortest and shallowest in U.S. history," said John B. Taylor, under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs.
Though the International Monetary Fund has criticized the United States on its budget and trade deficits repeatedly in the last few years, this report was unusually lengthy and pointed. And the I.M.F. went to lengths to publicize the report and seemed intent on getting American attention.
"I think it's encouraging that these are issues that are now at play in the presidential campaign that's just now getting under way," said Charles Collyns, deputy director of the I.M.F.'s Western Hemisphere department. "We're trying to contribute to persuade the climate of public opinion that this is an important issue that has to be dealt with, and political capital will need to be expended."
The I.M.F. has often been accused of being an adjunct of the United States, its largest shareholder.
But in the report, fund economists warned that the long-term fiscal outlook was far grimmer, predicting that underfunding for Social Security and Medicare will lead to shortages as high as $47 trillion over the next 70 years or nearly 500 percent of the current gross domestic product in the coming decades.
Some outside economists remain sanguine, noting that the United States is hardly the only country to run big budget deficits and that the nation's underlying economic conditions continue to be robust.
"Is the U.S. fiscal position unique? Probably not," said Kermit L. Schoenholtz, chief economist at Citigroup Global Markets. Japan's budget deficit is much higher than that of the United States, Mr. Schoenholtz said, and those of Germany and France are climbing rapidly.
In a paper presented last weekend, Robert E. Rubin, the former secretary of the Treasury, said that the federal budget was "on an unsustainable path" and that the "scale of the nation's projected budgetary imbalance is now so large that the risk of severe adverse consequences must be taken very seriously, although it is impossible to predict when such consequences may occur."
Other economists said they were afraid that this was a replay of the 1980's when the United States went from the world's largest creditor nation to its biggest debtor nation following tax cuts and a large military build-up under President Ronald Reagan.
John Vail, senior strategist for Mizuho Securities USA, said the I.M.F. report reflected the concerns of many foreign investors.
"I would say they reflect the majority of international opinion about the United States," he said. And he added, "The currency doesn't have the safe-haven status that it has had in recent years."
Many economists predict that the dollar will continue to decline for some time, and that the declining dollar will help lift American industry by making American products cheaper in countries with strengthening currencies.
"In the short term, it is probably helping the United States," said Robert D. Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Fund officials and most economists agreed that the short-term impact of deficit spending has helped pull the economy through a succession of crisis. And unlike Argentina and other developing nations that suffered through debt crises, the United States remains a magnet for foreign investment.
Treasury Secretary John W. Snow did not address the fund's report directly. But in a speech to the United States Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, he said Mr. Bush's tax cuts were central to spurring growth and reiterated the administration's pledge to reduce the deficit in half within five years.
"The deficit's important," Mr. Snow said. "It's going to be addressed. We're going to cut it in half. You're going to see the administration committed to it. But we need that growth in the economy. We had an obligation to the American work force and the American businesses to get the economy on a stronger path. We've done it and we have time to deal with the deficit."
But the report said that even if the administration succeeded it would not be enough to address the long-term problems posed by retiring baby boomers.
Moreover, the fund economists said that the administration's tax cuts could eventually lower United States productivity and the budget deficits could raise interest rates by as much as one percentage point in the industrialized world.
"An abrupt weakening of investor sentiments vis-à-vis the dollar could possibly lead to adverse consequences both domestically and abroad," the report said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters greet shipment to WIPP
By Frank Zoretich
Tribune Reporter
January 8, 2004
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news04/010804_news_truck.shtml
A truck carrying nuclear waste from the Nevada Test Site to permanent storage at the Waste Isolation Plant near Carlsbad passed through Albuquerque without incident today, but not without encountering protest.
A dozen people stood holding signs on the Carlisle Boulevard bridge over I-40 for three hours before the truck passed eastbound in the flow of traffic beneath them at 11:05 a.m.
Several of them, fearing radiation from the truck, left the bridge moments before it arrived.
"This is the dumbest idea," Bob Anderson, one of the protest's organizers said, referring to the decision to route the truck through the center of the city. "It's like a dirty bomb going off."
The protesters at first taped their signs to the chain-link fence installed above the bridge's railing to prevent debris from being tossed onto the highway. Three of the signs were placed side-by-side to read: "Code Orange...WIPP Route...Dumb Idea."
"It's the dumbest thing I ever heard of," said Jeanne Pahls, an Albuquerque Public Schools fourth-grade teacher. "No radioactive waste is safe."
"I'm concerned about accidents on the interstate, too. That's why I'm here," said Allen Cooper, a former Highland High School teacher, when Farrell McKay, area maintenance supervisor for the State Department of Transportation, told the protesters that for safety reasons they could not attach their signs with tape to the chain-link fencing.
Twice, at 9 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., Albuquerque Police Officer Lou Heckroth told the protesters it was illegal to attach signs to the fencing. Each time, he and McKay removed the signs when the protesters wouldn't. But they had no objection to the protesters merely holding the signs pressed against the fencing.
Several other police cars were parked south of the bridge, but only McKay interacted with the protesters.
Throughout the morning, westbound drivers on I-40 and those crossing over the highway on Carlisle honked their horns and signaled thumbs up or thumbs down at the protest group.
The driver of the WIPP truck honked his horn as he approached the bridge in the inside lane of I-40.
Janet Greenwald of Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping, was among the protesters. She'd been briefly detained by police in a protest Wednesday evening outside the Downtown Albuquerque office of Sen. Pete Domenici, an Albuquerque Republican, when she refused to leave without speaking to Domenici.
"I was told I could be charged with trespassing and failure to obey an officer," she said today. "The police told me I could go to my car or go to jail. They said it might be better for my cause to go to jail, but that there were a lot of unpleasant people there."
She didn't go to jail.
The waste shipment from the test site began Wednesday and traveled through California and Arizona. The shipment arrived at 6:46 a.m. today at the New Mexico port of entry, six miles west of Gallup.
Inspectors carrying radiation detectors walked around the tractor-trailer and its cargo, scanning it for any leaks. They also conducted a mechanical inspection, including lights and brakes.
Inspectors found no radiation leaks, but did find a couple of loose fender bolts above the trailer's rear axle, said Gary Trujillo, chief inspector at the port for the state Department of Public Safety.
They also found antifreeze leaking from a hose in the tractor, which the rig's driver fixed by tightening a clamp on the hose, he said.
"It was just an oversight on our part, and it's a minor thing we have to watch," said Cordie Mossier who, along with her husband, was driving the rig.
Mossier, of Carlsbad, played down the significance of the trip.
"It's our job, and we try to do it the best we can, no matter if it happens to be the 100th trip or the 5,000th trip. It would be all the same to us," Mossier said before driving the rig away from the port of entry at 8:30 a.m.
The waste is contaminated with americium-241. Americium is produced when plutonium atoms absorb neutrons in nuclear reactors and in nuclear explosions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
California had balked at allowing the shipments in July, but the U.S. Energy Department and governors from the four states agreed Oct. 9 to allow 40 to 60 shipments this year on the route, Ralph Smith, a WIPP spokesman, has said. Four similar shipments are planned this month.
WIPP is designed to hold defense-related radioactive waste in ancient salt beds 2,150 feet underground. The shipments have been described as contaminated protective gear, tools and equipment that can take thousands of years or more to decay to safe levels.
There have been 2,240 shipments to WIPP from various states during the past five years with no release of radioactivity, Smith said.
----
Radioactive Shipment Heads Through Albuquerque
By Melanie Dabovich
The Associated Press
January 8, 2004
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/apwipp501-08-04.htm
Protesters shouted "Stop!" and waved signs from an interstate overpass Thursday as a shipment of radioactive waste passed through Albuquerque.
The waste, in three huge containers aboard a tractor-trailer, headed east on Interstate 40 after being sent on its 1,130-mile journey from the Nevada Test Site on Wednesday. Its ultimate destination was the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad in southern New Mexico.
While WIPP routinely receives radioactive shipments, Thursday's was the first to come from the Nevada site and to travel through urban Albuquerque, home to roughly half a million people.
The demonstrators yelled, "Stop, stop!" as the truck passed under the I-40 bridge about 11:05 a.m., honking at the protesters as it went by under escort by two state police patrol cars. Trucks in nearby lanes then also started honking.
The protesters, from the Center for Peace and Justice, Stop the War Machine and Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping, held up signs reading, "Code Orange: WIPP" and "No WIPP trucks through Albuquerque."
They had a brief run-in with an Albuquerque police officer over the signs after they duct-taped some to the bridge. City ordinance prohibits anything from being fixed to an interstate bridge, and the protesters removed the signs to hold them instead.
Stop the War Machine's Bob Anderson had sent an e-mail to the organization's members urging them to gather on the bridge to protest "this appalling disregard for Albuquerque."
Most waste shipments to WIPP enter New Mexico from the north on Interstate 25 at Raton, then travel a sparsely populated route on U.S. 285 to Carlsbad.
Some protesters gathered Wednesday night outside the Albuquerque office of Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. One woman was arrested after allegedly refusing to leave without first speaking with the senator.
The waste traveled through California and Arizona before arriving at 6:46 a.m. Thursday at New Mexico's western port of entry near Gallup.
At the Gallup port of entry, inspectors carrying radiation detectors walked around the rig and its cargo, scanning for leaks. They also conducted a mechanical inspection.
Inspectors found no leaks but did report a couple of loose fender bolts above the trailer's rear axle, said Gary Trujillo, chief inspector at the port for the state Department of Public Safety.
They also found antifreeze leaking from a hose in the tractor, which the rig's driver fixed by tightening a clamp, he said.
"It was just an oversight on our part and it's a minor thing we have to watch," said Cordie Mossier who was driving the rig along with her husband.
Mossier, of Carlsbad, played down the significance of the trip.
"It's our job and we try to do it the best we can, no matter if it happens to be the 100th trip or the 5,000th trip. It would be all the same to us," Mossier said before driving the rig away from the port of entry at 8:30 a.m.
The waste is contaminated with americium-241 - "mostly alpha emitters, mostly low-level stuff and no beta or gamma radiation," Trujillo said. Americium is produced when plutonium atoms absorb neutrons in nuclear reactors and in nuclear weapons detonations, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Alpha radiation is less penetrating than beta or gamma radiation.
California balked at allowing the shipments in July, but the U.S. Department of Energy and governors from the four states agreed Oct. 9 to allow 40 to 60 shipments this year on the route, Ralph Smith, a WIPP spokesman, has said.
Similar shipments are planned for Jan. 13, 15, 20 and 22, the DOE has said. Shipments are to continue at a similar rate for the rest of 2004.
WIPP is designed to hold defense-related radioactive waste in ancient salt beds 2,150 feet underground.
There have been 2,240 shipments to WIPP from various states during the past five years with no release of radioactivity, Smith said. One shipment was involved in a crash in August 2002, when an allegedly drunken driver hit the rear of a truck. No one was seriously hurt.
----
Wyoming digest County commission criticizes Patriot Act
Thursday, January 8, 2004
Billings Gazette
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?tl=1&display=rednews/2004/01/08/build/wyoming/90-digest.inc
LANDER - The Fremont County Commission has approved a resolution critical of the federal Patriot Act.
Commissioners voted 4-0 Tuesday "to advocate the reform or repeal of all portions of the USA Patriot Act ... that usurp constitutionally protected freedoms and other laws and regulations which infringe on Wyoming citizens' rights and liberties."
The Patriot Act was passed nearly unanimously by Congress in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
But some argue that it infringes too much on individual liberties.
A group of about 40 Fremont County citizens submitted a draft resolution to commissioners last month. The resolution approved Tuesday uses much of the group's language but doesn't advocate total and immediate repeal of the act.
----
Caged dove
Prominent Bay Area activist imprisoned in Israel for protesting "apartheid wall"
By Camille T. Taiara - camille@sfbg.com
January 8, 2004
San Francisco Bay Guardian
http://www.sfbg.com/38/15/news_caged.html
As the Bay Guardian went to press Jan. 6, Bay Area activist Kate Raphael was serving her sixth day in an Israeli jail.
The Israeli government is seeking to deport Raphael for participating in a Dec. 31 march against the construction of a 400-mile-long barrier, dubbed a "security fence" by the Israeli government and an "apartheid wall" by activists who argue that it effectively annexes more Palestinian territory into Israel.
Raphael, one of the Bay Area's most prominent Jewish activists against Israel's occupation of Palestine, is part of an international effort to highlight the plight of Palestinians (see "Letters from Palestine," 8/6/03). Many have been injured, a few even killed, as Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's government has taken an increasingly tough stance against foreign activists.
Raphael was being held at the Michal Detention Centre in Hadera and could be banned from the country for 10 years if deported.
"Kate wants to fight it all the way," Raphael's attorney, Gaby Lasky, told the Bay Guardian. "If we need to appeal to the Supreme Court, we'll do that." At press time Lasky was still in negotiations over the terms of Raphael's release, which she hoped might come as early as Jan. 6.
Raphael was arrested on New Year's Eve, during the second of a week of actions meant to prevent Israeli forces from leveling an olive grove in the West Bank town of Budrus, through which Israel is erecting a section of the barrier. Israel has designed it to encircle the town, thereby cutting it off from basic services and separating many of the villagers from their fields.
Between 400 and 500 demonstrators - including Israelis, local Palestinians, and international activists - participated in the march. Soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd after some of the protesters began throwing stones, according to regional press reports. Dozens were hurt in the melee.
Raphael was detained along with three other international activists and four Israelis. One international, Swedish parliamentarian Gustav Fridolin, agreed to leave the country the next day, but the others intend to fight the deportation. All the Israelis arrested that day have been released.
Immediately following the demonstration, Israeli forces imposed a curfew on Budrus and conducted door-to-door raids. The crackdown has resulted in the arrest of nine local Palestinians so far, according to Stop the Wall (www.stopthewall.org), a Web site where activists in the field are posting daily reports.
Raphael, who helped found the San Francisco branch of Women in Black - an international, mostly Jewish, women's organization against the occupation - was on her fourth visit to the region and was working with the International Women's Peace Service.
"She quit her job in San Francisco and left her home in Berkeley, with the intent of staying [in the region] for two years," Naomi Azriel of Women in Black told us.
Since arriving in the West Bank in August 2002, Raphael initiated a project called Mikarov (known as Neighbor to Neighbor in English), which takes Israelis into the Palestinian territories to experience the occupation firsthand so they can educate their communities back home.
This isn't the first time the 45-year-old has gotten into trouble for the stances she's taken against the occupation. Raphael, an activist on the Palestine issue for more than 20 years, was also contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for questioning within two weeks of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (See "FBI Casting Wide Net in Sept. 11 Attack Investigation," 10/10/01).
The FBI told National Lawyers Guild attorney Rachel Lederman at the time that its interest in Raphael stemmed not from any potential ties to al-Qaeda but rather from her role in Women in Black.
Get involved: call the Israeli consul general in San Francisco, Yossi Amrani, at (415) 844-7500 to demand his government drop the deportation orders against Raphael and Kimberly Gray (another U.S. activist arrested at Budrus) and to express your opposition to the barrier and the occupation of Palestinian land. To contribute to Raphael's defense fund, send a check payable to IWPS to 2018 Shattuck Ave., PMB 122, Berkeley, CA 94704. (To make a tax-deductible contribution, write the check to the Middle East Children's Alliance and indicate IWPS on the memo line.) For more information call (510) 434-1304 or go to www.quitpalestine.org.
E-mail Camille T. Taiara mailto:camille@sfbg.com
----
Civil rights advocates protest FBI almanac warning
January 8, 2004
By Chris Strohm cstrohm@govexec.com
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0104/010804c1.htm
Civil rights advocates protested Thursday in front of the FBI building against a recent memo warning law enforcement officials across the country that would-be terrorists could use almanacs to plan attacks.
In a bulletin sent over the holidays to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists might use almanacs "to assist with target selection and preoperational planning." It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways.
According to the Associated Press, the bulletin states "the practice of researching potential targets is consistent with known methods of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning."
The bulletin has prompted objections from civil liberties advocates who say it might encourage police to arrest or interrogate people based on their reading habits.
"Basically, it makes it potentially illegal for somebody to walk around with their almanac," said Carol Moore of the D.C. Anti-War Network (DAWN) in Washington. Members of the group marched in front of the FBI building Thursday holding up almanacs.
"DAWN is protesting the absurdity of this almanac warning, which infringes on the liberties and privacy of all Americans," Moore added.
Almanacs contain a plethora of data, such as maps and information on the nation's tallest buildings, landmarks, cities and rivers. The books are also loaded with facts about gardening, recipes and planetary systems.
"Founding Father Ben Franklin probably never imagined that the almanac he created could be the subject of an FBI terrorism bulletin," said Nadine Strossen, American Civil Liberties Union president, in a statement.
The almanac alert was part of the FBI's regular intelligence bulletin sent weekly to law enforcement agencies nationwide. FBI spokesman Paul Bresson declined to comment on the bulletin, saying it is an internal memo for law enforcement officials.
"It's a law enforcement-sensitive communication, and I really can't share with you what's in it," he said. "It was never intended to be public."
Bresson said the agency is always trying to give the law enforcement community the best information possible to help them do their jobs.
"What we have done and will continue to do is apprise [law enforcement officials] of all information that helps protect public safety and...we feel it's necessary to arm them with this information," he said.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.