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NUCLEAR
Trident missiles could be made safer, studies say
Injury Reporting Is Criticized
Voices from past tell of fear, humor in nuclear shadow
Uranium pond at Sellafield sparks court threat by EU
Waiver to facilitate aid money
No 'deal' on Pakistan nuke pardon
Pakistani government not involved in nuclear proliferation
Rumsfeld Clears Musharraf of Nuclear Trafficking
Iran resumes works on nuclear fuel cycle: official
QUESTIONS FOR HANS BLIX What Weapons?
North Korea Rejects U.S. Demand to Scrap Its Nuclear Programs
North Korea rejects complete dismantling of nuke programme
Japan must improve intelligence network: defence chief
Japanese evacuate as troops remove wartime US bomb
Defense Panel Faults Nuclear Plans
Minnesota's nuclear power plants
Nanos: Lab, county in pivotal time
Neighbors fret about removal of most hazardous waste
Kerry Criticizes Bush For Attacks on Clarke
Clarke's Critique Reopens Debate on Iraq War
Bush's Efforts to Offset Clarke Stymied
Where Does the Buck Stop? Not Here
EXCERPT - 'Against All Enemies'
MILITARY
Afghan Voting Postponed for 3 Months
Scary Things Come in Small Packages
30 Wounded in Thailand Bomb Attack
Britain's secret army in Iraq:
Half of all recruits to Army read at level of 11-year-olds
Despite Rally, Taiwan President Tightens Hold on Office
Taiwan's Leader Agrees to Recount
Border fence gives way to rose bushes
Cleric May Warn Iraqis to Reject New Government
U.S. Plan Seeks to Build Civilian-Run Iraqi Army
Rockets Kill 4 Iraqis in Mosul
Bush Snubs Blair's Plea For Monitors In Palestine
U.S.: Request to recognize settlement blocs is ill-timed
Israel weighs indictment of Sharon
Prosecutor To Seek Indictment Of Sharon
Israeli Official Recommends an Indictment of Sharon
Hamas Leader Says God Has Declared War on U.S.
Long After Guerrilla War, Survivors Demand Justice From Brazil
NATO expands eastward, but pivots away from confrontation with Russia
In Pakistan, the Riddle of a Big Fish That Got Away
Israeli Report Faults Intelligence on Iraq
Israeli Secret Services Faulted for Iraq Forecasts
Iraq 'Friendly Fire' Tragedy Blamed on U.S. Marine
Army Spouses Expect Reenlistment Problems
The 'war president' waged a war of lies
Operation Iraqi Infoganda
Closure of controversial exhibition on German army crimes
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11 Panel Provokes a Discussion the White House Hoped to Avoid
Ex-Bush Aide Calls for Testimony on Terrorism to Be Opened
Voting Rights of Florida Felons Scrutinized After 2000 Election
Marine Defends Guantánamo Detainee, and Surprises Australians
Disenfranchised Florida Felons Struggle to Regain Their Rights
Europe, U.S. Diverge on How to Fight Terrorism
CIA: AL QAIDA CARRIED OUT MADRID STRIKES
OTHER
Plan to Battle AIDS Worldwide Is Falling Short
ACTIVISTS
Grand Rapids police monitored anti-war protests, chief says
Remarks by David Lochbaum, Nuclear Safety Engineer
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Trident missiles could be made safer, studies say
A recent incident sparks interest in research showing the effects of a serious accident at Bangor.
Christopher Dunagan,
March 28, 2004
Bremerton, Washington, Sun Staff
http://www.thesunlink.com/redesign/2004-03-28/local/435353.shtml
BANGOR - The risks are slight, experts say, but the consequences could be enormous.
A chemical explosion in a Trident missile at the Navy's Bangor submarine base potentially could spread radioactive plutonium all the way to Seattle, according to scientists and policy experts who have studied the missile's design.
Such an accident could raise the cancer risk for thousands of local residents and cost the government billions of dollars, they say.
While nobody wants to contemplate such an accident, a few scientists have examined the issues in cold, hard statistical terms.
Their studies are attracting renewed interest following a recent incident at the Bangor base that did not release radiation, but which raised questions about the area's vulnerability if that were ever to happen.
"It all depends on the level of contamination," said Frank von Hippel, a Princeton professor who co-authored a 1990 report on a hypothetical accident at the Naval Submarine Base at Bangor.
"Certain areas nearby," he said, "would be so heavily contaminated that they might have to be abandoned."
Workers near the missile explosion could be killed or injured, he said, and radiation could spread to the general population, depending on weather conditions.
A lot of questions
Von Hippel and other experts are quick to stress that the Navy's nuclear safety record appears to be perfect. Out of all the years of handling nuclear warheads, there has never been a release of plutonium.
But a recent incident, in which a ladder was reportedly left in a missile tube of the USS Georgia, has raised a lot of questions.
So far, the Navy has chosen not to acknowledge publicly that the incident occurred. But the West Sound area's two congressmen, U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, and Norman Dicks, D-Belfair, were briefed by Navy officials this month on an incident that Inslee described as "serious."
According to reports, the ladder sliced a 9-inch hole in the nose cone of a Trident missile as the missile was being lifted out of its launch tube. The lifting was stopped just before the ladder struck one of the missile's warheads, according to a report by military justice activist Walter Fitzpatrick and confirmed by other sources who asked to remain anonymous.
Experts contacted by The Sun could not, or would not, speculate about what a ladder could have done in a worst-case scenario, but everyone agreed that a nuclear explosion was virtually impossible.
Since 1968, nuclear warheads have been designed to be avoid detonation by any single-point explosion.
But, over the years, a number of experts have speculated about the result of a conventional explosion, set off by a fire or a high-speed crash or a bulletlike projectile. Such might occur during handling or loading a missile or during a crash involving an airplane or large ship.
Death, trauma and loss
Unlikely though they are, such accidents could hypothetically detonate the high-explosive in the nuclear warhead and possibly the rocket fuel itself, according to a 1994 report by John R. Harvey and Stefan Michalowski.
Harvey was associated with Stanford University at the time and now works for the National Nuclear Security Administration. Michalowski works for the State Department.
The greater the explosion, the more likely that the radioactive plutonium would be pulverized and released into the air with particles of breathable size, according to the report by von Hippel and his co-author Steve Fetter, professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The number of people affected would depend on the wind speed and direction as well as the weather.
A worst-case scenario -- with a dry wind blowing toward Seattle -- could increase the cancer rate for those affected by about half a percent over their lifetime.
Since an average person's risk of getting cancer is already about 20 percent, said von Hippel, the risk would rise to perhaps 20.5 percent.
"For the individual, the risk would be pretty small," he said.
But the perceptions, psychological trauma and economic costs are hard to predict.
"There would be a lot of panic," said Fetter, "and many thousands of people would think they are injured. Any cancer would be presumed to be a result of this accident."
In the worst-case scenario, the number of deaths would be under 2,000 and would occur over decades as the people grew older. Victims would range from Kitsap County to eastern King County, assuming the radioactive plume went through Seattle and Bellevue.
The government would have to appropriate funds for reparation to cover abandoned property, cleanup expenses and personal injury claims.
"The economic losses," Fetter said, "would run into the billions."
The Harvey-Michalowski report placed the value of a life at $1 million to $10 million and came up with an overall cost estimate at between $15 billion and $100 billion.
Building a safer missile
Because such a disaster would no doubt increase public pressure to shut down the Trident program, a number of experts have tried to find ways to increase safety of the missile system.
Sidney Drell of Stanford University headed a 1990 congressional panel on nuclear weapons safety. The panel concluded that the Trident system could be made safer at an uncertain cost by redesigning the missile to:
• Use warhead explosives that are less sensitive to shock. The Department of Defense shifted to a less sensitive warhead explosive in 1983, but exempted the Trident system (W88 class) to reduce size and weight aboard a submarine.
• Use solid rocket fuel that is less energetic and less likely to ignite on impact. Again, Trident stayed with the riskier fuel to increase range for a given payload.
• Address the risk of having the final-, third-stage rocket right in the center of a circle of warheads. The configuration allows for a shorter missile aboard a submarine, but increases the risk of a plutonium release. Ground-based missiles typically place the third stage below and at a safer distance from nuclear warheads.
"Trident," states the Harvey-Michalowski study, "was developed in response to stringent military requirements imposed at the height of the Cold War. Decisions were made to maximize capability and survivability at some arguably increased safety risk.
"These trade-offs would have been made differently if current national security needs could have been anticipated. As a result, Trident is not as safe as modern technology allows."
The reduction of the U.S. nuclear capability by international agreement could allow for fewer warheads for each Trident missile, according to the Harvey-Michalowski report. Because of the lower weight, one or more safety improvements could be made.
Because of the Navy's secrecy, none of the unclassified reports could say how such a design might work.
"You would have to have engineers look closely at this," Fetter said. "They would have to do tests. The Navy might go along with this because they would keep most of their system intact."
Asked to comment on this story, Navy officials were unable to respond before The Sun's deadline.
Whether underground nuclear tests of the warheads -- currently outlawed by Congress -- would be required for a new design remains the subject of some debate.
But making the missiles safer is always a good goal, Fetter said.
"You just can't foolproof any system," he said. "Of course, you have to have checklists. If you follow all the procedures to the letter, nothing bad will happen. But people screw up. There's not a system anywhere that someone can't screw up."
Reach Christopher Dunagan at (360) 792-9207 or at cdunagan@thesunlink.com.
----
Injury Reporting Is Criticized
DOE Draft Audit Faults Contractors at Nuclear Cleanup Sites
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29757-2004Mar27.html
SEATTLE, March 27 -- The Department of Energy has failed to keep accurate count of worker injuries at nuclear waste cleanup sites across the United States, and its records often downplay the dangers of cleanup work, according to a draft audit by the department's inspector general.
For nine out of 10 private contractors that perform environmental cleanup at old bomb-making sites from Washington state to South Carolina, the audit found that the Department of Energy maintained "inaccurate and incomplete accident and injury data," according to a draft audit report dated March 3.
"Some of the department's safety performance statistics were overstated -- that is, performance had been reported to be better than it actually was," the document said.
The inspector general's investigation also found instances in which major cleanup contractors were not required by the department to report any information on how many workers were hurt or sickened while working around nuclear waste. It found that the department also fails to record a significant number of workplace injuries that contractors themselves have documented.
The most serious example was at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, where the main contractor, Bechtel, reported 463 days lost to injury. The Department of Energy's database listed 166 days.
The draft also said that one major contractor, CH2M Hill, the company that presides over the cleanup of buried nuclear and chemical waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington, kept incomplete records that understated workplace injuries by about 5 percent.
"This is incredibly troubling, and it matches up with some of the anecdotal evidence we have been hearing from Hanford workers lately," said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who is visiting Hanford this weekend and has called for oversight hearings on worker health and safety at all Department of Energy cleanup sites.
A spokeswoman for CH2M Hill, Joy Turner, said the company resolved the discrepancy about understated injuries last July and "has taken actions to make sure this doesn't happen again."
The inspector general's investigation comes amid reports of increasing injuries to workers at Hanford, which is by far the largest and most expensive nuclear waste cleanup site in the United States.
On Thursday, three more workers were seen for medical evaluation after smelling a "sweet odor," chemical vapors from underground tanks. In the past 14 days, at least 10 other workers were exposed and six sought medical evaluation, according to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group. The group says that in the past two years, more than 90 workers have sought medical care for chemical vapor exposures at the Hanford's tank farms.
Department of Energy spokesman Joseph Davis said the draft audit from the inspector general is "incomplete" and "wrong," because it does not include comments from department managers who strongly disagree with some of the findings.
"There shouldn't be a rush to judgment on a draft IG report that does not consider all sides of the issues," Davis said. "We believe that we have systems in place that accurately reflect the recording of safety at our sites."
"We are in a political year," Davis added. "We are not surprised that people are taking political potshots at us."
The inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman, said in a statement that federal managers have asked for additional time to comment on his report, and that "when we receive those formal comments, we will carefully evaluate the information provided." A final report is expected in mid-April.
The Department of Energy and Washington state launched investigations last month into a years-long pattern of questionable medical and management practices at Hanford's private health clinic, the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation. They are looking into allegations of fraud, supervisor misconduct and falsification of medical records -- all of which the clinic denies.
Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham has said he will not tolerate any contractor behavior that endangers workers. But critics of the Energy Department say that the Bush administration, as part of its push for an "accelerated cleanup" of nuclear waste sites, has created financial incentives for contractors to cut corners on safety and underreport workplace injuries.
In many cases, those incentives involve extra cash for companies that work fast. CH2M Hill, for instance, can earn a bonus of as much as $2 million for each waste tank it empties by 2006.
The system also penalizes contractors -- by taking away as much as 10 percent of contract fees that in many cases run into the billions of dollars -- if they report too many workplace injuries.
The Governmental Accountability Project argues that the Department of Energy has created a system that encourages misreporting of injuries.
"The way it works now, contractors have a financial incentive not to tell on themselves," said Tom Carpenter, director of the group's nuclear oversight campaign.
The report said the inspector general is continuing to review charges that contractors at Hanford have underreported vapor injuries at the tank farms.
----
Voices from past tell of fear, humor in nuclear shadow
By Dawn Fallik
Sun, Mar. 28, 2004
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/8297374.htm
Interviews about Three Mile Island often reflect the fear, the fury and the frustration of not knowing what was going on.
And a just-released oral history of 400 local residents adds an oft-forgotten element: that humor and calm also existed in the midst of chaos.
One doctor joked about a professor he knew who "wrote a letter to the president of the Hershey Foods Corp. and told them that he thought that they ought to make a chocolate candy bar in the form of a mushroom cloud."
A secretary remembered seeing then-Nuclear Regulatory Commission director Harold Denton and appreciating something beyond his smarts.
"I thought he was so good-looking. I think he got things on the right track," she said.
And a campus police officer at Dickinson College said he realized he would be among the last to leave -- if he could at all -- and was watching the television when he found someone to trust.
"When Walter Cronkite's on, boy, he gives you the story. Walt don't lie," he said.
The anonymous interviews, conducted by 20 students and professors at Dickinson, were gathered on the condition that they would not be released for 25 years.
Subjects ranged from first-graders to government officials, talking about nightmares, jokes about the nuclear industry and evacuation worries.
"I had this daydream of, well, 30 years from now, they're going to come back and find the Emergency Operations Center staff living in the basement and all of Cumberland County is totally evacuated and the only way to get messages in and out is through telephone or telegraph or something like that," one emergency-operations coordinator said.
"But then you think, no, there's not going to be anybody in the telephone office plugging in long-distance calls. Then I thought, well, carrier pigeons. ... I'll be able to correspond with my family through carrier pigeons. ... It's sort of like a domino effect, you think of one thing and then, bang, and then you think of something else."
Lonna Malmsheimer was a 38-year-old American studies professor at Dickinson in Carlisle when she heard that there was an accident at the nuclear plant, about 20 miles away.
Now a 63-year-old American studies professor, she is overseeing the study's release.
The school suspended classes, and many of the students and professors had fled the campus.
So Malmsheimer and religion professor Dan Bechtel gathered the few students who were around and decided to study the historical event happening around them.
They spread out around the area, and started knocking on doors and asking questions.
"We started with 'When did you hear about Three Mile Island?'" Malmsheimer said. "'Did you know it was there before the accident?'"
As students returned to school, some joined the study and the interviewing, done with tiny Radio Shack tape recorders, continued for almost six months.
The tapes were copied and eventually turned into computer files.
Volunteers were asked about the media, about government officials, whether they lost sleep at night.
Children, interviewed at school, drew pictures and talked about images of "Mr. Yuck," a popular poison-warning campaign involving a simple drawing of a face with its tongue sticking out in disgust, said one interviewer, Beth Sandbower Harbinson.
Adults told of other worries: Was the milk safe to drink? Was it safe to stay? Should they pack up the cats and go?
Some felt the interview was a sort of therapy -- they could talk about their worries and fears without being judged.
Others said that the incident did not affect them at all and scoffed at the worries.
"There's so much money is made off this type of thing, it's ridiculous," said the campus police officer, citing the joke T-shirts and anti-radiation devices that appeared after the accident.
It is unclear how anyone will use the interviews, Malmsheimer said, but it is certain that the words of those involved in the crisis will live on as an oral reminder for generations.
"I was afraid at thinking of what the worst might be, but I also tried to be objective about it and rational," said a guidance counselor, who fled the area for several days during the crisis.
" ... If the worst had happened, my only investment in the world would have been destroyed. ... Everything I own is in that house in Harrisburg. So if we would have had to evacuate ... permanently, forever, I would have been wiped out financially."
------- britain
Uranium pond at Sellafield sparks court threat by EU
New alert over 'nuclear bomb' risk
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor,
Sunday Herald
28 March 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/print40849
THE European Commission is threatening to take the British government to court for failing to account for hundreds of tonnes of dangerous radioactive waste at the Sellafield nuclear complex.
A confidential EC memo leaked to the Sunday Herald alleges that the state-owned company British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) has been breaking European law for years by leaving unknown amounts of mixed-up waste in an open pond at the Cumbrian site. The waste should be properly looked after because some of the plutonium and uranium it contains could be made into nuclear bombs.
Delays and difficulties in solving the problem since it was first raised by the Commission in 1986 are causing "increasing concern", the leaked memo says. "A further delay in overcoming the continuous infringements cannot be further tolerated."
The EC executive is expected to decide this week to give the UK until May 1 to come up with a comprehensive plan for retrieving and quantifying the waste. If the deadline is not met, the EC will go to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg seeking to impose fines on BNFL.
Environmental groups welcomed the EC's action, arguing that BNFL had to be forced to solve the problem. "To prevent some unthinkable disaster, we need much more urgent action to put waste into a safer form," said Greenpeace campaigner Pete Roche.
The pond in which the waste is stored is known officially as B30, but nicknamed "dirty thirty" by Sellafield workers. It emits so much radiation that for safety reasons people are only permitted to work near it for less than an hour a day.
The pond was built in 1959 to store and unpack uranium fuel rods burnt in Britain's first generation of military and civil reactors. The hot fuel was stored under water to keep it cool, and to shield workers from its intense radiation.
After some fuel started corroding in the 1970s, the pond was phased out and eventually closed down in 1992. But it has been left with a huge legacy of nuclear waste under the water, which is slowly leaking into the surrounding air and earth.
According to the leaked memo, the European Commission is "strongly concerned about the situation regarding radioactive contamination of the environment surrounding the pond."
But it is even more worried about BNFL's persistent inability to accurately account for the potential bombs-grade material in the pond.
It takes only a few kilograms of plutonium to make an explosion capable of wiping out a city.
BNFL has told the EC that the pond might contain about 1.3 tonnes of plutonium, 400 kilograms of which is lying on the bottom in a sludge. A significant amount of strategically important nuclear material is not properly accounted for," says the leaked memo.
Another confidential document from BNFL, revealed by the Sunday Herald last July, suggests there is somewhere between 300 and 450 tonnes of uranium metal in the pond. It is impossible to be sure of the amounts because much has corroded and spilt over the years, and the water is impenetrably murky.
The pond was first inspected by the EC's nuclear watchdog, Euratom, in 1986, and has been visited by inspectors every year since 1991.
After every inspection, BNFL was informed that the storage of waste in the pond was "unsatisfactory".
Now the EC seems to have run out of patience. "Measures have to be taken to terminate this clear infringement of essential Euratom safeguard requirements," the EC memo concludes.
It includes a draft EC directive alleging that BNFL is in breach of articles 79 and 81 of the Euratom Treaty. The company is accused of a "continuous failure" to keep proper records of the nuclear material and to give EC inspectors access to it.
The directive gives the UK government until 1 May 2004 to come up with a "comprehensive plan" for removing the waste from the pond and quantifying it. Otherwise the EC will proceed "by imposing sanctions on BNFL proportionate to the severity of the infringements," the leaked memo says.
Environmentalists pointed out that most of the radioactive pollution around the Scottish coast comes from Sellafield.
"Forcing BNFL to put its house in order is good news whether you live north or south of the Border," said Fred Edwards, the spokesman for a coalition of 26 Scottish environmental groups.
On Tuesday the coalition, under the banner of the "everyone campaign", is planning to launch its bid to influence the elections to the European parliament in June.
"This case neatly highlights the role Europe can take in advancing environmental protection and public safety here in the UK," claimed Edwards.
BNFL declined to comment on the matter and referred all inquiries to the government's Department of Trade and Industry in London.
"We've not received anything official from the European Commission, so it would be premature to comment," said the department's spokes woman yesterday.
-------- depleted uranium
Waiver to facilitate aid money
Hi Pakistan
March 28 2004
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en58662&F_catID=&f_type=source
ISLAMABAD: The removal of 1999 sanctions against Pakistan would pave the way for realisation of $3 billion package with effect from October 2004, along with provision of excess military equipment once Pakistan is officially designated the major non-Nato ally (MNNA).
The half of the $3 billion Camp David package for Islamabad would go for Foreign military financing, including repairs of the remaining 32 F-16s, and other half would be under the Economic Support Fund (ESF). This would be about $600 million per annum (FMF/ESF) from the US financial year 2005 (beginning October 1, 2004), subject to the Congress approval.
Some of the preconditions for this assistance include no onward proliferation of the nukes and effective monitoring and export controls, vigorous support against terrorism and a functional democracy and parliament. The last issue has been addressed through the US presidential determination on Wednesday.
President Bush also issued a determination in February 2004 to certify that the government of Pakistan was cooperating in the fight against terrorism to address the second major concern. On the first issue on non-proliferation, two sides are still talking to each other. During the recent visit of US Secretary of State Colin Powell information sharing on Dr AQ Khan was one of the primary issues.
The five-year assistance package would cover economic, trade and investment cooperation, health, democracy and human rights, education, science and technology, defence and law enforcement. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the US EX-IM Bank would expand their operations in Pakistan. Under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA), which just provides a platform to discuss bilateral trade issues, two sides would discuss trade and investment facilitation issues on reciprocal basis. In addition, a five-year trade capacity-building programme will be launched under the auspices of the US Department of Commerce's Commercial Law Development Programme.
Under the 2004 budget, the US administration has already approved $395 million package for Pakistan, which also includes $200 million funds to write off about $460 million bilateral debt that Islamabad owes to Washington.
Under the MNNA status, Pakistan would become a beneficiary of excess military equipment of the US forces (no longer in use of the US troops). Though the benefits of MNNA status are largely symbolic, it implies a much closer working relationship with the defence forces of the beneficiary country. The actual mutual defence and security guarantees available to the full members of the Nato are not considered in this case.
Some of the benefits are as follows: -Priority for excess defence articles (EDA); -Stockpiling of US defence articles (this is largely done in case US considers it crucial to meet its strategic objectives in a particular area); -Purchase of depleted uranium anti-tank rounds; -Participation in cooperative research and development programmes; and -The provision of the Defence Export Loan Guarantee (DELG), and leasing of defence equipment and commercial satellites.
The major non-Nato ally status first mentioned in 1989 when the US talked about cooperative agreements with allies, and this status was limited to Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. However, through an amendment in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (new section 517), a provision was formally added to designate a country as MNNA. The designated MNNA countries received about $7 billion excess defence articles between 1991-95, according to a report.
-------- india / pakistan
No 'deal' on Pakistan nuke pardon
Sunday, March 28, 2004
(CNN)
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/03/28/musharraf.nuclear/
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The United States and Pakistan have not struck a deal enabling Islamabad to go easy on the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program while ratcheting up its fight against al Qaeda in tribal regions, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Sunday.
"This is all humbug. There is just no deal," Musharraf told ABC's This Week.
"If anyone thinks in the United States that we should be coerced into some direction, well, I'm afraid they don't know ground realities here."
Musharraf has pardoned A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, who has confessed to selling nuclear technology on the black market.
Speculation has abounded that Pakistan struck a deal with Washington: To make up for taking a soft line against Khan, Pakistan would intensify the battle against al Qaeda terrorists along the Afghan border. But Musharraf told ABC that no such deal exists.
He said that position has been made clear to officials at the State Department, and they "know that nuclear proliferation has not been done by the government. They know that there are some individuals who have done it."
Of Khan, he said, "People are, I think, over-assessing the physical damage of the proliferation that he has done."
Khan has confessed to supplying Libya with enriched uranium and gas centrifuge parts as part of a sophisticated nuclear black market.
He is also believed to have provided nuclear weapons designs to Iran, North Korea and possibly other nations.
Musharraf noted that making a nuclear bomb "is not easy" and is "highly technical," even if a country has designs for nuclear weapons.
"Then, having got the bomb, you need to know how to explode this bomb. You can break it -- you can throw it and break it. You can't explode it unless you have a proper expertise over trigger mechanisms," he said.
Musharraf also was asked if he believed al Qaeda had the capability to make a suitcase nuclear bomb.
"Never. Absolutely impossible," he said. "It's not that you can sit in mountains and make these things right there."
He added, "If I hand over a missile or a bomb to any extremist, believe me, he can do nothing about it. He cannot explode it."
----
Pakistani government not involved in nuclear proliferation: Musharraf
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Mar 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040328165241.8w05eh6l.html
The United States knows Pakistan's government was not involved in nuclear proliferation, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in a taped television interview broadcast Sunday.
"They know that nuclear proliferation has not been done by the government," Musharraf told ABC's "This Week" news show, in the interview taped Friday in Islamabad. "They know that there are some individuals who have done it."
Musharraf has been roiled in a controversy over top Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's involvement in leaking nuclear secrets.
Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, last month publicly confessed that he had shared nuclear secrets with Iran, Libya and North Korea. Musharraf later pardoned Khan.
In a seperate Sunday interview with ABC, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had seen no evidence that Musharraf was involved in leaking nuclear secrets, but he could not say if Pakistan's military was involved.
"I do not believe that there's any evidence or any suggestion that President Musharraf was involved," Rumsfeld said.
Asked whether high-level Pakistani military officials were involved, he said: "You can't say that I know that every person connected with the Pakistani military over some sustained period of time had no knowledge or participation whatsoever. That's silly. I couldn't do that."
The impact of Khan's leaks is unclear, the Pakistani leader said.
"People are, I think, over-assessing the physical damage of the proliferation that he has done," Musharraf said. "We have to be clear now, what was the impact?"
"If you are given a drawing or parts of centrifuges or even a whole centrifuge, that doesn't mean that the country is capable of producing a nuclear device. This is not easy. It's a highly technical issue."
Detonating a nuclear bomb is complicated, he added.
"You can't explode it unless you have a proper expertise over trigger mechanisms," he said.
Musharraf said it was impossible for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network to make a briefcase bomb.
"Never. Absolutely impossible," he said. "Now, when you talk of a briefcase bomb, you're talking of a trigger mechanism. It's not that you can sit in mountains and make these things right there."
Later, he added: "If I hand over a missile or a bomb to any extremist, believe me, he can do nothing about it. He cannot explode it."
----
Rumsfeld Clears Musharraf of Nuclear Trafficking
March 28, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-pakistan-rumsfeld.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday he had no reason to suspect President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan of past involvement in an international nuclear black market but declined to rule out other possible high-level military complicity.
``I do not believe that there's any evidence or any suggestion that President Musharraf was involved,'' Rumsfeld said in an interview on the ABC program ``This Week.''
Abdul Qader Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, admitted in February to having given nuclear weapons know-how and equipment to Iran, Libya and North Korea, saying he had done so without Pakistani government authorization.
``I'm not going to say that,'' Rumsfeld replied when asked whether he was confident there had been no other ``high-level military'' involvement in Pakistan.
``You can't prove a negative,'' he added. ``You can't say that I know that every person connected with the Pakistani military over some sustained period of time had no knowledge or participation whatsoever. That's silly. I couldn't do that.''
Critics have questioned how Khan could have carried out illicit sales going back to the late 1980s without some level of official support.
Musharraf, in a taped ABC interview in Islamabad on Friday, dismissed published reports about a possible deal with President Bush to go easy on him over the Khan-headed nuclear black market.
The deal purportedly would have been getting the Pakistani army to crack down hard on suspected al Qaeda guerrillas loyal to Osama bin Laden in tribal areas along the Afghan border.
``There is no deal whatsoever,'' said Musharraf, an Army general who seized power in an October, 1999, coup. ``This is all humbug. There is just no deal.''
He reiterated that Khan acted on his own and that neither the military nor the government was involved in illicit nuclear deals.
Musharraf also played down the harm done by the nuclear technology transfers to which Khan has confessed.
``People are, I think, over-assessing the physical damage of the proliferation that he has done,'' he said.
``If I hand over a missile or a bomb to any extremist, believe me, he can do nothing about it,'' he said. ``He cannot explode it'' without knowledge of a sophisticated triggering mechanism.
-------- iran
Iran resumes works on nuclear fuel cycle: official
TEHRAN (AFP)
Mar 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040328203224.5xofvgm7.html
Iran has resumed work on a key part of the nuclear fuel cycle, its atomic energy chief announced Sunday in an apparent step back from a deal with the UN nuclear watchdog to suspend all uranium enrichment-related activities.
Gholam Reza Aghazadeh told state television that "the experimental phase of the Isfahan processing installation has begun and by the end of this phase, in the next 20 days, experimental production at this facility will start."
"The uranium processing plant in Isfahan will produce all raw materials for the fuel cycle," he added.
The Isfahan installation is described as a Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF), where the refining of yellow cake takes place to produce materials that can be then used to produce enriched uranium.
In a deal with the International Atomic Enegy Agency (IAEA) brokered by Britain, France and Germany late last year, Tehran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment -- and all related activities -- while UN inspectors delved into suspicions Iran was using a bid to generate atomic energy as a cover for developing nuclear weapons.
But Iran, under massive international pressure to maintain the suspension, has consistently emphasised its right under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to produce nuclear fuel for what it insists are strictly peaceful purposes.
Iran also appears to be working to a more narrow definition of the suspension -- which diplomats say the Europeans had hoped would entirely halt Tehran's work on the highly sensitive nuclear fuel cycle.
Aghazadeh said the "voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment in Iran was a move to build trust with the IAEA, and based on the order of the Supreme National Security Council secretariat, the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation will suspend in the field of building parts and facility construction."
He did not elaborate, but state television added in a commentary that the Isfahan facility, situated near the historic city in the centre of the country, was "not part of the deal with the IAEA" and had been declared to the Vienna-based body in 2000.
Iran's Supreme National Security Council is headed by Hassan Rowhani, the official charged with negotiations with the IAEA and who negotiated the deal with the European Union's 'big three'.
Aghazadeh, who is also one of the Islamic republic's vice-presidents, confirmed that IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei would visit Tehran on April 6 for talks with "high-ranking officials".
It will be Elbaradei's third visit to Iran since February 2003.
And he said that a team of IAEA inspectors presently in the country had visited an enrichment facility in Natanz, 250 kilometres (150 miles) south of Tehran, on Sunday and would also travel to the Isfahan installation.
IAEA inspectors arrived in Iran on Saturday for a visit which Tehran had delayed earlier this month after the body condemned Iran for failing to report that it had designs for sophisticated P2 centrifuges for enriching uranium to levels that could be weapon-grade.
Tehran yielded and allowed the visit after a delay of two weeks, however, due to an international outcry against Iran.
A diplomat in Vienna said another inspection team slated to go into Iran in about two weeks would be "determining if the commitment to suspension is being honored."
Even more aggressive inspections are expected later in April, particularly to look into the P2 question, diplomats at the IAEA said.
The IAEA has been investigating since February 2003 whether Iran's nuclear programme is peaceful, or devoted to secretly developing atomic weapons, as the United States alleges.
The body is to report its findings at a meeting in Vienna in June that ElBaradei has said will be "key in the ... consideration of Iran's implementation" of the NPT.
An IAEA ruling that Iran is in non-compliance with the NPT would send the issue to the UN Security Council, which could then impose punishing sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
-------- iraq / inspections
QUESTIONS FOR HANS BLIX What Weapons?
March 28, 2004
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/magazine/28QUESTIONS.html
Q. Your new book, ''Disarming Iraq,'' recounts your futile search for weapons as the former chief United Nations weapons inspector.
A. Yes, President Bush and Tony Blair were convinced there was something there. They were convinced there were witches.
Q. You yourself initially believed there were weapons! Only later did you change your mind.
A. Yes, I, too, believed there were weapons. I began to be skeptical when we went to sites that were given to us by U.S. intelligence and we found nothing. They said this is the best intelligence we have, and I said, if this is the best, what is the rest?
Q. Anyway, Saddam Hussein is a kind of witch, isn't he?
A. No, he is Satan himself! Evil personified.
Q. You never even met him.
A. He considered it far below his dignity to meet any sort of lowly creatures like international inspectors.
Q. Can one say the same of certain leaders in democratic countries? Wasn't Vice President Cheney equally dismissive of you?
A. The Pentagon and Cheney have been very negative toward inspections. Cheney said inspections are useless at best.
Q. How many times did you meet with him?
A. Just once. We were invited in to see Bush, and somewhat to my surprise, we were taken in to see Cheney first. We had no note takers. It was not offered to us.
Q. And then you met with the president in the Oval Office?
A. It didn't look oval to me at the time, but I didn't pay much attention. It was Colin Powell, Cheney and Bush and others -- and a note taker! They had one on their side, and we had none on ours!
Q. Couldn't you just have jotted down a few notes in a pad?
A. It's not the decorum when you meet a president. You have to concentrate on the conversation.
Q. What was Bush like?
A. He made on me a boyish impression. He was agile, moving, moving in the chair, especially compared to Cheney.
Q. Who, I suppose, seems more wooden.
A. Yes, the rumors that Cheney is alive are somewhat exaggerated. It's Mark Twain in reverse.
Q. I assume you're referring to Twain's comment that the rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated. Did President Bush seem supportive of your belief in weapons inspection?
A. Yes, but I never thought that Bush would have such short patience as three and a half months. It was clearly not reasonable to break off the inspections when he did.
Q. What do you think of John Kerry?
A. I welcome his attitude toward multilateral cooperation. I think he is trying to get back to the traditional U.S. attitudes.
Q. What do you make of the presidential race?
A. I think maybe we foreigners should have the right to vote in your next election, since we are so dependent on you.
Q. Do you like the phrase ''weapons of mass destruction''?
A. It is a very poor phrase, because it lumps together chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, which are very different. About 35 to 40 countries have chemical weapons. If you just take nuclear, you have 8 -- plus 2.
Q. By plus 2, you mean Iran and North Korea, who may or may not have them. Have we made the world safer by removing Hussein?
A. No. It doesn't look that way.
Q. I find you salty in conversation, but your book is somewhat dry.
A. Perhaps it could have been colorful. But my attitude is one of understatement. In Sweden, we have a strong civil service tradition. I think we are even-tempered and patient. Diplomacy needs patience.
Q. Isn't your wife a diplomat?
A. She is retired, but she was an ambassador in charge of Arctic and Antarctic issues.
Q. Are there any nuclear weapons in Antarctica?
A. Not that I can see.
Q. You never see any nuclear weapons! Perhaps they're buried under the snow. Or perhaps you are blind.
A. Or bland. Do you know the saying that diplomacy is the bland leading the bland?
-------- korea
North Korea Rejects U.S. Demand to Scrap Its Nuclear Programs
March 28, 2004
New York Times
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/asia/28KORE.html?hp
BEIJING, March 27 - North Korea on Saturday explicitly rejected the formula the United States has put forward as its bottom-line position in talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear programs, raising doubts about whether the fitful negotiations are making even limited progress.
The statement carried by Radio Pyongyang and monitored by news agencies in South Korea came just after a visit to North Korea by China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, and shortly before a visit to the region by Vice President Dick Cheney that is planned for April. It used typically unrestrained language in accusing the United States of secretly planning a war.
"The present situation on the Korean peninsula remains dangerous owing to the reckless moves of the U.S. war hawks and their followers to unleash a war of aggression against the D.P.R.K. so that a nuclear war may break there anytime," it said, using the initials of North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Mr. Li said this week that North Korea was ready to "push forward" with a third round of talks involving the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. But North Korea appears to be setting the stage for another inconclusive effort.
The statement rejected the American demand for a "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling" of the country's nuclear programs. Bush administration officials have repeatedly stated that they will not sign any agreement with North Korea that does not use that wording. The administration also says it will not provide aid or other benefits to North Korea before it scraps all its nuclear programs and allows rigorous inspections.
While North Korea often harshly criticizes what it views as an inflexible stance by the United States, Saturday's announcement seemed to go a step further. It put North Korea on record as saying that it could not accept the main goals President Bush and his negotiators have insisted on in the first two rounds of talks.
The statement rejected the American formula point by point.
"Complete nuclear dismantling is a plot to overthrow the North's socialist system after stripping it of its nuclear deterrent," it said.
"Verifiable nuclear dismantling, reflects a U.S. intention to spy on our military capabilities before starting a war," it also said.
" `Irreversible nuclear dismantling' is nothing other than a noose to stifle us after eradicating our peaceful nuclear-energy industry," it added.
Bush administration officials have said that North Korean negotiators discussed accepting the American terms as a common negotiating goal in the last round of talks, held in Beijing in February. North Korea did not do so in the end, however, and the talks concluded without even achieving China's goal of getting all the parties to accept a framework for future negotiations.
American officials say they believe that North Korea has already produced at least two nuclear bombs and could make many more.
North Korea says it is willing to end its nuclear programs. But it has demanded that the United States make concessions, including providing energy aid and pledging not to use force against North Korea, before it fully dispenses with what it calls its nuclear deterrent.
The two sides also disagree about the range of North Korea's nuclear efforts and the American demand that an accord eliminate all nuclear programs, including those North Korea contends are intended to produce nuclear power for civilian uses.
----
North Korea rejects complete dismantling of nuke programme
Sunday, March 28, 2004
Reuters
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-3-2004_pg4_7
SEOUL: North Korea on Saturday rejected a complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of its nuclear programmes, calling the main US demand at six-way talks last month a plot aimed at subjugation.
Radio Pyongyang, monitored by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, said that the three requirements were a US ploy to disarm and stifle the North.
Yonhap quoted the radio as saying the three requirements would "rob its nuclear deterrent and disarm the North, investigate its military capabilities before starting a war and suffocate its economy by killing its nuclear energy industry." "The United States must give up its ambition to disarm and crush us to death if it sincerely intends to resolve the nuclear problem peacefully, and it must engage itself earnestly to the problem," the North's radio report was quoted as saying.
The report is the first commentary by the North following a visit by Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing to Pyongyang this week during which he met the North's leader Kim Jong-il. Li said on his return to Beijing on Thursday that the North "holds a positive attitude" and was willing to continue the process of six-party talks.
Saturday's radio report by the North said its solution to the nuclear problem continues to be "dialogue, a peaceful process and simultaneous actions." Pyongyang has demanded that the United States drop what it called a pursuit of military aggression, for which it would agree to give up nuclear programmes for military use.
Many analysts do not expect progress towards resolving the nuclear impasse before the US election in November, saying Kim Jong-il has little incentive to deal with a president whose days in office may be numbered.
Cheney visit: US Vice President Dick Cheney begins a tour to northeast Asia on April 10 that will focus on curbing North Korea's nuclear ambitions, on Iraq and on trade policy. The trip, only his third overseas mission since taking office in 2001, will take Cheney to Japan, China and South Korea, Japan's Foreign Ministry and the White House said.
The three Asian countries are among the six parties, along with Russia, the United States and North Korea, to the slow-moving talks on reclusive Pyongyang's nuclear programmes, an issue that will top his agenda, analysts said. His visit, which begins in Japan, comes after a second round of inconclusive six-way talks in Beijing last month aimed at trying to resolve the nuclear crisis over the North's nuclear programmes.
Cheney is believed to stand alongside those in Washington taking a hard line on dealing with the North and who doubt talks can result in any credible commitment from Pyongyang to scrap its plutonium extraction efforts and a suspected programme to enrich uranium.
Few expect progress in the talks even after the six parties last month agreed in principle to meet at a working-level to help speed up discussions. Analysts do not expect progress towards resolving the nuclear impasse before the US election in November, saying Kim Jong-il has little incentive to deal with a president whose days in office may be numbered.
Cheney is also expected to discuss the situation in Iraq with Japanese officials during the visit, which will last until April 13 before he leaves for China, the ministry said.
-------- japan
Japan must improve intelligence network: defence chief
TOKYO (AFP)
Mar 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040328071347.14py4lrp.html
Japan must better coordinate intelligence operations to counter terrorist attacks, the country's defence chief said Sunday.
"All government ministries have various information but do not know which is correct and which is wrong," Defence Agency Director-General Shigeru Ishiba said during a programme on the private Fuji Television network.
The ministries are making uncoordinated responses to information they obtain separately, he said.
"Since their skills (in information gathering) have improved, we must study again how to integrate them," he said.
The remark came on the eve of his agency's establishment of a special anti-terror unit.
Japan needs such a unit to counter terrorist attacks and other unconventional assaults, Ishiba said.
"It is the government's responsibility to prepare for attacks by terrorists or spies," he said.
Tokyo has stepped up security, doubling the number of police at major train stations since the March 11 bomb attacks on Madrid's rail system, which may have been carried out by the Al-Qaeda network or an associated Islamic militant group.
Japan has been named in a statement attributed to Al-Qaeda as a possible target because of its support for the US-led war in Iraq.
----
Japanese evacuate as troops remove wartime US bomb
TOKYO (AFP)
Mar 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040328072659.5c5peqn9.html
About 2,600 people were evacuated Sunday as Japanese troops disposed of an unexploded US-made bomb believed to have been dropped during World War II, a defence official and report said.
A bomb squad from the Ground Self-Defence Force removed the detonator of the one-tonne bomb containing 513 kilogrammes (1,129 pounds) of explosives in the central Japan city of Nagoya, the army spokesman said.
The bomb was found about two metres (six fee six inches) below the ground at a construction site, he said, adding citizens living within a 500-metre (yard) radius were ordered to evacuate.
The bomb will be dumped into the sea later.
Kyodo News said about 2,600 residents were evacuated.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Defense Panel Faults Nuclear Plans
Weapons Should Address Threats From 'Rogue States,' Task Force Says
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30154-2004Mar27.html
A prestigious Defense Department panel has recommended major changes to the United States' nuclear arsenal, saying the current plans to refurbish the existing weapons stockpile will not protect the nation from new threats from rogue states and terrorist groups.
A task force of the Defense Science Board said it is "most urgent" to create strong defenses against these new threats. In a report distributed inside the Pentagon last month, it said U.S. strategic forces should emphasize smaller nuclear warheads and should arm the nation's 50 giant Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads to allow a wide variety of options for targeting hostile forces.
"The nuclear weapons program as currently conceived -- a program focused primarily on refurbishing the [current] stockpile -- will not meet the country's future needs," the DSB group said in its study, made public last week by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. "Nuclear weapons are needed that produce much lower collateral damage," the panel said, indicating the need for greater precision, reduced radioactivity and the ability to dig deep into the ground to get hard targets.
The DSB recommendations come at a time when the Bush administration is struggling to determine the future size and makeup of the current U.S. nuclear stockpile of about 6,000 warheads, an issue that has been pending for more than two years. At a Senate Armed Services subcommittee meeting this past Tuesday, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he hoped the plan, which was due to be sent to Congress last month, would be submitted soon.
The DSB study recommended that the United States' high-yield nuclear warheads, now being refurbished to last another two decades, be reduced. It said the nation should procure special-purpose nonnuclear weapons; develop a new, submarine-launched nonnuclear missile; and study development of new sensors that could find small, moving and hidden targets.
The DSB report also sharply criticized current U.S. intelligence capabilities. It said intelligence agencies have "not developed the resources to adequately understand the leadership culture and values of its potential adversaries, particularly rogue states and terrorist organizations." It cited specifically the erosion of "our understanding of North Korean goals and tactics under Kim Jong Il" and "distinctions among the diverse elements of al Qaeda," Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.
The DSB is highly influential within the Pentagon, and many of its past recommendations have been the basis for changes in U.S. military policies. This study's critique of intelligence carries additional weight, because one of the task force's co-chairmen was retired Adm. Dennis Blair, who worked at the CIA during the Clinton administration and retired in 2002 after serving as commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific. The other co-chairmen were retired Gen. Michael Carns, a former Air Force vice chief of staff, and Vincent Vitto, president of the Draper Laboratory, a nonprofit research institution that has played a significant role in defense activities.
William Schneider Jr., the DSB chairman, wrote that the task force recommendations to senior Defense Department officials are "fully justified and actionable," and that the potential threat "demands that we consider solutions that go beyond 'improvements on the margin.' "
The DSB task force said that while it could take decades to build defenses against all weapons of mass destruction, it is more practical and "most urgent to create strong defenses against rogue states and terrorist organizations."
Central to that approach is attacking and killing leaders of those groups. That is a different strategy than when dealing with an enemy with an established government, where the primary mission is "to disable the adversary leadership's ability to carry out its responsibilities," the report said.
In Iraq, the task force said the "deck of cards" leaders, including former president Saddam Hussein, could not be found during the fighting and that weapons of mass destruction have not been discovered. "These physically small entities are essentially impossible to find without in situ [on site], intrusive sensors and probably HUMINT [human intelligence] as well," the panel said. "There has not been enough progress to date given the post-September 11 need for such systems."
To find such future targets, the panel said new technology is required that would feature sensors that could be placed on the ground, including devices to be installed by spies that would tag vehicles electronically to allow for tracking, locating and targeting weapons at far distances.
Because the targets would have to be able to be struck within a short time frame, the panel said the United States needs to develop a new cruise missile that could be launched from an offshore submarine and hit a target 1,500 miles away in 15 minutes.
In addition, it proposed that the Air Force keep the 50 Peacekeeper ICBMs now set for deactivation and redeploy them to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Cape Canaveral in Florida for use with conventional warheads. "These weapons would give the U.S. a 30-minute response capability for strategic strike worldwide," the panel said, noting it would cost less than $1 billion for development and deployment and could be ready by 2010.
"Future presidents should have strategic strike choices between massive conventional strikes and today's relatively large, high-fallout weapons delivered primarily by ballistic missiles," the study said.
"While we could previously execute some military operations only with nuclear weapons," the panel wrote, "we can now execute many of these with highly precise conventional weaponry." Among its recommendations in the nonnuclear area is development of so-called "interrogation rounds" or warheads filled with sensors that penetrate hidden bunkers and stay in place where they land, sending back information to guide in more powerful missiles.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- minnesota
Minnesota's nuclear power plants
by Frank Hornstein and Lisa Ledwidge
March 28, 2004
Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4690206.html
Today is the 25th anniversary of the most serious commercial nuclear power plant accident in U.S. history, the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power reactor near Harrisburg, Pa. Equipment failure and human error compounded to cause the reactor to overheat, radioactive gases to escape, and tens of thousands of residents to flee at least temporarily.
Fortunately no meltdowns have occurred at Prairie Island or Monticello, Minnesota's nuclear power plants. But let us recognize this historic day by reflecting on our state's relationship with nuclear power and what it means for our future.
Our state gets about 26 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. In addition to electricity, the reactors generate radioactive waste. People who say nuclear power is "clean energy" effectively ignore this part of the story.
Dealing with nuclear waste is one of the most vexing technological challenges. Some radionuclides in the waste persist for thousands, some for millions, of years.
Newly irradiated fuel rods are so radioactive that even being near one unprotected can be lethal within minutes. Exposure to lesser amounts of radiation can cause cancer or birth defects. Each year a single large nuclear power plant creates enough plutonium, embedded in the fuel rods, to make about 40 nuclear bombs.
The federal government's proposed plan for the management of high-level radioactive waste (i.e., irradiated nuclear fuel and waste from reprocessing) is to bury it at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. It was a decision driven too much by politics and too little by science.
The repository plan relies on containers that are prone to corrosion under the conditions prevalent at Yucca Mountain. And once they corrode, even the Energy Department admits that the geology of the mountain, volcanic tuff, will do little to prevent the radioactive waste from threatening already-scarce groundwater in the region. A member of Yucca Mountain's scientific federal review panel recently resigned, saying the repository program is flawed and its science is weak.
In January, a handful of Minnesota legislators from the legislative Electric Energy Task Force visited Nevada to tour the proposed repository. Several lawmakers also met with Nevada residents, legislators and Gov. Kenny Guinn. Nevadans made compelling arguments against the proposed dump, citing both the site's safety and unanswered questions concerning transportation of nuclear waste.
Yucca Mountain, contrary to its advocates, is not the long-term solution to managing radioactive waste. Other geologic options should be explored. In the meantime, it is Minnesota's responsibility to take care of our own waste by not generating it in the first place. Monticello's operating license expires in 2010, and Prairie Island's in 2013 (unit 1) and 2014 (unit 2). Minnesota must act now to phase out nuclear power and stop the generation of more waste and plutonium.
It is a realistic goal for Minnesota to replace most of its current nuclear generating capacity with wind power. The wind resources of the Midwest are comparable to oil production of all the members of OPEC; and wind won't run out. Biomass and solar energy, and using our energy more efficiently, also can help us transition away from nonrenewable energy sources.
Let us recommit ourselves today to phasing out nuclear power in Minnesota and ensuring that waste is handled as safely as possible.
-------- new mexico
Nanos: Lab, county in pivotal time
ALLISON MAJURE, lareporter@lamonitor.com,
Monitor Staff Writer,
Sunday, March 28, 2004
http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2004/03/23/headline_news/news01.txt
In a Monday morning presentation to employees reminiscent of a team-building meeting at a Fortune 500 company, Los Alamos National Laboratory director G. Peter Nanos unveiled the lab's new "unique value proposition," talked of adding value for the American taxpayer and returned often to the theme of overhead cost reduction in terms of "continuous improvement" with ongoing business process efficiencies.
But he never forgot the science.
"As someone who has watched the demise of the national laboratories, I know that the most important thing we have to do is keep Los Alamos the place to do the world's greatest science," Nanos said.
The new LANL value proposition, "The World's Greatest Science Protecting America" was met with strong applause from the 500 or so staff in attendance.
"We leverage the world's greatest science here," he said. "We have the greatest number of students, post docs and foreign scientists of any laboratory."
LANL employs roughly 12,000, 4,000 of whom are technical staff members. No other lab can boast as many.
"Around here, we don't say, 'It's the economy, stupid' but rather, 'It's the science, stupid,'" he jested at one point.
No longer secure in the continuation of University of California's management contract, the laboratory has been under several pressures for the last year following inquiries into alleged inventory, business, and security practices.
"The fact that we're here today has to do with some heroics from our business people," Nanos said. Footage from a previous Nanos talk, showed him saying, "If you see a 'BUS' person, hug them."
With just 30 days notice last year, the lab successfully completed a wall-to-wall inventory capturing more than 99 percent of their property. This would be a rate any public company would be hard pressed to achieve, Nanos commented.
Throughout the scrutiny and accelerated activity on the business and security side, Nanos was sure to emphasize that the awards and achievements of the scientists at LANL were once again unparalleled.
"During our darkest days of last spring we delivered the first certified plutonium pit to the nation. That was critical to have that occur."
The lab received eight R&D awards, more than any other lab, last year.
So many individual scientists and engineers were feted in 2003 that his talk could only capture a few such mentions, such as the 2004 Asian American Engineer of the Year, Wu-chun Feng.
Against a backdrop of inspirational fantasy mixed with hard fact, Nanos reconstructed the threats to America - from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 - with the use of movie, docudrama, and documentary video footage, that stressed teamwork, momentum, and commitment to winning.
Prior to Los Alamos, Nanos oversaw 10 defense laboratory divisions with over 20,000 employees as Commander of Strategic System Programs where he was accountable for the design, development and performance of the submarine-based strategic missile systems for the United States and the United Kingdom.
He said, "We are the only major laboratory without an enterprise project, we are now making that investment ... at this point the average manager at Los Alamos should be spending no more than 25 percent of their time on safety, security and administrative tasks."
When asked about the source for the 25 percent estimate, Nanos clarified that he was holding the lab to a commercial standard, referring to a standard rate often cited by Fortune 500 public companies that are fluent in best practices.
Even among laboratories, national or academic, Nanos cited more figures that set higher standards for the lab. "At the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab the overhead multiple is about 56 percent; ours is 114 percent, that's choking the science at Los Alamos National Laboratory."
Later he said, that for a national lab, an overhead multiple of 114 percent was considered within the range of normal, "but we're better than that," he said.
He closed by saying, "Excellence in all things ... It is what all of us do, not what each one of us does."
-------- ohio
Neighbors fret about removal of most hazardous waste at former uranium plant
By JOHN NOLAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 28, 2004
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2004/mar/28/032810720.html
CINCINNATI (AP) - Neighbors of a former plant that processed uranium for the government's Cold War nuclear weapons production are nervous about a new phase of environmental cleanup: Treating and removing the site's most hazardous radioactive wastes.
Disposing of wastes in three half-century-old concrete silos at the former Fernald plant is the toughest remaining job for the company overseeing the government's $4 billion cleanup at the 1,050-acre site.
The project, in the planning stages for more than three years, must be completed if Fluor Fernald Inc. is to make good on the U.S. Department of Energy's promise to finish by December 2006.
Silos 1 and 2 contain sludge residue of uranium ore from which uranium was extracted during processing at Fernald and a sister plant near St. Louis. Those wastes are to be mixed with water, pumped through a piping system into holding tanks and then turned into cement before being packed into steel containers and trucked to the Energy Department's Nevada test site for permanent storage.
Silo 3 contains powdery, metallic production wastes that are to be removed with a large vacuum device and bagged for trucking to the Nevada disposal site.
Fluor Fernald designed enclosed systems intended to remove the wastes without letting them escape into the environment. Workers are completing construction of the $220 million systems, and testing is to begin in late April. Truck shipments of the wastes to Nevada are to start this year and continue into 2006.
"This is the worst stuff that we have," said Lisa Crawford, president of Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health.
The organization has monitored the cleanup work for almost 20 years. Crawford and others will scrutinize results of the upcoming tests.
"Everybody's going to be on edge ... I hope it works," Crawford said. "The silos have always been the No. 1 concern of the people in the community, so this is a really scary thing for everybody."
Dennis Carr, a 23-year Fernald employee managing the silo project for Fluor Fernald, said he understands the concern.
"This is obviously the No. 1 concern of the community, these materials, and rightly so," he said.
The Silo 3 waste won't need treatment before disposal, so truck shipments of it are to begin in May, Carr said. In August, wastes from Silos 1 and 2 will start being pumped into four tanks. By November, conversion of those wastes into cement will begin for the truck shipments west.
Fernald, 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati, processed and purified uranium metal that was sent to the government's Hanford site near Richland, Wash., and the Savannah River operation near Aiken, S.C., for use in reactors to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Fernald's operations, begun in the early 1950s, were stopped in 1989 as the government designated it among the first environmental restoration sites.
The cleanup got under way in 1992. It has included removal of contaminated soils, demolition of old production buildings and removal of waste from ground pits for shipment offsite.
The Energy Department is spending billions of dollars on dozens of radioactive waste cleanups around the country. Some of the cleanups involve far more toxic wastes, including at the Hanford and Savannah River sites.
But Fernald's extraction of wastes from the silos posed an engineering challenge that had not come up at other cleanup sites, said Gene Branham, president of the Fernald Atomic Trades and Labor Council, the umbrella organization for all 13 craft unions at the site.
Branham, a 51-year Fernald employee, will tour the silo site within days to examine the systems. Branham said he will monitor the upcoming operational tests to make sure the systems work and don't pose a hazard to workers.
"It's truly a complicated procedure," Branham said. "It's one of those things where you just have to wait and see. They have good people assigned to it who are totally dedicated, and they've worked real hard."
On the Net: http://www.fernald.gov
-------- us politics
Kerry Criticizes Bush For Attacks on Clarke
Rice Urged to Testify Publicly on Sept. 11
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29991-2004Mar27.html
NORTH KANSAS CITY, Mo., March 27 -- Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Saturday accused President Bush of resorting to "character assassination" to discredit critics of the White House's anti-terrorism strategy and new Medicare law.
Treading cautiously into the latest controversy over Bush's commitment to fighting al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Kerry also called on national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly before the bipartisan commission investigating the deadly terrorist strikes.
"If Condoleezza Rice can find time to do 60 minutes on television before the American people, she ought to find 60 minutes to speak to the commission under oath," Kerry told reporters. "We are talking about the security of our country." Rice has been interviewed privately by commission members, but has refused to talk to them in a public forum.
Rice is scheduled to appear on CBS News's "60 Minutes" on Sunday to address allegations by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke that Bush paid too little attention to al Qaeda before the 2001 attacks and too much to striking Iraq in the aftermath. Clarke, who has contradicted Rice on several points, has aired his concerns in testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, media interviews and a new best-selling book.
Nicolle Devenish, a spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, said Kerry, with his remarks, "seeks to distract Americans from his own failed ideas for protecting America from future attacks."
Kerry, who pointed reporters to his "new discipline" as a candidate, has remained mostly silent about Clarke's allegations and the commission's work over the past week, much of which he spent vacationing in Idaho. The Massachusetts senator, who picked up a copy of Clarke's book last week, said he has not read or heard much of Clarke's testimony and cautioned that it would be inappropriate to comment in much detail at this time.
After what many Democrats considered a somewhat bumbling and defensive start to his general election campaign, Kerry has returned from vacation with a new strategy of focusing on economic issues, such as job loss here in North Kansas City, and on running a more upbeat and statesmanlike campaign.
A top Kerry aide, who requested anonymity to discuss internal strategy freely, said the Democratic nominee-in-waiting does not want to engage in daily fights with Bush over national security, especially when it is provoked by the president and his allies, and does not want to appear to be politicizing the terrorism investigation. Clarke's testimony, unless discredited, will damage Bush's credibility with or without Kerry highlighting it, the aide said.
The new strategy, however, will be on hold in coming days.
Kerry is planning time off this week to have elective surgery on his right shoulder in Boston. The outpatient procedure on Wednesday will limit Kerry's shoulder mobility and could keep him off the campaign trail for four or five days.
Kerry injured the shoulder a decade ago and aggravated the injury in January. David Wade, Kerry's spokesman, said the senator is having the surgery now "for convenience, just to get it done." Wade said the injury does not usually bother Kerry, but it did recently when he picked up a baby. It did not interfere with Kerry's winter sports in Idaho, Wade said.
This is the second time Kerry will be sidelined by a medical procedure: Last year, the candidate had his prostate removed after being diagnosed with cancer.
Before heading home, Kerry will swing through California to raise millions of dollars in Sacramento, San Francisco and Beverly Hills. On Saturday, he continued a two-day tour through Michigan and Missouri to tout his economic plan, including new tax breaks for corporations.
Kerry saved his sharpest words of the day for Bush, whom he twice accused of mounting a campaign of "character assassination" against Clarke, former treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill and Richard S. Foster, the administration official who disclosed that the president's new Medicare law will cost $135 billion more than was advertised before it passed. Foster, the administration's Medicare accountant, has said White House officials were aware of the higher cost estimate, but did not alert members of Congress on the eve of one of the closest and most contentious votes in history.
White House officials have questioned Clarke's honesty and motivation, claiming in several interviews that the former anti-terrorism chief is trying to profit from his book. They pursued a similar approach against O'Neill earlier this year when he was quoted in a journalist's book as criticizing Bush's policies.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) took to the Senate floor on Friday to call for the release of earlier Clarke testimony before Congress to determine if he lied.
"I don't think people want questions about character; I think they want questions about our security to be answered," Kerry said. "That's what this is about."
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Clarke's Critique Reopens Debate on Iraq War
Administration Strongly Resists View That Invasion Undermined War on Terrorism
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28976-2004Mar27?language=printer
John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 commission, put it bluntly to former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke when he testified publicly last week: Why did his earlier, private testimony to the commission not include the harsh criticism leveled at President Bush in his book?
"There's a very good reason for that," Clarke replied. "In the 15 hours of testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq. And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."
The furious charge and countercharge between Clarke and the White House last week has largely obscured this central complaint by Clarke. The commission investigating the 2001 attacks is not charged with probing this question, so little of the public testimony in recent days dwelled on Iraq. Politically, however, it is potentially just as important for Bush to deal with that assertion as it is for him to address the claim that he was not properly focused on the al Qaeda threat in the first eight months of his presidency.
Clarke, in his book, echoes other accounts, such as Ron Suskind's book on former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, that key administration officials appeared unduly focused on Iraq in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks -- and then leapt to the conclusion that Iraq was somehow involved.
Clarke depicts the president as tersely demanding that his staff look for links between the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq. He charges that, for Bush and his advisers, attacking Iraq was "a rigid belief, received wisdom, a decision already made and one that no fact or event could derail." In the end, through the Iraq war, "we delivered to al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable."
White House officials strongly dispute Clarke's conclusion, saying it reflects an old-fashioned approach to dealing with terrorism. "Those who question Iraq have an outdated and one-dimensional view of what is really a multi-dimensional threat to our nation," said Jim Wilkinson, deputy national security adviser for communications. "Some think the solution is to kill Osama bin Laden, finish Afghanistan and then go back to a defensive posture and hope we're not attacked again. This approach represents the old way of thinking because it ignores the fact that the modern terrorist threat is a global threat."
But Clarke's complaint resonates with some other former administration officials. Rand Beers, who served as counterterrorism chief after Clarke, has voiced the same complaint and is now foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry (Mass.). Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and Middle East specialist who left Bush's National Security Council staff a year ago, also agrees.
"Clarke's critique of administration decision-making and how it did not balance the imperative of finishing the job against al Qaeda versus what they wanted to do in Iraq is absolutely on the money," Leverett said.
He said that Arabic-speaking Special Forces officers and CIA officers who were doing a good job tracking Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and other al Qaeda leaders were pulled out of Afghanistan in March 2002 to begin preparing for Iraq. "We took the people out who could have caught them," he said. "But even if we get bin Laden or Zawahiri now, it is two years too late. Al Qaeda is a very different organization now. It has had time to adapt. The administration should have finished this job."
Jessica Stern, Harvard University lecturer and author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill," concurs. "It was a distraction on the war on terrorism and made it more difficult to prosecute because the al Qaeda movement used the war in Iraq to mobilize new recruits and energize the movement," she said. "And we apparently sent Special Forces from Afghanistan, where they should have been fighting al Qaeda, to Iraq."
But Eliot Cohen, director of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and an advocate of attacking Iraq, argues that Clarke's analysis wrongly assumes the battle against terrorism paralyzes the government when it comes to other wars. He said that if one assumes the fight against terrorism is a multi-year effort that could stretch decades, then "there is nothing the U.S. government can do for 30 years but fight al Qaeda." He noted that the bulk of the fighting in Iraq was carried out by military units, such as the 101st Airborne, that were not involved in Afghanistan.
Cohen agreed, however, that a war the scale of the Iraq invasion could divert the attention of senior officials from other issues, such as fighting terrorism. Pat Lang, who was head of Middle East and South Asia intelligence in the Defense Intelligence Agency for seven years, said: "When you commit as much time and attention and resources as we did to Iraq, which I do not believe is connected to the worldwide war against the jihadis, then you subtract what you could commit to the war on terrorism. You see that especially in the Special Forces commitment, as we have only so many of them."
Wilkinson countered that, under Bush's strategy, "we're taking territory and resources away from the terrorists across many fronts, from liberating Iraq and Afghanistan, to removing WMD from Libya, to seizing terrorist finances." He added that a recently discovered memo urging an Islamist battle against the U.S. occupation in Iraq, allegedly written by Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi to senior al Qaeda leaders, demonstrates "the terrorists understand what Iraq means to their survival."
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in an interview with network correspondents Wednesday, said that Clarke did not raise his concerns about the Iraq war in a lunch with her three weeks before the invasion. "He didn't say a word about Iraq being a potential disaster for the war on terrorism," Rice said.
White House officials also have tried to rebut Clarke's charge that officials were focused on Iraq even as they launched a war against Afghanistan.
Clarke's description of the discussions about Iraq's possible involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks is generally consistent with other accounts, such as that in "Bush at War" by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in his public testimony before the commission Tuesday, confirmed that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz -- a forceful advocate of attacking Iraq -- "raised the issue of whether or not Iraq should be considered for action during this time."
Rice, in the interview, said, "The president asked if Iraq was complicit. Anybody should have asked whether Iraq was complicit given our history with Iraq." But, she said, CIA Director George J. Tenet told Bush before they went to Camp David the weekend after the attacks "there was no evidence of that."
Woodward, in "Bush at War," wrote that the president ended the debate at Camp David that weekend by saying, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now. I don't have the evidence at this point."
Clarke also caused a stir last week by saying that Bush, in his secret directive ordering the strike against Afghanistan six days after Sept. 11, also told the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq. The Post had reported on this directive more than a year ago, generating no complaint from the administration. But in the furor over Clarke, administration officials said the Iraq order actually involved contingency plans if Iraq tried to take advantage of the fact the United States was fighting in Afghanistan.
"The idea that we were somehow sitting there thinking, 'Boy, we really wish we could do Iraq, not Afghanistan,' is just patently false," Rice said.
Woodward, whose book was based in large part on notes taken at National Security Council meetings, does not mention that the Iraq discussion involved such contingencies. Rather, Woodward reports extensively on an intense debate among senior officials whether an invasion was necessary shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Moreover, a senior administration official, in a Post interview more than a year ago, said Pentagon officials used the language contained in Bush's Afghanistan directive to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq.
Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.
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Bush's Efforts to Offset Clarke Stymied
Republicans Say Administration Struggling for Momentum After Ex-Aide's Assertions
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29992-2004Mar27.html
CRAWFORD, Tex., March 27 -- President Bush's intense efforts to neutralize the revelations of former national security official Richard A. Clarke have yet to succeed, leaving White House officials struggling to regain political momentum after a tumultuous week, according to interviews with Republicans both inside and outside the administration.
One Bush aide, who refused to be identified because the administration limits who may speak on the record, acknowledged that the White House had underestimated the political and media firestorm that Clarke would ignite. Beginning with interviews in connection with his new book and continuing with Capitol Hill testimony, Clarke said he had watched Bush repeatedly ignore warnings about al Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001, then diverted resources from the broader war on terrorism for an attack on Iraq.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who rode in Bush's limousine during a presidential visit to Phoenix on Friday, said the Clarke counterattack was "the most vigorous offensive I've ever seen from the administration on any issue.
"These attacks go to the heart of the strength of the president, and they felt it had to be put down and put down quickly," McCain said. "Whether they'll succeed or not is unclear."
Bush officials said they had hoped to use his public events during these weeks to overhaul his economic message and raise public awareness about indications of a burgeoning recovery. Instead, the White House has been consumed by defending Bush's handling of the war on terrorism, the bedrock on which he planned to build his case for reelection.
Polling has shown that Clarke's assertions have resonated as more than mere Beltway sniping and that voters are beginning to question the president's handling of terrorism.
A Newsweek poll released Saturday found that public approval of Bush's handling of terrorism and homeland security had eroded, with his approval rating on those issues dropping to 57 percent from 65 percent just over a month ago. It was 70 percent two months ago. However, 65 percent said Clarke's testimony had not affected their opinion of Bush.
Officials in both parties agreed that if Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) were able to pull even on those issues, the president's prospects would dim considerably. But Bush-Cheney campaign officials expressed relief that the Newsweek poll, taken Thursday and Friday, found that Kerry had failed to capitalize on Bush's woes. Bush's overall approval rating was statistically unchanged, at 49 percent, and he remained in a dead heat with Kerry. The poll, of 1,002 adults, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The poll showed Bush maintaining a strong showing on the intangible qualities that have always been his biggest appeal. When asked which phrases describe Bush, 62 percent said he has strong leadership qualities, 65 percent said he is personally likable, 61 percent said he says what he believes rather than what people want to hear, and 55 percent said he is honest and ethical. Bush was 6 to 18 percentage points ahead of Kerry in each category.
Clarke's accusations "will not have an impact because nobody believes that George Bush isn't wholly focused on preventing attacks like those of September 11th," said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush-Cheney campaign's communications director.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice will appear Sunday night on CBS's "60 Minutes," in an interview with Ed Bradley that is to be taped earlier Sunday at the White House.
Several Republican officials said they have warned the White House about the risk of smearing Clarke if independent voters wind up finding him believable, or if other evidence emerges that bolsters his contentions.
A senior official said the current strategy calls for Rice's interview to be "close to the end" of White House television appearances on the subject. "The goal is not to keep selling Clarke's book," the official said.
But Democrats said they will continue pressing Rice to testify under oath and in public before the independent commission looking into the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Rice, who has agreed to further private testimony, said she is refusing to go public to preserve the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.
Mary Matalin, a former White House official and a senior adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign, said that what she called "normal people" will wind up focusing on the larger issues of whether the attacks were an act of war and how the country will continue the global war on terrorism.
"The dramatic moments were dramatic moments, but the hysteria is a Beltway phenomenon," she said. "It was a draw on Clarke, and a net positive for the president because he had the opportunity to speak out on what he did and why he did it. People may know who Richard Clarke is now, but they also know that the president couldn't do in eight months what wasn't done in eight years."
Bush is spending the weekend at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., before heading into a week built around celebrations of achieving a campaign treasury of $170 million, a political record.
Cheney will give a speech about the economy on Monday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while Bush will speak about the economy in Wisconsin on Tuesday and job training in West Virginia on Friday. His radio address this weekend was about home ownership.
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FAULT LINES
Where Does the Buck Stop? Not Here
March 28, 2004
By MICHAEL ORESKES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/weekinreview/28ores.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ACCEPTING responsibility is an essential part of everyday life, something every parent and child, every boss and worker, every friend and colleague wrestle with, or know they should. But for a president it is quite rare, and at least in the view of some historians and government experts, getting rarer, as a national culture of shifting blame permeates American politics.
So it was last week that some powerful words were spoken to the spouses and families of those who died two and a half years ago in the terror of Sept. 11.
"Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you." The words of apology were unmistakable, but the face was hard to place. It belonged to none of the recognizable leaders of the government - not President Bush or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell or Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. Here was a middle-aged man with disappearing white hair and an American flag pinned in his left lapel: a former middle-level foreign policy official of three presidential administrations named Richard A. Clarke.
"We tried hard," Mr. Clarke told the families as he testified to a commission looking into Sept. 11. "But that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness."
The mea culpa appeared deeply meaningful to the bereaved families, who thronged around Mr. Clarke when he completed his testimony. But President Bush offered no similar statement, nor did Bill Clinton, for whom Mr. Clarke had also worked.
It is one thing for a deputy at the National Security Council to accept blame on behalf of not one but several administrations, an act perched between admirable and presumptuous. But it is quite something else for a president of the United States to say he is sorry.
In October 1983, terrorists in Lebanon drove a truckload of explosives into a building housing American marines, killing 241. That December, a Defense Department commission prepared to release a report castigating officers in the chain of command for failing to safeguard their troops.
A copy was sent to President Reagan before its release. He read through it, David R. Gergen, then an aide, recalled, and with little discussion headed for the press room. "If there is to be blame," Mr. Reagan said before the assembled corps, "it properly rests here in this office and with this president. And I accept responsibility for the bad as well as the good."
The commanders, Mr. Reagan said, should not be punished "for not fully comprehending the nature of today's terrorist threat."
There was some criticism at the time that Mr. Reagan had pre-empted the military disciplinary process. But over all, Mr. Gergen said, the acceptance of responsibility for something that happened during his term vastly improved Mr. Reagan's status with the military and strengthened him for the rest of his presidency.
"Every time I've seen a president or his team take responsibility it has had a salutary effect," Mr. Gergen said. "The reason why it has become so rare is the way the blame game is played. It can be so ferocious that any time they admit the slightest mistake it's going to be exploited by the other side."
Of course, accepting responsibility, let alone blame, for the events of Sept. 11 is on a scale different from virtually anything else a modern president has had to deal with. Certainly, an argument could be made that Sept. 11 is more analogous to Pearl Harbor than to Beirut, and Franklin D. Roosevelt never accepted responsibility for that sneak attack. Indeed, he talked the Republicans out of making it an issue in the 1944 campaign, saying it would hurt the war effort.
Within hours after the World Trade Center towers crumbled, Bush and Clinton partisans began blaming each other for the failure to stop Al Qaeda, and have been doing so ever since in any venue they can find.
The record is actually surprisingly clear, that there was a series of moments stretching back from Sept. 11 across at least eight years when more aggressive actions might have produced a different outcome that crisp, blue morning. For example:
In 1997 a commission led by Vice President Al Gore recommended steps to tighten airline security, including tougher screening of passengers and stronger locks on cockpit doors. Civil libertarians and the airline industry resisted.
Osama bin Laden, while hardly a household name, was well known as a threat. (Indeed, this newspaper ran a front-page series about him just as the Bush administration was entering office.)
The World Trade Center was already clearly marked as a target, from the bombing in 1993, and the idea to use planes as missiles was known from a disrupted plot to bring down the Eiffel Tower.
So who is responsible for not putting all this together, for failing to avert the tragedy? The airline industry? The Central Intelligence Agency? Richard Clarke? Mr. Bush? Mr. Clinton?
The most famous presidential keepsake in American history is arguably a 21/2-by-13-inch glass sign made at the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Okla. On one side, the side that faced the president, it said, "I'm from Missouri." The other side, the side that faced visitors to the Oval Office, said, "The Buck Stops Here."
To Harry S. Truman that meant accepting responsibility for making tough decisions, including firing Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But it did not necessarily mean expressing regret for them later. He was proud of saying he never lost sleep over his decision to drop the atom bomb, and 10 years later when he was invited to Japan he said he would go only if he did not have to kiss the posterior portion of any Japanese citizen's anatomy. (He didn't go.)
Mr. Bush made it clear last week that he was more in the Roosevelt than the Reagan mode of the responsible commander in chief, offering a narrow test of presidential responsibility in the Sept. 11 context.
"Had I known," President Bush said the day after Mr. Clarke's testimony, "that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people."
It is hard to imagine that anyone - even Mr. Bush's fiercest critics - doubts that.
But Mr. Bush's statement illustrates the transition from a political culture where accepting responsibility demonstrated strength to one in which it exposes weaknesses.
Compare the actions of another young president faced with a crisis early in his administration. It was mid-April 1961, and a C.I.A.-organized invasion of Cuba had collapsed at a place called the Bay of Pigs.
"There is an old saying," President John F. Kennedy said, "that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." The president added, "I'm the responsible officer of the government."
Despite the debacle, Mr. Kennedy's popularity increased.
But statesmanship is not always everything it seems, said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian. Even as Kennedy was taking responsibility, his aides were out quietly - on background as they say in Washington - blaming the fiasco on Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had set the invasion in motion. Eventually, one Kennedy administration official, Stuart L. Udall, blamed Eisenhower in public, which brought a fierce rebuttal from his vice president, Richard M. Nixon, and forced the White House to retreat. President Kennedy, his spokesman, Pierre E. Salinger, said, bears sole responsibility and wanted everyone to know it.
In those days, a leader took responsibility in public and his aides spread the blame only in private. Today, those aides spread the blame on cable TV and only former mid-level officials take responsibility. In the culture of today's politics, presidents may well be afraid to admit they can't make everything perfect.
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EXCERPT - 'Against All Enemies' By RICHARD A. CLARKE
March 28, 2004
NY Times Books section;
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/books/chapters/0328-1st-clarke.html
expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.
On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor-Iraq must have been helping them.
I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back.
By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq." Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. "I thought I was missing something here," I vented. "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor."
Powell shook his head. "It's not over yet."
Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh Shelton's reaction to the idea of changing the Iraqi government was guarded. He noted that could only be done with an invasion by a large force, one that would take months to assemble.
On the 12th and 13th the discussions wandered: what was our objective, who was the enemy, was our reaction to be a war on terrorism in general or al Qaeda in specific? If it was all terrorism we would fight, did we have to attack the anti-government forces in Colombia's jungles too? Gradually, the obvious prevailed: we would go to war with al Qaeda and the Taliban. The compromise consensus, however, was that the struggle against al Qaeda and the Taliban would be the first stage in a broader war on terrorism. It was also clear that there would be a second stage.
Most Americans had never heard of al Qaeda. Indeed, most senior officials in the administration did not know the term when we briefed them in January 2001. I found a moment without meetings and sat at my computer and began: "Who did this? Why do they hate us? How will we respond? What can you as an American do to help?" It all came out, in a stream of pages. I wrote of al Qaeda's hatred of freedom, of its perversion of a beautiful religion, of the need to avoid religious or ethnic prejudice. Thinking it might be helpful, I sent it to John Gibson in Speech Writing.
Meanwhile, Roger Cressey and I dusted off the draft National Security Presidential Directive on al Qaeda, authorizing aid to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Joined by Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, we also began to list the major domestic vulnerabilities to further terrorist attacks and to task the departments to start plugging the holes. Trains with HAZMAT-hazardous materials-were diverted from major cities. Crop dusters were grounded until they could be tracked and we could be sure terrorists were not filling them with biological agents. Special security teams were sent to protect telecommunications hubs, chemical plants, and nuclear reactors.
George Tenet and Cofer Black (the counterterrorism chief at CIA) were off and running now, demanding action from friendly intelligence services and preparing at last to send CIA officers into Afghan-
istan. Colin Powell and Rich Armitage were turning Pakistan around, from halfhearted support of the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda to full cooperation.
Later, on the evening of the 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you have a lot to do and all . . . but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way . . ."
I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr. President, al Qaeda did this."
"I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred . . ."
"Absolutely, we will look . . . again." I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. "But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen."
"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open.
Paul Kurtz walked in, passing the President on the way out. Seeing our expressions, he asked, "Geez, what just happened here?"
"Wolfowitz got to him," Lisa said, shaking her head.
"No," I said. "Look, he's the President. He has not spent years on terrorism. He has every right to ask us to look again, and we will, Paul."
Paul was the most open-minded person on the staff, so I asked him to lead the special project to get the departments and agencies to once again look for a bin Laden link to Saddam Hussein. He chaired a meeting the next day to develop an official position on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. All agencies and departments agreed, there was no cooperation between the two. A memorandum to that effect was sent up to the President, but there was never any indication that it reached him.
The next week President Bush addressed a Joint Session of Congress in the most eloquent speech of his career. Gone was any tentativeness or awkwardness as a speaker. Karen Hughes had drafted the text personally on her old typewriter. It included my questions and some of my answers: who is the enemy, why do they hate us . . .
The weeks that followed were filled with meetings, back to back. A Campaign Coordination Committee, co-chaired by Franklin Miller and me, developed a game plan for attacking al Qaeda. A Domestic Preparedness Committee, chaired by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, pooled the departments' efforts to identify and remedy vulnerabilities in the U.S. to further attack. The Cabinet and their deputies had their eyes opened. It was a time of jitters. There were clearly bogus reports of commando teams targeting the White House and nuclear bombs on Wall Street, but many of the people now reading such intelligence had never seen it before and could not tell the wheat from the chaff. Reagan National Airport remained closed, but because of concerns about aircraft possibly headed toward the White House, we were on constant alert.
Throughout it all, we thought of the dead, of the horror. Those of us who had stayed in the White House that day now knew why the United flight had crashed in Pennsylvania, that heroic passengers had fought and died, and probably saved our lives in the process. But we tried to stay unemotional, to stay focused on the work that had to be done, the work that kept us in the White House eighteen hours a day and more, every day since 9/11. We were told that parts of my FBI friend, John O'Neill, had been found in the rubble in New York and that there would be a memorial service in his hometown of Atlantic City. I told Condi Rice that we would be taking a half day off. Lisa, Roger, and Bev Roundtree joined me and we drove to New Jersey.
As the Mass ended and John's coffin rolled by, the bagpipes played, and, finally, I wept from my gut. There was so much to grieve about. How did this all happen? Why couldn't we stop it? How do we prevent it from happening again and rid the world of the horror? Someday I would find the time to think through it all and answer those questions.
Now is that time.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Voting Postponed for 3 Months
March 28, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/asia/28AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sunday, March 28 (AP) - Afghanistan's landmark national elections, which were scheduled for June, will be delayed until September, President Hamid Karzai said Sunday.
Mr. Karzai said the delay was needed to allow the United Nations to hold both presidential and parliamentary elections at the same time.
"We are ready to manage both elections, for the Parliament and presidency, in September," Mr. Karzai said at a news conference at his palace in the Afghan capital.
Officials had warned repeatedly that the country's first post-Taliban elections might be delayed because of logistical problems and concerns about security.
So far, only 1.5 million of an estimated 10.5 million eligible voters have been registered for the elections, and it remains unclear how the United Nations intends to carry out a plan to register most of the others in May.
The Afghan government said Saturday that it would disarm 40,000 irregular Afghan militia soldiers in time for the elections to reduce the risk of voter intimidation.
But the United Nations, the military coalition led by the United States and the Afghan government are still working on plans to protect election workers from militants of the former Taliban leadership.
Agence France-Presse reported that Mr. Karzai acknowledged that Afghanistan had experienced serious factional fighting in the past week, during which the aviation minister, Mirwais Sadiq, was killed in the western city of Herat. But he said electoral officials had assured him that progress was being made in the polls.
News of the postponement came as Afghanistan prepared to ask the international community for further pledges of aid at a conference to take place in Berlin this week.
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Scary Things Come in Small Packages
The Pentagon says what Carl Collins is cooking up in his lab could power the most devastating bomb this side of a nuke. A long list of heavyweight physicists calls that dangerous bunk. Either way, it'
By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, March 28, 2004
Washington Post Magazine; Page W15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22099-2004Mar24?language=printer
It came from Los Alamos, express delivery. Refined, processed and sealed in plastic, it looked more like the grime that clings to the car after a hard winter than something that might cost as much as $28 billion an ounce.
In a barnlike lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, among massive accelerators, old pieces of cannibalized metal, layers of dust, broken knobs, bits of wire and discarded electronics, the precious material was placed atop an upside-down Styrofoam coffee cup.
A dental X-ray machine -- the kind used in hundreds of strip malls around the country -- focused on the cup. A man with a radiation tag on his shirt flipped a switch. A few days passed. To the naked eye, nothing happened. But during that time an invisible X-ray beam, modulated by a commercial audio amplifier, slammed into the minute amount of material on the Styrofoam platform. Protected behind cinder blocks, a flickering computer screen registered jagged graphs.
And just like that, physicist Carl Collins either proved he was on the way to the next Manhattan Project, or perhaps proved nothing at all.
That was 1998. Six years later, a scientific dogfight rages over Collins's result. Was it really the beginning of a new super-bomb, or the biggest fizzle since cold fusion?
But the Pentagon hasn't waited for the dust to settle. Despite increasingly outraged protests by some of the country's most respected nuclear physicists, the Department of Defense has sunk millions into something that sounds to some like science fiction: Collins's efforts to get near-nuclear-level energy from a rare radioactive element without splitting any atoms.
As the debate has raged, a defense official has been promoting Collins's work with a picture of a "nuclear hand grenade," some agencies have promised an entirely new class of "isomer weapons," and the Central Intelligence Agency and the military have raised fears that the Russians might get there first.
The Big Pop
Although he didn't know it at the time, Carl Collins began his pursuit of isomer weapons in Romania. It was 1978, the height of the Cold War. While the nuclear physicists of the world's leading laboratories and universities attended meetings in Paris and London, Collins spent the better part of a decade in Bucharest working with scientists behind the Iron Curtain.
He ended up marrying a Romanian and, with his East European colleagues, began trying to tap a possibly immense source of energy from an atom with a hopped-up nucleus called an isomer.
In the simplest conception, imagine the nucleus of an atom as a deflated balloon. Blow up the balloon and tie it at the end, and you have a nuclear isomer -- the same balloon, but now filled with the stored energy of the enclosed air. Under ordinary circumstances, the filled balloon will gradually lose air, and pressure, from slow leakage.
The energy that isomers "leak" is in the form of gamma rays. Gamma rays are the most energetic wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. In extremely high doses, they could act like ray bombs in low-budget films, vaporizing living tissue and heating materials until they explode.
And theoretically that's what would happen if you could find a way to release all of an isomer's energy in an instant, like popping the balloon with a pin.
This, very crudely, was what Collins and his colleagues were attempting -- they wanted to use a small amount of energy to release a large amount of energy; they were looking for the pin that could pop the balloon. The potential was immense: Instead of the approximately one electron volt of energy stored in a single molecule of dynamite, each atom of the isomer Collins's group would eventually use could store 2.5 million electron volts.
Collins called the process "isomer triggering." His first attempts involved tantalum-180 -- the only naturally occurring nuclear isomer. The idea, roughly, was that he could use a beam of energy to act like a spark igniting dynamite. He eventually concluded that you could release energy from tantalum -- something that most physicists concede is possible -- but it required far more energy to "trigger" tantalum than the isomer released. In other words, there was no gain in energy, and thus there were no applications.
But Collins looked at his tantalum experiment as proving that triggering could work, and the issue was just a matter of finding a different, better isomer.
His belief in the potential of the right isomer was persuasive enough that, in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (what became known as the Star Wars program), Collins's project got substantial Pentagon funding in the hopes that isomer triggering would become the energy source for a powerful gamma-ray laser, a weapon that might vaporize incoming missiles in outer space. But when the space-based Star Wars fell by the wayside in the 1990s -- too expensive and technologically uncertain -- Collins was left to carry on in obscurity.
Which Collins and his colleagues did, performing thousands of experiments over the span of a decade to find the best candidate for isomer triggering. In 1995, at a NATO workshop on isomers attended by Ukrainian and Russian scientists who had been conducting gamma-ray research during the Cold War, a consensus emerged that the isomer should be hafnium-178. A small supply had been found in minute quantities as an unintended byproduct of a Los Alamos accelerator. One ounce of hafnium-178 stores enough energy to boil 120 tons of water. One tankful of it could fuel a car on a trip around Earth 520 times. And, most to the point, one gram of the material would have up to 50,000 times the explosive power of a gram of TNT.
A Bomb And A Prayer
Collins's lab -- at the far edge of the University of Texas at Dallas campus -- gives no hint of its dramatic mission. Its entrance is marked only with the Greek letter g, the scientific symbol for gamma rays, and outside there's a sign made from a discarded highway marker.
It was here, in the summer of 1998, that Collins and his group hooked up the dental X-ray machine and fired it at the hafnium sample. Today, the head of a similar X-ray machine, still attached to its swivel arm, sits discarded on the floor. The original audio amplifier, which Collins describes as the "type used in rock concerts," remains encased in concrete below the test bed, its final burying place.
Back in the office, behind a glass case, is the original Styrofoam cup, marked "Dr. C's memorial target holder," and next to it sits a second, identical cup ironically labeled "A cheap imitation."
The jury-rigged equipment is a testament to the resourcefulness of Collins's graduate students, the kind that only the command economies of communist Eastern Europe could have produced. A few of Collins's students picked up the X-ray machine from a dental-salvage business with a little sweet-talking and $1,500. Another student came up with the idea of using the 5-kilowatt amp to modulate the energy output.
The X-ray machine was left beaming on the hafnium for several weeks through a series of tests. There was no flash and bang -- even if hafnium proved to be everything Collins hoped it was, the microscopic sample's energy would be visible only to the most sensitive instruments. Instead, there was the painstaking recording and analysis of gamma-ray levels. Hafnium-178 has a half-life of 31 years, which means it gives off half of its stored energy over three decades. What Collins was looking for was clear evidence that his X-rays were accelerating that process, even a little bit.
Nothing about making the measurements or analyzing them was easy. It involved probability and margins of error, and required careful scientific rigor. But in a subsequent 1999 article in the respected scientific journal Physical Review Letters, Collins wrote that the experiment had been successful. The results were unambiguous, he claimed. He had been able to "trigger" the release of energy.
Among nuclear physicists, those results were met with some curiosity, some doubt and a great deal of ridicule. The results Collins claimed were absurdly out of whack with what conventional physics would allow for hafnium.
Critics also challenged his statistical accuracy, the high margin of error he reported and the overall significance of his results. Collins responded that the history of experimental physics was filled with examples of naysaying theoreticians being proved wrong. He dismissed the criticism as "judgmental opinion" and "logical fallacy."
But as the scientists fought out isomer triggering in the pages of Physical Review Letters, a number of dedicated isomer believers set out to show that Collins's results could be harnessed as a weapon. The isomer bomb began its roller-coaster ride from a controversial experiment in a relatively unknown science center to the inner sanctum of the military -- the E-Ring of the Pentagon. All it took was five years, an administration preoccupied with the war on terror, a new wellspring of support for nuclear and nuclear-type weapons, and an agency willing to ignore its own advisers.
Do You Believe In Isomers?
Based on Collins's reported success in the 1998 triggering, the Air Force moved in to support his work. Meanwhile, Pat McDaniel, an Air Force researcher who collaborated on the dental X-ray experiment, used his personal contacts to build interest at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
Sandia, along with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is operated by the Department of Energy. The labs make up the three legs of the U.S. nuclear weapons lab system. (As the "Z Division" of the Manhattan Project -- the super-secret World War II program to develop the atomic bomb -- Sandia was assigned the engineering task of designing and building the weapons, while Livermore and Los Alamos were at the heart of physics work.)
McDaniel found a receptive hearing from his friend and Sandia program manager Nancy Ries. Shortly after the 1998 experiment, Ries and McDaniel started handing out campaign-style buttons that read, "I believe in isomers," according to Peter Zimmerman, then a senior arms control official in the Clinton administration. Ries, McDaniel and intelligence officials began giving briefings touting isomer research as "the best thing for weapons research since sliced bread," Zimmerman said. Hafnium could be used to build a more powerful bomb or, more to the point of what the military was looking for, a small bomb with a huge bang, the believers argued. And even better, building a weapon using hafnium wouldn't violate internationally negotiated restrictions on testing nuclear weapons or congressional limits on developing new nuclear weapons. Because it wouldn't involve splitting atoms, a hafnium bomb would be a totally new class of weapon.
Zimmerman had long heard talk about isomers as a potent energy source for weapons, but had never taken it very seriously. He was well versed in the scientific issues -- with a PhD in nuclear physics. His 30-year career spanned the overlapping worlds of science and national security. The "I believe in isomers" campaign hit him just as he prepared to take over his new job in Foggy Bottom as chief scientist of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, whose mission was to both promote arms control and be on the lookout for new developments in weapons. As chief scientist, Zimmerman was responsible for preventing "technological surprise" in the weapons field. Though the science of an isomer bomb seemed to him to be questionable and the promises vastly unrealistic, he couldn't stop thinking about the 1939 decision by the Navy's research laboratory to ignore an Italian-born physicist, Enrico Fermi, who tried to convince the U.S. military that the fascists were working on a new weapon based on nuclear fission. The military thought he was talking science fiction.
Now, with talk of an isomer weapon, Zimmerman said recently, "I had the science fiction reaction, and a rather bad science fiction at that. But what I wanted to know was that if I discouraged DOD from funding it, I wouldn't be like the admiral who turned down Enrico Fermi in 1939."
Zimmerman had somewhere to turn: an elite, secretive group of senior scientists called the Jasons. Thought to be named after the Greek mythical hero Jason, the group of approximately 55 advisers has been around since 1959, most of the time as part of the Defense Advanced Research Proj-ects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's primary R&D arm. Operating mostly under the radar screen of public view, the Jasons pick their own members from among the nation's top scientists. Often called upon to evaluate controversies beyond the scientific understanding of government officials, the Jasons have weighed in on items ranging from obscure technology to weighty policy issues, and their influence over the years has been enormous. A 1966 report by the Jasons cast doubt on the use of strategic bombing to cut the Viet Cong's supply lines during the Vietnam War. In another report, the Jasons concluded that low-yield nuclear testing wasn't necessary for the United States to maintain a robust stockpile of nuclear weapons, a recommendation that figured prominently in the Clinton administration's support for a moratorium on nuclear testing.
Most important to Zimmerman with regard to the hafnium-triggering experiment, the Jasons had the scientific clout that would allow them to say whether a given scientific pursuit was outright harebrained. Zimmerman asked the Jasons to look at four principal questions: Did Collins indeed demonstrate that an "enhanced decay rate," or triggering, really took place? What is the physical mechanism that would allow the triggering to take place? Could enough hafnium be produced feasibly in the next 20 years to make it useful? Could a triggering mechanism be produced in the next 20 years?
The Jasons' conclusions, reached in July 1999, were damning on all four fronts. In essence, the Jasons concluded that the whole thing didn't pass the "snicker test," according to Zimmerman.
But there was a problem with the Jasons' study. Carl Collins, the man whose science was in question, never spoke to the group.
Even so, the study wasn't just about Collins's work. "Even if you trigger it, you couldn't use it as a weapon," said Steve Koonin, the provost of the California Institute of Technology, who led the Jasons' study. Hafnium-178 emits radiation like crazy; the amount required to fuel a bomb would require so much shielding to protect whoever is around the material that it would defeat the idea of having a small bomb. With the shielding, it wouldn't be such a useful bomb anymore, Koonin said. Finally, even if you could trigger hafnium in a bomb, it would be impossible to "burn" all the hafnium isomer. The resulting explosion, he said, would simply disperse a large amount of highly radioactive material. He paused for a second, and then said, "It sure would make a great dirty bomb."
A hafnium bomb, even if it didn't leave radioactive fallout, still wouldn't be like an ordinary bomb because, along with an explosive force, it would emit intense, penetrating gamma rays. According to Hill Roberts, a scientist at SRS Technologies in Huntsville, Ala., a gamma-ray bomb is appealing to some because gamma rays can pass through solid material and penetrate living tissue. Theoretically, an energetic gamma-ray burst could penetrate bunkers, killing whatever was inside -- be it humans or anthrax stockpiles. Putting it more bluntly, he said, "Tissue turns to goo."
But none of that would matter if an isomer bomb was flat-out impossible. Which was exactly what the Jasons concluded. Zimmerman thought he'd closed the book on the matter, and so did the Jasons.
In fact, the isomer bomb was just getting started.
The Argonne Group
Even if hafnium wasn't going to be a weapon, Collins's claims challenged conventional physics. Which raised a pressing question among government physicists: Could the results of the dental X-ray experiment be reproduced? In fact, the Jasons themselves, while arguing that hafnium couldn't be a weapon, suggested that another triggering experiment be done at a proper X-ray facility.
"When the results of that first paper came out, it seemed strange, and many nuclear physicists said it just couldn't be right," said John Schiffer, a senior scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory's Physics Division in Illinois. "There were some comments published, criticizing the paper, but most people just talked about it as something not to be taken seriously."
But in 2001, two years after Collins's results were published, John Becker, a physicist at the Livermore Lab, decided to do just that. He eventually put together a group of scientists that included Schiffer and 13 other researchers from three of the nation's leading Department of Energy labs: Argonne, Livermore and Los Alamos. The Becker group repeated the experiment using the powerful X-ray source at Argonne, which is the size of a football field and more than 100,000 times more intense than Collins's dental X-ray. According to the scientists who participated, if Collins's results were correct, then their team should have seen a much bigger signal than Collins had reported. But when the Argonne scientists turned on the X-ray, they saw nothing.
Collins's response: The Argonne group had set its X-ray at the wrong energy level. In his first article, Collins didn't specify the exact energy level that triggered the hafnium, he said, because his group learned what it was only after repeating the experiment at an advanced X-ray source in Japan. The scientists led by Becker did a second experiment a year later to attempt the level Collins described. Again, they found nothing.
This time Collins said the failure was the result of other differences in the design of the Argonne experiment. One of the most significant differences, he said, was that the radiation detectors were "blind" to precisely the energy level of gamma-ray emissions present when the isomer was triggered. In a recent interview, he described the members of the Argonne group as "failures," who were unfamiliar with the literature on triggering, inexperienced in the field and ill-equipped to repeat his experiments.
Becker and his colleagues responded by saying that the experimental differences were either irrelevant or untrue. Opinion in the scientific journals favored the Argonne group. In fact, Collins suddenly was no longer able to get published in Physical Review journals. He eventually published in Europhysics Letters, a lesser known journal. In April 2002, Don Gemmell, a physicist from Argonne, wrote to the editor of Europhysics Letters, warning that the journal was in danger of promoting a new "cold fusion" -- the infamous 1980s claim by two University of Utah researchers that they had discovered how to produce almost limitless energy by running electric current through a bottle of heavy water. After a series of e-mail exchanges, Europhysics Letters published the Argonne response and later declined to publish any more of Collins's papers.
Unable to publish in mainstream journals, Collins had to resort to Laser Physics, a Russian journal of lesser stature. Traditional physics seemed to have won the public battle. Becker's group had produced what it considered to be a textbook experiment that debunked hafnium triggering. The critics thought that, with Argonne's results in print, the 1998 Collins experiment was destined for the scientific dustbin.
Wrong again.
How To Build A Better Bomb
Even as Collins's work was being kicked around by the mainstream scientific community, it was being embraced by the CIA, according to several sources.
Mort Weiss, a retired nuclear physicist who once led Livermore Laboratory's isomer research, recently recalled that a CIA official named Fred Ambrose approached him in the 1980s to discuss CIA concerns about foreign countries developing isomer weapons. Then, after Collins's 1998 experiment, Weiss said, Ambrose became convinced that hafnium could be weaponized and that other countries, primarily Russia, were working actively on such a project. Weiss said he tried to explain that the physics wouldn't work, but Ambrose was convinced it would. "Fred is a true believer," Weiss said.
Ambrose did not respond to a request for an interview, and the CIA declined to comment.
The fears about hafnium technology falling into the wrong hands, and the Pentagon's desire for a weapon that could radiate through hardened bunkers and wipe out biological weapons, could only have multiplied after September 11, 2001. It had been three years since the Jasons' report, and George Ullrich, a senior Pentagon official in charge of weapons research, decided it was an opportune time to reassess the isomer debate. This go-round, the task was assigned to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded research arm of the Pentagon. Unlike the Jasons, whose 1999 review of the subject lasted just one day, IDA exhaustively researched hundreds of papers on the subject, including those by Collins.
While the IDA report concluded that research on isomers should go forward, it was critical of the focus on weapons. "Don't force it into trying to be practical before the relevant background work is done and it becomes ready for 'prime time,'" the authors wrote. In a personal blow to Collins, the authors also concluded his Physical Review Letters paper was "flawed and should not have passed peer review."
Ullrich's office accepted the judgment and decided that isomers were best left to universities engaged in basic physics research. But soon the nuclear hand grenade would once again explode back from the brink of oblivion.
Martin Stickley arrived at DARPA as a program manager in 2002. Stickley, who had managed research programs for the Air Force in London, had supported research by some of Collins's Eastern bloc colleagues. According to two of the participants in Collins's dental X-ray experiment, Stickley was a believer. The European work, according to McDaniel, "really sparked Martin's interest" in starting a triggering program at DARPA.
Stickley did not respond to requests for comment, and requests to DARPA to interview him were declined.
For Stickley, a promoter of isomer research, the timing was fortunate. The Jasons, who had panned isomer triggering three years earlier, had since been relocated out of DARPA, and it didn't hurt that the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, unveiled by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, emphasized that the United States needed new nuclear as well as non-nuclear bombs to destroy difficult targets, such as buried bunkers that could hide terrorists or weapons of mass destruction.
Last May, Stickley gave a PowerPoint briefing to a review panel in which he promoted the hafnium program as the next revolution in warfare. Hafnium bombs could be loaded in artillery shells, according to a copy of the briefing slides, or they could be used in the Pentagon's missile defense systems to knock incoming ballistic missiles out of the air. He encapsulated his vision of the program in a startling PowerPoint slide: a small hafnium hand grenade with a pullout ring and a caption that read, "Miniature bomb. Explosive yield, 2 KT [kilotons]. Size, 5-inch diameter." That would be an explosion about one-seventh the power of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima in 1945.
In other words, hafnium, if it worked, would be just what the secretary had ordered.
Under the direction of Stickley, DARPA began to hand out a number of contracts, totaling about $7 million, to national labs and research institutes, most of them associated with participants in the 1998 experiment. According to the Air Force, which administers the contracts, and a DARPA document, McDaniel, Collins and a former student of Collins's, James Carroll, were funded to conduct triggering experiments. The agency planned to spend $10 million in 2004, and then $20 million in 2005, according to a description of the hafnium program that DARPA gave to the State Department.
But Stickley needed to solve a fundamental problem. To make hafnium into a weapon, he would need to produce enough hafnium-178 to conduct a bomb experiment. The micrograms that had been used by Collins and others to test the physics of triggering were nowhere near the amount needed for a bomb. In early 2003, DARPA assembled a 12-member Hafnium Isomer Production Panel (HIPP) to make recommendations on the best way to produce the elusive isomer. Paul Robinson, the head of Sandia, co-chaired the panel along with Ehsan Khan, a Department of Energy official assigned to DARPA's isomer project.
Initial estimates were not encouraging. The Pentagon at first pegged production costs at more than $1 billion a gram, according to Robinson. While McDaniel claims that the production cost estimates have come down by "three orders of magnitude" to about $1 million a gram, the capital costs, according to some members of HIPP, would include $30 billion to $50 billion to build the specialized facilities needed to produce hafnium.
But as it turned out, production was only one of HIPP's concerns.
Among the experts appointed to the panel was Bill Herrmannsfeldt, who had worked for 40 years at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Herrmannsfeldt, by his account, began his research by typing the word "hafnium" into the Google search engine. One of the hits concerned the Argonne experiment, which led him to the Jasons' study, and then the IDA study, all questioning the original Collins experiment. He saw the ominous shadow of cold fusion creeping in through the crack of a Pentagon door. It was all there for him: the incredible claims, the immediate doubt and, most important, the inability of independent researchers to successfully repeat the original experiment.
His doubts became stronger when HIPP members met to discuss the production issues. Collins made a presentation to the panel, criticizing the Argonne experiment, and yet no members of that experiment had been invited to the meeting. Herrmannsfeldt said he tried to discuss his doubts about the science with Stickley and Khan, but to little avail. "I begged Khan to invite the critics, maybe I even threatened him, because this was really dangerous, even worse than I thought it would be," he said.
Frustrated by the lack of response from DARPA, Herr-mannsfeldt spearheaded a campaign to undermine the very project he was supposed to help move forward. His anger peaked with an August 13, 2003, letter written directly to Stickley at DARPA and Khan at the Department of Energy. Signed by five members of the HIPP panel and 10 experts in the field, Herrmannsfeldt's letter urged another review of hafnium triggering.
In Washington this January for another HIPP meeting, Herrmannsfeldt spoke calmly and softly about his concerns. He jotted down equations to show how DARPA would never get any useful energy out of hafnium. He talked about the reviews and competing experiments. He acknowledged his political concerns about the program -- he calls hafnium "the mother of all dirty bombs" that would entice other countries to build nuclear weapons -- but he based his argument on science. "I complained about the lack of respect for scientific advice, major reviews such as the Jasons and IDA," he said after the latest meeting. "Martin [Stickley] then came back and not very politely told me DARPA was above such things, and 'could ignore any publicity' around the program."
The end result of the panel's meeting, according to Herrmannsfeldt, was that Khan and Stickley were enthusiastic that production costs could be brought down. The program would go on.
'High Risk, High Payoff'
In the early spring of 2002, DARPA's annual tech expo was held in Anaheim, Calif., at Disneyland. In his keynote speech, DARPA Director Anthony Tether explained, "I thought there was nothing more appropriate than having DARPATech at Disneyland. Disneyland is a land of dreams and fantasy becoming reality, and that is what DARPA does and does well."
In its 46-year history, DARPA has had some incredible successes -- such as ARPANET, now better known as the Internet. It also has had plenty of failures.
But, Tether reminded his audience, "there is no sin in failing at DARPA. "Why?" he asked. "Because no one remembers the failure."
"High risk, high payoff" is Tether's motto, and it is DARPA's job to fund far-out ideas. Put in that perspective, the $7 million DARPA spent on isomer research last year is barely a drop in an annual defense budget of more than $400 billion. So why worry?
"I think the critics recognize that by Department of Defense standards, it's not a lot of money," said Ivan Oelrich, a former IDA scientist now at the Federation of American Scientists. "Even if they think it's a total waste, why lose sleep over it? The Defense Department spends about $16,000 a second, so by DOD standards, it's not much to worry about. That might be part of the explanation."
But Oelrich, who is familiar with isomer research from his days at IDA, argued that money alone should not be the standard for judging the program. Though DARPA reasonably wants to err on the side of pushing things too hard, rather than being too conservative, he explained, "there have to be some standards." Triggering hafnium, in his opinion, just didn't meet any intelligent standard.
Even one of the beneficiaries of DARPA's spending on isomer research, James Carroll, Collins's former student, has some concerns about the agency's approach. From his office in Youngstown, Ohio, Carroll argued that isomer triggering is not analogous to cold fusion, but he also described his unease with the focus on weapons. DARPA's involvement in isomer research is similar to an "impedance mismatch," he said, a scientific term describing the result of joining two systems that have different conceptual bases. DARPA wants a fast track, Carroll explained, but isomer research is still at the very basic stage. "It's a mismatch between expectations and reality. That perhaps is the difficult part here."
Isomer research is extremely good basic science, he said. "Maybe you can never make anything practical out of it . . . Maybe none of it will pan out. But in the meantime, we will learn a lot about how the nucleus responds to people banging on it."
In declining to answer specific questions about DARPA's work on hafnium, Tether responded with a general written statement offering a compelling argument for pursuing the hafnium bomb. The countries of the former Soviet Union are interested in isomer weapons, he said, and "an enemy with this capability could create havoc on a scale that has never been seen before." He raised the specter of isomer car bombs and "a suicide bomber with a few pounds of isomer."
While such weapons could be devastating in the hands of an adversary, it would be useful for the United States to have it as a deterrent, Tether wrote. An isomer bomb "would give the U.S. a capability that would truly be revolutionary given our ability to deliver small munitions with incredible precision." Isomers Hit Prime Time
The Capital Beltway is a world away from Collins's lab. Unlike the sparse landscape of the University of Texas at Dallas campus in suburban Richardson, Tex., Northern Virginia is dotted with hotels where defense contractors, scientists, researchers and "Beltway bandits" come to visit with their Washington sponsors. Common perception holds that the Pentagon itself houses the Defense Department, but in reality its offices extend along the Metro's Blue Line, from Rosslyn, where acquisition managers line Wilson Boulevard, to Crystal City, where satellite offices handle everything from foreign military sales to the management of a $200 billion fighter aircraft program.
Visiting defense contractors meet in conferences, on panels and at seminars in the Sheratons, Hiltons and Marriotts that populate Northern Virginia. While rarely five-star accommodations, they are all a convenient 10-minute drive to the Pentagon. The Hilton Towers in Ballston is definitely not for the high-end bandit. Sandwiched between a Metro station and an office building, the lobby of the hotel is the size of a typical family dining room, and the industrial carpet shows the wear of daily visitors rushing to early-morning appointments.
Sitting in the lobby one day last fall, an Army captain read the sports page, with a PowerPoint briefing at his side marked "Transformation, Now!" -- the Pentagon buzzword of the day. Rising from the opposite couch, a woman enthusiastically greeted a Russian doctor. They were off to a biological and chemical defense meeting. And here, too, was Carl Collins, all smiles and dressed as you might imagine any professor, with a golf shirt and sports jacket. Collins was in the area to brief DARPA's higher-ups on the progress in hafnium triggering, yet he seemed somehow out of place.
Defense contractors call the Pentagon "the customer," and speak about program "milestones," mixing military metaphors with business euphemisms and indecipherable acronyms. Collins does not walk the walk or talk the talk of a defense contractor. He speaks about the scientific method. He says he has never had a security clearance, and doesn't want one. He prefers doing research out in the open and wants to continue working with colleagues from behind the former Iron Curtain, he says. Although not particularly bothered by the military applications that have caught the eye of DARPA, he seems genuinely uninterested in its focus on weapons. He says that he really wasn't aware of how or why the agency became involved in his research. He had a contract in place with the Air Force, and at some point he simply noticed that part of the money was coming from DARPA.
In fact, that fall day in Ballston, Collins said he was unsure that hafnium would be useful for a bomb, though he claimed not to have given it much thought. If he had given any thought to applications, he said, it was to the concept of using tiny amounts of hafnium "seeds" for cancer therapy. The isomer seed, Collins said, could be "triggered" to give out precisely the right amount of gamma rays needed to destroy a tumor. There was already some interest in this from the Mayo Clinic, he said.
Collins laughed at the mention of the infamous dental X-ray machine. "That's not the worst of it," he said. "Sometimes we used car parts." But the truth is, he said, there is nothing wrong with using a dental X-ray machine to save money. And more importantly, he said, in 2001 he and his team, working with Japanese colleagues, went on to validate his original results at the world's most advanced X-ray source, the Spring-8 facility near Osaka, Japan. Collins chose Spring-8 precisely because he needed an advanced synchrotron, which can be tuned to precise energy levels. In his mind, this was the scientific method at work, the reproduction of earlier results proving out his theory of isomer triggering.
Collins is not beyond a bit of drama: He sees himself and his challenge to traditional nuclear physics as the modern-day equivalent of the trials of Giordano Bruno, the Dominican monk who was burned to death in 1600 for claiming Earth revolved around the sun. The "expert panels" represented by the Jasons and other critics are trying the same scare tactics, according to Collins. "You start talking about expert panels, that's exactly what they did to Bruno," Collins said. "This is the same thing."
But despite Collins's view that his initial triggering results were validated at Spring-8, there has been a lot of bad news since the big flash of attention in 1998. First, James Carroll, his former student, broke with Collins's group shortly after the first experiment and went on to set up his own gamma-ray research team at Youngstown State University, taking with him prominent Russian scientist Sarkis Karamian. Worse for Collins, Carroll began to challenge Collins's contention that the 1998 experiment -- and later experiments -- was clear proof of triggering. The data were not conclusive that triggering took place, Carroll maintained, saying that the results were "intriguing" but very preliminary. Carroll and Collins both declined to speak about the break, other than to acknowledge that it has personal as well as professional dimensions.
Collins asserts that his critics don't accept his results only because they didn't come out of a large science center. The mainstream journals are dominated by a "daisy chain" of famous scientists unwilling to accept groundbreaking work from outside their clique, he contends. Yet, at the same time, he denies that mainstream physicists reject his work, and points to allies like McDaniel.
McDaniel, who now works at Sandia, is a crucial part of the isomer debate because, while a Collins collaborator, he is also the only person who claims to have independently reproduced Collins's results. Using DARPA's sponsorship, McDaniel and his colleagues conducted a series of separate experiments, including three at a high-tech X-ray source at Louisiana State University over the past year. According to McDaniel, one experiment "seemed to corroborate Carl's results very well" and with fewer errors than previous Collins work. Another experiment proved difficult to measure, he said. A third experiment has been conducted, but he hasn't yet had time to assess the data.
McDaniel, however, has never published any of those results, giving rise to criticism that his alleged confirmation is meaningless. "All the data's noisy, so we were reluctant to publish," McDaniel said of his most recent experiments. Besides, he added, "publish or perish is not a problem for government employees."
The "noisy data" that concerned McDaniel involves statistical uncertainty and, possibly, background radiation that makes it difficult to be sure the instruments are measuring emissions from the hafnium, and not from something else. Another problem is the chronic inconsistency in experimental results. Some of McDaniel's tests produced data that exceeded the 1998 results, but others failed to show anything. It is hard to explain these differences, McDaniel acknowledges, but he argues the inconsistencies are reason enough to continue the experiments.
McDaniel contends that much of the criticism of hafnium is based on political concerns over a weapon. If hafnium proves out its potential, then the government will face a political decision. "If it does work, it's the same question about the super," McDaniel said, referring to the 1950s debate over developing the hydrogen bomb. The critics are trying to fight the science in the press because they don't like the politics, he said. "The issue is, in a free society, we need to know what's possible."
McDaniel, for one, believes that hafnium triggering is possible, and at Sandia last year, Paul Robinson, the head of the laboratory, was beginning to believe it, too. As a graduate student back in the '60s, Robinson himself had been interested in building a gamma-ray laser, and as an experimental physicist, he liked the romantic notion of proving the theoreticians wrong. More importantly, he trusted the work of Pat McDaniel. So, why is definitive, bowl-over-the-critics proof in such short supply? This is often the way new science discoveries start out, Robinson suggested.
"I suspect you'll keep looking at the triggering until you get it firmly established that you can do it," he said last year.
Of course, by that point, he noted, hafnium research "would probably be made classified, and you wouldn't read about it."
Robinson's remarks proved prescient. Last November, DARPA's talk of a new weapon made its way to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation, which wanted to know why everyone was discussing plans for a new super-bomb out in the open. The bureau sent a batch of e-mails to government scientists expressing concern that without more secrecy, isomer technology could fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.
Scientists who had been involved in the work at Argonne were apoplectic. The idea that the government would make a nonexistent weapon a classified secret struck them as silly, and also as dangerous if it meant that the scientific debate became shrouded in secrecy. As Don Gemmell, the Argonne physicist, responded in frustration, "Classifying the work at this stage would serve to protect this waste from public scrutiny. I would sooner see us look for ways to trigger a chain reaction in sugar. The material is readily available, is not radioactive, has an energy density greater than TNT, and is about as likely to work as 178Hf!"
At least some of the scientists' doubts may have reached DARPA. According to Herrmannsfeldt, the critic on the production panel, in late February two leading weapons scientists, both critical of the isomer program, jointly called Tether. After the conversation, DARPA's director took one step back. Rather than putting money into hafnium production immediately, according to DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker, the agency will focus on experiments to "scientifically prove, to the satisfaction of the majority of the nuclear physics community," that isomer triggering is real. For now, rather than the $30 million originally planned for 2004 and 2005, DARPA will spend just $7 million, according to updated budget submissions.
Zimmerman, the former arms control agency chief scientist, is skeptical that even the more cautious approach will make much difference in the end. "I think that a program like this, once started, will have an enormous amount of inertia," he said. It won't be a matter of someone deciding that this is just a waste of money, it will stick around for years, and likely grow in scope, he added. Zimmerman's concerns also go well beyond the science. "Are we going to advertise that we are going to build a new nuclear-type weapon based on new physical principles?" he asked.
The isomer bomb is foolish, Zimmerman said, but it's foolish in a dangerous sort of way if it pushes other countries to build real nuclear weapons in the hope of deterring the United States from using a fanciful hafnium bomb.
Back at Carl Collins's office in Texas, a clutter of paper shrouds his desk. A portrait of a beautiful young woman -- an old photo of Collins's wife, Doina -- stands out amid the chaos. Nearby is a copy of a novel by Dallas author Payne Harrison, who has written a number of techno- thrillers. The plot of one of them, Thunder of Erebus, has it all: a fictional isomer called rubidium-86, gamma-ray lasers for Star Wars, and then DARPA's development of a new, super-conventional weapon based on isomer triggering after Star Wars is canceled. In the book, Russia decides that it must control the world's supply of rubidium-86 (which, in the novel, is in Antarctica) for fear of DARPA's secret isomer program. Ironically, the Pentagon fears the Russians will build their own isomer weapon and then invade a country in the Persian Gulf.
Some years ago, Harrison hung around the gamma-ray lab for a few months "to absorb the culture," according to Collins. The author, a former tax accountant, shadowed Collins's team, eventually drifting out of the lab as quietly as he came in.
The odd thing is, Thunder of Erebus was published in 1991 -- a full decade before DARPA says it ever funded work on an isomer bomb.
Last May, Collins appeared at a DARPA meeting and showed a slide of a man hitting a golf ball across a field, a mushroom cloud rising at the end of the ball's arc. The caption read: "A golf ball filled with the isomer would have the energy of 10 tons of explosive." Collins was visibly uncomfortable when asked about the diagram, which was displayed at a closed meeting, and said apologetically that the "sponsors," DARPA, had asked him to make an illustration to show hafnium's potential. Collins is an avid golfer.
Asked how he felt about conducting an experiment whose results, if true, could lead to the next super-bomb, Collins began to talk about the need for science in a free society, about the medical applications, and then paused. "I guess I don't feel anything. At some point, I'll retire and go play golf," he said with a smile.
Sharon Weinberger covers Congress and the military for Defense Daily, a trade publication. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
-------- asia
30 Wounded in Thailand Bomb Attack
March 28, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/asia/28THAI.html
BANGKOK, March 27 (Reuters) - A bomb hidden in a motorcycle exploded outside a hotel in Thailand's largely Muslim south on Saturday, wounding about 30 people, a police spokesman said.
He said the bomb had exploded outside a bar and hotel in the Suneai Golok district of Narathiwat Province, which has been under martial law since an armed raid in January on an army camp in the region in which many weapons were stolen. State radio said one person had died in the blast, but there was no immediate confirmation from the police.
More than 60 people have been killed in the region, where many of Thailand's six million Muslims live, since the January raid, in which four soldiers were killed. Some officials believe that the violence may be part of a resurgence of a separatist war from the 1970's and '80's. The government blames separatists and mafias in a region also notorious for smuggling arms and drugs.
Muslim leaders have asked the government to lift martial law, which they say is disrupting economic life. The government says it is imposing martial law with as light a hand as it can.
A prominent Muslim lawyer, Somchai Neelaphaichit, who was defending Thai Muslims on trial for membership in Jemaah Islamiyah, which is linked to Al Qaeda, disappeared March 12.
Critics at home and abroad have suggested that security officials may be responsible for his disappearance, but the government has denied that.
On Thursday, a court issued arrest warrants for a Muslim lawmaker of the governing party and eight others accused of treason for plotting the unrest in the south. The legislator, Najmuddin Umar, denies any involvement and only a parliamentary vote to lift his immunity would allow him to be arrested.
-------- britain
Britain's secret army in Iraq:
thousands of armed security men who answer to nobody
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad and Severin Carrell in London
28 March 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=505826
So many British security firms are cashing in on the violence in Iraq that armed private security men now outnumber most of the national army contingents in the country.
Thousands of former soldiers and police officers from Britain, the US, Australia and South Africa are earning wages as high as £600 a day to protect Western officials, oil company executives and construction firm bosses in Iraq. The SAS is said to be suffering an unprecedented loss of personnel as its highly trained soldiers are lured by lucrative private security work.
With business of around £1bn, British companies are estimated to have the biggest share of private security contracts in Iraq. According to experts, between 1,200 and 1,500 former British soldiers and police officers, including former SAS, Marines, paratroopers and RUC officers, are working in Iraq. Some privately estimate that the total number of foreigners working for private security companies now exceeds the 8,700 British troops there.
Apart from the major US and British companies, dozens of small firms have set up shop in Iraq. Former British and American special forces members speak of their concern that smaller firms are hiring personnel with little experience with firearms and have no interest in setting out the circumstances in which their employees may use their weapons.
The presence of thousands of armed Westerners and others, including Gurkhas and Fijians, says much about America's fear of military casualties. Security firms are escorting convoys. Armed men from an American company are guarding US troops at night inside the former presidential palace where Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, has his headquarters. When a US helicopter crashed near Fallujah last year, an American security firm took control of the area and began rescue operations.
Details of the number of companies here - there may be as many as 400 - are further complicated by the number of security firms that are subcontracted by larger companies on a daily or weekly basis. Larger companies such as Control Risks complain that many are unregistered and uninsured.
Much of the money being earned by British companies is coming from the British taxpayer. The Independent on Sunday has learnt that the Foreign Office and Department for International Development have spent nearly £25m on hiring private bodyguards, armed escorts and security advisers to protect their civil servants. That figure is set to increase sharply in July when sovereignty is handed over to an Iraqi administration.
The largest contract is with Control Risks, which has earned £23.5m. It employs about 120 staff to protect about 150 British officials and contractors.
----
Half of all recruits to Army read at level of 11-year-olds
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
28/03/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/03/28/nmil28.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/03/28/ixhome.html
A confidential study into the educational standards of soldiers has revealed that half of all new infantry recruits only have the reading and writing skills of 11-year-olds.
The study commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, which the Telegraph has seen, also discloses that a fifth of recruits have the literacy and numeracy levels of seven-year-olds. Four per cent are at the standard of the average five-year-old. Among the problems uncovered were one soldier who admitted that he struggled to write letters to his young daughter and another who wrote "riht" for write, "cepe" instead of keep, and "rifel" for rifle.
The findings have raised fears among defence chiefs that soldiers of the future may not be able to operate the new generation of "smart" weapon systems that will dictate how battles are fought. Officers, who are more highly qualified, were not included in the study.
Within the next 10 years, the Army will be issued with equipment that will require all frontline soldiers to be computer literate and numerically literate if they are to fight and survive on the battlefield. They will also need to be able to read and understand ever-more complicated training manuals.
By 2010, the Ministry of Defence plans to equip the Army with a new fleet of armoured vehicles linked by a computer network and equipped with the most sophisticated weapons, communications and target-finding equipment available.
The £2 billion programme will become a cornerstone of the Army and will be used by basic tank and infantry soldiers, who will require a high degree of computer literacy to operate it.
The study into the educational standards of recruits was based on the results of 2,000 basic skills assessments of new privates compiled by Melanie Dickinson, a civilian instructor at the Infantry Training Centre in Catterick, North Yorkshire.
It reveals that four per cent of new recruits possessed a basic skill level equivalent to a five-year-old; 20 per cent equivalent to a seven-year-old; 50 per cent equivalent to an 11-year-old and 26 per cent had literacy levels equivalent to GCSE grades D to G in English and mathematics.
The reports states that there is a growing belief within the Army that believes that soldiers should be screened at recruiting centres for basic skills and those who are not up to an acceptable standard should be rejected.
Ms Dickinson admits, however, that this could create problems. "This could mean that the infantry would lose at least 25 per cent of its recruits in one go - and my own experience of 16 years in the Army tells me that you would also lose many good soldiers."
The report adds: "Nowadays there are very few soldiers who are entirely illiterate or innumerate, but there are a lot of soldiers who can't cope with the level of written information they are expected to understand."
The report goes on to say that the lowest educational level at which soldiers are accepted into the Army, called Basic Skills Level 1, is "widely accepted as the minimum level required to work and function in society in general".
No educational qualifications are necessary for privates seeking to join the Army, except for those who wish to train in technical trades such as signals, the Army Air Corps or the the various corps of engineers.
An applicant's suitability for a particular form of employment is determined by the results of an initial assessment, using computer touch-screen questions and answers.
A senior Army officer told the Telegraph: "Just because soldiers have literacy or numeracy issues, it does not mean they are stupid. Some of these individuals have very high IQs but they have been very poorly educated. There are soldiers serving in the SAS who struggle with reading and writing, yet they survive and become first-class soldiers, but they are the exception.
"The problem the Army faces is that the demands of modern military technology means that soldiers must possess more than the most basic of educational skills.
"In the very near future the basic infantryman will have to operate satellite navigation and target acquisition equipment in highly stressful conditions. If he can't read and write very well he will struggle to make the grade."
-------- china
Despite Rally, Taiwan President Tightens Hold on Office
March 28, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/asia/28TAIW.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 27 - Hundreds of thousands of Nationalist Party supporters crowded this city's center on Saturday in a peaceful protest of the island's disputed presidential election. President Chen Shui-bian agreed to one of the demonstrators' demands, but seemed to be in a strong position to fend off others and to remain Taiwan's president for the next four years.
After the rally, President Chen said he would accept an immediate, court-supervised recount. He also said that he would welcome the participation of any forensics experts who would like to help a task force created on Friday to investigate an incident on March 19 in which the president received a gash across the lower abdomen from what police now believe was a homemade bullet.
Su Chi, the senior spokesman for the Nationalists, said late Saturday night that his party accepted the recount, but wanted a broader investigation into the shooting incident and its aftermath.
Political analysts here have said that the Nationalists' chances may be slim of winning a recount; the initial count showed that the president prevailed by nearly 30,000 votes out of 13 million cast.
Addressing reporters in a hall of the presidential palace, a huge Taiwanese flag behind him, President Chen issued on Saturday night his first detailed denial of the Nationalists' claims - backed by little evidence - that he might have rigged the vote count or staged the shooting incident or needlessly put the military and police on alert so as to prevent servicemen and officers from voting.
The president said that if his rivals really believed he had faked the incident, then they should stand on a Jeep in public - as he was when shot - and let him pay for the world's best marksman to try to graze them, to see if the injuries could be faked. "Would they only believe this incident was true if all my organs fell out and I fell dead on the floor?" he asked. Mr. Chen's Jeep was traveling 17 miles an hour at the time of the incident, but he mockingly offered to his rivals that for them, "the Jeep doesn't have to be moving; it can be parked."
President Chen also said that the military alert after the shooting had no effect on the number of servicemen and officers who could be given leaves to vote, which had been decided two months in advance. Mr. Su disagreed, saying that the Nationalists had been gathering evidence that many servicemen were not able to vote at the last moment.
At the rally, Lien Chan, the Nationalist Party chairman and losing presidential candidate, told the crowds jammed in the plaza by the presidential palace that he also wanted to give a chance to cast ballots to military personnel who were unable to vote in the election a week ago. President Chen did not address this idea, but his party had previously ruled it out.
In the Nationalist Party headquarters across the plaza, party elders seemed dispirited, and conceded that they had begun running low on options to fight the victory of President Chen and his Democratic Progressive Party.
Asked what comes next, Huang Teh-fu, a senior Nationalist lawmaker, replied, "We have no further plans; that depends on the crowd."
Sun Kauo-hwa, another Nationalist lawmaker, said that it was not possible for the party's supporters to continue blocking streets in the city center, as they have for the last week, because doing so would embarrass Ma Ying-jeou, the popular mayor of Taipei. Mr. Ma is the party's most likely presidential candidate in the next elections, in 2008.
"Of course, we try to protect him," by urging the crowd to move to the parklike environs of the nearby Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, Mr. Sun said.
The Taipei police estimated with unusual precision that 468,000 people participated in Saturday's rally. But the acreage and density of the crowd suggested that the actual total might have been smaller.
Scuffles on Friday between riot police and a few hundred People First Party supporters, who smashed windows and doors at the Central Election Commission, had raised fears about possible disturbances on Saturday. But in cool weather and under a light but steady drizzle, the crowd stayed calm.
The White House publicly congratulated President Chen on Friday as the winner, while acknowledging that legal challenges continue.
American support is crucial to Taiwan's ability to maintain its informal independence from the mainland, so the White House congratulations was widely seen here as an important victory for President Chen.
The Nationalist Party alarmed the Democratic Progressive Party on Friday when it issued two statements that could be construed as wooing support from the military and the police, which worked closely with the Nationalists through four decades of martial law that ended only in 1987.
But interviews with opposition lawmakers and demonstrators unearthed very little enthusiasm for the military or police to put any pressure on President Chen to call a new election or conduct a recount on terms acceptable to the Nationalists.
"If we want to keep the society peaceful, they should be kept sidelined," said Thomas Lee, a lawmaker from the People First Party, which is closely affiliated with the Nationalists but tends to be somewhat more radical and more willing to confront President Chen.
On a street near the presidential palace, Zeng Long-yun, a 50-year-old factory manager, denounced the election as unfair and questioned the impartiality of the courts. But he said he also believed that the military and police should and would stay out of the national debate here.
"The army and police are neutral," he said. "We are a democracy."
--------
Taiwan's Leader Agrees to Recount
By Tim Culpan
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29769-2004Mar27.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 27 -- After a massive protest that flooded the streets of Taipei, President Chen Shui-bian announced Saturday night that he would agree to a judicial recount of his disputed reelection as demanded by his political foes.
The concession was aimed at defusing political tension that has roiled this self-governing island since the March 20 vote, in which Chen defeated his Nationalist Party rival, Lien Chan, by only about 30,000 votes out of more than 13 million ballots cast. In a further peacemaking gesture, Chen offered to meet with Lien and his lieutenants to discuss efforts to return political life to normal.
During a news conference, the Taiwanese president said he would write a letter to the High Court on Monday expressing his willingness to accede to a recount supervised by judges instead of the Central Election Commission and other government organs that were in charge of the balloting that has been called into question.
In an earlier attempt to assuage doubts about the legitimacy of his victory, Chen had agreed to an administrative recount. But Lien and his Nationalist Party supporters contended that would not have sufficient independence from the government to satisfy their doubts. As a result, lawmakers were unable to agree on legislation proposed by Chen's Democratic Progressive Party that would have made a quick administrative recount possible.
Instead, Nationalist Party officials declared their intention to go to court seeking a judicially supervised recount. But they were told by judges that hearing the case could take months. With his announcement, Chen offered to present no defense when the Nationalists bring their case, which he said would allow the court to move swiftly to begin a recount.
The Central Election Commission, following Taiwan's electoral timetable, officially declared Chen the winner on Friday, six days after the March 20 voting. The earliest the court can hear the Nationalist Party demand, therefore, is Monday.
The protest in Taipei on Saturday, with a flag-waving crowd estimated by police to number as many as 500,000 people, was by far the largest of nonstop demonstrations that have been held over the contested voting in front of the presidential office. Although violence had been feared, the protest was peaceful.
Lien, addressing the crowd, reiterated his demand for an investigation into a shooting the day before the election in which Chen and his vice president, Annette Lu, were slightly wounded. Lien has said the shooting produced a surge of sympathy votes that may have decided the election.
Correspondent Edward Cody in Beijing contributed to this report.
-------- europe
Border fence gives way to rose bushes
March 28, 2004
By George Jahn
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040327-104712-1476r.htm
GORIZIA, Italy - Guns and roses define this town's postwar history. The guns - and the border guards who toted them - are now only a memory. So is the Iron Curtain that split Gorizia between Italy and Yugoslavia after World War II.
Fifty-seven years later, the border is hard to spot - just worn stone markers, a thin iron fence, or a fading white line on a house that straddled the frontier.
Yugoslavia has vanished, and the country across the border is now Slovenia. Next to disappear will be the fence, which is being replaced by rose bushes on May 1, when Slovenia and nine other mostly ex-communist newcomers join the European Union.
Gorizia and its Slovenian side, Nova Gorica, will be awash in street festivals, and are sending a joint team to compete in a soccer tournament pitting new and old EU members against each other.
"We have to overcome the divisions of the past, but I'm not worried," said Vittorio Brancati, Gorizia's Italian mayor. "We - both of us - are open peoples, with a multicultural tradition." Gorizians and Goricans aren't alone. Come May 1, flags will fly and bands will oompah in Germany and Poland, Austria and the Czech Republic and elsewhere as a handful of border towns and villages reunite after decades of separation.
In Gorizia's case, the boundary drawn by the Allies on Feb. 10, 1947, probably did some initial good. Atrocities during and immediately after World War II by Italian fascists, then by Slovene partisans had poisoned relations.
But for many, the new border exacerbated the pain. Parents were split from their children. A wife visiting her parents found herself unable to return to her husband on what was suddenly the Slovene side. The border arbitrarily put living rooms in Italy and kitchens in Slovenia.
"The border that was finally decided on had no consideration for the people," recalled Martino Michele, Gorizia's former mayor. "It separated cows in the fields from their barns. It cut through graveyards. It even bisected individual graves."
Overnight, the border had become an ideological front line between Italy in the Western camp, and communist Yugoslavia, complete with barbed wire, guard towers and troops.
Some tried to defy the new reality. They paid with their lives.
Older people on both sides remember the nightly sound of shooting - and the sight of carts leaving the border area the next morning, legs of corpses sticking out over the end and bouncing to the rhythm of the horses pulling the wagons.
With the lines drawn, the two nations clamped down. Slovene was spoken only in whispers on the Italian side - as was Italian in the Slovene part of town. Schools and theaters became unilingual, as did street and other public signs.
Change came, but slowly. "By the early 1960s, people on both sides started saying, 'Those on the other side are people just like we are,' " Mr. Michele recalls.
He and his Slovene counterpart, Josko Strukelj, worked surreptitiously to right some wrongs. Mr. Strukelj recalled an anxious night spent moving border stakes in the cemetery "so that some of our graves could remain in Slovenia."
Mr. Michele ignored a law passed in Rome requiring Slovenes to give their newborns Italian names.
In 1963, they arranged their first secret meeting, risking dismissal and prison for consorting with the enemy.
"There were a lot of suspicions on both sides, but we made a deal, and that was part of our personal friendship," said Mr. Michele, exchanging a smile with Mr. Strukelj. "Each of us would live up to our promises - even if that meant going against our political parties and our political systems."
While the border still exists, it is a far cry from the forbidding barrier of the past. To cross it, the 35,000 Gorizians and 18,000 Nova Goricans need only to show ID cards to a bored guard in a booth, and that too will end in about three years.
Municipal officials from both sides sit on committees to plan common utilities, transportation, even a theater subscription good for performances on both sides of town.
-------- iraq
Cleric May Warn Iraqis to Reject New Government
March 28, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/worldspecial/28IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 27 - An aide to Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric was quoted Saturday as saying that the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, might issue a religious edict against any Iraqis who join the interim government that is scheduled to take office when the United States transfers sovereignty to Iraq on June 30.
Ayatollah Sistani's representative in Kuwait, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Mohri, warned that the edict, or fatwa, would be issued if Ayatollah Sistani's demands for changes in the interim constitution adopted earlier this month were not met. Ayatollah Sistani has called for scaling back guarantees of minority rights written into the charter with American encouragement as an assurance to Iraq's principal minorities, Sunnis and Kurds, who have been concerned at the prospect of domination by the Shiite majority.
Ayatollah Mohri's warning, delivered in a sermon at Friday Prayers in Kuwait, was reported by Kuwaiti newspapers on Saturday, according to a Reuters report. Without changes to the minority guarantees, Ayatollah Mohri was reported to have said, "Imam Sistani may issue a fatwa declaring illegitimate all those to whom power is transferred in June," meaning the interim government, and "may also order the Iraqi people to protest or carry out major popular demonstrations and sit-ins in all Iraqi cities."
The possibility of a religious decree by Ayatollah Sistani, who heads the most powerful body of Shiite clerics in Iraq, with a following among millions of Shiites, increased pressure on the American occupation authority to find ways to defuse the growing discord over the interim constitution. Ayatollah Sistani's aides had previously threatened to hold up talks on the formation of an interim government, the next step in the American political timetable, unless changes were made to free the Shiite majority from the constraints inherent in the minority guarantees.
Adding a new level of invective in his remarks in Kuwait, Ayatollah Mohri warned the Americans and the United Nations, which has accepted an American invitation to seek mediated solutions to the disputes over Iraq's path to a fully elected government, not to resist Ayatollah Sistani's demands, "or else there will be pandemonium in Iraq, and protests and chaos will be widespread." If the wording accurately reflected Ayatollah Sistani's views, they marked the closest that the powerful cleric has come to threatening public disorder.
American officials in Baghdad are hoping that a confrontation with Ayatollah Sistani can be headed off with the help of the United Nations mediators, whose advance team will meet with American officials in Baghdad on Saturday. The team is headed by Carina Perelli, an aide to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations' special envoy to Iraq, who is expected to arrive in Iraq in early April. Iraqi officials said Saturday that Ms. Perelli's group would focus on the mechanics of the elections.
As the Americans wrestled with ways of avoiding an impasse with Ayatollah Sistani, they faced a drumbeat of insurgent attacks across central and northern Iraq that gave little hope that the war here is attenuating. Reporters reaching the city reported American raids were continuing in Falluja, 30 miles west of Baghdad, where marines fought at least two battles with insurgents in the past week.
In the northern city of Mosul, a rocket attack on the provincial governor's office on Saturday killed four Iraqis, including a 13-year-old girl and two women, and wounded 19 others, news agency reports said. In Kirkuk, another northern city, the Iraqi police reported that a colonel in a section that controls weapons permits had been shot dead by gunmen. Attacks on the new American-trained police force have killed more than 360 policemen in recent months, according to a figure given by American officers.
In a separate attack on the police in Mosul, gunmen who attacked a bank as policemen were drawing their monthly salaries killed one officer and wounded another, a police spokesman said.
In Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, the police said American forces had opened fire on Friday night on a civilian car, killing a 3-year-old boy and wounding six women and children, Reuters said. The report quoted an American military spokesman, Maj. Neal O'Brien, as saying that he had no information about a child being killed, but that he knew of one incident in which four Iraqis were injured after their car ran a checkpoint.
In Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded along a boulevard flanking the Tigris River, directly across from the occupation authority's headquarters. The bomb destroyed one of a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles that Iraqi police said were carrying Iraqi bodyguards heading to escort duties for the occupation authority. The police said seven of the Iraqis were wounded.
A Lawyer for Hussein
PARIS, March 27 (Reuters) - The French lawyer known for defending the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal said Saturday that Saddam Hussein's nephew had chosen him to represent Mr. Hussein, the deposed Iraqi president.
The lawyer, Jacques Verges, said in a telephone interview he had received a letter from Ali Barzan al-Tikriti, whose father Barzan al-Tikriti is Mr. Hussein's half brother, asking him to defend Mr. Hussein.
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U.S. Plan Seeks to Build Civilian-Run Iraqi Army
Prospective Leaders Being Trained in Washington
By Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29876-2004Mar27?language=printer
BAGHDAD, March 27 -- U.S. officials are moving rapidly to create a civilian-run Iraqi Defense Ministry that will work in tandem with the American military after the handover of Iraqi sovereignty on June 30 and could form the nucleus of a strategic alliance between the two countries.
Since February, about 50 Iraqi officials have been flown to Washington to attend a Pentagon-run school on how to recruit, train and equip a military that operates under civilian leadership, according to the retired U.S. Army colonel who directs the program. A class of 25 graduated on Friday from the three-week course, which included meetings with officials in Congress and the Defense and State departments.
In addition, a former militia leader has been picked to lead Iraq's new defense bureaucracy, according to two people familiar with the decision. Bruska Shaways, the former commander of an Iraqi Kurd paramilitary force, aided U.S. commanders in northern Iraq last year during the invasion of the country. His appointment comes as the U.S. military is seeking to disband independent Iraqi militias.
With the handover of sovereignty less than 100 days away, the Bush administration and Iraq's leaders have not negotiated a status-of-forces agreement spelling out the rights and responsibilities of U.S. troops in Iraq after June 30. U.S. officials have said U.N. Resolution 1511, passed on Oct. 16, and the Iraqi interim constitution adopted this month provide a legal basis for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq. But the establishment and staffing of an Iraqi Defense Ministry appear aimed at ensuring that the Iraqi military's new leaders will be responsive to U.S. interests, regardless of what kind of agreement is eventually reached.
In a nine-page executive order signed on March 21, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, established an Iraqi version of the Pentagon, replete with a chief of staff for the armed forces, an inspector general and directors for budgeting, intelligence and logistics. While the ministry has administrative control of the armed forces, the order calls for Iraqi troops to operate under the command of the U.S.-led forces.
Positions in the Iraqi ministry are to be filled by civil servants and military officers rather than political appointees. Shaways, as secretary general, would head the defense bureaucracy and answer to an appointed defense minister -- another civilian. U.S. officials said their goal is to stabilize the new military by making it difficult to remove anyone but the minister.
"This is very much like the British model, where the ministry is run by career civil servants and military professionals," a senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Thursday. He said Bremer would name an interim defense minister in early April.
Creation of a new Iraqi army has been one of the highest priorities of the occupation authority since Bremer's decision 10 months ago to dismantle the force that served under former president Saddam Hussein. Bremer's move proved to be his most controversial. Although he subsequently ordered the formation of a new 40,000-soldier army, many Iraqis say that the dissolution of the original army destabilized society and may have created a vast pool of trained, unemployed fighters ready to join the insurgency that has claimed hundreds of American and Iraqi lives.
U.S. officials began recruiting and training the new army in August, officials said, and by December they had assembled a team of legal and policy experts to devise a new Defense Ministry that would be insulated from Iraq's fractious domestic politics.
The senior U.S. official acknowledged, however, that the interim Iraqi government could jettison the plan. "That's for the Iraqis to decide," he said. "We believe we have offered the best advice and the best organization, and many Iraqis, including Governing Council members, have embraced this recommendation. We made modifications based on their suggestions."
The U.S.-based training is a key component of the Americans' strategy.
Two groups of about 25 Iraqi officials -- including five women and a handful of former military officers who served under Hussein but were not high-level members of his Baath Party -- have completed a special course at the National Defense University in Washington.
"What we're talking about is, how does one go about managing the development and design of a security force in a participatory, transparent and accountable political system," said Gerald B. Thompson, a former infantry officer who directs the university's Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies.
Neither Thompson nor U.S. officials in Baghdad would identify the graduates of the training course, citing potential security threats against Iraqis who cooperate with the U.S.-led occupation.
Shaways, whom U.S. officials declined to make available for an interview, spent two decades in northwestern Iraq as a commander, military adviser and defense minister for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of two factions that have largely governed northern Iraq since 1991, when the United States imposed a "no-fly" zone in the area. He is a top deputy to Massoud Barzani, the party's leader and a member of the Governing Council.
Although Shaways has been critical of the United States, in particular of the civil disorder that erupted in the northern city of Mosul after Hussein's forces retreated in April, he is popular among U.S. commanders.
Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which until recently had control of northern Iraq, described Shaways as a "superb" choice.
A legal adviser to Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni Muslim member of the Governing Council, said he liked the idea of a military largely controlled by technocrats and professionals.
"The fact is that, at the end of the day, what Iraqis need are the most qualified people available in Iraq to render service in the rebuilding of Iraq," said the adviser, Feisal Istrabadi, a lawyer who holds Iraqi and American citizenship and has been a vocal critic of Bremer's decision to dissolve the army.
Istrabadi said the security situation in Iraq would make it difficult for political leaders to drastically alter the U.S.-designed system. "Let's be very practical about this, leaving aside issues of national pride and all that," he said. "We have foreigners blowing themselves up and blowing Iraqis up by the hundreds. That has got to be ended. In the absence of an American force, Iraq will descend into absolute chaos."
However, Entifadh Qanbar, a spokesman for Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite member of the council who is backed by the Pentagon, questioned whether the U.S. plan would have legitimacy when Bremer leaves.
"After July 1, any type of structure created without sufficient coordination, transparency and dialogue with the Governing Council can be reversed, dismantled and rebuilt again," Qanbar said. "This is an Iraqi issue, and we are not going to let anybody -- no matter how strong an ally -- impose or put into place structures without full knowledge of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people."
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Rockets Kill 4 Iraqis in Mosul
Attack Leaves 13 Wounded; U.S. Soldiers Shoot 2 Civilians
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30066-2004Mar27.html
BAGHDAD, March 27 -- A rocket attack in the northern city of Mosul killed four Iraqis on Saturday. Two more civilians, including a 3-year-old, were reportedly fatally shot by U.S. troops at checkpoints in other cities.
The rocket attack on the Mosul city hall wounded 13 people, including two Iraqi police officers and a child, police and hospital officials said. Attacks on police have become an almost daily occurrence in Mosul, a city of 2 million.
In Tikrit, the ancestral home of former president Saddam Hussein, a 3-year-old boy was killed and six people were wounded when U.S. soldiers opened fire on a vehicle at a checkpoint shortly after dark on Friday, the Reuters news agency reported. Iraqi police said a male driver, three other children and three women, including the child's mother, were wounded in the incident.
"The Americans are criminals," the slain child's mother, May Qahtan, said from her hospital bed, according to Reuters. "Saddam is the only terrorist? The Americans are the ones killing all these people, all these children."
In Kirkuk, another northern city, an Iraqi working for a U.S. contractor was killed and two others wounded when soldiers opened fire on their car, Reuters also reported. Their employer, RTI International, was hired by the U.S. Agency for International Development to help Iraqis learn self-governance.
Also in Kirkuk, a police lieutenant was reportedly killed by unidentified gunmen in an attack Friday evening. The victim was identified as an Assyrian Christian in a city where divisions among Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and Assyrians have increased in the postwar era.
In Baghdad, a bomb erupted during the morning rush hour on a route leading toward two hotels where many Iraqis work for foreign news organizations and contractors. Bursts of gunfire sounded after the blast, which exploded beside a white sport-utility vehicle similar to those associated with the U.S.-led coalition and the private security firms it employs. News services reported that at least five Iraqis were wounded.
Meanwhile, U.S. Marines continued an operation in Fallujah, a seat of resistance to the occupation 35 miles west of Baghdad. Hospitals in the city reported that 15 Iraqi civilians had been killed there during sporadic, day-long firefights at the edge of the city. A Marine was also killed.
Spokesmen for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which took over from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division on Wednesday, said they could not comment on the operation while it continued.
Separately, a BBC documentary reported that it had identified the former presidential bodyguard who led U.S. forces to the property where Hussein was found in December, hiding in a hole in the ground. Mohammad Ibrahim Omar Musslit, a portly figure with glasses and a mustache like his patron's, led U.S. troops to the area hours after he was arrested in Baghdad, the BBC reported on its Web site, citing a Panorama documentary scheduled to be broadcast Sunday night. Musslit was described as the only person who knew all of Hussein's movements at the time of his capture.
The program said that Musslit was with Hussein when he fled Baghdad on April 9 in a white Oldsmobile, traveling north as U.S. troops took the city from the south and west. He is not expected to receive the $25 million reward U.S. officials offered for information leading to the capture of Hussein.
A French lawyer announced Saturday that he would represent Hussein in the war crimes trial now being prepared by U.S. and Iraqi officials. Jacques Verges showed reporters a letter from a Hussein nephew, Ali Barzan Tikriti, retaining the 79-year-old attorney "to assure the defense of my uncle."
Verges has a history of defending unpopular clients, including Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal and former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. Verges said he would also defend Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister.
-------- israel / palestine
Bush Snubs Blair's Plea For Monitors In Palestine
March 28, 2004
(IslamOnline.net & News Agencies)
http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/2004-03/28/article03.shtml
LONDON - U.S. President George Bush has rebuffed a request from his closest ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair to deploy a U.S.-led "monitoring force" to act as a buffer between Israel and the Palestinians, The Times revealed Saturday, March27 .
The plea was at the heart of talks between the two sides at the highest level over the past few months with London urging Washington to play an active role in the Middle East to alley the growing "Islamic" hatred towards the West, said the paper.
But defiant wartime Bush was not even ready to think it over, it quoted a Whitehall official as saying.
The Times said the reaction came to the resentment of Blair who gambled on his political career by staunchly supporting U.S. policies in return for its backing of the moribund Middle East peace process.
The foreign office and intelligence officials have succeeded in getting Palestinian security services under one umbrella in the West Bank to revive the Palestinian-Israeli security coordination.
But they were keen on taking a step further in the Gaza Strip by convincing Washington to approve the dispatch of U.S.-led hundreds-strong security force to head off any repercussions due to a planned Israeli pullout of the Strip.
Israel fears the conflict with the Palestinians would take an international dimension if such a force was deployed.
American concerns that a possible power vacuum in the Strip could be filled by Hamas played into the hands of London , which has been pressing Washington to accept the proposal, but to no avail due to Israeli pressure.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has done everything in his power to scupper British attempts to have a European role in the occupied territories, hinting this could damage Bush's reelection campaign.
He has been rather trying to drum up American support for his unilateral disengagement plan.
Annexation
Although Bush has finally agreed to schedule a meeting with Sharon on April14 , he refused to cross the lines set by the American foreign policy about an Israeli request to approve annexation of Gush Etzion and Ma'aleh Adumim settlement blocs east and south of Al-Quds (occupied Jerusalem ) and Ariel in the northwest of the West Bank .
Sources in the Bush administration said it would be difficult to endorse the Israeli request, reported the Israeli Haaretz daily Sunday, March28 .
Israel Radio quoted the sources as saying the proposal was ill-timed especially that Bush was trying to calm the Arab world in the aftermath of Israeli's assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin last week.
The 66 -year-old wheelchair-bound Yassin was assassinated along with eight others in an Israeli missile strike on his way home after performing the dawn prayers.
According to the sources, Bush would be more willing to support Sharon 's disengagement plan, arguing it could rekindle the peacemaking.
The official announcement of the Bush-Sharon meeting date came at the conclusion of talks last week between Israeli delegates Dov Weisglass and Giora Eiland and U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and National Security Council representatives Steven Hadley and Elliot Abrams are to arrive in Israel on Wednesday to finalize arrangements for Sharon 's trip.
They will also visit Egypt and Jordan to prepare upcoming visits of their leaders to Washington .
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would fly to Washington two days before Sharon while Jordanian King Abdullah II was due on April21 .
----
U.S.: Request to recognize settlement blocs is ill-timed
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent,
Haaretz Service
28/03/2004
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=409506&contrassID=1&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
Sources in the United States administration said they would find it difficult to adhere to Israeli requests that Washington recognize several West Bank settlement blocs in exchange for Israel's execution of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, Israel Radio reported Sunday.
Israel informed the U.S. that it is prepared to withdraw from the entire Gaza Strip and six settlements in the West Bank, and is seeking American recognition of the settlement blocs of Ariel, Gush Etzion, Ma'aleh Adumim and areas around Jerusalem.
The sources were quoted as saying the Israeli proposal was ill-timed in light of President George W. Bush's efforts to calm the Arab world in the aftermath of Israeli's targeted assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin last week.
However, the sources added that the American president had reason to support Sharon's plan, as it could rekindle Middle East peace efforts and would counter claims of political rivals regarding the administration's lack of effort in advancing Middle East peace.
Meanwhile, Israel Defense Forces troops and police officers dismantled a structure from a West Bank outpost near Kiryat Arba before dawn Sunday and arrested seven minors who attacked the officers, Army Radio reported Sunday.
The minors refused to evacuate the Heroes outpost, according to the report.
Sharon to meet Bush on April 14
Sharon will meet with Bush in Washington on April 14. Their discussion will center on the prime minister's disengagement plan and support to be given to it via a declaration to be issued by Bush.
The Sharon-Bush meeting will be held at the presidential retreat at Camp David, or at some other site outside of Washington, to emphasize its importance.
The official announcement of the April 14 meeting was released at the end of talks last week between Israeli delegates Dov Weisglass and Giora Eiland and U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
The Israeli delegation returned here on Friday; senior Israeli officials said "great progress" was made during their talks in the U.S.
Sharon, these sources emphasized, is pleased with agreements reached in the talks with Rice and her assistants. In Sharon's opinion, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - who has publicized a list of demands that are to be met prior to his giving support for the separation plan - will also be satisfied by these newly reached understandings with the Bush administration.
Three U.S. delegates - the State Department's Richard Burns and National Security Council representatives Steven Hadley and Elliot Abrams - are to arrive in Jerusalem on Wednesday to finalize arrangements for Sharon's trip to the U.S. The trio will also visit Egypt and Jordan to prepare upcoming visits of leaders of these countries in the U.S.
The focus of last week's discussions in the U.S. with the Israeli delegation was details of what Israel is to receive in exchange for its withdrawal from some areas and the dismantling of settlements under the separation plan.
Weisglass and Eiland presented Rice with two scenarios, either a withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip, or a pullout from the Gaza Strip together with the evacuation of four settlements in the northern part of the West Bank. The four settlements are Ganim, Kadim, Sa-Nur and Homesh.
According to the Israeli sources, members of the delegation decided at the last moment not to outline a third scenario (proposed by Eiland), which would have referred to the evacuation of six West Bank settlements, including also Mevo Dotan and Hermesh.
A decision about an Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi road on the Gaza-Egypt border is to be reached after negotiations with Egypt, the Israeli officials told their American hosts. The decision will also be influenced by IDF assessments about security circumstances in this Rafah area, the Israelis said.
Sharon opposes an Egyptian proposal to revise the peace agreement between the two states so that Egyptian troops can be deployed along the Philadelphi road.
Talks on the future of the Rafah region have been deferred due to Egypt's criticism of last week's assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Israel's target for the completion of the separation plan is June-July 2005, Eiland told the U.S. officials. The process of winning cabinet and Knesset approval for the withdrawal will continue until the end of 2004, he added.
Israel has asked the U.S. for a number of guarantees and compensations in exchange for its withdrawal. These include:
- A declaration affirming that the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip ends the occupation there that began in 1967. The Bush administration has hesitated to meet this condition in circumstances where Israel retains control of the Philadelphi road. The U.S. officials believe Sharon wants such a declaration to serve as a precedent recognizing Israel's right to control border crossing areas adjacent to a Palestinian state.
- Recognition of Israel's future annexation of Ariel, Gush Etzion, Ma'aleh Adumim and areas around Jerusalem: all these regions were included in Clinton's December 2000 peace plan. Though it is not certain that the U.S. will officially recognize Israel's right to annex these areas, the Bush administration could agree to Israeli construction in these settlement blocs.
- Recognition of Israel's right to pursue terror suspects within the Gaza Strip even after a withdrawal from it, should terror attacks continue. The U.S. administration is inclined to agree to this term.
- Conferral of exemption to Israel from any other diplomatic peace plan until a Palestinian Authority leadership emerges with a commitment to crack down on terror. The U.S. is not inclined to agree to such a wide-ranging "exemption" but it is likely to ease its demand that implementation of the road map lead quickly to a final status agreement.
- Items demanded by Netanyahu, including an American declaration denying a right of Palestinian refugee return to Israel, and the completion of the separation fence around settlement blocs.
----
Israel weighs indictment of Sharon
March 28, 2004
By Corinne Heller
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040328-125057-7054r.htm
JERUSALEM - Israel's chief prosecutor has drafted an indictment against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a long-running corruption scandal that could drive him from office, Israel's Channel 2 television said yesterday.
The report said State Attorney Edna Arbel plans to submit the charge sheet within days to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, who will make the final decision on whether to put the 76-year-old leader on trial.
Channel 2 said it could take Mr. Mazuz months to decide whether to accept Mrs. Arbel's recommendations, adding to a cloud of political uncertainty that has enveloped Mr. Sharon.
A spokesman for the Justice Ministry, which represents both the state attorney and the attorney general, declined to comment on the report. Mr. Sharon's office also had no comment.
Mr. Sharon's attorney, Avigdor Klagsbald, was quoted by Israel's Yediot Ahronot newspaper on its Web site as saying the chief prosecutor's draft was a "media-manipulation attempt."
"The state is conducting a system of unfair leaks against the prime minister in an attempt to put pressure on public opinion and the opinion of the attorney general, who is the sole authority to decide whether to submit an indictment," the paper quoted him as saying.
Israel Radio quoted sources in the prime minister's office as saying Mr. Sharon would only comment on the case when Mr. Mazuz finally decided about the indictment.
Mrs. Arbel's draft concluded there were sufficient grounds to charge Mr. Sharon with bribery in connection with a real estate deal involving his son, Gilad, and land developer David Appel, a stalwart of the prime minister's Likud Party, the report said.
The latest development catches Mr. Sharon during a stormy time while he tries to win support from the United States and from his own Cabinet for his plan to evacuate Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and some in the West Bank.
There was no immediate indication whether the reported draft indictment would delay Mr. Sharon's planned trip to Washington on April 14 to meet with President Bush regarding his disengagement plan.
Palestinians fear an Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip would mask an attempt by Mr. Sharon to annex settlements in the West Bank, denying them the viable state they seek.
Prosecutors say Mr. Appel hired Gilad Sharon in 1999 and paid him large sums to persuade his father, then foreign minister, to promote real estate deals, including a Greek island resort that was never built.
Mr. Sharon has in the past denied any wrongdoing. Mr. Appel, who was charged in January with trying to bribe Mr. Sharon in the 1990s, also denies the charges against him. Mr. Appel's indictment did not cite any evidence that Mr. Sharon knowingly accepted money to grant political favors.
Some Cabinet ministers from the centrist Shinui party, Mr. Sharon's largest coalition partner, have called on the prime minister to suspend himself if the attorney general decides to indict him, Israeli media reported after the Channel 2 report.
Mr. Sharon has said he has no intention of resigning over the charges. In 1993, Israel's high court ordered Aryeh Deri, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, to resign from the Cabinet over corruption charges. He was sent to prison in 1999.
Legal experts are divided over whether, under law, Mr. Sharon would be forced to resign if indicted.
"Sharon must suspend himself - it is inconceivable for a prime minister to have an indictment against him," said Menachem Klein, a political analyst at Israel's Bar Ilan University.
Mr. Sharon has faced a public backlash over the past months over charges of corruption and misconduct regarding multiple scandals. Israeli police are conducting investigations of the cases and Mr. Sharon denies involvement in all of them.
In one case, Mr. Sharon's sons, Gilad and Omri, are charged with using a $1.5 million loan from a South African businessman as collateral to repay purported illicit contributions to Mr. Sharon's campaign. Foreign funding of political campaigns is illegal in Israel.
The political uncertainty for Mr. Sharon also comes when Israel is on elevated alert for Palestinian revenge attacks after last week's assassination of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin.
In Beirut yesterday, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah joined a new Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, in mourning and offered the help of the Lebanese militant group in revenge operations.
"Consider us in Hezbollah, from the secretary-general and leadership down to our fighters and women, members of Hamas, and soldiers under your command," Sheik Nasrallah said.
In the Balata refugee camp outside the West Bank town of Nablus, a 6-year-old boy was shot dead when a Palestinian gunman opened fire at an Israeli military jeep during a raid, the Israeli army said.
Television footage taken of the incident by foreign television networks showed a gunshot ricocheting off an armored Israeli jeep toward an upper floor of an adjacent building.
Palestinian residents said the dead boy, Khalil Walwil, was killed either when soldiers on a nearby hill opened fire at the building while he stood by a window or when troops shot at Palestinians throwing stones.
Israeli soldiers raided the camp to search for militants planning suicide bombings, but left empty-handed.
----
Prosecutor To Seek Indictment Of Sharon
Bribery Scandal Erodes Israeli Leader's Support
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29947-2004Mar27.html
JERUSALEM, March 27 -- Israel's chief prosecutor will recommend Sunday that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon be indicted on charges of accepting bribes in connection with real estate deals, an Israeli television station reported Saturday night.
Justice Ministry spokesman Jacob Galanti said, "I can't affirm or deny" the Channel 2 report. An official in Sharon's office, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, said, "My office has no comment."
Sharon has denied wrongdoing in connection with several cases of alleged financial corruption that have been under investigation for months. The widening scandal has severely eroded the prime minister's public support and prompted calls for his resignation, which were revived almost immediately after State Attorney Edna Arbel reportedly decided to draft an indictment against him.
"Sharon must salvage whatever is left to the dignity of Israel's democracy and resign," Ran Cohen, a member of parliament from the dovish Meretz party, told Israeli news media.
But Zeev Boim, a lawmaker from Sharon's Likud Party, said such responses were premature and added, "This is only a recommendation."
Arbel's recommendation would be the first step in the lengthy legal process for bringing a prime minister to court on criminal charges. If the newly appointed attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, accepts the recommendation, Sharon and his attorneys are entitled to a hearing before Mazuz, a government legal expert said on the condition that he not be named.
To take the indictment to court, the attorney general must persuade parliament to approve the removal of the prime minister's constitutional immunity from prosecution, the expert said.
Legal experts are divided over whether the indictment alone would require Sharon to resign. But political leaders and analysts said political and public debate would likely determine Sharon's political fate, regardless of legal technicalities.
"This adds another layer of pressure on the prime minister," said Asher Arian, a senior fellow with the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem. "But it's not a done deal."
The state attorney's recommendation that Sharon be indicted reportedly will be submitted Sunday and will allege that he accepted bribes from David Appel, a prominent businessman and Likud activist, in return for agreeing to help Appel win lucrative real estate deals. The deals included a project on a Greek island and the bidding on government-controlled land in Israel.
In January, a Tel Aviv court charged Appel in connection with the case. The indictment said he "gave Ariel Sharon a bribe in recognition of activities connected to fulfillment of his public positions." It alleged Appel paid about $100,000 to Sharon's son, Gilad, to serve as a marketing adviser for the Greek island project and transferred about $580,000 to the Sharon family ranch in the Negev Desert. The indictment said the actions took place in 1999, when Sharon was foreign minister.
At the time of that indictment, Arbel, the state prosecutor, was quoted in the Israeli news media saying Sharon "could and should" be indicted.
Israeli police also have questioned Sharon regarding allegations that his two sons, Gilad and Omri, took a $1.5 million loan from a South African businessman as collateral to repay illegal contributions to Sharon's campaign to lead the Likud Party before he was elected prime minister. Israeli TV stations this year aired portions of a videotape that showed Omri Sharon discussing ways to funnel money to his father's campaign.
This month, the daily newspaper Maariv reported that Sharon had business dealings in the 1970s with the father-in-law of Elhanan Tannenbaum, an Israeli businessman who was freed by the Lebanese Muslim group Hezbollah in January in a prisoner exchange. The newspaper alleged that those business ties influenced Sharon to agree to the exchange.
Sharon's popularity has plummeted in recent months, driven not only by the allegations but by more than three years of violent conflict with the Palestinians. Several political factions have expressed opposition to his recent proposals for withdrawing Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip.
In the past three months, he has survived 23 no-confidence votes in parliament, once by a single vote. In a recent public opinion poll by Maariv, Sharon's popularity stood at 33 percent. Maariv recently called for Sharon's resignation over corruption allegations, as have several prominent political leaders.
If Sharon resigned, the two men considered to be the leading candidates to succeed him as head of Likud -- and potentially as prime minister -- are Binyamin Netanyahu, the finance minister, and Silvan Shalom, the foreign minister. Both have been noncommittal about whether they would pursue Sharon's suggestions for withdrawal from Gaza.
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Israeli Official Recommends an Indictment of Sharon
March 28, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/middleeast/28CND-MIDE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, March 28 - Israel's state prosecutor officially recommended today that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should be indicted on charges of taking bribes from a real estate developer, Israeli news media reported.
Her recommendation went to Israel's attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, who will make the final decision whether or not to indict in the next several weeks.
The Justice ministry confirmed that the prosecutor, Edna Arbel, had made a recommendation, but declined to discuss its substance.
So far, Mr. Sharon has not been charged with any wrongdoing; his office declined to comment on the reports.
The case involves a real estate developer who was indicted in January on charges of trying to bribe Mr. Sharon with about $700,000, most of it paid to Gilad Sharon, his son.
The prosecutor's recommendation came after a turbulent week for Mr. Sharon and Israel, which has undergone more than three years of conflict with the Palestinians. On Monday, after a decision by the government, Israeli forces killed the spiritual leader of the militant group Hamas with a missile strike. Israelis are now braced for retaliation threatened by Hamas, while the army keeps up an offensive against the group.
The recommendation of an indictment would significantly add to the political burden on Mr. Sharon as he attempts his boldest yet most delicate mission as prime minister: rallying support in Israel and the Bush administration for his plan unilaterally to withdraw soldiers and settlers from most or all of the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank.
Channel Two television reported on Saturday that Edna Arbel, the state prosecutor, would recommend that Mr. Sharon be indicted on charges of accepting bribes from the developer, David Appel, in what is known as the Greek island affair.
In issuing its indictment of Mr. Appel in January, the court said he had tried to secure Mr. Sharon's help in real estate deals, including a resort and casino on a Greek island, starting in the late 1990's, when Mr. Sharon was foreign minister in a previous government.
Advisers to Mr. Sharon have said they expected Ms. Arbel to recommend an indictment. But they have also said that at a particularly delicate time, with the fate of a sitting government probably at stake, Mr. Mazuz was likely to hold any such recommendation to a very high standard of proof and likely conviction.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior politician from Mr. Sharon's rivalrous Likud faction called a recommendation to indict "quite serious in itself." He said a recommendation would force Mr. Mazuz to present "very good reasons why not to" indict. He said it could put pressure on Mr. Sharon to step aside in advance of an indictment to preserve the stature of his office.
The Sharon government appointed Mr. Mazuz, who has a reputation as independent-minded, to be attorney general only in January. He was selected from a list of three proposed by an independent commission.
Mr. Sharon's predecessors as prime minister, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, served under threat of indictments that never materialized. Mr. Sharon has said he will serve "at least until 2007," when elections are scheduled.
Mr. Mazuz would be likely to take at least a month, and probably longer, to decide whether to indict, the justice official said.
If Mr. Mazuz decides to proceed with an indictment, Mr. Sharon would then have the chance to demand a hearing to argue against that step. Should Mr. Mazuz still decide to move forward, he would begin a legal process to strip Mr. Sharon of his immunity to prosecution as a member of Parliament. "It's a long, long process," the official said.
Legal experts are divided about whether an indictment would automatically compel a sitting prime minister to resign. But if he is indicted, Mr. Sharon, 76, will come under tremendous political pressure to step down immediately.
He continues to dominate Israel's politics, but his popular support has faded as the economy languished in recent months and the conflict with the Palestinians ground on.
Further, he has outraged the far-right parties in his governing coalition with his announced intention to withdraw without a peace agreement from some of the territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. Mr. Sharon says that Israel needs to draw more secure boundaries, and that if it does not act now, it risks an eventual, internationally imposed solution to the conflict that will deprive it of more territory.
Members of Likud have also opposed the plan, and some are already jostling to replace Mr. Sharon.
In general, Likud leaders have remained publicly silent about the possibility of an indictment. But Limor Livnat, the minister of education and a rising Likud official, said in January that Mr. Sharon would have to step aside if indicted.
The third element of Mr. Sharon's governing coalition, the centrist Shinui Party, portrays itself as a proponent of clean government. Joseph Paritzky, the minister of infrastructure and a Shinui member, told the Web site of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot on Saturday that Mr. Sharon would have to resign if indicted, saying Shinui would otherwise leave the coalition.
Yet Mr. Sharon has a long history of defying apparent political doom, and the limits of governing Israel under indictment are untested.
In separate cases involved a cabinet minister and a deputy minister, Israel's high court has ruled that an indictment on charges reflecting moral lapses forced immediate resignation.
But some legal experts say the court might treat a prime minister as being in a unique category, since his resignation would force a change of government. Other legal experts regard the existing precedents as binding.
Mr. Sharon's advisers have already begun laying the groundwork for a possible political defense, saying the prime minister, preoccupied with matters of state, is very trusting of those around him.
The indictment of Mr. Appel charged that he had told Mr. Sharon that Gilad would make a lot of money, but it did not lay out evidence that Mr. Sharon had knowingly taken a bribe. Legal experts say it would be possible to prosecute one man for giving bribes, without prosecuting the target of the bribe, if he was believed to be unaware of the intent.
For proposed payments of $3 million, Mr. Appel hired Gilad to promote the development of a resort and casino on a Greek island, though, the indictment said, he "did not have the relevant professional skills."
After hiring Gilad, Mr. Appel made monthly payments to an account of the Sharon ranch, which is in Gilad's name, the indictment said. The indictment of Mr. Appel listed 15 separate payments, some in dollars and some in shekels, totaling about $700,000. The resort was never built.
--------
Hamas Leader Says God Has Declared War on U.S.
March 28, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/middleeast/28CND-HAMA.html
JERUSALEM, March 28 - The new Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, called President Bush the enemy of Muslims and said today that God had declared war on the United States.
Hamas has long said its battle is with Israel, and has directed its attacks, and most of its heated rhetoric, against the Jewish state. But since Israel's killing last week of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Islamic movement has issued bitter denunciations of the United States, though it has stopped short of saying it will strike at American targets.
"We knew that Bush is the enemy of God, the enemy of Islam and Muslims," Dr. Rantisi told several thousand Hamas supporters attending a rally at the Islamic University in Gaza City. "America declared war against God. Sharon declared war against God, and God declared war against America, Bush and Sharon."
Hamas has said that the United States must have given its blessing to the Israeli attack on Sheik Yassin. However, the United States has said it had no advance warning.
Dr. Rantisi criticized the United States veto on Thursday of a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have condemned Israel's killing of Sheik Yassin in a helicopter missile strike on March 22.
Dr. Rantisi has become the Hamas leader in the Palestinian territories, though Khaled Mashaal, who is based in Syria, heads the group's political bureau, its top decision-making body.
Hamas and other Palestinian factions have pledged major retaliatory strikes. Israel has foiled several attempted attacks in the past week. No Israelis have been killed, but a number of Palestinians have lost their lives in almost daily clashes.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli troops arrested today a 16-year-old, Taher Hariwi, who was suspected of planning to carrying out a suicide bombing, the military said.
In a highly publicized incident on Wednesday, Israeli troops confronted a 16-year-old Palestinian who was wearing a suicide bomber belt at a checkpoint on the edge of Nablus. The youth was arrested and the bomb was detonated safely.
Also today, the military shot to death a wanted Palestinian during an arrest raid in a village near the West Bank town of Hebron, the military said.
-------- latin america
Long After Guerrilla War, Survivors Demand Justice From Brazil's Government
March 28, 2004
By LARRY ROHTER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/americas/28BRAZ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
XAMBIOÁ, Brazil - At the cemetery here, a half dozen bodies once secretly buried have been unearthed. More skeletons have been recovered from an Indian reservation just to the north. Somewhere out in the jungle lie the remains of 50 or so others, whose relatives are now belatedly demanding justice.
The dead were victims of a guerrilla war against Communist insurgents fought largely in secret in this remote southeast corner of the Amazon from 1970 to 1974, the harshest years of Brazil's military rule.
When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office more than a year ago as the country's first president from the left-wing Workers' Party, many presumed that he would be sympathetic to helping relatives of the dead locate the bodies of loved ones and bring those responsible for their torture and killing to justice.
In neighboring Argentina and Chile, aggressive efforts are under way to address much more widespread abuses under similar dictatorships. But Mr. da Silva's government, like other Brazilian governments for 30 years, has so far resisted a full accounting of the episode, one of the darkest and most divisive in this nation's past, for fear of opening old wounds.
"This is not going to be done in a manner that creates a big national political crisis," Nilmário Miranda, the government's human rights secretary, said in response to growing accusations of betrayal and moral cowardice. "It has to be negotiated."
All told, the Brazilian Armed Forces deployed more than 10,000 soldiers in this rugged region where the Araguaia and Tocantins rivers converge. What became known as the Araguaia guerrilla war ended only after more than 60 combatants from the Communist Party of Brazil, hoping to carve out a Maoist "liberated zone" in the Amazon, were hunted down and executed. Some were beheaded, and many were killed after surrendering to troops and being tortured.
As many as a score of local peasants, caught in the cross-fire and under pressure from both sides to collaborate, are also believed to have been killed, according to residents and human rights groups. Hundreds more were displaced.
To this day, those villagers remain uncompensated and barred from returning to their small farms, which the military summarily expropriated or bombed with napalm three decades ago.
That the military carried out a deliberate policy of exterminating the rebels, thereby sweeping up many local peasants as well, is supported in a new best-selling book, "The Dictatorship Defeated," which has renewed interest in the conflict.
The author, Elio Gaspari, gained access to official audiotapes recorded by Gen. Ernesto Geisel, Brazil's president from 1974 to 1979, in which top military leaders spoke uninhibitedly about their decision not to capture the guerrillas and put them on trial, but to eliminate them.
"This business of killing people is a barbarity, but I think it has to be done," General Geisel said during one discussion early in 1974 with his soon-to-be minister of the army. "We can't let go of this war."
Before leaving office, the general arranged an amnesty that applied to the leftist guerrillas and exiles and also the military and police officers who had tortured or killed them.
But in July, a federal judge ordered the military to supply relatives with information on how the guerrillas and peasants had died and where they were buried. The Workers' Party government immediately sought to block enforcement of the decree, surprising human rights advocates.
The decision was interpreted here as an effort to cement relations with a military establishment that traditionally viewed the Workers' Party as radicals, and it generated deep anguish within the party itself. Some crucial party leaders saw it as a betrayal of principles. A few have gone public with their discontent.
"This is an open wound between us," Eduardo Greenhalgh, a member of Congress who was Mr. da Silva's lawyer when the president was a labor leader, said in a speech to the national bar association late last year. "I felt a deep pain when the president, who is my friend, comrade and former client, decided, for reasons of state that I fail to comprehend, to appeal a ruling I had spent 21 years of my life trying to win."
To hold off its critics, the government has set up a commission to investigate how the guerrillas died and where their bodies were buried. But that board excludes family members and other nongovernment representatives and has no mandate to punish those responsible for the killings. It has already missed two deadlines to supply information to relatives.
"The creation of this commission serves to protect those who apprehended, killed and disappeared opponents of the dictatorship," Elizabeth Silveira, president of the human rights group Torture Never Again, said in testimony to a congressional committee in the capital, Brasília, last year.
"The government," she added, "is strengthening impunity in our country and is swimming against the tide of history."
One of the leading figures in the negotiations, largely conducted behind closed doors, between the Workers' Party and the armed forces is José Genoino, the party president, himself a survivor of the war.
"We defend the right of the families to a concrete explanation of where these bodies are and if it is not possible to locate them, what happened to them," he said in an interview. "But what the Workers' Party government will not do is create a political tribunal to judge the behavior of the armed forces during the military dictatorship."
But to human rights advocates and some Workers' Party members, such a response raises another important issue, that of just compensation to residents of the region who also got caught up in the military's scorched-earth policy.
"As unjust as what happened to the guerrillas was, they made a conscious decision to fight and knew what they were doing and what could happen to them," said Miriam Alves, a Workers' Party staff member of the human rights commission of the lower house of the Brazilian Congress.
"But the local population had no choice in the matter, and it was massacred," she added. "The state must redress this situation."
The family of Eduardo Rodrigues dos Santos is among those that suffered the most. It was the family's misfortune to be the neighbor of a group of settlers, later identified as guerrillas, who had arrived from the south, befriended the peasants and offered them medicine and other scarce services.
During one military campaign, Mr. Rodrigues dos Santos recalled, the family was moved to an island in the middle of the Araguaia River. There they watched as Brazilian Air Force planes bombed and strafed their settlement, destroying their home and those of other families.
One day in 1972, two of his sons, Lauro and Sabino, found a strange object on the ground, which they could not know was a grenade. It exploded, blowing off Sabino's head, destroying most of Lauro's left arm and tearing through his torso.
"It was Aug. 16, and we were on our lunch break," recalled Lauro, now 52, the owner of a general store. "I spent four months in the hospital, and the army officers who came to visit me told me it was their grenade and that I'd be taken care of for the rest of my life, with scholarships and disability payments. But I've never received anything."
Mr. Rodrigues dos Santos, now 78, was himself pressed into service as a guide for the army along with his friend Otacilio Alves de Miranda, a local boatman.
"We felt we couldn't say no," Mr. Rodrigues dos Santos explained. Both men say there were tortured in an attempt to pry information from them about the guerrillas.
"I took a real beating when they flew me down there to Brasília for questioning," Mr. Miranda said in an interview at his home in Marabá, near here. "Hour after hour, they would shock my head with electricity and beat me with bludgeons, screaming and yelling at me all the while."
Such brutality was routine, other former guides maintain. Even today, Antônio Alves de Souza said in an interview in Xambioá, a garrison town where the Brazilian Armed Forces had a base, he and his friends bear scars and still suffer nightmares.
"After torturing me with electricity and plunging my head into a water tank until I could no longer breathe, they threw me into a pit of garbage that was filled with snakes and scorpions and held me there for more than a week," he recalled. "When they finally pulled me out for questioning, they removed the head of a man from a burlap bag and asked if I knew him."
After being released, Mr. Miranda, then 33, suffered a stroke. He was hospitalized, and doctors removed a brain tumor that he and his wife, Felicidade, believe resulted from his torture. But when they went to the military seeking compensation, they were turned away.
"For those who died, it is all over, their tribulations have ended," Mrs. Miranda said. "But those who survived are still suffering today from the traumatic consequences of the horrors they were forced to endure."
-------- nato
NATO expands eastward, but pivots away from confrontation with Russia
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Mar 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040328070956.jfqr06cq.html
NATO's expansion eastward this week marks the latest step in a decade-long pivot by the Atlantic alliance away from confrontation with Russia toward new dangers in the Middle East.
Despite some threats and grumbling from Moscow, the admission of seven new members -- all former Soviet republics or East bloc states -- has been carried off with little of the impassioned debate that accompanied the first round of NATO enlargement in 1999.
"I think it's symbolically quite significant in that it represents the next step to the enlargement that brought Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in a few years ago and it further consolidates the eastward spread of stability and democracy in Europe," said Charles Kupchan, an expert on European security at the Council on Foreign Relations here.
"It's strategic significance is relatively muted in that the main show in town is now about terrorism, and it's in the Middle East; it's not in Europe anymore," he said.
The new members are Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Slovakia.
The Baltic states are the first former Soviet republics to join the alliance, a bitter pill for Moscow, which has protested NATO plans to fly air defense patrols from Lithuania and warned it might respond with a nuclear buildup.
But softening Russian antagonism is an epochal transformation now underway within NATO that is replacing Cold War defenses aimed at Moscow with light, rapidly deployable forces designed to respond to crises outside Europe, notably in the Middle East and Central Asia.
NATO "is in the process of one of its most fundamental changes in its history," General Jim Jones, the supreme allied commander, told defense reporters Friday.
"It will be a different organization. It will have a different membership. The Eastern European influence will change the voting demographics. It will bring different views," he said.
"It is an organization that as a result of the Prague Summit is going global instead of regional," he said.
The centerpiece is a new NATO Response Force designed for rapid deployments. It fuses air, land, sea and special forces components into a ready unit capable of moving in.
The alliance also has taken command of an international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, a reflection of the dramatic recasting of the alliance's roles and mission from a simple territorial defense of Europe.
Looking to its allies to ease the burden on its own overstretched forces, the United States has said it would like NATO to assume command of a division in Iraq. "It's very much a topic but there is no mission," Jones said.
Beyond NATO, the United States is devising plans to dismantle many of the huge bases from which its forces defended Europe for more than 50 years against a Soviet invasion.
In their place, it is planning a network of a network of smaller bases flung across the globe, many of them lightly manned and used only for training or in the event of a crisis.
Accelerating the changes were the September 11 attacks on the United States and the new threats of Islamic extremism.
"The United States has committed itself to recognizing that the greater Middle East for the forseable future is going to be of primary interest," said Jones.
The September 11 attacks also brought the United States and Russia closer in ways that has helped ease the sting of NATO's expansion.
"It now makes sense to talk about a strategic partnership, particularly because the US has arrived in Russia's backyard, and the Russians have generally been cooperating with the US on the anti-terror front.
"After September 11, the notion of partnership of strategic partnership became concrete and meaningful because the US needed access to air bases in Russia's southern rim so that it could get to Afghanistan," said Kupchan.
Kupchan also believes NATO enlargement will open more opportunities for engagement with Russia because the former Soviet bloc countries will feel more relaxed in their dealing with Moscow once they are under NATO's wing.
-------- pakistan / india
In Pakistan, the Riddle of a Big Fish That Got Away
March 28, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/weekinreview/28rohd.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - By the end of last week, the news from Pakistan's remote tribal areas seemed the exact opposite of what it had been just seven days earlier. Again, the pivotal question centered on Pakistan's army: Just how hard was it really trying to capture and kill terrorists? On March 18, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, gave a television interview in which he described a pitched battle between Pakistani soldiers and 400 to 500 militants and set off expectations that Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been surrounded.
Two days later, military officials were playing down talk of Mr. Zawahiri's encirclement as "conjecture." And by the end of this week, a fresh audiotape message purportedly from Dr. Zawahiri emerged - taunting the government with a defiant call for General Musharraf's overthrow.
What exactly had happened in the isolated corner of Pakistan where the battle had raged was a riddle.
Had Dr. Zawahiri and other militants humbled the mighty Pakistani army, killing at least 30 Pakistani soldiers and capturing another 20 before escaping? Or had the entire battle been blown out of proportion by Pakistani officials, including General Musharraf, in a week when they were eager to impress a visiting American dignitary, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell?
Both versions of the events carry a grain of truth, according to Pakistani analysts of military affairs. And whatever occurred, they said, the episode had troubling implications for the future of Pakistani military operations in the country's tribal areas.
The fierceness of the fight suggested that hundreds of foreign militants, perhaps including Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, may have turned the South Waziristan tribal agency into their new base for operations. At the same time, Pakistan's army appeared to have bungled a critical operation there or to have wavered in the face of determined resistance.
The Pakistani operation began on March 18, the final day of a two-day visit to Islamabad by Mr. Powell, who extended to Pakistan the status of a major non-NATO ally of the United States.
"I don't think it went well," said Ayesah Siddiqa, an expert on the Pakistani military who reports for the Jane's publications on military and security subjects. "It's not a simple operation in the tribal areas."
Pakistani officials said 300 members of a tribal area paramilitary force, the Frontier Corps, surrounded the house of a local tribesman said to be sheltering foreign fighters in the village of Kaloosha. Three vehicles unexpectedly roared out under fire, and one escaped.
Several hours later the Pakistani forces found themselves under fire from heavy machine guns, mortars and rockets behind them, and in the battle that followed 15 Frontier Corps members were killed and another 10 were taken prisoner, along with two low-level government officials. In the end, 400 regular army troops were sent in. That night, General Musharraf and other Pakistani officials suggested that those inside the compound might have been fighting to defend a "high value target." Speculation quickly focused on Dr. Zawahiri, who Pakistani officials said had been in the area.
Military officials announced that the Pakistani army had formed a double cordon around the 400 to 500 militants. The following day, they vowed that no one would escape.
But more setbacks followed. Fire from a Pakistani helicopter killed at least a dozen civilians. Guerrillas attacked two army resupply convoys miles away, killing another 20 soldiers and capturing eight. Last Monday, the Pakistani army announced the discovery of a network of tunnels in the compound where the fighting originated. Noting a sharp drop in the resistance they were facing, officials said the fighters may have used the tunnels to escape.
Military officials offered no explanation for how the fighters had been able to spend weeks, if not months, building the tunnels on the compound. The battle, in fact, occurred in a cluster of villages 10 miles from a major Pakistani army base, not in a remote area. Pakistani officials said the house had been raided in December, but no militants or tunnels were found.
Last Thursday, the commander of the operation announced that 140 suspected militants had been arrested, and he declared the operation nearly over.
The next day, the tape attributed to Dr. Zawahiri emerged. An Afghan official with ties to South Waziristan said Dr. Zawahiri was never involved in the fighting and has been hiding in a mountain range that spans South Waziristan and the adjoining tribal area, North Waziristan. He said Mr. bin Laden was nearby, also hiding in Pakistan.
As the clash came to a quiet end, some Pakistani commentators defended the army's performance. Others mocked it.
"The hype, alas, did not last," wrote Ayaz Amir, a columnist for the English-language newspaper Daily Dawn. "This is a first-rate fiasco, whichever way you look at it."
Ms. Siddiqa said she still did not know what had happened in South Waziristan. She said she did not have an accurate sense from the army how many militants were surrounded, who they were and why the Zawahiri claim was made.
Hazan Askari Rizvi, a scholar who studies the Pakistani military, said the army only started to confront the militants four months ago, after two attempts by Islamists to assassinate General Musharraf in December. The crackdown accelerated after the United States accepted General Musharraf's pardon of the country's leading scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, in a scandal over the proliferation of Pakistan's nuclear technology. The United States also did not challenge General Musharraf when he said that he and all senior officials in Pakistan's powerful military and intelligence establishment had been completely unaware of Dr. Khan's proliferation activities.
Mr. Rizvi said that for the two years before the assassination attempts, the Pakistani army, while publicly pledging total support for the American war on terrorism, had turned a blind eye to some militants in the tribal areas. Those militants, he said, were aiding a Pakistan-backed insurgency in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. "The Musharraf government did not want to alienate these groups," he said.
One American intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, estimated that the majority of the members of the Pakistani army and intelligence services were sympathetic to the militants and that many were helping them. He said American and British special operations were being conducted in the tribal areas to find Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahiri, a statement Pakistani officials denied.
Other Pakistani analysts have another theory: that while General Musharraf and senior military leaders firmly back the crackdown, some lower level members of the army, Frontier Corps and intelligence services may be continuing to tip off the militants. Opposition politicians, indeed, have complained that General Musharraf has been kowtowing to the United States - which, just last week, lifted sanctions imposed on Pakistan in 1999, when General Musharraf took power in a coup.
Mr. Rizvi, the military analyst, was more charitable. He predicted that things would go better for the Pakistani army in subsequent operations. Those efforts, he said, would be serious.
"The next time," he said. "I think they will be using massive force."
-------- spies / spy agencies
Israeli Report Faults Intelligence on Iraq
March 28, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/middleeast/28CND-ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, March 28 - A parliamentary subcommittee delivered today a rare criticism of Israel's intelligence services, saying the agencies overestimated Iraq's weapons programs prior to last year's war because they could not obtain "hard facts."
The subcommittee on Israel's intelligence agencies cited the same kinds of apparently inaccurate assessments on weapons of mass destruction that have also prompted formal inquiries in the United States and Britain.
The lawmakers said they found no evidence that Israel's intelligence services intentionally misled the country's political leaders. They also noted that Israeli assessments had not played any significant role in the decision by the United States and Britain to go to war in Iraq.
"The most serious mistake was that we were not able to form a solid system for assessing Iraq's capabilities," said Yuval Steinitz, the chairman of the subcommittee and a leading member of the rightist Likud Party, which is headed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Despite Israel's reputation for gathering intelligence, particularly in the Middle East, Mr. Steinitz acknowledged that the United States and Britain were better positioned to evaluate Iraq.
With powerful satellites, the ability to send planes over Iraqi territory at will, and with troops on Iraq's border before the war, the United States and Britain had substantial intelligence advantages, Mr. Steinitz said.
The subcommittee found that Israel's intelligence has been strong in monitoring Iran's nuclear program, but failed to detect Libya's nuclear efforts, which Libya says it has now abandoned.
"For Israel, it is intolerable that an Arab country like Libya can develop a nuclear program without the intelligence services providing current, up-to-date information," Mr. Steinitz said.
Though the report did not harshly criticize specific individuals or agencies, it was clear the findings were directed primarily at the Mossad, the external intelligence service, and the military's intelligence wing.
Israel was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, regarded as one of the country's most serious threats.
In Israel, the faulty intelligence estimates contributed to government decisions to spend tens of millions of dollars to supply gas masks to the entire population and to inoculate 17,000 emergency workers with the smallpox vaccine.
In the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles with conventional warheads at Israel, causing damage but relatively few serious casualties. Israel feared a similar assault last year, with the possibility of chemical or biological weapons packed in the warheads.
The committee's report did not include classified findings that are being presented to the government. But the subcommittee cited several specific flaws in Israeli intelligence.
After the first Gulf War, Western governments stated that Iraq still possessed an estimated 25 Scud missiles. As the war approached last year, Israeli intelligence estimated that Iraq had 50 missiles, and then raised the figure to 100, Mr. Steinitz said at a news conference.
The subcommittee i found "no information to support this escalation," he said.
Information sharing among allies sometimes produces an information loop in which speculation just keeps getting passed on, he said. "Israel gave information to foreign intelligence services, which they used for their own purposes. Then it comes back around to Israel without any substantiation from the field," Mr. Steinitz added.
A leftist lawmaker, Yossi Sarid, a sharp critic of Mr. Sharon's government, has alleged that Israel knew Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but did not tell the United States because Israel wanted the war to proceed.
Mr. Steinitz rejected that claim, saying that any mistakes "were made in good faith."
However, one opposition member of the subcommittee, Haim Ramon, issued a dissenting opinion and attacked both Israel's intelligence gathering, and the government's handling of it.
"Just as British and U.S. intelligence failed, Israeli intelligence failed," Mr. Ramon said. "Unfortunately, I think we exaggerated the threat."
Mr. Sharon's government should have asked hard questions about the intelligence findings before spending large sums of money on defensive measures, said Mr. Ramon, of the left-leaning Labor Party.
"For the last three years, I asked the intelligence people, `How do you know - not just estimate - that Iraq has these missiles?' There was no answer," he said.
Mr. Ramon said the money spent to guard against the Iraqi threat could have saved lives if it had been spent fighting Palestinian terrorism or promoting traffic safety.
While Israel's prewar assessment of Iraq appeared to be generally in line with the United States, Mr. Steinitz cited at least one difference.
The United States claimed Mr. Hussein was attempting to rebuild his nuclear program, "but this was not the claim of Israeli intelligence," Mr. Steinitz noted.
Dany Shoham, a retired lieutenant colonel who served in military intelligence, said Israel has extremely good information on countries along its borders, a list that includes Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.
But the quality of Israeli intelligence begins to dip when traveling further from Israel's frontiers, he said.
"The Israeli intelligence community is inferior to the United Kingdom and particularly the United States in monitoring states not bordering Israel," said Mr. Shoham, an analyst at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
However, Israel's secret services defined Iran and its nuclear program as the top priority in the late 1990's and that has generated strong intelligence, he said.
--------
Israeli Secret Services Faulted for Iraq Forecasts
March 28, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-intelligence.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel overestimated Iraq's military capabilities but the miscalculation in no way influenced the U.S. decision to topple Saddam Hussein, a parliamentary inquiry found Sunday.
It was rare public criticism of the secret services in Israel, issued even as Britain and the United States -- partners in the Iraq invasion -- conduct their own investigations into intelligence failures which preceded the war.
The Knesset Subcommittee on the Secret Services also assailed Israeli intelligence as slow to pick up on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's weapons of mass destruction program until shortly before he abandoned it in December.
``The military and political echelons are responsible for an intelligence foul-up regarding Iraq and Libya,'' the panel said in the 80-page report calling for an overhaul.
Officially at war with Saddam, its avowed enemy, Israel shared intelligence with Washington, its closest ally, before last year's invasion. Then, as now, it played down its cooperation to avoid deepening Arab ire at the campaign.
Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the right-wing ruling Likud party who led the inquiry, said Israeli input played ``a very minor role'' in Washington's prewar planning.
``The American and British intelligence services had much better access to Iraq by simply sitting in Kuwait and being able to fly almost freely over Iraqi soil,'' Steinitz told reporters.
Having failed to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the United States and Britain have been at pains to defend the assessments that drove them to war.
SNOWBALL EFFECT
The report complained of a snowball effect in intelligence sharing, whereby some Israeli assessments, analyzed by U.S. counterparts, eventually found their way back to Israel in repackaged form.
``It is not inconceivable that (such) analyzes had a bolstering and authenticating effect as though authoritative,'' said the report, parts of which were kept classified.
Before the hostilities, Israel issued its citizens with gas masks for fear Iraq would strike with non-conventional missiles -- an escalation of its 39 Scud salvoes in the 1991 Gulf war.
After the U.S. invasion passed without attack on Israel, the army came under criticism for having ordered the public to put protective plastic sheeting on windows and open sealed gas mask kits at a replacement cost of millions of dollars.
The subcommittee widened its probe beyond Iraq after the U.S.- and British-brokered disarmament pledge by Gaddafi caught Israel by surprise. Last October, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Libya was seeking nuclear weapons.
The Steinitz report urged better coordination between the Mossad, which carries out espionage and counter-terrorism operations abroad, and Military Intelligence, charged with keeping an eye on the armed forces of hostile states.
Leading Military Intelligence's efforts is a signals interception unit known as 8200. New Yorker magazine recently said the unit tipped off the United States on Iran's procurement of nuclear know-how from Pakistan.
The subcommittee report suggested 8200 be streamlined and upgraded as a civilian unit.
U.S. officials declined comment on the findings. A spokesman for Sharon, who oversees secret services, said the report ``will be taken into consideration.''
-------- us
Iraq 'Friendly Fire' Tragedy Blamed on U.S. Marine
Sun Mar 28, 2004
By Charles Aldinger
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4679780§ion=news
WASHINGTON - The worst U.S. "friendly fire" incident of the Iraq war has been blamed on a Marine captain who called fighter jets to strike suspected Iraqi positions last March, unaware that dozens of Marines were fighting in the area, defense officials said on Sunday.
Ten Marines were killed and three wounded in the incident near the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya and an investigation report, to be released on Monday by the U.S. Central Command, said the dead were so shot up by both Iraqis and A-10 Air Force jets that it was almost impossible to determine exactly how they died.
But the year-long probe by an 11-member U.S. military team concluded that actions by the unidentified Marine captain, a ground-based air controller, directly resulted in the confused incident during the firefight on March 23, 2003.
It recommended that the officer receive some type of administrative discipline, but stipulated that "he didn't act with any negligence or reckless disregard," one of the defense officials, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters.
"It was a very ugly scene on the ground -- just a terrible thing in the heat of battle," said another defense official.
Marine Corps officials, who spent the weekend discussing the report with the families of Marines involved, declined to comment except to say that no action had been taken against the ground controller because the report had not yet been released.
Investigators found that the captain was in the city of Nassiriya at the time, could not see the action in a barren area near a canal and should have consulted his battalion commander, who would have known that U.S. troops were in the strike area. But the report said he had been cleared by his immediate commander to call in air power.
ON DRIVE TO BAGHDAD
Eighteen Marines were killed and 17 wounded in the area as Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion 2nd Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, sought to seize bridges and a canal near Nassiriya.
But the investigation concluded that apparently only 13 Marines were involved in the friendly fire strikes.
The air controller was from Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion and was being used because Charlie Company had no air controller.
The investigation, headed by U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. William Hodgkins, found that two unnamed Air Force pilots from the 103rd Fighter Squadron of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard did not act with negligence and should not be held liable.
The A-10s, designed to fly low and use heavy cannon and rockets, are capable of destroying tanks and armored vehicles.
The incident occurred on one of the most tragic days of the major-combat phase of the Iraq war for U.S.-led forces.
In a news conference on the day of the incident, Gen. John Abizaid, current head of the Central Command, said U.S. Marines "defeated an enemy attack" in Nassiriya staged by a combination of Iraqi troops and irregular forces "in the sharpest engagement of the war thus far."
That initial public account did not mention the role of the A-10s, but days later Central Command announced that it was investigating whether the Marines were killed by friendly fire.
On the same day, in another friendly fire incident, a U.S. Patriot missile battery shot down a British RAF GR4 Tornado close to the Kuwaiti border.
Also, a U.S. Army 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company convoy carrying U.S. soldiers including Pfc. Jessica Lynch, was ambushed by Iraqis after making a wrong turn. Several were killed and others captured and later rescued, including Lynch.
----
Army Spouses Expect Reenlistment Problems
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28977-2004Mar27?language=printer
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. -- Patty B. Morgan's husband was fighting in Iraq with the 101st Airborne, and she was caring for two children by herself. Their lease was expiring and they had committed to buying a house across town, so she was going through with the move anyway.
One hot morning last July, as she was about to drive boxes to the new place, she walked outside, infant car seat in hand, and opened the garage door -- to find that her green Jeep had been stolen.
A few days later, she was told that her husband wouldn't be home by Labor Day, as she had expected, but would serve in Iraq six months more, for a total of a year.
"It was a hell of a week," Morgan said in her throaty voice.
Morgan's experience is part of a significant change in Army life brought about by the post-9/11 world: The extended, or repeated, deployments that have characterized the Army since then have intensified the burdens traditionally borne by military families. And most of the spouses who have remained behind are wondering how long the Army can keep it up.
This change is reflected in a recent poll conducted by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, and in dozens of supplemental interviews. The poll, the first nongovernmental survey of military spouses conducted since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, included more than 1,000 spouses living on or near the 10 heaviest-deploying Army bases.
While most of them said they have coped well, three-quarters said they believe the Army is likely to encounter personnel problems as soldiers and their families tire of the pace and leave for civilian lives.
Lt. Gen. Franklin "Buster" Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief, said in an interview that, overall, The Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll results seemed to reflect those of the service's internal surveys.
The findings come at a time when the Army is providing soldiers' families with unprecedented levels of support. Over the past 30 years, beginning with the end of conscription after the Vietnam War, the service became smaller, more professional -- and more married. By the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the military was caught flat-footed by the growing need to support soldiers' families during a major deployment.
In response, the Army built a robust network of family supports ranging from day care to counseling to legal help to instruction in Army basics, household finance and coping with stress. In addition, spouses can volunteer to watch over one another through Army Family Readiness Groups.
As Patty Morgan dealt with her crisis last July, she also drew on another common, and powerful, resource: her "military girlfriends" from nearby Fort Campbell, Ky. They swooped in, she recalled, to provide babysitting, transportation and relief from her volunteer duties with her Army Family Readiness Group so she could go ahead with her move and do the paperwork to replace the Jeep. "We have formed bonds," she said. "We're all family."
Hagenbeck said the Army is taking family concerns over deployments into account. "We recognize that as a major issue," he said. Yet since Sept. 11, 2001, the Army has been increasingly expeditionary -- that is, based in the United States but prepared to take on a stream of new missions overseas. "That's the business we're going to be in for a while," said Col. Michael Resty, the garrison commander at Fort Carson, Colo. "Anybody who thinks differently is fooling themselves."
The strain on troops and their families has led some in Congress to advocate a big boost in the size of the active-duty Army, which stands at about 485,000 troops.
The Pentagon is planning to add 30,000 soldiers over the next several years, but before agreeing to further expansion, it wants to see whether the other steps it is taking will ease the strain. Most notably, the Pentagon is reorganizing divisions to expand the number of the Army's deployable brigades from 33 to 48. In addition, the Army has announced a new policy under which troops will serve longer tours at bases, permitting their families to put down deeper roots.
The question is whether those steps will be sufficient. "There's no way to know for sure," said Tom Donnelly, a former staff member of the House Armed Services Committee. Donnelly said he expects that 2005 will be "the make-or-break year," as some soldiers who have already served in Iraq for a year are sent back for a second tour.
In the meantime, repeated and unpredictable deployments remain Army spouses' biggest issue. In The Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll, a slight majority -- 55 percent -- said their spouses' current deployment had been extended longer than they expected. Of that group, more than a third said that had created "major problems" for them.
"It was a roller coaster," said Meg Davis, whose husband, a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division, spent the past year in Iraq. "Everybody said six months, so we were expecting August, worst-case scenario." Instead, her husband did not return home until February.
Of the spouses polled, 95 percent were women. Three-quarters had one or more children younger than 18. The same proportion had had a spouse deployed overseas since Sept. 11, 2001. A third of those whose husbands had deployed and returned said they expected another deployment in the next year. The poll did not examine the problems faced by the families of National Guard and Reserve troops because they are a far more difficult population to locate and survey.
Large majorities of Army wives said that coping with their spouses' deployment had been a problem, but that they were proud of their service to the country. Many resented media coverage that portrays them as not handling it well. "It's not fair to us, or to the guys over there, to say that we're all having nervous breakdowns, because we're not," said Holly Petraeus, wife of the commander of the 101st Airborne.
At the same time, some worry about the toll on their marriages, and far more worry about the emotional strain they see in their children.
There is almost one child -- a total of about 470,000 -- for each soldier on active duty in the Army. In interviews, mothers said the Iraq deployment has been harder on their children than it has been on them. In the poll, three-quarters said the deployment had created problems for their offspring, with more than a quarter characterizing the troubles as major. Two-thirds said their sons and daughters were "sad"; somewhat less than a third said their children were more aggressive or had trouble concentrating.
"When my husband deployed to Afghanistan, my fourth-grader, the light kind of went out of her face," said Amanda Hicks, whose husband is a pilot in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Hicks and her fellow teachers at Ringgold Elementary School, the school closest to the gates of Fort Campbell, said their current students are notably fragile. "I have got the teariest class this year," said Debbie Sanders, a kindergarten teacher. "They just cry all the time."
While half of the spouses rated their own morale as high, less than a third rated the morale of the families around them similarly.
And even though they feel at least somewhat supported by their nonmilitary countrymen, the spouses do not feel particularly well understood by them -- not even by their own extended families. With the community of wives living on and around Army bases offering an attractive alternative, this generation has broken the long-established pattern of going back home for the duration of a husband's deployment.
"We have become a sorority of separation," said Anne Torza, wife of an Apache attack-helicopter pilot in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, "and I wouldn't give up my sisters for anything. You know that 'band of brothers'? We're a band of sisters."
The Daily Tax
"It's been a rough, rough, tiresome year," said Jeniqua Knuckles, mother of three and wife of an artillery sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division who spent most of 2003 in northern Iraq.
That was what the women who did well tended to say. More than 40 percent of those with deployed spouses said the experience had left them depressed, and nearly 80 percent said they often felt lonely.
Family-oriented holidays were especially difficult: Candice Foster, whose husband is a staff sergeant in the 4th Infantry Division, said she left the Christmas tree up an extra two months with all her husband's presents underneath.
"The hardest part is going to bed and waking up alone, every night and day being alone," said Amy Greene, wife of a 3rd Armored Cavalry medic and mother of a baby born while her husband was in Iraq for the past year. "It's very hard, especially when you see all the happy families together and you know that your family may never be together again."
Although the possibility of death has become part of their everyday lives -- over the past year, 588 U.S. troops have died in Iraq -- the women do not talk about it much, at least not directly. Their avoidance was reflected in the cautious way some talked when asked about memorial services. Foster said she simply could not attend them. "I thought it was just too hard, with my husband still over there," she said. "It could be him."
Even when things are going well, their spouses' absence remains a source of chronic underlying tension, imposing a small daily tax on their psychic energy.
"It's always there," said Jennifer Trantham, wife of a Black Hawk helicopter crew chief in the 3rd Infantry Division, which returned from the Middle East last summer. There were whole days, she said, when she would hang around the house, "kind of hoping he will call." He has already been told to expect to redeploy to Iraq next year, she added.
Counterbalancing the daily burdens are not only the wives' Army and informal networks, but also their own sense of purpose. Three-quarters felt they were "doing something important," and more than eight in 10 said their spouses' deployment had made them more confident in their ability to take care of themselves and their families.
Diane Campbell, wife of a warrant officer in the 43rd Area Support Group, said that one night at a movie, her young daughter turned to her and out of the blue said, "My daddy's saving the world."
Many have eased their emotional load by getting out of the house and staying busy volunteering or taking on new projects. Some have blossomed, learning new skills ranging from changing tires to paying bills.
Ileana Arnold, wife of a motor pool sergeant in the 3rd Armored Cavalry, said that until last year she had always left home-improvement projects to her husband. But when he shipped out, she said, she began building a patio behind her house. That done, she moved on to a series of woodworking projects. When she began hammering and sawing, she joked, her five children began muttering things such as, "Daddy needs to come home now!"
From Kitchen to Battlefield
Technology -- not only 24-hour news, but also e-mail -- has kept this generation of spouses extraordinarily close to their husbands' lives. But that, they have discovered, is a mixed blessing. The Iraq deployment has been the U.S. military's first war fought in an interconnected environment, in which even front-line soldiers generally have access to e-mail and the Internet. "It's the 'kitchen table to the battlefield' war," Morgan said. "Something happens -- between cable news, the cell phone, the Internet, e-mail -- it goes back and forth instantly."
That speed can be vexing: Almost every wife seems to have gotten a predawn call telling her to turn on the television because the "crawl" on the bottom of the cable news screen was reporting that a soldier had been killed in the region of Iraq where her husband was posted.
To squelch rumors sparked by such reports, the Army has had each unit's Family Readiness Group quickly transmit information on events in Iraq. "When something happens, the phone tree lights up, so you're not sitting there watching TV trying to figure out if your husband is hurt," said Kristin Jackson, whose husband is a mechanic in the 101st Airborne.
But even when the news is that he is safe, she quietly added, it carries a pang of grief. "It still hurts, because it is someone's husband, and it is a loss in our family," she said.
About four in 10 spouses said they had had problems communicating with their deployed soldiers. But that number reflects more than anything the height of their expectations: Many of them grew up on instant messaging. At first, as units deployed to Iraq last spring, most had to write letters to communicate -- and for some, it was an unfamiliar exercise.
Hiccups in the mail compounded their worries. Tanya Metansingh, whose husband is a scout in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, mistakenly believed for some time that her husband had been wounded in the face twice, both times by shrapnel: Her mother-in-law received a letter about an incident in May, and a month later, as she was about to give birth, Metansingh received another -- not realizing that the second letter had simply been held up for four weeks.
Later in 2003, e-mails and phone calls from Iraq became more common, and something of a lifeline. Many wives said that, in recent months, they had received electronic communications three or four times a week -- including digital photographs of their soldier-spouses, which are especially meaningful for children who cannot yet read.
"Technology has made a huge difference," said Sonia Scott, whose husband, an Apache attack-helicopter pilot in the 3rd Armored Cavalry, spent the past year in western Iraq. "I think it's kept marriages together."
Given a close-up view of the war, two-thirds of the spouses said things were going well for the United States in Iraq. Only four in 10 said media coverage of the war was good, and even fewer approved of the coverage of military families.
"Our soldiers are doing wonderful things, like painting schools, and they never see it in the newspapers," said Jeanne Koss, who works with Family Readiness Groups at Fort Carson.
Television news, the spouses said, acted like a powerful drug for them over the past year, reviled but craved. "It's a necessary evil," said Jean Patterson, wife of a senior sergeant in an engineering battalion that was in Mosul, Iraq, for 12 months. "We're addicted to it, we need the information -- but then we turn around and bash it."
Morgan said simply, "It can make you physically ill."
That was not an idle observation. Army counselors and others said that one of the leading indicators that a deployed soldier's wife is headed for trouble is that she takes hours-long wallows in the news. The problem was especially acute last spring, when all the broadcasts from correspondents embedded with front-line combat units made it possible to watch hours of coverage at a time -- a new experience for Army wives and everyone else.
Here, too, the wives were concerned about their children: The coverage tends to show the most violent aspects of the deployment -- firefights, helicopter crashes and the aftermath of bombings -- so children tend to assume that is what life is like for their deployed fathers. And coverage of casualties and funerals, many wives found, was insensitive, even rude.
One other thought hovered in the back of their minds: "Family members believe in the mission," said Jan McConnell, a youth services coordinator at Fort Carson. "But as you keep hearing press reports about how other people feel about Iraq, everybody wonders, 'Will the American public turn against the military?' "
Civilian Cluelessness
When Traci Lever, married to a platoon sergeant in the 3rd Armored Cavalry, had a fender bender not long ago, she mailed the damage estimate of $500 to the driver who had hit her. When the driver learned that her husband had just returned from a year in Iraq, he sent a check for $600 -- and enclosed a second one for $50 with the notation, "Dinner for two."
Despite such gestures, military wives see a gap between themselves and the civilian world. About 90 percent of spouses said they were satisfied with the respect the American public shows soldiers. But Davis, wife of the 101st Airborne Division lieutenant, spoke for many when she said: "The farther away you get from post, the less understanding there is."
Often, the spouses see good intentions thwarted by a lack of comprehension. Desaree Venema, whose husband has been gone for a year as a senior sergeant in the 4th Infantry Division, said that in her nonmilitary neighborhood, residents have been supportive, shoveling snow and babysitting her daughters "when I have a bad day." But when they complain about a spouse having to go on a week-long business trip, she said, "I just about have to draw blood from my tongue" to stop from shouting at them.
"It's wonderful to put the red, white and blue Dixie Cups in the chain-link fence to show patriotism, but you need specific tools," said McConnell, the Fort Carson youth services coordinator. Civilians sometimes will say things such as, "It's good your dad can e-mail you because it shows he's alive," unaware of how scary it will sound to a child -- especially when the e-mail breaks down, said Mary M. Keller, executive director of Military Child Education Coalition, a nonprofit group.
Many wives said that even their own parents and siblings back home don't get it.
"I would talk to my parents" back home in Texas, said Marisela Martinez, wife of a 4th Infantry Division sergeant who was deployed to the Sunni Triangle until recently. "But they don't know what we're going through. I try to explain to my dad what I'm going through, and he'd say, 'Well, you signed up for this.' "
Coming, Going, Gone
There was only one point on which the spouses' views of the Army turned toward to the negative: About half said the Army had done a "not so good" or "poor" job of keeping them informed about the timing and duration of deployments.
When deployments were extended, spouses said, there were direct and painful consequences: Those whose husbands were gone for longer than expected were nearly twice as likely as the others to report that a child was having trouble at school or acting more aggressively. Extensions also sharply increased the percentage of spouses who reported feeling depressed and anxious.
"We are not a bunch of whiners," said Joyce Dolinish, wife of a commander in the 101st Airborne. "But the repeated deployments worry us."
Many Army wives did not sign up for that life. At Fort Carson, for example, the major unit is a brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, which had not seen combat since coming home from Vietnam in December 1970. And until 9/11, Army recruiters tended to dwell less on the adventure of Army life and more on financial incentives, such as education benefits.
The spouses who were interviewed estimated that one or two of every 10 wives take deployment very hard. "Their husbands will probably get out," Kristin Jackson said.
That sentiment is widely shared: About 76 percent of those polled said they believe the Army is heading for personnel problems as soldiers and their families tire of the post-9/11 pace and leave the service.
And yet, the same percentage said that, knowing what they know now about the Army, they would do it all over again.
What those numbers reflect, said wives and other Army insiders, is that the Army is adapting to the post-9/11 world. "We're seeing a harder Army come out of this," full of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, said Lt. Jason Davis, the husband of Meg Davis.
"The reenlistments that we'll see will be good ones," the Iraq veteran said. "These guys are experts, and they know what they're getting into."
A strong minority of military wives want no part of that frequent-flier life.
About half of those polled said they expect their spouses to reenlist, and that they will support the decision. But about three in 10 said that they are certain their spouses will get out -- and that they want that to happen.
If those numbers prove true, "that's a good news story for the Army," said Master Sgt. J.D. Riley, a Pentagon expert on enlisted personnel issues. Currently, he said, about 50 percent of soldiers leave at the end of their first term.
The greater worry is that more seasoned soldiers -- especially the senior sergeants who are the backbone of today's Army -- will start leaving in unusually large numbers, as they did during the latter part of the Vietnam War. It is too early to tell if Iraq will provoke such an exodus, but some Army experts are concerned by internal Army data indicating morale problems among troops serving there.
"He's getting out," Erika Storm said of her husband, a seven-year Army veteran who is a mechanic for Bradley Fighting Vehicles in the 4th Infantry Division. "As good as the Army is, he doesn't want to tear himself away from his family."
The most vulnerable spouses are also those newest to the Army. Shyla McLaughlin said she and her husband will "definitely" leave the Army as soon as they can. "I knew there were chances of deployment, but I didn't know how hard it was going to be," she said.
But some Army wives hope their husbands will stay. "This is the first time my husband has said, in 12 years, that he's ready to get out," said Candice Foster. But if she has anything to say about it, she said, "he's going to stay in." A steady paycheck, good benefits and a safe environment in which to rear children all combine to provide a powerful lure.
Those who intend to stay in especially cite the powerful sense of comradeship they have developed over the past year with other Army wives -- the "sorority of separation" to which Anne Torza referred. "This life is an adventure," she said, "and we're in it together."
In military terms, they have achieved unit cohesion.
Assistant polling director Claudia Deane contributed to this report.
-------- propaganda wars
The 'war president' waged a war of lies
By Eric Margolis - Contributing Foreign Editor
Toronto Sun,
March 28, 2004
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/03/28/398787.html
A cascade of embarrassing revelations and accusations are demolishing George W. Bush's slickly packaged, made-for-TV persona as a "war president" and the scourge of Islamic terrorists.
Former president Jimmy Carter accused Bush and British PM Tony Blair of waging a war of "lies" against Iraq.
Poland's president said he was "deceived" by Bush into sending troops to Iraq. Spain's new prime minister denounced Bush's Iraq adventure as a "fiasco" and a "war based on lies."
A group of leading American business executives ran a full-page ad in The New York Times entitled "Have you noticed what's happened to chief executives who lie?" with a picture of an executive being led away in handcuffs. The ad described the Iraq invasion as a "state-sponsored deception (that) already dwarfs the damage done by the worst corporate scandals," citing 566 American dead and a cost of $125 billion US (not to mention 20,000 Iraqi deaths).
The underlying message was stark: the president and his "war cabinet" ought to face criminal charges for lying to the nation and starting an unnecessary war for domestic political reasons.
The fourth bombshell exploded when Richard Clarke, the respected former counter-terrorism chief under presidents Clinton and George Bush Sr., went public with the most damning accusations yet made against the White House. His testimony before a commission investigating the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. asserted the Bush administration damaged U.S. national security, did not do enough to prevent the 9/11 attacks, and obsessed over Iraq while largely ignoring al-Qaida's threat.
Bush, said Clarke, did "a terrible job" in fighting terrorism. Bush's obsession with Iraq left the U.S. "needlessly unprepared" to counter an al-Qaida attack. He also criticized, somewhat less strongly, the Clinton administration's anti-terrorism efforts.
Clarke, a Republican, insisted there were no links between Iraq and either 9/11 or terrorism, and that Iraq had no concealed weapons, a position long maintained by this column. But the feeble, politicized 9/11 commission failed to follow up on this dramatic testimony.
Vice President Dick Cheney was described by Clarke as a "right-wing ideologue." He accused Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq War, of "belittling" the al-Qaida threat.
We learned Defence Secretary Rumsfeld was so preoccupied with anti-missile defence before 9/11 he ignored al-Qaida.
Urgent warnings
The commission's report stated Rumsfeld "did not recall any particular counter-terrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11," though the CIA claimed to have urgently warned both Bush and Rumsfeld of impending attacks.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who refused to testify, was shown to be a dithering, confused amateur and a character assassin who has led the White House attacks on Clarke.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, another self-styled scourge of terrorists, actually proposed cutting spending on counter-terrorism exactly one day before 9/11 - and again, afterward. Unfortunately, the commission failed to ask why the Bush administration had been sending millions in aid to the "terrorist" Taliban until four months before 9/11.
This column has repeatedly asserted the Bush administration was asleep on guard duty on 9/11.
True, there were no warnings hijacked airliners were coming on that specific day. But with the benefit of hindsight, we see the same ineptitude and confusion that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor - a combination of distraction, smugness, self-deception, disbelief and bungling. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan's naval codes were being intercepted and deciphered; her attacking aircraft were spotted by radar. Yet the obvious conclusions somehow were not made. The same applies to Sept. 11, 2001.
In the U.S. Navy, a ship's captain is responsible for all accidents or misfortunes, no matter what the excuse. But no senior member of the Bush administration has accepted responsibility for the death of some 3,000 people on 9/11. No one resigned.
No senior U.S. official acted with the honour and courage of Britain's foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who resigned to protest a war against Iraq he charged was based entirely on falsehoods and disinformation.
Instead, the Bush administration launched a trumped up war against Iraq to mask its own negligence prior to 9/11, and to satisfy America's lust for revenge by attacking a nation innocent of that crime.
Clarke, at least, had the decency to apologize to the families of the 9/11 victims, saying, "the government failed you. And I failed you." We have yet to hear a peep of self-criticism from the blundering but arrogant Bush White House.
Of course not. This administration is running for re-election on its "war record" against Iraq, and its so-called war on terrorism. Bush is playing Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman.
But his claim to be a war president is like the man who murders his family, then begs for mercy because he is an orphan. The Iraq war was not one of self-defence, like World War II, but an unprovoked, illegal aggression engineered by the Bush administration and justified by a torrent of shameful lies. Bush's "war on terrorism" is a police action that was unnecessarily and foolishly militarized.
Richard Clarke, no matter his motives, has done his nation an important, badly needed service.
--------
Operation Iraqi Infoganda
March 28, 2004
FRANK RICH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/arts/28RICH.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Real journalism may be reeling, but faux journalism rocks. As an entertainment category in the cultural marketplace, it may soon rival reality TV and porn. Television is increasingly awash in fake anchors delivering fake news, some of them far more trenchant than real anchors delivering real news. Even CNBC, a financial news network, is chasing after the success of Jon Stewart; its new nightly fake newscast, presided over by a formerly funny "Saturday Night Live" fake anchor, Dennis Miller, is being promoted with far more zeal than was ever lavished on CNBC's real "News With Brian Williams."
Turn on real news shows like "Dateline NBC" and "Larry King Live," meanwhile, and you're all too likely to find Jayson Blair, the lying former reporter of The New York Times, continuing to play a reporter on TV as he fabricates earnest blather about his concern for journalistic standards. Elsewhere on the dial you'll learn that a fake news show ("The Daily Show") has been in a booking war with a real news show ("Hardball") over who would first be able to interview the real (I think) Desmond Tutu. At such absurd moments, and they are countless these days in our 24/7 information miasma, real journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending mutant that would defy a polygraph's ability to sort out the lies from the truth.
This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush administration, which has responded to the growing national appetite for fictionalized news by producing a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far as to field its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia, the "reporters" who appeared in TV "news" videos distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services to local news shows around the country. The point of these spots - which were broadcast whole or in part as actual news by more than 50 stations in 40 states - was to hype the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an unalloyed Godsend to elderly voters. They are part of a year-plus p.r. campaign, which, with its $124 million budget, would dwarf in size most actual news organizations.
When one real reporter, Robert Pear of The Times, blew the whistle on these TV "news" stories this month, a government spokesman defended them with pure Orwell-speak: "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools." The government also informed us that Ms. Ryan was no impostor but an actual "freelance journalist." The Columbia Journalism Review, investigating further, found that Ms. Ryan's past assignments included serving as a TV shill for pharmaceutical companies in infomercials plugging FluMist and Excedrin. Given that drug companies may also be the principal beneficiaries of the new Medicare law, she is nothing if not consistent in her journalistic patrons. But she is a freelance reporter only in the sense that Mike Ditka would qualify as one when appearing in Levitra ads.
As for the mystery of Alberto Garcia's journalistic bonafides, it remains at this writing unresolved. His reporting career has not left a trace on any data bank. Perhaps he is the creation of Stephen Glass, the serial fantasist who once ruled the pages of The New Republic.
Back at Comedy Central, Jon Stewart was ambivalent about the government's foray into his own specialty, musing aloud about whether he should be outraged or flattered. One of his faux correspondents, though, was outright faux despondent. "They created a whole new category of fake news - infoganda," Rob Corddry said. "We'll never be able to keep up!" But Mr. Corddry's joke is not really a joke. The more real journalism declines, the easier it is for such government infoganda to fill the vacuum.
George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real news media as much as possible. By the start of this year, he had held only 11 solo press conferences, as opposed to his father's count of 71 by the same point in his presidency. (Even the criminally secretive Richard Nixon had held 23.) Mr. Bush has declared that he rarely reads newspapers and that he prefers to "go over the heads of the filter" - as he calls the news media - and "speak directly to the people." To this end, he gave a series of interviews to regional broadcasters last fall - a holding action, no doubt, until Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia could be hired to fill that role. When the president made a rare exception last month and took questions from an actual front-line journalist, NBC's Tim Russert, his performance was so maladroit that the experiment is unlikely to be repeated anytime too soon.
There's no point in bothering with actual news people anyway, when you can make up your own story and make it stick, whatever the filter might have to say about it. No fake news story has become more embedded in our culture than the administration's account of its actions on 9/11. As The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page this week - just as the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going public with his parallel account - many of this story's most familiar details are utter fiction. Mr. Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of that morning was to put the military on alert is false. So are the president's claims that he watched the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on TV that morning. (No such video yet existed.) Nor was Air Force One under threat as Mr. Bush flew around the country, delaying his return to Washington.
Yet the fake narrative of 9/11 has been scrupulously maintained by the White House for more than two years. Although the administration has tried at every juncture to stonewall the 9/11 investigative commission, its personnel, including the president, had all the time in the world for the producer of a TV movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." The result was a scenario that further rewrote the history of that day, stirring steroids into false tales of presidential derring-do. Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, characterized one of the movie's many elisions in Salon. To show the president continuing to sit and read with elementary school kids "while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers," she wrote, "would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision."
To shore up the Rove version of 9/11 once Richard Clarke went public with his alternative tale on last Sunday's "60 Minutes," the White House placed Condoleezza Rice on all five morning news shows the next day. The administration is confident that it can reinstate its bogus scenario - particularly given that Ms. Rice, unlike Mr. Clarke, is refusing to take the risk of reciting it under oath to the 9/11 commission.
After 9/11, similar fake-news techniques helped speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The run-up to the war was falsified by a barrage of those "modern public information tools," including 16 words of Tom Clancy-style fiction in the State of the Union. John Burns of The Times, speaking by phone from Iraq to a postmortem on war coverage sponsored by the University of California journalism school in Berkeley this month, said of the real press back then: "We failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration's plan to go to war." What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated by the administration's false news reports of impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to www.reform.house.gov/min, where a searchable database posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell and National Security Adviser Rice in 125 separate public appearances."
Once the war began, the Defense Department turned a warehouse in Qatar into a TV studio, where it installed a $250,000 Central Command briefing stage, shipped from Chicago by FedEx for an additional $47,000. The set was lent authority by a real-news set designer, whose previous credits included ABC's "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America." As for the embedded journalists who filled in the rest of the story, a candid assessment was delivered by Lt. Col. Rick Long, the former head of media relations for the Marine Corps, also speaking at Berkeley 10 days ago: "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment. . . . Overall, we were very happy with the outcome."
The "news" of the war included its fictionalized Rambo, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, and its fictionalized conclusion, the "Mission Accomplished" celebration led by the president on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. (Mr. Bush said that the premature victory banner was the handiwork of the ship's crew when in fact it was the product of the White House scenic shop.) But for all that fake news, we still don't know such real news as how many Iraqi civilians were killed as we gave them their freedom. We are still shielded from images of American casualties, before or after they are placed in coffins.
Now that the breakdown in pre-9/11 security is threatening to dominate the real news, the administration is working overtime to overwhelm it with its latest, thematically related fake story line. Time magazine reports that employees of the Department of Homeland Security have been given the goal of providing the president "with one homeland-security photo-op a month." The Associated Press reports that the department is also hiring a "liaison to the entertainment industry" - with a salary as high as $136,000, plus benefits - "to make sure that dramatic portrayals of it are as accurate as possible." (The deadline for applications, do note, is tomorrow.) Of course "accurate" in that job description should be read as "inaccurate," since the liaison's real task, like that of the intrepid reporter Karen Ryan, will be to make sure that any actual news of our homeland security's many holes is kept on the q.t. According to E! entertainment news, we can even expect a new TV show, "D.H.S. - the Series," to which both Mr. Bush and Tom Ridge will contribute endorsements and sound bites.
When it comes to homeland security, you can be sure that the administration's faux news will always be good news - though this is the one story in which the real news can sometimes become just too intrusive to ignore.
-------- war crimes
Closure of controversial exhibition on German army crimes
HAMBURG, Germany (AFP)
Mar 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040328150900.zyjpjuda.html
A controversial exhibition exposing the crimes of the Germany army during World War II opened for the last time Sunday after drawing some 1.2 million visitors.
Expecting a bumper crowd on the final day, organisers extended the opening hours until 10:00 pm (2000 GMT).
Police had Saturday mounted a heavy security operation to prevent any clash between rival neo-Nazi and anti-fascist protestrs, but there was no trouble.
The exhibition, which first opened eight years ago before being remodelled, has been controversial for highlighting the role of the ordinary German army, the Wehrmacht, in war crimes.
Although there has been a tendency to see the Wehrmacht as innocent of the sort of crimes perpetrated by the elite, black-uniformed SS and special units, the display points to cases where it was also involved, either actively or at least passively.
A first exhibition, which toured 32 German and Austrian cities between 1995 and 1999, was hit in a blast claimed by an obscure far-right group in 1999.
Later that year it closed, and its director was forced to stand down, amid stiff criticism over inaccuracies in at least nine cases where war crimes had been attributed to the Wehrmacht.
It reopened in 2001 under its present title, "Crimes of the Wehrmacht, the scale of the war of extermination 1941-1945."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11 Panel Provokes a Discussion the White House Hoped to Avoid
March 28, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ADAM NAGOURNEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/politics/28PANE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, March 27 - In the summer of 2001, according to witnesses interviewed by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 hijackings, President Bush was told repeatedly of terror warnings pouring into American intelligence agencies, mostly about threats overseas.
The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who briefed Mr. Bush on threats almost daily, "was around town literally pounding on desks saying that something is happening, this is an unprecedented level of threat information," said Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, who was quoted in a Congressional report last year.
But even as the warnings spiked in June and July that year, there appeared to be little sense of alarm at the White House, officials of the Central Intelligence Agency told the commission. It was not until Sept. 4 that Mr. Bush's national security team approved a plan intended to eradicate Al Qaeda and not until Sept. 10 that Mr. Tenet was told to put the plan into effect.
Now, nearly two and half years later, the issue of whether Mr. Bush and his advisers failed to respond adequately to the threat of terror before Sept. 11, 2001, has become the focus of intense scrutiny and debate in Washington.
The White House had long hoped to avoid just such a discussion of Mr. Bush's actions before the hijackings, fearing it would draw attention to the first months of his presidency rather than the period after Sept. 11 when he took military action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The White House had opposed the creation of the independent commission and for many months cooperated reluctantly with the panel.
White House fears were realized this week when Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, depicted the first months of the Bush presidency as a time of indecision and inaction on terrorism. Many of the preliminary findings of the commission supported the picture Mr. Clarke outlined in his new book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," published by Free Press.
Politically, as the presidential campaign rolls forward, a pivotal question is whether that portrait, which the White House worked feverishly to undermine, will raise questions about what has been a fundamental part of his re-election appeal. Mr. Bush is expected to defend his conduct when he answers questions to be asked by the commission's chairman and vice chairman, assuring continued attention on this phase of his presidency. They will question Mr. Bush in private for about an hour. Vice President Dick Cheney has also agreed to answer questions about his activities prior to the attacks.
On Sunday, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, will appear on "60 Minutes," the CBS program on which Mr. Clarke first criticized his former White House colleagues a week ago.
The commission is expected to release a report on its finding in late July, when the Democrats will meet in Boston to nominate Mr. Bush's opponent.
Mr. Bush has often talked about how his presidency did not, in a real sense, begin until Sept. 11 when, he said, he found in the aftermath of the attacks the defining purpose of his presidency. Mr. Bush and his aides have made his prosecution of the war on terror the touchstone of his re-election campaign.
Mr. Bush and his aides say they believe that his leadership after Sept. 11 created an irrevocable bond with voters that would be nearly impossible to erase and will ultimately overshadow any questions raised about the pre-Sept. 11 period of his presidency.
Still, they have acknowledged that this would be a very different kind of election had it not been for the attacks, and that any advantage the president enjoys going into the election is because of that chapter of his presidency. The White House selected the time and place of the convention where Mr. Bush will be nominated - New York City, less than two weeks before the third anniversary of the attacks - with that in mind.
Several Republicans not associated with the Bush campaign said that they were concerned about the turn of events, warning that the commission findings and Mr. Clarke's testimony were a challenge to the central pillar of Mr. Bush's campaign appeal: his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush's likely opponent, has long said that a critical part of his own strategy to defeat Mr. Bush was to at least even the playing field on issues of national security and foreign affairs, and thus move the presidential debate to the issue of the economy.
"Let's be as generous as possible," said one Republican strategist, who said he did not want to be quoted by name in criticizing the White House. "If voters believe Clarke, than Bush's greatest strength - his response to terrorism - is significantly eroded. This Clarke stuff is significantly bad for Bush."
The net effect of the week's debate has, Mr. Bush's advisers argued, been to at best discredit Mr. Clarke and at worst cloud the issue. "I think in the end, he's not going to have any credibility," Charles Black, a Republican consultant with ties to the White House, said of Mr. Clarke. "I think any objective person watching this is going to come away saying this is confusing at best."
The White House is responding to Mr. Clarke and the commission's findings with a strategy that includes Ms. Rice's "60 Minutes" appearance. She has made multiple appearances this week to make a case that she was actively involved in the decision making before Sept. 11.
Beyond that, Mr. Bush's aides hope to shift any blame about security shortcomings to the Clinton administration, arguing that the Bush administration was hardly alone in underestimating the potential threat of a domestic terrorist attack and that Mr. Clinton had no success in eliminating Al Qaeda.
The White House strategy also involves what officials said would be a continued effort to discredit Mr. Clarke and to confuse the dispute with a battery of accusations and counteraccusations intended to increasingly make this dispute appear to be a partisan fight between Republicans and Democrats.
"Our analysis is that the Democrats were so eager to thrust the 9/11 hearings into the political arena that they resorted to an overreach that kind of ignored some basic facts that the American people know about President Bush," said Nicolle Devenish, Mr. Bush's campaign communications director. "The world was watching in the days and weeks after 9/11."
A review of the evidence produced this week provides relatively little direct information about Mr. Bush's thinking, statements or actions regarding terrorism in the months after he took office. The commission's reports suggest that he left the issue largely to top advisers, who studied it, but took no concrete action against Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.
The commission's reports show that Mr. Bush was warned repeatedly about terrorist threats, but they provide no indication that he urged his aides to accelerate their policy review or produce specific plans in response to the warnings, from outgoing Clinton administration officials and from Mr. Tenet, his own intelligence chief.
In May 2001, Ms. Rice recalled in a private meeting with the commission, Mr. Bush grew impatient with repeated warnings in his daily briefings. At one point, Ms. Rice said, the president expressed impatience with "swatting flies," and urged his advisers to take more aggressive steps against Al Qaeda. But there is no indication that his complaints had any impact.
Instead, the evidence suggests that Mr. Bush allowed the terrorism issue to drift down the list of White House priorities from the relatively high importance given it by President Bill Clinton's national security aides. For the most part, Mr. Bush advisers told the commission that they continued the operational activities of their predecessors.
On Aug. 6, 2001, Mr. Bush, was told in a briefing held at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., that Mr. bin Laden's followers were believed to be capable of hijacking commercial jets in the United States. It was a scrap of information, based on a single 1999 British intelligence report and not enough to be considered credible.
The briefing was disclosed by Ms. Rice in May 2002 in an apparent effort to show that Mr. Bush was eager for information about terrorism and wanted to know more about the possibility of a Qaeda attack in the United States. But this week, Richard Ben-Veniste, a commission member, said that the C.I.A. had advised the panel that the agency's official who met with Mr. Bush did not recall him requesting the information and that the agency itself had come up with the idea of briefing the president on terrorist activities involving aircraft.
--------
Ex-Bush Aide Calls for Testimony on Terrorism to Be Opened
March 28, 2004
By SUSAN SAULNY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/politics/28CND-POLI.html?hp
The debate over whether President Bush and his advisers failed to respond adequately to the threat of terror before Sept. 11, 2001, moved today to another front, the Sunday morning talk show circuit, with calls from both sides for more public disclosure.
A former White House counterterrorism adviser who testified before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks called for classified records to be made public, while the chairman of the panel urged the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify in public.
Mr. Clarke, the former White House terrorism chief, said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that he favored the declassification of his testimony two years ago at a Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, along with such other materials as memos and e-mail messages.
Republicans in Congress had been pressing for the declassification of Mr. Clarke's testimony to examine whether the claims in his book and in more recent, public testimony are in sync.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean, said that it would not relent in its pursuit of public testimony from Ms. Rice but that it was unlikely the commission would resort to a subpoena to compel her to testify.
"We do feel unanimously as a commission that she should testify in public," former Mr. Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey appointed by President Bush to lead the commission, said on "Fox News Sunday." "We feel it's important to get her case out there. We recognize there are arguments having to do with separation of powers. We think in a tragedy of this magnitude that those kind of legal arguments are probably overridden.
"So we are going to accept, I believe - at least I would recommend to the commission accepting any testimony Dr. Rice gives us under any conditions, but we are still going to press and still believe unanimously as a commission that we should hear from her in public."
Mr. Clarke, who in a recently published book and in his testimony has accused the Bush administration of largely ignoring the threat of Qaeda attacks before Sept. 11, insisted that his motivation for highlighting the government's missteps in the war on terror is strictly to answer the question that has been posed to him: Why did Sept. 11 happen? He said he hoped that his criticisms might force a better structure within government for dealing with potential threats.
But Republicans have contended that what Mr. Clarke is saying now differs significantly from what he told a Congressional panel two years ago as a member of the administration and that his previous testimony should be declassified.
"I would welcome it being declassified, but not just a little line here or there," Mr. Clarke said on NBC today. "Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony."
He added: "And I want more declassified."
Mr. Clarke said the private testimony of the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, before the commission should be declassified. He added that e-mail messages, memos and all other correspondence between Ms. Rice and Mr. Clarke should be included in that.
"The families, the victims families, have no idea what Dr. Rice has said," Mr. Clarke said. "They weren't in those closed hearings where she testified before the 9/11 Commission. They want to know. So let's take her testimony before the 9/11 Commission and make it part of the package of what gets declassified."
Mr. Clarke also contended that the war in Iraq has undermined the war on terror by further inflaming Islamic radicals, diverting government money and attention, and leaving the homeland vulnerable.
On the ABC News program "This Week" and "Fox News Sunday," Donald H. Rumsfeld, attempted to poke holes in Mr. Clarke's statements on the administration, calling some of his recollections out of context and just plain wrong. Regarding one of Mr. Clarke's most publicized statements, that Mr. Rumsfeld pushed for an invasion of Iraq because there were no good targets in Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld told Fox News that the quote was correct but out of context.
"If you think about it, the United States government made a decision to go into Afghanistan, not into Iraq, after 9/11," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "So the implication of what he's saying obviously misunderstands what actually took place."
And on ABC, he said, "If one looks at what was done, we went to Afghanistan, we didn't go to Iraq," even though Americans were being heavily targeted in Iraq.
He continued: "It was a highly successful effort and it did not destroy Al Qaeda. But it certainly took away their training, their haven, and it certainly destroyed the Taliban and eliminated them from running that country. That's what the president's action was. It wasn't Iraq. It was Afghanistan."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation" that he disagreed with Mr. Clarke's core premise, that the administration was lackadaisical in regard to terror. He said Mr. Clarke contradicted himself.
"I've known Dick Clarke for many years, over three of those administrations, and he is a public servant who feels strongly about these issues," Mr. Powell said. "But when I looked at what he said before the commission this week and when I looked through his book and when I also looked at what he had said to the Congress in 2002 in the background press briefings he gave, there are inconsistencies and contradictions between what he is saying now and what he said then.
Mr. Rumsfeld attempted to distance himself from Mr. Clarke, saying he hardly ever had interaction with the terrorism chief. "Well, I don't know the man," the defense secretary said. "I've probably met him, been in meetings with him two or three times."
Mr. Rumsfeld said he was quoted at one point in Mr. Clarke's book as speaking at a meeting that he did not attend.
-------- elections
Voting Rights of Florida Felons Scrutinized After 2000 Election
March 28, 2004
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/politics/campaign/28FELO.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
TALLAHASSEE - Gov. Jeb Bush looked out over a roomful of felons appealing to him for something they had lost, and tried to reassure them.
"Don't be nervous; we're not mean people," the governor said as some fidgeted, prayed, hushed children or polished their handwritten statements. "You can just speak from the heart."
And they did: convicted robbers, drunken drivers, drug traffickers and others, all finished with their sentences, standing up one by one in a basement room at the State Capitol and asking Mr. Bush to restore their civil rights. Their files before him, Mr. Bush asked one man about his drinking, another about his temper, and so on.
Four mornings a year, this unusual scene unfolds in front of the governor and his cabinet, as they review the requests of some of the thousands of felons whom Florida has stripped of their rights to vote, serve on a jury and hold public office.
Since daybreak on Nov. 8, 2000, when the nation awoke to the shock of a presidential race ending in a virtual tie, Florida's voting laws and practices have been the subject of intense debate and scrutiny. The disputed election results led the state to adopt sweeping changes in how votes are cast and counted and how voter rolls are maintained.
Yet as Florida becomes an election-year battleground again, with Governor Bush vowing to ensure victory here for his brother and Democrats eager to reclaim the state, its electoral practices - including its felon disenfranchisement law - are drawing renewed attention.
In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons. At the same time, some counties mistakenly allowed actual felons to vote or turned away legitimate voters as suspected felons. A lawsuit filed in January 2001 sought to prevent similar errors, while another, filed just before the 2000 election, charged that the ban on felons voting discriminated against blacks and should be overturned.
Critics say that President Bush would have lost in 2000 if disenfranchised felons had been allowed to vote. A 2001 report by a University of Minnesota sociologist counted more than 600,000 such felons in Florida, not including those still in prison, on parole or on probation. More than one in four black men here may not vote, the report found. The state says it is impossible to know how many disenfranchised felons live here, because some have died or moved out of state.
Although the Democratic Party here has not made fighting the ban a priority since 2000, to the frustration of civil rights groups, Scott Maddox, the party chairman, said he had followed the issue closely and believed the governor and legislature supported the ban for partisan reasons.
"It's amazing to me that these Republicans that keep quoting the Bible seemingly don't believe in redemption and forgiveness when it comes to restoring civil rights," Mr. Maddox said through a spokeswoman.
Florida is the largest of the seven states that permanently take away the voting rights of all felons. While other states have scaled back similar bans in recent years, Governor Bush and the Legislature call their law a necessary consequence for citizens who commit crimes, and point out that many are eventually granted clemency. "The governor believes this is a fair process," Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, wrote in an e-mail response to questions about the ban. He pointed out that more criminals were getting their rights restored without hearings under a smoother process set in place by the governor.
Partly because the ban drew widespread attention after 2000, the backlog of felons whose applications for rights restoration are under review - 35,585 as of March 15 - is more than five times what it was in July 2001. The state automatically restores the rights of some felons after reviewing their records, while others need only fill out a short application. But others, including convicted drug traffickers, sex offenders, violent offenders and those guilty of public corruption, must go through an investigation and wait for a hearing in Tallahassee, which can take years.
Many felons apply not just to regain voting rights, but because they cannot qualify for certain state-issued professional licenses - nursing or contracting licenses, for example - unless their rights are restored.
Julio Lima, who was convicted on cocaine trafficking charges in 1997 said he had since gone to school to become an insurance adjuster but could not get a license without civil rights. Mr. Lima, 34, said he applied for restoration in 2002 and was still waiting for a hearing date.
The clemency board, which consists of the governor and his three cabinet members, has files on each applicant. The State Parole Commission recommends before their hearings whether to accept their applications, based partly on investigations that might include interviews with employers, neighbors and victims. But the board does not always follow the recommendations. "How's the anger situation going?" Mr. Bush asked one man after leafing through his file on the most recent hearing day, March 18, when the clemency board considered 57 voting rights cases.
"You've stayed clean?" the governor asked another.
Over the course of that morning, board members seemed especially interested to know whether former alcohol and drug abusers were now sober. They had little patience for multiple traffic violations, domestic violence records and blame passing.
They rejected the application of a man convicted of killing a pregnant woman while driving drunk in 1989 (her mother was there, tearfully saying that he had never apologized) and a man convicted of a lewd act against a child in 1993. They restored the rights of a former drug addict who now helps AIDS patients and a convicted drug trafficker who said he wanted to make his young daughter proud by voting.
In all, the board restored the rights of 23 felons, rejected the applications of 30 and delayed decisions on 4.
The law has been on the books since 1868, when Florida gave blacks the right to vote as a condition of the state's being readmitted to the Union after the Civil War. A new State Constitution drafted that year expanded the number of crimes that required disenfranchisement, a change that critics say was meant to affect blacks disproportionately. They also charge that this discriminatory intent of the ban persists even though the provision was re-enacted in 1968 as part of a new Constitution.
A federal judge in Miami dismissed one lawsuit seeking to overturn the ban, Johnson v. Bush, filed just before the 2000 election by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. But in December, an appeals court in Atlanta reversed the decision and ordered a trial, saying the state had to prove it re-enacted the law for a "nondiscriminatory purpose" and not just for the sake of continuity. The state has asked for a rehearing of the appeal.
In recent decades, the largest number of people who regained their voting rights in a year was 16,192 in 1986, under Gov. Bob Graham, a Democrat. But the numbers dropped sharply in the 1990's, when another Democrat, Lawton Chiles, was governor. That is because the state made it harder for many felons to get restoration during the tough-on-crime era of the early 90's.
"Jeb Bush is not responsible for this problem," said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. "It's more than 100 years in the making under both Democrats and Republicans. But Jeb Bush and his cabinet are the only ones who can alleviate it right now."
Lifting the ban would require a constitutional amendment, and civil rights groups have started a petition drive to try to put the issue on the ballot. Mr. Simon and others said an easier alternative would be for Mr. Bush and his cabinet to eliminate the hearing process.
Several thousand felons apply each month; in Mr. Bush's first three years in office, from 1999 through 2001, the state restored the rights of an average of 1,550 people a year, according to data from the Florida Parole Commission. But the number jumped in the last two years: 6,649 felons had their voting rights restored in 2002, and 14,828 in 2003, according to the commission.
Mr. DiPietre, the governor's spokesman, said the application rules were streamlined in 2001. Among other changes, most felons guilty of less serious crimes and those with outstanding court fines were allowed to skip hearings.
Another suit, filed by the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators and others in March 2001, led to a court order last summer requiring the State Department of Corrections to help 125,000 felons apply to get their voting rights back once they had finished serving their sentences.
A third suit, filed by the N.A.A.C.P. in January 2001, resulted in a settlement in which the state agreed to screen suspected felons more carefully before reporting them to county elections supervisors for possible removal from the voting rolls.
Only Maine and Vermont allow felons to vote even while they are in prison. Besides Florida, only Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska and Virginia take away all felons' voting rights and do not automatically restore them.
"Why should we keep people from voting after we spent all this money rehabilitating them?" Mr. Meek said. "Why stand in judgment on whether they should vote or not? This is politicians standing in and playing the role of virtuecrat."
That was how John Eason, the man convicted of committing a lewd act on a child, said he felt as he left his hearing, his application denied. He wanted his rights back so he could get a contractor's license, he said, to take over his father's business. Mr. Eason's sister traveled with him from Lakeland to tell Mr. Bush that he had been a model uncle.
"The government thinks they're doing society a favor by showing that it's still convicting the bad people," Mr. Eason said. "But how does it benefit society to keep me down in this way?"
Things turned out better for Cecil Taylor, who had been convicted of driving drunk and whose college art teacher came to speak of his potential. After the board asked Mr. Taylor if he had drunk alcohol since his conviction, and Mr. Taylor said he had not, Mr. Bush restored his rights - with a caveat.
"I'm praying that you're not going to start drinking again," Mr. Bush told him. "When we make these decisions, sometimes it puts us in a little bit of a precarious position in that you could let us down."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Marine Defends Guantánamo Detainee, and Surprises Australians
March 28, 2004
By RAYMOND BONNER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/worldspecial2/28AUST.html?pagewanted=all&position=
SYDNEY, Australia - What you see is not necessarily what you get.
That was the common reaction here to Maj. Michael Mori, an intense, energetic, 38-year-old American who became a near celebrity in Australia when he was here earlier this month.
He is an officer in the United States Marine Corps and looks it - powerful physique, chiseled features, military haircut.
But when he speaks, he sometimes sounds like a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, sharply criticizing the Bush administration's policy toward the detainees at GuantÀanamo Bay, Cuba, calling the military tribunals before which some will be tried ``kangaroo courts.''
``We can't work it out,'' said Minna Muhlen-Schulte, an art student at the University of New South Wales, referring to the disconnect between Major Mori's image and his views. Having seen him on the news, she had come to hear him in person.
Major Mori sees no contradiction. He is an American, and he is a marine. But he is also a lawyer for David Hicks, an Australian who was captured in Afghanistan more than two years ago and has been held at GuantÀanamo since. Major Mori was in Australia to investigate the case, and has been besieged by television, radio and print journalists.
``What I'm saying about the system isn't leftist,'' he said one recent morning here, speaking of the tribunals. ``It offends my understanding of what justice is that's been ingrained in me by the Marine Corps and by my legal training.''
Major Mori describes himself as apolitical - he says it does not matter to him if there are four more years of President Bush, ``followed by eight years of Jeb,'' or if Senator John Kerry is the next president. He says his objections to the military commissions are the same as those the Bush administration has to the International Criminal Court. Both have unchecked power, and both can be misused for politically motivated prosecutions, he said.
One recent evening, Major Mori, in full uniform, was roundly applauded by the left-leaning crowd that gathered at the sandstone New South Wales Parliament House for the world premiere of ``The President Versus David Hicks,'' a documentary about Mr. Hicks's life.
It depicts Mr. Hicks's journey from high school dropout to Taliban warrior, with stops along the way training horses in Japan, fighting with the Kosovo Liberation Army and in Kashmir with a group linked to Pakistan's intelligence service. Now 28, he tried Christianity before converting to Islam.
``He was always searching for something,'' Beverley Hicks, his stepmother, says in the film. ``He thought the Islamic religion was going to give him what he needed.''
The film was commissioned by SBS, the multicultural and multilingual public radio and television network here, and was directed by Curtis Levy, a documentary filmmaker in Sydney whose films often stir debate. It is to be shown next month at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina, and later at the HotDocs Festival in Toronto.
The film includes material from many of Mr. Hicks's letters to his parents, a working-class couple in Adelaide, South Australia, and some of the views he expresses may cause even his strongest defenders to wince.
In one letter, he speaks about ``Washington-Jewish domination,'' and about the ``Jewish propaganda war machine.''
Those are deplorable views, Major Mori said, but not illegal ones.
Major Mori, who grew up in New England, enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was 18. Four years later, he enrolled at Norwich University in Vermont. He remained in the Marine Reserves and was commissioned upon graduation, and when the Marines said they needed lawyers, he went off to Western New England School of Law, in Springfield, Mass.
He volunteered to represent the GuantÀanamo detainees and was appointed in November. Mr. Hicks is one of only a handful of the several hundred detainees who have been assigned a lawyer.
``I am not asking anyone to condone what David Hicks may have done,'' Major Mori said.
The lawyer contends, however, that Mr. Hicks should be tried by international legal standards, or returned to Australia. These are the same demands that Britain has made on behalf of its citizens being detained at GuantÀanamo, five of whom were recently released.
In Mr. Hicks's case, however, the Australian government, under its conservative prime minister, John Howard, has not pushed for Mr. Hicks's release.
If he were returned to Australia, he would have to be released, because as an Australian citizen, he violated no laws in fighting with the Taliban, Australian officials said.
Mr. Hicks did not kill any civilians or American soldiers, Major Mori said, a claim that has not been contradicted by the Bush administration. Mr. Hicks is likely to be charged by the tribunals with conspiracy to commit treason. The evidence against him will include his training at camps run by Al Qaeda, which Western intelligence officials say was more extensive than has been publicly reported.
He was trained, for example, in surveillance of public buildings in an urban setting and in assassinations, a senior Western intelligence official said.
Major Mori said he was not allowed to discuss any of the facts of his client's case.
Mr. Hicks's parents say his lawyers and the government are discussing a possible plea bargain in exchange for a limited sentence, but neither side would discuss the details of the negotiations. If the case is not settled, it may go to trial in a few months.
The documentary on Mr. Hicks's case has been criticized by some Australians as being too anti-Bush and too sympathetic to David Hicks. A columnist in The Australian, Imre Salusinszky, described the film as ``disturbing and thought-provoking,'' but said it was ``unashamedly advocating for David Hicks.''
At a showing of the documentary, Robert Ellis, a playwright, journalist and political speechwriter, said Australians were generally ``astonished'' by Major Mori. When he was appointed, ``we assumed it was a fix,'' Mr. Ellis said. But now, ``there's this hero, and in a military uniform.''
--------
FIGHTING FOR FLORIDA
Disenfranchised Florida Felons Struggle to Regain Their Rights
March 28, 2004
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/politics/campaign/28FELO.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Gov. Jeb Bush looked out over a roomful of felons appealing to him for something they had lost, and tried to reassure them.
"Don't be nervous; we're not mean people," the governor said as some fidgeted, prayed, hushed children or polished their handwritten statements. "You can just speak from the heart."
And they did: convicted robbers, drunken drivers, drug traffickers and others, all finished with their sentences, standing up one by one in a basement room at the State Capitol and asking Mr. Bush to restore their civil rights. Their files before him, Mr. Bush asked one man about his drinking, another about his temper, and so on.
Four mornings a year, this unusual scene unfolds in front of the governor and his cabinet, as they review the requests of some of the thousands of felons whom Florida has stripped of their rights to vote, serve on a jury and hold public office.
Since daybreak on Nov. 8, 2000, when the nation awoke to the shock of a presidential race ending in a virtual tie, Florida's voting laws and practices have been the subject of intense debate and scrutiny. The disputed election results led the state to adopt sweeping changes in how votes are cast and counted and how voter rolls are maintained.
Yet as Florida becomes an election-year battleground again, with Governor Bush vowing to ensure victory here for his brother and Democrats eager to reclaim the state, its electoral practices - including its felon disenfranchisement law - are drawing renewed attention.
In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons. At the same time, some counties mistakenly allowed actual felons to vote or turned away legitimate voters as suspected felons. A lawsuit filed in January 2001 sought to prevent similar errors, while another, filed just before the 2000 election, charged that the ban on felons voting discriminated against blacks and should be overturned.
Critics say that President Bush would have lost in 2000 if disenfranchised felons had been allowed to vote. A 2001 report by a University of Minnesota sociologist counted more than 600,000 in Florida, not including those still in prison, on parole or on probation. More than one in four black men here may not vote, the report found. The state says it is impossible to know how many disenfranchised felons live here, because some have died or moved.
Although the Democratic Party here has not made fighting the ban a priority since 2000, to the frustration of civil rights groups, Scott Maddox, the party chairman, said he had followed the issue closely and believed the governor and legislature supported the ban for partisan reasons.
"It's amazing to me that these Republicans that keep quoting the Bible seemingly don't believe in redemption and forgiveness when it comes to restoring civil rights," Mr. Maddox said through a spokeswoman.
Florida is the largest of the seven states that permanently take away the voting rights of all felons. While other states have scaled back similar bans in recent years, Governor Bush and the Legislature call their law a necessary consequence for citizens who commit crimes, and point out that many are eventually granted clemency. "The governor believes this is a fair process," Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, wrote in an e-mail response to questions about the ban. He pointed out that more criminals were getting their rights restored without hearings under a smoother process set in place by the governor.
Partly because the ban drew widespread attention after 2000, the backlog of felons whose applications for rights restoration are under review - 35,585 as of March 15 - is more than five times what it was in July 2001. The state automatically restores the rights of some felons after reviewing their records, while others need only fill out a short application. But others, including convicted drug traffickers, sex offenders, violent offenders and those guilty of public corruption, must go through an investigation and wait for a hearing in Tallahassee, which can take years.
Many felons apply not just to regain voting rights, but because they cannot qualify for certain state-issued professional licenses - nursing or contracting licenses, for example - unless their rights are restored.
Julio Lima, who was convicted on cocaine trafficking charges in 1997 said he had since gone to school to become an insurance adjuster but could not get a license without civil rights. Mr. Lima, 34, said he applied for restoration in 2002 and was still waiting for a hearing date.
The clemency board, which consists of the governor and his three cabinet members, has files on each applicant. The State Parole Commission recommends before their hearings whether to accept their applications, based partly on investigations that might include interviews with employers, neighbors and victims. But the board does not always follow the recommendations.
"How's the anger situation going?" Mr. Bush asked one man after leafing through his file on the most recent hearing day, March 18, when the clemency board considered 57 voting rights cases.
"You've stayed clean?" the governor asked another.
Over the course of that morning, board members seemed especially interested to know whether former alcohol and drug abusers were now sober. They had little patience for multiple traffic violations, domestic violence records and blame passing.
They rejected the application of a man convicted of killing a pregnant woman while driving drunk in 1989 (her mother was there, tearfully saying that he had never apologized) and a man convicted of a lewd act against a child in 1993. They restored the rights of a former drug addict who now helps AIDS patients and a convicted drug trafficker who said he wanted to make his young daughter proud by voting.
In all, the board restored the rights of 23 felons, rejected the applications of 30 and delayed decisions on 4.
The law has been on the books since 1868, when Florida gave blacks the right to vote as a condition of the state's being readmitted to the Union after the Civil War. A new State Constitution drafted that year expanded the number of crimes that required disenfranchisement, a change that critics say was meant to affect blacks disproportionately. They also charge that this discriminatory intent of the ban persists even though the provision was re-enacted in 1968 as part of a new Constitution.
A federal judge in Miami dismissed one lawsuit seeking to overturn the ban, Johnson v. Bush, filed just before the 2000 election by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. But in December, an appeals court in Atlanta reversed the decision and ordered a trial, saying the state had to prove it re-enacted the law for a "nondiscriminatory purpose" and not just for the sake of continuity. The state has asked for a rehearing of the appeal.
In recent decades, the largest number of people who regained their voting rights in a year was 16,192 in 1986, under Gov. Bob Graham, a Democrat. But the numbers dropped sharply in the 1990's, when another Democrat, Lawton Chiles, was governor. That is because the state made it harder for many felons to get restoration during the tough-on-crime era of the early 90's.
"Jeb Bush is not responsible for this problem," said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. "It's more than 100 years in the making under both Democrats and Republicans. But Jeb Bush and his cabinet are the only ones who can alleviate it right now."
Lifting the ban would require a constitutional amendment, and civil rights groups have started a petition drive to try to put the issue on the ballot. Mr. Simon and others said an easier alternative would be for Mr. Bush and his cabinet to eliminate the hearing process.
Several thousand felons apply each month; in Mr. Bush's first three years in office, from 1999 through 2001, the state restored the rights of an average of 1,550 people a year, according to data from the Florida Parole Commission. But the number jumped in the last two years: 6,649 felons had their voting rights restored in 2002, and 14,828 in 2003, according to the commission.
Mr. DiPietre, the governor's spokesman, said the application rules were streamlined in 2001. Among other changes, most felons guilty of less serious crimes and those with outstanding court fines were allowed to skip hearings.
Another suit, filed by the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators and others in March 2001, led to a court order last summer requiring the State Department of Corrections to help 125,000 felons apply to get their voting rights back once they had finished serving their sentences.
A third suit, filed by the N.A.A.C.P. in January 2001, resulted in a settlement in which the state agreed to screen suspected felons more carefully before reporting them to county elections supervisors for possible removal from the voting rolls.
Only Maine and Vermont allow felons to vote even while they are in prison. Besides Florida, only Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska and Virginia take away all felons' voting rights and do not automatically restore them.
"Why should we keep people from voting after we spent all this money rehabilitating them?" Representative Kendrick B. Meek, a Miami Democrat, said. "Why stand in judgment on whether they should vote or not? This is politicians standing in and playing the role of virtuecrat."
That was how John Eason, the man convicted of committing a lewd act on a child, said he felt as he left his hearing, his application denied. He wanted his rights back so he could get a contractor's license, he said, to take over his father's business. Mr. Eason's sister traveled with him from Lakeland to tell Mr. Bush that he had been a model uncle.
"The government thinks they're doing society a favor by showing that it's still convicting the bad people," Mr. Eason said. "But how does it benefit society to keep me down in this way?"
Things turned out better for Cecil Taylor, who had been convicted of driving drunk and whose college art teacher came to speak of his potential. After the board asked Mr. Taylor if he had drunk alcohol since his conviction, and Mr. Taylor said he had not, Mr. Bush restored his rights - with a caveat.
"I'm praying that you're not going to start drinking again," Mr. Bush told him. "When we make these decisions, sometimes it puts us in a little bit of a precarious position in that you could let us down."
-------- terrorism
Europe, U.S. Diverge on How to Fight Terrorism
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28975-2004Mar27?language=printer
LONDON -- While President Bush was giving an address earlier this month describing the war on terrorism as "not a figure of speech" but "an inescapable calling of our generation," the official in charge of overseeing Europe's counterterrorism efforts was offering a far different assessment.
"Europe is not at war," Javier Solana, foreign policy chief for the European Union, told a German newspaper. "We have to energetically oppose terrorism, but we mustn't change the way we live."
Between those two declarations lies a gap that reflects the different modern histories, cultures and approaches to terrorism of the United States and Europe, according to politicians and analysts on the continent.
The Madrid train bombings that killed 190 rush-hour commuters on March 11 -- the first major attack on European soil believed to have been carried out by Islamic extremists connected to the al Qaeda network -- has compelled European nations to reassess how they fight terrorism. At a summit that ended Friday, EU leaders announced several measures designed to increase cooperation among their police forces and intelligence services. But the attacks have not led to a fundamental shift in Europe's approach.
"The Europeans are simply not as shocked by terrorism as Americans were," said Michael Clarke, director of the International Policy Institute at King's College London. "March 11 in Madrid was a wake-up call to Europe, whereas September 11 to America was the beginning of a new kind of war. So we say we've got to do more of the same, only a bit more vigorously, which is a very European reaction. But for the United States, September 11 meant not just new policies but a new way of thinking about the world."
Nor have the Madrid attacks led to an increase in transatlantic unity against terrorism. Instead, analysts said, the attacks have reinforced familiar themes and old grievances with the Bush administration, especially the belief that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has given terrorists a new base and a new cause to rally behind.
"What Bush calls the war against terrorism is the war which Bush chose to wage in Iraq," said Francois Heisbourg, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. "And that war has become massively unpopular in Europe. People see it here as aggravating terrorism, not fighting it."
Interviews and polling research suggest that voters who ousted the pro-American government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar after the Madrid bombings did so at least in part because they believed Spain's participation in the Iraq war had provoked the attacks. Polls in Britain and Italy, whose governments have also been high-profile supporters of the war, suggest voters there fear their countries have also joined al Qaeda's hit list.
Unlike during the Cold War, when most of Western Europe shared with the United States the same sense of danger from nuclear attack, many Europeans see terrorism as a selective threat -- and believe they can opt out by distancing themselves from Washington.
During a visit to Lisbon on Wednesday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged that the Madrid bombings had exacerbated the divergence between the United States and Europe. But he urged other European leaders not to allow these differences to derail the fight against terrorism. "It would indeed be a ghastly victory for the people who committed the carnage of the innocent in Madrid, if in addition to the destruction and death, they also caused us to turn in recrimination on each other," he said.
Analysts trace some of the differences between the United States and Europe to the ways they view recent history. For Europeans, the seminal date is November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and Europe began the process of reunification with the former Soviet bloc. The end of the Cold War and European reunification has been the enduring narrative of the past 15 years, one that has promised peace and prosperity.
But for the United States, that narrative has been supplanted by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon and a new global campaign that some Americans liken to a new world war.
European leaders insist they are prepared to use force to combat terrorism. They point to their enthusiastic support for the U.S.-led military campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. And Bush and European leaders have all identified the lack of democracy, human rights safeguards and economic opportunity as root causes of popular support for Islamic extremists in the Muslim world.
"At the government level I don't see any huge differences in principle," said Gary Samore, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "Everyone accepts you need both hard power in the near term to deal with terrorist operatives and soft power to deal in the long term with root causes."
Europeans have had decades of bitter experience in dealing with domestic terrorism. Britain waged a 25-year campaign against the Irish Republican Army, while Spain has battled the Basque separatist group ETA. Germany defeated the Baader-Meinhof gang and Italy, the Red Brigades. France has engaged in a long struggle with Islamic extremists from Algeria.
"Their experience told them terrorism is a threat but not a war," said Mustafa Alani, a terrorism analyst at the Royal United Services Institute here. "If it's a war, you have to commit yourself fully -- all your resources, everything, and they found this has no appeal in public opinion."
European officials say they recognize that the diffuse nature of Islamic terrorism -- small cells of militants operating autonomously -- is a new phenomenon that requires better cross-border cooperation to combat. They also concede that Islamic radicals are using European cities as staging grounds for attacks elsewhere, beginning with the Sept. 11 strikes, which were carried out largely by an al Qaeda cell in Hamburg. Several countries, notably Britain, have adopted tough anti-terrorism legislation and rounded up hundreds of suspected operatives. But many officials acknowledge they have been slow to implement steps to deal with terrorism on a transnational level.
The way in which Jamal Zougam, the principal suspect in the Madrid bombings, slipped through the net of several nations illustrates the problem. Spanish, French and Moroccan investigators have all said that Zougam, a Moroccan national, was on their list of suspected terrorists and that they evaluated him as a potential threat. But each also said others took the threat less than seriously and failed to arrest him.
"There's a huge gap in terms of cooperation and coordination of information-gathering and intelligence," Alani said. "This is a transnational threat -- many operations are planned and prepared not in the target country but somewhere else. You cannot really fight it in a single state."
Just as in the United States, where the CIA and FBI have been reluctant to share resources and information, intelligence and law enforcement agencies in Europe have jealously guarded their own sources, methods and information. While they may cooperate with each other and with their U.S. counterparts on a case-by-case basis, analysts say there is no overall strategy or protocol. And many fear that the appointment of a new "anti-terrorism czar" -- one of a package of new measures EU leaders announced Thursday -- could add another layer of bureaucracy without improving effectiveness.
"It is a defining moment for the lack of definition," said Timothy Garton Ash, an international relations analyst at Oxford University. "We have yet to see a really coherent European response."
Many Europeans contend that the Bush administration's inability or unwillingness to try to make diplomatic progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a fundamental sore point in the fight against terrorism.
"You wouldn't do away with worldwide terrorism if you resolved it, but you'd reduce the breeding ground for extremism in the Middle East," said Volker Perthes of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Ultimately, said Clarke of the International Policy Institute, Europeans and Americans have a fundamental cultural divide. "You're a can-do society," he said, "and there's an American cultural propensity to see terrorism, like other issues, as a problem that has to be solved. But the European attitude tends much more to see it as something that has to be managed."
----
CIA: AL QAIDA CARRIED OUT MADRID STRIKES
Sun, 28 Mar 2004
[MENL]
http://menewsline.com/stories/2004/march/03_29_2.html
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. intelligence community has determined that Al Qaida carried out the multiple train bombings in Madrid in which more than 200 people were killed.
CIA director George Tenet said the March 11 strikes on commuter trains in Madrid implicated Al Qaida operatives. Tenet dismissed the initial Spanish government claim that the Basque separatist ETA group conducted the attacks.
"While the investigation is far from complete, available information strongly implicates Spain-based Islamic extremists linked to Al Qaida as being responsible," Tenet said in a written statement for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States on Wednesday. "Spanish authorities have detained nearly a dozen suspects, many with ties to former Spain Al Qaida cell leader Barakat Yarkas, but we have no information indicating whether the central Al Qaida leadership ordered or approved the attack."
Tenet's testimony was the first public confirmation by the U.S. intelligence community that Al Qaida was believed to have masterminded the bombings. The CIA chief, however, said the agency did not assess that the Al Qaida leadership provided financial or operational help.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- health
Plan to Battle AIDS Worldwide Is Falling Short
March 28, 2004
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/international/28AIDS.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
Three years after the United Nations declared a worldwide offensive against AIDS and 14 months after President Bush promised $15 billion for AIDS treatment in poor countries, shortages of money and battles over patents have kept antiretroviral drugs from reaching more than 90 percent of the poor people who need them.
Progress in distributing the drugs, which have sharply cut the death rate in the United States and other Western countries, has been excruciatingly slow despite steep drops in their prices.
As a result, only about 300,000 people in the world's poorest nations are getting the drugs, of six million who need them, according to the World Health Organization.
Experts, advocacy groups and health officials agree that the delays, compounded by inadequate medical facilities and training in very poor countries, are likely to persist unless spending is stepped up sharply.
Early this month, Stephen Lewis, the special United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa, conceded that the W.H.O.'s ambitious plan to have three million people in treatment by 2005 - announced on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day - was already collapsing from a lack of money. Donations to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are now about $1.6 billion a year, barely 20 percent of what Secretary General Kofi Annan said was needed when he created the fund in 2001.
Saying that global contributions come to a tiny fraction of what is being spent on military operations and building civilian institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Lewis added that if the W.H.O. program failed, "there are no excuses left, no rationalizations to hide behind, no murky slanders to justify indifference - there will only be the mass graves of the betrayed."
While Mr. Bush promised in his 2003 State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over five years on AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, his budget requests have fallen far short of that goal. For the most recent donation to the Global Fund, he requested only $200 million, although Congress authorized $550 million.
Nor have Europe and Asia been as generous as the fund had hoped.
Dr. Richard G. A. Feachem, a Briton who is the fund's executive director, put a brave face on the situation, describing current donations as "a steep upward flight path to our cruising altitude, which we anticipate to be $8 billion." To get there in the fund's first two years would be "inconceivable," he added. He is lobbying Congress for $1.2 billion for 2005.
At the same time, few people in poor countries have been able to get lower-priced generic antiretroviral drugs. While the generic drugs have been approved by the W.H.O., endorsed by the World Bank and used in several African countries, the Bush administration has so far paid only for medicines that are still under patent and cost much more.
For example, Daniel Berman, co-director of the Doctors Without Borders campaign for low-cost drugs, said that in Zimbabwe his organization planned to treat 1,000 patients with drugs from two approved Indian generic makers, Cipla Ltd. and Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd.
Both companies combine three antiretrovirals so that a day's dose is just two pills and the cost is $244 to $292 per patient per year. Meanwhile, Mr. Berman said, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta plans to pay for the treatment of 1,000 Zimbabweans, buying the same three drugs separately from GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Boehringer-Ingelheim. The best prices available in Africa from those companies, he said, add up to $562 a year, and a daily dose is six pills.
Advocates of cheap drugs say the Bush administration has yielded to pressure from the pharmaceutical lobby to find ways to reject the generics.
On Friday, Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, wrote a joint letter to the White House urging it to accept W.H.O.-approved generics.
In a separate letter, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, accused the administration of trying to set standards for Indian generics higher than those for American ones.
A spokesman for Randall L. Tobias, the administration's AIDS coordinator, said any suggestion that he was snubbing generics was "utter nonsense."
"We will buy whatever drug is safe and effective at the lowest possible price," said the spokesman, Dr. Mark R. Dybul. "We don't care if it's made by Cipla or Ranbaxy, in South Africa or Brazil or Nigeria."
Mr. Tobias has scheduled a meeting in Botswana for Monday to ascertain whether the W.H.O.'s approval process is rigorous enough.
Dr. Lembit Rago, who leads the W.H.O. assessments, said he used "absolutely the same principles" as the Food and Drug Administration, and borrowed his inspectors from regulatory agencies in Canada, France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. As soon as his office approved the Indian pills, he said, "a very cold wind began to blow from the U.S."
"It is no secret that Pharma is lobbying against us in a big way," he said.
A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association of America, the industry's American lobbying group, said his association was "not involved in any way in this." But he called the Indian drugs "new combinations that have not been appropriately treated."
Dr. Dybul said Mr. Tobias wanted to see all the data the Indian companies gave the W.H.O.
A W.H.O. spokeswoman said the agency signed confidentiality agreements, but she said the Bush administration could ask the Indian companies for the data.
Against that backdrop, prices for both branded and generic medicines have plunged in the last two years. Last October, a foundation organized by former President Bill Clinton announced an agreement with Indian and South African generic makers to sell the drugs for $140 per patient per year if large orders were guaranteed, payment was in cash and the drug maker did not have to pay the legal and lobbying costs of getting each drug licensed in each country.
In January, Mr. Clinton announced that he had brokered another price-cut deal with five companies making AIDS tests. One of the companies, Becton, Dickinson & Company, dropped the cost of its CD-4 count, which measures immune cells, to as little as $3, from a high of $10.
On Dec. 9, with little fanfare, an important step took place in South Africa. Two pharmaceutical giants, Glaxo and Boehringer-Ingelheim, agreed to grant licenses to produce AIDS drugs to four generic companies from India and South Africa.
The companies will be allowed to sell the drugs anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. In return, Glaxo and Boehringer will get royalties of 5 percent of sales. Under the threat of heavy fines, the companies had backed down from their original plan: a license for one small generic maker supplying only South Africa's public hospitals and royalties of 15 percent to 30 percent.
The Canadian government has proposed a law encouraging its drug makers to make cheap copies of drugs to treat AIDS and malaria for export to poor countries. The bill is bogged down in Parliament.
Treatment plans have varied wildly in different countries. South Africa, with the world's largest number of AIDS patients, was slow to roll out nationwide treatment because of years of opposition by President Thabo Mbeki. India, which has the second largest number, has been slow to negotiate low prices with its own generic companies. Brazil makes its own generic drugs. Romania buys only brand-name drugs, but its epidemic is confined to about 10,000 people.
Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, has had trouble running even so much as a pilot program for 15,000 of an estimated 3.5 million infected people. Many of the country's 25 treatment centers, which were selling the drugs at a subsidized price of $85 a year, ran dry in September and did not get new supplies until February.
Malaysia is the only country to exercise a "compulsory license" right under trade treaties to ignore a patent and import generics, said James P. Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a group that is pushing for cheaper drugs. Uganda, Mozambique and Zambia may soon do the same, he said, but China backed away from doing so for fear of American trade retaliation. "They're using older drugs that are already off patent in China," he said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Grand Rapids police monitored anti-war protests, chief says
Associated Press
Sun, Mar. 28, 2004
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/8299281.htm
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - When opposition to the war in Iraq began to mount last year, city police sent undercover officers to anti-war meetings and rallies, collecting intelligence about the aims of activists, the department's chief confirmed.
Grand Rapids Police Chief Harry Dolan said the officers were sent after police received information activists planned unlawful measures, such as blocking traffic on a downtown Grand Rapids street.
Police had reason for heightened concern about protesters, because of the arrest of 12 people at a January 2003 rally protesting an appearance by President Bush, Dolan said.
The protesters were arrested when dozens marched through downtown streets after the main rally had concluded and refused police orders to disperse.
"We are living in a different time now. It's a different day," Dolan told The Grand Rapids Press for a story published Sunday.
But war protesters say the surveillance infringed on their civil rights more than it protected them from terror. In one case, they say, police threatened the job of a protester and said they would arrest her if she identified undercover officers she recognized.
Abby Puls, 24, said she was leaving a Grand Rapids protest in March 2003, when undercover officers called her over to their car.
She claims that one of the men in the car took her hand, then squeezed it hard enough to force her to tell them her full name. The other hinted she could lose her job at a Kent County courthouse if judges found out she was "choosing sides" on the war, Puls said.
He also said she could be arrested for "hindering and opposing" a police investigation if she identified undercover police, Puls said.
Dolan confirmed officers, whom he would not identify, threatened Puls with arrest if she identified them. But the police chief said they did so because they feared their safety could be compromised. Dolan said the officers denied threatening her job and said no one squeezed her hand to make her reveal her name.
Information from: The Grand Rapids Press, http://www.gr-press.com
----
Remarks by David Lochbaum, Nuclear Safety Engineer, about Safety Culture at the UNPLUG Salem Rally
March 28, 2004
From: Norm Cohen <ncohen12@comcast.net>
Good afternoon and thanks for coming out for this event. UNPLUG Salem is sponsoring this event. I must start with a plug for Norm Cohen. During my seven years at the Union of Concerned Scientists, I have worked with activists around the country. None can match Norm's combination of persistence, craftiness, and capability. The people of this region are very fortunate to have Norm Cohen on the job.
I would like to talk to you about safety culture and how it affects nuclear power plant operation. I hope to provide a solid foundation for the next speaker, who will chronicle very serious safety culture problems at the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear plants.
According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, safety culture is:
Although there are alternative definitions of safety culture, there is general agreement on the important attributes of safety culture. These include a questioning attitude, conservative decisionmaking, attention to detail, personal accountability, adherence to procedures, as well as the management traits and processes, such as leadership, conservative operating philosophy, effective training, and effective corrective and preventative action, that reinforce these attributes of the workforce.1
The Presidential Commission examining Three Mile Island, the worst nuclear power plant accident in U.S. history that happened 25 years ago today, concluded that safety culture played a key role in that disaster:
After many years of operation of nuclear power plants, with no evidence that any member of the general public has been hurt, the belief that nuclear power plants are sufficiently safe grew into a conviction. One must recognize this to understand why many steps that could have prevented the accident at Three Mile Island were not taken.
[T]his attitude must be changed to one that says that nuclear power by its very nature is potentially dangerous, and, therefore, one must continually question whether the safeguards already in place are sufficient to prevent major accidents. A comprehensive system is required in which equipment and human beings are treated with equal importance.2
Twenty-five years after TMI, equipment and human beings at nuclear power plants are still not getting treated with sufficient importance.
In 1996, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) ordered two nuclear reactors at the Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut to remain shut down until its owner had restored a proper safety culture. The NRC based its order on the following findings:
1. A large number of allegations (an average of 42 per year) were being raised to the NRC, which indicated that the Licensee's own programs were not effective in resolving its employee concerns.
2. The Licensee's employees believed that the managers responsible for discrimination were not appropriately disciplined.
3. The Licensee's management frequently identified problems but was ineffective in implementing corrective actions.
4. The Licensee's management was reluctant to admit mistakes.
5. The Licensee's managers lacked skill in handling concerns and were generally not supportive of their employees raising concerns.3
Late last year, the NRC delayed the restart of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio because of concerns about safety culture. The plant' s owners conceded that the NRC' s concerns were real:
Over time, the plant appeared to become complacent. In many areas, a minimum compliance standard existed in management and thus throughout the Davis-Besse organization. ... There was a lack of sensitivity to nuclear safety and the focus was to justify existing conditions. The overall conclusion is that Management ineffectively implemented processes and thus failed to detect and address plant problems as opportunities arose.4
At Millstone, workers raising safety concerns faced illegal retaliation. Many were fired simply because they dared to express a safety concern. At Davis-Besse, workers raising safety concerns found deaf ears. Management ignored their concerns until workers tired of even voicing them.
As you will hear in a few moments, the safety culture at Salem and Hope Creek today is just as bad as that at Millstone and Davis-Besse.
Some say that bad safety cultures occur when greedy plant owners placed profits ahead of safety. But that doesn' t make sense - no one profited from Three Mile Island, Millstone, or Davis-Besse.
The accident at Three Mile Island turned a $470 million asset into a billion dollar liability that nearly bankrupted the owner. The Millstone debacle cost nearly a billion dollars to clean up that nearly bankrupted the owner. The Davis-Besse debacle cost over $600 million to fix.
Who and what allowed things to get so bad that hundreds of millions of dollars were needed to restore safety margins?
The best explanation I have read is in Diane Vaughn' s 1996 book, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, about the first space shuttle tragedy. Vaughn described the fundamental problem as 'normalization of deviance' where abnormal equipment performance happened so often that it became normal and expected. The Challenger exploded shortly after launch in January 1986 because o-rings on the fuel tank failed. But on seven of the nine shuttle flights in 1985, the fuel tank o-rings had partially failed. It wasn' t supposed to happen, but it was happening. Because it happened and didn' t lead to disaster, it became accepted. Once it was tolerated, incrementally worse o-ring failures were also acceptable - until Challenger blew up. Only then were the fuel tanks re-designed to eliminate the o-ring vulnerability.
'Normalization of deviance' is essentially another term for bad safety culture. It is the lack of a questioning attitude, the lack of an effective means to find and fix problems. It is abandoning rigorous commitment to high standards and instead lowering the bar to whatever level is necessary to get over.
All of the problems that teamed up to cause the Three Mile Island accident had happened individually several times before the accident. When the first problem happened, it didn' t cause an accident, so it wasallowed to remain unfixed. Then a second problem developed and was also tolerated. A third, fourth, and fifth problem made individual appearances and were allowed to stay. Defense-in-depth was being torn down brick by brick. Twenty-five years ago today, many known but tolerated problems coalesced to cause a reactor core meltdown.
This pattern repeated at Millstone and Davis-Besse; fortunately without the final chapter on meltdown.
Literally dozens of warning signs were dismissed at these nuclear plants, cutting gaping holes in the safety nets. It took longer than two years to fix the safety problems at these nuclear plants, illustrating just how bad conditions had gotten.
It is said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Sadly, that appears to apply to the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear plants. These reactors are literally down the road from here. PSEG management is figuratively steering these reactors down the same road that Millstone and Davis-Besse traveled. Those journeys were unsafe and uneconomical. It makes no sense for PSEG management to follow that map.
But they are on that road and they have been on that road for some time. About a year ago, our next speaker worked at Salem and Hope Creek. She communicated warnings to senior management about equipment problems. She advised senior management about problems with the methods used at Salem and Hope Creek to find and fix safety issues. Senior management didn' t want to hear it. They fired her. The only way that management can proceed along a road that is unsafe and uneconomical towards a destination that spells disaster is to blind themselves to all road signs and deafen themselves to all warnings.
Our next speaker worked at PSEG Nuclear for five years; not as someone who cared for the equipment but as someone who cared for the people. As a direct report to the PSEG Nuclear President, she focused on long-standing people and leadership issues that contributed to mediocre performance over the prior 20 years.
She received awards from PSEG for her innovative leadership, coaching initiatives, and contributions. She fought for the people of Salem and Hope Creek, wanting them to be respected, valued and heard. When she took on voicing safety concerns of operators and the management team to the Chief Nuclear Officer and Chairman of the Board, she was fired and rushed out the door.
Unceremoniously and illegally, PSEG executives discarded one of their best " early warning systems" - someone with the courage and commitment to bring nuclear safety issues to the attention of leaders who needed to know. It speaks volumes that workers, who did not trust the Employee Concerns Program and senior management, trusted her to champion their safety concerns. But instead of praising Dr. Harvin for putting safety and people first, PSEG showed her the door. It silenced her and sent a very loud message for the people of Salem and Hope Creek to keep their mouths shut or suffer the same fate.
PSEG compounded its errors by labeling Dr. Harvin a disgruntled employee. What company executives failed to realize is that Dr. Harvin remains committed to the mission she undertook six years ago when she came to Salem and Hope Creek - to have this site be a safe and great place for people to work.
Had PSEG listened to Dr. Harvin instead of firing her, things would be much better today. Workers would be heard instead of ignored. Many safety issues would be corrected, instead of denied. The site's safety culture would be improving, instead of declining.
Just ten days ago, PSEG executives finally admitted to the NRC that the site' s safety culture problems are very deep and not easily fixed. These are many of the same problems that Dr. Harvin was fired for voicing last year. Hopefully, PSEG is listening now. After all, the best way to get out of a hole is to stop digging.
It is my pleasure to introduce to you a talented, capable, and caring leader - Dr. Kymn Harvin.
1 NRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards letter ACRSR-2042 dated July 16, 2003, "Safety Culture."
2 NRC Chairman Richard A. Meserve, Speech titled "Safety Culture: An NRC Perspective," at the 2002 INPO CEO Conference, November 8, 2002.
[Available online at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/speeches/2002/s-02-033.html]
3 Nuclear Regulatory Commission notice published in the Federal Register, November 13, 1996, p. 58254.
4 FirstEnergy, " Root Cause Analysis Report: Failure to Identify Significant Degradation of the Reactor Pressure Vessel Head," August 13, 2002.
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