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NUCLEAR
British lawyer calls for Gulf War syndrome review
Probe on track despite Pakistan's refusal: IAEA
Pakistan: Nuke Probe 'Internal Matter'
PENTAGON: PROSPECT OF IRAQI WMD IN SYRIA
Japan ready for nuclear crisis talks with North Korea
China irks US in stand on N Korean Uranium bomb
U.S., China Disagree on N. Korea Weapons
Practicing Nuclear War
Beryllium find not a surprise, union says
Nuclear waste
Rumsfeld: Gadhafi avoided similar fate of Saddam
Rumsfeld Defends Iraq War at NATO Meeting
Co-Chair of Bush Iraq Panel Part of Neocon Network
The day Cheney was rocked to the core
Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes
Bush, Aides Ignored CIA Caveats on Iraq
Treasury Improperly Released Information to O'Neill
Rumsfeld on Israeli weapons
MILITARY
NATO to Expand Force in Afghanistan
Powell Pledges $200M to Rebuild Liberia
Case Against Ex-CIA Agent Is Dismissed
After Hutton, the verdict: 51 per cent say Blair should go
Nigeria Orders an Investigation of Halliburton Gas Payments
French troops in Kuwait for regular war games
Lights Are Coming On, Slowly, in Iraq
Cleric Denies Reports of an Attempt on Life
Israeli Air Strike Kills Boy in Gaza
Sharon May Move Settlers to West Bank From Gaza
At U.S. Urging, NATO Acts to Bolster Afghan Rebuilding Role
Iraq threat was limited, troops told
39 Die in Moscow as Bomb Goes Off on Subway Train
Tenet Plans to Remain in C.I.A. Job
'Business as Usual' at Plant That Tenet Says Was Shut
Agency Alert About Iraqi Not Heeded, Officials Say
Annan Warns U.S. Will Face Doubts
Annan: Intel Woes Affect U.S. Credibility
Armor From Home
Sex Attacks Prompt Pentagon Inquiry
Inquiry Ordered Into Attacks on Female GIs
Distinguishing Neocon Commentary from Drivel
The Intelligence Commission
Security, Terror, and the Psychodynamics of Empire
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Bush Sets Panel on Intelligence Before Iraq War
Bush Names Commission On Iraq Data
Court rejects effort to ban foods that contain hemp
2 More Detainees at Guantanamo May Face Tribunals, Pentagon Says
OTHER
Clean-burning wind
ACTIVISTS
Nobles: Water whistle-blower Seema Bhat.
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
British lawyer calls for Gulf War syndrome review
2004-02-07
(Xinhuanet)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-02/07/content_1303355.htm
LONDON, Feb. 7 -- A senior British lawyer has demandeda public review of the issues surrounding Gulf War syndrome, the BBC reported Saturday.
In a letter to Lord Morris of Manchester, who has campaigned for Gulf War veterans, lawyer Stephen Irwin said: "There is no doubt that many of them are ill. It is accepted by experts worldwide that the veterans suffer ill health which is associated with their active service in the Gulf."
Gulf War syndrome is a condition popularized after the war against Iraq in 1991. Many of the 5,500 British troops who served in the Gulf, together with US soldiers, have experienced a range of symptoms including muscle weakness, neurological symptoms, headaches, depression, fatigue, short-term memory loss and difficulty in concentrating, joint and muscle pain, sleep disturbances, skin rashes and shortness of breath.
There were also reports in the US of the same syndrome among Gulf War veterans.
"Science has not explained the mechanism or mechanisms of theirillness, much less that their suffering has resulted from fault," Irwin said in the letter. "Nevertheless, we firmly believe that for very many veterans, their suffering is genuine and has a significant impact on their daily lives and the lives of their families."
"We would ask government to consider instituting a full public review of the position of the veterans, as has been called for by the Royal British Legion, and to instigate a process of conciliation with the veteran groups," Irwin said.
"This should be designed to mark the effects of war service on the veterans who are suffering and to make good, by ex-gratia payments, the deficiencies of the War Pension Scheme," Irwin added.
Lord Morris was expected to deliver Irwin's letter to Downing Street on Saturday.
Last week, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported that an eight-year, multi-million pound legal battle by more than 2,000 British veterans for compensation for Gulf War syndrome has collapsed due to insufficient scientific evidence either to prove the case or toshow negligence on behalf of Britain's Ministry of Defense (MoD).
To succeed in their claim against the MoD, the veterans would have to produce scientific evidence to prove their illness was caused by service in the 1991 Gulf War and that the MoD had been negligent, the paper said.
Gulf War syndrome has been attributed to stress, smoke from burning oil wells, injections, depleted uranium ammunition and other causes, although many believe the condition could be psychosomatic.
The US and Britain have refused to accept a direct link betweenthe war and the syndrome, even though they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars researching possible causes.
-------- india / pakistan
Probe on track despite Pakistan's refusal: IAEA
Saturday February 07, 2004
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/feb2004-daily/07-02-2004/main/main1.htm
Spokesman says no immediate plans to visit Islamabad; Annan terms pardon for Dr Khan odd; biggest proliferator gone: Powell
VIENNA: The UN atomic watchdog insisted on Friday that its investigation into Pakistani-led black market nuclear trading was on track despite Islamabad's refusal to reveal documents or allow inspections of its facilities.
"We are intensely interested in this black market because it impacts on our ability to complete our work in Iran and Libya," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told AFP.
He was speaking after Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf on Thursday rejected demands for an independent investigation, sharing of documents with the IAEA or opening of nuclear installations to UN inspections.
Pakistan is a member of the IAEA but not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which empowers the agency to monitor worldwide compliance with nuclear safeguards. "We have to look at the statute to see if there's the expectation that other member states would cooperate with the agency with its safeguards elsewhere," a Western diplomat at the IAEA said.
He said that if Pakistan was part of the global black market, "then it would behove them to fix some of the damage they've done." The revelations from Khan are just the "tip of an iceberg" about such illegal trafficking, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said on Thursday.
"We need to follow this through. We need to know who was producing centrifuges" that can be used to make highly enriched uranium for atomic bombs. He said Pakistan has been "quite cooperative so far" with the IAEA.
But a Western diplomat close to the IAEA said the agency had not asked Pakistan if it could interview Khan. He said the political situation there was too sensitive. "The IAEA doesn't want Musharraf to fall. That would be the worst thing that could happen," he said.
The IAEA had set off the Khan scandal when it alerted Pakistan last year that Iran had blueprints for centrifuges that were similar to ones Pakistan had used in building the bomb and which Khan acquired when he worked in the Netherlands in the 1970s.
But a diplomat said nothing would have happened without US pressure on Pakistan to come clean on Khan. "The US put so much pressure on them. If it were just the IAEA, forget it, they couldn't do a thing," the diplomat said.
Analyst Jon Wolfsthal, who works in Washington's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in Vienna: "The idea that this is the end of the story is impossible to accept." Malaysia was a source of making parts for centrifuges. "They do manufacturing knock-off's quite well," said Wolfstahl about Malaysia's industrial capabilities.
Dubai on the other hand was a source for middlemen for the trafficking. Wolfstahl said other countries involved might be Saudi Arabia, which in the 1980's bought long-range missiles from China, the Iraq of fallen dictator Saddam Hussein and maybe even Syria.
Saudi Arabia, he said, is concerned over Iran, which has been acquiring both nuclear and missile technology. He said Syria was an unlikely candidate, however, for nuclear proliferation since it was mainly interested in chemical and biological weapons.
Meanwhile, "Khan probably did more with Iran than Iran has admitted," Wolfstahl said, referring to weapons design blueprints such as were found in Libya but not yet in Iran. If such documents showed up, they could be the "smoking gun" for the IAEA to see Iran has failed to comply with international nuclear safeguards and take the issue to the UN Security Council, which could then impose punishing sanctions on Tehran.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said it was 'odd' that Pakistan pardoned its top nuclear scientist who has confessed to selling atomic secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. But taking a line similar to US, he chose not to criticise President Pervez Musharraf's decision. He noted the president had faced a tough call because Abdul Qadeer Khan was revered as the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb. Further, Musharraf had pledged to stamp out such proliferation from the South Asian country.
"Obviously it is a very difficult situation that he has to deal with - he is dealing with a national hero," Annan told reporters. The head of the world body said Musharraf had assured him he would take whatever measures to ensure this sort of trafficking does not take place and deal very firmly with those involved. The pardon sounds rather odd if you are going to deal firmly with that issue but Musharraf obviously is the president of the country and has to manage his own national situation, Anan held.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the meanwhile, deflected criticism that Washington has failed to condemn Musharraf's decision and called the uncovering of the black-market nuclear network a 'success'. "The biggest proliferator is now gone and so we don't have to worry about proliferation from A Q Khan or his network. And this is a success for the international community," Powell told reporters during a visit to the United Nations headquarters in New York. Powell said he would tell Musharraf to ensure there was no chance of Pakistan selling secrets again. "I expect to be talking to President Musharraf to make sure that there is a full understanding of what the A Q Khan network has done over the years so there are no remnants of it left and there is no possibility of further proliferating activities coming out of that network."
"A public trial is likely to implicate previous army chiefs, prime ministers, presidents and perhaps even the incumbent president," said Michael Krepon of the Henry L Stimson Center think tank in Washington. "My sense is that the Bush administration is not asking Musharraf to do the impossible, it's only asking him to do the extremely difficult," Krepon added. -Agencies
Nadeem Malik adds: The IAEA has no immediate plans to visit Pakistan, as part of the ongoing investigations against nuclear proliferation. "At this time, there are no plans to visit Pakistan," said Melissa Fleming, media head at the IAEA, in response to a question from The News regarding possibility of the IAEA visiting Pakistan.
--------
Pakistan: Nuke Probe 'Internal Matter'
February 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Nuclear.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- After pardoning its top scientist for selling nuclear weapons technology, Pakistan on Saturday rejected a call by rival India for an international debate on its proliferation scandal, saying it was an ``internal matter.''
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of the Pakistan's nuclear program, was forgiven by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf Thursday for spreading nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea through the international black market.
Key allies like the United States have refused to criticize Pakistan for not prosecuting Khan. India, however, on Friday said the proliferation by Pakistani scientists was of concern to the international community and should be debated.
``The investigations in Pakistan are an internal matter,'' Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan responded in a statement. ``The buck stops here in Pakistan. The matter won't be debated elsewhere.''
``Pakistan is already cooperating with IAEA,'' the spokesman said, referring to the U.N. atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose information about Pakistani technology found in Iran and Libya prompted the investigation of Khan and colleagues at a top Pakistani nuclear facility.
Khan is suspected to have made millions from selling nuclear hardware and designs.
According to Pakistani government and intelligence sources, equipment including centrifuges for enriching uranium were trafficked from Pakistan from 1989 until the late 1990s, often through Dubai. Some of the equipment was reconditioned in Malaysia and elsewhere before being sent to Iran, Libya and North Korea, the sources say.
Governments and experts have welcomed Khan's exposure, although IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has warned the Pakistani scientist was just the ``tip of the iceberg'' in the illicit international trade in nuclear technology.
Musharraf has said Pakistan won't submit to any U.N. supervision of its weapons program, or an independent investigation, but was willing to share the findings of its investigation with the IAEA.
Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday demanded that Pakistan's president -- a key ally in the U.S.-led war on terrorism -- keep his pledge to end nuclear proliferation but refused to criticize his pardon of Khan, saying it was something that Musharraf ``felt was appropriate for him to do.''
A public trial of Khan, regarded as a national hero in Pakistan for providing a nuclear deterrent against India, could have put Musharraf in a tight political spot. It would have angered many Pakistanis and could have exposed high-level military involvement -- although Pakistan denies any official knowledge.
Musharraf is eyed with suspicion by Islamists for his alliance with Washington, and his opponents accuse him of caving into the West and putting the country's nuclear capability under threat by investigating Khan.
-------- iraq / inspections
PENTAGON: PROSPECT OF IRAQI WMD IN SYRIA
Sat, 07 Feb 2004
Middle East Newsline
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/february/02_08_1.html
WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The U.S. military community has disputed a CIA determination that Iraq was unlikely to have transferred weapons of mass destruction to neighboring Syria in early 2003.
Defense Department officials said U.S. Army intelligence and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency have concluded that Saddam Hussein might have transferred Iraq's WMD arsenal to Syria a year ago. The officials said the U.S. intelligence community has amassed sufficient evidence to press Syria to open its facilities to British-U.S. inspection.
The Iraq Survey Group -- the 1,300-member team examining WMD issues -- was told by members of the Saddam regime that Iraq sent biological weapons to Syria and chemical weapons to the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, Pentagon officials said. The group was told that components of Saddam's chemical weapons program were shipped to Syrian Air Force facilities in central Syria.
In contrast, the State Department and the CIA leadership assesses that Saddam was unlikely to have transferred his arsenal of WMD and extended-range Scud missiles in March 2003. Officials said the department, as well as significant elements in the CIA, has quietly concluded that Saddam would not have trusted Syria or any other of its neighbors with Iraq's WMD arsenal.
-------- japan
Japan ready for nuclear crisis talks with North Korea
TOKYO (AFP)
Feb 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040207144051.xp9inp2d.html
Japanese officials said Tokyo is ready to discuss North Korea's proposed nuclear development freeze even if Pyongyang refuses to completely abandon its nuclear program, Kyodo news reported Saturday.
Officials said they are worried that a second round of nuclear crisis talks could immediately break down if too much emphasis is placed on demands that North Korea expresses a willingness to scrap it nuclear program, Kyodo said.
Pyongyang announced earlier Tuesday that it had agreed to hold a second round of six-nation talks to defuse tensions over its nuclear weapons drive on February 25 in Beijing.
The first round of multilateral talks, which brought together the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China, took place in Beijing in August last year.
Those talks ended inconclusively with North Korea and the United States at loggerheads over conditions for ending the crisis.
Japan has hinted it would give Pyongyang large economic aid in exchange for nuclear weapons dismantlement and a resolution of the abduction of Japanese by North Korean spies in the 1970s and 80s.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he would try to raise the abduction issue at the forum.
"This is not just about the nuclear issue," he said. "Although (the abduction issue) is a bilateral matter, we have to think about using this venue to address it."
-------- korea
China irks US in stand on N Korean Uranium bomb
7th FEB
Manorama
http://www.manoramaonline.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=manorama/MmArticle/CommonFullStory&c=MmArticle&cid=1076006951260&channel=News&p=1002194839100&count=7
Washington: China and the United States disagree over a key part of North Korea's nuclear capabilities, a US official said, a dispute that could give the North Koreans a diplomatic boost in sensitive talks later this month.
China has refused to accept the US contention that North Korea is developing nuclear weapons based on highly enriched uranium, the official said. North Korea has acknowledged it has a plutonium-based programme but denies it is developing a uranium-based one. The administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Friday that US diplomats have told Beijing its position is not helpful.
American negotiators are concerned that China's stand could benefit Pyongyang heading into six-party talks to be held February 25 in Beijing on the overall North Korean nuclear programme. Besides the United States and North Korea, the discussions also will include China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.
The administration of President George W. Bush is seeking a complete and verifiable elimination of the North's nuclear capability. Officials have said it is difficult to see how such an agreement can be reached if Pyongyang continues to maintain that it has no uranium programme.
---------
U.S., China Disagree on N. Korea Weapons
February 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China-North-Korea.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bush administration officials are concerned that China's rejection of U.S. contentions about the scope of North Korea's nuclear weapons program could give Pyongyang a boost at a key six-nation meeting this month.
Since 2002, the United States has contended that North Korea has been developing uranium-based nuclear weapons as a supplement to its long-standing plutonium-based nuclear capability.
While there is no dispute about the plutonium program, North Korea has persistently denied the U.S. allegations about the uranium-based project. Its stand is supported by China.
An administration official said Friday the United States has informed China that its backing for North Korea on this point is not helpful, particularly as multilateral discussions over the North Korea nuclear question are about to resume. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
The talks in Beijing, set to start on Feb. 25, will involve the United States, North and South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.
The United States is seeking the verifiable dismantling of all of the North's nuclear weapons facilities.
Officials have said that no comprehensive agreement is possible so long as North Korea does not acknowledge all aspects of its nuclear program.
The North has said it is willing to dismantle its plutonium-based program, the only one that it acknowledges.
The Bush administration would be willing to offer economic benefits to the North as Pyongyang moves ahead with a disarmament program. Officials do not expect a breakthrough at the Beijing meetings.
The administration says intelligence information disclosed the existence of the North Korean uranium program in 2002 and that Pyongyang officials acknowledged the program during talks in October of that year.
North Korea has denied the existence of any such program and said the meeting 16 months ago produced no such admission.
The Bush administration has frequently praised China for its leadership role in attempts to resolve the North Korea nuclear impasse. Beyond that, China has said it supports the U.S. goal of keeping the Korean peninsula without a nuclear program.
China and the United States have other differences over North Korea, but they do not appear to be as serious. China, for example, has suggested the United States make concessions in its approach to the North.
It also has been more enthusiastic than the United States over North Korea's willingness to freeze its plutonium-based program.
In December, Secretary of State Colin Powell called that proposal ``positive,'' but the administration has since played down its significance.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said last week, ``We're not seeking or asking for a freeze. We're looking for elimination of the programs.''
-------- russia
Practicing Nuclear War
by Charley Reese
February 7, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=1926
About the middle of this month, Russia will stage the largest strategic nuclear maneuvers since 1982. These maneuvers will involve the test-firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles, both from land and sea; the test-firing of cruise missiles from strategic bombers; and even the launch of a military satellite.
Publicly, according to the Moscow Times, Russian generals say this is part of preparing for the war on terrorism. Obviously, however, you don't need strategic nuclear weapons to fight terrorists. No, what the Russians are doing is practicing all-out nuclear war against the United States. The Russian military probably believes a nuclear exchange with the United States is still a possibility, and therefore the military should train for it.
Now, why would they think nuclear war is still possible? They are realists. A realist disregards intentions and looks at capabilities. Intentions amount to intangible thought and therefore can change on a dime. Capabilities, however, involve hard, measurable objects like missiles, bombers, submarines and ships. It takes a great deal of time to change capabilities. Whatever our intentions, we have the capability of wiping Russia off the map. Whatever their intentions, the Russians have the capability of wiping us off the map.
I have long argued that with the end of the Cold War, the United States' relationship with Russia should be the paramount job of American diplomacy. Unfortunately, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have thought otherwise. About all we did after the fall of communism was to send some Wall Street sharks over to teach their sharks how to rape the Russian economy. Otherwise, we treated Russia as if it were a Third World country.
Dearly beloved, no country that can destroy the United States in 30 minutes is a Third World country. Keep in mind that more than half of our population lives in 75 metropolitan areas. Those are targets in military terms. The Russians could put 10 nuclear warheads on each of those targets and still have many, many hundreds of warheads left.
Being as how both countries have hundreds of nuclear missiles on a hair-trigger alert that once launched, on purpose or by accident, can't be called back, you would think the president of the United States would realize how important it is to be tight with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president and a very tough guy.
Alas, President Bush, obsessed with a petty tyrant who lacked the capability of causing us any harm, has just about put U.S.-Russian relations in the freezer. Bush has talked and acted recklessly, ditching the anti-ballistic missile treaty, announcing an end to the no-first-use-of-nukes policy and replacing it with a policy of pre-emptive war. He has demonstrated that he will ignore allies, world opinion, international law and the United Nations.
Can you blame the Russians for being cautious? After all, Mr. Bush said no one can allow the worst weapons in the world to be controlled by the worst leader in the world. Well, the shoe fits the cocky little guy from Texas. Worst weapons, worst leader - or so it must seem to the Russians. It's no wonder that a large poll of Europeans found that the United States and Israel ranked right up there with North Korea and Iran as the greatest threats to world peace.
I'm not suggesting that the nuclear maneuvers are a prelude to war, but they are a practical result of cold relations with the United States. President Bush's foreign policy has been characterized mainly by blunders, the largest of which was alienating world opinion, which had been solidly on our side after the Sept. 11 attack.
Domestic blunders can be easily repaired by the legislative branches, but foreign-policy blunders can sometimes have dire, even fatal, consequences. The president ought to be pursuing disarmament, but instead he has initiated a new arms race.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
Beryllium find not a surprise, union says
Testing to continue on workers
By DANIEL PRAZER
Chillicothe Gazette Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004
http://www.chillicothegazette.com/news/stories/20040207/localnews/372547.html
PIKETON -- Following the public disclosure Thursday that the toxic metal beryllium was found in a machine shop at the Piketon uranium enrichment plant, the union represents the plant's workers has said the discovery comes as no surprise.
"It wasn't anything new to us," said Dan Minter, president of the PACE Local 5-689 union. "From our point of view, we were aware of it."
The metal was found in compressor blades used in the mothballed gaseous diffusion enrichment process and in a machine shop that kept the blades working efficiently, said William Murphie, manager of a Lexington, Ky., Department of Energy office that oversees cleanup efforts at the plant.
Plant officials, in the meantime, have roped off areas where the metal was found -- the compressor blades and some machine shop equipment -- posting signs about the contamination. Employees aren't being allowed to use the equipment.
"We've done air samples," said Angie Duduit, spokesperson for the United States Enrichment Corp., which runs the plant. "We have not detected any air samples to contain beryllium. We're just trying to keep people out of the area."
The metal isn't used in any form to enrich uranium, Duduit said, and USEC is continuing to test for traces of beryllium. The testing should be finished within the next month.
Minter said over the last 24 months, eight employees have been found to have chronic beryllium disease, and another eight have been deemed sensitive to the metal. The exposure, however, could have taken place decades ago, as the disease has a latency period of up to 20 years.
"In all probability, the exposures, we hope, to be a legacy exposure," Minter said.
But he also said the union wanted to expand the testing of current and former workers to make sure anybody exposed received proper medical care.
"We'd like to see the process expanded that way and we think it has to be an enduring process," Minter said.
As testing of both the workers and the site goes on, Minter said it must be determined that ongoing work at the plant isn't exposing more people, and cleanup ought to be the next step. Workers will be outfitted with adequate protective gear, specifically a respirator. Activities such as grinding or welding that could make the metal airborne now require the use of a respirator, but 20 years ago, the practice was rare, Minter said.
Duduit said normal precautionary equipment used at the plant provides adequate protection from the beryllium they've found.
"If you could eliminate the risk by removing the material, then you wouldn't need that protective equipment," he said.
Workers would have probably breathed the dust produced by grinding the metal or alloys containing it. Minter also said the levels of beryllium found would be commonplace in many manufacturing operations, and could have come from other sources, since it once was used in fluorescent light bulbs and grinding wheels.
"This is not a nuclear product," he said. "You could probably find it in any machine shop that used any beryllium product."
But like asbestos, industries have realized what was formerly considered a safe material could harm the long-term health of employees, Minter said. Knowing what they do now, the concern rests in making sure nobody else is exposed. A spokesperson from the company contracted to do much of the cleanup at the plant agreed.
"The welfare of Bechtel-Jacobs Co. and subcontractor employees are of the utmost importance, and if it is determined that they are at risk, measures will be implemented to ensure their safety," said Jack Williams, a Bechtel-Jacobs spokesperson. He added that the machine shop building isn't part of its "cleanup mission."
"Bechtel-Jacobs Co. is continuing to monitor the progress at Portsmouth, and we have plans to meet next week with the union and USEC to review the results of sampling," Williams said.
Testing of sites at the plant will continue, Murphie said, and this discovery was on the first of up to 14 locations. He said the DOE expects to find similar levels in other locations, given the "extreme sensitivity of the equipment."
Right now, the DOE's suspicion is the beryllium was released when the compressor blades were being milled to keep them working efficiently, Murphie said, as beryllium, in small amounts, is commonly found in aluminum.
"Beryllium is a natural constituent of the ore that they mine, so it's not uncommon. In fact, it's very common for beryllium to be a regular factor in the (aluminum) ore," Murphie said.
But he added that the fact it was used in a nuclear facility now undergoing cleanup brings the issue to the forefront, as there is more reason to look for it.
"We're talking about extremely low levels of beryllium in this aluminum, which in the normal conditions, people would say 'so what?'"
(Prazer can be reached at 772-9364 or via e-mail at dprazer@nncogannett.com)
FAQ: Beryllium
What is beryllium?
A naturally occurring metal that, when mixed with other metals, is used in everything from bicycle frames to dental bridges. In its pure form, it's used in nuclear weapons and reactors, X-ray machines and space vehicles.
It is emitted when fossil fuels are burned, and settles in small levels over land and water, and, as it is naturally occurring, is present in rocks and soil. Ambient levels are very low.
The federal government restricts exposure to workers to 5.4 parts per billion over an 8-hour shift.
How is it dangerous?
Beryllium, if breathed as a dust, can be harmful. Anywhere from 1 percent to 15 percent of people become sensitive to beryllium after being exposed to it, and, if long-term exposure continues, it can result in chronic beryllium disease and an increased risk of lung cancer.
What is chronic beryllium disease?
CBD is an scarring, inflammatory reaction in the respiratory system that can cause weakness, fatigue and breathing difficulties. Other symptoms may include anorexia, weight loss and heart disease and enlargement.
Source: www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts4.html
-------- utah
Nuclear waste
Saturday, February 07, 2004
N.S. Nokkentved
THE DAILY HERALD
http://www.harktheherald.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=13635&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
A radioactive waste bill in the Utah Legislature closes a loophole that might have allowed more concentrated waste into the state without legislative or gubernatorial approval.
But critics fear the bill leaves another loophole open that would allow higher concentrations of plutonium and enriched uranium.
Rep. Steve Urquhart, R-St. George, introduced a bill this week that would require the approval of the governor and the Legislature before a radioactive waste facility in the state could accept "radioactive waste having a higher radionuclide concentration limit than allowed under an existing approved license."
He introduced the bill on behalf of a legislative task force on radioactive waste, on which he serves as co-chairman. The task force voted to extend the provision requiring legislative and gubernatorial approval, which now applies to Class B and C wastes, to all radioactive waste with a higher concentration.
The task force concern grew from an issue that emerged late last year with efforts in Congress to reclassify highly concentrated radioactive waste from federal uranium processing plant in Fernald, Ohio. The change would have allowed the federal government to send the waste to Envirocare of Utah Inc., a radioactive waste landfill in Tooele County.
Environmentalists praised Urquhart's bill as a good step, but some say it leaves open another loophole.
Jason Groenewold, of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, is concerned that the Legislature was allowing state regulators to decide the concentration of nuclear material allowed into the state for disposal.
That's a decision the Legislature should make, he said.
The issue is a pair of license amendments to Urquhart's bill requested by Envirocare. One would increase the concentration of radioactivity in waste that also includes hazardous chemicals. The other would change the way limits are described for waste contaminated with plutonium and uranium, known as Special Nuclear Materials.
Some think the amendments should be covered by the legislation, others think they shouldn't.
"I think they should be," Urquhart said.
The request to increase the concentration of mixed waste clearly falls under the legislation, Groenewold said. But the other request is less clear.
Envirocare's license to dispose of wastes containing Special Nuclear Materials set the limit at concentrations up to 10 nanoCuries of radioactivity per gram of waste.
A Curie is a measure of radioactivity, and a nanoCurie is one billionth of a curie.
The company wants to change how the concentration is figured.
Limits now are based on the amount of radioactivity per gram of waste, the change would base limits on the amount of radioactive material per gram of waste.
Ken Alkema, Envirocare vice president, said the license amendment would not let the radioactive waste landfill dispose of waste in concentrations above 10 nanocuries.
"We can't go above that," he said. "The only change is it allows us to take bigger containers."
N.S. Nokkentved can be reached at 801-344-2930 or at nnokkentved@heraldextra.com
-------- us politics
Rumsfeld: Gadhafi avoided similar fate of Saddam
07-02-2004,
(Albawaba.com)
http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=269750&lang=e&dir=news
US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended Saturday of the decision to depose Saddam Hussein and said Libya's Moammar Gadhafi might have avoided a similar fate by voluntarily giving up its weapons of mass destruction.
In a speech to the Munich Conference on Security Policy, Rumsfeld insisted that President Bush was right to have invaded Iraq.
In London, the rapid rapprochement between the United States and Libya continued Friday as officials of the two nations discussed assigning representatives to each other's capital and ending the ban on Americans traveling to Libya.
A statement from the U.S. Embassy, quoted by The AP, said the meeting between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and Libyan officials was positive and thorough but reached no agreement on either topic.
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Rumsfeld Defends Iraq War at NATO Meeting
ROBERT BURNS
Associated Press
Sat, Feb. 07, 2004
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/local/7899944.htm
MUNICH, Germany - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, defending the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to a skeptical international audience, said Saturday he is confident Saddam Hussein's removal eventually will spread "seeds of freedom" through the Middle East.
In a sign that prewar diplomatic rifts continue, however, Germany's foreign minister warned of "possibly fatal consequences" for NATO should the alliance take a direct role in Iraq's reconstruction that resulted in failure. Russia's defense minister, whose government also opposed the war, said military force should be used only "within the realm" of international law.
Rumsfeld made an impassioned defense of the U.S. role in the world, contending that Arab television networks' coverage was contributing to the decline in America's image abroad by promoting the notion that Americans are imperialists.
"I know in my heart and my brain that America ain't what's wrong with the world," Rumsfeld told a German questioner after his speech.
"To the extent that that concept is promoted, as it is," Rumsfeld said, "only time will deal with that."
Rumsfeld asserted that the war showed other "rogue regimes" what could happen if they should refuse to come clean about disarming. He did not mention that inspectors have failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, a principal reason the Bush administration gave for invading last March.
The secretary suggested that Libya had an eye on what had happened to Iraq when the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadhafi, voluntarily ended his weapons ambitions in December.
"We may never know exactly why Saddam Hussein chose the destruction of his regime over peaceful disarmament," Rumsfeld said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy.
"But we know this: It was his choice, and if he had chosen differently - if his regime had taken the steps that Libya is now taking, there would have been no war," the secretary said.
Rumsfeld said there was more at stake in Iraq than just banned weapons. He asserted that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have liberated 50 million oppressed people.
"It's critical that our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan be successful," he said. "Because once the seeds of freedom are sown in the Middle Eastern soil, I believe they can spread across that region just as they spread across Europe during the course of the last half-century."
Without mentioning the administration's prewar claims that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, Rumsfeld said the war was worth the cost.
"The last 12 months has provided to the world's rogue regimes two different models of behavior: the path of cooperation and the path of defiance," he said.
"The lessons from those experiences should be clear: pursuit of weapons of mass murder can carry with it costs. By contrast, leaders who abandon the pursuit of those weapons and the means to deliver them will find an open path to better relations with the free nations of the world," Rumsfeld said.
As for NATO's involvement in Iraq, the United States has encouraged the alliance to consider a direct role but has not pressed the issue until Iraq regains self-rule, which is scheduled to occur July 1.
NATO's new secretary-general insisted the alliance should not rule out a role in Iraq.
"If a legitimate Iraqi government asks for our assistance, and if we have the support of the United Nations, NATO should not abdicate from its responsibilities," Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told the conference.
The same two alliance countries that were the most vigorously opposed to the Iraq war a year ago, Germany and France, reasserted their skepticism in Munich.
"The potentially very serious, possibly fatal, consequences for the alliance absolutely must be taken into consideration" because of the risk of failure, Germany's Fischer said.
The French defense minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, told reporters a deployment now would be premature. "France is not hostile in principle," she said, "but it hasn't been discussed because it's much too early."
The discussion about Iraq at this year's conference was less contentious than a year ago. Still, Rumsfeld offered a spirited defense of the war and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said the invasion and its chaotic aftermath proved that his government's opposition was sound.
"We were not and are still not convinced of the validity of the reasons for war," Fischer said in opening remarks.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, whose government also opposed the war, was less explicit in his criticism but questioned the "admissibility of the unilateral use of force."
Without mentioning Iraq, Ivanov said, "It is wrong to fight terrorism with illegal techniques." He also said Iraq had "turned into a real magnet for terrorists" in the Middle East.
Fischer said the Iraq problem requires a broader plan for peace in the Middle East.
ON THE NET
NATO on security meeting: http://www.nato.int/docu/update/2004/02-february/e0206a.htm
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Co-Chair of Bush Iraq Panel Part of Neocon Network
by Jim Lobe
February 7, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=1939
President George W. Bush's choice to co-chair his commission to investigate intelligence failures prior to the Iraq War is a longtime, right wing political activist closely tied to the neo-conservative network that led the pro-war propaganda campaign.
Federal appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman, who will share the chairmanship with former Virginia Democratic Senator Charles Robb, also has some history in covert operations.
In 1980, when he served as part of former Republican president Ronald Reagan's senior campaign staff, he played a key role in setting up secret contacts between the Reagan-Bush campaign and the Islamic government in Tehran, in what became known as the "October Surprise" controversy.
(Former president George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, was Reagan's vice-president for two terms, 1981-89).
Rewarded with his appeals court judgeship several years later, Silberman helped advise right-wing activists during the 1990s on strategies for pursuing allegations of sexual misconduct by then-Democratic president Bill Clinton, according to various accounts.
Besides Silberman and Robb, a conservative Democrat who also has strong ties to neo-conservatives through the Democratic Leadership Council, Bush chose five other commission members and indicated that two more have yet to be named.
The five include Arizona Republican Senator John McCain; former White House counsel for Clinton and former president Jimmy Carter, Lloyd Cutler; Yale University President Richard Levin; former deputy Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, Admiral William Studeman and retired appeals court judge Pat Wald.
In announcing the panel, Bush rejected appeals by the opposition Democrats in Congress that they be given a role in deciding its membership in order to enhance its credibility.
He also appeared to limit the commission's mandate to study only the mistakes made by the intelligence community in assessing Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.
Bush said the commission will submits its report by Mar. 31, 2005, well after the presidential elections in November.
"Last week, our former chief weapons inspector, David Kay ... stated that some prewar intelligence assessments by America and other nations about Iraq's weapons stockpiles have not been confirmed," Bush said. "We are determined to find out why."
Democrats said the mandate was too limited. "The president is not allowing (the commission) to look into the growing number of questions millions of Americans are asking about the administration's statements and actions before the Iraq war," said Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle.
"That investigation still needs to be done."
Democrats have charged that political pressure from leading administration figures, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, contributed to the intelligence failures, as did officials' public exaggerations of the intelligence community's assessments in order to persuade the public to support the war.
Democrats and other analysts had also wanted the commission to take up the administration's prewar charges that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein worked closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist group.
"The independent commission ... should seize upon its mandate to investigate 'related 21st century threats' and the biggest failure in the justification for the Iraq war: unproven allegations of links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein," said Charles Peņa, a foreign-policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that has strongly opposed the Iraq war, despite its generally Republican orientation.
Yet, Bush's appointments surprised several observers by their ideological diversity and reputations for independence.
"Overall, this is a much more professional, much more balanced group than I expected," said Mel Goodman, a former top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, who has frequently charged the administration with distorting and exaggerating the intelligence on Iraq.
"It looks like the pragmatists in the White House must have said, 'it's important that we get good names, so we're not attacked'," added Goodman, who teaches at the National War College. He said much will now depend on who is appointed as the panel's staff director.
While a Republican who has often taken neo-conservative positions, McCain, who opposed Bush in the 2000 Republican primary elections and has frequently clashed with him on key issues, is considered fiercely independent.
During his tenure at the CIA, Studeman was well respected among analysts. In contrast to a number of other senior officials, "Studeman was an honest man," said Goodman, whose public charges that former CIA chief Robert Gates had slanted assessments of Soviet power and intentions in the late 1980s created a sensation in Washington.
Cutler, a top adviser to both Carter and Clinton, has enjoyed a strong reputation for independence and thoughtfulness over several decades, while Wald, who was appointed to the bench by Carter, is considered a strong-willed liberal Democrat, who after retirement served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
The appointment of both Silberman and Wald to the commission is seen as particularly curious, because they are known not to get along. In his controversial book, Blinded by the Right, former right-wing journalist David Brock said Silberman gave "false information" to him about Wald whom, according to Brock, "(Silberman) hated with a passion."
Brock depicts Silberman as a major, if discreet, figure in the right-wing network that harassed Bill and Hillary Clinton for various alleged scandals during the 1990s. Brock, who describes Silberman as his "mentor," has since admitted that many of his attacks on Democrats were based on little or no evidence.
"A consummate Washington insider for more than two decades," Brock wrote, "Larry would often preface his advice to me with the wry demurrer that judges shouldn't get involved in politics - 'that would be improper,' he'd say - and then go ahead anyway."
"He was a behind-the-scenes adviser to the conservative editors of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and he delighted his conservative audiences with his acid critiques of the liberal press," added Brock.
Silberman has also reportedly been known as aggressive and sometimes abusive, even in his written opinions. He once accused Clinton of "declaring war on the United States" by permitting his aides to attack Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in the Whitewater case, while, during an argument with another appeals court judge, he is reported to have said, "if you were 10 years younger, I'd be tempted to punch you in the nose."
But it is his role in the 1980 election that is perhaps most intriguing about Silberman's appointment.
He is alleged to have set up and participated in a mysterious meeting in Washington on Oct. 2, 1980 - one month before the election - with Reagan's top foreign policy adviser, then-Marine Lieutenant Colonel Robert McFarlane (Reagan's national security adviser during the Iran-Contra scandal), and at least one Iranian arms dealer.
It was the culmination of a series of secret meetings - never reported to the U.S. government - between Reagan campaign officials and Iranians who purported to represent the government of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The precise purpose of those meetings has never been resolved, but one school of thought, propounded most effectively in the early 1980s by Carter's top National Security Council adviser on Iran, was that the Republican campaign was trying to ensure that Tehran would not make a deal with Carter to release US Embassy hostages who were being held in Iran until after the November elections.
In return, Iran would be covertly supplied with U.S.-made weapons via Israeli middlemen, according to the theory.
Reagan officials, including Silberman, have vehemently denied this version of events.
Nonetheless, it appears that Silberman was a key conduit to Iran during the early 1980s.
According to one source, after he received his judicial appointment, Silberman passed along his Iranian contacts to Michael Ledeen, a close associate of Richard Perle at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who played a key role with McFarlane in the transfer of US weapons to Tehran in the deal that gave rise to the Iran-Contra scandal.
Several years later, Silberman cast the deciding vote on a three-judge panel in a decision that resulted in dismissing the criminal convictions of Admiral John Poindexter and Lt. Col. Oliver North for lying to Congress in connection with the scandal.
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The day Cheney was rocked to the core
By Jim Lobe
Feb 7, 2004
Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB07Aa03.html
WASHINGTON - If United States Vice President Dick Cheney was hoping that the cold, crisp air of Davos and his private audience with Pope John Paul II late last month would revive his spirits, as well as his standing in the polls, he must be deeply disappointed.
Since returning home, he has faced a seemingly unrelenting succession of disclosures and attacks that appear to get worse with each passing day. What the albatross was to the ancient mariner, Cheney is fast becoming to George W Bush's re-election chances.
Just consider what happened to Cheney Thursday: the early morning edition of the Wall Street Journal ran an article - first reported by Newsweek - on how Justice Department investigators had asked Halliburton Company for documents relating to US$180 million in allegedly illegal payments by a consortium of companies, including Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, in connection with the construction of a big natural-gas plant in Nigeria in the late 1990s, while Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive officer.
When the Los Angeles Times hit the news stands a couple of hours later, Cheney was right there on the front page with the headline: "Scalia was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows." Antonin Scalia is a Supreme Court Justice who was Cheney's guest on a recent and rather costly (to the taxpayer) bird-hunting trip to Louisiana, and who also will soon hear a major case on government secrecy in which the vice president is the defendant.
Legal ethics experts quoted in the story, of course, zeroed in on the question of whether Scalia might best recuse himself from hearing the case, but there were also suggestions that perhaps Cheney could have exercised slightly better judgement. "It is not just a trip with a litigant. It's a trip at the expense of the litigant," noted one law professor.
Finished with the morning papers, Cheney may have tuned in to watch Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet deliver a passionate defense at Georgetown University of the official intelligence community's performance in the runup to the Iraq war, only to find himself a target, if only inferentially.
While Tenet didn't say anything explicitly about Cheney, he certainly didn't do much to dispel the increasingly strong impression in Washington - among Democrats, it's become a conviction - that, of all of Bush's senior advisers, Cheney and his staff worked hardest to hype what the intelligence community was saying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction programs.
While the intelligence community had concluded that Saddam wanted nuclear weapons, Tenet declared, it also made clear as of late 2002 that Saddam had none, and that he probably would not have been able to make one until some time between 2007 and 2009, at the earliest.
That assertion, of course, raises a major question. If the intelligence community agreed that Saddam had no nuclear weapons, where did Cheney get the information that would substantiate his statement on the very day that the US launched its invasion last March: "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
The answer, according to Democratic members of the Congressional intelligence committees, who have become increasingly outspoken in recent days, is that Cheney and his staff had an independent source of "intelligence" outside the formal intelligence community. Lodged in the Pentagon's policy shop under Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the now-notorious Office of Special Plans "cherry-picked" raw intelligence, interviewed "defectors", and produced its own talking points and analysis that were "stovepiped" straight to Cheney's office, notably John Hannah, his top Mideast staffer, and I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his powerful chief of staff.
When asked about this theory by a Georgetown student on Thursday, Tenet answered artfully, asserting: "I can tell you with certainty that the president of the United States gets his intelligence from one person and one community - me ... The rest of it, I don't know."
In the legal profession, Tenet's reply is called a negative pregnant, an apparent denial that suggests that further questioning may be fruitful. Indeed, Republican Jane Harmon, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, noted in a CNN interview on Thursday evening that, in speaking of "one community", Tenet was effectively confirming that the Pentagon-Cheney channel, that provided a much more alarmist view of Saddam's capabilities, may well have been at work.
But if Cheney felt displeased by Tenet's performance, things only got worse - much worse - later in the afternoon when United Press International (UPI) reported what has been rumored ever since Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation into the "outing" as a CIA officer by "two senior administration officials" of Valerie Plame, shortly after her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, had published an article in the New York Times charging that the administration knew that its reports of Saddam's alleged attempts to buy uranium yellowcake in Africa were bogus.
Quoting "federal law-enforcement officials," UPI's intelligence correspondent Richard Sale reported on Thursday that the two main suspects were none other than Libby and Hannah. One official reportedly told Sale that Hannah was being advised "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" in order to pressure him to implicate higher-ups - presumably Libby, if not, perhaps, Cheney himself.
A 1982 law makes deliberately revealing the identity of covert intelligence officers a felony punishable by as many as 10 years in prison. If either Hannah or Libby were officially named as suspects or actually indicted, the impact on Cheney's credibility and electability would be devastating.
According to recent polls, Cheney's approval ratings, hovering around 20 percent, are already far below Bush's, which have themselves sunk below 50 percent for the first time in his presidency. Even Halliburton, whose public image has become so tarnished that it has launched a controversial television ad campaign to boost its image, last week listed Cheney's association to the company as a "risk factor" for its shareholders.
Republicans in Congress, particularly on the intelligence and foreign relations committees, find themselves having to devote more time and political capital to defending the vice president, and even some influential Republican donors have privately suggested that Cheney bow out. Speculation about possible replacements - most recently, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (the Republican convention is in New York City, August 30 to September 2.) - is growing steadily. Of course, there's always another day.
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NEWS ANALYSIS
Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes
February 7, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/politics/07ASSE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 - It will be more than a year before the country hears the conclusions of the commission that President Bush reluctantly appointed on Friday to examine what has gone wrong with American intelligence collection.
But in recent days, it has been obvious in Washington that something has also gone awry in a White House that prides itself on never wavering from its message, especially when the subject is Iraq. At moments, Mr. Bush and his national security team - badgered for explanations about whether the country would have gone to war if it knew then what it knows now - have sounded as if these days, it is every warrior for himself.
Rather than uniform and disciplined, their answers have been ad hoc and inconsistent. And the result is that the president appears very much on the defensive just at a moment when his aides thought he would be reaping the political benefits of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.
"It's been a bit of a cacophony," one national security official at the White House acknowledged Friday. "Maybe the naming of the commission will smooth it out."
The change in pitch began with Mr. Bush himself, who in the heady days after Mr. Hussein's fall regularly declared that it was only a matter of time before weapons of mass destruction would be found. When the chief American weapons inspector, David A. Kay, emerged from Iraq and punctured whatever remained of that confidence, Mr. Bush shifted, declaring that the war there had been the right one to fight, for reasons having little to do with any Iraqi weapons that could have been imminently used. Yet he declared his unwavering confidence in the intelligence that lands on his desk every morning at 8, and in the people who provide it.
On Friday afternoon, looking unusually ill at ease in the White House press room while quickly announcing most of the members of his commission, he acknowledged that "some prewar intelligence assessments by America and other nations about Iraq's weapons stockpiles have not been confirmed."
"We are determined to figure out why," he said, his first specific acknowledgment that he decided to engage in a preventive war last March on the basis of a flawed assessment, at best, of how urgent a threat Iraq posed to America and its allies.
Mr. Bush has not gone as far as his secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, who caused more than a few winces in the White House this week when he told The Washington Post that had he known there were no stockpiles of weapons, he is not sure he would have recommended going to war. Mr. Powell stated the obvious: "It was the stockpiles that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and the world." And, he noted, "the absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus."
He was quickly reined in, but few in the State Department - or the White House - doubt that Mr. Powell, perhaps thinking about his legacy in what is expected to be his last year in office, gave a brief glimpse of his true thoughts.
Not surprisingly, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been the most combative, saying that if Mr. Hussein could hide in a hole for months on end, then surely his weapons could also hide in one.
"What we have learned thus far," Mr. Rumsfeld said, "has not proven Saddam Hussein had what intelligence indicated and what we believed he had, but it also has not proven the opposite."
Only a day later, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, conceded that the C.I.A.'s critics had at least half a point.
"When the facts on Iraq are all in," Mr. Tenet said, "we will be neither completely right nor completely wrong."
That assessment, many in the White House believe, may be their best talking point from this moment forward.
Even if the appointment of the commission allows the administration, at least for now, to get back on message, chinks exposed in the White House armor on this issue will not be easily sealed.
People close to Mr. Bush say he has been frustrated that Mr. Kay's assessment rekindled all the arguments that dominated the news over the summer, when the White House had to pull back from the president's State of the Union claim of last year that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium in Africa.
Mr. Bush certainly was in no mood Friday to entertain many questions on the issue of intelligence. He announced the commission's formation in a five-minute statement. He barely introduced its co-chairmen, former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia and Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal appeals judge in Washington. He left the room without taking questions.
More to the point, Mr. Bush never explained whether the charter of the commission would extend beyond intelligence gathering to the politically crucial question of how the White House had used the intelligence it received. Democrats seized on the omission.
"On the one hand, the commission is charged with looking at prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq, but apparently not at exaggerations of that intelligence by the Bush administration," said the Senate Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, Carl Levin of Michigan. "On the other hand, the commission is tasked to look at so many other areas that it will not be able to adequately focus on the paramount issue of the analysis, production and use of prewar intelligence on Iraq."
Even some in the White House conceded that only one member of the commission - Adm. William O. Studeman, former deputy director of central intelligence - was deeply versed in both human and high-tech intelligence collection, though Senator Robb once served on the Intelligence Committee.
Also on the panel is Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who frequently gets under Mr. Bush's skin on questions of the deficit and other domestic issues. But he was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, and his independent streak will most likely insulate Mr. Bush from the Democratic accusations that the president picked a panel unlikely to challenge him.
In any event, the commission's makeup seems to have been influenced more by a quest for political balance than for depth of knowledge about the challenges facing the turf-conscious intelligence agencies. That is in sharp contrast to the last major investigative panel that the administration appointed, to examine the disaster involving the space shuttle Columbia. That panel had specialists on composites and propulsion, organizational dynamics and safety, along with experts who spend their lives thinking about the future of the space program.
An equivalent panel in this case might have included experts in a variety of espionage specialties, in the difficulties of piercing secretive governments and terror groups, and in the way other nations have organized their intelligence agencies.
But then again, intelligence collection is not a precise science. And in the end, its findings merge with the necessities of politics and power.
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Bush, Aides Ignored CIA Caveats on Iraq
Clear-Cut Assertions Were Made Before Arms Assessment Was Completed
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 7, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20194-2004Feb6.html
In its fall 2002 campaign to win congressional support for a war against Iraq, President Bush and his top advisers ignored many of the caveats and qualifiers included in the classified report on Saddam Hussein's weapons that CIA Director George J. Tenet defended Thursday.
In fact, they made some of their most unequivocal assertions about unconventional weapons before the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was completed.
Iraq "is a grave and gathering danger," Bush told the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002. At the White House two weeks later -- after referring to a British government report that Iraq could launch "a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order" is given -- he went on to say, "Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX -- nerve gas -- or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally."
Three weeks later, on the day the NIE was delivered to Congress, Bush told lawmakers in the White House Rose Garden that Iraq's current course was "a threat of unique urgency."
On Thursday, summarizing the NIE's conclusions, Tenet said: "They never said Iraq was an imminent threat."
The administration's prewar comments -- and the more cautious, qualified phrasings of intelligence analysts -- are at the heart of the debate over whether the faulty prewar claims resulted from bad intelligence or exaggeration by top White House officials -- or both.
Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told senators last week that caveats often fall by the wayside "the higher you go up" the bureaucratic chain. At the top, he said, "you read the headlines, you read the summary, you're busy, you've got other things to do."
Administration supporters say Bush, Vice President Cheney and others were simply extrapolating from the comprehensive intelligence provided by Tenet's intelligence community. Critics say Bush and his Cabinet had already decided to go to war, regardless of what the intelligence efforts found.
The controversy, arising during the Democratic presidential primary campaign, has taken on a partisan hue. Some Democrats, however, say they perceived GOP partisanship earlier, when Republicans advocated an invasion of Iraq before the 2002 congressional elections. Bush said on Sept.13, 2002, that he did not think he could explain to voters the position of some Democrats who said Congress should wait for the United Nations to authorize the use of force before giving the president the authority he wanted.
Now that extended efforts to find weapons of mass destruction have proved futile, some are asking why Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld used unequivocal rhetoric to describe the threat from Iraq when the intelligence on the subject was much more nuanced and subjective.
For example, when Bush on Sept. 24, 2002, repeated the British claim that Iraq's chemical weapons could be activated within 45 minutes, he ignored the fact that U.S. intelligence mistrusted the source and that the claim never appeared in the October 2002 U.S. estimate.
On Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney said: "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." The estimate, several weeks later, would say it would take as many as five years, unless Baghdad immediately obtained weapons-grade materials.
In the same speech, Cheney raised the specter that Hussein would give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists, a prospect invoked often in the weeks to come. "Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network, or a murderous dictator, or the two working together, constitute as grave a threat as can be imagined," Cheney said.
It would be more than a month later that a declassified portion of the NIE would show that U.S. intelligence analysts had forecast that Hussein would give such weapons to terrorists only if Iraq were invaded and he faced annihilation.
"The probability of him initiating an attack . . . in the foreseeable future . . . I think would be low," a senior CIA official told the Senate intelligence committee during a classified briefing on the estimate on Oct. 2, 2002. The CIA released a partial transcript five days later after committee Democrats complained that a published "white paper" on Iraq's weapons had not given the public a fair reading of what the classified NIE contained.
On Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney said of Hussein on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." Cheney was referring to the aluminum tubes that some analysts believed could be used for a centrifuge to help make nuclear materials; others believed they were for an antiaircraft rocket.
Such absolute certainty, however, did not appear in the estimate. Tenet said Thursday that the controversy has yet to be cleared up.
On Sept. 19, 2002, Rumsfeld, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq." The October estimate contained no similar language.
Speaking to the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18, 2002, Rumsfeld described an immediate threat from biological weapons. Hussein, he said, could deploy "sleeper cells armed with biological weapons to attack us from within -- and then deny any knowledge or connection to the attacks."
While the intelligence community believed Hussein had biological agents such as anthrax, and that they could be quickly produced and weaponized for delivery by bombs, missiles or aerial sprayers, the October 2002 estimate said: "We had no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons, agents, or stockpiles at Baghdad's disposal."
Tenet's "provisional bottom line" on biological weapons, he said Thursday, is that research and development efforts were underway in Iraq "that would have permitted a rapid shift to agent production if seed stocks were available. But we do not know if production took place -- and just as clearly -- we have not yet found biological weapons."
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Treasury Improperly Released Information to O'Neill
By Dana Milbank and Lucy Shackelford
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20193-2004Feb6.html
The Treasury Department said it improperly released classified information to former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill for a book about the Bush administration.
The department said the fault was in the document-screening process and that no action would be taken against O'Neill or the book's author, Ron Suskind. "The corrective action is to be taken internally," said Anne Womack Kolton, a Treasury spokeswoman. She said there will be no effort made to prevent publication of the documents, which are being released over the Internet.
In a letter to lawmakers, O'Neill's successor, John W. Snow, said a preliminary review done by the department's inspector general found "a number of documents that contain classified information."
"The Treasury Department recognized that those documents were not properly reviewed before their release," Snow wrote.
O'Neill provided about 19,000 pages of documents to Suskind for his book, "The Price of Loyalty," which is critical of President Bush and his administration. It portrays Bush as detached from policy details and his administration as unconcerned about deficits and determined to go to war in Iraq even before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Suskind said yesterday that he has hired lawyers who have been in discussion with government lawyers over the online release of the documents. "None of the documents in the 19,000 that we know of were stamped 'classified,' " he said. "There may be documents the government feels retroactively that should be classified. Those are the documents the government in the last few days has alerted us about."
The author said the government has so far identified only "a handful" of sensitive documents and that he is still in negotiations over which will be released. "I have no intentions to publish anything that would compromise national security," he said.
The Treasury investigation began after one document, marked "secret," was shown in an O'Neill interview on CBS's "60 Minutes." But Suskind has said that document was only a cover sheet for secret documents that were not included in those released to O'Neill.
Kolton said there will be "additional security training" for those screening documents, because those given to O'Neill "were not properly reviewed before they were released."
Suskind began to post documents on his Web site on Thursday. Among the 20 documents already released by Suskind are memos related to tax cuts, Iraq, global warming, corporate governance, Africa and the Middle East. He said that the 20 documents were not among those that concerned Treasury officials and that he would be posting others in the coming days.
Rep. Charles B. Rangel (N.Y.), ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, responding to the inspector general's report said, "While the administration has gone through all of this trouble to see if they can find something that Secretary O'Neill did wrong, they have not contradicted the accuracy of his account."
--------
Rumsfeld on Israeli weapons
Saturday, February 7, 2004
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040207-0432.html
United States Department of Defense. News Transcript On the web: http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040207-0432.html Media contact: +1 (703) 697-5131 Public contact: http://www.dod.mil/faq/comment.html or +1 (703) 428-0711
Presenter: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld Saturday, February 7, 2004 Secretary Rumsfeld Availability at the Munich Conference on Security Policy
Q: Mr. Secretary, there is probably too little time to expect you to already answer the proposals made by the German foreign minister this morning, but he also expressed something that is of general concern to us here in Europe. The question is, how can NATO again become a place where the strategic issues that affect us on both sides of the Atlantic can be discussed before they become military issues, and here the decisive point will be whether the U.S. administration is prepared to make NATO again a place where such discussion can take place. Could you perhaps comment on that?
Rumsfeld: Certainly. I think NATO is a place where important issues are being discussed; indeed I see NATO today with a good deal of energy and life and opportunity. The United States went to NATO immediately before Afghanistan and before Iraq and discussed what was taking place in the world. NATO responded instantaneously and invoked Article 5 and provided AWACS assistance to the United States, as you may recall. I think the test is, someone mentioned intelligence earlier here today and the fact that NATO does not have common intelligence, if you will.
To the extent we are all working off the same set of facts, or roughly the same set of facts, the people from our respective countries tend to come to roughly the same conclusions, and to the extent we're not working off the same set of facts, we tend not to; and it seems to me that it may very well be that one thing NATO might do would be to do a better job of seeing that the intelligence capabilities of the respective countries are brought together and that the people in NATO and the capitals of NATO countries are kept tuned into those threats and the kinds of capabilities that we as free people face. We're much more likely to get a faster common understanding to the extent we have a reasonably similar perspective with respect to what the facts are.
Q [Member of the German Parliament]: I'm grateful for your remarks and my question is, if it is right that the Europeans should have a high interest in good transatlantic relations and in particular in an effective NATO. Over the last two years one has had the impression that the United States does not have an equally strong interest because they acted in different constellations. My question is, if there is a stronger interest now again on the part of the United States, does that have to do with the need for seeking allies for a specific scenario or is there a longer term, strategic interest of the United States in a reliable and binding NATO? The second question that follows the first one immediately is, if it is right that the European Union is becoming increasingly a political union and makes security a matter of its discussions -- and I'm quite sure that this will be the case --now, if that is so, will the United States be prepared to deal with the Europeans in NATO so that they have a common position and would the United States be prepared to accept a European caucus?
Rumsfeld: You know, I'm 71 years old and I watched NATO for a whale of a long time. And I have seen the relationship go through the skybolt and through the gas pipeline problems and Bosnia and goodness gracious, what else? Oh, the Pershing missiles and the Kissinger-Michel Jobert discussions, debates, whatever you want to call them. France pulling out of NATO's integrated military command, throwing NATO out of France. What's going on is that you're seeing our world go through a period of changes in the security situation, and what you see as the groans and the creaks is this institution of NATO adjusting to those changes in the security situation. We ought not to be surprised. Last year was not unique in the history of this alliance. It's been a pattern, it goes like this. It always has.
Now, what about the U.S. role. The implication of your comment was that we were less interested last year and more interested this year -- is that because we need something? No! First of all that's an incorrect assessment, in my modest opinion, and of course I could be wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong. [Laughter.] In this case I think I'm right and let me tell you why. It has been the United States that has been consistently suggesting new initiatives in NATO over and over. Where did the NATO response force come from? Where did the Chem-Bio idea come from? Where did some of these other ideas in NATO come from? Where did the idea of fixing the command structure come from, and making it more relevant? We have been engaged in that institution. We believe in it. Now is it tactical or is it strategic you ask, something like that --sometimes I overstate for emphasis. It's obviously strategic, it's long-term. Any monkey looking down from Mars on Earth knows that the countries in NATO and North America are the bulk of the countries on the face of the earth that have the same values, the same concerns, the same hopes and aspirations for the world, the same lack of a desire to impose their will on somebody else and take their real estate and seize it. We don't do that. We're the bulk of democracies in the world and we have common interests and that is what the interest of the United States has been and is today.
Q [U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, South Carolina]: You may need a translator because I speak southern English, but we will give it a go. Mr. Secretary, you made a very passionate argument about the war, but as I was here last year, I was very firm in my beliefs that Iraq was part of the problem, not the solution when it came to terrorism. I am disappointed about the weapons of mass destruction, I want to know why, if we were wrong. I think it's important that my country, Senator McCain, President Bush and all of us will find out if we were wrong at all, and I think it's important that we look at that aspect of our intelligence. But I do believe the war was just. I do believe it was right, but here is the problem. If I'm a European or Russian, the doctrine of preemption would make me uncomfortable. I can understand that. But what I would say to our allies: that after 9/11 the doctrine of preemption, I think, is necessary. In the Cold War, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction was a very serious doctrine, and it was that if you strike us, you will not survive. Rationality won out; the belief was that you would not forfeit your life to try to get an advantage, because we have the capability to take your life. In terrorism, that does not work. So, Mr. Secretary, if you could, could you please explain from your point of view, why the doctrine of preemption is a rational doctrine in the war on terrorism and how we can better integrate that doctrine with our allies?
Rumsfeld: I'll try. This is a poor quote from somebody, and I forgot who said it, but somebody once said that "a defender has to be right every time, and an attacker, a terrorist, only has to be lucky once in a while."
Now the problem -- what did we do in Afghanistan? Here was a country where we made a conscious decision to preemptively, to use the word, go after the Taliban and the al Qaeda in that country because we concluded, only after we'd lost 3000 people, many from your countries as well as ours, that the training and the support for that was reasonably centered there, although not exclusively. That was different; it was a different thing.
If someone is going to throw a snowball at you, you may not want to act preemptively; you can afford to take the blow and live with it and do something after the fact. As you go up the scale from a snowball to a weapon of mass destruction, at some point, where the risk gets high enough that it is not going to be a snowball in your face, but it could be a biological weapon that could kill tens of thousands of human beings; and then you ask yourself, do you have an obligation to take the blow and then do something about it afterwards? Or if you've got at risk, not 3,000, but 30,000, or 300,000 -- whatever -- or do you have an obligation in that case to act somewhat differently? And it seems to me that when one is looking at the idea of preempting -- I mean think back in history. If one is looking across a border and they see the enemy massing on the other side of the border, people tended not to wait until the enemy came in and attacked the country; they tended to go after the massing forces before they came in to your country. So preemption is not something that is new, and it is something in my mind that has to be weighed and considered by all of us with respect to what is the potential loss.
What is at risk? That, it seems to me, is something that we all, collectively, individually, are going to have to think through as we go through this period. What we've seen in the press is a network that exists -- a private network in some instances that exists who is moving around weapons of mass destruction and the abilities to produce them. If that's happening as we've been reading in the press, one has to say, we know there's an appetite on the part of terrorists to kill people. They're training. People are being trained in schools to do that. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that at some point these private networks and these terrorist networks are going to connect, and at that moment people are going to have to face up to the realities of the 21st century.
Q [Dr. Saleh Rusheidat, ambassador of Jordan to Germany]: Thank you Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency. We believe without solving the problem in the Middle East, I mean the problem between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the whole region will be under stress and maybe Europe, and we know that a lot of initiatives were launched for the last thirty years. Some of the Israelis, the officials, they said they need 20 years more to solve this problem. My question to you, what should be done to solve this problem? How much time do we have to wait? Thank you.
Rumsfeld: Well, there are just an awful lot of wonderful people who spend big chunks of their lives worrying with that problem in the Middle East. For a variety of reasons, it's almost like two dancers. When one leans forward, the other one leans back, and when one leans back, the other one leans forward, and it hasn't been solved. It seems to me that to be solved there has to be interlocutors that can deliver on security, because what one is looking for is peace in that part of the world.
You ask how much longer? I suppose it's a matter to some extent of the -- oh, what's the right word -- the desire on the part of the people in the region to solve it. People in the region tend to look outside the region and say, my goodness, why doesn't somebody come in and solve that? Why don't they grab people by the scruff of the neck, push them together and make them agree? That lasts about five minutes and then they pull back apart, and I think that ultimately the solution: the United States needs to be working on it, we need to continue to work on it, Europe needs to work on it and continue to working on it, but in the last analysis, a lasting solution in that part of the world is going to come because people are exasperated, exhausted and tired of seeing their opportunities for prosperity go down the drain and tired of listening to people shoot off their mouths and people shoot off their weapons and fire bullets and no one deliver a dad-burned thing for the people.
Q [Wolfgang Ischinger, German ambassador to the United States]: Mr. Secretary, You said that the success of the coalition last year was very positive, but now, unfortunately, the standing of the United States in that same period of time has not improved worldwide but it has deteriorated dramatically. There are comments made by U.S. government officials in the last few days who have expressed great concern about this. There are people who would even go as far as to suggest that this poor standing of the United States could be harmful for a strategy for the greater Middle East as presented by Minister Fisher this morning and it could almost be an obstacle to such a strategy. My question is, do you share these concerns, how seriously do you take these concerns, and if you do take them seriously, Secretary, what ways would you suggest to improve the image of the United States, not here in Europe but also in those countries outside of Europe which are represented here? Thank you.
Rumsfeld: That's a tough question. The perspective of the United States has gone up and down over the decades. I suppose it will over the period ahead. The problem in the Middle East is a serious one. When you have Al Jazeera and Al Arabia and some of the networks in that area that people watch, constantly, daily putting out information that is biased and untrue. It ought not to be a great surprise to find that an awful lot of that people in that area have an impression of the coalition and the United States that is a highly negative one. What does one do about that?
Well, I guess they try to find ways to see that the messages are communicated more accurately. They try to constantly behave in a way that will bring credit to them rather than to lead people to be disparaging of them. I know in my heart and my brain that America ain't what's wrong with the world. To the extent that that concept is promoted, as it is, and in this country in television as well -- to the extent that's the case, only time, I guess, will deal with that. But if you think of what was going on in Iraq a year ago, with people being tortured, rape rooms, mass graves, gross corruption, a country that had used chemical weapons on its own people, used them on their neighbors, defiant to the United Nations through 17 UN Security Council resolutions -- and look at the way it was treated in the press. I mean there were prominent people who represent countries in this room that opined that they didn't really think it made a hell of a lot a difference who won.
Think of that. Equating the countries in the coalition with what was going on in that country, publicly. Shocking, absolutely shocking. Now, is the United States perfect? No. Goodness no! Do we make mistakes? You bet! But if there were a simple, easy answer to this I guess it wouldn't be a problem. I don't know what the simple easy answer is. You live in the United States. Maybe someone like you can help. (Laughter.)
Moderator: By accident, the next question comes from a journalist.
Q [Joseph Joffe, chief editor of German weekly magazine "Die Zeit"]: Mr. Secretary, since you are a modest man, I would like to ask a modest question.
Rumsfeld: Zip up your pockets, folks! (Laughter.)
Q: No. I have no gun in my pocket! But I want to ask a question about guns in pockets. My question follows on the question posed here by Senator Graham, and it has to do with preemption and intelligence. I agree with you that you can't wait to absorb the first blow when the other side isn't throwing snowballs but something much heftier. But it follows therefrom that we have to have very, very good intelligence. I've got to make sure before I train my M-16 on the other guy that what he has in his pocket is actually a gun and he is not fondling his pipe. Now the problem -- and this is not just a problem of the United States, it's a problem of the intelligence services in Britain, in Germany, even in Israel, which has a great local advantage -- that they all did not produce, say, extremely good intelligence on Iraq. And the question now is, it's in no way the same question that Senator Graham poses. What are we going to about intelligence in a situation where first-rate intelligence is absolutely vital, so we don't shoot he wrong guy? Let's start with the CIA and NSA.
Rumsfeld: That is a critically important question. If you are going to live in this world, and it's a dangerous world, you do have to have elegant intelligence, and it is tough. When you're dealing with closed societies, where we don't know what we need to know, and they now precisely what it is they want to hide from us, and they're good at it, and people are proliferating not just weapons, they're proliferating techniques to deal with denial and deception, to avoid being found as to what you're doing. The tunneling that's taking place on this globe makes life complicated. Fiberoptics makes life complicated, cuts in intelligence budgets makes life more complicated. The complexity of the fact that we now don't have one target, we've got multiple targets that we have to be thinking about and looking at. It is a very difficult thing to do.
I'm very pleased that the President has formed a commission that -- and Senator McCain here is one of the distinguished members, nine members -- they are going to take a look at the successes of the intelligence community -- and there are a lot of them -- and they are going to look at the failures of the intelligence community, and they are going to ask what caused the successes, what caused the failures. Iraq, to be sure, but also Libya, other things as well. And then they are going to look at the threats of the 21st century and say, what can we learn, what are the lessons learned from this that we can then apply, we, meaning the United States with our friends and allies, that we have very close, intimate intelligence co-operation with. What can we then learn from that that we can better arrange ourselves for the future? And I think it will be a constructive effort, and I am delighted the President made the decision, and we all have to figure out ways that we can better protect the people that we represent.
Q [Professor Karl Kaiser, visiting professor at Harvard University]: Mr. Secretary, the doctrine of preemption has been greatly criticized all over the world, but you rightly point out that under conditions of weapons of mass destructions and terrorism, our old criteria of defining the legitimacy of defense, of course, is to be reviewed. And it is an absolutely central rule of international law, I'm referring to Article 51, which makes the use of force legitimate. My question to you now is: should we not leave the redefinition of the criteria just to the accidents of the moment? Shouldn't we all sit together and redefine the criteria of when defense is legitimate under these circumstances? And secondly, where should we do it, in your opinion?
Rumsfeld: I think it's a good idea. I'll leave it to experts and diplomats to figure out where it ought to be done. My guess is it needs to be done in multiple locations. It's such a central issue that needs to be addressed, and it should be done in academia, it should be done in the think tanks, it ought to be done inside governments and it ought to be done among and between governments. It is enormously important. We did an exercise, I didn't, but some people in the United States did, I think it was Johns Hopkins on, they called it "Dark Winter," and they looked at smallpox, I believe, and put it in two or three locations in the United States and watched what happened. And the numbers immediately, very rapidly, ran into the hundreds of thousands of dead. You think what we've done for decades, when I was a child, even then we preempted. If someone got smallpox they were quarantined; they had not given that to anybody else yet, but they were stopped and they were not allowed to give it to anybody else and -- why? Because so many people could be killed by smallpox was the reason. The state stepped in and said, we are going to preemptively stop you from hurting somebody else even though you don't want to, you have no intention to, and there is not any certainty you even would -- but we're going to stop you. I think you're right, I think it's something that merits our attention, and I suspect when with discussions and debates are completed we'll find that it fits something like I suggested: the more powerful, the greater the risk and the danger, the lower the threshold for action.
Moderator: One last question.
Q [Palestinian general]: Mr. Secretary, You talked about countries that were trying to produce weapons of mass destruction. You talked about Iraq and you talked about Iran and North Korea. I have a question, a direct question to you. What are you doing with Israel? As far as Israel is concerned, Israel has more atomic weapons in the region than any other country. Why do you remain silent in regard to Israel? I think it's important to answer this question because this has to do with the world, the strategy that we are pursuing today. I think that if the position towards Israel were different then the situation would be different in the Near East, and this is a great problem.
Rumsfeld: You know the answer before I give it, I'm sure. The world knows the answer. We take the world like you find it; and Israel is a small state with a small population. It's a democracy and it exists in a neighborhood that in many -- over a period of time has opined from time to time that they'd prefer it not be there and they'd like it to be put in the sea. And Israel has opined that it would prefer not to get put in the sea, and as a result, over a period of decades, it has arranged itself so it hasn't been put in the sea.
Thank you very much.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
NATO to Expand Force in Afghanistan
Defense Ministers Promise Rumsfeld Regional Security Teams
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20100-2004Feb6.html
MUNICH, Feb. 6 -- Several European defense ministers offered on Friday to expand NATO operations in Afghanistan by forming new regional security teams beyond Kabul. But U.S. and NATO authorities gave conflicting statements on whether the teams could be established in time to bolster security for national elections planned for this summer.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, attending a meeting of NATO defense ministers here, had appealed for more alliance help and greeted the European commitments enthusiastically. In remarks to the ministers and at a news conference afterward, he outlined an even greater potential role for NATO in Afghanistan in which the alliance would ultimately take command of all international military operations in the country.
The officials also discussed Iraq. For weeks, alliance officials have mulled the possibility of NATO taking charge of the international force that patrols south-central Iraq under Polish and Spanish leadership.
With political power in Iraq scheduled to pass to an interim government this summer, France and Germany, which opposed the U.S. invasion, have signaled a willingness to consider a NATO deployment. But the ministers made no decision on the matter, and instead focused on the growing mission in Afghanistan.
"NATO's first priority is to get Afghanistan right," said Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's new secretary general. "We have no choice."
NATO's ability to follow through on the mission, its first outside of Europe, has become a crucial test for the alliance. In August, NATO took command of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, which now numbers nearly 8,000 troops. As a test case for expanding beyond the capital, Germany last month took charge of a security team in the northern city of Kunduz.
The U.S.-led coalition force of 13,000 troops has seven teams of its own and intends to set up more. The teams, known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams and made up of 80 to 200 soldiers each, provide security for aid workers and engage in small development projects. The Bush administration regards them as crucial not only to providing greater security in the provinces but also to extending the authority of the Afghan government, since troops of the new Afghan army work with the teams.
U.S. officials have been eager for NATO to establish additional teams in advance of the national elections. But NATO has had difficulty mustering enough troops and equipment from member nations to fulfill commitments; Rumsfeld and his staff came to Munich hoping to spur the project.
At the meeting Friday, Gen. James Jones, a U.S. Marine who commands NATO forces, briefed the ministers on a plan to set up five new teams. The briefing, according to one participant, provided "a certain amount of momentum" that led the ministers of four countries -- Britain, Italy, Turkey and Norway -- to commit to leading one team each. A U.S. official said the Netherlands has also indicated it might head one.
While U.S. forces are concentrated in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where Taliban and al Qaeda fighters remain a threat, plans call for the NATO teams to go into the relatively calm north and west.
Asked about timing, Rumsfeld said it was "realistic" that the NATO teams could be set up by the summer. But de Hoop Scheffer told reporters that no formal decision was made and that the matter might have to wait until a NATO summit in Istanbul in June.
Eventually, Rumsfeld said, NATO might take control of all the reconstruction teams in Afghanistan, and after that, assume command of all international forces there. But another senior U.S. official called that idea "an aspiration" that has "really no definition" to it.
The ministers also discussed plans to end NATO's mission in Bosnia, which began in 1995, and replace it with police and military forces from the European Union. The proposal, which is to be formally approved at the Istanbul summit, would leave a small headquarters unit headed by a U.S. two-star general that would continue to provide counterterrorism assistance and hunt for war crimes suspects still wanted by the International War Crimes Tribunal -- most notably, Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic.
-------- africa
Powell Pledges $200M to Rebuild Liberia
U.S. Pledges $200 Million to Help Rebuild Liberia, Urges World to Seize 'Last, Best Chance' for Peace
The Associated Press
February 7, 2004
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20040206_1092.html
UNITED NATIONS Feb. 6 - Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged $200 million Friday to start rebuilding Liberia after 14 years of civil war, and urged the world community to help Liberians seize what may be "their last, best chance for peace."
Calling the United States Liberia's "best and oldest friend," Powell told a high-level donors conference that Washington will support international efforts "to build a future of hope" for Liberians.
"This promising moment is not likely to come again, and the people of Liberia need our collective help to seize this moment," he said.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened the session with an appeal to international donors for nearly $500 million for Liberia's reconstruction and at least $100 million more to meet its immediate humanitarian needs.
"Let us all seize this moment to end this long-running nightmare that has disgraced humankind," he said. "Let us consolidate the peace, and make the peace process irreversible."
Ireland's development minister Thomas Kitt, speaking on behalf of the European Union, echoed Annan's appeal, saying, "We now have a real opportunity to end the agony of Liberia and its people."
The West African nation is trying to rebuild following President Charles Taylor's flight into exile in August, which cleared the way for a power-sharing deal between his government and rebels after 14 years of fighting that claimed more than 150,000 lives. The new government is expected to arrange elections for late 2005 and cede power to a representative government in early 2006.
Speaking on behalf of Liberia, the country's transitional leader, Gyude Bryant, acknowledged that corruption is still rife, but he said efforts were being made to end it.
Powell is expected to lobby Security Council members during his New York visit to support a new resolution that would freeze assets against Taylor, his family and associates, a U.N. diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Taylor has been indicted by a U.N.-backed war-crimes court in neighboring Sierra Leone for supporting its vicious rebel movement, the Revolutionary United Front.
The U.N. Security Council in December voted unanimously to maintain sanctions against Liberia, including an arms embargo and a ban on importing Liberian diamonds or timber. It also kept a travel ban on Taylor, who lives in the Nigerian jungle city of Calabar, and other leaders of his government.
Powell, whose plane was delayed for over two hours because of bad weather, pledged U.S. support, telling international donors: "I can assure you of America's strong commitment to work with you as together we help the people of Liberia seize what may well be their last, best chance for peace, prosperity and democracy."
The World Bank and the United Nations estimate that $487.7 million is needed over the next two years to meet Liberia's most urgent reconstruction needs. Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said donors are likely to come up with the money.
But Annan told donors that a U.N. humanitarian appeal for $179 million to help Liberians has been largely unfunded. U.N. officials said only $3 million for emergency humanitarian relief has been donated, along with food aid.
Powell said the U.S. Congress has appropriated $200 million for Liberia's reconstruction. He said the United States has already provided nearly $90 million to address the humanitarian crisis and the plight of refugees, but U.S. officials said this money was not part of the U.N. appeal.
The European Union is also expected to pledge about $200 million, an EU official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Additional pledges were expected from French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, senior officials from Japan, Sweden and Britain, and representatives from about 24 other countries in Asia, Africa and Europe who have signed up to speak.
-------- arms
Case Against Ex-CIA Agent Is Dismissed
Associated Press
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20490-2004Feb6.html
HOUSTON, Feb. 6 -- A federal judge dismissed an indictment against a former CIA operative who was convicted of selling arms to Libya, after prosecutors decided they would not pursue a retrial.
A 1983 conviction of Edwin Wilson, now 75, for shipping 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya was thrown out late last year. At his trial, Wilson maintained he was only doing what the CIA asked him to do.
Wilson is jailed at a federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa., on two other convictions. He will be eligible for release this fall, Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said in Washington.
A federal court in Virginia convicted Wilson of exporting firearms to Libya without permission and sentenced him to 10 years. A New York court sentenced him to 25 years, to run consecutively with the Virginia term, on offenses involving claims he conspired behind bars to have witnesses and prosecutors killed.
In a scathing opinion Friday, U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes said the government failed to correct information about Wilson's service to the CIA that it acknowledged internally was false. Federal prosecutors informed Hughes earlier Friday they would not seek a retrial.
Corallo said the decision to dismiss the Texas case was based in part on "the difficulty of marshaling the facts and witnesses after 21 years."
Wilson's attorney, David Adler, said the government did the right thing by not seeking a retrial. He said Wilson would not have received a fair trial because a number of witnesses in the Texas case have died.
-------- britain
After Hutton, the verdict: 51 per cent say Blair should go
By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor
07 February 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=488780
Tony Blair's loss of public trust after the war on Iraq and the Hutton report is underlined today by a poll for The Independent showing more than half of voters want him to resign.
The NOP poll, conducted this week, shows that 51 per cent want the Prime Minister to quit and 54 per cent believe he lied to the nation over the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
It also shows the Tories are ahead of Labour in popularity. The Conservatives are on 36 per cent, with Labour on 35 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 24 per cent.
But when those polled were asked how they would vote if Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, was leader, Labour regained the lead. The Conservatives would be on 36 per cent, Labour 37 and the Liberal Democrats 22.
The poll concludes a terrible week for the Prime Minister in which the Tories called for his resignation and Brian Jones, a former MoD intelligence expert, widened his criticism of the Government's dossier on Iraq.
When asked what they thought of the statement: "It is now time for Tony Blair to resign and hand over to someone else", 51 per cent said they agreed or strongly agreed - 35 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed.
The depth of public disillusion with Mr Blair is highlighted in another finding. When asked about the new inquiry into the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, some 68 per cent believe it will be a "whitewash", while just 23 per cent believe it will be a "genuine attempt to find the truth".
When asked "Given what you know now, do you think Tony Blair lied to the nation over the threat posed by Iraq?" 54 per cent responded "yes" and 31 per cent said "no". The rest were undecided.
Michael Howard, the Tory leader, renewed his call yesterday for Mr Blair to step aside over his admission that he did not know the exact nature of Saddam's weapons threat before the war. Mr Blair told MPs on Wednesday he had not known the claim that Iraq had chemical weapons ready to fire within 45 minutes referred to battlefield rather than long-range munitions.
The Government's dossier stated that "intelligence indicates that the Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so". Press reports at the time which suggested the claim involved ballistic missiles capable of striking British interests in Cyprus went uncorrected by the Government. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, and the former foreign secretary Robin Cook added to the pressure on Mr Blair when they revealed they had been told the weapons were short-range mortars.
In contrast to Mr Blair's fortunes, Mr Howard's positive poll ratings continued. Forty-seven per cent of those asked felt that he had done a very good or fairly good job since becoming leader in November, compared with 15 per cent rating him very bad or fairly bad.
Mr Howard said it was clear that Mr Blair had to resign over his admission about the 45-minute claim. "I've been a member of a cabinet that took the country to war. I remember the kind of questions John Major used to ask and we all used to ask, and it's just absolutely extraordinary that the Prime Minister took this gravest of all decisions without bothering to ask that simple question."
Lord King, a former defence secretary and a past chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, said Mr Blair's admission was "quite extraordinary". He said: "The Prime Minister made a point in the dossier ... he said it is not possible to share intelligence with the whole country for obvious reasons and, therefore, as Prime Minister he had made it his duty, along with his colleagues, to be briefed in detail, so that they could set out the facts in that dossier," he told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
NOP interviewed 1,003 people by telephone between 4 February and 5 February. Results were weighted to be representative of the population.
-------- business
Nigeria Orders an Investigation of Halliburton Gas Payments
February 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/international/africa/07NIGE.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/international/africa/07NIGE.html?pagewanted=all
ABUJA, Nigeria, Feb. 6 - Nigeria on Friday ordered an investigation into allegations that a Halliburton subsidiary paid $180 million in bribes to land a natural gas project contract here. Vice President Dick Cheney was head of Halliburton at the time.
The allegations are already under scrutiny in the United States and France. Inquiries by the United States Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission were disclosed this week.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has ordered a "high-level investigation" into the allegations, a presidential spokeswoman, Remi Oyo, said here in the capital.
Ms. Oyo said the investigation was being led by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, a body Mr. Obasanjo set up to fight rampant breaches of financial law.
The $4 billion Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Plant was built in the 1990's by a consortium that included Kellogg Brown & Root, a unit of Halliburton. Cathy Gist, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, which is based in Houston, said that the Nigerian government had not notified the company of the investigation and that Halliburton did not have reason to assume any of its employees or those employed by the joint venture had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The act bars American businesses and individuals from bribing foreign officials.
Ms. Gist said the company would cooperate with investigations by United States officials.
Justice Department officials disclosed Wednesday that the department was reviewing documents voluntarily provided by Halliburton to determine whether to begin a full investigation.
Halliburton, already under fire for what the Pentagon says are overcharges in contracts related to the war in Iraq, revealed the Justice Department request in a filing on Jan. 21 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
"Management made the decision to include these statements because of the politically charged environment in which we now operate," Ms. Gist said. "We are trying to keep the investment community informed of the accurate facts about the company's business."
According to Halliburton's filing, the illegal payment allegations involve a joint venture of which K.B.R. was a 25 percent owner. The other partners were Technip of France, ENI of Italy and Japan Gasoline.
The filing says the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are reviewing the allegations. The payments for the gas plant contract were said to have been made to Nigerian officials.
-------- europe
French troops in Kuwait for regular war games
KUWAIT CITY (AFP)
Feb 07, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040207135334.qf8w4al9.html
Some 1,200 French troops have arrived in Kuwait to take part in war games with the emirate's forces aimed at boosting joint military operations, the French embassy here said Saturday.
Preparations for the land, air and naval exercises are due to be completed on Sunday and actual maneuvers, which also will involve 1,200 Kuwaiti troops from the three forces, will start on Monday, the embassy said in a statement.
Codenamed "Pearl of the West 2004," the war games will focus on boosting "interoperability ... in the conduct and execution of joint military operations," the statement added.
The exercises involving four Mirage-2000 aircraft, three warships and several Puma and Gazelle helicopters are the first since the US-led invasion of Iraq last year, but are not related to it as they were planned well in advance.
Kuwait and France, which signed a defence cooperation pact after the 1991 Gulf War, hold military exercises once every four years. Previous large-scale maneuvers were staged in 1996 and 2000.
Two French warships, Foudre and Edir, docked at Kuwait's Shuwaikh port Saturday to take part in the exercises. They will offload vehicles and equipment for the maneuvers.
The war games involve a live-fire exercise at Udairi Range in the Kuwaiti desert on February 23, the last day of the maneuvers.
-------- iraq
Lights Are Coming On, Slowly, in Iraq
Citizens Frustrated by Continuing Problems With Power Generation, Distribution
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20166-2004Feb6?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- During eight months of reconstruction work, occupation authorities in Iraq have tried to reverse decades of political favoritism by distributing electricity more equitably throughout the country. Iraq now generates slightly more electricity than it did before the war, and with this city of 5 million people no longer hogging the supply, many cities that had little power under Saddam Hussein are glowing again.
"Our policy is fair allocation across the nation," said Robyn McGuckin, the Coalition Provisional Authority's deputy senior adviser for electricity.
Getting the electricity flowing has been one of the occupation authority's top priorities, and the pace of the project has been one of the main sources of frustration for Iraqis.
Immediately after the war, the U.S. Agency for International Development assumed responsibility for overseeing reconstruction of Iraq's electrical grid and hired Bechtel National Inc. as the initial contractor to make repairs and add capacity. In August, the military brought in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to share oversight duties with USAID. The engineer corps picked Fluor Corp., Washington Group International and Perini Corp. to work on 26 projects around the country, and IPA Worldwide Services to buy generators.
Lt. Col. Joseph P. Schweitzer, director of operations for the Corps of Engineers, said commanders brought the corps in because of concerns "that we were going to lose the consent of the Iraqi people if we did not do something significant to improve the power generation."
The obstacles have been enormous, according to the engineers and contractors working in Iraq. Security ranks high on the list, as insurgents continually sabotage power lines and attack repair teams -- most recently killing two French subcontractors near Fallujah on Jan. 5.
But there are other problems as well: postwar looting by Iraqis, poor planning by Americans for the massive reconstruction, unrealistic expectations about how quickly things could be done, too little money and the state of disrepair of the entire electrical infrastructure.
"This is just the most amazing mess," said Clifford G. Mumm, a Bechtel executive supervising the company's work in Iraq. "But it's not unlike what people found when they went to East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell, or in Kosovo."
Col. Lem DuBose, commander of the Corps of Engineers mission in another key Iraqi sector -- oil -- said of the general state of industry here: "If Iraq was a used car, Saddam sold at the right time. Everything was falling apart."
The World Bank estimates that it will cost $12.1 billion to restore and improve the country's electrical capacity, more than twice what Congress appropriated last fall.
Mumm said it would be impossible to give Iraq all of the electricity it needs, at least in the short term. The country's entire power grid is technically capable of generating about 10,000 megawatts, but only about half of it works, Mumm said.
Occupation officials say they hope to give Iraq 6,000 megawatts of generating capacity -- the same amount of power that the city of Baltimore typically uses -- but a World Bank report says that goal "will be difficult to achieve without the addition of significant emergency generating plants." The occupation authority has no plans to install such plants, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office.
"Once the system is . . . back up, there is not an adequate distribution system," Mumm said. "Power in Iraq will be a long story."
At the same time, the overall condition of the system is gradually improving. With output surpassing prewar levels, the engineers have been able to shut down parts of the system for winter maintenance.
"Generating units at power plants are like vehicles in a small fleet," the occupation authority's McGuckin explained. "You have to change the oil and check the sparks every couple of thousand of miles -- in this case thousands of megawatt hours -- to keep things running well."
Brig. Gen. Steven Hawkins runs the Corps of Engineers efforts to restore electricity from a Baghdad mansion with a sweeping marble staircase and spectacular view of the Tigris River. Using $1 billion in Iraqi funds, the corps has restored five major power plants, erected 200 transmission towers and created a security force of 1,500 officers to guard oil facilities.
Hawkins said that, although he was still unable to meet the expectations of the Iraqi people, "it's better than it was. It's getting better every day."
For example, in the past few months, the southern port city of Basra has enjoyed uninterrupted power almost 24 hours a day. Before the war, it was getting only a few hours of power a day.
Engineers are working to route some of that electricity to Baghdad, where the power flickers on and off in three-hour intervals. But saboteurs keep attacking the transmission lines. Mumm said in some cases attackers have left signs reading, "Stop sending our power to Baghdad."
The result, he said, "is surplus generation in the south we're not able to tap."
But in Baghdad, many people say they cannot understand why it is taking so long to get power restored, especially when the Electricity Ministry began sending out power bills last month for the first time since the war.
"They want 350 Iraqi dinars," said Qasim Zubaidi, 35, who owns an exchange shop in the Karada district. "For what? For no electricity?"
Amar Sabah, 25, who owns an electrical supplies shop, said people have lost patience. "They are tired of this game," he said. "Saddam also used electricity to keep people busy with something to think of so that they'll not ask about other things."
Under Hussein, the system of electrical distribution was anything but democratic. "Thugs could threaten or bribe substation operators to withhold electricity from one area and provide uninterrupted electricity to other areas," said Lt. Col. Taras "T.J." Jemetz, who is in charge of the Corps of Engineers projects in central Iraq. "Saddam was known to punish residents of areas that fell out of his favor by withholding electricity to those areas."
To eliminate such favoritism, the Army engineers are installing a centralized computer system that will alert government officials if power at regional distribution points is disrupted. The new system was up and running last week at a refurbished substation in Baghdad.
"This does not eliminate the corruption aspect, but at least provides the capability to know that there is a problem," Jemetz said.
In dozens of interviews last month, engineers and contractors described the challenges they face every day.
Rockets and bullets rain down almost nightly outside the secured compound in Baghdad where the contractors and engineers live. They sleep on cots in palaces that have gold-plated faucets in the bathrooms, but no heat. They stay up late drinking nonalcoholic beer left over from the holidays and poring over plans to restore the electrical grid one transmitter at a time. Everyone is exhausted, red-eyed and dirty by the end of the day because there is so much work to do.
Rhett Hubbard, a civilian engineer for the Corps of Engineers, said that the security situation was so uncertain that he had adopted a 30-minute rule. A power plant operator back home in Portland, Ore., Hubbard is in charge of repairing electrical substations in Baghdad. When he visits the stations, however, he doesn't linger. "I try not to spend more than 15 to 30 minutes at a maximum," he said, adding that he has at least six bodyguards at each job site.
North of Baghdad, Bechtel and Fluor are finishing a power plant project begun under Hussein, whose government had purchased huge turbine generators with funds from the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program. The equipment sat in a neighboring country for two years and is only now being installed.
"Nothing is easy here right now," said Cecil Whitehouse, a civilian overseeing the project for the Army engineers.
When the project started in October, Whitehouse and his crew drove to the site from Baghdad every day, a risky commute. So in November, the corps and its contractors moved to the desolate site.
Just outside the perimeter of the plant, in the shadow of the massive transmission towers, Iraqis live in mud huts that have no electricity.
Muhamed Abdul-Jabbar, a project manager at the power station for the Electricity Ministry, said he initially didn't tell his friends or family that he was working with the Americans, fearing that he might be seen as a traitor. He has since changed his mind.
"I see suffering," he said in broken English. "Everywhere there was suffering. The American companies come here, and we want to increase electrical energy. Power is very good."
Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
--------
Cleric Denies Reports of an Attempt on Life
Iraq's Shiites Urged to Stay Calm
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20127-2004Feb6?language=printer
NAJAF, Iraq, Feb. 6 -- The office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential religious leader, denied Friday that the reclusive cleric had been the target of an assassination attempt and urged his followers to exercise "the greatest degree of caution" as they await a U.N. mission being dispatched to determine the feasibility of his demand for direct elections in Iraq.
The attempt on Sistani's life was reported by two security officials and a member of Iraq's Governing Council, who said the 73-year-old cleric survived an attack Thursday in this sacred Shiite Muslim city. On Friday, an influential Shiite Muslim television station in Lebanon, Al-Manar, reported that security guards had arrested a man as he attempted to burst into Sistani's office.
Details were sketchy, however, and others, including a leading Shiite Muslim party, Sistani's representatives and the U.S. military, had said Thursday that the report was wrong.
In a rare statement, which was issued late Friday, Sistani's office said reports of an attack were "incorrect in their totality and details."
Despite the denials, rumors continued to circulate that at least one guard was wounded, and one of Sistani's top security officials said four people had been detained. Another, however, recanted after confirming the attack a day earlier.
"There's no question he's safe and in good health," said the official, who identified himself only as Abu Abdullah. "But this report has no foundation in truth. You can imagine that it was no more than a dream."
Asked to explain the discrepancy, he answered, "It was a mistake."
The report of the assassination attempt comes at a sensitive time in Iraq's transition from the U.S. occupation. Sistani, who has emerged as a pivotal leader in Iraqi politics by virtue of his influence over the country's Shiite majority, has rejected a U.S. plan to choose a transitional legislature through a series of caucuses in Iraq's 18 provinces. He has instead demanded direct nationwide elections, a stand that drew tens of thousands of supporters into the streets of Iraq's two largest cities last month.
Both sides are now awaiting the findings of a U.N. mission expected to begin work within days. The mission, which Sistani has supported, is charged with determining the feasibility of holding elections and devising possible alternatives. While U.S. officials have said they are willing to revise the plan, they are reluctant to postpone a transfer of sovereignty scheduled for June 30.
In Najaf on Friday, some residents speculated that the reported assassination attempt was timed to the U.N. mission's arrival, and the statement from Sistani's office suggested that the ayatollah's followers were worried about a backlash.
"We stress the need of all citizens to observe the greatest degree of caution in everything concerning the political and security situation in these sensitive times," said the handwritten statement, which bore the stamp of Sistani's office. "We hope the international team will be provided an appropriate atmosphere to accomplish its work in a correct way."
Hours after the attempt on Sistani's life was reported on Thursday, there was confusion in Najaf, and residents said dozens of his supporters arrived at night at the alley leading to his two-story brick office to help guard him. The confusion was heightened by a local television report that congratulated Sistani on his survival. Two hours later, another report was aired denying an attack took place.
But by Friday, as Sistani's representatives issued denials that the incident occurred, virtually no one would speculate about it. In a country driven by rumors, the uniformity was a striking show of deference to statements by Sistani, who is known as the marja, or supreme religious authority, and whose words on personal and political matters carry the force of law.
"The people who live in Najaf obey every order from the marja," said Essam Kamil, 39, a merchant who once worked in Sistani's office. "If he says there's nothing there, then everyone says there's nothing there."
A current running through conversations, however, was dread over the implications of an assassination attempt. Some feared an exacerbation of feuds among Shiites, who make up three-fifths of Iraq's 25 million people. Others warned of ethnic and sectarian strife, worsened by the leadership vacuum Sistani's absence would create.
"Even if there was an attempt, we should not talk about it," said Ammar Djeili, who runs a bookstore on Prophet's Street, which leads to the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine and its throng of pilgrims. "It should be handled without attracting attention, without too many voices. It's a critical situation now in the country. They should treat the disease with silence."
For Djeili, the fear of strife was warranted.
"Everybody's asking, 'What happened? How is Sayyid Sistani's health?' " he said, using an honorific for Sistani that denotes his descent from the prophet Muhammad. "Some people are ready to bring guns to protect the sayyid. We're in a stage where we don't need chaos, we don't need disturbances."
A few minutes later, Zuheir Jawad, 49, a tribal elder, entered the shop, which is stacked with books nine shelves high.
"How's the sayyid?" Jawad asked.
"There's nothing," Djeili answered, shaking his head. "There's nothing."
"People are just now catching their breath," Djeili said afterward. "And now they hear that they tried to assassinate Sayyid Sistani? People need to breathe. They want to feel secure, and they want the society to feel stable."
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Air Strike Kills Boy in Gaza
February 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Gaza-Explosion.html
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- An Israeli air strike struck a car in Gaza City on Saturday, critically wounding the bodyguard of an Islamic Jihad leader and killing a 12-year-old boy, witnesses and doctors said.
Ten people were wounded, three of them critically, in the blast, which ripped apart the front end of a white Peugeot on a busy Gaza street. Some witnesses reported seeing a missile fired from an aircraft and heard Israeli warplanes in the sky around the time of the explosion. An army spokeswoman had no immediate comment.
Israel's military has routinely targeted Palestinian militants in air strikes throughout more than three years of fighting.
The blast critically wounded Aziz Mahmoud al-Shami, a top bodyguard and a cousin of Islamic Jihad leader Abdullah Shami, according to officials at Gaza's Shifa Hospital. The Islamic Jihad leader was not in the car.
Tarek Sousi, a 12-year-old boy on his way to school, was killed in the blast, doctors said.
Crowds of onlookers gathered around the wreckage of the car, which caught fire after the strike.
In the last Israeli air strike, on Dec. 30, a helicopter fired two missiles at a car carrying Hamas militants, wounding 11 people.
--------
Sharon May Move Settlers to West Bank From Gaza
February 7, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/international/middleeast/07MIDE.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Feb. 6 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may seek to move settlers from the Gaza Strip to settlements in the West Bank under his plan for "unilateral disengagement" from the Palestinians, officials in his office said Friday.
The idea underscores the fact that Mr. Sharon envisions a swap of sorts, giving up most of the Gaza Strip but holding on to large chunks of the West Bank.
Mr. Sharon argues that, with Tel Aviv in sight of some West Bank towns, Israelis would be in danger if Israel turned over the West Bank, which, like Gaza, Israel occupied in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
Palestinian officials contend that they could not build a viable state in Gaza and a West Bank broken up by blocs of Israeli settlements.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said any proposal to move settlers from Gaza to the West Bank "undermines the basic foundation of peace." He added, "The settlements in the West Bank are as much an obstacle to peace as the settlements in Gaza."
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Friday that Mr. Sharon would seek American approval to expand West Bank settlements that he will argue Israel is sure to annex as part of any eventual peace deal.
Successive American administrations have resisted Israeli settlement in the West Bank and Gaza as impeding peace. Under the road map, the peace initiative sponsored by the Bush administration, Israel is supposed to halt settlement growth, while the Palestinians are supposed to begin dismantling militant groups.
The peace initiative calls for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in 2005, defined by borders negotiated between the two sides.
But no substantive negotiations are under way, and Mr. Sharon argues that the Palestinian leadership has not proved a credible partner in bilateral arrangements or talks. Palestinian officials say Mr. Sharon is seeking to avoid negotiations for fear of having to yield too much territory.
Mr. Sharon says he will pursue his unilateral plan only once he judges that the road map has failed. His associates say his plan could go into action over the summer.
Ehud Olmert, the vice prime minister, said he told Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Thursday that Mr. Sharon's plan would not replace a deal creating a Palestinian state.
Instead, he told Israel Radio, "We see this as part of the implementation of the understanding acceptable to both us and the Americans." He called it a "station along the way" to a final agreement.
Mr. Sharon proposes evacuating up to 17 of the 20 Gaza settlements, as well as some isolated West Bank settlements. According to this plan, the barrier Israel is now building against West Bank Palestinians would separate the two populations.
About 7,500 Israeli settlers live in fortified enclaves in the Gaza Strip, among more than 1.2 million Palestinians. In the West Bank, about 230,000 settlers live in 125 settlements, among more than two million Palestinians.
-------- nato
At U.S. Urging, NATO Acts to Bolster Afghan Rebuilding Role
February 7, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/international/europe/07RUMS.html?pagewanted=all
MUNICH, Feb. 6 - NATO defense ministers agreed Friday to take specific steps to strengthen the alliance's reconstruction role in Afghanistan with an eye toward eventually taking over most of the security and rebuilding tasks in the country.
At a closed, three-hour meeting here, Britain, Italy, Turkey and Norway committed themselves to leading four of five new NATO teams of soldiers and civilians that will fan out beyond the capital, Kabul, and assist local authorities with security and rebuilding, a senior American official said. The Netherlands, Romania and Lithuania also indicated interest in contributing forces to the new teams, the official said.
The United States, Britain, New Zealand and Germany are now operating eight provincial-reconstruction teams, but Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top American officials have been pressing to create as many as 10 more before Afghanistan holds national and regional elections this summer.
"A number of countries volunteered to lead or participate in new provincial-reconstruction teams in Afghanistan," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters. NATO already fields a 5,500-member peacekeeping force in and around Kabul, which operates separately from about 13,000 American-led troops that are mainly focused on hunting down pockets of Al Qaeda terrorists and Afghanistan's former Taliban government.
But military commanders and diplomats have expressed concerns that since NATO decided in principle in October to expand its force beyond Kabul, its political commitments have outstripped its willingness to supply troops and equipment for the new missions.
NATO officials, for instance, fretted for weeks about whose troops would replace the German forces operating Kabul airport when Germany's tour there ends soon. After most nations declined, Iceland finally agreed to supply most of the necessary firefighters and airport specialists, although the mission is still short a handful of air traffic controllers, a senior NATO official said Friday.
David Pratt, the defense minister of Canada, which assumes control of the NATO peacekeeping force from Germany in the next few days, said in an interview that the alliance's effort to reach out into the Afghan countryside would require thousands of additional troops to ensure "that not only Kabul enjoys a high level of security but also some of the outlying areas in the north, in the south and in the east."
The new NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has said that the credibility of NATO is "on the line" in Afghanistan - its first mission outside the European Atlantic area - and he underscored Friday that "it's very important the political commitment NATO entered into be fulfilled."
That may be easier said than done. Since NATO decided in October to expand its force beyond Kabul, many nations have begged off sending more troops, citing other commitments. Some countries have even proposed hiring civilian contractors to fulfill their promises in Afghanistan.
This reluctance has frustrated NATO's military commander, Gen. James L. Jones, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, who has urged members to put up the additional troops as promised or scrap their ambitious plans.
-------- pacific
Iraq threat was limited, troops told
By Lindsay Murdoch
February 7, 2004
The Age (Australia)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/06/1075854063537.html
Australian troops fighting in Iraq were told in an official briefing days before entering the country that Saddam Hussein did not have the capability to launch weapons of mass destruction against its neighbours.
Roger Hill, Australia's most experienced weapons inspector, yesterday told The Age that Iraq had possessed the remnants of weapons of mass destruction but its ability to use them on the battlefield was "almost zero".
"There is no question Iraq possessed materials, documents and possibly products," Mr Hill said. "But it did not have the ability to conduct attacks on its near or regional neighbours," he said. "I told our troops that. I also told people in the other coalition forces. But I was a lone voice."
In March last year, shortly before the war, Mr Howard told Parliament: "We are determined to join other countries to deprive Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, its chemical and biological weapons, which even in minute quantities are capable of causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale."
Mr Hill said Australia should have had a closer look at the intelligence information it had received before committing troops to the US-led invasion.
Asked if the Australian Government was aware at the time of his assessment of Iraq's capabilities, Mr Hill said: "If they had asked me, I would have told them."
Mr Hill, who is widely acknowledged as Australia's top expert on Saddam's weapons programs, said that during the eight years he spent travelling to Iraq as a senior UN weapons inspector he was asked only once to brief officials in Canberra about the threat posed by Saddam.
The Australian Defence Force sent him to the Middle East to advise the 100-strong squadron of Perth-based SAS soldiers who conducted covert operations inside Iraq during the first weeks of the war. Mr Hill, a career army officer, had served in the SAS and led the last UN inspection team that went to Iraq in November 1998.
But none of Canberra's intelligence agencies asked for his assessment of the Iraq threat before the Government made its decision to send the troops.
Prime Minister John Howard yesterday left open the question of whether Australia would follow the US and Britain and have its own independent inquiry into the intelligence used to determine whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Hill was not asked to testify before a seven-member parliamentary committee that was set up last year to look into Australia's intelligence services. That committee's report is due to be released later this month.
Roger Hill in Jakarta
Mr Hill said most of Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons were destroyed or hidden before the war. But he said that Saddam did not have the missile systems to deliver them anyway.
"It is all very well having weapons of mass destruction, like a chemical round, but you still have to have the ability to deliver them," Mr Hill said. "They had not been able to bring the systems out of storage, to practise with them or to transport them," he said. "None of these sorts of things were functioning."
Mr Hill said the Government would be negligent if it did not hold an independent inquiry into the intelligence it received before the war, focusing on the quality of the information and obtaining a better understanding of the sources of information.
"Was there a conspiracy or was it just poor assessment? That is the issue," Mr Hill said. "I am still not sure."
Mr Hill said he did not believe there was any particular flaw in Australia's intelligence agencies, but that "it appears we got it wrong". He added: "But that is at this stage."
Mr Howard said this week that information that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was one of the principal justifications for sending Australian troops to war.
Only days before the invasion he said in a televised speech that the prospect Saddam could arm terrorists with weapons of mass destruction was a "direct, undeniable and lethal threat to Australia and its people".
Mr Howard had told Parliament several weeks earlier the Government had information that Iraq possessed both chemical and biological weapons and had the capacity to build a nuclear arsenal.
Mr Hill said after the first war in the Gulf Saddam set up a committee that arranged material on weapons of mass destruction to be hidden and ordered that no records be kept. "They will be digging up stuff for years to come. I guarantee it."
Mr Hill said the SAS soldiers he briefed days before they went to war would not have slept easier because of what he told them.
"When I say the Iraqis didn't have enough weapons of mass destruction to threaten any of their neighbours, that is true," Mr Hill said.
"But did they have enough to kill soldiers? Yes," he said.
The Australians played a pivotal role in the first strike on Iraq, launching a secret raid on Scud missile sites in western Iraq a day before US President George Bush declared the invasion had begun. The missiles had the capability to reach Israel but it is not known if they were able to be fired at the time.
-------- russia / chechnya
39 Die in Moscow as Bomb Goes Off on Subway Train
February 7, 2004
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/international/europe/07RUSS.html?pagewanted=all
MOSCOW, Feb. 6 - A bomb exploded inside a crowded subway train during the morning rush on Friday, killing at least 39 people and wounding more than 130. No one claimed responsibility for the bombing though senior government officials, including President Vladimir V. Putin, said they suspected that it was the latest in a series of terrorist attacks linked to the war in Chechnya.
The bomb, said to have been hidden in a backpack or bag, ravaged the second car of the train as it left the Avtozavodskaya station in southeast Moscow and headed toward the city's center at 8:45 a.m. The blast shattered the train's windows, rent its metal seats and bars and hurled bodies and body parts from the train.
Hundreds of passengers, some of them bloodied and dazed, had to stagger hundreds of yards through smoke-filled tunnels to reach safety. As they emerged, they described a scene of fear, confusion and carnage deep beneath the heart of the Russian capital.
"I saw five bodies near the tracks and some metal parts," said Anna Kolmykova, 51, who was riding two or three cars behind the one where the bomb went off. Police officers who happened to be in her car helped escort the survivors out.
"Those officers warned us about the bodies and pieces of metal so that we would not stumble," she said, her face smeared with black soot.
As is typical in such attacks, no one came forward to take responsibility, and it was not immediately clear if the explosives had been left on the train or if the blast was the work of a suicide bomber.
Mr. Putin, appearing with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan at the close of a previously scheduled visit, responded indirectly, as he did on Dec. 9 when a suicide bomber killed herself and five others in front of the National Hotel, only a few hundred feet from the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin called for an intensified international effort to combat terrorism. "It is the plague of the 21st century," he said in televised remarks.
Russia has endured a wave of terrorist bombings stemming from the long, devastating war in Chechnya, but never before has so deadly an attack struck the city's subway.
In his remarks, Mr. Putin blamed that wave of terror on Aslan Maskhadov, the separatist leader who served as the president of Chechnya from 1997 until the outbreak of the second war there in 1999.
Still, it is not clear who placed the bomb on the train, or whether it was a suicide attack. But it was clearly intended to inflict maximum bloodshed and exploit the darkest fears of Muscovites. The Metro, as the subway is called, is the world's busiest, with more than eight million passengers a day, normally a source of city pride.
"This makes me feel just awful," said Ilya Blokhin, 31, a doctor who was aboard the train. "If they are starting to blow up Metro trains, what is next?"
Mr. Maskhadov, the Chechen leader, has denied ordering attacks, and his chief envoy, Akhmed Zakayev, denounced the one on Friday in a telephone interview from London. Mr. Zakayev said Mr. Maskhadov could not control those in Chechnya who would organize attacks.
"These actions in Moscow against civilians are in no way of benefit to us," he said.
As he has before, Mr. Putin ruled out any talks with Chechen separatists, despite calls from Mr. Zakayev and others for a negotiated settlement. "Russia does not negotiate with terrorists," Mr. Putin said. "Russia eliminates them."
Mr. Putin's remarks - at once determined, but also indirect - appeared to have been intended to minimize any political damage from the continued violence and fear that gnaws at the country.
Mr. Putin, who rose to power as the second war in Chechnya unfolded, is seeking re-election on March 14. While he is universally expected to win, he finds himself presiding over a conflict that continues to exact a deadly toll far beyond the battered Chechen region, which is in the Caucasus area of southern Russia.
With the bombing on Friday, there have been 13 terrorist attacks in the last year, most of them suicide bombings. More than 260 people have died in the attacks, including at least 62 in Moscow.
Irina M. Khakamada, a former member of Russia's Parliament who has mounted a quixotic presidential campaign, said the Kremlin's military and political efforts in Chechnya, including a referendum and a presidential election in the region last year, had proved ineffective at ending the violence.
"The peace process that is under way is not guaranteeing people's security," she said in a radio interview on Ekho Moskvy.
As they have after each of the terrorist attacks here, officials announced that they had increased security at airports and at subway and railroad stations across Moscow and in other major cities, including St. Petersburg. But there appears to be little the authorities can do to halt the attacks, especially those carried out by bombers willing to die.
According to officials, witnesses reported seeing a man and a woman who appeared to be from the Caucasus, carrying suspicious bags. It is not clear whether the bombing was a suicide attack, but the authorities later released a composite sketch of the man, suggesting that he was not among those killed.
Some politicians called for tougher measures. Dmitry O. Rogozin, the new deputy speaker of parliament and a leader of the nationalist party Motherland, called for a state of emergency and suggested that next month's election be postponed. Without referring to Chechens directly, he blamed "an ethnic criminal community" with loyalists in Moscow.
"The enemy is here, inside," he told the Interfax news agency.
Officials warned that the death toll could still rise. By Friday night more than 110 people remained hospitalized, some with grave injuries. At Sklifosovsky Hospital, the city's main critical care center, a typed list of 36 of the wounded hung on the front door.
The bomb struck on the Zamoskvoretskaya Line, also known as the Green Line, which courses through the city center from northwest to southeast. At rush hour the subway is always packed, with passengers jostling shoulder to shoulder.
The force of the bomb - estimated at the equivalent of 11 pounds of dynamite - shredded bodies, complicating the grim task of counting the dead, let alone identifying them.
The survivors were evacuated from the stations between which the wrecked train was stopped, Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya, pouring out into public squares choked with ambulances and rescue workers. Ms. Kolmykova described passengers trudging out in darkness with their clothes and hair scorched, but said there had been little panic.
The bombing, though, struck a deep chord in her that went beyond simple fear. She said she wanted to emigrate to Italy, which she had visited recently, because Russia had become a country where normal, peaceful life was out of reach.
"I feel so offended for us, for our country," she said. "I want to emigrate not only because of fear. It is a complex of things. Just look at our pensioners. My mother is 77, she is sick and she has to beg for the medicines that she needs and that were prescribed. And in Italy I saw 90-year-olds happy, laughing and dancing."
-------- spies
Tenet Plans to Remain in C.I.A. Job
February 7, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/politics/07TENE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 - George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has agreed to stay in his post at least through the end of the year, according to three people close to him.
Mr. Tenet made the pledge in December after a personal appeal from President Bush, who had learned that the intelligence chief was thinking about stepping down, the people close to Mr. Tenet said. Mr. Bush even appealed to Mr. Tenet's wife, Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, by telling her that her husband's continued service was important to the country, the people said.
Mr. Tenet, who took office in 1997, has long told friends that he wanted to step down from his post. But Mr. Tenet has also told friends that he was not eager to leave at a time when the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the community are coming under criticism for their role in misjudging Iraq's stockpiles of illicit weapons.
Some members of Congress, including Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, have said that Mr. Tenet should resign or be fired because of the apparent misjudgments made by American intelligence agencies in providing prewar assessments about Iraq's illicit weapons.
But the White House has defended Mr. Tenet by saying that it is too soon to judge the extent of any intelligence failure on Iraq, and by noting that American intelligence agencies were not alone in having concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons at the time of the American invasion last March.
Though he was appointed by President Bill Clinton, Mr. Tenet has forged a close personal relationship with President Bush, and meets with him six mornings a week to provide intelligence briefings.
--------
'Business as Usual' at Plant That Tenet Says Was Shut
February 7, 2004
By RAYMOND BONNER and WAYNE ARNOLD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/international/asia/07MALA.html
SHAH ALAM, Malaysia, Feb. 6 - In his speech at Georgetown University on Thursday in defense of American intelligence gathering, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, claimed a clear, unequivocal victory against the black market nuclear proliferation network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan.
"Malaysian authorities have shut down one of the network's largest plants," Mr. Tenet said.
He was referring to the Scomi Precision Engineering installation here in Shah Alam, which made centrifuge components found on a ship seized last October on its way to Libya. His assertion was categorical.
Then he repeated it during the question and answer period after the speech, saying that "the Malaysian government has closed the facility."
But he appears to have been mistaken.
"It's business as usual," said Rohaida Ali Badaruddin, director of communications for the plant's parent, the Scomi Group, as she led a group of reporters, mostly Malaysian, through the clean, modern, air-conditioned facility on Friday afternoon. "We are still doing our manufacturing," she said, "milling, turning, cutting."
An American intelligence official said Friday that Mr. Tenet's claim was a result of an editing error.
The intelligence official said Malaysian authorities had indeed shut down the production of centrifuges within the Scomi facility. "That part of the plant that was producing centrifuge parts is not now doing it," the official said, adding that the error had been made by those who drafted Mr. Tenet's speech and did not reflect faulty intelligence.
Malaysian authorities said on Friday that they had taken no actions to shut down the plant, and plant officials said that nothing had been shut down, that it had reduced the number of employees because the contract for the centrifuge components had been filled last August.
There was also Mr. Tenet's description of the plant as one of the nuclear network's largest. That, too, seems as if it might have been inaccurate - unless the network itself was not very substantial.
At its peak, Scomi Precision Engineering, a two-year-old company, had 40 employees and less than $10 million in sales.
The parts seized on their way to Libya were "not very sophisticated, not very complicated," said Che Lokman Che Omar, the factory manager. "I have made more difficult parts many times before."
Many of the parts produced at the plant are "dual use" items, which means they have legitimate uses as well as illegal ones. If someone came along today and wanted parts like the ones halted on the way to Libya, the company could make them, Mr. Che Omar and Ms. Badaruddin agreed. And it might not have any reason to be suspicious.
Company officials were certainly not suspicious the first time around.
In 2001 a Dubai company, General Technical Industries, approached Scomi Group, a chemical, oil and gas trading and manufacturing company, with an order for 14 centrifuge components. The Dubai company was represented by a Sri Lanka native who lives here, B. S. A. Tahir. He told Scomi that the parts were for an oil-and-gas-company client of his, Scomi officials said.
Scomi was expanding and decided to use this opportunity to set up Scomi Precision Engineering to manufacture high-precision machine components, Ms. Badaruddin said.
Scomi and General Technical Industries signed a two-year contract, worth about $3.5 million, in December 2001, and operations began at a 33,000-square-foot site in the huge industrial park in this city some 15 miles north of Kuala Lumpur. The plant bought modern milling, turning and tooling machines from Britain, Japan, France and Taiwan.
It also needed the raw materials, and bought aluminum from a German company, Bikar Metalle, through its Singapore subsidiary Bikar Metal Asia, Scomi officials said.
As the investigation into the nuclear network has expanded, and Scomi's involvement has become publicly known, the Malaysian government has sought to shift the focus to its archrival Singapore. On Thursday, government officials told local journalists of Bikar Metal Asia's role in procuring raw materials, and on Friday the Singaporean connection was splashed on the front page of The New Straits Times, a major Malay daily controlled by the ruling party.
In Singapore on Friday, the managing director of Bikar Metal Asia, Thorsten Heise, confirmed that his company had sold aluminum tubes to Scomi Precision Engineering. But he said Bikar had had no idea what they were going to be used for.
Scomi officials, likewise, said they had had no idea where the components they were making were going to end up.
The last shipment to General Technical was last August, two months before the seizure of the ship and the start of the investigation. The company invited reporters to tour the plant to show that it had nothing to hide, Ms. Badaruddin said. The invitation was striking for its rarity in a region where corporate and public officials are usually unconcerned about public accountability.
It was in November that the C.I.A. notified Malaysian intelligence about the seizure of the parts headed to Libya, the Malaysian police chief said on Wednesday.
But no investigators contacted the company until Malaysian officials did so two weeks ago, Mr. Che Omar, the plant manager, said. No one from the C.I.A. or any other American entity has been to the plant or talked to company officials, he said.
Raymond Bonner reported from Malaysia for this article, and Wayne Arnold from Singapore. Douglas Jehl contributed reporting from Washington.
--------
INTELLIGENCE
Agency Alert About Iraqi Not Heeded, Officials Say
February 7, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/politics/07INTE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 - An Iraqi military defector identified as unreliable by the Defense Intelligence Agency provided some of the information that went into United States intelligence estimates that Iraq had stockpiles of biological weapons at the time of the American invasion last March, senior government officials said Friday.
A classified "fabrication notification" about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A. to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information.
Because the warning went unheeded, the officials said, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles.
Intelligence officers from the D.I.A. interviewed the defector twice in early 2002 and circulated reports based on those debriefings. They concluded he had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress, the officials said. That group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who had close ties to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, had introduced the defector to American intelligence, the officials said.
Nevertheless, because of what the officials described as a mistake, the defector was among four sources cited by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council last February as having provided "eyewitness accounts" about mobile biological weapons facilities in Iraq, the officials said. The defector had described mobile biological research laboratories, as distinct from the mobile biological production factories mounted on trailers that were described by other sources.
The intelligence about the mobile facilities was central to the prewar conclusion that Iraq was producing biological arms, senior intelligence officials have said. No such arms or production facilities have been found in Iraq since the war, and David A. Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, has said he believes that Iraq never produced large stockpiles of the weapons during the 1990's.
Soon after the invasion, American troops in Iraq discovered suspicious trailers that were initially described by the Central Intelligence Agency as having been designed as factories for biological weapons. But most analysts have since concluded that they were used to make hydrogen for military weather balloons.
Dr. Kay reported in October that American inspectors had found "a network of laboratories and safe houses controlled by Iraqi intelligence and security services" that contained equipment for chemical and biological research. But American officials have not described any discovery of the mobile laboratories described by the Iraqi major.
In his speech at Georgetown University on Thursday, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, provided the first hint that the prewar intelligence on Iraq had been tainted by evidence previously identified as unreliable.
Apparently alluding to the Iraqi military defector, Mr. Tenet said intelligence agencies had "recently discovered that relevant analysts in the community missed a notice that identified a source we had cited as providing information that, in some cases was unreliable, and in other cases was fabricated." Mr. Tenet went to say, "We have acknowledged this mistake."
In interviews on Friday, intelligence officials described the episode as a significant embarrassment. They said the information provided by the defector had contributed significantly not only to the National Intelligence Estimate but to Mr. Powell's presentation to the United Nations last Feb. 5.
"He was either making it up or he heard somebody else talking about it," one intelligence official said of the information the defector had provided, "but he didn't know what he was talking about." The official said the notification circulated by the D.I.A. had advised other agencies "that the information that this guy provided was unreliable."
In a related matter, the intelligence officials acknowledged that the United States still had not been able to interview two other people with access to senior Iraqi officials, and whose claims that Iraq possessed chemical and biological stockpiles were relayed to American officials in September 2002 by two foreign intelligence services.
-------- un
Annan Warns U.S. Will Face Doubts
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20114-2004Feb6.html
UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 6 -- The U.S. failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has heightened international skepticism over the quality of American intelligence and may complicate efforts to use it in the future to build a case for action against outlaw regimes, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Friday.
"The bar has been raised," Annan said during a break in a U.N. conference on financing the reconstruction of Liberia. "People are going to be very suspicious when one talks to them about intelligence. And they are going to be very suspicious when we try to use intelligence to justify certain actions."
The U.N. chief's statement underscored the potential damage the questionable intelligence the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq is having on U.S. credibility at the United Nations. It coincided with a visit by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who traveled to the United Nations to rally support for the reconstruction of Liberia and to pledge $200 million in U.S. support for the effort.
In a Feb. 5, 2003, appearance before the U.N. Security Council, Powell delivered a vigorous case for military action, arguing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. On Monday, he told The Washington Post that he did not know whether he would have recommended the invasion if he had been told Iraq had no banned weapons.
But Powell defended the U.S. case for war Friday, noting that the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate, which provided the basis for his 2003 presentation, "represented the best judgment we could make at the time."
Powell also offered a strenuous defense of President Bush's decision. The president's action "was totally justified by the information that he was provided," he said. The "one thing we don't have to worry about now is whether there are any weapons of mass destruction or a Saddam Hussein in Iraq to use them," he said.
"I don't think any apologies are necessary," he added. "We said that this was a regime led by a dictator who had every intention of keeping his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs going, and anyone who thinks he didn't is just dead wrong. And there is no evidence to suggest that that was an incorrect judgment."
--------
Annan: Intel Woes Affect U.S. Credibility
February 7, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Intelligence-Doubts.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan says he believes questions about U.S. intelligence on Iraq will make people ``very suspicious'' about future claims. Secretary of State Colin Powell disagrees.
President Bush has come under increasing criticism over the U.S. failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- the prime U.S. justification for the war. The issue surfaced last month with the resignation of top U.S. weapons hunter David Kay, who said Saddam's purported weapons didn't exist at the time of the U.S. invasion.
Annan and Powell, in separate news conferences, disagreed Friday on the long-term effects of the intelligence controversy.
``There has been some damage -- damage that will probably take some time to heal,'' Annan said at an international donors conference for Liberia. ``People are going to be very suspicious when one talks to them about intelligence. And they are going to be very suspicious when we try to use intelligence to justify certain actions.''
Powell strongly defended U.S. intelligence, saying Saddam had every intention of keeping Iraq's weapons programs going ``and anyone who thinks he didn't is just dead wrong.''
``There is no evidence to suggest this was an incorrect judgment,'' he insisted.
Saddam had used weapons of mass destruction in the past and it was clear that, if given the opportunity, he would use them in the future, Powell said. He also had the infrastructure, and the dual-use facilities.
``We knew that he was working on these matters. What we weren't sure of and what we ... couldn't be absolutely sure, was the nature of his stockpiles. And so it's the stockpile question that we are still examining,'' he said.
Powell came to the United Nations a year and a day after he presented the U.S. case for war against Iraq to the Security Council. On Thursday in Washington, CIA Director George Tenet gave his first public defense of prewar intelligence, saying U.S. analysts never claimed before the war that Iraq posed an imminent threat.
Tenet said analysts had varying opinions on the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and those differences were spelled out in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate given to the White House. That report summarized intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
Powell said the prewar intelligence available to the United States and other countries was solid.
``I don't think any apologies are necessary,'' he said.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who met with Powell in New York, expressed sympathy for the Bush administration's predicament saying, ``everyone knows we are working with the kind of information we have.''
But Annan said he believes ``the bar has been raised'' on what is required to convince people, whether domestically or internationally.
Annan cautioned, nonetheless, that people who use intelligence must be ``very, very careful as to the quality of the intelligence and perhaps be extra careful to check with other sources to make sure that it is solid.''
The secretary-general also expressed President Bush's appointment of a bipartisan commission to examine intelligence on Iraq's weapons. ``I think is a step in the right direction,'' Annan said.
-------- us
Armor From Home
Amid Shortage of Gear, Some U.S. Soldiers Must Equip Themselves
By Keith Garvin,
Feb. 7, 2004
ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/iraq_equipment_040207.html
WASHINGTON - Pene Palifka, a proud and protective mother, worries about her son, Billy, a specialist with the National Guard deployed in Iraq. She reads his letters home almost daily.
"I just can't wait for him to come home," she said. "We'll celebrate that day."
Concerned about her son's safety, Palifka recently spent $1,100 of her own money on armored chest plates to protect him and others from enemy fire.
"[By] purchasing something for my son, then that means hopefully somewhere down the line somebody else that's overseas will have adequate equipment," Pene Palifka said.
It's become an almost routine practice for deploying troops and their families.
Despite efforts to produce more vests with the armored plates, the Pentagon says there still aren't enough, especially among guardsmen and reservists. All troops rotating out of Iraq are now being required to leave their vests behind so incoming troops can use them.
'We ... Buy It Ourselves'
Many active-duty troops also are spending money on other equipment.
One group of Marines due to leave for Iraq bought goggles, backpacks, magazine pouches and gloves. It's better than their issued equipment, they said, and worth their hard-earned cash.
"They gave us the stuff that we need, but we need more as well," Marine Sgt. Nick Medina told ABCNEWS last month. "So we go ahead and buy it ourselves."
Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has introduced a bill calling for the government to repay the families of troops who buy their own gear.
"It's time to step up and do the right thing and reimburse all those individuals, who because of the care and concern that they have for our men and women overseas, their loved ones have gone into their pocket to assist them," Larson said.
Whether she gets reimbursed or not, Pene Palifka says the price she paid for her peace of mind was worth it.
--------
Sex Attacks Prompt Pentagon Inquiry
February 7, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/politics/07INQU.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has ordered an investigation into Pentagon measures to prevent sexual assaults within the ranks after a spate of reports of male troops abusing servicewomen in Iraq and Kuwait, officials said Friday.
"Sexual assault will not be tolerated in the Department of Defense," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a memo asking for a report and recommendations within 90 days.
The Pentagon said it had received reports of 88 cases of "sexual misconduct" in the past year from the command region that extends from Iraq and the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. Eighty cases were reported by the Army, seven by the Air Force and one by the Marines. The incidents involved American military personnel attacking one another, and most involved women being assaulted by men.
--------
Inquiry Ordered Into Attacks on Female GIs
Sexual Assaults Are Alleged Overseas; Women Say Treatment Is Lacking
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20254-2004Feb6.html
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has ordered a high-level investigation into reports that several dozen female service members deployed in Kuwait and Iraq have been sexually assaulted and denied adequate medical care and counseling, the Pentagon said yesterday.
"Commanders at every level have a duty to take appropriate steps to prevent sexual assaults, protect victims, and hold those who commit offenses accountable," Rumsfeld said in a memorandum to David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.
In the memo, released by defense officials, Rumsfeld directed Chu to report back within 90 days on how the Defense Department handles reports of sexual assaults in the combat theater and whether adequate treatment and care are being provided.
Rumsfeld also directed Chu to determine whether private channels for reporting sexual assaults have been established by units in Kuwait and Iraq.
"We are responsible for ensuring that the victims of sexual assault are properly treated, their medical and psychological needs are properly met, our policies and programs are effective, and we are prompt in dealing with all issues involved," Rumsfeld said.
A total of 88 cases of sexual misconduct have been reported by the military services over the past year in the Central Command area of operations, which includes Kuwait and Iraq. The Army has reported 80, the Air Force seven and the Marines one.
One senior officer who recently returned from the theater said most of those cases involved fraternization between male and female service members, not sexual assaults.
Rumsfeld issued the memo on sexual assaults in response to a Jan. 25 article in the Denver Post that said that more than three dozen female service members, victimized by sexual assaults in Iraq, Kuwait and elsewhere, had sought rape counseling and other assistance upon returning to the United States, according to one defense official.
The newspaper said most of the victims contacted the Miles Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Newtown, Conn., that focuses on instances of sexual assault, sexual harassment, child abuse and domestic violence in the U.S. military.
Kate Summers, the foundation's director of victim services, said yesterday in an interview that Miles had worked with 38 female service members who said they had been sexually assaulted in Kuwait and Iraq, including 12 who reported the assaults to military authorities.
"They have ranged from misdemeanors to felonies," Summers said of the 38 cases, noting that 75 to 80 percent of them involved alleged rapes or attempted rapes.
"What we have seen is that there has not been access available to [appropriate] medical care," Summers said. "In some of the cases, the victim's only access to any type of medical care would have been a medic or a corpsman."
Summers said that in a number of cases, women have been "re-victimized" through the filing of charges against them for adultery or fraternization.
One of the 38 cases involves a 23-year-old sergeant from the 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division who alleges that she was knocked unconscious, bound and gagged, and then raped at Camp Udairi in Kuwait on Nov. 28 as her unit awaited deployment to Iraq. The soldier, traumatized and angered by the way she was treated by Army officials after the assault, later attempted to commit suicide by overdosing on antidepressants.
Rep. Joseph R. Pitts (R-Pa.) began investigating the case after the soldier's mother, a constituent, contacted his office in December and said that she had been unable to get in touch with her daughter after the assault. "We basically facilitated a conversation between mother and daughter," said Derek Karchner, Pitts's press secretary, and made sure that the Army was giving the soldier adequate care. The soldier was then sent back to the United States for further care, he said.
The soldier's mother called the memo "long overdue" and said last night in an interview that the Army has been "very unprepared" to either care for her daughter or apprehend her attacker.
"It's just ludicrous, the lack of empathy that military personnel display," the mother said. "Today, she's not doing well, and she's a strong girl. This did not have to happen. You have to have faith in your military, and for her to be violated by one of our own -- it's hard to explain [my] feelings about that."
In releasing Rumsfeld's memo, defense officials said commanders are expected to take action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice in cases of alleged sexual misconduct and sexual assaults. Military reporting procedures can be formal or informal, written or oral, and do not require the formal filing of a complaint, they said.
"It's a serious thing," one defense official said of the reported sexual assaults. "The secretary wants to get to the bottom of it, and he wants Undersecretary Chu to get to the bottom of these allegations."
-------- propaganda wars
Distinguishing Neocon Commentary from Drivel
by Kim Petersen www.dissidentvoice.org
February 7, 2004
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb04/Petersen0207.htm
How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! how horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite.
-- Voltaire
Charles Krauthammer is a Washington Post contributor awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his "distinguished commentary." His recent offering, "Calling Iraq's Bluff," would be better distinguished as drivel. The title itself says it all. In what way was a disarmed Iraq, dissected by no-fly zones, supposed to be bluffing?
Some attempt had to be made to overcome the reddish glow of neocon embarrassment following weapons inspector David Kay's inescapable admission that there weren't any of the WMD that President George Bush and his cabal insistently pronounced were in Iraq. Krauthammer diverts attention to an assertion about "WMD-related activities." The Bush cabal decided upon an invasion of Iraq not based on "WMD-related activities" but because they claimed to know Iraq had the real WMD and they knew where they are!
Krauthammer's article is replete with obfuscation and shifting goalposts? The invasion was predicated on the known possession of WMD and not on "U.N.-prohibited and illegally concealed activities." This reasoning applies much more to another renegade Middle East state. Israel is an undeclared nuclear power in serial violation of all kinds of UN Security Council resolutions and the US, and most of the western world by default, pathetically support this racist state spawned from ethnic cleansing and an ongoing slow-motion genocide. Can hypocrisy get much worse?
Then the neocon henchman Krauthammer asks us to suspend skepticism with two erroneous statements. He claims there was an intelligence failure. The politicians are absolved of fault. Oh really! That is why the neocons set up their own intelligence wing -- the Office of Special Plans (OSP)? That is why Vice President Dick Cheney and Congressional has-been Newt Gingrich were repeatedly turning up at the CIA headquarters not so subtly encouraging intelligence reports amenable to the neocon agenda? That is why the OSP relied on Iraqi National Congress members, which the CIA considered to be dubious sources?
Second, are we supposed to believe that the neocons are victims? And more egregiously, victims of that wily fox Saddam Hussein? Is Krauthammer really crediting Hussein with having outfoxed the vaunted US intelligence? (Was it really a spiderhole in which Saddam Hussein was discovered or a foxhole?) For Krauthammer it was all one big bluff game where everybody was bluffing each other. Over 10,000 Iraqi civilians died based on the supposed inability to read Saddam's poker face and the neocon acceptance of flawed intelligence.
In likelihood, Kay has presented a report every bit as deceitful as the Hutton whitewash was for UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. We are asked to trust Kay, who had hitherto insisted on the existence of WMD in Iraq, and disregard the fact that UNSCOM investigator Scott Ritter had been warning ever since UNSCOM was pulled out of Iraq by the US (and not kicked out by Saddam as the mendacious corporate media prefers to report) that Iraq was "fundamentally disarmed." This makes Krauthammer out to be either ignorant or a liar when he states, "When the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, they assumed that the huge stockpiles of unaccounted-for weapons still existed."
Why should we believe reports carried out by government-appointed flunkies? Heck, Bush even tried to appoint the paragon of impartiality, Henry Kissinger, to initially head the 9-11 inquiry.
Even if "Bush was relying on what the intelligence agencies were telling him," does that absolve him of responsibility? He self-admittedly dodges reading reports because he avers it is better to get his information from reliable, objective sources. Is he not choosing his own objective sources? If so then where does the buck stop? How many people have to take the fall for Bush? Does he have no responsibility for the team he assembled or the people he keeps in place around him? No heads have fallen for an aggression clearly based on a false pretext. Thousands of people have died for a mistake and the blame is brazenly pushed on the repository-for-all-things-evil-or-untoward: Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless it is easy enough to cook up new post-hoc pretexts and justifications. There is always the fall back of ends-justifying-the-immoral-means.
Krauthammer oleaginously tries to play both sides of the fence. He accuses Saddam of "concealment of both the weapons and their possible destruction." Which is it? Are there WMD or were they destroyed? Kay has stated that there are none. Krauthammer agrees by calling it a colossal intelligence failure but he tries to keep alive the possibility that they do exist. This is so transparently disingenuous that it is a wonder if he retains an ounce of credibility.
How is Saddam Hussein supposed to prove that missiles that once existed no longer exist? It had already been researched by Ritter's team and accounted for the inability to categorically state that Iraq was 100% disarmed. Krauthammer offered no solutions to this question.
The commentary only gets worse if one is able to read further. Krauthammer berates Iraq for being unstable when Bush took office. How stable can a country be when it strains under UN sanctions labeled as "genocidal" by UN humanitarian heads who quit in disgust, where reportedly 6000 Iraqis were dying a month, and an outbreak of genetic disorders were reportedly occurring against the backdrop of a depleted uranium-littered landscape?
Krauthammer's twists the known facts when arguing that the US forces were required in the "garrisoning of Saudi Arabia." What threat was the declawed -- and sanctions -- wracked Iraq to Saudi Arabia or to anyone else for that matter, much less the globe's only superpower? After being bloodied in Kuwait why would Saddam further want to incur the forces of empire again, especially in his much-weakened form? Russian satellite-photos from the earliest phase of the Persian Gulf Slaughter had exposed the US administration lie that Iraqi tanks and troops were poised on the border ready to invade Saudi Arabia.
The perpetual and risible attempts to tie in al Qaeda with Saddam further sully Krauthammer's integrity.
Krauthammer claims there were only two choices: "The United States could have either retreated and allowed Hussein free rein -- or gone to war and removed him." This ignores that fact that Shiites in the South and Kurds in the north has risen up against Saddam following his defeat in 1991 but George Bush Sr. had chosen instead to allow Saddam to crush the revolt encouraged by then US administration figures; but in the end it was decided better the devil the US knew than the one the US didn't. The Shiites and Kurds were crushed. Anyway, what gives the US the right to arrogate unto itself the choice of which dictators will fall and which will stand? Why did the US cozy up to dictators like Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Marcos, and why does it currently appease despots like the corrupt Saudi regime and Karimov in Uzbekistan? It reeks to someplace high in the firmament of hypocrisy.
How can such neocon drivel be taken seriously?
Kim Petersen is a writer living in Nova Scotia, Canada. He can be reached at: kimpetersen@gyxi.dk.
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The Intelligence Commission
February 7, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/opinion/07SAT2.html
President Bush's new commission to review why the intelligence on Iraq misfired looks more like an effort to deflect attention until after the election than a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of the Iraq fiasco. Though dignified and bipartisan, the members lack the technical expertise to really unravel what was wrong with American intelligence and suggest how to fix it. And Mr. Bush withheld the mandate to get at the big political question they could answer: Did the administration hype intelligence to increase support for the war?
The co-chairmen are appropriately of opposite parties: Charles Robb, a Democrat who married Lyndon Johnson's daughter and went on to be elected as governor and senator in Virginia, and Laurence Silberman, a Republican and retired appeals court judge who was a Reagan appointee. The other five members include Senator John McCain, a maverick Republican known to speak his mind; Lloyd Cutler, who was legal counsel for two Democratic presidents; Richard Levin, president of Yale University; and Patricia Wald, a liberal who was chief judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. The only appointee with a deep knowledge of intelligence gathering is Adm. William Studeman, a former deputy director of central intelligence.
This group lacks the stature and name recognition that would give its findings commanding credibility. Worse yet, it looks as if Mr. Bush, who chose not to allow a truly independent panel, will limit its mandate to a review of intelligence gathering and analysis. He has given the panel the authority to examine why the prewar estimates of Iraq's weapons stockpiles differ from what has been found and to evaluate intelligence on weapons programs in other countries. Mr. Bush did not ask the panel for an unfettered look at how his administration had presented the intelligence in making the case for war. By dodging that, the president leaves voters to find their own answers.
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Security, Terror, and the Psychodynamics of Empire
by Stephen Soldz
ZNet
February 07, 2004
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=4948
[Talk delivered at the Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice forum, "The Psychodynamics of Empire," Cambridge, MA, Feb. 6, 2004]
On September 11, 2001, the United States experienced a massive terrorist attack that killed some 3,000 people. To put this event in perspective, remember, the United Kingdom experienced the latest IRA terror campaign for over two decades. Italy experienced the Red Brigades for at least a half-dozen years along with a variety of right-wing terrorist groups. Many Latin American countries have experienced terrorism of left and right, along with state terror, often supported by the United States, killing tens to hundreds of thousands in several countries. Iraq has been through three wars and over a decade of sanctions resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the impoverishment of a once thriving country. And, in the last 25 years, several African countries have experienced the terror of civil wars resulting in the deaths of millions.
Further, European countries have millions of Muslim immigrants potentially responsive to increased Islamic extremism and people in these countries are far more likely to experience domestic unrest associated with Islamic fundamentalism. Yet, many American citizens feel that we are uniquely the victims of Islamic-inspired terror and are entitled to exact retribution in whatever ways our leaders claim will make our country safer. Norms for behavior between nations, international law, and other institutions that inhibit war have been shredded by the world's dominant superpower, the United States. The possibility that the end of the cold war would result in a safer world has been surrendered by many Americans without a fight.
From near the beginning, American ideology has claimed a unique status for America. As former President Reagan described it, America is a "Shining City On a Hill," borrowing from Jesus' description of Heaven in the Sermon on the Mount. Thus, in Reagan's view, the U.S. was akin to Heaven. Further, it was shining, not necessarily because of what we do, but because of who we are. And, as the Bush administration has made abundantly clear, the rest of the world had better recognize our superiority.
America, as we were taught, is a country where those who work hard succeed. It is a beacon of opportunity. And the boom years of the 1990s showed that many, without extraordinary talent, could become, at least temporarily, very wealthy. Those who didn't share this wealth often felt inferior in some way. We also learn from our earliest years that America is the most generous nation on earth, despite devoting far less of its wealth than most other industrial countries to foreign aid, or to aid to the domestic needy, for that matter.
Americans, like our President, are notorious for our lack of knowledge and lack of interest in the views of people of other countries and other cultures. Remember Freedom Fries? In clinical jargon, we describe those who feel that they should be treated special because of the type of person they are, and who lack empathy for others, as "narcissistic." Thus, America exhibits a kind of social narcissism. In recent years psychoanalysts have learned that narcissism is accompanied by pervasive, yet disowned, fear, shame, and hostility.
The writer Tom Engelhardt did a quick analysis of President Bush's recent State of the Union speech. Here's what he found:
In the first half of the speech, the words "terror" or "terrorists" were used 14 times; some form of "kill" ("killers," "killed," "killing") 10 times; war 7 times; and that doesn't count the various stand-ins for war or warlike actions ("aggressive raids," "attack," "offensive," "patrols," "operations," "battle," "armored charges," "midnight raids," "on the offensive," and the slightly more opaque "pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the Greater Middle East," a favorite phrase of our vice president as well); "weapons" was used 8 times (usually in the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" or "of mass murder," or in one case in the extraordinarily convoluted phrase, "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities"); "threat" appeared 4 times, "hunting" or "manhunt" 3 times; "capture" 3 times; ditto "tracking"; "plotting" four times; "danger" in some form four times including "ultimate danger"; some form of the word "violent" three times; "thugs" twice; some form of "enemy" 3 times.
This analysis suggests that the President and his speech writers think that talk of terror and danger would appeal to the millions of Americans whose votes are needed to reelect him this November. When we psychoanalysts hear someone talking and feeling repetitively about some perceived aspect of the outer world, we make the assumption that, whatever its external truth, this repetitive perception reflects something about that individual's inner world as well. Thus, consistent with the view of American superiority as having strong elements of narcissism, we might conclude that Americans are feeling overwhelmingly insecure and afraid.
Why might this be? Surely the events of September 11th were quite a shock to many of us. Throughout much of its history, the continental United States has been impervious to the wars and strife that have convulsed much of the rest of the world. Not since the War of 1812 have we been invaded. Wars were things fought in foreign territory and invasion was something we did to others, as witness Panama, Grenada, Haiti, and Iraq in recent years. While there has always been a degree of domestic terrorism, most white people in this country have not feared it on a daily basis. Even the shock of the Oklahoma City bombing didn't change this.
Yet Americans have been insecure and afraid for a long time. While a few made it spectacularly in the 1990s, most workers experienced nearly stagnant incomes, incomes that became threatened when one's job, or even profession, disappeared. Job security is largely a thing of the past. In a dramatic illustration of this, the political scientist Jacob Hacker found that the instability of family income has increased 500% from 1972 to 1998. This means that families today are far more likely to have a severe downturn in their personal economic fortunes than they were 30 years ago.
Especially lost or at risk are good-paying blue collar jobs, those unionized positions in auto and steel factories that paid enough to support a family. Most of those jobs are overseas now, and many white-collar professional jobs are rapidly headed that way. So not only are families more prone to economic catastrophe, but they are less likely to recover to prior levels. Even we psychoanalysts and other psychotherapists, along with doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, have experienced the managed care juggernaut.
When a downturn hits, far more than in any other industrialized country, workers in the United States are on their own. We are the only such country without near universal health insurance. We pride ourselves on our medical system, twice as expensive per capita as any other on earth, but have a dreadful child mortality rate, and are not at the top in life expectancy. Our unemployment insurance and pension systems are abysmal compared to those in most other industrial countries. The social safety net is being shredded daily. And trust, that most basic of social bonds, has dropped precipitously. From 1960 to 2000, the percentage of people who believes that "most people can be trusted" dropped from around 55% to approximately 35%, and down to 25% among high school students.
Additional insecurity comes from the radical transition in gender roles. At least in ideology, until recently the public sphere was dominated by men, who were in charge and to be obeyed. And women's roles, while circumscribed, were also well-defined. No more. Men have lost some, though not all of their authority. And their role as the head of family is especially threatened by the increased job insecurity. Women, in turn, are expected to remain their children's primary caretaker and continue to carry much of the burden of homemaking while also successfully pursuing a career. So they worry about their children and about their job at the same time. Further threats to the family include the lurking possibility of divorce disrupting our very sense of who we are. And now the very definition of marriage is under question.
So what happens when you live in the Greatest Nation on Earth, that Shining City on a Hill, and you feel threatened with loss of job, security, and your role in the family? A sense of inadequacy, shame and humiliation. "If I can't make it, there must be something wrong with me." Furthermore, feeling inadequate and shameful in such a wonderful country is itself shameful, setting up a reinforcing cycle. When offered an external enemy, an other, to blame and fear, is it any wonder that many grab at the opportunity. An external enemy is far safer.
Those Islamic terrorists who killed 3,000 of us are not the greatest threat the average person faces. But, those in charge talk of the terror from the other, THEM, those Islamic terrorists (or is it Saddam Hussein, the secular Baathist, oh well, it's THEM). In the dichotomized world view, if they are the bad ones, the repository of evil, we can be good. The shame and rage we feel do not have to be acknowledged. It's not because of my inadequacy as a worker, a spouse, or a parent that I feel afraid of what will happen or angry at "the way things are."
At least the boss firing you isn't one of THEM, though the worker taking your job may well be. If we are angry and afraid for our children because their schools stink since the tax base that supported them has been eroded through the massive tax cuts for the rich, well, it's ok, because at least we're fighting THEM. And THEY will be after us forever. We psychoanalysts call this projection. We disown our own rage and attribute it to the other. We then do not consciously feel threatened by the rage and what it implies about us, as it is justified by the hostility of the other. It's ok to hate THEM, the ones who want to kill us.
The linguist George Lakoff argues that people have two contrasting models of family structure in their minds. One model emphasizes parents as nurturers whose role is to cooperate with their spouse to take care of their children and teach the children to take care of others in turn. The other model, the patriarchal model, features a strict authoritarian father who portrays the world as dangerous and strives to protect his family from this danger, using moral authority and strong punishment. Lakoff argues that most people have both models available, and circumstances cause one or the other model to become activated. While Lakoff's model may be somewhat simplistic, it provides a useful way of thinking about what is happening now.
The fear, anxiety, and sense of failure despite our best efforts that many Americans experience - especially in this, the best country in history - and the accompanying shame, help activate the strict father model. The existence of an enemy out to destroy us leads people to believe we need a strong leader, an all-wise father-figure to protect us. Enter President Bush with his jump suit and cod piece. The President can take out his six-guns and get the Evil Ones "dead or alive". As Tom Engelhardt's analysis of the State of the Union speech suggests, President Bush is a master at increasing the sense of fear and insecurity, so as to activate this strict father model, with him as the indispensable father, of course. When this model is activated, the existence of a strong leader can make us feel safe. But if that leader is seen to have feet of clay, or worse, we may be left defenseless. Hence, we are likely to ignore scandal in times of perceived crisis in order to feel safe. To see the leader as weak, or a liar, or manipulator only increases the sense of danger.
Now we psychoanalysts have also discovered an extension of projection called projective identification. In projective identification, a person who has projected his or her hostile impulses onto another gets that other to act in ways that can be perceived as consistent with those projections. "See! They are out to get me! I was right to punch them in the face!" Thus, the U.S. defies the will of people in virtually all countries of the world and invades Iraq on a trumped-up pretext. As Iraqis resist occupation by the Shining City on a Hill, we feel, "See! They really are a danger! We can't leave now or they'll think we're weak, the murderous bastards." And so we show our love through Operation Iron Hammer. U.S. troops surround a village with barbed wire and demand that residents show an ID card, in English only of course -- "This fence is here for your protection," reads the sign posted in front of the barbed-wire fence. "Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be shot." -- and the commanding officer says: "This is an effort to protect the majority of the population, the people who want to get on with their lives." But we understand what THEY need: "You have to understand the Arab mind," Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. "The only thing they understand is force -- force, pride and saving face."
Or, as it was so succinctly put by Colonel Sassaman: "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them."
So where does this leave us? I want to end with a suggestion of hope. When psychoanalysts are faced with projective identification, they use the feelings induced in them -- the analysts -- to understand what is being disowned in the projector. At the same time, analysts strive to not act destructively on these feelings, not to fulfill the role the Other is assigned in the enactment, but rather to control, to modulate it, and to reflect it to the projector, so as to gradually allow that person to reduce their projection, to accept the disowned feelings and impulses as their own.
In a similar way, social criticism and protest, when successful, can act as a mirror for a society, allowing people to see and gradually reincorporate their disowned wishes and impulses. This is more likely to occur when the demonstrators succeed in avoiding becoming the Other, but can be seen as part of the social self, as the best of US, rather than as an infiltration of THEM into the body politic. This helps explain the remarkable success of protest at certain moments, and the ability of nonviolence to sometimes change empires.
This perspective also indicates the danger in being perceived as outsiders, as part of THEM. Supporters of the status quo, of course, seek to portray social critics and protesters as THEM. As Attorney General Ashcroft testified to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on December 6, 2001:
"to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists -- for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."
What I'm suggesting, in contrast, is that "people of good will," through talk and through action, can help a society to see itself more clearly, to accept its flaws and seek to remedy them, and to become more accepting of the wishes and interests of others. In George Lakoff's terms, this would activate the nurturant family model. The alternative is for our society to continue with an unsuccessful attempt at exterminating evil, an attempt that always fails, and fails at great cost to the self and to others. Given modern technology, those costs may include the end of human civilization as we know it. We must learn how to fulfill this mirror role more effectively if we are to have a human society to hand on to our children.
Stephen Soldz (soldzs@bgsp.edu) is a psychoanalyst and is Coordinator and a founding member of Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice. He is on the faculty of the Institute for the Study of Violence at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He maintains the IRAQ: Occupation and Resistance Report website.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Bush Sets Panel on Intelligence Before Iraq War
February 7, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/politics/07PREX.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 - President Bush created a bipartisan commission on Friday to investigate the quality of the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war and to address problems posed by weapons proliferation. He gave the panel until March 2005, well after the November elections, to submit its conclusions.
Mr. Bush selected Charles S. Robb, the former Democratic senator and governor from Virginia, and Laurence H. Silberman, a Republican appeals court judge who was named to his job by President Ronald Reagan, as chairmen of the commission.
The president named an eclectic group to serve on the panel, including Lloyd N. Cutler, a former confidant of President Bill Clinton, and Senator John McCain, Mr. Bush's bitter rival for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. Only one, Adm. William O. Studeman, a former deputy director of central intelligence, brings extensive professional experience in intelligence matters.
Mr. Bush had strongly resisted the idea of appointing such a panel. He relented last weekend, however, under pressure from both parties, as the inability of American inspectors to find evidence of illicit weapons in Iraq emerged as a political liability.
In a hastily arranged appearance in the White House briefing room on Friday afternoon, Mr. Bush said the commission will "look at American intelligence capabilities, especially our intelligence about weapons of mass destruction."
Along with a speech on Thursday by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, Mr. Bush's decision to name the panel represents an implicit acknowledgment that the prewar intelligence assessment that Iraq possessed illicit weapons may have included serious misjudgments.
With the panel not due to report its findings until March 2005, the naming of the commission may also help Mr. Bush to deflect election-year questions about why and how the administration and the intelligence community misread the Iraqi threat. But the panel's lack of experts in the murky world of intelligence gathering drew some immediate criticism.
"These are certainly prominent and well-respected Americans," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency. "But it is in my view unfortunate that there are no former cabinet officers, no former commanders in chief and no former senior ambassadors on the panel. This is a group that has limited experience in dealing with intelligence and foreign policy at the highest levels."
On the campaign trail and in Congress, Democrats swiftly questioned whether the panel appointed by Mr. Bush would delve sufficiently into whether the president and his top aides misused intelligence in building a case for war against Iraq.
Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, issued a statement saying that "I still believe we need a comprehensive, genuinely independent inquiry to provide our troops and all Americans the answers they deserve."
Others named to the panel include Richard C. Levin, the president of Yale University, and Patricia M. Wald, a Democrat who is a former appeals court judge who left the court to sit on an international tribunal investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
Two other members of what will be a nine-person group will be named later, Mr. Bush said.
In a written statement on Friday night, Mr. Robb said he looked forward to conducting "an independent review and assessment" of intelligence efforts.
In a separate statement, Judge Silberman said, "The country and the president must maintain confidence in the intelligence community, and I will do all I can to serve that goal."
American intelligence agencies are already under scrutiny from the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are examining their work on Iraq, and from the Congressionally appointed commission that is looking into the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Some of those inquiries may be completed before the presidential election in November.
Even so, the commission's extensive mandate gives its review of American intelligence agencies the potential to be the most significant since the inquiry completed in 1976 by the Senate select committee headed by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho.
Mr. Bush said the panel would be allowed complete access to intelligence agencies and to the work of the Iraq Survey Group, which is continuing its hunt for weapons in Iraq. He said it would seek "to figure out why" prewar intelligence about Iraq's illicit weapons had not yet been confirmed by facts on the ground.
More broadly, Mr. Bush said, the group "will examine intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and related 21st-century threats and issue specific recommendations to ensure our capabilities are strong." He said its work would include a look at intelligence on weapons programs in North Korea, Libya, Afghanistan and Iran. Mr. Bush did not mention Pakistan, which has emerged as the base for a black market for nuclear weapons materials.
The Church committee, which looked into abuses involving intelligence activities and recommended reforms for the future, was composed almost entirely of senators with extensive experience in intelligence matters, including Mr. Church, then the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, John Tower of Texas, Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee and Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota.
The White House said over the weekend that the new commission would include people with extensive experience as producers and consumers of intelligence, and it had widely been expected in Washington that its members might include former directors of central intelligence or national security advisers.
But in naming two judges and a lawyer to the panel, Mr. Bush may have been acknowledging the intersections between intelligence and the law in a time in which individuals, rather than countries, have increasingly emerged as American foes. Judge Wald was a candidate to become attorney general in the Clinton administration.
Among other members, both Mr. Robb and Mr. McCain have served on Congressional committees that oversee intelligence agencies within the military and the intelligence community. Mr. Levin, the Yale president, is an economist and Rhodes scholar who attended Oxford University with Mr. Clinton and was President Bush's first overnight guest at the White House.
Mr. Bush created the commission by executive order, a step that deprived Congress of a role in choosing its members. A draft of the order that was released by the White House on Friday night said the commission would examine "whether American intelligence agencies are sufficiently authorized, organized, equipped, trained and financed to identify and warn in a timely manner" and able to support American responses to "the development and transfer of knowledge, expertise, technologies, materials, and resources" associated with illicit weapons and related threats of the 21st century.
--------
Bush Names Commission On Iraq Data
President Concedes Analysis May Have Been Flawed
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20286-2004Feb6?language=printer
President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that some prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons stockpiles may have been wrong, and he named a seven-member commission to investigate the nation's intelligence operations.
Bush had resisted such a commission until pressure intensified from members of both parties. He called for a report and recommendations by March 31, 2005, which is four months after he faces voters in the general election and two months after he leaves office if not reelected.
The chairmen will be former U.S. senator and Virginia governor Charles S. Robb, a Democrat who served on the Senate intelligence committee until his defeat in 2000, and Laurence H. Silberman, a federal appeals court judge and Republican who was deputy attorney general under presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford.
The most sensitive part of the commission's charge is to study the information about Iraq that was available to the White House before the war, in an effort to determine whether an intelligence failure contributed to Bush's as-yet-unproved assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Bush, looking grim in a hastily scheduled afternoon appearance in the White House briefing room with Robb and Silberman, cited a statement by former U.S. weapons hunter David Kay in pointing out that "some prewar intelligence assessments by America and other nations about Iraq's weapons stockpiles have not been confirmed."
"We are determined to figure out why," Bush said. "We're also determined to make sure that American intelligence is as accurate as possible for every challenge in the future."
Robb, son-in-law of former president Lyndon B. Johnson, and Silberman will be joined by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.); Lloyd N. Cutler, White House counsel to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; Yale University President Richard C. Levin; Patricia M. Wald, former chief judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; and retired Adm. William O. Studeman, former deputy director of the CIA and director of the National Security Agency.
Aside from Studeman, none of the commission members has significant intelligence experience, intelligence experts said. Studeman is a member of the Defense Science Board, which has been looking at ways to increase the Pentagon's role in intelligence gathering and operations.
Loch K. Johnson, a political science professor at the University of Georgia and an authority on the CIA, said he is disappointed the panel members "have not been deeply involved in contemporary intelligence issues."
"Where are the people who know about intelligence but have no axes to grind or institutional biases to reflect?" he said. "I don't see those people there."
Bush said the commission will look into the weapons programs of North Korea and Iran, two other secretive countries that have expressed nuclear ambitions. He said the panel will also examine intelligence on past threats posed by Libya and Afghanistan.
Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi agreed in December to surrender his weapons of mass destruction, and investigators have since discovered he had an extensive nuclear program that went largely undetected by Western intelligence agencies.
"The commission I have appointed today will examine intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and related 21st-century threats and issue specific recommendations to ensure our capabilities are strong," the president said.
Democrats attacked Bush's decision to appoint all the members, instead of allowing Congress to name some of them as Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and others have urged in recent days.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said Bush's handpicked appointments "to investigate his own administration . . . creates the appearance of a cozy inside job." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called it "a commission wholly owned by the executive branch investigating the executive branch."
Bush pushed the due date for the commission's report until more than 13 months from now because, aides said, he did not want the probe to become embroiled in election-year politics. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced a similar commission this week and called for its report by July.
Concerns over intelligence gathering have become a central theme of the presidential campaign, with Democratic contenders challenging Bush's conclusions about Iraq's weapons capabilities.
The formation of the commission came a day after CIA Director George J. Tenet gave a speech at Georgetown University in which he defended U.S intelligence gathering and said that although CIA analysts made mistakes about Iraq, they never said the nation posed an "imminent threat."
A Republican official involved in the commission's selection process said yesterday's announcement was part of a White House "strategy to seize the initiative on this issue -- part defense, but partly trying to get to higher ground again" since Kay's statements last month after he resigned as head of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan declined to answer a question yesterday about accountability for prewar intelligence, saying he did not want to "prejudge" the commission and the continued work of the Iraq Survey Group. "The president, obviously, will look forward to the work of the independent commission," McClellan said.
Republican sources said Vice President Cheney, whose allegations about Hussein helped build support for the war with the public and on Capitol Hill, vetted possible panel members. "He was very involved," a friend said. Cheney talked privately with McCain about serving even before the White House acknowledged it was considering a panel, the sources said.
The selection process appeared troubled, especially for a White House that prides itself on efficiency. The commission was to have nine members and was to be named earlier this week. Bush named seven and said he would fill two other slots later.
Robb did not have his first conversation with the White House until 8:30 a.m. yesterday, Democratic sources said. The sources said Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), a former speaker of the House, turned down an invitation to serve on the panel. A call to Foley was not returned.
Bush signed an executive order creating the panel, formally known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The order said the panel will "examine the Intelligence Community's intelligence prior to the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom and compare it with the findings of the Iraq Survey Group and other relevant agencies or organizations concerning the capabilities, intentions, and activities of Iraq relating to the design, development, manufacture, acquisition, possession, proliferation, transfer, testing, potential or threatened use, or use of Weapons of Mass Destruction and related means of delivery."
The order said the commission will have an executive director and other staff.
Staff writer Dana Priest contributed to this report.
-------- courts
Court rejects effort to ban foods that contain hemp
Saturday, February 07, 2004
Seattle Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2001852840&zsection_id=268448413&slug=ndig07&date=20040207
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court in San Francisco yesterday rejected a government effort to ban the sale of bread, protein powders and other foods made from hemp, the psychoactively benign botanical cousin of marijuana.
The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals undercuts an attempt to halt domestic consumption of hemp launched by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in October 2001.
The decision leaves unresolved the bigger battle over the federal government's prohibition on domestic agricultural production of hemp, which can be used for everything from paper production to car parts. Currently, hemp products and foods are produced from seed, oil or fiber imported from other countries, such as Canada, where harvest is not prohibited.
Unlike smoked cannabis, hemp contains only trace amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the chemical that produces the "high" sought by the pot users.
The three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit ruled that the DEA maintains regulatory authority over smoked marijuana and synthetically derived THC, but not over food that contains hemp. Officials at the DEA and Justice Department declined to comment.
-------- prisons / prisoners
2 More Detainees at Guantanamo May Face Tribunals, Pentagon Says
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20287-2004Feb6.html
The Pentagon yesterday named a Sudanese and a Yemeni as the third and fourth detainees at the U.S. Navy prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who could soon be tried before military tribunals, and assigned them military lawyers. They join another Yemeni man and an Australian detainee who also have been designated as potential defendants.
Air Force Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, a military defense lawyer, was detailed to represent Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan, and two other Pentagon defense lawyers -- Navy Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel and Army Maj. Mark Bridges -- were assigned to represent Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen.
The military provided no information about either detainee. Like the first pair of detainees, who already have been assigned military lawyers, neither of the prisoners named yesterday has been charged with a crime. Officials said detailing a defense attorney to an inmate indicates the time probably is approaching for the prisoner to be charged before a military tribunal or "commission," as the Pentagon calls the proceedings.
The Australian inmate, David Hicks, was the first to have a lawyer named to his case, and sources said the Pentagon wants him to be the first taken before a tribunal. Military officials hope Hicks will plead guilty in a plea agreement, the sources said.
Last month Hicks's military attorney, Marine Corps Maj. Michael Mori, said the tribunals "will not provide a full and fair trial." He declined to talk about any plea discussions.
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift has been named to defend Yemeni detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan.
Two other detainees who are in an initial group of six deemed eligible to stand trial are British citizens. But they have not been provided lawyers, suggesting they could be tried later, if they are tried at all. The British government, a close ally of the Bush administration, is protesting a number of the tribunals' rules.
Last month, the five military defense attorneys -- Mori, Swift, Shaffer, Sundel and Bridges -- filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court contending that tribunal defendants would be thrust into a legal "black hole" and that the lack of civilian review of convictions gives President Bush "monarchical" powers. They filed the document in connection with a case that asks the Supreme Court to allow civilian courts to review the detentions of Guantanamo Bay prisoners. The government's position is that the Guantanamo Bay facility is outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Clean-burning wind
February 07, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040206-084204-2374r.htm
"Wind power puffery" (Commentary, Wednesday) by H. Sterling Burnett is a confusing and often misleading diatribe against the wind industry.
In his most confusing argument, Mr. Burnett appears to say the following: All of our energy can't be provided by wind energy; therefore, we need fossil-fuel power plants. Because we also need fossil-fuel power plants - which cause a lot of pollution - we should include some of the pollution from fossil-fuel power plants when we calculate the pollution caused by wind farms. Wow. How's that for logic?
The simple fact is that a unit of energy produced by wind is far less polluting than the same unit of energy produced by a conventional power plant. As the percentage of energy produced by wind energy in the United States grows, we pollute less.
Some other points:
Mr. Burnett would have us believe that a lot of stupid people are wasting money on wind projects. Does he really think investors like to lose money? Wind energy is not too expensive. At many locations, it is the cheapest fuel. That is why smart companies are investing a lot of money and building wind farms.
Wind production is subsidized partially by the U.S. government. However, fossil fuels also are subsidized, and the market costs of fossil fuels do not include the indirect cost to society of the pollution they generate. On a level playing field, wind is economically competitive. Rapidly improving turbine technology will make it more so in the future.
Mr. Burnett also appears to say that wind energy should not be supported because there are some people who dislike the aesthetics of wind farms. Wind obviously is not appropriate for all sites, but I'm sure Mr. Burnett agrees that we cannot cancel all projects that have any dissenters.
Mr. Burnett grossly exaggerated the past problem of birds interacting with wind turbines. Also, new, larger turbines going into service move much more slowly, and birds can easily avoid the blades.
Wind energy is growing rapidly because it is economical as well as less polluting.
Of course, we still need fossil-fuel power sources, but in many cases wind is the best solution. To not promote and fund wind power would be both shortsighted and bad economics.
JOSEPH DEELY Santa Clara, Calif.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Nobles: Water whistle-blower Seema Bhat.
February 07, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040206-084154-9290r.htm
Drip . . . drip . . . drip. The data kept accumulating. District home after District home kept turning up with higher than expected concentrations of lead in the tap water. It was higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) limit of 15 parts per billion - sometimes far higher. Miss Bhat, the water quality manager of the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority (WASA), was aware of the problem, but she couldn't make anyone else pay attention.
She kept trying to convince supervisors to take action. They ignored her. So she went to the EPA. Her superiors responded by enrolling her in a course designed to teach her to respect the chain of command. Miss Bhat still persisted in releasing information about the problem. In March 1999, her supervisors plugged the leak by firing her.
The whole situation came flooding out this week, alarming residents and angering the D.C. Council and Mayor Anthony Williams. Of the over 6,000 homes tested last summer, over 4,000 had lead contamination in excess of EPA limits. Over 2,000 of them had lead concentrations of over three times EPA limits.
WASA will now have to start replacing the approximately 23,000 lead water service lines in the District. Miss Bhat won't be supervising the cleanup: Although she won a lawsuit for wrongful termination, WASA has appealed. Residents concerned about lead contamination can call (202) 787-2783.
For constant drumming about the contamination in D.C. tap water, Miss Bhat is the Noble of the week.
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