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NUCLEAR
Tabletop Fusion Reported Again
AP: Pakistan Knew of Nuclear Black Market
UN watchdog to continue investigating Iran nuclear program
U.S., Iran Clash as U.N. Opens Key Nuclear Review
U.S. Blasts Allies Over Iran Nukes
Top Iraq Nuke Scientist Seeks UN Probe
ElBaradei: N.Korea Set Dangerous Nuclear Precedent
US Troops Should Go Under Atomic Deal - N.Korea
North Korea's Nuclear Tests in Pakistan
Russia to recycle weapons-grade uranium from Libya: IAEA
Russia Brings Back Weapons Uranium from Libya
Ohio Nuclear Plant Can Reopen, Agency Says
Ohio Nuclear Plant Can Reopen, Agency Says
Potential nuclear waste dump by Savannah River
Bush Hindering Probes, Kerry Says
MILITARY
Afghanistan: Abuses by U.S. Forces
For More Afghan Women, Immolation Is Escape
U.S. Rebuked on Afghans in Detention
Zimbabwe seizes 'US plane' with military gear
China presses EU to lift arms embargo
US Navy, Marines hold manoeuvres in Albania
federal contracts
Kerry: I'd have sent Aristide US troops
Gunfire Kills 5 During a March in Haiti Capital
Statement From Aristide
The Master Operator
Deal struck on Iraq constitution
Iraqis Sign Interim Constitution After Shiites Drop Objections
Shiites Agree to Sign Iraqi Charter
At Least 14 Palestinians Killed in Firefight in Gaza
14 Palestinians Killed in Battle as Israelis Raid Camps in Gaza
After Haiti, Venezuela is wary of US interference
Military Spending Sparks Warnings
Foreign Crises Stretch U.S. in Election Year
Shifting Sands and Shifting Plans
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Relatives of Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay Tell of Anger
ENERGY
New Mexico Embraces Renewable Energy
Panel scrutinizes energy
OTHER
Dozens Treated After Chemicals Leak in Antwerp
Mine's Pollution Fund Is Focus of Federal Agencies' Duel
Duel to the Death Inside HIV-Infected Cells
-------- NUCLEAR
Tabletop Fusion Reported Again
Science Notebook
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A08
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39128-2004Mar7.html
Scientists who met widespread skepticism two years ago when they claimed to have achieved tabletop fusion say they have repeated and expanded the feat -- with much better measurements to confirm it. They did it by exposing a canister of liquid to neutron pulses and simultaneously bombarding the liquid with sound waves, causing tiny bubbles to implode at pressures and temperatures comparable to those in the interiors of stars.
Nuclear engineer Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, of Purdue University, said his "sonofusion" device cost less than $1,000 and in the short-term could probably be engineered as a cheap source of neutron emissions for use in portable detection devices.
But Taleyarkhan cautioned that they were far from the coveted "break-even point," when the energy produced by a fusion reaction exceeds the energy needed to cause it -- a milestone that could allow fusion to become the world's primary source of electric power.
This time, Taleyarkhan led a team from several institutions, used a more sophisticated apparatus and subjected the research to more independent reviewers. Results are to be published in Physical Review E.
The researchers filled a thermos bottle-sized glass canister with chilled acetone made with deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen containing one proton and one neutron. The team exposed the liquid to a pulse of neutrons every five milliseconds, while at the same time hitting it with sound waves. The neutron pulse caused tiny cavities to form in the liquid, while the sound waves expanded the cavities, then contracted them suddenly, with tremendous force and a flash of light. The implosion created temperatures of 10 million degrees Celsius and pressures equivalent to 1,000 Earth atmospheres, the researchers said.
This caused deuterium atoms to fuse, while the liquid emitted neutrons, gamma rays and atoms of tritium, another hydrogen isotope. All are characteristic of fusion reactions, Taleyarkhan said.
-- Guy Gugliotta
-------- india / pakistan
AP: Pakistan Knew of Nuclear Black Market
March 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Black-Market.html?pagewanted=all&position=
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- U.N. investigators are increasingly certain Pakistan government leaders knew the country's top atomic scientist was supplying other nations with nuclear technology and designs, particularly North Korea, diplomats told The Associated Press.
While rogue nations were the main customers of the nuclear black market, sales of enriched uranium and warhead drawings have fed international fears that terrorists also could have bought weapons technology or material, the diplomats said.
The investigation has widened beyond Iran, Libya and North Korea -- the identified customers of the network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan -- they said, speaking on condition of anonymity in a series of interviews.
The diplomats' assessment comes about half way through the probe by the International Atomic Energy Agency and western intelligence services into the Khan network, whose tentacles extended from Pakistan to Dubai, Malaysia, South Korea, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Britain, the Netherlands and beyond with potential ties to Syria, Turkey and Spain.
Investigators told AP they expect to complete the probe by June, eight months after U.S. officials confronted the Pakistani government with suspicions about Khan, setting into motion events that led the father of Islamabad's nuclear program to confess last month.
Despite denials by the Pakistani government, investigators now are certain that some, if not all, of the country's decision makers were aware of Khan's dealings, especially with North Korea, which apparently helped Islamabad build missiles in exchange for aid with its nuclear arms program, said one diplomat.
``In all cases except Pakistan, we are sure there was no government involvement,'' he said. ``In Pakistan, it's hard to believe all this happened under their noses and nobody knew about it.''
The diplomats didn't say which parts of the Pakistani government might have known of Khan's black market activity - military, political or both.
Andrew Koch, of Jane's Defense Weekly, said he ran into evidence that senior military officers knew of Khan's sideline four years ago when he attended a military technology exhibition in Karachi. There, the booth of A.Q. Khan's Research Laboratories, complete with pamphlets offering uranium enrichment equipment, shared space with displays of electronics, anti-tank missiles and other items sold by the government defense industry, he said.
``I picked up the (Khan) brochures and I inquired whether everything inside was for sale and was told, 'yes, of course, it all had government approval and was available for sale and export,''' he said from Washington.
Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, has insisted his government was not involved.
``The Pakistani government has never and will never proliferate,'' he told a meeting of world leaders in January in Davos, Switzerland, pledging to prosecute all ``anti-state'' elements found culpable.
But his pardon of Khan led to speculation the scientist agreed to keep silent on any government involvement in exchange for avoiding punishment.
Much of what was sold were expensive and high-tech uranium enrichment centrifuge components to Libya -- which has confessed to trying to build weapons of mass destruction -- and Iran, which denies such ambitions and says its enrichment plans are not for warheads but nuclear power.
Such equipment would be useless to terrorists lacking the space and expertise needed to set up thousands of centrifuges in series and repeatedly recycle isotopes until they were weapons grade. The tens of millions of dollars needed to buy the equipment might also be a deterrent.
But the diplomats identified two recent discoveries -- traces of highly enriched uranium apparently of Russian origin found in Iran, and drawings of a nuclear warhead surrendered by Libya -- as representing a potential fast track for terrorists looking to build a weapon.
The uranium apparently was sold by individuals in the black market and not by the Russian government and carried a signature typical of enrichment in the former Soviet Union, the diplomats said. While short of the 90 percent weapons level, it was enriched enough to make it suitable for a warhead with much less equipment and effort than needed to enrich natural uranium.
``We're talking a couple of dozen centrifuges, as compared to about 1,000,'' said one diplomat.
The engineers' drawings of a nuclear weapon, now under IAEA seal in the United States, were of Chinese origin. The texts accompanying them were in both Chinese and English, some handwritten. China is widely assumed to have supplied much of the clandestine nuclear technology that Khan used to establish Pakistan as a nuclear power in 1998.
With such high-tech drawings and about 50 pounds of highly enriched uranium, nuclear experts associated with terrorist groups could make a crude warhead, said one diplomat.
``The simplest way to go about it is to get ready-made nuclear material and weapons design, and -- from what's been found in Iran and Libya -- both seem to be available on the market,'' said another.
Investigators cannot say whether other countries -- or groups -- have the drawings.
Al-Qaida has shown an interest in acquiring nuclear weapons.
The U.S. federal indictment of Osama bin Laden charges that as far back as 1992 the al-Qaida leader ``and others known and unknown, made efforts to obtain the components of nuclear weapons.''
Bin Laden, in a November 2001 interview with a Pakistani journalist, boasted of having hidden such components ``as a deterrent.'' And in 1998, a Russian nuclear weapons design expert was investigated for allegedly working with the Taliban allies of bin Laden.
Another question is whether the Khan network supplied states other than Iran, Libya and North Korea. Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman of the Vienna-based IAEA, said answering that was the agency's ``No. 1 priority.''
A possible suspect is Syria, which denies nuclear weapons ambitions. U.S. officials are divided on whether Syria constitutes a nuclear threat, with Undersecretary of State John Bolton at odds with senior intelligence officials who insist there's no clear evidence implicating the country, diplomats told AP.
Several teams of Syrian experts spent time at Ranstad Mineral, a Swedish plant that extracted uranium for enrichment between 1997 and 2002. The IAEA confirmed sponsoring some visits, as part of Syria's small-scale peaceful nuclear program. But Bengt Lillja, owner of the plant, said the Syrians paid several visits later on their own -- and still later, Sweden's nuclear watchdog agency ordered the plant shut down because of unspecified irregularities in the extraction process.
Experts suspect more covert manufacturing operations will be discovered beyond the centrifuge parts plants identified in Malaysia.
A factory in Turkey is being scrutinized, one diplomat familiar with the investigation said, but declined to go into details beyond suggesting the plant might also be making missile components.
David Albright, a former Iraq nuclear weapons inspector who runs the Institute for Science and International Security, also pointed to Turkey, saying, ``We know some components (to Libya) came out of there.''
A diplomat said a company in Spain also was under investigation.
Associated Press reporter Susanna Loof contributed to this report from Stockholm.
-------- iran
UN watchdog to continue investigating Iran nuclear program
VIENNA (AFP)
Mar 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040308191709.p6ilrhkb.html
The UN nuclear watchdog said Monday it would continue probing charges Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons despite Tehran's insistence the investigation should end as it has fully disclosed its atomic activities.
As the watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, began a board of governors meeting in Vienna, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters that both Iran and Libya "have been in breach of their obligations under the safeguards agreement" of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
"In view of many years of violation of non-proliferation obligations by Libya and Iran, I am asking for the provision of information and a full measure of transparency," he said.
Responding to Tehran's call Sunday for the IAEA to close its file on Iran's nuclear programme, ElBaradei said "that depends very much ... on the kind of cooperation we hopefully will continue to receive from Iran."
The United States charges that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons, but Tehran maintains its nuclear program is strictly peaceful.
US ambassador to the IAEA Kenneth Brill said Monday that Iran was changing its story in order to hide a continuing nuclear weapons program from investigation by the IAEA.
"The fact is the Iranians change their stories to fit the facts," Brill said.
Diplomats said the United States was trying to get the IAEA board to adopt a tough resolution condemning the Iranians for hiding sensitive technology and insisting on a "trigger mechanism" for the matter to go before the UN Security Council, which could impose sanctions, if more violations are discovered.
But Europeans and other countries, led by Britain, France and Germany, resist this as they want to encourage Iran's cooperation with the IAEA.
The so-called Euro 3 had struck an agreement in October for Iran to cooperate with the IAEA. The three states advocate a tactic of "constructive engagement" with the Islamic Republic.
"The US text is not balanced. Washington acts as if nothing positive has happened since November" despite Iran's allowing wider inspections by the IAEA, one diplomat said.
ElBaradei told the 35-nation IAEA board that he was "seriously concerned that Iran's October declaration did not include any reference to its possession of P-2 centrifuge designs (for making enriched uranium which could be weapon-grade) and related RD (research and development) which in my view was a setback to Iran's stated policy of transparency."
ElBaradei said "this was particularly the case" since the October declaration was trumpeted by Iran as providing "the full scope of Iranian nuclear activities" including "a complete centrifuge R and D chronology."
But Iran's ambassador to the IAEA Pirooz Hosseini told reporters Tehran did not say everything in a report last October "because what we announced at that time was based on our obligations under the safeguard agreement" of the NPT.
In December, Iran signed an additional protocol to the NPT allowing for wider inspections and Hosseini said that "according to the time line of the additional protocol, we are going to provide every information which is necessary for the agency."
Brill said senior Iranian officals had said the October report would be "full, complete and represent total transparency."
"When it was proved that was not the case, that the Iranian declaration was neither correct nor complete in very significant ways" then the Iranians "changed their story and said we didn't mean it was going to be full and complete," Brill said.
The IAEA board is expected to report Libya to the UN Security Council for previous non-compliance with the NPT but praise it for its current cooperation in eliminating weapons development programs.
A Western diplomat said that Libya was "almost done in revealing its nuclear program" and the non-compliance declaration would merely be a "pro-forma" way of closing the chapter with no threat of sanctions against the North African country.
--------
U.S., Iran Clash as U.N. Opens Key Nuclear Review
March 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iaea.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The United States accused Iran Monday of constantly changing its story about its nuclear activities, and the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog rejected an Iranian call to stop investigating the country.
Iran said it was the victim of a ``war of propaganda'' over its nuclear program, which it insists is purely for generating electricity but which Washington says is geared toward building an atomic bomb.
The clashing statements came as governors of the U.N. watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), opened a meeting at which they will vote on resolutions on Iran's and Libya's previously undeclared nuclear programs.
Disagreement centered on Tehran's failure to mention, in a declaration late last year, that it had designs for advanced ``P2'' centrifuges capable of producing highly enriched uranium for use in a nuclear reactor or, potentially, an atomic weapon.
``I am seriously concerned that Iran's October declaration did not include any reference to its possession of P2 centrifuge designs and related (research and development), which in my view was a setback to Iran's stated policy of transparency,'' IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told the IAEA board of governors.
Iranian ambassador Pirooz Hosseini said Iranian officials had been misquoted by the media last year as saying the October dossier was intended to be exhaustive.
``At the time...we were not obliged to announce everything,'' he told reporters.
U.S. ambassador Kenneth Brill disputed Hosseini's comments, saying Iran had pledged at the time that the declaration would be open and complete.
``CHANGING STORIES''
``I think it's striking that the more the (IAEA) learns, the more the Iranians have to change their stories,'' he told reporters. ``There's a large number of very significant outstanding issues that still need to be dealt with.''
A senior Iranian official said Sunday the IAEA should confirm Iran's innocence and remove it from the agenda of the Vienna meeting, which sources said could run all week. But ElBaradei said the board was not through with Iran.
``I think the issue will be removed from the agenda when we are done with all the issues that are outstanding,'' he said. The main issue is the nature of Tehran's enrichment program and the origin of enriched uranium found by the U.N. last year.
Brill said Iran would be a long-term issue for the IAEA ``because there's more to go to get to the bottom of it.''
Outside the IAEA boardroom, diplomats from 35 board member states were meeting in small groups to find a compromise on a draft resolution on Iran they said was too weak for the Americans and too harsh for Germany, France and Britain.
Iran's envoy told reporters he was disappointed that the draft circulated by the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has ``very tough and harsh language.''
``There is not any place for a tough and harsh resolution,'' given Iran's cooperation with the U.N. watchdog, he said.
One Western diplomat told Reuters the latest version of the draft resolution on Iran says the board ``deplores'' Tehran's omissions and describes them as a ``matter for serious concern.''
``It's quite strong,'' the diplomat said.
Revelations in recent weeks that a top Pakistani atomic scientist sold nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya have intensified international concern that ``rogue states'' or terrorists could get their hands on weapons of mass destruction.
ElBaradei himself has spoken of an extensive international network of black-market proliferators.
The IAEA chief told governors that export controls needed to become broader and tighter, and mechanisms must be put in place to ensure the agency was told of all sensitive nuclear or nuclear-related technology transfers.
He said he would soon appoint expert groups to look at setting up regional centers to tighten control over activities like nuclear fuel production, processing of weapons-usable material and disposal of waste.
``The nuclear non-proliferation regime remains under stress, and a range of measures will be needed to restore confidence in its effectiveness,'' he said.
The United States is holding out the example of Libya, which unexpectedly renounced all its weapons of mass destruction programs in December, as one for Iran and others to follow.
-------
U.S. Blasts Allies Over Iran Nukes
March 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency-Iran.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- In a trans-Atlantic rift over Iran, a top U.S. official complained in a letter to France, Germany and Britain that their softer stance was hurting common efforts to get Tehran to honor promises for full nuclear disclosure, diplomats told The Associated Press on Monday.
News of the letter by U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton came amid tensions at a key board meeting of the U.N. atomic agency over whether Iran has done enough to banish suspicions it had a nuclear weapons program.
The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, refused to provide details about the letter but said such direct criticism was unusual.
Convinced that Tehran at one point wanted to make nuclear weapons and continues to harbor secrets, Washington wants tough language to dominate in any resolution adopted by the board of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.
On the other side, Germany, Britain and France seek to emphasize progress Iran has made in revealing nuclear activities and cooperating with U.N. inspectors since the discovery last year of a secret uranium enrichment program and covert tests that could be applied toward making weapons.
At Monday's board of governors meeting, the chief Iranian delegate predicted that U.S. attempts to crack down on Tehran will fail.
Yet Iranian attempts to end international scrutiny of its past and present nuclear agenda found no favor with IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, who said Tehran would remain a top agenda item for the U.N. agency until fears it was trying to make nuclear weapons were put to rest.
ElBaradei spoke on the first day of what was to be a three-day meeting. But diplomats said the conference might go until Friday because of the lack of consensus on how to deal with Iran's mixed record on lifting nearly two decades of nuclear secrecy.
``We are still far away on common language,'' a senior diplomat said as the meeting progressed.
A U.S-proposed text, seen by AP, spoke of ``serious failures'' by Iran to reveal nuclear secrets and the ``most serious concerns'' about its activities. Europeans consider that language too harsh.
Chief Iranian delegate Pirooz Hosseini said the U.S. attempt to take Iran to task ``is not going to work.''
``Almost all colleagues in the IAEA think that we have done our best in our ability to work with the agency,'' he said.
Before the meeting, senior Iranian official Hasan Rowhani demanded an end to the scrutiny of his country's nuclear activities, insisting they were never geared toward making arms.
ElBaradei, however, suggested that Iran would remain an agency priority. ``The issue will (only) be removed from the agenda when we are done with all the issues that are outstanding,'' he told reporters.
ElBaradei also said the board would discuss agency findings resulting from its probe of the ``complex black market network'' providing Iran, Libya and North Korea with nuclear weapons technology.
He described both Iran and Libya as being in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But with Libya apparently keeping pledges to reveal and scrap its nuclear weapons program, it is Iran taking the heat at the Vienna meeting.
While insisting it is interested in uranium enrichment only to generate power not to make weapons, Iran suspended its program to defang criticism. Still, it reserves the right to resume such activities, despite international demands that its enrichment be totally scrapped.
Tehran has also allowed IAEA inspectors broad access to its nuclear programs and handed over materials requested by ElBaradei. But an IAEA report prepared for Monday's meeting faults Tehran for continuing to hide evidence of nuclear experiments unearthed by agency inspectors. Made public last month, the dossier dealt the Islamic Republic a setback in its efforts to convince the world that its nuclear program is peaceful and that it is fully cooperating with the U.N. agency.
The report mentioned finds of traces of polonium, a radioactive element that can be used in nuclear weapons but that Iran says it wanted for generating electricity. It also expressed concerns with the discovery of an advanced P-2 uranium centrifuge system -- something the Bush administration said raises ``serious concerns'' about Tehran's intentions.
ElBaradei told the board he was ``seriously concerned'' about Iran's refusal to declare the P-2, calling it a ``setback to Iran's stated policy of transparency.''
Hosseini, Iran's delegate, said his country had nothing else to reveal.
Washington was unconvinced.
``I think its striking that the more the agency learns the more the Iranians have to change their stories,'' chief U.S. delegate Kenneth C. Brill told reporters.
On the Net:
IAEA, www.iaea.org
-------- iraq / inspections
Top Iraq Nuke Scientist Seeks UN Probe
March 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Nuclear.html
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- The father of Iraq's nuclear bomb program denied Monday that Saddam Hussein tried to restart his atomic activities, but acknowledged Iraq tried to conceal its banned weapons operations before destroying them 13 years ago.
Jafar Dhia Jafar, speaking publicly for the first time since U.S. forces occupied Baghdad, also called for a U.N. probe of what its inspectors knew before the U.S.-led invasion. Inspectors ``reached total conviction'' that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons yet failed to convey that to the Security Council because of U.S. pressure, he said.
``Reports of the United Nations to the Security Council should have been clear and courageous,'' Jafar said.
Before the invasion last March, chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and his nuclear counterpart Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that in four months of searching, their teams found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction or programs to build them, and needed more time to make a definitive conclusion.
Asked to respond to Jafar's claims, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said ElBaradei was forthright to the Security Council. She rejected the idea that investigators were absolutely convinced Iraq had no weapons program.
``In order to be thorough and factual we had to make sure that we had checked every lead and every possibility before making any final determination,'' Fleming said. ``After four months, we weren't quite there yet.''
At the time, U.S. officials insisted Saddam was developing a nuclear weapons program. After the war, U.S. inspectors also found no signs of a revived program. Still, David Kay, the chief U.S. inspector who resigned in January, contended last October he found ``evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons.'' That evidence has not been made public.
Jafar has been living in the United Arab Emirates since slipping out of Iraq to Syria during the war. U.S. officials said last April he had surrendered and was questioned.
On Monday, he addressed a meeting on the repercussions of the occupation of Iraq, organized by the Beirut-based Center for Arab Unity Studies. Before a sympathetic audience of intellectuals and Arab nationalists, he presented a paper co-written with Noman Saad Eddin al-Noaimi, a former director-general of Iraq's nuclear program.
``Saddam Hussein issued orders in July 1991 for the destruction of all banned weapons, in addition to the systems to produce them. It was carried out by the Special Republican Guard forces,'' the scientists said in their paper.
``We can confirm with absolute certainty that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction after its unilateral destruction of all its components in the summer of 1991, and did not resume any such activity because it no longer had the foundations to resume such activity,'' they wrote.
In a later panel discussion, Jafar -- who once was an adviser to the Iraqi dictator as a leader of his nuclear program -- acknowledged Iraq tried to conceal its weapons programs from international inspectors, who first arrived in early 1991.
``There was concealment at the beginning in all programs,'' he said.
But Jafar said the speed with which inspectors operated, aerial reconnaissance and the large size of equipment that had to be moved led to the ``the concealment operation failing within weeks'' and to an Iraqi decision to dismantle and destroy the weapons and their programs.
He also acknowledged Iraqi errors in handling the destruction of the weapons programs.
The United Nations had complained that figures relating to chemical and biological agents did not match what was produced, used or destroyed. In a reply to a question from the audience, Jafar said the destruction of the banned weapons and substances by Special Republican Guard forces ``was not done in a proper, detailed manner.''
``There were great and serious attempts later to document it (the destruction), put the pieces together and estimate what was destroyed. It was not convincing,'' he said.
The two scientists wrote about the history of Iraq's nuclear program and how Saddam turned it into a covert effort after Israel's 1981 airstrikes that destroyed a nuclear reactor near Baghdad before it became operational.
In their paper, the scientists said Iraq achieved ``encouraging results'' by the end of 1990 in uranium enrichment programs as well as in studies and designs of nuclear weapons, but the activities ``did not continue as a result of the Desert Storm war in 1991.''
Iraq produced 160 tons of low-grade uranium in 1990, according to the scientists, before most of the facilities were damaged or destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War. The paper listed the detailed destruction of nuclear facilities in the Gulf War and in 1998 U.S. airstrikes.
Scientists, engineers and technicians who worked on armament and homegrown technology ``were dispersed after the 1991 war. Some moved to work in state civilian institutions or universities, some left to work in the private sector, some retired, many emigrated and some died,'' they wrote.
-------- korea
ElBaradei: N.Korea Set Dangerous Nuclear Precedent
March 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-korea-elbaradei.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - North Korea's nuclear activities and its withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) have set a dangerous precedent, the head of the United Nations atomic weapons watchdog said Monday.
The United States believes the reclusive Communist state has at least one nuclear weapon, which it developed during the years when it was thought to be complying with the NPT before quitting the pact early last year.
``The nuclear activities of (North Korea) and its notice of withdrawal from the NPT have set a dangerous precedent and thus remain a threat to the credibility of the nuclear non-proliferation regime,'' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in the text of a speech.
Pyongyang expelled the IAEA's inspectors on December 31, 2002, and has not let them back in the country since -- despite ElBaradei's repeated appeals for their return.
His remarks were prepared for delivery at a closed-door meeting of the IAEA's Board of Governors, which is meeting to discuss Iran's and Libya's violations of the NPT, as well as the global black market that supplied Iran, Libya and North Korea with potentially weapons-related atomic technology.
Although last month's round of six-party talks in Beijing produced no breakthrough, ElBaradei said the ``agreement to continue these talks is a welcome development.''
He added any agreement reached on North Korea would need to ``strike a balance between the security needs ofand the need of the international community to gain assurance, though international verification, that all (its) nuclear activities ... are exclusively for peaceful purposes.''
The six-party talks included the United States, both North and South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.
---------
US Troops Should Go Under Atomic Deal - N.Korea
March 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea responded Monday to U.S. demands for it to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, saying U.S. forces should completely withdraw from the South.
The United States repeated at talks with the two Koreas, Russia, China and Japan last month in Beijing it wanted the ``complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement'' (CVID) of North Korea's nuclear program.
In a commentary, the North's main newspaper Rodong Sinmum said the U.S demand was a ploy to try to strangle North Korea economically and snoop around under the guise of inspections.
``Now that the U.S. is persistently forcing the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of nuclear program upon the DPRK, turning aside from the latter's elastic and most magnanimous proposal, the DPRK cannot but demand the U.S. completely withdraw its troops from South Korea in a verifiable way,'' Rodong Sinmun said.
The initials DPRK stand for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
North Korea's official KCNA news agency carried the newspaper's commentary, which also said Washington should guarantee a peace treaty and normalize relations.
The United States has 37,000 troops stationed in the South to deter the North from attacking, as it did in 1950 at the start of the three-year Korean War. That conflict ended in a truce, not a full peace.
The daily said the U.S. insistence on complete dismantling of the North's nuclear deterrent was ``brigandish logic'' and intended to ``exterminate'' Pyongyang's communist system.
Rodong Sinmun said Pyongyang was prepared to negotiate about its nuclear deterrent but not to give up what it described as its peaceful nuclear activity.
The United States has accused the North of pursuing a uranium enrichment program to make nuclear weapons. The North has denied this. North Korea's nuclear ambitions have been part of President Bush's global focus on illegal arms.
Separately, Rodong Sinmun took a predictable swipe at a serving South Korean minister, describing Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon as an ``ignoramus'' for saying during a visit to Washington it would be difficult to push ahead with large-scale North-South economic projects unless the nuclear crisis was solved.
``Those turning their back on the nation and acting marionettes of the U.S. are bound to meet a miserable end,'' the newspaper said, according to KCNA's English-language service.
--------
North Korea's Nuclear Tests in Pakistan
Source:Han Hosuk's Thesis On Analysis of Korean Peninsula-KWW
Translated on 3/8/2004
http://www.minjok.com/english/index.php3?catagory=engl&code=23104
On June 10, 1998, an Air Koryo chartered plane took off the runway of the Islamabad International Airport of Pakistan. No one had anticipated the significance of this Pyongyang-bound flight in the affairs of the Korean peninsula. On board the plane were the 20 North Korean nuclear scientists who had conducted an underground nuclear test at Pakistan's Balochistan nuclear test site. In addition, the plane was loaded with the nuclear test equipment and test data.
Pakistan has conducted six nuclear tests. On May 28, 1998, Pakistan exploded 5 nuclear devices simultaneously at the Chagal Hills (Ras Koh range) nuclear test site. One of the devices was a boosted fission device. Two days later, a 14 KT nuclear device was tested at the Balochistan test site. This device is believed to be a plutonium bomb flown in from North Korea.
The people of Pakistan were relieved and overjoyed at the news of Pakistani nuclear tests in the aftermath of India's nuclear tests of the same scale (including a boosted bomb) a few months earlier. In stark contrast to the festive mood prevailing in Pakistan, the dark cloud of American spy planes and satellites shadowed the Pakistani nuclear facilities, and a horde of US CIA and DIA agents swarmed to Pakistan's capital.
Pyongyang had no time to celebrate its Balochistan nuclear test because it had the daunting task of extract its nuclear scientists, test equipment and data safely from Pakistan. Hundreds of American spies and agents were out to grab North Korean scientists and nuclear materials. Even if the plane took off safely, it could have been shot down or forced to land by American planes.
North Korea had anticipated dirty plays by the Americans and worked out detailed counter measures for the safe return of its nuclear assets. Little has been published about this super secret operation. Several American news articles have revealed certain aspects of the operation, however.
The Los Angeles Times has published two articles (1999.8.23 and 2004.3.1) related to the operation. On June 7, 1998, one week after the Balohsitan test, a gunshot rang out in the darkness of the night in the exclusive residential district of Islamabad. The district referred to as "E-7" is for high-ranking military officers and nuclear scientists, and as such, it is highly secured. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb, lives in the district. In fact, the gun was fired only a few meters from Dr. Khan's residence. The victim was Kim Sa-nae, a North Korean woman. There was no eyewitness and Pakistani plainclothes men investigated the incidence. Kim Sa-nae was reportedly well-known for her cold-noodles, a famed North Korean dish.
Kim's death was duly reported on Pakistani newspapers but few paid attention at the time, when the news of the nuclear tests dominated the news at the time. The Pakistanis said that Kim Sa-nae was a North Korean diplomat. Her mysterious murder was forgotten until the Los Angeles Times picked it up one year later in 1998. The Los Angeles Times story went far beyond what was reported by the Pakistanis. It had some sinister twists to the unsolved murder.
1). The Pakistani police refused to disclose the true identity of Kim Sa-nae. The US intelligence claims that Kim was the wife of Kang Thae-yun, a mid-level staff member at the North Korean Embassy in Pakistan, and that Kang was in fact an agent of North Korea's Chang-kwang Trading Company, which sells weapons overseas. The Americans claim that Kang was no diplomat - he was a weapons salesman. Kang left Pakistan one month after Kim's death. On the other hand, the Pakistanis claim that Kim Sa-nae was one of the twenty North Korean nuclear scientists, who were staying at the guest house of Dr. Khan's residence when Kim was shot.
2). The Pakistani police has not disclosed the murderer of Kim Sa-nae. There have been three different speculations. One says that a cook working next door to Dr. Khan borrowed a gun from a guard and fired it by accident. The second story says that one of Dr. Khan's neighbors fired his gun accidentally while cleaning it. Dr. Khan has stated that Kim's death was accidental. In contrast, the American intelligence claims that Kim Sa-nae was an American spy and provided information on North Korea's nuclear tests to the Western intelligence agents, and that she was killed while trying to defect.
3). The Los Angeles Times article claims no autopsy was done on Kim's body and the Pakistani police was told to close the book on her case. The American intelligence claims that her body was returned to Pyongyang on June 10th, four days after her murder on a Pakistani cargo plane, and that her coffin contained two centrifuge machines for enriching uranium and associated manuals. In those days, Air Koryo had two flights per month to Islamabad. In fact, an Air Koryo plane was at Islamabad at the time of Kim's murder. Then, why would Kim's body be on a Pakistani plane?
The truth is most likely that there was no Kim Sa-nae. She was made up by North Korea to create confusion to cover up the extraction of its nuclear assets. On the other hand, the Americans went along to hammer in their claim that Pakistan provided enriched uranium technology to North Korea (and therefore, North Korea has an enriched uranium nuclear program).
The Kim Sa-nae 'murder' was a fabrication to draw away American spies in Pakistan from the imminent departure of the Air Koryo plane carrying North Korean nuclear scientists, test equipment and test data. It was a cat and mouse game, in which North Korea won.
-------- russia
Russia to recycle weapons-grade uranium from Libya: IAEA
VIENNA (AFP)
Mar 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040308163830.p185xu9g.html
Russia has agreed to recycle weapons-grade uranium from Libya in a move to help Tripoli dismantle its weapons of mass destruction programs, the UN nuclear watchdog said Monday.
"Russia agreed to take back the HEU (highly enriched uranium)" as it "was the original supplier in the 1980's for the 10-megawatt reactor and critical facility at the Tajoura Nuclear Research Center near Tripoli," the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a press statement.
Russia will "blend down the HEU", which was enriched to 80 percent, "into low-enriched uranium (LEU), making it unsuitable for a nuclear weapon," the statement said.
The HEU was "in the form of fresh fuel, . . . in fuel assemblies containing about 13 kilograms of fissile uranium-235, as well as about three kilograms of uranium," the statement said.
It said "HEU is a safeguarded fissile material that fuels nuclear reactors for research and electricity production but can also be processed and used to make a nuclear weapon."
IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei said in Libya last month that his agency would help the northern African state convert its military-oriented nuclear program into a peaceful program.
The recycling of the Tajoura reactor for the LEU -- which Russia will return once it is recycled -- rather than HEU is part of this.
Libya has since December been dismantling its weapons of mass destruction development programs, after reaching agreement on this with the United States and Britain.
The HEU was taken out of Libya overnight from Sunday to Monday.
"The 700,000 dollar (560,000 euros) fuel-removal was funded by the United States Department of Energy," the IAEA statement said.
--------
Russia Brings Back Weapons Uranium from Libya
Mon 8 Mar 2004
"PA" News Scotsman
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2624875
Russia today brought back weapons-grade uranium that the Soviet Union supplied to Libya for a nuclear research centre at least 20 years ago, Russian officials and the United Nations nuclear watchdog said.
In a United States-funded operation, 88 nuclear fuel assemblies - bundles of rods that contain fuel used for reactors - were transferred to Russia from the Tajura research centre outside Tripoli.
The spokesman said the fuel was made in Russia and supplied to Libya in 1980-1984. The Tajura facility includes a 10-megawatt reactor built in 1980 with equipment imported from the Soviet Union.
Libya recently acknowledged having a nuclear weapons programme and pledged to scrap it, and the International Atomic Energy Association said it had helped Libyan authorities prepare for the removal, monitoring the packing of the fuel.
The uranium was 80% enriched and was in fuel assemblies containing about 13 kilograms (28.7 pounds) of uranium-235, as well as about 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) of ordinary uranium, the Vienna-based IAEA said in a statement.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
Ohio Nuclear Plant Can Reopen, Agency Says
March 8, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/national/08CND-NUKE.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON, March 8 - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said today that it would allow an Ohio company to reopen a nuclear power plant that was shut down more than two years ago after technicians discovered that acid used in the cooling water had eaten almost all the way through the lid of the reactor.
The plant, Davis-Besse, near Toledo, has since undergone extensive changes in hardware and personnel, although critics say the reopening is premature. Some are hoping that the owner, the FirstEnergy Corporation, will sell the plant to another operator.
The shutdown is the longest in recent years among the nation's 103 operable reactors, and the discovery raised questions about the industry's ability to learn from its mistakes, since corrosion by such acid was a known problem and First Energy failed to inspect for it.
Avoiding accidents by recognizing problems in their early stages is a critical lesson of the Three Mile Island accident, which occurred 25 years ago this month near Harrisburg, Pa. Despite that accident, which involved a partial meltdown, officials were chagrined to discover that a similar event had almost occurred at Davis-Besse, which is of the same design. But knowledge of the reactor's vulnerability had not been communicated to other operators of the same model.
The corrosion incident also exposed problems within the staff of the regulatory commission, which initially wanted prompt inspections of all 68 plants that could be vulnerable to the problem but relented and gave the owners permission to delay, leaving time for the hole in the lid to grow. Plants are designed with emergency equipment to cope with leaks, but the designs do not contemplate failure of the steel in that location, which is 6 inches thick.
A subsequent investigation by the commission's inspector general found poor communications within the agency itself. The commission had a photo taken during a refueling shutdown in 2000 that showed evidence of the corrosion, but officials failed to act on it, according to the inspector general. The commission staff said that it was still in the process of reforming its internal procedures.
Today, the commission staff said that it had grounds for "reasonable assurance" that the Davis-Besse plant, in Oak Harbor, Ohio, could be started up and operated safely, but that the commission would maintain extra scrutiny of the plant for five years.
A major part of the changes at the plant, the commission staff said, was changes in its "safety culture," or the willingness of plant workers to raise safety questions to managers, and their expectation that such questions would be properly resolved.
FirstEnergy has acknowledged that it delayed an inspection because that would have forced the closing of the reactor and a loss in electricity production, and that it was insufficiently curious about other indications of trouble, like the presence of the acid, in powdered form, around the reactor building.
James Caldwell, the regional administrator for the commission's Midwest region, said that safety culture was still a problem the first time that his agency considered allowing the plant to restart, but that recently "our folks interviewed about 120 people, and based on that interview, we determined that the folks said they would raise safety issue, and management would deal with safety issues promptly."
In anticipation of the announcement, FirstEnergy heated up the reactor to more than 500 degrees Farenheit and to more than 2,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. It will be back to full power in 10 to 14 days, a spokesman, Todd Schneider, said. FirstEnergy has spent more than $600 million on replacement power and on physical improvements at the reactor, he said.
The company still faces a criminal investigation by a federal grand jury into its handling of the corrosion matter. Paul Blanch, an electrical engineer and specialist in what the nuclear industry calls a "safety-conscious work environment," pointed out that the commission had at one point promised not to allow a restarting of the plant before the criminal issues were resolved, but was now doing so.
"If there are people there that could possibly be indicted, obviously they should not restart," he said.
But a commission spokesman, Jan Strasma, said that although a criminal investigation was continuing, "we see no immediate safety issues that warrant agency action."
Mr. Blanch said that last year he had tried to obtain a copy of the plan that the commission was requiring for reform of Davis-Besse's safety culture, and was turned down, making it difficult for knowledgeable outsiders to determine if the remedy was sound. The commission gave him a copy on Monday, after the announcement, he said.
Reopening Davis-Besse is good news for FirstEnergy, but the company faces a variety of other challenges, including the possibility of damage suits arising from the blackout last Aug. 14, which began in its territory and stretched into eight states and parts of Ontario.
---------
Ohio Nuclear Plant Can Reopen, Agency Says
March 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Plant-Restart.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- An Ohio nuclear plant is being allowed to reopen after a two-year shutdown over safety issues stemming from an acid leak that ate through a protective steel reactor cap, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced Monday.
Corrosion on the reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant along Lake Erie east of Toledo, Ohio, was the most extensive ever found at a U.S. nuclear reactor and led to a review of 68 similar plants nationwide.
NRC officials blamed plant operators for allowing a breakdown in safety standards that caused the leak to go unnoticed for years. The plant is owned by FirstEnergy Corp., in Akron, Ohio, the same company that a U.S.-Canadian government task force said shares much of the blame for the Northeast blackout last August.
But the NRC also came under fire for not detecting the leak sooner. As a result, regulators have agreed to make changes to its safety and inspection procedures. On Monday, the agency said the plant can safely operate following numerous repairs and changes in management.
The plant was closed in February 2002 for routine maintenance when inspectors found that corrosion on the reactor vessel, where leaking boric acid had nearly eaten through a 6-inch-thick steel cap.
FirstEnergy Corp. spent about $600 million making repairs and buying replacement power while the plant was prevented from producing electricity.
During the shutdown, regulators also found design flaws in Davis-Besse's cooling system pumps, which led to prolonged repairs. FirstEnergy replaced the damaged reactor vessel head and overhauled the plant's management.
The company asked the NRC on Feb. 12 for permission to restart the plant, saying the plant was now capable of being safely operated.
Two teams of NRC inspectors said at the February meeting that they saw marked improvement in plant operations and worker performance. Although the inspectors found widespread problems during a December review, they said none rose to the level of being a safety concern.
Environmental groups, though, questioned whether the plant was really committed to safety.
During the shutdown, some critics in Congress questioned whether the NRC bowed to pressure from FirstEnergy and allowed the utility to keep Davis-Besse operating despite concerns about the reactor lid.
The NRC has rejected allegations that it put profits ahead of safety.
On the Net:
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
FirstEnergy Corp.: http://www.firstenergycorp.com
-------- south carolina
Potential nuclear waste dump by Savannah River, new report: Atlanta press conference 3/11
Mon, 08 Mar 2004
From: Lisa Ledwidge/IEER <ieer@ieer.org>
For further information contact:
Arjun Makhijani, IEER: 301-270-5500
Bob Schaeffer: 239-395-6773
MEDIA ADVISORY
NUCLEAR WASTE MISMANAGEMENT WOULD CREATE HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE DUMP IN SAVANNAH RIVER WATERSHED
Standards for Drinking Water Contaminated with Radioactive Tritium May Need to be Tightened
WHAT: News conference to release 95-page report, Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside: Threats to the Savannah River from Radioactive Contamination at the Savannah River Site (SRS), detailing tritium contamination of the Savannah River, the environmental injustice inflicted by SRS-related contamination on people who subsist on fish from its waters, and the dangerous policies that would create a vast de facto high-level radioactive waste dump in the river's watershed.
WHERE: Georgia Capitol Rotunda, 206 Washington St. on Capitol Square, Atlanta, Georgia
WHEN: Thursday, March 11, 2004, 3:30 p.m.
WHO: Dr. Arjun Makhijani, principal author of the report, and President, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER); Ms. Bobbie Paul, Executive Director, Atlanta Women's Action for New Directions (WAND) and Board member, Georgia Center for Law in the Public Interest; Reverend Charles Utley, Central Savannah River Area campaign director for Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Augusta, GA; State Representative Nan Grogan Orrock (GA), House Majority Whip and WiLL President (Women Legislators' Lobby); State Representative Ron Stephens (GA); State Senator Regina Thomas (GA); State Representative Tom Bordeaux (GA)
WHY: The Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina produced more than one-third of the plutonium for U.S. nuclear bombs, almost all of the tritium, and other nuclear materials for the U.S. weapons program. Past dumping and mismanagement and a failure to implement an adequate cleanup plan at SRS have created extensive water pollution beneath the site as well as risks for critical water resources in the region.
This new report describes the breadth and depth of the problem caused by threats to water resources from SRS. It explores the problem of tritium contamination of the Savannah River in detail, both for South Carolina and Georgia. It discusses why tritium standards may not be adequate to protect pregnant women and developing fetuses and may, therefore, need to be tightened. It also discusses environmental injustice arising from the contamination of the Savannah River inflicted on African Americans who depend on the river as a primary source of protein. The report finds that DOE is leaving behind large amounts of radioactivity in high-level waste tanks and pronouncing them closed. Continuation of this policy would create de facto high-level radioactive waste dumps in the Savannah River watershed. It offers recommendations for reducing the SRS-related risks to water resources and for rectifying environmental injustice.
Lisa Ledwidge Outreach Director, United States, and Editor of Science for Democratic Action Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER)
NEW ADDRESS & PHONE:
PO Box 6674
Minneapolis, MN 55406 USA
tel. 1-612-722-9700
fax: please call first
ieer@ieer.org | http://www.ieer.org
IEER's main office:
6935 Laurel Ave. Suite 201
Takoma Park, MD 20912 USA
tel. 1-301-270-5500
fax 1-301-270-3029
-------- us politics
Bush Hindering Probes, Kerry Says
President's Campaign Says Charges of 'Stonewalling' on 9/11, Iraq Are Inaccurate
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38886-2004Mar7?language=printer
TOUGALOO, Miss., March 7 -- Sen. John F. Kerry, intensifying the election fight over terrorism and national security, accused President Bush on Sunday of "stonewalling" for political reasons separate investigations into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and prewar intelligence on Iraq.
The Massachusetts Democrat echoed Bush's promise to make Sept. 11 a top election issue and, for the second time in the young general election campaign, portrayed the president as playing politics with the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
"I think one of the most critical questions in front of the country is with respect to 9/11, why is this administration stonewalling and resisting the investigation into why we had the greatest security failure in the history of our country and why is he also resisting having an immediate investigation into the security failure with respect to the intelligence in Iraq," Kerry told reporters at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss.
Kerry's new line of attack, described as a direct response to Bush's Sept. 11 political challenge, highlighted the headlining role terrorism and national security are playing in the 2004 presidential election. Bush is trying to paint Kerry as too wobbly and inconsistent to lead the nation through troubled times; Kerry is portraying the president as reckless and inept with his foreign policy.
Steve Schmidt, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, called the charges "another example of inaccurate attacks by Senator Kerry.
"Senator Kerry feels a great deal of vulnerability because of his record of voting to cut the nation's intelligence budget," Schmidt said.
Marc Racicot, Bush's campaign chairman, asserted earlier on "Fox News Sunday" that Bush has been "entirely cooperative" with the independent panel looking into the Sept. 11 attacks -- formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
Just days after blasting Bush for raising Sept. 11 images in election ads, Kerry said the Bush White House has complicated the independent investigation into the terrorist attacks in hopes of shutting it down quickly. "I think they don't want accountability," Kerry said. "They want to get it out of the way as fast as they can so the memory of Americans might be shorter."
A bipartisan independent commission investigating intelligence failures is expected to release its findings this summer, though some commission members have complained of a lack of White House cooperation in getting documents and open interviews with key officials.
Kerry, who voted for the Iraq war, said the British are moving more swiftly than the United States to investigate the prewar intelligence used to justify the invasion, and he accused Bush of "slow walking" a probe here in hopes of pushing the issue off until after the November election.
Last month, Bush named a commission to determine why inspectors have not found the weapons that intelligence experts said Saddam Hussein was hiding in Iraq. He told the panel to report back by the end of March 2005.
Kerry believes "their political agenda has stopped them from doing both quickly or effectively," spokesman David Wade said Sunday.
The senator said he plans to ask a group of Republicans and Democrats to travel to Iraq soon to survey the situation and report their findings. "I do have a responsibility to get the best information possible," he said.
Kerry said he may travel to Iraq himself, but worries that such a trip might be seen as too political during the election season. "That's a possibility and it's something that's been discussed, but the time's difficult and I don't want any sense of politicization in that regard."
Kerry's remarks to reporters came two hours after he used a 15-minute morning speech at a black church to rail against politicians who fail to match their religious words with earthly deeds and seek to divide the nation over race, income and even home states.
"You can run the list of those deeds not matched by words," Kerry said, quoting the New Testament's James, before rattling off everything from broken environmental promises to those who profess to be a "compassionate conservative."
Bush often invokes his religious faith, and Kerry plans to highlight his own beliefs and what he sees as the Bible's call to social action, a top aide said. Kerry will largely confine his Bible-based remarks to church services on the campaign trail as he has throughout his political career, the aide said.
Kerry finished his speech at the Pentecostal church with this warning: "I don't agree with the hollowness, nor do you, that tries to divide black and white, rich and poor, Massachusetts and Mississippi," he said. "In fact, some people just want us pointing fingers at each other. The reason they do that is so no one points a finger at them."
Yet, two hours later, Kerry was pointing the finger at Bush and his administration over delays in finalizing the Sept. 11 report and prewar intelligence. "The American people deserve an answer now," he said. The senator said last week that it was inappropriate for Bush to use images of the Sept. 11 ruins in his election ads, sparking a debate over the politics of terrorism that spilled over into the Sunday morning political shows.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), appearing on ABC's "This Week," said he would not have invoked some of the images used in the Bush ads, but defended the president's reliance on the broader theme.
"Oh, I might not have used the ad of the coffin coming out, or the body coming out of the ruins with a flag on it. But let's be very clear. The president had a defining moment on September 11, and his leadership of the American people clearly is part of the rationale and a large part of the rationale for his reelection."
At the news conference, Kerry said he would meet this week with former presidential rival Howard Dean, who was critical of Kerry through the primaries and caucuses. The Kerry campaign is eager to get Dean on board and tap into the former Vermont governor's fundraising machine, which shattered records in 2003 by raking in more than $40 million.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghanistan: Abuses by U.S. Forces
Beatings in Detention; No Legal Process
Human Rights Watch
March 8, 2004
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/03/08/afghan8073.htm
U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan have arbitrarily detained civilians, used excessive force during arrests of non-combatants, and mistreated detainees, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.
The United States is setting a terrible example in Afghanistan on detention practices. Civilians are being held in a legal black hole - with no tribunals, no legal counsel, no family visits and no basic legal protections.
Human Rights Watch concludes that the U.S.-administered system of arrest and detention in Afghanistan exists outside of the rule of law. The United States is maintaining separate detention facilities at Bagram, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Asadabad military bases.
"The United States is setting a terrible example in Afghanistan on detention practices," said Brad Adams, executive director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "Civilians are being held in a legal black hole - with no tribunals, no legal counsel, no family visits and no basic legal protections."
The 59-page report, "Enduring Freedom": Abuses by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, is based on research conducted by Human Rights Watch in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2003 and early 2004. Human Rights Watch documented cases of U.S. forces using military tactics, including unprovoked deadly force, during operations to apprehend civilians in uncontested residential areas-situations where law enforcement standards and tactics should have been used. Afghan forces deployed with U.S. forces have also mistreated persons during search and arrest operations and looted homes.
The report also details mistreatment in U.S. detention facilities. Released detainees have said that U.S. forces severely beat them, doused them with cold water and subjected them to freezing temperatures. Many said they were forced to stay awake, or to stand or kneel in painful positions for extended periods of time.
"There is compelling evidence suggesting that U.S. personnel have committed acts against detainees amounting to torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment," said Adams.
The report also describes frequent arbitrary arrests of civilians, apparently based on mistaken or faulty intelligence, and numerous cases of civilians-grocers, farmers, or laborers-who were held incommunicado and indefinitely.
Human Rights Watch said that many of the violations documented were reported in non-combat situations, and emphasized that many abuses-especially arbitrary arrests and mistreatment of detainees-were inexcusable even within the context of war.
Human Rights Watch said that Taliban and other anti-U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan had themselves violated international humanitarian law by carrying out armed attacks and abductions against civilians and humanitarian aid workers. But Human Rights Watch pointed out that under international law those violations could not serve as an excuse for U.S. violations.
"The Taliban and other insurgent groups are illegally targeting civilians and humanitarian aid workers," said Adams. "But abuses by one party to a conflict do not justify violations by the other side. This is a fundamental principle of the laws of war."
The United States has not responded adequately to questions about arrest and detention practices. In particular, Human Rights Watch raised the case of three detainees who are known to have died while in U.S. custody-two at the Bagram airbase north of Kabul in December 2002 and one at the Asadabad airbase in eastern Afghanistan in June 2003. The first two deaths were ruled homicides by U.S. military pathologists who performed autopsies on the two men. U.S. officials have yet to explain what happened to any of the three men.
"This stonewalling must stop," said Adams. "The United States is obligated to investigate allegations and prosecute those who have violated the law. There is no sign that serious investigations are taking place."
Human Rights Watch said that the United States was eroding international standards by not taking action.
"Abusive governments across the world can now point to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and say, 'If they can abuse human rights and get away with it, why can't we?'" said Adams.
President George W. Bush and officials in his administration stated in June 2003 that the United States does not torture or mistreat detainees in the custody of the United States. But the United States has refused to allow any independent observers access to detention facilities in Afghanistan, except for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not report publicly on its findings. Human Rights Watch noted that some documented abuses in the report took place after President Bush's statement.
The report includes the following recommendations to the United States:
- Investigate and publicly report on allegations of mistreatment at detention facilities in Afghanistan;
- Instruct military and intelligence personnel to take all appropriate steps to prevent or stop abuses by Afghan forces deployed with or under the command of U.S. forces;
- Create a legal system of tribunals, in conjunction with the Afghan government, to ensure that detainees in Afghanistan-both combatants and civilians-are processed and screened in accordance with applicable standards of the Geneva Conventions and human rights law;
- Permit families of detainees, and those providing legal assistance, to visit detainees;
- Reevaluate and revise arrest methods and standing Rules of Engagement for U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan to ensure that law enforcement methods are used when U.S. forces are arresting non-combatants in non-combat situations.
The report also calls on Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government to urge the United States to bring their detention system within Afghanistan into compliance with international law, and to order Afghan commanders to stop or attempt to prevent abuses during military operations.
----
For More Afghan Women, Immolation Is Escape
March 8, 2004
New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/international/asia/08BURN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JALALABAD, Afghanistan - Waiflike, draped in a pale blue veil, Madina, 20, sits on her hospital bed, bandages covering the terrible, raw burns on her neck and chest. Her hands tremble. She picks nervously at the soles of her feet and confesses that three months earlier she set herself on fire with kerosene.
Beside her, on the next bed, her mother-in-law, Bibi Khanum, and her brother-in-law, Abdul Muhammad, 18, confirm her account but deny her reason, which Madina would explain only outside on a terrace, away from her husband's family. "All the time they beat me," she said. "They broke my arm. But what should I do? This was my home."
Accounts like Madina's are repeated across Afghanistan, doctors and human rights workers say. They are discovering more and more young women who have set themselves on fire, desperate to escape the cruelties of family life and harsh tribal traditions that show no sign of changing despite the end of Taliban rule and the dawn of democracy.
Doctors and nurses in Kabul and Jalalabad say they have seen more cases recently, partly because the population has been swollen by the return of two million refugees and because cases are being tracked for the first time by rights groups, hospitals and the government.
But the trauma and social upheaval of decades of war, poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan have also intensified the traditional pressures on young women, they say.
The recently formed Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission recorded 40 such cases in just the past six months in Herat, a western city of half a million people.
Karima Karimi, one of the commission's officers, says she suspects that the actual figure is higher, and President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation. Officials at the commission said it was reasonable to estimate that Afghanistan had hundreds of such cases in a year.
"It is not only in Herat; it is in all of Afghanistan," said Dr. Soraya Rahim, deputy minister of women's affairs, on her return from a government investigative trip to Herat.
"It takes different forms in different provinces," she said in a telephone interview. "Some take tablets. Some cut their wrists. Some hang themselves. Some burn themselves.
"But the reason is very important. The first reason is our very bad tradition of forced marriage. Girls think this is the only way, that there is no other way in life."
Educated women in the cities who were repressed by the old Taliban government have benefited from the changes in Afghanistan, and many are now working and studying. But in villages and remote tribal areas, the new order has not improved women's longstanding low status.
Daughters are often exchanged between families, are given in marriage as compensation for crimes, or are married to men two or three times their age.
When young girls marry, they leave home to live with their husband's extended family, where the mother-in-law rules the household. Often they are seen as little more than a new source of labor.
While the authorities have little idea of the full extent of the burnings, because families hide them out of shame and often claim they are accidents, the desperate attempts of young women to escape lives dictated by tribal customs and a deeply conservative Islam are undeniable.
Often they resort to burning, since kerosene and cooking fuels are easily accessible to women. In heavily populated eastern Afghanistan, the chief of anesthesiology at Jalalabad's Public Hospital No. 1, Muhammad Naseem, said the hospital received an average of 20 burn cases a month, at least two or three of which were self-inflicted.
The rest were household accidents, most caused by pressure cookers, gas or oil stoves or kerosene lamps, which account for many more cases of burns to women and children than those that are self-inflicted.
Nurses often learn the difference only in moments of confidence, or they spot telltale signs of family problems, like the absence of hospital visits by the husband. For the first time, human rights officials are paying attention, too.
The tribal areas, populated by Pashtuns who live by a code entirely their own, are particularly harsh in their treatment of women, said Sharifa, an officer from the human rights commission in Jalalabad. Like many Afghans, she uses only one name.
She said that when she visited the women's wards of Hospital No. 1 one day last month, she found five women who had tried self-immolation. One morning at the hospital, one of the five died after suffering for 11 days.
Madina's account is typical of the hardships young women encounter. She was married at 15 in an exchange of daughters between two families, a common practice in Afghanistan. She married Din Muhammad, and his sister was married to her uncle.
Madina said she had borne two children - Najiba, 4, and Taj Muhammad, 2. When her husband was jailed for drug offenses three years ago, she moved back from Pakistan to live with her in-laws in the village of Charbagh, in eastern Afghanistan.
In the interview on the hospital terrace, Madina explained that her troubles began a year ago, when the girl who had married her uncle died during pregnancy. Madina's mother-in-law turned her grief on Madina. "She would say, `My daughter is in the grave, and you are still alive,' " Madina recounted.
In the hospital room, her mother-in-law, Bibi Khanum, a small woman with blue eyes and tiny hands, denied driving Madina to try to kill herself.
"God knows if it was cruelty," she said. "The reason she was impatient was because her husband was in jail."
"It's not true," Madina whispered.
Madina's husband, freed from prison and remorseful, has promised to take her to live away from the rest of the family. They are poor, and she is painfully thin and ill, but recovering. Away from her mother-in-law, she does not tremble.
Qadri Gul, 20, one of Dr. Naseem's patients, was less fortunate, dying after 11 days. Married for five years, she was the mother of two children. Her husband took a second wife shortly after they had wed, and she told the hospital staff and her family that her husband and her in-laws had beaten her daily, and had even encouraged her when she had threatened to burn herself.
She visited her parents and her numerous sisters in Jalalabad for the Muslim festival of Id al-Fitr in November. "Her body was completely bruised," her sister Basmina recalled. "She had marks on her buttocks and said, `I don't know if I will get better.' "
They did not tell their mother, who nevertheless sensed that all was not well. "She was upset," the mother, Bibi Jan, recalled. "She did not put henna on her hands. She looked unhappy."
She went home after the holiday with a toy car for her son, but when the children started fighting over it, she took it away. That sparked a fight with her husband. He slammed a glass into her head, knocking her out. When she regained consciousness, she threatened to kill herself by setting herself on fire.
"He laughed and said: `There are the matches and the kerosene. Burn yourself,' " Basmina recounted.
As she lay dying in the hospital, Qadri Gul told her mother and sisters what had happened. Sharifa from the human rights office also interviewed her.
Her mother said: "She blamed her husband, her brother-in-law and her mother-in-law. I will leave them to God, but I will just ask them the question `What did you do to my daughter?' " She was sitting in her courtyard, surrounded by relatives and mourners on the third day after her daughter's death.
"She was a very good girl," her mother said. "From neck to legs she was burnt."
--------
U.S. Rebuked on Afghans in Detention
March 8, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/international/asia/08AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, March 7 - A human rights group on Sunday accused American forces in Afghanistan of detaining at least 1,000 Afghans and other people over the past two years in "a climate of almost total impunity" that it contends violates international human rights law. A spokesman for the American military in Afghanistan disputed the findings.
In a 60-page report issued Sunday, the group, Human Rights Watch, also called on the United States military to release the results of investigations into the deaths of three Afghans in American custody in 2002 and 2003. Initial military medical investigators declared two of the deaths homicides.
The report also said it had received "numerous reports" of American forces relying on faulty intelligence or using "excessive or indiscriminate force" that resulted in avoidable civilian deaths and the detention of innocent people. It contended that the United States was employing interrogation techniques, like shackling prisoners, stripping them naked or depriving them of sleep, that the State Department had condemned as torture in countries like Libya, North Korea and Iran.
"There is little doubt that U.S. policies on the detention of terrorism suspects both in Afghanistan and elsewhere have harmed public opinion of the United States around the world," the report said. "This course of action is shortsighted and damaging to the rule of law, not only in Afghanistan but across the world."
Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a spokesman for the American-led coalition in Afghanistan, said American forces were acting properly. He said the procedures used in the main American detention facility at Bagram Air Base just north of Kabul had been changed.
"We are in complete compliance with the laws of combat," he said.
Much of the report focused on the treatment of detainees in Bagram and other facilities across the country. The International Committee of the Red Cross is the only outside group allowed to visit the facilities and to carry messages between detainees and their families. For the past two years, the American military has refused to release information about the number of detainees it is holding, their nationalities or their names.
The report said detainees were in a legal limbo in which they could be held in indefinite secret detention, not formally charged and barred from contact with lawyers and journalists. It said the detainees in Afghanistan, no matter what their rank or role, had been treated as "unlawful combatants" who had far fewer legal rights than prisoners of war.
"They are held at the apparent whim of U.S. authorities, in some cases for more than a year," the report said. "The general lack of due process with the U.S. detention system violates both international humanitarian law and basic standard of human rights law."
Colonel Hilferty said the report did not take into account the fact that combat continues in Afghanistan and that using law enforcement methods was inappropriate. "We are engaged in combat operations," Colonel Hilferty said. "It's a war."
-------- africa
Zimbabwe seizes 'US plane' with military gear, 64 'mercenaries': minister
HARARE (AFP)
Mar 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040308195543.u5oox1kv.html
Zimbabwe has impounded a US-registered aircraft which landed at Harare airport with military equipment and 64 suspected mercenaries, Home Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi announced Monday.
In Washington, a US State Department official denied that the plane was registered in the United States, though said it might once have been. "It is not a US registered aircraft right now," the official said on condition of anonymity.
Mohadi said that a "United States of America-registered Boeing 727-100 cargo plane was detained last (Sunday) night at about 1930 hours (1730 GMT) at Harare International Airport after its owners had made a false declaration of its cargo and crew."
"The plane was actually carrying 64 suspected mercenaries of various nationalities," the minister told a press conference.
"Further investigations also revealed that on board the plane was military material."
State television showed footage of the plane late Monday.
Some of the equipment shown included satellite telephones, compasses, radios, military knives and boots, bolt-cutters and sleeping bags.
The television said that most of the suspects were white, "heavily built males".
The equipment found aboard the plane was usually used by "commandos on a special mission" it added.
In Pretoria, meanwhile, South African Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad said that "the South African government is concerned at unconfirmed reports that some of the people on board may be South African nationals".
Pahad did not say where those reports came from, but added, in a statement: "Should the allegations that those South Africans on board are involved in mercenary activities prove true, this would amount to a serious breach of the Foreign Military Assistance Act which expressly prohibits the involvement of South Africans in military activities outside South Africa without the due authorisation of the National Conventional Arms Control Committee."
Mohadi said full details would be issued in due course but that in the meantime investigations were under way to establish the "true identities of the men and their ultimate mission".
The plane was moved to a military airbase, AFP was told.
What had been done with the men aboard was not immediately clear.
A US embassy official in Harare claimed "We know nothing about it" and the mystery deepened when the official in Washington confirmed: "It is not a US government or a US commercial aircraft as far as we know.
"I understand that at one point back in the 1970's someone may have owned it in the US but it hasn't been a US aircraft since the early 80s," the official said.
"I have no idea who owns it. There is no US citizen on board."
President Robert Mugabe has repeatedly accused the US government and the former colonial power, Britain, of trying to oust him since he was re-elected in controversial polls two years ago.
Relations between the United States and Zimbabwe worsened last week when US President George W. Bush renewed sanctions imposed on Mugabe and other government officials a year ago for allegedly undermining democracy in the southern African country.
Washington said it was widening the existing sanctions regime against Zimbabwe to include seven government-related businesses.
Bush said the Zimbabwe government was causing a breakdown of the rule of law, economic instability, and fomenting politically motivated violence, but Information Minister Jonathan Moyo responded angrily, referring to the Americans as "hamburger-eating imperialists".
Last month the EU extended sanctions it had imposed against Zimbabwe, to include an arms embargo as well as travel restrictions and a freeze on any overseas assets of 95 government officials, including Mugabe.
The economy of the former British colony has been in a nose-dive in recent years with international support drying up, and rates of inflation and interest skyrocketing to record highs of more than 600 percent.
Mugabe's reputation as an African statesman started fading in recent years after the country -- once the region's breadbasket -- slid into economic decline as land reforms which had been left unresolved for years, were jump-started with the violent occupation of white-owned farms.
-------- arms
China presses EU to lift arms embargo
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Mar 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040308200713.o88y248x.html
China's deputy foreign minister pressed the EU Monday to lift a 15-year-old arms embargo on Beijing, saying China has no plans for big increases in weapons imports as a result, EU sources said. But EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten reiterated a call for Beijing to take more "concrete steps" to improve human rights to ensure the lifting of the ban, imposed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
In talks with Patten in Brussels, Yesui Zhang said China feels the ban was "inappropriate in the current context," and reiterated Beijing's respect for an EU code of conduct on arms imports to countries with human rights problems.
"They said that they were'nt expecting a huge rise in the quantity of arms imports. They understood that the code of conduct would still operate," said an EU source.
The arms embargo was imposed after June 1989, when China sent tanks to crush weeks-long pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, killing hundreds.
China has been lobbying hard for the ban to be lifted. "It's the result of the Cold War, and it's out of date," a foreign ministry spokeswoman said last month. "It's not in the interest of the development of China-EU relations."
A French-led drive to end the EU embargo is fueling tension with the United States, which is vehemently opposed to lifting the ban. But a growing number of EU states appear to support the move.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has signalled support for lifting the ban. But diplomats say several EU countries, including the Netherlands and Sweden, are reluctant to lift the ban, citing China's human rights record.
Patten explained to Zhang that, while there is no direct link between the arms embargo and anything else, "it would be a great deal easier to persuade those who are not yet persuaded, for example the European Parliament, if they took some concrete steps to improve the human rights record," said the source.
Patten's spokeswoman Emma Udwin said last week that the EU is unlikely to reach an agreement on the issue at a summit in Brussels this month, although EU foreign ministers are likely to discuss it in April.
US and EU leaders locked horns over the issue in talks in Washington last week, with US Secretary of State Colin Powell expressing "concern" that the EU might lift the embargo.
French President Jacques Chirac said in January the embargo "makes no more sense today" and that he hoped it would be scrapped "in the coming months."
Even Britain, which was at the forefront of the EU arms ban in 1989, appears at least open to lifting the ban.
"Our position is that we do accept the need for a review of the arms embargo. We think there probably is an issue about modernizing it," said a British source.
Zhang's meeting with Patten was part of formal preparations for a visit to Brussels in May by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and a trip to China by European Commission head Romano Prodi in April, and to assess the state of relations.
-------- balkans
US Navy, Marines hold manoeuvres in Albania
TIRANA (AFP)
Mar 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040308161605.4ivoqcpw.html
A US Navy strike group and special marines task force began exercises Monday with the Albanian military, officials said.
"The propose of the exercise is to conduct training in expeditionary strike group warfare capabilities ... " the US embassy in Tirana said in a statement.
It said the US forces included "special operations capable" marines and the USS Wasp Expeditionary Strike Group.
Albanian defence ministry spokesman Igli Hasani said the five-day exercises were part of ongoing military cooperation between the two countries and would help Albania prepare for eventual NATO membership.
Albania has put its air and naval bases at the disposal of NATO forces and has sent a small contingent of troops to assist the US-led coalition in Iraq.
-------- business
federal contracts
Monday, March 8, 2004
Washington Post States News Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39110-2004Mar7?language=printer
Civilian Police International LLC of Alexandria won a $1.6 billion contract from the State Department of State for support services for peace operations and other complex security operations overseas.
Orkand Corp. of Falls Church won a $100 million contract from the Postal Service for technical support services.
Sentel Corp. of Alexandria won a $22 million contract from the Defense Department to test and evaluate domestic and foreign weapon systems.
Shaw Environmental Inc. of Centreville won a $15.84 million contract from the Defense Energy Support Center for conducting a comprehensive survey of fuel facilities for the Defense Department.
Advanced Resources International of Arlington won a contract valued at up to $5 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Frederick Ward Associates of Bel Air, Md., won a $2.5 million contract with the Postal Service for architectural and engineering services.
OPX Architecture/Interiors of Washington won a $2.5 million contract from the Postal Service for architectural and engineering services.
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Emerging Markets Ltd. of Washington won a contract valued at up to $2.38 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Ashe Facility Services Inc. of Yorktown, Va., won a $2.26 million contract from the Navy's Facilities Engineering Command for grounds maintenance services.
AT&T Government Solutions of Vienna won a $1.8 million contract from the Air Force for voice and data services.
SRA International Inc. of Fairfax won a $1.67 million contract from the Air Force Materiel Command for information technology research and development services for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence applications.
AT&T Government Solutions of Vienna won a $1.5 million contract from the Air Force for local voice and data services.
Anixter Federal of Reston won a $1.18 million contract from the Justice Department's Federal Prison Industries/UNICOR for cables.
Varco/Mac Electrical Construction Co. of Annapolis Junction, Md., won an $845,000 contract from the Postal Service to install a fire alarm system.
AT&T Government Solutions of Vienna won a $676,000 contract from the Marine Corps to upgrade its computer hardware acquisitions tracking system.
Mid-American Elevator Co. of Alexandria won a $632,760 contract from the General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service for elevator maintenance.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke, Va., won a $375,552 contract from the Naval Inventory Control Point for optic-cell assemblies.
John Mercer of Alexandria won a contract valued at up to $307,500 from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Litton Systems Inc. of Blacksburg, Va., won a $201,246 contract from the Defense General Supply Center for motor rotors.
Smiths Aerospace Inc. of Sterling won a $163,083 contract from the Defense Industrial Supply Center for pins.
Central Parking System of Washington won a $146,440 contract from the Homeland Security Department's Secret Service for parking spaces.
First Dawn & Associates of Newport News, Va., won a contract valued at up to $125,000 from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for special purpose clothing.
Oracle Surveillance Systems Ltd. of Baltimore won a contract valued at up to $125,000 from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for construction and building materials.
Marine Air Supply Co. of Fredrick won a $114,955 contract from the Defense Supply Center for circuit breakers.
Radian Inc. of Alexandria won a $92,748 contract from the Defense Supply Center for electrical cable.
Milspareco Inc. of Richmond won an $83,922 contract from the Defense Supply Center for breakaway airline emergency air brake parts kits.
Wichitech Industries Inc. of Columbia won an $83,910 contract from the Defense General Supply Center for composite repairs.
Radisson Plaza/Lord Baltimore Hotel of Baltimore won a $72,975 contract from the Veterans Affairs Department for hotel accommodations.
Dela Technology Corp. of Rockville won a $70,490 contract from the Defense Supply Center for night vision image intensifier.
Dela Technology Corp. of Rockville won a $66,182 contract from the Defense Supply Center for control unit diesel engine governors.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $64,575 contract from the Defense Supply Center for fuel filters.
Fairfax Precision Manufacturing Inc. of Sterling won a $62,640 contract from the Defense General Supply Center for lower clamp frames.
Metalcraft Inc. of Baltimore won a $55,685 contract from the Defense Industrial Supply Center for fire extinguishers.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $51,990 contract from the Defense Supply Center for electrical receptacle connectors.
These contracts were awarded by the federal government to companies in Maryland, Virginia and the District. For more information, call States News Service at 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
-------- haiti
Kerry: I'd have sent Aristide US troops
By Roy Eccleston, Washington correspondent
March 08, 2004
Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,8898017%255E2703,00.html
DEMOCRATIC presidential candidate John Kerry has struck out at Republican attempts to portray him as a weak commander-in-chief by declaring he would have sent troops to protect the democratically elected president of Haiti who fled just over a week ago.
Senator Kerry said he would have been prepared to use the US military, unilaterally if necessary - a swipe at President George W.Bush's claim that under the Democrats the US would need the world's permission to use its troops.
He previously has accused the White House of effectively backing Haiti's rebels in their attempt to force out President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but he added yesterday that the US has sent a "terrible message" to democracies in its own region.
"Look, Aristide was no picnic and did a lot of things wrong," Senator Kerry told The New York Times in his first foreign policy interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee last week.
"But we had understandings in the region about the right of a democratic regime to ask for help. And we contravened all of that."
His shot was one of several fired as the two sides prepared for an eight-month tussle for the presidency.
Mr Bush, meeting Mexican President Vicente Fox at his Texas ranch, was forced to defend his economic policy in the face of continued weak job growth, as well as his use of the September 11 terror attacks in election ads.
But he also made a push for the votes of Hispanics - now the largest minority in the US - with a promise that Mexicans who travelled frequently to the US would bypass the requirement that foreigners be fingerprinted and photographed.
At a press conference after the meeting with Mr Fox, Mr Bush rejected calls by some families of victims of the 2001 attacks to withdraw the ads.
They feature a fleeting image of the ruins of the World Trade Centre in New York and a flag-draped firefighter's coffin.
Mr Bush told reporters he had an "obligation" to keep talking about the attacks, and how his administration had handled that day and the war on terrorism that followed.
"I will continue to speak out about the effects of 9/11 on our country and my presidency," Mr Bush said.
"I have an obligation to those who died. I have an obligation to those who were heroic in their attempt to rescue. And I won't forget that obligation."
Senator Kerry has declined to comment on the ads, but lashed out yesterday at Mr Bush's failure to live up to his promises to create 4million jobs in the wake of poor new employment figures last month. Just 21,000 new jobs were added in February, well below an estimate last year by Treasury Secretary John Snow that the improving US economy would create an average of 200,000 new jobs a month.
"The economy is getting stronger," Mr Bush insisted. "We've overcome a lot. We've been through a recession. We've been through an attack. We've been through corporate scandals. We've been through war."
In Houston, Texas, Senator Kerry seized on the job numbers to attack Mr Bush's record on the economy, the most important issue in voters' minds.
"Didn't he promise 4 million jobs would be created with those tax cuts?" Senator Kerry asked, referring to three sets of tax cuts that have been the centrepiece of the Bush administration's economic strategy.
--------
Gunfire Kills 5 During a March in Haiti Capital
March 8, 2004
By TIM WEINER and LYDIA POLGREEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/international/americas/08HAIT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 7 - At least five people were killed Sunday when gunfire broke out near the presidential palace, after thousands of Haitians, including rebel leaders, marched peacefully through the capital to the palace gates.
The demonstrators, who had marched beside a convoy of armed United States marines and French troops, were calling for a new government and a new army.
Four Haitians and a Spanish television journalist died from gunshot wounds, said Dr. Ronald Georges, a surgeon at the overwhelmed emergency room of the Canape Vert Hospital in the capital. At least 20 people were wounded by "high-velocity weapons," Dr. Georges said.
The carnage marred a march that was by far the largest in Haiti since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled into exile a week ago under American pressure, after a monthlong rebellion that had threatened to plunge Haiti into anarchy.
An international peacekeeping force led by the United States has since begun to take control in Haiti, but both Aristide supporters and opponents remain heavily armed, resisting American calls to turn in their weapons. The results of their recalcitrance were plainly displayed Sunday, when men identified by witnesses as militant supporters of Mr. Aristide fired on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators.
Thousands of Mr. Aristide's opponents were gathered near the palace gates when the shooting started. Witnesses said the gunmen were chimères, the toughs Mr. Aristide had used to enforce his authority.
"The chimères just started shooting at us out of nowhere," said Sacha Baker, an opposition protester. "The cops started shooting back, and a lot of people were hit. The marines were nowhere to be seen."
Three marines returned fire from inside the palace gates, said Maj. Richard Crusan, a Marines spokesman in Port-au-Prince. He said a first volley came from outside the gates at 2:40 p.m. and a second from outside the gates eight minutes later.
A small contingent of marines came from inside the palace gates to aid some of the wounded. The marines who were with the parade of demonstrators all morning did not go all the way to the palace, but stopped to secure checkpoints a few blocks away at midday, about two hours before the shooting.
Three witnesses said the gunfire had begun in the Rue Lamarre, 100 yards from the palace gates. They said the shooting stopped after a group of marines came from inside the palace gates toward the armed Aristide supporters, then resumed after the marines went back to the palace carrying wounded people.
"The Marines need to change the rules of engagement," said Charles Baker, a prominent Aristide opponent who helped bring the wounded to the hospital. "They need to protect us or they need to go home and let us protect ourselves."
At the hospital emergency room, doctors struggled to cope with the nearly two dozen gunshot victims. The most seriously wounded lay on gurneys; half a dozen men writhed in pools of blood on the floor. Orderlies in lime-green suits struggled to mop up the pools of blood as each victim passed through, but their yellow buckets were soon full of crimson water.
"We have just two operating rooms," Dr. Georges said. "We are doing the best we can."
In the waiting room, a woman in a black cap screamed: "César is dead! César is dead! We were just together marching, and now he is dead!" Inside the emergency room, behind a screen, lay a dead man, his head covered with a white sheet. A piece of paper taped to his belly identified him: César Milfort.
Guy Philippe, the rebel leader whose actions helped push Mr. Aristide into exile, visited victims at the hospital, his face contorted as he saw their wounds. Mr. Philippe, who has said he would disarm his men with the expectation that American troops would protect the Haitian people but has not yet done so, criticized the marines. "They haven't done anything," he said.
Ricardo Ortega, the New York correspondent for the Spanish broadcast network Antena 3, died of a gunshot wound to the abdomen. The wounded included an American photographer, Michael Laughlin, 37, who was on assignment for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, of Fort Lauderdale. He was shot in the shoulder and cheek, but the wounds were not life threatening, doctors said.
The march to the presidential palace began at about 9:15 a.m., less than six hours before the shooting, when about 50 marines, French soldiers and Haitian policemen rolled up to St. Peter's Church in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, during a Mass.
Several hundred demonstrators immediately set out with the rolling convoy of foreign soldiers, making them part of the march. The river of people grew to many thousands as it reached Toussaint L'Ouverture Boulevard, named after the leader of the slave revolt that created a free Haiti in 1804.
The demonstration surged past the Marine convoy, carrying troops armed with .50-caliber machine guns and assault rifles. Mr. Philippe, the rebel leader, appeared in the crowd next to the marines. The demonstrators sang his praises, and a marine telephoned superiors to report Mr. Philippe's presence.
Mr. Philippe has called for the restoration of the notorious Haitian Army, and so did some demonstrators. The army overthrew Mr. Aristide in 1991 and the United States restored him to power in 1994.
The marchers supported a new government, freed both from the influence of Mr. Aristide's party, Lavalas, and from United States forces.
"We don't want Lavalas!" the crowd sang. "We don't want occupation!" Others chanted "Bring back the army!" and "Fix the police!" They also cheered for Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a former Haitian military officer convicted of killing Aristide supporters.
Hundreds of the marchers called for the arrest of Mr. Aristide's prime minister, Yvon Neptune. Pamphlets, signs and chants supported a retired Haitian Army lieutenant general, Hérard Abraham, to replace him. A seven-member "council of elders" is supposed to select a new prime minister in two or three days.
Mr. Abraham was a member of a military junta in the late 1980's. But, unique among modern Haitian Army officers, he handed power to a civilian leader, the sitting chief justice of the Supreme Court, in 1990. That opened the way to Haiti's first free elections in December 1990, which Mr. Aristide won, only to be overthrown by the army the next year.
As radio reports filtered through the crowd about a possible counterdemonstration by Aristide supporters, the anti-Aristide crowd sang a song in Creole about them. It went something like this, "They're here, they're weird, look out for them."
--------
Statement From Aristide
March 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/international/africa/08ARIS.html
BANGUI, Central African Republic, March 7 - Jean-Bertrand Aristide said in a message read out by a Central African minister on Sunday that he was being well treated in this African state, to which he came a week ago after stepping down from the Haitian presidency.
But the government of the Central African Republic refused to let Mr. Aristide's wife, Mildred, address a news conference called to reassure the public that Mr. Aristide was not being held a virtual prisoner.
"We have been very well received" at the presidential palace by President François Bozize, said the brief message handed by Mrs. Aristide to Foreign Minister Charles Wenezoui in front of reporters.
Mr. Wenezoui refused requests to allow Mrs. Aristide, who looked calm but slightly uncomfortable, to speak.
-------- iraq
The Master Operator
You might think Ahmad Chalabi is discredited and despised. But he's still growing more powerful
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
March 8, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4409622/
Nobody seems to love Ahmad Chalabi anymore. From the moment he flew into Iraq last year with a band of U.S.-trained militia at his side, many locals saw him as an interloper, a pretender and, in some eyes, an American lackey. These days, when the U.S.-run administration in Baghdad takes confidential polls to gauge public support for its hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council, Chalabi's approval ratings are "the most negative by far" among the 25 members, says an official who's perused the results. "The numbers I've seen run around 60 percent negative to 30 percent positive."
Chalabi is equally unpopular in some Washington fiefdoms. State Department officials and CIA agents have loathed him for years, raising questions about subjects ranging from his expense accounts to the intelligence he supplied on Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction. Even Chalabi's friends and patrons at the Pentagon may be having doubts. Privately, some of Chalabi's aides complain their old buddies in the office of the secretary of Defense have forgotten them.
So you might think Chalabi is discredited and finished. But then you'd be wrong-very wrong. On the contrary, the former exile leader has insinuated himself into several of the most powerful positions inside occupied Iraq. This MIT-trained mathematician, a great judge of political odds, knows just how to play both ends against the middle.
A huge stain on Chalabi's reputation, widely known in Iraq, is his conviction in absentia for massive bank fraud in neighboring Jordan during the 1980s. (Chalabi denies the charges and claims Saddam Hussein had a hand in framing him.) Never mind all that. Chalabi is now head of the Governing Council's economic and finance committee. As such he has overseen the appointment of the minister of oil, the minister of finance, the central bank governor, the trade minister, the head of the trade bank and the designated managing director of the largest commercial bank in the country. For the moment, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer writes the big checks and can veto policies. But all that will change on June 30, the Bush administration's self-imposed deadline for returning sovereignty to an Iraqi government. "Ahmad is positioning himself," says one cabinet minister. "He is a master tactician."
Chalabi's other major source of strength is the De-Baathification Commission, which he heads. Its mandate-to work against former members of Saddam's regime and his Baath Party-is so wide-ranging that even one of Chalabi's aides calls it "a government within the government." It's empowered to oversee educational reform, track down Saddam's funds, purge senior Baathists from government jobs and occasionally reinstate those who can convince the commission they weren't complicit in Saddam's crimes. The backbone of the operation is a vast collection of secret documents seized from Saddam's files. To process them, according to one Chalabi aide, the De-Baathification Commission has 50 document scanners. There are only 20 other scanners in all the rest of the government.
Chalabi's latest feints have been toward the powerful Shiite religious leadership in Iraq, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. (Chalabi has long had close ties to the Iranian mullahs, too.) He voiced support for Islamic law, then had a representative of his vote against it last week. As members of the Governing Council struggled to reach agreement on the "fundamental law," or interim constitution that was supposed to be approved by Feb. 28, Chalabi's representative then joined seven other Shiite council members who stormed out of the meeting. "Chalabi is riding the Sistani wave," says one of his critics on the council.
Both Iraqi and U.S. officials in Baghdad say it's almost certain that on June 30, the government that does receive sovereignty-and the purse strings-will be either the current, appointed council, or some variation on it. Will Chalabi and his people still be in place, still powerful? You can just about bank on it.
----
Deal struck on Iraq constitution
March 8, 2004
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/07/1078594240274.html
An Iraqi Shi'ite official yesterday said a deal had been struck on Iraq's interim constitution, after talks at the home of Shi'ite religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
"You will hear very good news, very soon, the signing will take place Monday," Governing Council member Muwaffaq al-Rubaie told reporters two days after his religious bloc withdrew their endorsement and pulled out of a signing ceremony.
Mr Rubaie and Ahmad Chalabi, along with Abdel Adel Mahdi, a representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), visited Ayatollah Sistani for 25 minutes as informal talks proceeded on how to break the deadlock on the country's transitional law.
"We think Sistani does not want to provoke a crisis in the country but, to the contrary, wishes to facilitate our work to make the political process succeed and without any interruption," Mr Rubaie said.
Both Mr Chalabi and Mr Rubaie later headed to Baghdad.
The Governing Council's current president also voiced optimism that the body would meet Monday's crucial deadline.
"We are headed towards an agreement on the unresolved issues. The signing of the provisional constitution must happen today at 2pm (1100 GMT)," Mohammed Barhul al-Uloom told reporters.
He spoke after meeting Ayatollah Sistani's son, Mohammed Rida, who shuttled back and forth relaying messages between his father and the emissaries sent by the Governing Council.
He was accompanied by Mr Chalabi, Mr Rubaie, Ahmed Shayyah Barak, Rajaa Habib Khuzai and representatives from the Islamist parties Dawa and SCIRI.
The Shi'ite bloc skipped the signing on Friday because they disagreed with a clause in the basic law that gave what they felt to be unfair power to the Kurdish north.
They also wanted a greater presence in Iraq's next executive, and indicated concern about Kurdish becoming an official state language, a source close to the negotiations told AFP.
----
Iraqis Sign Interim Constitution After Shiites Drop Objections
March 8, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/international/09CND_IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 8 - The Iraqi Governing Council signed the interim constitution today after Shiite leaders ended a deadlock that had threatened to undermine the transfer of sovereignty by the American-led occupation force to the Iraqi people scheduled for later this year.
All 25 members of the Iraqi council signed the document during a ceremony in Baghdad, which the president of the council, Sayyed Muhammad Bahr al-Uloum, called a "historic moment, decisive in the history of Iraq."
The Shiite leaders, who had refused last week to approve the interim constitution, said they had agreed to sign it despite their concerns that it could grant a relatively small number of people veto power over Iraq's permanent constitution, which is to be written after nationwide elections are held this year or next.
They said they had made their decision to endorse the constitution after receiving the approval of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, adding that he had dropped his objections because he did not want to spoil the Iraqis' opportunity to get a constitution, even an imperfect one.
Ayatollah Sistani, who had touched off the impasse last week by expressing his concerns to the Shiite leaders, today said in a statement that the interim constitution makes it harder for the drafting of a permanent charter, placing "obstacles to arriving at a permanent constitution for the country," and that any further law must be endorsed by an elected national assembly.
Until Sunday, the ayatollah had all but dictated to American officials the terms of such important political questions as elections. Comments by Ayatollah Sistani in January, for instance, scuttled an agreement by which a future Iraqi national assembly would have been selected in a series of nationwide caucuses.
"We've decided to sign the constitution and resolve the problems in it later," said Hamid al-Bayati, a senior leader with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the groups that had refused to sign the document on Friday.
"Sistani and the others are not micromanaging the political process," said a Shiite political leader who met with Ayatollah Sistani on Sunday, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They have confidence in the Shiite representatives. They understand the political realities. As long as the issue is stated and put out in the open, then they are not going to stand in the way."
On Friday the ceremony was canceled when the 5 Shiites, among the 13 Shiites who are on the council, objected at the last moment and failed to show up. Council members preferred to have unanimous agreement on the document.
In an attack that underlined the difficulties of restoring security, guerrillas fired mortars at a Baghdad police station today, wounding two policemen and three civilians, the Iraqi police said. The deadlock over the interim constitution had pitted the country's majority Shiites against its Kurdish minority in the north. The dispute arose over language that allows the permanent constitution to be ratified by a majority vote of the Iraqi people. With a majority of the votes, the constitution would pass, unless it were opposed by a two-thirds majority in 3 of the country's 18 provinces. In that case, it would fail.
That language was inserted into the interim constitution to reassure the Kurds, who want to retain the autonomous status they have enjoyed since 1991. The Shiite leaders said the clause meant that the constitution could be held hostage to a relatively small number of voters.
When the Shiite leaders insisted that language be deleted, Kurdish leaders threatened to back out of the constitution.
"We already have our own government," one Kurdish official said on Sunday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "If the Shiites try to make us obey, we won't ask for anything. We will just keep what we have."
The negotiations over the constitution unfolded Sunday as the American compound in Baghdad was attacked by a salvo of seven rockets.
Five of the rockets hit the Rashid Hotel, a target of previous attacks. The other two rockets landed near the American-controlled convention center, where the signing ceremony was scheduled to take place. Officers on the scene said one person was slightly wounded.
It was unclear whether the attackers had timed the rocket explosions to precede the signing ceremony, but an American officer suggested that they might have done so.
"I think there are definitely people who are trying to stop the new Iraq from emerging," said Lt. Col. Randy Lane, standing near the spot where the rockets had been launched.
The rockets were fired from a Toyota Land Cruiser parked just outside the American compound. Two rockets did not go off, and minutes later, the car exploded. An Iraqi security official said the car had been rigged with a bomb.
-------
Shiites Agree to Sign Iraqi Charter
Officials Say Top Cleric Will Not Block Passage
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38116-2004Mar7?language=printer
BAGHDAD, March 7 -- Shiite Muslim political leaders who had refused to sign the country's interim constitution said Sunday that they would approve the document without changes on Monday despite concerns voiced by the country's top cleric.
The reversal appeared to signal the end of an embarrassing deadlock over a U.S.-backed document that is designed to prepare Iraq for self-government and enshrine broad protections for individual rights. Officials of Iraq's Governing Council said they hoped to convene a signing ceremony on Monday, resurrecting an event that was canceled Friday after five Shiite leaders balked at the last minute.
A few hours after the Shiite leaders announced their willingness to sign, at least seven rockets exploded a block away from the Baghdad conference center where the ceremony is scheduled to occur. Five rockets struck the al-Rashid Hotel, inside the Green Zone, a high-security swath of the capital where thousands of U.S. personnel live and work. An American contractor was injured in the attack, a military spokesman said.
The Shiite politicians agreed to change their position after meeting with the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, in the holy city of Najaf. In refusing to sign the document on Friday, the politicians said Sistani had rejected two provisions in the interim constitution, one that would give ethnic Kurds, who make up 20 percent of Iraq's population, effective veto power over a permanent constitution and another that would establish a single president under the transitional administration.
After Sunday's meeting, which lasted for about 30 minutes, a top aide to one of the political leaders said Sistani was not happy with the provisions but would not order the politicians to reject the document.
"Sistani has reservations, but it will not constitute an obstacle," the aide, Mohammed Hussein Bahr Uloum, told reporters in Najaf.
Uloum, the son of Mohammed Bahr Uloum, one of the five Shiite dissenters and the council's current president, said Shiite leaders would sign the interim constitution "as it stands."
Although the Shiite leaders refused to divulge the substance of their discussions with Sistani, they suggested that they had received approval from the grand ayatollah to sign the document, known as the Transitional Administrative Law.
"The news is very good," said Mowaffak Rubaie, one of the Shiite Governing Council members who met with Sistani. "We are very happy that Ayatollah Sistani understands our point. We came to clarify the reason of delaying signing the law."
Sistani, Rubaie said, "understands the explanation we gave him. He doesn't want to create a crisis in the country. He wants to facilitate our work and the political process in Iraq."
Mohammed Hussein Hakim, the son of another senior Shiite cleric who participated in discussions with the politicians, told the Reuters news service that religious leaders were not pleased with the document but they also did not want to block it.
"The religious authorities have made their position clear to the politicians, but don't want to interfere directly," Hakim told Reuters. "They have deep reservations, but also know this interim constitution is a step in the right direction."
The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, confirmed that the Shiites had agreed to approve the constitution. "The indications we're getting from what we've heard are that the Governing Council is going to get together tomorrow and sign it tomorrow, and I hope that will happen," Bremer said on CNN's "Late Edition."
The Shiites' initial refusal to sign provided a clear demonstration of the political influence of Sistani and other top clerics. Sistani has vowed to refrain from interfering in the day-to-day operations of government, but he has taken an intense interest in the interim constitution. He has indicated he believes it to be central to Iraq's democratic transition and the guarantee of religious freedom for Shiites, a majority that was long oppressed by deposed president Saddam Hussein's Sunni Muslim-dominated government.
Sistani had earlier demanded that elected individuals draft a constitution, foiling the Bush administration's first transition plan. A second plan, to select an interim government through regional caucuses, was also gutted by Sistani's objections, forcing the administration to agree to hold elections for a transitional government by early next year.
The interim constitution is designed to remain in force until an elected assembly agrees on a permanent charter and it is approved in a nationwide referendum.
The Shiites wanted to delete a clause in the interim constitution that says a permanent charter will not go into effect if two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces reject it, even if the document receives a nationwide majority. Because ethnic Kurds control three provinces in the north, the provision would effectively give the Kurds the ability to scuttle a constitution.
The Kurds regard the provision as an insurance policy that would prevent a Shiite majority from dictating the terms of the constitution, which is supposed to be written next year by an elected transitional assembly.
The five Shiite dissenters also wanted the government that takes power after elections to be headed by a five-member presidency instead of a single president and two powerful vice presidents as outlined by the interim constitution. The Shiites fear that the authority of the president, presumably a Shiite, would be diluted by the two vice presidents, who would almost certainly be a Sunni Arab and a Kurd. Instead, the Shiites wanted a five-member co-presidency that could have given the Shiites a 3-to-2 majority.
Kurdish and Sunni Arab leaders have refused to make changes to the document, which was agreed to last Monday after laborious negotiations.
A senior Kurdish leader said he was "cautiously optimistic" the interim constitution would be signed on Monday. "The indications are positive," the leader said. "But we have to wait until they sign."
The five Shiites who refused to sign the interim document were Rubaie, Uloum, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, Abdul Aziz Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Ibrahim Jafari of the Dawa party.
-------- israel / palestine
At Least 14 Palestinians Killed in Firefight in Gaza
Battle Ensues After Israelis Attempt Incursion
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37532-2004Mar7.html
JERUSALEM, March 7 -- At least 14 Palestinians, including three children, were killed and 80 others wounded Sunday during a chaotic firefight in the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli military officials and eyewitness accounts.
The clash occurred when Palestinian fighters armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, molotov cocktails and crude antitank missiles prevented Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers from carrying out an operation in two Gaza Strip refugee camps, witnesses and officials said. No Israeli soldiers were reported killed or wounded.
The eight-hour battle between Palestinians using guerrilla-style hit-and-run tactics and Israeli armored forces was one of the most deadly encounters in months in the Gaza Strip, where combat has intensified while Israeli political leaders debate a proposal by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to consider evacuating Jewish settlements in Gaza.
An Israeli spokesman said the pre-dawn incursion was intended to confiscate weapons and arrest gunmen accused of launching recent attacks at Israeli soldiers guarding the nearby Netzarim settlement.
"We witnessed intensive fighting from the beginning: antitank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs, molotov cocktails," said a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces. "We did not manage to confiscate anything or arrest anyone. We didn't get close enough and decided to go and pull out."
Even the withdrawal from the outskirts of the two refugee camps was hindered when gunmen attacked and disabled a huge armored bulldozer, prompting Israeli commanders to summon more armored forces to rescue the vehicle and its occupants, the spokesman said.
The ferocity of the fighters' assault underscored a trend of increasingly organized and sophisticated tactics against Israeli troops and improved cooperation among militant organizations in the Gaza Strip, according to both Palestinian and Israeli officials.
The incursion was launched just 17 hours after Palestinian attackers using jeeps disguised to look like Israeli army vehicles tried to assault an Israeli military checkpoint at the Erez border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Six Palestinians died in the botched attack -- four of the assailants and two officers from Palestinian security forces who were posted nearby.
Palestinian officials said they believed the militant organizations were combining and refining their resistance against the Israelis to survive escalating crackdowns and in response to Sharon's proposed withdrawal from Gaza settlements. "Nobody is certain what's going to happen as far as Sharon's plan," said Ziad Abu Amr, a Gaza representative on the Palestinian Legislative Council. "All sides are trying to improve their positions here."
"The motivation is at an all-time high," said Sharon's spokesman, Raanan Gissin. "The terrorist organizations are afraid if Israel disengages and the Palestinians are forced to move in and take control, their freedom of movement and action will be limited."
Palestinian officials have accused Israel of intentionally increasing its incursions into the Gaza Strip in the wake of Sharon's possible settlement withdrawal.
Gissin said the incursions were "part of sustained targeted operations directed specifically against armed strongholds of Hamas," the Palestinian militant group known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, as well as against fighters "roaming freely into the camps and taking the law into their own hands."
Sunday morning's incursion was the third major street battle in less than six weeks between Israeli armored units and Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip. At least 37 Palestinians have been killed in the clashes. No Israeli soldiers have died.
At about 2:30 a.m., Shadi Saideni, 22, a member of Hamas who had been posted as a lookout, spotted Israeli armored vehicles and tanks moving toward the two central Gaza refugee camps of Nusseirat and Bureij, according to an account by the organization.
Alerts and shouts of "God is Great!" began blaring from mosques across the two densely built communities. Witnesses said fighters from militant organizations were summoned to protect the two camps, which straddle the Gaza Strip's main highway just south of Gaza City. Scores of militants converged on the camps' entrances and fired at the approaching armored vehicles, witnesses said.
For eight hours, the militants launched crude antitank missiles and homemade bombs at Israeli forces as tanks fired back and AH-64 Apache helicopters circled above, spitting missiles and heavy-caliber bullets into the fray below, witnesses said.
The flocks of children that gather every time Israeli tanks roll into civilian areas darted among houses and through labyrinthine alleyways trying to simultaneously catch glimpses of the fighting and duck for cover, witnesses said.
The dead included Mohammed Younis, 7, and two 14-year-old boys -- Mohammed Badawi and Mohammed Abu Zrain, according to Palestinian officials. A fourth civilian identified as Thaer Maghari was also killed, the officials said. Nine militants from Hamas, and one fighter from the Popular Resistance Committee, an organization comprised of renegades from other militant groups, died in the fighting, according to statements issued by the two organizations.
Special correspondent Islam Abdulkarim in Gaza City contributed to this report.
--------
14 Palestinians Killed in Battle as Israelis Raid Camps in Gaza
March 8, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/international/middleeast/08MIDE.html
NUSEIRAT REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip, March 7 - Israeli armored forces raided the outskirts of two neighboring refugee camps in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, igniting a gun-and-grenade battle that lasted for hours and left 14 Palestinians dead.
At least 10 of the dead were gunmen, but Palestinians said 3 were unarmed youths. They included a 9-year-old boy who had told his mother he was going to school but apparently went to watch the fighting instead. No Israelis were wounded.
It was the deadliest single Israeli raid in more than a year. Witnesses and the army described a bedlam of gunfire and explosions of grenades and firebombs after Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships moved on the camps, and mosque loudspeakers summoned gunmen to jihad.
After dawn, hundreds of children and teenagers, some of them flinging stones from improvised slings, swarmed the uncertain edges of the congested battlefield, a mix of orange orchards in fragrant bloom and fetid, sandy camp lanes.
Eighty-three people were injured, including 40 under the age of 18, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The Israeli Army said soldiers were searching for weapons and for militants responsible for firing mortar bombs and antitank missiles at nearby Jewish settlements. The Israeli forces eventually withdrew under what the army described as extraordinarily heavy Palestinian fire, including antitank missiles, mortar bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. They did not make any arrests or seize any weapons.
The raid came a day after a brazen suicidal Palestinian assault on an Israeli-controlled boundary crossing from Gaza. That attack on Saturday killed the four assailants and two Palestinian policemen without harming any Israelis. It suggested a new daring by militants here as the governing Palestinian Authority crumbles and the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, speaks of an eventual, unilateral withdrawal from most or all of the Gaza Strip.
Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Mr. Sharon, said of the raid on Sunday, "This is a signal to show that even though there are talks about disengagement, we are not going to let them use these camps to launch their attacks."
He said soldiers tried to avoid hurting civilians. He expressed regret for the deaths of the children but said: "The children flock to the gunmen. No doubt the gunmen are using them."
Palestinians accused Israel of staging the attack in hopes of drawing out and killing militants.
"I think the Israelis did this so that the militant people would come and confront them, and they could get them all at once," said Awad Quader, 27, a chicken farmer who lives near the center of where the fighting was.
In a statement, the Islamic militant group Hamas identified nine of the dead as members of its violent wing. Two were known to be particularly active in firing mortar bombs and rockets at Israeli targets.
Nuseirat and the neighboring Bureij camp held a ritual on Sunday that is grimly familiar to the residents. Middle-aged and elderly men gathered to sit quietly on plastic chairs outside the homes of the dead, women gathered to sit on the floors inside, and young men and boys lofted the bodies through the streets in roiling crowds, shouting that God is great.
The body of Mahmoud Younis, 9, his face rigid and yellow, was wrapped in a bright green Hamas flag as it was carried to the low door of his cinder-block home. One man repeatedly fired a silver pistol into the air outside as the body was borne in and then carried away for burial.
Mahmoud's mother, Jamila Younis, 35, said her son had gotten up at 6, put on his school uniform and said he wanted to go to class despite the fighting. "Instead of going to school, I think he and his friends went to the place where there was the incursion," she said, her eyes red. "His friends came and said, `Your son died.' He got a bullet in the head and also in his foot."
Outside the Younis home were more than a dozen members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group connected to the mainstream Fatah faction. They wore black hoods with black or green mesh over their eyes. Some had rocket-propelled grenades strapped to their waists along with the Kalashnikov rifles in their hands.
Their leader, a man of 40 who did not wear a hood and gave the nom de guerre Abu Jandal, said Mr. Sharon was confused about his own intentions but added, "The pressure of resistance from here will force him to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank."
He said the Israeli raid would recruit more militants for him. "All these young kids are asking to be martyrs," he said, gesturing at dozens of boys who crowded around him and his gunmen. "They want to be bombs."
Judging by their route of withdrawal, the Israeli forces began their raid from just north of here at the Israeli settlement of Netzarim. Palestinian witnesses said that, at the start of the raid, soldiers seized at least two tall buildings and set up sniper posts.
The army said soldiers were seeking to track down a militant cell centered at the Bureij camp that has fired dozens of mortar bombs during the past two months at Netzarim and the settlement of Kfar Darom, south of here. Those attacks have not caused injuries, but an army spokesman said they could have caused great harm.
The Israeli Army frequently enters Palestinian cities in the West Bank in what it says are searches for wanted men, and gunmen now seldom resist those raids. But in Gaza, militants continue to fight back. An Israeli raid into Gaza City on Feb. 11 left 12 Palestinians dead, and another on Jan. 28 left 8 dead. In both cases, most of the dead were gunmen.
The army said the fight here was unusual in that the Palestinians responded so quickly, and with considerable firepower.
The Palestinian fire actually intensified during the withdrawal, the army said. At least one armored vehicle was partly disabled and had to be rescued. Some children climbed onto halted armored vehicles, the army said.
After the Israelis withdrew at midmorning, a hole four feet deep and six feet across gaped in Salahadin Road between the camps, where militants had detonated a mine.
-------- latin america
After Haiti, Venezuela is wary of US interference
The US response in Haiti has divided Latin Americans over US policy - especially in politically torn Venezuela.
By Mike Ceaser
The Christian Science Monitor
March 08, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0308/p07s01-woam.html
CARACAS, VENEZUELA - Whether Washington is a hero or hangman of democracy in Latin America may be a matter of political perspective.
Haitians watched last week as US agents whisked leftist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide off to the heart of Africa in what Mr. Aristide describes as a kidnapping. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, another leftist who has antagonized Washington, has harshly accused the White House of backing coup-plotters against him. Critical of US action in Haiti, he warned the US on Friday to "get its hands off Venezuela."
The Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, an organization of mostly English-speaking nations, is calling for Aristide's departure to be investigated. More than a dozen Caribbean nations have refused to join any peacekeeping force there.
Washington has reformed from the days when it supported vicious Latin American dictatorships, but it has not embraced democracy unreservedly, says Robert Fatton, a Haitian-American professor of politics at the University of Virginia.
"There have been changes in support for democracy, but they have to be democracies that the US likes," he says.
Haitians and Venezuelans alike are divided over US actions. What Chávez and Aristide loyalists may consider American intrusion and coup-mongering is simply support for democracy in the eyes of many of their opponents, who have accused both presidents of ruling authoritatively and violating human rights.
Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans marched on Saturday to protest the denial of a presidential recall vote. The demonstration was more peaceful than last week's rioting when Chávez critics burned tires and blockaded streets.
Protester Anais Viloria, an attorney, says he favors US involvement in Venezuela. "The United States is a guarantor of democracy," he says.
But across town at the National Electoral Council's headquarters, pro-Chávez demonstrators waved banners saying "CIA out of Venezuela." Security guard Otilio Bencomo charges the US with plotting to remove Chavez by any means in order to cheaply obtain Venezuela's oil.
"[Washington] wants a government which will kneel down before them, in order to take Venezuela's natural resources," he says.
Chávez is trying to derail the effort to hold a recall vote. Opposition organizations turned in 3.4 million signatures last December, but the electoral council ruled last week that only 1.8 million of those were valid - far below the 2.4 million required. Chávez opponents charge the government-dominated council with using unfair technicalities. Those whose signatures were ruled doubtful will have an opportunity to confirm their signatures during a "repair period," but the opposition claims the electoral council has set conditions designed to frustrate that goal.
The US has earned Chávez's ire by sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-Chávez organizations here and by issuing a steady stream of criticisms of Chávez policies. On Saturday, President Bush expressed support for the referendum process.
At the same time, Washington's abandonment of Aristide has set a dangerous precedent for other leaders, Mr. Fatton says. "It generates a lot of problems for a government which was elected and becomes unpopular," he says.
In Chile, where dictator Augusto Pinochet's government murdered thou- sands of leftists - and enjoyed US backing during much of his regime - the public attitude toward Washington is moving on, says Guillermo Holzman, a University of Chile professor of politics. Chileans are dubious about the US's democratic values, he says, but for new reasons: the Bush administration's unilateral actions on issues such as the Kyoto Protocol and the war in Iraq.
"It's not clear whether [US actions] are to support democracy or protect its interests," Mr. Holzman says.
Michael Shifter, an analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, says the White House has repeatedly fumbled - and damaged its image - in Latin America because the terror war has distracted its attention. "[A problem] reaches a crisis point and then it's too late, and Washington reacts badly," he says.
Carlos Gervasoni, a political science professor at Catholic University in Buenos Aires, says Washington's response to Venezuela's 2002 coup caused it much more damage in Latin America than did its recent actions in Haiti. In Haiti, he argues, the democratic succession was preserved following Aristide's departure. But Washington gave an extremely negative signal two years ago when it welcomed the de facto government that ousted Chavez and dissolved the constitution and parliament.
"Venezuela was the Bush administration's one opportunity to support democracy, and it didn't," he said.
But, Mr. Gervasoni says, by restricting itself to a peacekeeping force in Haiti, Washington avoided another international relations disaster in a region sensitive about its role in history as the US's backyard. "A military intervention would have been rejected in Latin America," he says. "That is Latin America's greatest fear."
• Material from Reuters was used for this report.
-------- us
Military Spending Sparks Warnings
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38812-2004Mar7?language=printer
A sharp jump in military spending under President Bush has lifted defense budgets to levels not seen since the height of the Reagan buildup of the early 1980s, prompting warnings by lawmakers and defense analysts that the surge may no longer be sustainable in a time of deepening deficits.
The military bills, which are approaching $500 billion a year, reflect an exceptional confluence of events, as the Pentagon attempts to cover the costs of stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan while pursuing an array of new weaponry, exploring revolutionary technologies and caring for an all-volunteer military.
In a sign of mounting pressure to constrain the Pentagon's purse, the Senate Budget Committee voted last week to trim $7 billion from Bush's defense request. Defense hawks vowed to restore the money and to block a similar cost-cutting move expected in the House.
The looming political battle bore a striking parallel with conditions 19 years ago when congressional alarm over a soaring federal deficit led to the end of President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup.
"This feels to me the way it did back in 1985," said John Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary and comptroller under President Bill Clinton and now president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "I believe the tide has begun to turn. These deficit and defense budget numbers are so shockingly big now that, politically, they're untenable."
Indeed, the Army's decision last month to cancel its Comanche helicopter program signaled a growing recognition by military authorities that they can no longer afford all the projects they have in the works.
Among the most vulnerable projects are a few big-ticket weapons programs conceived during the Cold War and still in development, including the Air Force's F/A-22 Raptor jet, the multi-service F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Marine Corps's V-22 tiltrotor aircraft and the Navy's Virginia-class attack submarine. Some newer, experimental projects may also be at risk -- notably, the Army's Future Combat System, the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship and the Bush administration's missile defense program.
But deciding what to cut is likely to prove more problematic now than in the Reagan years, according to military officials and defense specialists, who note that Bush's spending boost has differed markedly from Reagan's.
For one thing, while Reagan's rise took place in peacetime, Bush's budgets have included a significant wartime component. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan added more than $60 billion to the 2003 and 2004 budgets. They likely will require an additional $50 billion or so in 2005 on top of the $421 billion Bush already has requested, according to a White House estimate.
"The fact that we are in some manner of war at this time may put a floor under what's done to defense, a floor that was not there in 1985," said Gordon Adams, director of the Security Policy Studies program at George Washington University.
Another substantial chunk of Bush's buildup has gone toward higher salary, health care and retirement costs associated with sustaining a fully professional, family-oriented military. This, too, contrasts with Reagan's spending increase, much of which went to buying fleets of tanks, helicopters, aircraft and other military equipment.
"A lot of the extra money that the president is giving us is being soaked up not in hardware or structure, but in compensation," said Lt. Gen. Jerry Sinn, the Army's top budget officer. "Without these budget increases, we'd be looking at force reductions."
Indeed, the high cost of troops is one reason Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has resisted calls in Congress for a permanent expansion of the armed forces to ease the strain on 1.4 million active duty troops and 1.2 million reservists.
Sinn cited figures showing that, on average, officer compensation has nearly doubled since 1990, from $68,000 to $115,000. "Grade creep" has led to higher percentages of commissioned and noncommissioned officers in the force, which in turn has escalated costs.
"In Reagan's era, we were buying lots of stuff," Hamre said. "Now, the military establishment is substantially different, with a much reduced force and fewer weapons on order. Yet, we're spending the same amount of money. It's just startling."
Bush came into office pledging to impose greater fiscal discipline on the Pentagon and stressing new, "transformational" technologies aimed at reshaping the U.S. military into a leaner, more mobile force geared to fighting regional wars and terrorist networks instead of the old Soviet Union.
But the terrorist attacks in 2001 triggered a surge in defense spending that eased pressure on the Pentagon to choose between the legacy systems still in development and the new technologies getting off the ground, including missile defenses, pilotless aircraft and laser communications satellites. Before last month's elimination of Comanche, the Pentagon under Bush had cut only two other sizable programs -- the Army's Crusader howitzer and a Navy missile defense system.
In late 2001, Bush approved a military budget plan that provided for increases of about $10 billion a year, plus the cost of inflation, through the rest of his term and beyond. The actual increases have been much greater.
Total defense budget authority, which covers not only the Pentagon's needs but also the nuclear weapons programs run by the Energy Department, rose by $19 billion in 2002 to $385 billion. It soared $89 billion the next year to $474 billion and has remained at about the same level in fiscal 2004.
By comparison, Reagan's buildup, in today's dollars, peaked at $494 billion in 1985.
Under Bush, said Adams of GWU, the Pentagon has "dodged a bullet" and avoided hard choices it would have faced under tighter fiscal conditions. "It has been able to have its cake and eat it, too."
Defense hawks in Congress remain determined to prevent the cake from being sliced up. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and 33 other House Republicans sent a letter Feb. 25 to Rep. Jim Nussle (R-Iowa), chairman of the Budget Committee, warning they would oppose a budget resolution cutting Bush's request.
At a hearing of his committee last week, Hunter said reductions now "would be a mistake in the middle of a war, while our service personnel are engaged with the enemy." He and opponents of defense cuts also have pointed to aging fleets of military aircraft and vehicles, arguing that investment in new equipment must be sustained to make up for the "procurement holiday" of the 1990s that followed the Soviet Union's collapse.
Even with the recent rise in defense spending, they note, the military's share of the nation's gross domestic product amounts to only 4 percent, compared with an average 6 percent in the 1980s. The military's share of the federal budget is down as well, from an average 28 percent in the 1980s to slightly less than 20 percent in 2004.
Still, say proponents of defense cuts, the Pentagon consumes about half of all federal discretionary spending. As military spending has shot up under Bush, most other discretionary categories have remained flat or declined.
"There are many people in the other Appropriations subcommittees -- including the leaders of those subcommittees -- who believe their flat funding puts them in a very difficult position, and they'll be taking a hard look at our defense bill to try to tap into that pool," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee's panel on defense.
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Foreign Crises Stretch U.S. in Election Year
By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38937-2004Mar7?language=printer
With Haiti's drama and the flare-up of violence in Iraq, the United States faces an overload of crises that Republicans and Democrats agree will be even more difficult to deal with now that the presidential campaign is in full swing.
Rarely has Washington had such a large and diverse array of foreign policy problems to juggle as leaders of both parties hit the campaign trail. And rarely have those crises been so central to an election, evident in the scathing volleys between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) over the past week.
In the first presidential election since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration finds its foreign policy initiatives to defend the United States from the new threats becoming hot election issues -- and liabilities. "It's fighting three wars: Iraq, Afghanistan and the global war on terror. It has to deal with everything from Colombia to Haiti, the Palestinians to North Korea, the World Trade Organization. If someone is arguing the administration has a lot on its plate and it is stretched, they've got a point," said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a top foreign policy planning official in both Bush administrations.
But the broader question is whether the confluence of crises -- and the intense election debate they have spawned -- will crimp U.S. willingness or ability to focus on new problems or opportunities, leaving Washington instead reacting and on the defensive. Some Republican insiders have adopted a crisis-avoidance mantra for the election season: "No war in '04."
"It's a very challenging time," said James B. Steinberg, Brookings Institution director of foreign policy studies and deputy national security adviser for the Clinton administration. "There's a real temptation to play defense rather than to take these things on. But when you do that, you risk becoming a hostage of current fortunes and, rather than shaping the environment, you allow other people to drive the agenda and set the pace."
There are already signs that the Bush administration may be reluctant to tackle new hot spots, which Republicans and Democrats say is what happened during the uprising against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's controversial but democratically elected leader.
Washington resisted getting embroiled until the final days of the confrontation, despite long-brewing signs of trouble, because of "time and resources and focus and energy," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.). With so many troops tied down in Iraq and elsewhere, "the last thing we need is another problem. So we try to get out on the cheap," he said.
The United States is guilty of outright neglect for its failure to act earlier, Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.) told Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at a House Appropriations Committee hearing last week. "This was not an overnight crisis, and could we not have better supported the democracy in Haiti if we had been more generous with our assistance?" Serrano said.
Haiti is symptomatic of the dilemmas during an election season after 21/2 years of ambitious but controversial interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The next eight months is not a time for "discretionary commitments" that are "politically ambitious and costly entanglements," Haass said. "Iraq is a war of choice. It is hard to imagine more wars of choice in the foreseeable future."
White House officials deny that the administration is stretched thin or overburdened.
"This White House is the most calm that I've worked in. I was struck by this [at the end of February] as we were wrapping up six-party talks on North Korea and had Haiti and Iraq's Transitional Administrative Law. The phones were ringing off the hook, but there was no sense of crisis in the White House. No one starts running a fever if there's a crisis," said a senior administration official who has worked in top positions for several administrations.
Political strategist Karl Rove is not urging Bush to kick problems down the road to avoid tough choices, said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff.
"Bush understands that it's riskier in many cases to endlessly put off dealing with problems -- and that they'll come back to bite you at a time not of your choosing," Kristol said. "Bush needs to go to the country on the basis of his foreign policy. That's risky and some won't like it. But he can't say, 'Elect me because of my foreign policy,' but then, this year, put everything on hold."
This White House also remembers the recent past. The first Bush administration adopted a "keep things calm" strategy in the 1992 campaign -- and voters decided it wasn't needed to keep around to handle foreign policy, Kristol added.
Yet Republicans and Democrats note signs that crisis overload and campaign realities have already weakened the United States' ability to exert decisive leverage -- and given greater edge to players in the field.
In the Middle East, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is pressing a unilateral plan to separate Israel from the Palestinians, rather than the road map for a Palestinian state designed by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia -- aware of U.S. sensitivities about key pro-Israeli votes. (U.S. and Israeli officials say Sharon's plan fits within the road map.)
After taking the lead in pressing Iran on its nuclear technology, Washington now defers to Europe to prod the Islamic republic into surrendering data on its program.
In Asia, North Korea is playing hardball with the United States and its allies over nuclear disarmament, aware that the Bush administration is unlikely in an election year to cede much in return.
With a controversial referendum this spring in Taiwan over independence, China may be tempted to raise tensions across the straits of Taiwan to quash nationalist stirrings, less inhibited than in past years because of the U.S. election.
Election years are always periods of "genuine risk" for U.S. interests abroad, because candidates view problems through "a political prism" and often make commitments "on the run" based on "quick information" rather than all facets of national interest, said Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic chairman of the House International Relations Committee and now director of the Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "It's very difficult to conduct U.S. foreign policy in the heat of an American election."
But the range of U.S. commitments abroad since Sept. 11 has left the administration with limited fiscal, military and political mobility, from the inventory of weapons to the number of deployable troops, and from mounting costs to the public appetite for more foreign adventures, said Foreign Policy magazine editor Moises Naim.
Administrations have difficulty juggling more than two or three major issues at the same time, added David Gergen, director of Harvard's Center for Public Leadership and a White House adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. "This White House is already dealing with three. Any more than that and you'll drop one. It's too small a system and staff," he said.
Hagel added, "You can't put more than 24 hours in Colin Powell's schedule. The entire war cabinet can only have so much attention."
But the problems of being overextended may well last beyond the election, foreign policy experts warn.
"No matter who wins, the same reality will confront the next president in 2005 -- that we are severely overstretched and have to make a number of choices: whether to stop taking on new commitments, and if necessary discard some, or to increase the size of military forces and dramatically increase the defense budget," said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member during the Reagan administration who is now at the Nixon Center.
"This sort of notion that we are omnipotent and at a unipolar moment that allows us to knock off regimes we don't like, it's an idea whose time has passed," Kemp said.
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Shifting Sands and Shifting Plans
Commander of 101st Finds Rhythm of Battle
By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38936-2004Mar7?language=printer
Second of three articles
We crossed the border into Iraq at 9:55 a.m. on Monday, March 24, 2003, in Warlord 457, the Black Hawk helicopter of Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division. At 90 knots and from an altitude of 70 feet, the landscape was flat and vast, a great brown pan stippled with tufted grass. Bedouins waved from their tents, closely watched by our flinty-eyed door gunners.
Severe weather was closing fast, and Petraeus wanted to reach Forward Operating Base Shell -- the 101st assault command post near Najaf -- before the storm arrived. After a brief stop south of Nasiriyah at a desert refueling point dubbed Exxon, we reboarded and headed north for the final 80-minute flight.
Petraeus seemed pensive. A murderous grenade attack in Kuwait early Sunday morning, allegedly by a disaffected sergeant, had wounded 16 of his soldiers, two of them fatally, just hours before the division's 1st Brigade began streaming into Iraq. Earlier that day, a deep strike near Karbala by the 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment had turned sour, with two $20 million AH-64 Apaches lost and 28 others so riddled by Iraqi gunfire that the aircraft averaged 15 to 20 bullet holes each.
From the commander's seat in the right rear of Warlord 457, Petraeus looked across to where I sat fumbling, as usual, with the complicated seat harness. "This is not only going to take determination," he said over the intercom, "but sheer determination."
"That's the best kind," I replied, affecting a phony buoyancy.
"I do think this thing is overstretched," he said. "But to be fair, they didn't expect this kind of resistance."
I barely had time to wonder what he was talking about -- wasn't the 3rd Infantry Division more than halfway to Baghdad? -- when the fair weather abruptly vanished. Dust thickened, and within five minutes the helicopter seemed wrapped in cotton batting. The pilots slowed down, picking their way.
At 11:30, Petraeus radioed the division main headquarters at Camp New Jersey in Kuwait, using his call sign, Eagle Six. "Get hold of Destiny and Thunder" -- his two aviation brigades -- "and tell them not to launch any more aircraft west. The winds are picking up and conditions are marginal."
Peering out the left rear window, I thought his description was generous. The sun floated above us like a gold lozenge in the haze, but the world below had become vague and opaque. An occasional smear of green drifted past, only to be swallowed by the relentless brown.
"Eagle Six, this is Victory Six." The serene voice of Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps and Petraeus's superior, came through my headset. Wallace was already at the V Corps advance command post, north of Shell at Objective Rams, a few miles from Najaf. "We will not conduct a mission tonight," he said, referring to a planned deep attack by 101st Apaches. Search-and-rescue teams were hunting two Apache pilots missing from the 11th Regiment's mission the previous night. "Other things," Wallace said, had also intruded on the Army's best-laid plans.
"Victory Six, Eagle Six," Petraeus answered. "Roger. High winds are forecast."
"We'll talk later," Wallace said.
"I am en route from Exxon to Shell," Petraeus added. He rubbed the window with a white cloth, as if to wipe away the murk. "The weather is marginal. Recommend against launching Chinooks" -- large CH-47 helicopters -- "with bridging equipment."
"Roger," Wallace said. "Thanks for that. I concur."
At 11:45, Warlord 457's chief pilot, Warrant Officer Marc Daniels, told Petraeus over the intercom that we had reached the point of no return. The Black Hawk had 65 minutes of fuel remaining. Shell lay 33 minutes ahead at our current pace. If we were to return to Exxon -- flying into the wind -- we had to do it right now. Petraeus wiped the window again, and advised the crew to push on.
"Roger. Bad enough to scare, but not bad enough to make yourself turn around," Daniels said with admirable sang-froid. Visibility now was perhaps a couple of hundred feet. Daniels climbed to 300 feet, following an azimuth and relying on instruments. The door gunners leaned out of the bay, watching for other helicopters, as well as uncharted hills and power lines. I tried to block out an insistent image of the Black Hawk cartwheeling across the desert in a cataclysm of broken blades and burning fuel. My palms were moist and my pulse had quickened. Petraeus was very quiet, and I wondered if he felt as unsettled as I did.
More radio reports came over the corps network. A protracted gunfight had occurred at Nasiriyah. Iraqi forces had ambushed a unit traveling by convoy at the rear of the 3rd Division. At least 15 soldiers were missing -- among them, as we later learned, Pfc. Jessica Lynch.
Petraeus looked at me across the helicopter bay. I cocked an eyebrow. Nasiriyah was a Shiite Muslim stronghold that was supposed to welcome the American liberators. A phrase heard from Washington in recent weeks was, "Expect parades."
Visibility had diminished to 50 feet. Petraeus wiped his window. The pilots eased Warlord 457 up and down, climbing when they glimpsed ground through the blowing dust, then easing back down when the ground vanished.
At 12:23 p.m. I spied a rectangular patch of green, then another, and another. Tents. Vehicles. Forward Operating Base Shell. I felt a sweeping sense of salvation, and gratitude to our crew, as the pilots settled the helicopter onto the first available spot. The thin sand crust gave way beneath the wheels and the helicopter lurched sharply to the right. The engines died as we scurried out into the warm wind.
"That may have been the worst flight I have ever had," Petraeus said. He smiled wanly.
Looking 'Through Different Eyes'
Not until Thursday, March 27, did the skies fair, permitting the Army to resume its drive northward. Wallace's original plan -- to have swarming Apaches slash holes in Iraqi defenses, with 3rd Infantry Division armored units and other forces besieging Baghdad from improvised firebases outside the capital -- had been undermined by helicopter vulnerabilities and stiff resistance by Iraqi Fedayeen irregulars attacking out of cities in the Euphrates valley.
With better weather came a better plan: The 3rd Division would press on toward Baghdad from the southwest, while the 101st subdued several large Shiite cities that Wallace originally had intended to bypass. The first and ultimately most important of these proved to be Najaf, a city of half a million and sacred site of the burial shrine of Ali, the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law. Seat of the most fanatical resistance -- four 3rd Division soldiers were killed March 29 by the first suicide car bombing targeted against the invaders -- it also straddled a vital northbound route, Highway 9.
The 101st assault began in earnest a few hours later, with Petraeus's 1st Brigade squeezing from the south and his 2nd Brigade attacking from the north after flying 250 miles by helicopter from Kuwait. By Monday morning, March 31, Najaf was encircled. Hit-and-run attacks on Army supply lines diminished. Battle rhythms are important, both for units and for commanders, and Petraeus after several days in Iraq had found a good one for himself: attending to logistics and administrative details in the morning, circulating among the brigades through the afternoon, then returning to the assault command post for further planning and a decent night's sleep.
Under Army doctrine, a division commander was supposed to anticipate and plan the battle 72 to 96 hours in advance, while his subordinates orchestrated the immediate fight. I saw how difficult that could be, given the fluidity of the battlefield, the frequent change in orders from above and the hypnotic lure of the action. Petraeus again mulled his battlefield lessons.
"Some of this is about just feeling it," he said, rubbing his fingers together as we drove toward Najaf in his Humvee, "and having a tactical awareness. It's like hearing the radio. Some people can hear it across the tent, even with all the other noise around -- their ears are somehow tuned to it -- and others just can't. As a battle develops, you have to look through different eyes -- armor eyes, dismounted infantry eyes, aviation eyes."
Shortly before noon on the 31st, we stood on the runway of Najaf's airport on the southeast edge of town listening over the radio to an account of the morning's action. The 2nd Brigade early at dawn had conducted a feint toward Hilla, 25 miles north, to draw attention away from the 3rd Infantry Division's movements near Karbala. Iraqi defenders, including unexpected reinforcements from the Republican Guard's Nebuchadnezzar Division, answered the brigade's move with artillery and small-arms fire.
Eight Apaches from the 101st had been hit, two of them seriously damaged in a fusillade of small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and antiaircraft guns from palm groves along Highway 9. One pilot, a company commander, was wounded. And the division had lost its first soldier in combat: Spec. Brandon J. Rowe of Roscoe, Ill. Killed by shellfire, he was a week shy of his 21st birthday.
Petraeus stared across the airfield as he replaced the radio handset. He looked grim, as if in physical pain. Later he told me that he had felt his blood pressure spike. Iraqi losses would prove substantial, but the Apaches' vulnerability and the defenders' tenacity were clearly preying on the commanding general's mind. "This is a very tough place for leaders," he later told me. "They have to make difficult decisions, and they have to make them quickly."
Shortly after 1 p.m., Wallace landed in his Black Hawk on the runway and walked over to the Humvee. The corps commander listened to Petraeus's battle summary: The 2nd Brigade, finishing the feint toward Hilla, would redouble pressure on Najaf from the north. The 1st Brigade would attack from the southeast, south and southwest, with a sharp increase in firepower. Wallace two days earlier had been content to bottle up Najaf with the 101st; now, with most of the division committed to the cause, he seemed willing to take the city by force.
After Petraeus finished his report, Wallace stood silently for a minute. Petraeus drummed his fingers on the map. A brilliant fireball rose from downtown Najaf, where an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter had put a Hellfire missile into a building.
"I think we're going to be seized with this thing for a while, sir," Petraeus said.
"Keep the pressure on," Wallace advised, then rambled back to his helicopter.
Synchronized Violence
As we swung south to rendezvous with the 1st Brigade commander, Col. Ben Hodges, on the west side of town, Petraeus turned in his seat. "It's looking like a long war again. I'm not even sure 4th ID" -- the infantry division, originally earmarked for Turkey, was just arriving in Kuwait -- "is going to be enough. My sense is to pull it back to a tighter cordon, given the long LOCs [lines of communication]. The question now is when General Wallace will feel pressure to keep going north."
At 3 p.m., after looping around to the city's other flank, we found Hodges on a narrow road a mile from the 150-foot escarpment on which Najaf is perched. He was almost within small-arms range of the golden dome of the mosque at Ali's shrine. Brown smoke from American mortar rounds foamed through a palm grove at the base of the escarpment. Artillery tubes barked nearby, and a few seconds later white blossoms of detonating 105mm shells opened along the tree line. Petraeus and Hodges climbed onto a Humvee hood, scanning the city with their field glasses. The direction and timing of the attack had been arranged to fix the afternoon sun in the defenders' eyes.
"They've been forced back into the center of town. As they continue to come out, we're able to kill them, to attrit them," Hodges said. "We are under no time pressure. There's no need to go up there and get stuck."
Two Special Forces gun trucks had parked along the road near Hodges' command post. "Everything we got today, sir, suggests they're pretty much ready to crack," a captain who commanded the SF team told Petraeus. "The locals wonder why we're not in there already."
Petraeus shrugged. "I just think there's nothing fast about this."
"Sir," another SF soldier said, "the general consensus of the last couple days is that if we commit, and get in and seize some terrain, the population will be with us. The neighborhood near the mosque is a rabbit warren, but we think the locals will help us identify the strongholds." Fedayeen and Al Quds militiamen occupied bunkers and trenches along a canal behind the tree line, as well as a white, four-story Baath Party building, easily visible on the lip of the escarpment.
Fifty artillery shells ripped through the trees. "That hurt," Hodges murmured without lowering his glasses. "There are villages in that wood line, so we can't be indiscriminate. But I'm probably pushing it more than I would have two weeks ago."
Several prisoners under guard shuffled down the road, their hands cuffed and their faces so coated with flies as to appear masked. Overhead I heard the muffled growl of U.S. Navy F/A-18s. A GBU-12 bomb detonated with a splash of flame, followed by a rolling boom. Another exploded, and another, until five bombs had smashed the bunker line. Billowing smoke hid the golden dome.
A platoon of Abrams tanks clanked down the road, and soon the boom of their 120mm main guns echoed against the trees. Through Hodges' borrowed glasses, I could see shells gouge the facade of the four-story Baath Party building. The hysterical cackle of .50-caliber machine guns mingled with the thud of Mk-19 grenade launchers. Several Humvees scooted across a field into firing positions, and a barrage of TOW missiles erupted with a white whoosh before smashing into the building. Kiowas darted along the trees and up over the escarpment, hammering the Iraqi positions with machine guns and hundreds of rockets. Eight hundred men from the 2nd Battalion of the 327th Infantry padded down the road in their infantry waddle and soon vanished into the tree line.
It was all so fierce, so terribly fierce, a symphony of fire. It was combined arms at its most lethal, the relentless orchestration of air, armor, artillery, infantry and all the other killing modalities. It was combined and, in Pentagon jargon, it was joint, with the Army complemented by Navy, Air Force and Marine aircraft. The U.S. military for 60 years had worked to make this the signature of American firepower, and no other nation could approximate such a synchronized application of violence. Until recently, this synchronization had been the province of senior generals, but now I could see that it was routine for colonels and captains and sergeants on the battlefield to summon the genies of the air and the earth and the sea, and to sic them on the enemy.
On occasion, of course, violence could be misplaced, or imperfectly leveraged. A few days later, in an attack on Karbala, the coordination between ground and air forces was sometimes ragged, with a U.S. Maverick missile detonating behind Petraeus and his command group. A combat commander learned to shrug off such episodes and move forward.
Hodges lowered his glasses without taking his eyes off Najaf. "What I haven't been able to figure out," he told Petraeus, "is what happens if they don't fold."
"I think you just keep pounding them," Petraeus said.
"Sir," the Special Forces captain said, "we don't want a war of attrition, but that's where we are."
"We are," Petraeus agreed. "It's a siege."
'What Do We Do With It?'
Three more days would be needed to fully subdue Najaf, but even before the city was completely pacified, the cheering crowds long anticipated by the Pentagon appeared on the streets, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, and finally by the thousands.
Petraeus found himself trying to sort out his enemies. "I should have thought about this earlier, but the people who have control of these towns, the Baath Party officials, have a bigger stake in this than the Republican Guard," he mused during one of our trips from Shell to Najaf. "The ones who are really fighting are those who have the most to lose, the local power brokers who are losing their cars, their headquarters, their houses, everything. In hindsight, we should have anticipated this. It's the local power brokers we're going to have to root out."
On the afternoon of April 1, we drove up the escarpment and parked near a mechanic's garage on the southern edge of town. Najaf was foul-smelling and very warm. Several pickups with machine guns stood in the street. "OGA," Petraeus murmured, referring to Other Government Agency, the vernacular for CIA operatives. The team chief, lean and whiskered, wore a 'Bama baseball cap decorated with an "I Love New York" button and his blood type, A.
"Get word to the head cleric and tell him that we deeply regret that we've had to fire near some of his holy sites in the city," Petraeus said. "Now we need his help and advice on how to make sure that the city and the shrines are secure. Can we get a cleric to come out and talk to us?"
"We're working on it, General," Mr. OGA said. The most influential Shiite cleric in Najaf was Ali Sistani, who for years had lived under virtual house arrest near Ali's shrine. Sistani's many scholarly treatises included works on usury, marriage to infidels and "doubtful clothes," of which our OGA friends had an extensive wardrobe.
"Sistani hasn't issued a fatwa," Mr. OGA said. U.S. intelligence hoped for a clerical legal decree welcoming the invasion. "But he's not pro-regime. He's sitting on the fence." (On the fence Sistani would remain for the next year, even as he emerged as the preeminent figure in the Iraqi political landscape.)
"Again, it needs to be a tone of voice in which we say, 'We need your advice,' " Petraeus cautioned. "We need to make this a cooperative effort."
"Now we've got to think," he mused. "What the hell do we do next? We own Najaf. So what do we do with it?"
We drove back down the escarpment, past more smiling pedestrians gesturing with raised thumbs. Petraeus was silent, lost in thought, and I could almost hear the gears shifting as he pondered the abrupt transition from a deliberate urban attack to an occupation.
NEXT: On to Baghdad
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- prisons / prisoners
Relatives of Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay Tell of Anger and Sadness at Detentions
March 8, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/national/08GITM.html
As the battle for public opinion over the issue of the detentions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heats up, relatives of three of the prisoners there began a tour yesterday of New York and Washington to draw attention to the detainees' situation.
Aymen Sassi, a 21-year-old student from Vénissieux, a suburb of Lyon, France, said in an interview yesterday that his older brother's arrest and detention at the Guantánamo naval base had devastated his family. "My father, his whole world collapsed when he heard the news," Mr. Sassi said through a translator. Mr. Sassi's brother, Nizar, 23, is one of about 650 prisoners held at the base, some for more than two years.
Mr. Sassi said that he did not believe that his brother traveled to the Pakistan-Afghanistan area, where he was arrested, to get involved in the region's politics or fighting. Nizar had just bought a new car and was intending to leave his job with the municipal government to open a restaurant, he said.
His brother "was a normal guy who liked to go nightclubbing," Aymen Sassi said, and had spoken of getting married and settling down. He was in the region because he loved to travel and had already spent considerable time moving throughout Europe, he said.
But Nizar Sassi's restlessness was connected to a need to understand his Arabic heritage and Muslim religion, his brother said. He wanted to learn formal Arabic, rather than the Tunisian version his parents spoke, Mr. Sassi said.
The lives of almost all of the prisoners at Guantánamo have received little attention, even as their detention has provoked debate in the United States and abroad about whether there is any proper legal foundation for it. Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which arranged the relatives' visit to the United States, said that in addition to the legal challenges pending in the Supreme Court, "we want to put a face to these people."
The delegation also includes Rabiye Kurnaz, the mother of Murat Kurnaz, a 23-year-old Turkish citizen and German resident; and Azmat Begg, the father of Moazzam Begg, a 36-year-old Briton who has been listed as eligible to face a military tribunal for war crimes.
All three said they were not asserting that their relatives had not committed any crimes. They said they were sad and angry that the detainees had been held for so long without being charged.
The delegation will try to meet with members of Congress in the next few days, Mr. Romero said.
The military brought charges against detainees for the first time last month, accusing two of involvement in war crimes and terrorism. The charges mean that they may soon face a United States military commission, the first such proceedings since the end of World War II.
In recent weeks, Bush administration officials have tried to answer their critics more forcefully. The defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, have said in speeches that the critics have a basic misunderstanding of the situation when they complain of people being held indefinitely without being charged. They say the detentions are justified because the United States is at war, and therefore there is no need to charge enemy fighters to keep them imprisoned.
Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Gonzales have described about a dozen of the detainees as senior operatives of Al Qaeda.
But critics say that many, if not most, of the Guantánamo detainees are guilty of little beyond the bad luck to have been caught up in the chaotic aftermath of war. Most were captured in Pakistan or Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban government.
But even as the United States government moves toward military tribunals, it has released more than 80 detainees to other countries.
Ms. Kurnaz said that the German authorities telephoned her in December 2001 with the news that her son was a prisoner of the Americans. In one letter sent to her through the International Committee of the Red Cross, Murat wrote, "Don't worry, I am fine and I didn't do anything wrong." Although he was gradually becoming more religious than his parents, Ms. Kurnaz said, he had no interest in politics or in any extreme form of Islam.
Mr. Begg, a retired banker from Birmingham, said he did not know what his son might have done in Afghanistan or Pakistan but insisted that he should face a British court, not a military tribunal.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
New Mexico Embraces Renewable Energy
SANTA FE, New Mexico, (ENS)
March 8, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-08-09.asp#anchor2
In the state of New Mexico, a new law requires that renewable energy must make up no less than five percent of retail electricity sales by 2006, increasing at one percent per year and leveling off at 10 percent by 2011.
Called a renewable portfolio standard, the state joins others such as Texas in requiring investor-owned electric utilities to make a serious commitment to renewable energy. It does not apply to rural facilities or urban municipal utilities.
Governor Bill Richardson, a former energy secretary in the Clinton administration, was delighted with the new law, which he signed Thursday at the New Mexico Audubon Society's Randall Davey Center in Santa Fe.
"I am here today to say New Mexico can have it all," Richardson said. "We can build a prosperous, high wage economy, we can become a leader in renewable energy production, we can have responsible development and create beautiful parks to honor our history and culture and provide recreation for our families. We can do all this, and protect and preserve our environment and precious natural resources."
Richardson also signed into law the Advanced Energy Technology Development Act which sets up an investment program to fund hydrogen and other cutting-edge energy technologies. "Through this energy fund, we are going to convert schools, state buildings, and non-profits to clean energy sources," the governor said.
Another clean energy bill became law, too, the Excise Tax Abatement for Fuel Efficient Vehicles. "We're going to encourage people to use more fuel-efficient vehicles, and we're going to give them money to do it, in a way, said Richardson. "This does several things at once - helps reduce pollution, invests in new technology, and saves people money."
Richardson also announced an investment in state parks, $5.7 million dollars in capital and operating costs to create, expand, and improve state parks across New Mexico.
The state has appropriated $1.7 million to purchase land for new parks or expand existing parks. In addition, $2 million was earmarked to build and operate New Mexico's 33rd state park - Mesilla Valley Bosque Park in Dona Ana County. "We are working to build a partnership among the State Parks Division, private landowners, the International Boundary and Water Commission, Bureau of Land management, and the Elephant Butte Irrigation District to manage the park," the governor said.
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Panel scrutinizes energy
Monday, March 08, 2004
By CAROLYN LORIÉ
Reformer Staff
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8860~2003442,00.html
BRATTLEBORO -- The fog burned off just in time for Saturday's public forum on renewable energy. With sunlight pouring into the Robert H. Gibson River Garden, the lights stayed off for the three-hour event that was attended by approximately 40 people.
An eight-member panel, with representatives from the state Legislature, the public service board and various non-profits, led a discussion on everything from wind energy, solar power and wood-chip generators to the state's 20-year energy plan and the federal subsidization of utility companies.
Much of the material presented by the panel and the questions asked by those in the audience, dealt with the near future, with particular concern paid to three dates -- 2008, 2012 and 2016. The first date is when Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant will run out of storage space for its spent fuel (that date gets bumped up to 2006, if the proposed power increase of 20 percent is approved). Next, 2012 is the year Vermont Yankee, which, according the Nuclear Energy Institute, generates 67.3 percent of the state's electricity, will shut down if its license is not renewed. Finally, 2016 is when Vermont's contract with Hydro-Quebec expires. How each of these issues plays out could have a significant effect on Vermont ratepayers, as well as on the state's economy.
"We are headed for a crisis, if we aren't in one already," said panelist Sen. Rod Gander, D-Windham.
Robert Walker, executive director of Sustainable Energy Resource Group, a non-profit based in Thetford, echoed that sentiment, citing a list of the world's energy troubles: global warming, the diminishing reserves of fossil fuels, the vulnerability of power plants to terrorists attacks. "It's a particularly dynamic time in energy right now. Vermont could go one of two different directions and I'm afraid (the Douglas)administration is taking us down the wrong road," he said.
A lot of criticism was directed at the administration's 20-year energy plan, which someone in the audience pointed out is less than 100 pages long, compared to the 1,000-page plans put out in previous years. According to Gander, the document is being revised.
While there was agreement that there has to be investment in renewable energy, there was some debate about which types are best for Vermont. With private companies seeking to place windmills on the state's ridgelines, there has been a lot of discussion recently about their aesthetic and environmental impact.
"Big ugly towers" was how one man at the forum described the mountaintop power generators, although he later added that he would "rather see windfarms than Exxon-Valdezes," referring to the oil tanker that dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.
Rep. Gini Milkey, D-Windham, suggested that Vermonters need to rethink their relationship to the landscape. "We have been programmed to think of the ridgeline as sacred. Living within 10 miles of Vermont Yankee, when I see those windtowers in Searsburg, I think they look pretty darn good," she said.
The event attracted both long-time residents and newcomers to the area. Sarah Machtey, who recently moved to Hinsdale, N.H., from Ithaca, N.Y., said she came to "learn about what's going on in the community."
Rick Foley, Brattleboro resident and professor of power and energy at Keene (N.H.) State College, said he came to follow up on last year's resolution calling for energy independence in Vermont. "This is like a report card. Despite the efforts of a log of good people, the state does not get a good grade. It's very discouraging," he said.
-------- environment
Dozens Treated After Chemicals Leak in Antwerp
REUTERS BELGIUM:
March 8, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24172/story.htm
ANTWERP, Belgium - Dozens of people were treated for breathing difficulties after a truck loaded with toxic chemicals overturned and sprang a leak near the port of Antwerp last week, a Reuters witness said.
A spokeswoman for the Antwerp police said the truck flipped over on a main road leading to the port. Police cordoned off the area of the accident.
Photographer Marc de Rouck said he saw a yellow cloud billowing from the accident site and about 70 people receive treatment at a medical post for breathing problems and stinging eyes.
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Mine's Pollution Fund Is Focus of Federal Agencies' Duel
March 8, 2004
By FELICITY BARRINGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/national/08GOLD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BATTLE MOUNTAIN, Nev. - From the walls of a massive terraced pit in the barren mountains above this small desert town, microscopic specks of gold were harvested a dozen years ago and will soon be harvested again. With the mining comes the inevitable chemical consequence: rain and melting snow combine with newly exposed rock fragments to produce sulfuric acid.
The Newmont Mining Corporation, which wants to revive its operations here, has acknowledged that both the old and the new projects may produce enough acid to pollute the groundwater 100 to 10,000 years in the future, though Newmont executives say this is unlikely.
And so for the first time, the Interior Department is invoking new federal regulations and requiring Newmont, the world's largest gold producer, to set money aside in a trust fund to pay for any pollution that surfaces, even when Newmont may no longer exist.
The fund is the first test of mining regulations overhauled by the Bush administration. And it is central to one of the biggest and least-known environmental battles within the administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which has the most experience with mine cleanups but no direct authority over mining on federal lands, had argued fiercely that $33.5 million would be needed to prevent groundwater pollution, according to official records of the dispute.
The mining company countered that a fund of $408,000 would be sufficient.
In February, the Bureau of Land Management in the Interior Department gave its final approval to the project, requiring Newmont to set aside $408,000 in a trust fund and a $1 million bond that could be used to supplement the fund if periodic monitoring found that necessary.
The fight between the agencies was in many ways a reflection of their history. The Environmental Protection Agency was born of the environmental movement's rise in the early 1970's. The Interior Department's attitude toward mining was originally embodied in the Mining Law of 1872, which was intended to allow mining companies easy access to federal lands.
But mining has been an environmental byword for decades. "Historically, mining projects have resulted in the expenditure of billions of dollars by the government for environmental cleanups," wrote Wayne Nastri, the San Francisco regional administrator of the environmental agency.
"E.P.A. believes the project will likely create a perpetual and significant acid mine drainage problem requiring mitigation for hundreds of years," Mr. Nastri wrote at another point. Unless the Newmont trust fund was adequately financed, he argued, "the federal government would inherit an enormous financial burden." Nationwide, mining companies have had a high closing rate, leaving suppurating sores in the landscape and no money to heal them.
The environmental agency's arguments were disputed by the company and the Interior Department. The environmental agency abandoned its quest to get the larger amount of money, one longtime agency official said, because its officials believed that they could not prevail against the Interior Department.
Gail Givens, the assistant field manager at the Bureau of Land Management's Battle Mountain office, said that Newmont's prediction of perpetual groundwater pollution was a "worst-case scenario." Should the worst case occur, he added, "our regulations allow us to adjust and make the proponent put in more money at any time."
John Mudge, Newmont's director of environmental affairs in North America, said the likelihood of any long-term pollution was small. "Every aspect of this operation has environmental protection built in," he said. Long-term acid drainage, a staple of earlier generations of mines, is highly unlikely, he said, because of new, clean-as-you-go technologies.
Besides, the huge pit will produce pollution without any new mining, the company's environmental statement predicted. The safeguards for the new operations would also catch the old pollution, Mr. Mudge said.
Northern Nevada, whose desolate expanses are the heartland of the country's gold mining industry, accepts mining as a birthright, if not an honor. Before the rise of Las Vegas, mining was Nevada's signature industry; if the state were a country, it would be the world's third-largest gold producer. Newmont, a worldwide gold producer, is one of the biggest operators here and has done extensive reclamation work at nearby mine sites, which are now topped with artificial buttes from which sage is just beginning to sprout.
But productive mines, with 30-year life spans, no longer enlarge communities nor renew economic vitality here. When early construction on this project, called the Phoenix, is complete, the number of miners needed to move the tons of earth and leach out the tiny specks of gold will equal the number of miners who will have finished work at Newmont's Lone Tree mine not far away.
So the spare mountains above Battle Mountain are empty, windy places, and the town beneath is sparsely populated.
The same climate and landscape that make the area hard to live in make it hard to predict environmental damage from mining. In January and February, snow can cover the surface mining sites, which are giant industrial complexes tucked into the mountains throughout the state. The melt-off can be slow or swift.
The Phoenix project's environmental impact statement predicts the pollution, if unchecked, will seep into the groundwater and then into local streams and rivers about 60 years after the mine shuts down. It will peak 100 to 1,000 years after the mining begins, and will linger for 10,000 years or more, the company's model predicted.
Tom Myers, the executive director of Great Basin Mine Watch, a Reno-based environmental group, argues that the model is too optimistic and does not include enough monitoring wells.
Newmont officials, however, said that their model probably exaggerated the impact.
They also argued that the cost of remediation and monitoring would rise slowly, as engineering efficiencies and technological advances trim construction costs and productivity gains trim labor costs. The E.P.A.'s overall cost estimates were triple those of the land management agency's and Newmont's.
Mr. Nastri also argued in his written comments that the financial assumptions underlying the trust fund - an annual pretax return of 9.8 percent, an annual inflation rate of 3.1 percent, Newmont's continuing ability to pay taxes on the fund's behalf - were unrealistic. Newmont's current market capitalization is $7.3 billion; gold prices for the past few months have been at all-time highs.
Wilbur Lewellen, a professor of management at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue who specializes in long-term forecasting, said that the Bureau of Labor Management's assumptions "don't strike me as outrageous."
The E.P.A., according to Mr. Givens of the land-management agency, erred by rating the Phoenix site as a future Superfund site, and "that's not what we have here." He added: "We don't desire the taxpayer to clean up something done by private industry. The difference is in how we go about it."
Mr. Mudge of Newmont said he believed "every aspect of this operation has environmental protection built in."
-------- health
Duel to the Death Inside HIV-Infected Cells
Discovery of Shadowy Enzyme and Its Nemesis May Prove Key Step in Defeating the Virus That Causes AIDS
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38702-2004Mar7?language=printer
Most of the time, life with the AIDS virus appears to be a placid affair.
Except for the days immediately after infection, people fighting human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) don't suffer the roller coaster of fevers or aches typical of many infections. The debilitating symptoms of AIDS occur mostly at the end, years after the virus has taken up residence in billions of cells.
AIDS virologists know, however, that appearances deceive. The body's fight against HIV is steady and fierce. Rough estimates are that hundreds of millions of cells called lymphocytes -- the immune system's foot soldiers -- die in the struggle and are replaced each day.
The body mounts two broad forms of attack. Antibodies produced by the immune system kill individual virus particles, called virions, before they can infect cells. At the same time, killer lymphocytes hunt down and destroy their unfortunate brethren already infected with HIV in order to prevent the virus from making more virions inside them.
Both of those modes of attack take place outside cells in the vast battlefields of bloodstream and lymph nodes. But it turns out they're not the only places where the fight is underway.
In the last two years, AIDS researchers have discovered a much different struggle that is waged in the quiet confines of the cell interior. There, it's a cloak-and-dagger game between two individual molecules -- one produced by the virus, the other by the infected cell.
This insight is one of biology's more exciting discoveries in years. It has shed new light on the shadowy workings of innate immunity, the body's ancient, although far from primitive, form of defense. It has deepened virologists' profound respect for HIV's wiles. At the same time, it has offered a new, previously unrecognized target where the virus might be attacked by a drug of the future.
The AIDS virus contains only nine genes. Molecular biologists have known for many years that one of them enhances the virus's infectiousness. It was named Vif, for virion infectivity factor. But until recently, nobody actually knew what it did.
Two years ago, researchers Ann M. Sheehy and Michael Malim at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine began to answer that question. Much of what they learned came from watching what happens when human lymphocytes -- HIV's preferred target -- are infected with a mutant form of the virus that lacks Vif.
That work -- and that of laboratories following up on those findings -- has uncovered an unusual sequence of events that were the topic of much discussion last month at the 11th Retrovirus Conference, the annual midwinter AIDS meeting in the United States.
It turns out that lymphocytes produce a substance that's been given the unwieldy name APOBEC3G. It's a member of a family of enzymes whose job is to edit RNA or DNA, the strands of genetic material that constitute genes.
The various APOBEC enzymes -- there are nearly a dozen -- make specific changes in a gene's message. These are the equivalent of rewriting a word or two in a paragraph. That, in turn, alters the gene's meaning in small but significant ways.
This system of gene editing makes the storage of information more economical. Genes whose messages differ by only a word or two don't have to be spelled out separately in the cell's genome. Instead, the cell can store one version -- and the minor variations can be created by editing that template once it's transcribed, or copied.
APOBEC3G, however, is an editor grown tired of wearing green eyeshades and thanklessly editing copy. APOBEC3G dreams of being a secret agent. It wants to turn its pencil into a lethal weapon.
When an AIDS virus lacking Vif infects a lymphocyte, molecules of APOBEC3G shadow the newly replicating virions. In a process that's not fully understood, the enzyme slips inside the viral envelope just before the envelope is sealed and the virion buds off from the cell.
When that virion attaches to another cell and infects it, the material it unloads includes APOBEC3G.
Transcribing and copying its genes into the cell's DNA is an essential step in HIV's replication. As the virus goes about this inside the newly infected cell, APOBEC3G goes to work, too. It edits -- and edits and edits and edits. It edits the viral DNA transcript to a point where the message is such an unreadable mess that the cell tears it up. This stops replication and breaks the chain of infection.
This, at least, is what happens in APOBEC3G's dreams. But it isn't what happens in reality very often. That's because HIV virions lacking Vif don't exist in the wild -- and for an obvious reason. They cannot make more of themselves when APOBEC3G is around.
In reality, nearly all wild-type strains of HIV do have Vif. It is HIV's own secret agent, evolved over time to neutralize APOBEC3G. Although many details of the mechanism are still undiscovered, Vif appears to work this way:
As APOBEC3G trails a developing virion inside an infected cell, Vif -- which has been made in the cell from one of HIV's genes during the replication process -- lies in wait for it. As the editing enzyme is just about to sneak into the viral envelope, Vif intercepts it.
In a scene that would make the old Soviet KGB proud, this adventure-seeking editor, clearly an amateur in a world of professionals, is calmly led away from the budding virion.
Vif is quickly joined by other proteins named cullin, elongin and ubiquitin. Together they lead the hapless enzyme into a cellular structure called a proteosome -- the Room Where Very Bad Things Happen. There, quite literally, APOBEC3G is liquidated.
How much this particular fight contributes to the body's war of attrition against HIV is uncertain.
"It has been obvious during the recent years that we come down [to defeat], but not without a fight," Didier Trono of the University of Geneva told the scientists at the conference. "Even though we get outsmarted at the end, we give a good game to the virus."
Armed with these insights, scientists are hoping to change the outcome of the game.
"I think there are tremendous therapeutic implications of this new discovery," said Dana H. Gabuzda, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
If there were a way to block Vif from interfering with APOBEC3G, the editor might be freed to go about its lethal work. A substance capable of doing that might make a good AIDS drug. Gabuzda and members of her laboratory are hard at work looking for one now.
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