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NUCLEAR
Feature: Safety issues still haunt nukes
GULF WAR WIVES FACE BABY MISERY
Reactor at Lithuania's Ignalina nuclear plant closed for maintenance
India test-fires two anti-aircraft Sky missiles two minutes apart
Iran's resumption of work on nuclear fuel cycle could damage confidence
Iran Stops Building Centrifuges
Arms Hunter to Tell Congress No Iraqi WMD Found
LIBYAN INSPECTIONS POINT TO NUKE TIES WITH EGYPT
Russia Boasts Weapon to Battle Star Wars
Nato's 'Unfriendly' Expansion Worries Russia
Ukrainian Nuclear Reactor Is Shut Down
US urged to rethink its nuclear stockpiles
Nuclear Security Decisions Are Shrouded in Secrecy
In One Small Town, Radioactive Waste Is a Welcome Sight
Pantex weighs worker training
The Armageddon Plan
Kucinich Takes 26.53 Percent in Alaska
The Empire Backfires
MILITARY
New Attacks in Afghanistan Raise Concerns About Security
Nigeria's ruling party wins poll, almost 50 people died
Ivoirian Opposition Calls for Protests
Chinese, Indian defence ministers agree to boost military ties
Censored Study on Bioterror Doubts U.S. Preparedness
NEAR MISS CLAIM DENIED BY BNFL
Air Force helped craft measure awarding Boeing tanker deal
Federal Contracts Air Force Work Renewal Brightens SI's Outlook
Vast majority of Portuguese want troops in Iraq withdrawn: poll
US now looking to install a PM in Iraq
Iraq as a weapons lab
Shiites Organize to Block U.S. Plan
Four Killed in Mosul; Shiite Newspaper Shut
British MP wants economic sanctions against Israel
Call to Indict Sharon Ignites Political Storm
Draft Indictment Charges Sharon
Sharon's Son Told to Hand Over Papers in Corruption Cases
Hamas Leader Calls Bush Foe of Muslims
Scrapping of Arab Summit Sparks Recriminations
Summit's Collapse Leaves Arab Leaders in Disarray
NATO fighters ready to defend Baltic states: NATO chief
NATO chief says "some nuts to crack" in Russia relations
Conflict Ends in Pakistani Tribal Lands
Lawmakers Rebuke Israeli Intelligence Services Over Iraq
Iraq Friendly Fire Blamed On Marine
Marine Is Blamed in Marine Deaths
Cut disputed scenes from `Jenin, Jenin,' Israeli court proposes
G.I.'s Padlock Baghdad Paper Accused of Lies
The Question We Should Be Asking
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Rice Defends Refusal To Testify Compromise Sought With 9/11 Commission
President Asked Aide to Explore Iraq Link to 9/11
Kerry a firm foe of death penalty
Homeland Security's Early Test
Madrid attacks may spur Basque group to rethink terrorism
19 Killed in Uzbekistan Attacks and Explosion
OTHER
No Health Risks Found Near Intel Plant - Study
Rapid growth of "dead zones" in oceans threatens planet
Type Of Buckyball Shown To Cause Brain Damage In Fish
D.C. Knew Of Lead Problems In 2002
ACTIVISTS
Protesters gear up for N.Y.
Daniel Ellsberg sees a new trend
It's the end of the world as we know it
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Feature: Safety issues still haunt nukes
March 29, 2004
By Eliza Barclay
United Press International
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040303-044334-3231r.htm
Twenty-five years after the nation's most serious nuclear accident occurred at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pa., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- the federal agency that regulates U.S. commercial nuclear power plants -- still fields serious concerns about the safety of nuclear power.
On March 28, 1979, the TMI-2 reactor core at the plant, near Middletown, Pa., suffered a partial meltdown, the result of equipment malfunctions, design-related problems and worker errors.
Though the partial meltdown caused two serious situations inside the reactor -- the creation of several small steam voids, or bubbles, and one large hydrogen bubble, either of which could have caused a breach of containment and a much bigger radiation release -- both were resolved, albeit narrowly. Workers injected water pressure into the reactor cooling system to disintegrate the steam bubbles and slowly reduce the size of the hydrogen bubble.
The reactor core did release more than 10 million curies -- basic units of radioactivity -- into the atmosphere in the form of noble gases. But those gases do not interact with the body and therefore no one in the area received an appreciable dose. This was verified by later studies on the health of local residents conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the NRC, which indicated the most significant consequences were psychological.
The commission, reeling from public outcry about its handling of the event, adopted watershed safety policies, including operator training programs and more comprehensive emergency response capabilities. The industry created a peer group -- the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations.
Critics of the NRC's regulatory strategies for keeping the nation's nuclear power plants safe say the recent closure of FirstEnergy Corp.'s Davis-Besse plant, near Oak Harbor, Ohio, indicates the commission still is not maintaining a sufficient level of vigilance in its monitoring of the industry.
In 2002, inspectors performing a routine inspection of the Davis-Besse plant found a pineapple-sized corrosion cavity in the reactor head. The subsequent repairs and NRC-ordered shutdown -- needed to avert what could have been a serious accident -- lasted almost two years.
On March 16, First Energy resumed plant operation, but after only one day the corporation was forced to shut down the plant again because of valve problems -- which were related to electricity generation, not reactor safety.
First Energy spokesman Todd Schneider said the company expected the plant to be up and running again by March 20 -- it restarted the morning of March 26.
"If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said the demons of Three Mile Island had been exorcised. But you can't quite say that today because of Davis-Besse," Harold Denton, the NRC's nuclear reactor regulation chief in 1979, told an audience at the NRC's 16th annual Regulatory Information Conference on March 11 in Washington.
The watchdog group Public Citizen said although the NRC touts its innovative "safety culture" as part of Three Mile Island's consequences, nuclear power, by nature, can never be safe enough.
"Nuclear power is too unforgiving of human nature," Dave Ritter, a policy analyst for Public Citizen, told United Press International. "NRC may send more inspectors to Davis-Besse now, but there could be a problem with another plant that they are not paying close enough attention to."
The commission contends the Three Mile Island event helped to usher in a new era a safety and, although significant challenges remain in enforcement, the industry has come a long way since 1979.
In remembrance of the disaster, the NRC made a presentation on March 3 to an audience at its headquarters in Rockville, Md. Various commission officials described how Three Mile Island changed the course of commercial nuclear power in the United States, and in a statement they said nuclear power plants are significantly safer since the event.
"We were ill-prepared when it happened, but since the accident, we have been determined to learn from the experience," said William Travers, NRC's executive director for operations.
"We now have a resident inspector program -- inspectors are located at every plant," said NRC Commissioner Jeffrey S. Merrifield. "There are also regional offices from which NRC would immediately dispatch a team of experts in the case of another accident."
Nuclear watchdog groups assert the commission could do more to improve the safety of plants, prevent accidents, and maintain open communication lines with organizations beyond the industry.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer who has been working on nuclear issues with the Union of Concerned Scientists since 1996, wrote a retrospective in 1999 for Three Mile Island's 20th anniversary. He included in his comments four calls to action for NRC that, if adopted, he said would help it avoid another reactor accident, perhaps with even more serious consequences than Three Mile Island.
Lochbaum told UPI that five years later, NRC has only made noticeable improvements in one out of the four issues he had called upon them to address.
"NRC now communicates more openly, but it still must develop risk studies based on all information, not just a convenient subset of data; respond quickly to warning signs, instead of waiting for problems to avalanche into disaster; and remain aggressively vigilant to prevent complacency from eroding safety margins," Lochbaum said.
Commission Chairman Nils J. Diaz admitted at the presentation complacency is a problem that has plagued NRC since Three Mile Island, even as the agency has tried to address it.
"I think it is a fact that human nature sometimes relies on what I call prosperity," Diaz said, "and that prosperity, in many ways, could lead to complacency."
Since 1984, 27 nuclear power plants have been closed for more than a year for safety repairs.
"There have been many signals that the equipment in these old plants is wearing down," Lochbaum said. "If NRC was doing a better job on safety, we wouldn't have all these shutdowns. In the case of Davis-Besse, the NRC felt that it was a good performer, so they sent few inspectors there and weren't able to detect the problem."
The Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a network of citizens and environmental organizations concerned about nuclear energy issues, also questions whether the NRC is dealing with safety issues appropriately. NIRS, along with Be Safe, a project of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, is sponsoring the Three Mile Island 25th Anniversary Anti-Nuclear Days of Action through March 28 in several states across the nation. State and local groups have organized educational events to commemorate the event and to call for actions to prevent future nuclear accidents.
"Some reactors' vulnerabilities have been corrected over the years," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of NIRS. "But the record is at best mixed -- another incident like Three Mile Island could definitely occur."
Aside from technical vulnerabilities, since Sept. 11, 2001, the NRC also has had to reckon with the possibility of nuclear power plants as potential targets for terrorists. As part of its improved security programs, the commission will be conducting approximately 22 force-on-force exercises per year -- simulated, commando-style attacks -- on the 104 U.S. plants, starting next October. Each site will perform a security exercise at least once every three years.
Just as it has devoted more attention to security issues, the NRC also has made a point of confining access to discussions about security to a select circle of experts. Lochbaum noted that prior to Sept. 11, the NRC held monthly public meetings with groups, such as the UCS to discuss safety and security policy issues.
"Since 9/11, NRC has closed its doors to everyone except the industry," Lochbaum said.
The NRC also pulled its risk studies from the public arena because it feared they were too accessible for terrorists, he added.
Still, the NRC contends it has expanded its external communications to address security concerns by working more closely with other federal agencies.
"After the events of Sept. 11, the NRC greatly enhanced its ability to effectively communicate with other federal agencies with security functions, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Merrifield said.
Diaz maintained that NRC's improvements in safety management and emergency preparedness were event-driven actions -- Three Mile Island and Sept. 11 required new levels of expertise and vigilance.
"Using a rear view mirror as a way of judging where you are right now is not always accurate," Merrifield noted. "And as the mirror sometimes says, things might be larger than they may seem in the mirror. And I think that's a good clue for the way we need to act."
Eliza Barclay is an intern with UPI Science News. E-mail sciencemail@upi.com
-------- depleted uranium
GULF WAR WIVES FACE BABY MISERY
ANDY GREENWOOD
29 March 2004
Western Morning News (UK)
http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=103354&command=displayContent&sourceNode=103331&contentPK=9379160
Worrying evidence that 1991 Gulf War veterans are more likely to suffer miscarriages and higher rate of birth defects should be urgently reviewed by Government ministers, a Westcountry MP has demanded.WORRYING evidence that 1991 Gulf War veterans are more likely to suffer miscarriages and higher rate of birth defects should be urgently reviewed by Government ministers, a Westcountry MP has demanded.
Researchers found a 40 per cent increased risk of miscarriage among women whose partners served in the Gulf, with some evidence of a higher risk of genital and renal system malformations.
They said the findings should be interpreted with caution and, overall, veterans should be reassured that possible exposure to hazardous chemicals and depleted uranium should not affect their reproductive health.
But North Cornwall Lib-Dem MP Paul Tyler, who has long-campaigned on behalf of Gulf veterans, tabled questions with the Ministry of Defence earlier this week, sceptical of the Government's interpretation of the findings.
"The report of yet more health problems follows a huge weight of evidence," Mr Tyler said.
"The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine identifies a risk of miscarriage about 40 per cent higher, and of malformations 50 per cent, compared with troops who did not go to the Gulf in 1991. But then doubts are expressed about the accuracy of these figures and the Ministry of Defence - without proof - appears to dismiss the whole study as misleading.
"Service families deserve better than this - why should they be left with such incredible confusion on such a sensitive subject?
"These examples are now too frequent to be a coincidence. To re-establish confidence in service families Defence Ministers must now set up a comprehensive and totally independent inquiry into all these problems."
The research is said to be the first epidemiological study of reproductive health among UK troops serving in the first Gulf War.
Published in the International Journal of Epidemiology and funded by the Ministry of Defence, it followed concerns raised after the first Gulf War about apparent clusters of birth defects and miscarriages.
The researchers concluded that there was "no strong evidence" for a link between the father's deployment in the Gulf and an increased risk of stillbirth or chromosomal malformations or other deformities.
But the researchers said their findings did reveal some areas of concern. There was some evidence of an increased risk of malformations of the reproductive and renal systems.
However, they said these links were weakened when their analysis was restricted to conditions confirmed by doctors.
"We cannot at this stage conclude that there is a real link between miscarriage and a father's service in the Gulf War," researcher Dr Pat Doyle said.
"We are now studying this in more depth."
The study was based on 44,087 questionnaires from UK Gulf War veterans and others who were in service at the time, but not deployed to the Gulf.
-------- europe
Reactor at Lithuania's Ignalina nuclear plant closed for maintenance
VILNIUS (AFP)
Mar 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040329110530.ixzzlpsz.html
One of two reactors at Lithuania's Soviet-built Ignalina nuclear power plant was closed down over the weekend for a month for preventative maintenance, the plant's information centre said on Monday in a statement.
The reactor is of similar design to the one that exploded at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986 in the world's worst civil nuclear disaster.
Lithuania, the world's second most nuclear dependent state, has committed itself to closing down the reactor by 2005 as part of its negotiations on European Union membership and to closing the second reactor by 2009.
As a result of the reactor closure, the plant on Monday was operating at half of its 2,500 megawatt capacity, the plant's information centre said.
After final closure of Ignalina the Baltic former Soviet republic plans to remain nuclear by building a new reactor using Ignalina's infrastructure.
Last year Ignalina sold 14.25 billion kilowatt hours of energy and earned 15.5 million litas (4.5 million euros) profit, according to preliminary figures.
-------- india / pakistan
India test-fires two anti-aircraft Sky missiles two minutes apart
BHUBANESWAR, India (AFP)
Mar 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040329132731.0wc2o1lf.html
India on Monday twice test-fired medium range surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles within two minutes of each other from a site in the eastern state of Orissa, a defence official said.
One Akash (Sky) missile was fired from a mobile launcher at 3.55 pmin India's Chandipur-on-sea testing site, 200 kilometres (125 miles) northeast of Orissa's state capital Bhubaneswar, the official said.
Another indigenously-built Akash was fired at 3.57 pm (1027 GMT) and successfully hit a target that was air-dropped from a military aircraft, the official added.
Monday's tests of the 650-kilogram (1,430 pound) Akash bring the number of times it has been test-fired so far to eight. It carries a 50 kilogrampound) warhead and is designed to travel 25 kilometres (15 miles).
India's other anti-aircraft missile, the Trishul (Trident), can deliver a 15-kilogram warhead up to nine kilometers.
The Trishul has also been tested eight times and will soon enter mass production.
Both the Akash and Trishul form part of India's ambitions to develop an air defence and assault system that also includes a 5,000-kilometre (3,100-mile) ballistic missile that can transport a one-tonne nuclear warhead.
-------- iran
Iran's resumption of work on nuclear fuel cycle could damage confidence
VIENNA (AFP)
Mar 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040329110624.nkkxl08k.html
Iran's resumption of work on its nuclear fuel cycle may not violate an agreement to suspend uranium enrichment but could damage confidence it is doing everything necessary to prove it is not secretly developing nuclear weapons, diplomats said Monday.
Iran's atomic energy chief Gholam Reza Aghazadeh said in Tehran Sunday that Iran had resumed work on a first part of the nuclear fuel cycle, doing uranium conversion at a processing plant in Isfahan.
The Isfahan installation is a Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF), where uranium is transformed into a yellow cake that can then be used to produce enriched uranium.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday that Iran had already told the IAEA in February that it would be resuming work on uranium conversion.
"The Iranians reported to us in Febuary that they were going to begin this activity in March, and IAEA inspectors will be visiting the Isfahan facility this week," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told AFP.
A Western diplomat close to the IAEA said that while the Iranians may "technically" have the right under a deal worked out in October with Britain, France and Germany to do uranium conversion, the Iranians had also pledged to stop all enrichment-related activities.
"It depends on what they're doing exactly. It's not black and white. There's a big political context," to the suspension of uranium enrichment since the IAEA has portrayed this as a measure to build confidence that Iran is cooperating with international inspections, the diplomat said.
One diplomat said the uranium conversion was "not something that was part of the suspension. It was just not part of the suspension deal."
The suspension has "only to do with the production of uranium hexafluoride," the diplomat said.
He added that the Iranians do "not have the capability to produce uranium hexafluoride" at Isfahan.
Highly enriched uranium can be fuel for a civilian power reactor but also the raw material for an atom bomb. 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.
It is to report its findings at a meeting in Vienna in June that the agency's chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said will be "key in the ... consideration of Iran's implementation" of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (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 sanctions on the Islamic republic.
Iran, under massive international pressure to maintain the suspension of uranium enrichment, has consistently emphasised its right under the 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.
----
Iran Stops Building Centrifuges
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
Mar 29, 2004,
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran has stopped building centrifuges, which can be used for uranium enrichment, in an effort to win the world's trust over its nuclear program, the head of its Atomic Energy Organization said Monday.
The comments by Gholamreza Aghazadeh came with inspectors from the U.N. nuclear agency in Iran to check on its nuclear facilities.
Aghazadeh said the suspension of the construction of centrifuges had been ordered by the country's Supreme National Security Council, Iran's top decision-making body.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year under strong international pressure over the aims and dimensions of its nuclear program. But it continued to build centrifuges, which are used in enrichment, despite criticism that this violated the spirit of its pledge to cease enrichment.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran has voluntarily expanded (the enrichment) suspension to include the production of components and assembly," state television quoted Aghazadeh as saying on its Web site.
An official of the Atomic Energy Organization explained that this referred to centrifuges and said it had been done to build greater trust with the U.N. agency, the International Atomic Energy Organization, and with Iran's European partners.
"So far, we had suspended injecting gas into centrifuges as part of a deal reached with the European countries," the official told The Associated Press, referring to the enrichment suspension. "Now, we have voluntarily suspended production and assembly of centrifuge machines."
"Let the world know that Iran is doing this voluntarily to win greater trust in the world," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Iran is taking this unilateral decision in the expectation that Iran's nuclear dossier will be taken off the IAEA's agenda," he added.
The United States has been pushing the U.N. agency to declare that Iran has breached its duties as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which allows nuclear development only for peaceful purposes.
America strongly suspects that Iran has a secret program to build nuclear weapons. Iran denies this, saying its nuclear program is strictly for generating electricity.
Earlier this month, the IAEA rebuked Iran for failing to disclose certain aspects of its nuclear development. Last year IAEA inspectors found radioactive particles that had been enriched to weapons-grade level - higher than what Iran requires for fuel for a nuclear reactor. Iran said the particles had been found on imported equipment.
IAEA director Mohammed ElBaradei says Iran has much to do before the U.N. agency can give its nuclear program a clean bill of health.
ElBaradei, who plans to visit Iran early next month, hopes to present an assessment of Iran's nuclear activities to the IAEA board of governors in June.
-------- iraq / inspections
Arms Hunter to Tell Congress No Iraqi WMD Found
Mon Mar 29, 2004
By Tabassum Zakaria
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4691629§ion=news
WASHINGTON - The new chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq will tell lawmakers this week in his first congressional briefings that his teams have not found any banned arms, but it is too early to reach conclusions and the search will continue, U.S. officials said on Monday.
Charles Duelfer was appointed in January by the CIA to replace David Kay, who after stepping down as chief weapons hunter said he believed there were no large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq when the United States invaded in 2003.
That unleashed a flurry of accusations from critics that President Bush and his administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq to gather support for war.
The question of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction has been a key issue leading up to the November presidential election, as Democrats seek to unseat Bush.
Duelfer will brief the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors on Tuesday about his initial impressions of the hunt for unconventional weapons after six weeks in Iraq. He will brief House of Representatives committees later in the week.
"There is much work that needs still to be done, it is premature for anyone to leap to conclusions, and they continue to get good leads which require investigation," a U.S. official said about the likely message from Duelfer.
Also testifying will be Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, who heads the Defense Department's Iraq Survey Group -- about 1,200 to 1,400 personnel -- which conducts the hunt for unconventional weapons under Duelfer's guidance.
Teams still go to suspected sites when they get information about potential areas related to weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. The hunt for banned weapons does not have a deadline and was expected to continue through the end of this year.
U.S. officials have been discussing how the weapons search will be affected by the mid-year handover of sovereignty to Iraqis, an official said.
Kay had said it would probably become more difficult for U.S. forces to get access to people for interviews after the transfer to Iraqis.
-------- libya
LIBYAN INSPECTIONS POINT TO NUKE TIES WITH EGYPT
Mon, 29 Mar 2004
[MENL]
http://menewsline.com/stories/2004/march/03_30_1.html
WASHINGTON -- The United States has found evidence that Libya traded nuclear and missile expertise with Egypt.
Inspections by a British-U.S. team of Libyan facilities in late 2003 and early 2004 have uncovered evidence that Libya was both the source for and recipient of nuclear and missile technology and expertise from Egypt. Officials said the evidence confirmed suspicions over the last three years of a secret trade between Cairo and Tripoli in strategic weapons obtained from North Korea.
"The evidence of Egyptian involvement in Libya's missile and nuclear weapons program is highly damaging and most of the doubts we had previously have been resolved," an official said. "That doesn't mean, however, that there will be imminent repercussions."
The officials did not elaborate on the type of evidence found in Libya. But they said Egypt appeared to have been using Libya as a way-station for obtaining nuclear and missile technology and components from North Korea.
-------- missile defense
Russia Boasts Weapon to Battle Star Wars
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 29, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Wonder-Weapons.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia has designed a ``revolutionary'' weapon that would make the prospective U.S. missile defense useless, Russian news agencies reported Monday, quoting a senior Defense Ministry official.
The official, who was not identified by name, said tests conducted during last month's military maneuvers would dramatically change the philosophy behind development of Russia's nuclear forces, the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies reported.
If deployed, the new weapon would take the value of any U.S. missile shield to ``zero,'' the news agencies quoted the official as saying.
The official said the new weapon would be inexpensive, providing an ``asymmetric answer'' to U.S. missile defenses, which are proving extremely costly to develope.
Russia, meanwhile, also has continued research in prospective missile defenses and has an edge in some areas compared to other nations, the official said.
The statement reported Monday was in line with claims by President Vladimir Putin's that experiments performed during last month's maneuvers proved that Russia could soon build strategic weapons that could puncture any missile-defense system.
At the time, Col-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, explained that the military tested a ``hypersonic flying vehicle'' that was able to maneuver between space and the earth's atmosphere.
Military analysts said that the mysterious new weapons could be a maneuverable ballistic missile warhead or a hypersonic cruise missile.
While Putin said the development of such new weapons wasn't aimed against the United States, most observers viewed the move as Moscow's retaliation to the U.S. missile defense plans.
After years of vociferous protests, Russia reacted calmly when Washington withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 in order to develop of a nationwide missile shield. But U.S.-Russian relations have soured again lately, and Moscow has complained about Washington's plans to build new low-yield nuclear weapons.
-------- russia
Nato's 'Unfriendly' Expansion Worries Russia
The Scotsman
March 29, 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2712868
A senior Russian MP warned today of a growing rift between Nato and Moscow as the military alliance expands to include seven former Soviet-dominated nations.
President George Bush was today to formally welcome the new members into the 55-year-old alliance, set up during the Cold War to shield the West from Soviet military might.
While Russia's relationship with Nato has improved in recent years and the former foes work together to combat threats such as terrorism, Moscow is wary about Nato's creeping proximity.
"Nato's steps have had an unfriendly character toward Russia," said Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the international affairs committee in Russia's lower house of parliament.
Of particular concern to Russia is the entrance into Nato of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. All are former Soviet republics which just 15 years ago were home to more than 100,000 Red Army soldiers, but today have eagerly turned West.
Nato has agreed to include three Baltic states under its air defence shield, planning to enforce it by stationing four F-16 fighter planes in Lithuania. The planes will make regular flights near Russia's border, close enough to conduct reconnaissance.
"If significant Nato military bases appear near Russia's borders and change the balance of forces in this region, then we can't exclude that Russia will consider the possibility of taking corresponding action so that the balance is not breached," Kosachyov said.
Asked what those measures might encompass, he said boosting Russia's own military deployments in north-west Russia - but he added this was a development no one wanted.
A former Russian Air Force commander, General Anatoly Kornukov, suggested a harsher response: shooting down Nato planes.
"If (a plane) violates the air space, shoot it down without ceremony and be done with it," he said. "A warplane is a warplane ... after all, they are not flying for their own pleasure."
Nato has tried to reassure Russia that the expansion is not directed against Moscow. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Russia should not view the bigger Nato as a threat, but as a partner.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Russia is not threatened by the deployment of the four planes. But Russian concerns are still expected to dominate Friday's planned Nato-Russia meeting in Brussels.
Topping Russia's list of demands is that the new Nato member states sign up to the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, which regulates the deployment of warplanes, tanks and other heavy non-nuclear weapons.
Kosachyov said that Nato gave Russia assurances that only "essential, usual weapons" - not nuclear - will be placed on the territory of new members.
"But what essential, usual weapons are, no one knows," he said.
Russia is also concerned about the European Union's expansion eastward on Thursday to include 10 new nations. The EU and Russia have a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement but Moscow has balked at extending it to the new nations, fearing it would lose trade and travel rights.
-------- ukraine
Ukrainian Nuclear Reactor Is Shut Down
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 29, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Ukraine-Nuclear.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- A reactor at the Rivne nuclear power plant in western Ukraine was shut down early Monday by its automatic safety system, but radiation levels were not affected, energy officials said.
Rivne's No. 3 reactor was pulled off the power grid, an officials at the state nuclear power company Energoatom said on condition of anonymity. The official declined to say what caused the halt.
Officials at the State Committee on Nuclear Power Regulation said the shutdown was caused by a short circuit in the high-voltage equipment of the power generator, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
Minor malfunctions occur frequently at the former Soviet republic's four operating nuclear power plants.
Three of Ukraine's 13 functioning nuclear power reactors are undergoing maintenance.
Ukraine was the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in April 1986, with an explosion and fire at a reactor at the Chernobyl atomic plant. It was closed in 2000.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
US urged to rethink its nuclear stockpiles
By Walter Pincus
Washington March 29, 2004
The Washington Post
A Defence Department panel has recommended big changes to the US nuclear arsenal, saying the current plans to update the existing weapons stockpile will not protect the nation from threats from so-called rogue states and terrorist groups.
A task force of the Defence Science Board said it was "most urgent" to create strong defences against these new threats.
In a report to the Pentagon made public last week it said that in US strategic forces there should be an emphasise on smaller nuclear warheads, and 50 giant Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles should be armed with conventional warheads to allow a wide variety of options for targeting hostile forces. "The nuclear weapons program as currently conceived . . . will not meet the country's future needs," the board's report said.
"Nuclear weapons are needed that produce much lower collateral damage," it said indicating the importance of using weapons of greater precision and reduced radioactivity.
The recommendations come as the US struggles to decide on the size and make-up of its nuclear stockpile of about 6000 warheads.
The board's study recommended that the US's high-yield nuclear warheads, now being refurbished to last another two decades, should be reduced. Special-purpose non-nuclear weapons and a submarine-launched non nuclear missile should be developed, it said. New sensors that could find small, moving and hidden targets should also be considered.
The report also criticised US intelligence. It said intelligence agencies had "not developed the resources to adequately understand the leadership culture and values of its potential adversaries, particularly rogue states and terrorist organisations".
It cited the erosion of "our understanding of North Korean goals and tactics under Kim Jong-il" and "distinctions among the diverse elements of al-Qaeda".
Many of the board's past recommendations have been the basis for changes in US military policies. This study's critique of intelligence carries additional weight, because one of the task force's co-chairmen is Dennis Blair, a former admiral who worked with the CIA during the Clinton administration and retired in 2002 after serving as commander-in-chief of US forces in the Pacific.
The report said that while it could take decades to build defences against all weapons of mass destruction, it was more practical and "most urgent to create strong defences against rogue states and terrorist organisations". Central to that approach was attacking and killing leaders of those groups.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuclear Security Decisions Are Shrouded in Secrecy
Agency Withholds Unclassified Information
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31788-2004Mar28?language=printer
Nineteen men in four squads. That's the size of the terrorist threat that some nuclear critics say armed guards at U.S. nuclear power plants and weapons facilities should be able to rebuff. The figure is pegged to the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The Bush administration has updated a much weaker 1980s-era standard, but government and congressional officials say the presumed attack still involves considerably fewer than 19 terrorists -- and that means requiring a smaller guard force than critics say is necessary.
A legal dispute related to this standard has now arisen, but -- as in other recent discussions of the administration's response to terrorism threats -- the squabbling is occurring almost entirely outside public view. The immediate issue is an unclassified request by a nuclear power plant operator for an exemption from certain parts of the new security requirements.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has deemed the operator's request sensitive, and declared that its release would bring criminal prosecution. Critics who allege the standards are already too lax have filed a challenge to the exemption request, which the commission has also declared is too sensitive to be released.
It is but one example of the manner in which post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism controls -- even those concerning unclassified information -- have altered the landscape of public debate about security matters. Civil defense arrangements that were once the subject of mostly open rulemaking or debate are now often decided under a cloak of secrecy covering all but industry and government participants.
The result has been to complicate efforts to hold officials accountable for their decisions, especially in the counterterrorism field, say advocates of open policymaking. "There has been a proliferation of new controls on unclassified information," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists. "This is where the public is at a disadvantage," because few mechanisms are available to challenge these controls or to ensure that public representatives have access comparable to what industry routinely gains.
In the nuclear site security case, Duke Power asked the NRC to waive certain security precautions, normally required wherever more than a bomb's worth of special nuclear materials are present. The request involves the planned shipment next spring of French-made nuclear fuel rods containing plutonium to its plants in North and South Carolina, where they will be stored and then burned in reactors.
The challenge has been filed by the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, with technical advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Although UCS scientist Edwin Lyman, who has a security clearance, read the exemption request after signing a non-disclosure statement, neither he nor the environmental group has been able to learn exactly what the NRC's security standards are.
Lyman says he is willing to keep whatever he learns confidential, but that without knowing more, he cannot fully assess the proposal or effectively express concerns about the underlying standard. But the NRC, ruling in a Feb. 18 decision, said that although Duke Power has a "need to know," the environmental group does not.
Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a longtime critic of nuclear power, has complained that the NRC barred the groups from learning the same information it shared not only with Duke Power but also with the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group that has lobbied against stiffer guard force requirements.
In a March 18 letter to the NRC, institute President Joe Colvin said the group was meeting "almost daily" with the commission staff to discuss the security standard, now undergoing a final government review. A senior NRC official, speaking on condition that he not be named, asserted that "the public does not have a need to know [the postulated terrorist threat] and doesn't, for the most part, have security clearances. . . . There is no way you can bring the public into that discussion." He said the critics "are unlikely to have anything but disdain for anything that we do, so I don't know what we can gain from that." Duke Power maintains that its power plants are well protected, and that its security exemption request is reasonable, given the difficulty of diverting plutonium contained in the bulky fuel rods. Nuclear Energy Institute Vice President Steve Floyd is skeptical of the critics' demands for even controlled access to threat information. "You have to realize what their agenda is -- to drive costs up to the point where nuclear [power] is no longer feasible," Floyd said.
But Aftergood of the Government Secrecy Project said that "it is the public that has to deal with the consequences" of a nuclear site security breach, and so it is entitled to participate more fully in the debate. "Fundamentally, the NRC policy views members of the public as a threat," Aftergood said.
The NRC is not alone in imposing its own, new controls on unclassified information. The Department of Homeland Security has promised not to disclose security data furnished by companies on their "critical infrastructure or protected systems," a potentially broad category of data.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has adopted a slightly different policy to shield what it calls critical "energy infrastructure" data: It will release the data to recipients who sign a non-disclosure pledge. These and other government offices are essentially taking their cues from a White House directive in March 2002, which encouraged government officials to treat all unclassified security-related information as sensitive data not subject to public release.
But the NRC policy is one of the most expansive. The commission recently threatened staff members at a watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), with criminal prosecution because they published their own detailed critique of security at Entergy Nuclear's two reactors at Indian Point in New York.
"The Commission is concerned that a public discussion of some of those issues would not be in the best interests of the United States," NRC Secretary Annette L. Vietti-Cook wrote to the group in the fall, noting problems related to discussion in the critique of the number of attackers a plant might have to fend off and particular security weaknesses.
Roy P. Zimmerman, director of the NRC's office of nuclear security, subsequently wrote that POGO's critique -- which the group says was based solely on interviews it conducted with people who participated in or observed Indian Point security drills -- had been deemed "safeguards information" protected by federal law. Such laws, he noted, apply to "any person . . . who produces, receives, or acquires" such data, no matter how they got it.
In an apparent Catch-22, Zimmerman said the commission could not, however, specify what information it wanted deleted from the critique. That prompted POGO's lawyer, David C. Vladeck, to allege that the NRC was trying to "silence" the group. Eventually, the NRC, which denied the accusation, agreed to describe the offending information in general terms, and POGO released a new critique containing passages it had rephrased.
But, in an illustration of the challenges the government faces in trying to quash public discussion of sensitive but unclassified information, the original POGO critique remains posted on an independent Web site devoted to disseminating whatever officials seek to censor (www.thememoryhole.org).
Since Sept. 11, 2001, many bureaucrats have been using heightened security concerns to "hide their inadequacies," said Danielle Brian, POGO's executive director. "It has gone far, far beyond what is reasonable."
Aftergood similarly warns that the government has "cast too broad a net and . . . failed to provide an internal self-check." The sole office for policing the government's disclosure of security-related information was created in an era when data were either classified or subject to public release, and has no jurisdiction over the burgeoning realm of sensitive but unclassified information, he said.
J. William Leonard, who heads that office -- the Information Security Oversight Office, an arm of the National Archives -- confirms Aftergood's account. Although making no comment on specific disputes, he said that in many instances, "sensitive but unclassified" is a label without meaning that is misused by officials who lack the proper "training, background or understanding" to decide what to withhold. Leonard said that strictly applying a "need to know" test can sometimes exclude important players whose valuable insight is not foreseen.
Leonard gave a speech last year that he says is still relevant, in which he noted that the government needs to create "a seamless process" for sharing or withholding information, yet "we are . . . quite possibly adding new seams every day" by not enforcing a reasonable, government-wide policy.
-------- south carolina
In One Small Town, Radioactive Waste Is a Welcome Sight
By ANDREW JACOBS
March 29, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/national/29NUKE.html?ei=5062&en=2a9f1b49ddaf5c96&ex=1081141200&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=
NELLING, S.C. - The people of this pine-shaded expanse of Carolina low country have a message for the nuclear power plants and hospitals of the nation: Send us your spent reactors, your irradiated medical implements, your old detritus still glowing with radiation.
"We hear the word `nuclear' and it's a good thing," said Tim Moore, the mayor of this poor, sparsely populated town 70 miles south of Columbia. "We're happy to have the stuff. It doesn't scare us one bit."
For more than 30 years, Snelling has eagerly housed one of the oldest and most active graveyards for atomic waste. The 235-acre site, operated by Chem-Nuclear Systems Inc., is the only place in the United States licensed to take retired steam generators and pressure vessels, and the only one where the 39 states east of the Rockies can send the most radioactive of low-level waste.
As many as 25 reactors around the country will be reaching the end of their operating licenses in the next few years, and must close if they do not get extensions. Company executives are hoping they can arrive before 2008, when, under the terms of a new federal plan, only New Jersey and Connecticut will be allowed to send their waste to South Carolina. In recent months, people here have been eagerly awaiting the shipment of a 770-ton workhorse from California, although officials at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station near San Diego have been unable to find a way to get it to the East Coast.
The San Diego reactor would earn Chem-Nuke, as it is known here, a $5 million burial fee. "We sure would like to have it," said Mr. Moore, 78, who has been mayor for 35 years and lives a half-mile from the site.
The nuclear waste business has been good for Snelling, which gets 40 percent of its budget from taxes on the site and dumping fees, and Barnwell County, which received $1.4 million last year, about one-tenth of its revenue. Chem-Nuclear employs 60 people, most of them locals, and last year, as part of a deal with the state, about $30 million, slightly more than half what the company took in, went toward education programs.
"I think everyone would agree that we're an asset to the state and the community," James Latham, Chem-Nuclear's vice president for operations, said as he drove through the dusty plain that conceals about 28 million cubic feet of waste. Like most people who live or work in Snelling, Mr. Latham is quite proud of the place. "Whatever you do, don't call it a dump," he said.
Of course, not everyone is thrilled with South Carolina's status as one of the nation's biggest repositories for nuclear waste. The site has been repeatedly slated for closing, beginning in the mid-1980's, but state legislators have always found a way to keep it open over the opposition of environmentalists. Faced with a budget shortfall, the South Carolina House voted this month to raise next year's limit on incoming waste in exchange for a $6 million infusion to the state coffers.
"South Carolina has a reputation for buckling under when the money gets tight," said Ben Johnson, who heads the compact formed with New Jersey and Connecticut in 2000 to satisfy federal legislation compelling every state to come up with a plan to dispose of its own low-level nuclear waste. "We need to send out the message that the jig is up, that South Carolina is not for sale."
For environmentalists, burying nuclear waste in some of the most waterlogged terrain in the country is simply bad science. Although the more highly radioactive waste is sealed in plastic casks inside concrete vaults, neither the vaults nor the trenches in which they sit are waterproof. Once covered with soil, the entire pit is topped by an impermeable cover, although water can enter the trench from the sides.
Still, the current technology is an improvement from the early days of Chem-Nuclear's operations, when 55-gallon metal drums of radioactive waste were often heaved into the pits. Partly as a result of the old practices, state officials say, a tritium-suffused plume of water has been spreading underground, although it has not been detected in any of the backyard wells that serve Snelling's 300 residents.
"I've been drinking the water all my life and I'm still here," Mayor Moore said.
But considering that some of the radioactive debris has a half-life of millions of years, some critics say it is only a matter of time before the contamination gets farther afield. "It's absolutely the most primitive nuclear waste technology you could imagine," said Bob Guild, an environmental lawyer and a member of the state chapter of the Sierra Club, which is filing a legal challenge to the state's most recent attempt to expand capacity at Chem-Nuclear.
By comparison, Mr. Guild said, the nation's only other privately run complex for low-level nuclear waste, Envirocare, is in an arid stretch of Utah, and it is not authorized to receive the more radioactive kinds of waste that make up half of Chem-Nuclear's intake. "Your average county garbage dump has higher standards than this place," he said.
Henry Porter, who oversees the Chem-Nuclear site for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, disputes the notion that it is a ticking time bomb. More than two-thirds of the subterranean radioactivity has already decayed to background levels, he said, and much of the rest will be harmless in another 500 years. The most long-lived substance, plutonium, is present only in trace amounts, he said, and the terrain's dense clay slows the spread of radioactive isotopes. "I've been regulating them for 15 years and I have no concerns," Mr. Porter said.
Neither do Chem-Nuclear's executives, and neither, it seems, do any of its employees. Standing at the edge of a pit with a Geiger counter in his hand, Eddie Green said he rarely worried about radiation exposure. "Around here, this is probably the best job there is," said Mr. Green, 43, whose title is health physics technician but who is better known as a member of "the rad police." "You can't beat the benefits."
In interviews with residents who live near the site, no one had anything negative to say about Chem-Nuclear. The biggest problems in town, they said, are boredom, a lack of jobs and the dirt roads that muss up car exteriors. Most everyone, it seems, knows someone who works at Chem-Nuclear or at the Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons plant at the southern edge of the county.
"I'd love to get a job there if I could," said Judy Moody, 28, who recently lost her $9-an-hour job at a vending machine assembly plant.
By all accounts, Chem-Nuclear is a good neighbor: it established a small public park near its front gate, and executives donated land to Snelling's fire department. Each year, the company sponsors a local baseball team and makes donations to the American Cancer Society.
"People trust us," Mr. Latham of Chem-Nuclear said. "Whenever we have public meetings, people from the community will sit on our side of the room. In other places, the moment the word `radioactive' comes out of your mouth, you've got people shouting you down."
Those close ties between corporation and community worry some critics. Phil Leventis, a state senator who has been one of the more vocal opponents of the site, said the company had been effective at co-opting local residents and state legislators. It is among the 10 most generous political contributors in the state, according to public filings.
"This is a case study of how a company can make a fortune, plow a little back into the political landscape and get an incredible benefit," Mr. Leventis said. "The only reason we keep taking this waste is not because we're geologically or technologically suited for it. It's just that here in South Carolina we have just the right political climate."
-------- texas
Pantex weighs worker training
By Jim McBride, jim.mcbride@amarillo.com
Monday, March 29, 2004
Amarillo Globe
http://www.amarillonet.com/stories/032904/new_pantexplant.shtml
Pantex Plant is bolstering worker training, procedures and document reviews in the wake of a Jan. 8 incident when weapons technicians taped and moved a cracked high-explosive charge while dismantling a nuclear warhead.
Steve Erhart, senior scientific and technical adviser for the Pantex Site Office, said contractor BWXT Pantex has finished a corrective action plan and Pantex was satisfied with the document.
The plan has been presented to top National Nuclear Security Administration officials and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
Erhart said the Pantex Site Office conducted an internal self-assessment of the incident to review how plant workers responded. The assessment, he said, concluded workers' actions were proper and the incident was reported in a timely fashion up the chain of command.
"Further, we concluded that local oversight of the nuclear explosive charge control process and weapons-specific training for facility representatives, although satisfactory, could be enhanced," Erhart said in a statement.
Contractor BWXT Pantex also convened a review board of senior managers, engineers and weapons lab experts to study the incident.
According to a safety board report, workers discovered the cracked high explosive during dismantlement work on the W-56, a retired nuclear weapon that is carried on a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile.
"The configuration of the partially dismantled weapon and the nature of the cracks appear to have increased the opportunities for dropping all or part of the explosives and hence increased the potential for a violent reaction," the report said.
But Pantex officials said Friday the Jan. 8 incident did not pose a safety problem.
"Our investigation determined that there was never, at any time, a safety issue related to this incident. The safe control of all components and materials was maintained at all times," Jud Simmons, a BWXT Pantex spokesman, said in a statement. "The technicians were working in a safe and professional manner. They performed the process as they were trained, and they stopped work when appropriate."
John Conway, chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, said a weapons lab's nuclear safety expert should have helped workers responding to the incident and workers could have halted the procedure more quickly.
"I think they should have stopped it sooner ... They called for assistance - that's the key thing - and the laboratory had a so-called expert there, who did not come down to eyeball it, but rendered an opinion that all they had to do was tape it up," he said. "Then it was taped, but not the way the safety expert would have done it presumably, as I have been told."
Conway said assistance from laboratory weapons experts also should be stepped up.
During the incident, workers were removing a high-explosives charge from a plutonium weapons core during a final dismantlement procedure.
"The investigation team also concluded that enhancements in training, procedure development and document review would benefit the plant's operations, and these improvements are currently being communicated to our employees," Simmons said.
Dismantlement operations are expected to resume after additional reviews and process enhancements are finished.
The defense safety board earlier credited Pantex workers for their response but questioned the effectiveness of Pantex training and procedures for ensuring safe nuclear explosive operations.
Experts from California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory should help Pantex officials as they do follow-up work, Conway said.
"The main thing right now, if I say something, is that we make sure that the laboratory at Livermore - particularly since it was one of their weapons - gives them the assistance that they need on what they are going to do now with this unit," he said.
Conway said the Pantex contractor has completed its portion of the analysis, but more work is needed.
-------- us politics
The Armageddon Plan
by James Mann
The Atlantic Monthly
March 2004
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/03/mann.htm
During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new "President" in the event that a nuclear attack killed the country's leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of the Bush Administration on and after 9/11
At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area-where, as the head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of emergency.
After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man-joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet-slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would head to each of the locations.
Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role.
The inspiration for this program came from within the Administration itself, not from Cheney or Rumsfeld; except for a brief stint Rumsfeld served as Middle East envoy, neither of them ever held office in the Reagan Administration. Nevertheless, they were leading figures in the program.
A few details about the effort have come to light over the years, but nothing about the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld. The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration in the hours, days, and months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Vice President Cheney urged President Bush to stay out of Washington for the rest of that day; Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to get out of town; Cheney himself began to move from Washington to a series of "undisclosed locations"; and other federal officials were later sent to work outside the capital, to ensure the continuity of government in case of further attacks. All these actions had their roots in the Reagan Administration's clandestine planning exercises.
he U.S. government considered the possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union more seriously during the early Reagan years than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Reagan had spoken in his 1980 campaign about the need for civil-defense programs to help the United States survive a nuclear exchange, and once in office he not only moved to boost civil defense but also approved a new defense-policy document that included plans for waging a protracted nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The exercises in which Cheney and Rumsfeld participated were a hidden component of these more public efforts to prepare for nuclear war.
The premise of the secret exercises was that in case of a nuclear attack on Washington, the United States needed to act swiftly to avoid "decapitation"-that is, a break in civilian leadership. A core element of the Reagan Administration's strategy for fighting a nuclear war would be to decapitate the Soviet leadership by striking at top political and military officials and their communications lines; the Administration wanted to make sure that the Soviets couldn't do to America what U.S. nuclear strategists were planning to do to the Soviet Union.
Under the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations the U.S. government had built large underground installations at Mount Weather, in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and near Camp David, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, each of which could serve as a military command post for the President in time of war. Yet a crucial problem remained: what might happen if the President couldn't make it to one of those bunkers in time.
The Constitution makes the Vice President the successor if the President dies or is incapacitated, but it establishes no order of succession beyond that. Federal law, most recently the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, establishes further details. If the Vice President dies or cannot serve, then the speaker of the House of Representatives becomes President. After him in the line of succession come the president pro tempore of the Senate (typically the longest-serving member of the majority party) and then the members of the Cabinet, in the order in which their posts were created-starting with the Secretary of State and moving to the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and so on. The Reagan Administration, however, worried that this procedure might not meet the split-second needs of an all-out war with the Soviet Union. What if a nuclear attack killed both the President and the Vice President, and maybe the speaker of the House, too? Who would run the country if it was too hard to track down the next living person in line under the Succession Act? What civilian leader could immediately give U.S. military commanders the orders to respond to an attack, and how would that leader communicate with the military? In a continuing nuclear exchange, who would have the authority to reach an agreement with the Soviet leadership to bring the war to an end?
The outline of the plan was simple. Once the United States was (or believed itself about to be) under nuclear attack, three teams would be sent from Washington to three different locations around the United States. Each team would be prepared to assume leadership of the country, and would include a Cabinet member who was prepared to become President. If the Soviet Union were somehow to locate one of the teams and hit it with a nuclear weapon, the second team or, if necessary, the third could take over.
This was not some abstract textbook plan; it was practiced in concrete and elaborate detail. Each team was named for a color-"red" or "blue," for example-and each had an experienced executive who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates were people who had served at high levels in the executive branch, preferably with the national-security apparatus. Cheney and Rumsfeld had each served as White House chief of staff in the Ford Administration. Other team leaders over the years included James Woolsey, later the director of the CIA, and Kenneth Duberstein, who served for a time as Reagan's actual White House chief of staff.
As for the Cabinet members on each team, some had little experience in national security; at various times, for example, participants in the secret exercises included John Block, Reagan's first Secretary of Agriculture, and Malcolm Baldrige, the Secretary of Commerce. What counted was not experience in foreign policy but, rather, that the Cabinet member was available. It seems fair to conclude that some of these "Presidents" would have been mere figureheads for a more experienced chief of staff, such as Cheney or Rumsfeld. Still, the Cabinet members were the ones who would issue orders, or in whose name the orders would be issued.
One of the questions studied in these exercises was what concrete steps a team might take to establish its credibility. What might be done to demonstrate to the American public, to U.S. allies, and to the Soviet leadership that "President" John Block or "President" Malcolm Baldrige was now running the country, and that he should be treated as the legitimate leader of the United States? One option was to have the new "President" order an American submarine up from the depths to the surface of the ocean-since the power to surface a submarine would be a clear sign that he was now in full control of U.S. military forces. This standard-control of the military-is one of the tests the U.S. government uses in deciding whether to deal with a foreign leader after a coup d'état.
"One of the awkward questions we faced," one participant in the planning of the program explains, "was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." For one thing, it was felt that reconvening Congress, and replacing members who had been killed, would take too long. Moreover, if Congress did reconvene, it might elect a new speaker of the House, whose claim to the presidency might have greater legitimacy than that of a Secretary of Agriculture or Commerce who had been set up as President under Reagan's secret program. The election of a new House speaker would not only take time but also create the potential for confusion. The Reagan Administration's primary goal was to set up a chain of command that could respond to the urgent minute-by-minute demands of a nuclear war, when there might be no time to swear in a new President under the regular process of succession, and when a new President would not have the time to appoint a new staff. The Administration, however, chose to establish this process without going to Congress for the legislation that would have given it constitutional legitimacy.
Ronald Reagan established the continuity-of-government program with a secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's National Security Adviser, the President himself made the final decision about who would head each of the three teams. Within Reagan's National Security Council the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal. Vice President George H.W. Bush was given the authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government agency with a bland name: the National Program Office. It had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Much of this money was spent on advanced communications equipment that would enable the teams to have secure conversations with U.S. military commanders. In fact, the few details that have previously come to light about the secret program, primarily from a 1991 CNN investigative report, stemmed from allegations of waste and abuses in awarding contracts to private companies, and claims that this equipment malfunctioned.
The exercises were usually scheduled during a congressional recess, so that Cheney would miss as little work on Capitol Hill as possible. Although Cheney, Rumsfeld, and one other team leader took part in each exercise, the Cabinet members changed depending on who was available at a particular time. (Once, Attorney General Ed Meese participated in an exercise that departed from Andrews in the pre-dawn hours of June 18, 1986-the day after Chief Justice Warren Burger resigned. One official remembers looking at Meese and thinking, "First a Supreme Court resignation, and now America's in a nuclear war. You're having a bad day.")
In addition to the designated White House chief of staff and his President, each team included representatives from the Departments of State and Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and also from various domestic-policy agencies. The idea was to practice running the entire federal government with a skeletal crew during a nuclear war. At one point there was talk of bringing in the governors of Virginia and Maryland and the mayor of the District of Columbia, but the idea was discarded because they didn't have the necessary security clearance.
The exercises were designed to be stressful. Participants gathered in haste, moved and worked in the early-morning hours, lived in Army-base conditions, and dined on early, particularly unappetizing versions of the military's dry, mass-produced MREs (meals ready to eat). An entire exercise lasted close to two weeks, but each team took part for only three or four days. One team would leave Washington, run through its drills, and then-as if it were on the verge of being "nuked"-hand off to the next team.
The plans were carried out with elaborate deception, designed to prevent Soviet reconnaissance satellites from detecting where in the United States the teams were going. Thus the teams were sent out in the middle of the night, and changed locations from one exercise to the next. Decoy convoys were sometimes dispatched along with the genuine convoys carrying the communications gear. The underlying logic was that the Soviets could not possibly target all the makeshift locations around the United States where the Reagan teams might operate.
The capstone to all these efforts to stay mobile was a special airplane, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a modified Boeing 747 based at Andrews and specially outfitted with a conference room and advanced communications gear. In it a President could remain in the air and run the country during a nuclear showdown. In one exercise a team of officials stayed aloft in this plane for three days straight, cruising up and down the coasts and back and forth across the country, refueling in the air.
When George H.W. Bush was elected President, in 1988, members of the secret Reagan program rejoiced; having been closely involved with the effort from the start, Bush wouldn't need to be initiated into its intricacies and probably wouldn't re-evaluate it. In fact, despite dramatically improved relations with Moscow, Bush did continue the exercises, with some minor modifications. Cheney was appointed Secretary of Defense and dropped out as a team leader.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the rationale for the exercises changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was obviously no longer plausible-but what if terrorists carrying nuclear weapons attacked the United States and killed the President and the Vice President? Finally, during the early Clinton years, it was decided that this scenario was farfetched and outdated, a mere legacy of the Cold War. It seemed that no enemy in the world was still capable of decapitating America's leadership, and the program was abandoned.
There things stood until September 11, 2001, when Cheney and Rumsfeld suddenly began to act out parts of a script they had rehearsed years before. Operating from the underground shelter beneath the White House, called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Cheney told Bush to delay a planned flight back from Florida to Washington. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instructed a reluctant Wolfowitz to get out of town to the safety of one of the underground bunkers, which had been built to survive nuclear attack. Cheney also ordered House Speaker Dennis Hastert, other congressional leaders, and several Cabinet members (including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton) evacuated to one of these secure facilities away from the capital. Explaining these actions a few days later, Cheney vaguely told NBC's Tim Russert, "We did a lot of planning during the Cold War with respect to the possibility of a nuclear incident." He did not mention the Reagan Administration program or the secret drills in which he and Rumsfeld had regularly practiced running the country.
Their participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades, from the Ford Administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States-inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America keeps on fighting.
James Mann, former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, is senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C. This article is adapted from his book Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet to be published this month.
----
Kucinich Takes 26.53 Percent in Alaska
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MARCH 29, 2004
CONTACT: www.Kucinich.US
Matt Harris 216.889.2004
Terre Lundy, 515.988.5534
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0329-14.htm
WASHINGTON - March 29 - Final results from Alaska's March 20 caucuses were tallied over the weekend showing Dennis Kucinich with 26.53% of the vote and John Kerry with 47.81%. It was the second second-place showing for Kucinich, who captured about 31% of the caucus votes in Hawaii earlier this month.
The remainder of the state's caucus votes, about 26%, will be up for grabs at the Alaska Democratic Convention, May 21 - 23 in Anchorage, because no other candidate, nor the uncommitted delegates, achieved the 15% threshold.
In some of Alaska's 36 voting districts, notably those around Juneau, Fairbanks, and the Kenai Peninsula, Kucinich did exceptionally well against Kerry. In one, the margin was 83% Kucinich, 17% Kerry. In four others, Kucinich won a majority of the votes, with percentages in some as high as 63%, 64%, and 62.5%.
"I want to thank the Democratic voters in Alaska for their strong show of support for the principles of peace, universal health care, the Patriot Act, and unfair trade policies that are costing us millions of jobs while diminishing workers rights and environmental protections everywhere," Kucinich said. He pointed out that Alaska Democrats voted for him even though electoral projections indicated that Sen. Kerry apparently had enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination.
"The voters of Alaska voted their consciences. They voted for the issues that they believe in. They voted because they want their voices to be heard as a way of shaping the direction of the Democratic Party," Kucinich said.
He also pointed to the fact that millions of other voters in 16 other primaries and caucuses still have a chance to do what Alaska did: vote for Kucinich and send a message. "Even though the nomination may be decided, why should millions of Democrats in these sixteen voting areas be denied a chance to affect the direction of our party?" Kucinich said. Voters still have sixteen chances "to register their concerns and support issues that have not yet been embraced by the Democratic Party and its presumptive nominee, Sen. John Kerry," he noted.
The final results, as reported by the Alaska Democratic Party, are as follows:
John Kerry 47.81%
Dennis Kucinich 26.53%
Uncommitted 11.95%
Howard Dean 11.08%
John Edwards 2.62%
--------
The Empire Backfires
By Jonathan Schell
The Nation
29 March 2004 Issue
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040329&s=schell
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/031404H.shtml
The detailed article below raises a disturbing question: Is the war in Iraq a diversion, like a magician's trick to take the people's eyes of other, more serious global problems? For example, there are many major issues that remain witout solutions: Pakistan's rampant nuclear weapons proliferation, the millions of jobless workers in the U.S., bin Laden still on the loose, and the U.S.-led coups against democratically elected governments in Haiti and Venezuela.
-Veterans for Common Sense
The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes. Instead, 549 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, have died; some $125 billion has been expended; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and water are sometime things; America's former well-wishers, the Shiites, are impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and Iraq as a whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century. And yet all this is only part of the cost of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. To weigh the full cost, one must look not just at the war itself but away from it, at the progress of the larger policy it served, at things that have been done elsewhere--some far from Iraq or deep in the past--and, perhaps above all, at things that have been left undone.
Nuclear Fingerprints
While American troops were dying in Baghdad and Falluja and Samarra, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman, was busy making centrifuge parts in Malaysia and selling them to Libya and Iran and possibly other countries. The centrifuges are used for producing bomb-grade uranium. Tahir's project was part of a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of the Pakistani atomic bomb. This particular father stole most of the makings of his nuclear offspring from companies in Europe, where he worked during the 1980s. In the 1990s, the thief became a middleman--a fence--immensely enriching himself in the process. In fairness to Khan, we should add that almost everyone who has been involved in developing atomic bombs since 1945 has been either a thief or a borrower. Stalin purloined a bomb design from the United States, courtesy of the German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project. China got help from Russia until the Sino-Soviet split put an end to it. Pakistan got secret help from China in the early 1970s. And now it turns out that Khan, among many, many other Pakistanis, almost certainly including the highest members of the government, has been helping Libya, Iran, North Korea and probably others obtain the bomb. That's apparently how Chinese designs--some still in Chinese--were found in Libya when its quixotic leader, Muammar Qaddafi, recently agreed to surrender his country's nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The rest of the designs were in English.
Were Klaus Fuchs's fingerprints on them? Only figuratively, because they were "copies of copies of copies," an official said. But such is the nature of proliferation. It is mainly a transfer of information from one mind to another. Copying is all there is to it. Sometimes, a bit of hardware needs to be transferred, which is where Tahir came in. Indeed, at least seven countries are already known to have been involved in the Pakistani effort, which Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, called a "Wal-Mart" of nuclear technology and an American official called "one-stop shopping" for nuclear weapons. Khan even printed a brochure with his picture on it listing all the components of nuclear weapons that bomb-hungry customers could buy from him. "What Pakistan has done," the expert on nuclear proliferation George Perkovich, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has rightly said, "is the most threatening activity of proliferation in history. It's impossible to overstate how damaging this is."
Another word for this process of copying would be globalization. Proliferation is merely globalization of weapons of mass destruction. The kinship of the two is illustrated by other details of Tahir's story. The Sri Lankan first wanted to build his centrifuges in Turkey, but then decided that Malaysia had certain advantages. It had recently been seeking to make itself into a convenient place for Muslims from all over the world to do high-tech business. Controls were lax, as befits an export platform. "It's easy, quick, efficient. Do your business and disappear fast, in and out," Karim Raslan, a Malaysian columnist and social commentator, recently told Alan Sipress of the Washington Post. Probably that was why extreme Islamist organizations, including Al Qaeda operatives, had often chosen to meet there. Global terrorism is a kind of globalization, too. The linkup of such terrorism and the world market for nuclear weapons is a specter that haunts the world of the twenty-first century.
The War and Its Aims
But aren't we supposed to be talking about the Iraq war on this anniversary of its launch? We are, but wars have aims, and the declared aim of this one was to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, the President articulated the threat he would soon carry out in Iraq: "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." Later, he said we didn't want the next warning to be "a mushroom cloud." Indeed, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly ruled out every other justification for the war. Asked about the other reasons, he said, "The President has not linked authority to go to war to any of those elements." When Senator John Kerry explained his vote for the resolution authorizing the war, he cited the Powell testimony. Thus not only Bush but also the man likely to be his Democratic challenger in this year's election justified war solely in the name of nonproliferation.
Proliferation, however, is not, as the President seemed to think, just a rogue state or two seeking weapons of mass destruction; it is the entire half-century-long process of globalization that stretches from Klaus Fuchs's espionage to Tahir's nuclear arms bazaar and beyond. The war was a failure in its own terms because weapons of mass destruction were absent in Iraq; the war policy failed because they were present and spreading in Pakistan. For Bush's warning of a mushroom cloud over an American city, though false with respect to Iraq, was indisputably well-founded in regard to Pakistan's nuclear one-stop-shopping: The next warning stemming from this kind of failure could indeed be a mushroom cloud.
The questions that now cry out to be answered are, Why did the United States, standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride (supplied, we now know, to Libya) and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty warehouse of Iraq? What sort of nonproliferation policy could lead to actions like these? How did the Bush Administration, in the name of protecting the country from nuclear danger, wind up leaving it wide open to nuclear danger?
In answering these questions, it would be reassuring, in a way, to report that the basic facts were discovered only after the war, but the truth is otherwise. In the case of Iraq, it's now abundantly clear that some combination of deception, self-deception and outright fraud (the exact proportions of each are still under investigation) led to the manufacture of a gross and avoidable falsehood. In the months before the war, most of the governments of the world strenuously urged the United States not to go to war on the basis of the flimsy and unconvincing evidence it was offering. In the case of Pakistan, the question of how much the Administration knew before the war has scarcely been asked, yet we know that the most serious breach--the proliferation to North Korea--was reported and publicized before the war.
It's important to recall the chronology of the Korean aspect of Pakistan's proliferation. In January 2003 Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that Pakistan had given North Korea extensive help with its nuclear program, including its launch of a uranium enrichment process. In return, North Korea was sending guided missiles to Pakistan. In June 2002, Hersh revealed, the CIA had sent the White House a report on these developments. On October 4, 2002, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs James Kelly confronted the North Koreans with the CIA information, and, according to Kelly, North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister, Kang Suk Ju, startled him by responding, "Of course we have a nuclear program." (Since then, the North Koreans have unconvincingly denied the existence of the uranium enrichment program.)
Bush of course had already named the Pyongyang government as a member of the "axis of evil." It had long been the policy of the United States that nuclearization of North Korea was intolerable. However, the Administration said nothing of the North Korean events to the Congress or the public. North Korea, which now had openly embarked on nuclear armament, and was even threatening to use nuclear weapons, was more dangerous than Saddam's Iraq. Why tackle the lesser problem in Iraq, the members of Congress would have had to ask themselves, while ignoring the greater in North Korea? On October 10, a week after the Kelly visit, the House of Representatives passed the Iraq resolution, and the next day the Senate followed suit. Only five days later, on October 16, did Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, reveal what was happening in North Korea.
In short, from June 2002, when the CIA delivered its report to the White House, until October 16--the period in which the nation's decision to go to war in Iraq was made--the Administration knowingly withheld the news about North Korea and its Pakistan connection from the public. Even after the vote, Secretary of State Colin Powell strangely insisted that the North Korean situation was "not a crisis" but only "a difficulty." Nevertheless, he extracted a pledge from Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that the nuclear technology shipments to North Korea would stop. (They did not.) In March, information was circulating that both Pakistan and North Korea were helping Iran to develop atomic weapons. (The North Korean and Iranian crises are of course still brewing.)
In sum, the glaring contradiction between the policy of "regime change" for already disarmed Iraq and regime-support for proliferating Pakistan was not a postwar discovery; it was fully visible before the war. The Nation enjoys no access to intelligence files, yet in an article arguing the case against the war, this author was able to comment that an "objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of menace" would put "Pakistan first," North Korea second, Iran third and Iraq only fourth--and to note the curiosity that "the Bush Administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse order, placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it befriends and coddles, nowhere on the list." Was nonproliferation, then, as irrelevant to the Administration's aims in Iraq as catching terrorists? Or was protecting the nation and the world against weapons of mass destruction merely deployed as a smokescreen to conceal other purposes? And if so, what were they?
A New Leviathan
The answers seem to lie in the larger architecture of the Bush foreign policy, or Bush Doctrine. Its aim, which many have properly called imperial, is to establish lasting American hegemony over the entire globe, and its ultimate means is to overthrow regimes of which the United States disapproves, pre-emptively if necessary. The Bush Doctrine indeed represents more than a revolution in American policy; if successful, it would amount to an overturn of the existing international order. In the new, imperial order, the United States would be first among nations, and force would be first among its means of domination. Other, weaker nations would be invited to take their place in shifting coalitions to support goals of America's choosing. The United States would be so strong, the President has suggested, that other countries would simply drop out of the business of military competition, "thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." Much as, in the early modern period, when nation-states were being born, absolutist kings, the masters of overwhelming military force within their countries, in effect said, "There is now a new thing called a nation; a nation must be orderly; we kings, we sovereigns, will assert a monopoly over the use of force, and thus supply that order," so now the United States seemed to be saying, "There now is a thing called globalization; the global sphere must be orderly; we, the sole superpower, will monopolize force throughout the globe, and thus supply international order."
And so, even as the Bush Administration proclaimed US military superiority, it pulled the country out of the world's major peaceful initiatives to deal with global problems--withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol to check global warming and from the International Criminal Court, and sabotaging a protocol that would have given teeth to the biological weapons convention. When the UN Security Council would not agree to American decisions on war and peace, it became "irrelevant"; when NATO allies balked, they became "old Europe." Admittedly, these existing international treaties and institutions were not a full-fledged cooperative system; rather, they were promising foundations for such a system. In any case, the Administration wanted none of it.
Richard Perle, who until recently served on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, seemed to speak for the Administration in an article he wrote for the Guardian the day after the Iraq war was launched. He wrote, "The chatterbox on the Hudson [sic] will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions."
In this larger plan to establish American hegemony, the Iraq war had an indispensable role. If the world was to be orderly, then proliferation must be stopped; if force was the solution to proliferation, then pre-emption was necessary (to avoid that mushroom cloud); if pre-emption was necessary, then regime change was necessary (so the offending government could never build the banned weapons again); and if all this was necessary, then Iraq was the one country in the world where it all could be demonstrated. Neither North Korea nor Iran offered an opportunity to teach these lessons--the first because it was capable of responding with a major war, even nuclear war, and the second because even the Administration could see that US invasion would be met with fierce popular resistance. It's thus no accident that the peril of weapons of mass destruction was the sole justification in the two legal documents by which the Administration sought to legitimize the war--HJ Resolution 114 and Security Council Resolution 1441. Nor is it an accident that the proliferation threat played the same role in the domestic political campaign for the war--by forging the supposed link between the "war on terror" and nuclear danger. In short, absent the new idea that proliferation was best stopped by pre-emptive use of force, the new American empire would have been unsalable, to the American people or to Congress. Iraq was the foundation stone of the bid for global empire.
The reliance on force over cooperation that was writ large in the imperial plan was also writ small in the occupation of Iraq. How else to understand the astonishing failure to make any preparation for the political, military, policing and even technical challenges that would face American forces? If a problem, large or small, had no military solution, this Administration seemed incapable of even seeing it. The United States was as blind to the politics of Iraq as it was to the politics of the world.
Thus we don't have to suppose that Bush officials were indifferent to the spectacular dangers that Khan's network posed to the safety of the United States and the world or that the Iraqi resistance would pose to American forces. We only have to suppose that they were simply unable to recognize facts they had failed to acknowledge in their overarching vision of a new imperial order. In both cases, ideology trumped reality.
The same pattern is manifest on an even larger scale. Just now, the peoples of the world have embarked, some willingly and some not, on an arduous, wrenching, perilous, mind-exhaustingly complicated process of learning how to live as one indivisibly connected species on our one small, endangered planet. Seen in a certain light, the Administration's imperial bid, if successful, would amount to a kind of planetary coup d'état, in which the world's dominant power takes charge of this process by virtue of its almost freakishly superior military strength. Seen in another, less dramatic light, the American imperial solution has interposed a huge, unnecessary roadblock between the world and the Himalayan mountain range of urgent tasks that it must accomplish no matter who is in charge: saving the planet from overheating; inventing a humane, just, orderly, democratic, accountable global economy; redressing mounting global inequality and poverty; responding to human rights emergencies, including genocide; and, of course, stopping proliferation as well as rolling back the existing arsenals of nuclear arms. None of these exigencies can be met as long as the world and its greatest power are engaged in a wrestling match over how to proceed.
Does the world want to indict and prosecute crimes against humanity? First, it must decide whether the International Criminal Court will do the job or entrust it to unprosecutable American forces. Do we want to reverse global warming and head off the extinction of the one-third of the world's species that, according to a report published in Nature magazine, are at risk in the next fifty years? First, the world's largest polluter has to be drawn into the global talks. Do we want to save the world from weapons of mass destruction? First, we have to decide whether we want to do it together peacefully or permit the world's only superpower to attempt it by force of arms.
No wonder, then, that the Administration, as reported by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in these pages, has mounted an assault on the scientific findings that confirm these dangers to the world [see "The Junk Science of George W. Bush," March 8]. The United States' destructive hyperactivity in Iraq cannot be disentangled from its neglect of global warming. Here, too, ideology is the enemy of fact, and empire is the nemesis of progress.
If the engine of a train suddenly goes off the rails, a wreck ensues. Such is the war in Iraq, now one year old. At the same time, the train's journey forward is canceled. Such is the current paralysis of the international community. Only when the engine is back on the tracks and starts in the right direction can either disaster be overcome. Only then will everyone be able to even begin the return to the world's unfinished business.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
New Attacks in Afghanistan Raise Concerns About Security
March 29, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/asia/29AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, March 28 (Reuters) - After President Hamid Karzai formally postponed Afghanistan's presidential and parliamentary elections, from June to September, new violence on Sunday underlined the security concerns behind the delay.
Announcing the agreement on September elections on the eve of a trip to Berlin for an aid donors' conference, Mr. Karzai said security for the election, the first since the overthrow of the Taliban, would be a major issue at the meeting.
As he spoke, news was reaching Kabul from a remote central province of a raid by gunmen suspected of being Taliban fighters that killed at least two soldiers, while blasts in a southeastern town killed a suicide bomber and wounded six people.
The decision to delay the elections until September came after the United Nations said that it did not look feasible to hold both elections in June, as outlined in an international agreement that brought Mr. Karzai to power in late 2001.
Instead, the United Nations and Afghan election authorities had recommended holding both elections in September.
Under the 2001 Bonn agreement that led to the establishment of Mr. Karzai's government, elections were planned for June, but the United Nations says only 1.46 million voters were registered by March 15, far short of the target of 10.5 million.
Poor security is a main reason for the slow registration.
Security worries were heightened by recent fighting between pro-government factions in the western city of Herat, until then one of the most peaceful parts of the country.
The Taliban, driven from power by American-led forces in 2001, have threatened to disrupt the election. More than 600 people have been killed in insurgent attacks and gun battles since August.
A Taliban spokesman said in a statement late Saturday that a delay in the elections was an embarrassment for the United States and Mr. Karzai, and that the election was intended to distract Afghans from the Muslim holy war.
In the latest violence, Taliban fighters raided an army post in Uruzgan Province killing two soldiers, an official said. Three soldiers were wounded and 10 were missing.
A Taliban spokesman said 11 soldiers had been killed.
In a separate incident, a suicide bomber trying to attack a military base in the southeastern town of Khost was killed on Saturday when his bomb exploded prematurely, a commander said.
Six civilians were hurt in a rocket attack on a restaurant near the town's airport, where American forces are based. In a third attack in Khost on Saturday, three grenades were thrown at homes of soldiers, some working with American forces. No one was hurt.
-------- africa
Nigeria's ruling party wins poll, almost 50 people died
Monday, 29 March, 2004,
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3572539.stm
Despite some violence, voting was more peaceful than predicted Nigeria's ruling People Democratic Party (PDP) has won a sweeping victory in local elections during which almost 50 people died.
President Olusegun Obasanjo's party now controls almost all levels of government across the country.
The local elections were marred with claims of massive rigging and recorded a very low turn out.
The opposition won elections in the predominantly Muslim states in the north-west of the country.
The PDP won 25 of the 30 states where the elections were held but lost in the key states of Kano, Zamfara and Sokoto.
Controversial elections
About 20 people died in central Plateau State on Friday at the eve of the poll.
Clashes broke out between the Tarok and Hausa-Fulani people in Wase town, near Jos, reportedly in an attempt to disrupt the voting.
Seven more people had been shot or slashed to death in the oil-rich Rivers state, Anyakwee Nsirimovu, an observer with the non-governmental organisation Transition Monitoring Group, told Reuters news agency.
Nigerian media reports say more people were killed in four other states during the controversial local government elections.
The BBC's Sola Odunfa in Lagos says many Nigerians declined to participate saying they felt their votes would not count as the election was "pre-determined".
Our correspondent says both the ruling PDP and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) - the main opposition grouping - have been blamed for the violence.
Predicted violence
The BBC's Yusuf Sarki Mohammed in Kaduna says elections were not held in three local authorities due to lack of ballot papers and many voters were disenfranchised.
"I am very angry because we did not vote, this was a litmus paper test for the independent state electoral bodies and they have failed," Omar Sani, a campaign director for one of the candidates in Kaduna told the BBC.
These are the first local elections to be organised by a civilian government since the 1960s. They had been delayed twice in the past two years.
About 250,000 policemen were deployed throughout Nigeria to prevent fighting.
In the northern city of Kano on Saturday police fired warning shots when a mob outside a polling station tried to attack an opposition dignitary.
Two election candidates died in the run-up to the poll.
However, correspondents say there was little of the predicted violence which had prompted the army to be on standby.
--------
Ivoirian Opposition Calls for Protests
March 29, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/africa/29IVOR.html
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, March 28 (Reuters) - Ivory Coast's opposition has called for protests on Monday, raising fears of more violence just days after security forces cracked down on an attempted rally in Abidjan, the country's largest city.
The police said Sunday that the death toll from the aborted rally on Thursday and later raids by security forces in some neighborhoods of Abidjan had risen to 37. The opposition said more than 160 people had been killed between Thursday and Saturday.
A declaration on Sunday by the opposition coalition, which includes rebels holding the country's north, urged "militants and sympathizers, as well as all Ivoirians passionate for justice, freedom and peace, to stage peaceful demonstrations in each city of the nation from Monday."
President Laurent Gbagbo has banned public demonstrations in Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer, until the end of April.
International mediators have warned that the violence of the past few days threatens to destroy a fragile effort to maintain peace after a civil war began over a failed coup against Mr. Gbagbo in September 2002.
The war was declared finished last July after all sides signed a peace agreement brokered by France, Ivory Coast's former colonial power.
But the country remains split between a rebel-held, mainly Muslim north and a government-controlled, mostly Christian south. No disarmament has taken place, and both sides seem to be digging in.
-------- asia
Chinese, Indian defence ministers agree to boost military ties
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Mar 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040329180538.a6bq5k8e.html
The Chinese and Indian defence ministers agreed Monday on measures to strengthen links between their armed forces, officials said, in a new sign of improving ties between the two most populous nations.
Chinese Defence Minister Cao Gangchuan, who arrived in India Friday, was given a ceremonial guard of honour before he met his Indian counterpart, George Fernandes. Delegation-level talks were also held, an official said.
"Both sides presented new proposals to strengthen and develop defence exchanges and confidence-building," India's defence ministry said in a statement.
They had both invited each other's officers to witness military exercises in the "interest of building familiarity, trust and confidence", it said.
"It was agreed that training, including Chinese-language training in defence institutions in India, sports and cultural exchanges and friendly interaction between border personnel would be increased."
The two countries fought a brief but bitter border war in 1962 that left their relations in shreds. In recent years they have played down their territorial disputes to focus on improving commercial and other ties.
"It was felt that an early resolution of the boundary question would give a boost to bilateral relations," the Indian statement added.
Cao said before leaving Beijing his trip was aimed at creating a "peaceful regional, political and security environment with all Asian countries".
Cao called on Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee before leaving for the Taj Mahal city of Agra from where he is due to fly to Thailand on Tuesday.
A Sino-Indian row over their Himalayan border that stretches through some of the world's most inhospitable terrain has defied resolution for decades.
Moves to resolve it gained momentum after Vajpayee visited Beijing last June.
India accuses China of occupying 38,000 square kilometres (14,670 square miles) of territory in Kashmir while Beijing lays claim to 90,000 square kilometres (34,750 square miles) -- all of Arunachal Pradesh state in the northeast India, the scene of their 1962 war.
Caos' visit follows a trip by Fernandes to Beijing in February 2003 that was preceded by the first-ever joint naval exercises.
He is in New Delhi after a visit to China's longtime friend and India's arch-rival Pakistan, where he held "excellent and fruitful talks", according to a Pakistan government statement.
-------- biological weapons
Censored Study on Bioterror Doubts U.S. Preparedness
By JUDITH MILLER
NY TIMES
March 29, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/politics/29ANTH.html
Two years after a report on the 2001 anthrax attacks was completed, the Pentagon has released parts of the unclassified document, which concludes that the nation is woefully ill-prepared to detect and respond to a bioterrorist assault.
In a sweeping assessment, the report identifies weaknesses in "almost every aspect of U.S. biopreparedness and response." But perhaps equally significant is the two-year battle over the Pentagon's refusal to release the study. That struggle highlights the growing tension between public access to information and the government's refusal to divulge anything it says terrorists could use to attack Americans.
The dispute has pitted the Pentagon against the center that released the study, advocates of openness in government like the Federation of American Scientists, public health officials and even current and former emergency response officials of the Bush administration.
The dispute revolves around a 44-page analysis titled "Lessons from the Anthrax Attacks: Implications for U.S. Bioterrorism Preparedness." It was written by a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research center in Washington that conducts only nonsecret research for the government and other clients. The report was based largely on discussions among some 40 government and private experts on public health, national security and law enforcement who attended a meeting the center sponsored in December 2001.
The report was written by David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the center. It documents many systemic weaknesses in the nation's response to the October 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people. The study also makes recommendations about how to prevent, detect and respond to such attacks. Many of those recommendations have been or are being adopted by the Bush administration.
Since then, the center and the Project on Government Secrecy, part of the scientists' group, have been trying to get Pentagon permission to publish the complete report. But the Defense Department has refused.
In a statement issued Friday, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Pentagon unit that commissioned the $150,000 study, said it had initially refused to release the document and was still preventing parts of it from being distributed. The statement said the study could "circumvent" Pentagon "rules and practices established to prevent the spread of information associated with W.M.D.," referring to nuclear, biological, chemical and other weapons of mass destruction.
But several civil libertarians, scientists, public health officials and emergency response experts challenged the Pentagon's position.
"This study was based on discussions that were held in an unclassified setting," said Jerome M. Hauer, a former assistant secretary for public health emergency preparedness in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration, who attended the December meeting. "To close the results of that forum is myopic and does nothing to better prepare this country to deal with those threats."
Public health officials were also critical. "It was not my impression that the report contained information so sensitive that it could not have been shared," said Patrick Libbey, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. He said he had read an uncensored version of the document several months ago.
John J. Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary in the Clinton administration and now the director of the center, said that because all the materials used to produce it were public, the entire document should be released.
Censored parts of the document were read to a New York Times reporter. In one instance in the redacted version, the summary states, "The fall 2001 anthrax attacks may turn out to be . . . to confront." The deleted passage reads: "the easiest of bioterrorist strikes."
The anthrax letter crisis was slowly winding down in December 2001 when the 40 government and private biodefense, national security and pubic health experts met at the center for a daylong discussion of lessons learned from the attacks.
In April 2002, Mr. Heyman completed his report, concluding that the attacks revealed dangerous "gaps in our scientific base" and badly strained the country's public health offices and laboratory infrastructure.
"Biological weapons have the potential to cause casualties equal to, or far greater than, nuclear weapons," the report warns. A redacted version was published quietly Wednesday on the Federation of American Scientists' Web site: http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/cbw/dtra02.pdf.
Paradoxically, the study said one of the gravest problems during the attacks was the government's failure "on all levels" to provide "timely and accurate information."
The report recommends, among other things, that the government expand public health laboratories and offices, establish a chain of command during attacks; develop "mass-medication and treatment delivery strategies in advance"; increase "cooperation between medical, public health and law enforcement communities"; establish a "comprehensive, balanced research agenda"; and develop a "coordinated media strategy."
In April 2002, Mr. Heyman submitted his report to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He said, the agency stamped it "for official use only," which limited its circulation to government officials and federal contractors, saying that public release "could reveal potential weaknesses" in the nation's emergency preparedness system.
The center protested and the report was referred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which upheld the agency.
After the center again protested, Pentagon officials said in August 2002 that their decision was final. A year later, the Federation of American Scientists, which had learned of the study, requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy, said that the Pentagon finally informed him this month that parts of the report could be publicly distributed.
In a letter, H.J. McIntyre, chief of the Freedom of Information Act Policy Office at the Pentagon, said the censored information "could potentially aid enemies of the U.S. in development of techniques to defeat W.M.D. response efforts of the U.S. government."
Mr. Aftergood called the redactions "arbitrary and unjustified."
"While we can't expect to defend against every conceivable attack, we can learn from experience," he said. "Refusing to disclose the lessons learned from the anthrax crisis is self-defeating in that it impedes that learning process."
-------- britain
NEAR MISS CLAIM DENIED BY BNFL
Sellafield: BNFL denies that an incident last year was hushed up
29/03/2004
By Julian Whittle,
UK News & Star
http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/viewarticle.asp?id=85708
BRITISH Nuclear Fuels today categorically denied allegations that an RAF jet came within 100ft of crashing into a cooling tower at Sellafield.
The Sunday Express yesterday claimed a "world exclusive" for its report under the headline "A second from nuclear disaster".
The newspaper quoted an un-named BNFL source as saying that an RAF fighter, probably a Tornado from RAF Leeming in Yorkshire, came within 100ft of a cooling tower at Calder Hall, Sellafield's now-defunct nuclear power station.
The incident is supposed to have happened in December last year and was allegedly hushed up.
But BNFL spokesman Alan Hughes dismissed the story.
He said: "The Sunday Express didn't contact us, and I don't know who their source is, but the facts of their story don't stack up.
"This incident did not happen. I can say that categorically."
Tony Parrini, the RAF's regional community relations officer based at Penrith, was also sceptical about the newpaper's claims.
He told the News & Star: "I have checked with BNFL, the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Trade and Industry, which is responsible for Sellafield, and they know nothing about it.
"We don't know where they've got their story from.
"Certainly, we've had no complaints from local people about low flying and you would expect complaints if an aircraft was flying that low."
RAF jets are allowed to fly no lower than 250ft when exercising over Cumbria, except under special circumstances at RAF Spadeadam, near Brampton, where they can fly as low as 100ft.
Mr Parrini also confirmed that a low-flying exclusion zone operates around Sellafield, Chapelcross and other nuclear plants.
Anti-nuclear campaigners have highlighted Sellafield's vulnerability to airborne terrorist attack.
BNFL appears to be taking the threat seriously.
It has already been reported that a blast-proof wall is to be built around the plutonium storage vaults and plutonium storage building at Sellafield, offering greater protection against aircraft impact.
A BNFL spokesman said at the time: "We have received planning permission to build new structures on the Sellafield site as part of our ongoing pro-active and responsible security enhancements programme."
Have you seen aircraft over Sellafield or Chapelcross? Call our 24-hour talkback line on 01228 612300.
What's your view of this story? Email the News & Star at news@cumbrian-newspapers.co.uk or post it on our Forums
http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/forums
-------- business
Air Force helped craft measure awarding Boeing tanker deal
By ALAN BJERGA
Mon, Mar. 29, 2004
Knight Ridder Newspapers
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/8306717.htm
WASHINGTON - A former Air Force employee who's now facing indictment played a key role in creating the legislation that handed a controversial tanker-aircraft program to Boeing Co., according to internal Boeing documents obtained by Senate investigators.
Darleen Druyun, then an Air Force tanker negotiator, worked closely with Boeing and congressional supporters to pass the 2001 law that set up the $23.5 billion leasing program, the documents show.
One e-mail indicates that Druyun kept Boeing officials informed of her efforts on behalf of the legislation while she was working for the Air Force.
"The primary (tanker lobbying) effort has focused on a briefing Darleen expects to take to Sen. Stevens," said one Boeing e-mail, dated Sept. 30, 2001. Sen. Ted Stevens, R- Alaska, inserted a provision in a December 2001 appropriations bill that called on the Air Force to lease 100 767s from Boeing to be used as tankers.
The same e-mail, from Boeing's lead tanker negotiator, John Sams, to several Boeing officials, noted that "throughout the uniformed AF (Air Force), the realization exist (sic) that leasing is considerably more costly to the AF and the taxpayer."
Air Force acquisitions chief Marvin Sambur told Knight Ridder last week that the Air Force worked closely with Boeing on the program, to the exclusion of rival tanker manufacturer Airbus, because legislation required it to.
The e-mails and other documents show that the Air Force helped make sure that the legislation was written in such a way that Boeing would be favored, and collaborated with Boeing on the company's behalf.
Druyun later left the Air Force and took a job with Boeing. Boeing fired her in late 2003, along with Chief Financial Officer Mike Sears, for improperly discussing a job at Boeing while still at the Air Force. She's under investigation for her role in the tanker negotiations.
The documents indicate that Druyun's involvement in shepherding the legislation through Congress began as early as Sept. 25, 2001, when she met with Boeing officials to discuss the viability of leasing tankers rather than buying them.
In the Sept. 30 e-mail, Boeing officials said one of the goals of Druyun's briefing to Stevens would be to overcome the "legal impediments" to the more costly tanker-lease plan. The "legal impediments" included White House Office of Management and Budget policies against leasing.
Later documents show close collaboration among Boeing, the Air Force and lawmakers to pass legislation to give Boeing the tanker contract.
In an e-mail on Dec. 6, 2001, on the eve of the tanker legislation's introduction in Congress, Boeing tanker vice president Bob Gower distributed a copy of the legislation to other Boeing officials and asked them to "determine what language changes we would recommend."
Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Cheryl Law declined to comment Monday, citing legal action. "The Air Force always adheres to the highest standards of ethical conduct in our acquisition policies and procedures," she said.
The relationship came as little surprise to followers of military acquisitions, who say companies routinely work with lawmakers and the Pentagon to craft contracts that benefit all three groups.
"This is the reality of defense contracting," said Richard Aboulafia, aerospace analyst with the Teal Group in suburban Washington.
But Druyun's involvement makes it look as if the talks were ethically tainted from the start, said Keith Ashdown, the policy director for Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington. "She was not the sole reason, but one of the central driving forces, in getting the program moving forward into congressional legislation," he said.
The Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General held a briefing for select lawmakers Monday on a draft of its report investigating the tanker program. The report is expected to be made public next week.
(Bjerga reports for The Wichita Eagle.)
----
Federal Contracts Air Force Work Renewal Brightens SI's Outlook
By Anitha Reddy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32089-2004Mar28.html
SI International Inc. won a contract potentially worth $800 million to continue providing communication network support to the Air Force Space Command, removing a major uncertainty that has hung over the stock for months.
SI International's current contract to provide the same services, which expires Sept. 30, is the Reston company's largest source of revenue. SI said the contract would account for 12 to 14 percent of its projected revenue of $240 million to $255 million for 2004.
The company's stock leaped 28 percent on Friday, closing at $23.28, on the news.
"We've had this re-compete looming in investors' minds since we went public in November 2002," said S. Bradford Antle, president and chief operating officer of SI. "It has been a constant issue we've addressed in call after call."
The space command selected SI to build and maintain the communication networks that send, receive and transmit information gathered by the country's defense satellites.
Both the company and analysts expect the new contract to bring in considerably more total revenue than the current contract. The company predicts the current contract, awarded in 1997, will generate a total of $150 million to $175 million by the time it expires.
Shares of SI International have been trading at a discount to the stocks of other government technology contractors since October, when investors first became skittish over the impending contract award. The stock's price-to-earnings ratio began to approach that of the company's peers in February, but the stock lost ground again in March, said Tim Quillin, an analyst for Stephens Inc., an investment bank in Little Rock. "This is impressive for a company the size of SI," Quillin said. "There is the potential for expansion of the business that they do with Space Command."
Quillin added that he expects the business under the contract to grow at least as fast as the overall company, whose revenue has been growing by 15 percent a year, for the next six or seven years. The contract is guaranteed for three and a half years, but the Air Force could extend it up to nine and a half years.
SI was confident it would win the new contract, Antle said, so it had already factored in a high percentage of the likely revenue into its forecasts for the coming year. Accordingly, he said, the company did not change its guidance because of the contract award.
SI has 1,900 employees, including 175 employees now working on the Space Command contract, primarily in Colorado Springs, where the agency is based. The company reported profits of $7.4 million on revenue of $168.3 million in 2003.
This summer, the company will find out if it has been selected by the State Department to continue processing visas for people applying for permanent residency in the United States, Antle said. That contract makes up 7 to 8 percent of annual revenue, or $16.8 million to $20.4 million, the company said.
-------- europe
Vast majority of Portuguese want troops in Iraq withdrawn: poll
LISBON (AFP)
Mar 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040329150923.hzh7eool.html
Nearly three in four residents of Portugal, or 71 percent, want the country's 128-strong contingent of national guards in Iraq to be withdrawn from the war-ravaged country, a poll published Monday found.
Only one in four backed the continuation of the mission while the remaining three percent had no opinion, according to the poll carried out for top-selling daily newspaper Correio da Manha.
While opposition to the presence of the national guards in Iraq was stronger among supporters of left-wing parties, the poll found a slim majority of backers of the ruling centre-right Social Democrats also want the troops to come home.
Portugal dispatched the national guard contingent to Iraq in November, immediately after a suicide bomb attack on the Italian base at Nasiriyah, in the south of the country.
Nineteen Italians and nine Iraqis were killed in that attack.
The Portuguese national guards are part of a multinational force which is providing security in southern Iraq under British command.
The Portuguese government has come under pressure from left-wing parties to recall the guards since Spain's incoming prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero vowed earlier this month to stand by his pre-election pledge to withdraw Spain's troops from Iraq if the UN does not take charge by the end of June.
Zapatero's Socialist party won an upset victory in elections held March 14, three days after the Madrid train bombings revived opposition to the conservative Popular Party of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's decision to commit Spain to the war.
But Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso has rejected the calls to bring the troops home, arguing he does not set policy based on election results in other countries.
Last week he announced Portugal would be willing to keep its national guards in Iraq after Washington hands over sovereignty of the country to Iraqis on June 30 if asked to do so by Iraqi authorities.
The telephone poll of 600 was carried out by the Aximage polling firm between March 15 and 17.
-------- iraq
US now looking to install a PM in Iraq
By Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
March 29, 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/28/1080412237911.html
The United States wants to transfer power in Iraq to a hand-picked prime minister, abandoning plans for an expansion of the current 25-member governing council, coalition officials in Baghdad say.
With less than 100 days before the US occupation authorities are to transfer sovereignty on June 30, fears of wrangling among Iraqi politicians has forced Washington to make its third switch of strategy in six months.
The search is now on for an Iraqi to serve as chief executive. He will almost certainly be from the Shia Muslim majority, and probably a secular technocrat. It is not clear if Iraqi agreement on this issue has been sought.
Initial plans for enlarging the existing 25-member governing council, which has the task of appointing the cabinet, have been downgraded in favour of letting the present members get on with their job. Although the council may still be increased, the process need not be tied to the June 30 deadline.
Plans to create a three-man presidency - with a representative of the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds - are still under way, but its powers would be mainly symbolic. The interim government will serve until direct elections for a national assembly are held at the end of the year.
A decision about how to pick an Iraqi government to take over when the Americans cede power have been in turmoil for several months. An initial US proposal to hold unelected caucuses of regional "notables" to choose a council which would then nominate a cabinet, collapsed in disarray after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shia cleric, called for direct elections.
The latest plan is to choose a government after a vague process of "extensive deliberation and consultations with cross-sections of the Iraqi people".
Ayatollah Sistani said last week that he would not meet any United Nations officials if the world body endorsed the transitional law. One of his aides said on Saturday that the cleric might issue a religious edict against any Iraqis who join the interim government.
Latest developments
The man who led US forces to Saddam Hussein's hiding place would not get the $US25 million ($34 million) bounty because he had not given the information willingly, the BBC TV program Panoramaquoted US soldiers as saying. Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Musslit, one of Saddam's closest bodyguards, is said to have betrayed him shortly after being arrested in December.
Jacques Verg, the French lawyer who defended the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, says a nephew of Saddam has asked him to represent the deposed dictator.
----
Iraq as a weapons lab
Tomdispatch,
March 29, 2004
http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1338
For the neocons of this administration, as a friend said to me recently, Iraq was to be a laboratory that would reveal the face of imperial America. It was there that we would finally take up our rightful role as the new Rome. Fierce as Saddam Hussein's regime was to its own people, by 2003 it was a relative pushover for the greatest military power on this or any other imaginable planet. After the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War I, the endless bombings in the no-fly zones, and over a decade of harsh sanctions, Iraq's military was a shadow of its former self by the time the U.S. invaded.
The neocons and their allies had long dreamed of and planned for a "cakewalk" through Iraq that would establish in a new way American domination in the region and offer a calling card to the world. Iraq was to be the demonstration model, the prototype, for the Bush Doctrine as laid out in the National Security Strategy of 2002, which announced to the planet that we were an alliance of one, a power of a sort previously unknown in history that needed to follow no one's rules. Iraq would be where they would test out their version of "democracy" (our men in office) and "privatization" (our corporations in the saddle). And the rest of the Middle East, possibly the rest of the world, would fall in line or suffer the consequences.
While Iraq has since failed them in every regard other than the ease of military victory, it has proved an effective laboratory, a testing grounds, for other matters entirely, as Nick Turse, who writes regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-industrial complex, points out below. Tom
Living weapons labs War American-style By Nick Turse
With the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq just past and millions of demonstrators back in the streets of cities across the world, are we any clearer on the reasons for going to war? We know it was about energy and empire; but, as we also know, the official claim (until recently) was that it was about those non-existent WMDs. Or was it to remove a tyrant? Or to democratize the Middle East? Or to wage the war on terror? Or to finish Papa's Gulf War I? While at least some of these reasons are endlessly debated by media talking heads, the functions of the war -- among them the way Iraq has been used as a weapons laboratory -- have received far less attention.
Since the invention of weapons, man has been attempting to improve them; and since World War II, the United States has been the leading global actor in the research and development of weapons meant to incapacitate people. In terms of intensive research in the fields of "wound ballistics," "rapid incapacitation weaponry," and fragmentation "kill mechanisms" to create ever more lethal antipersonnel weapons -- what might best be called "scientific slaughter" -- the U.S. has left the rest of the world in the dust.
Back in 1965, Jack Raymond of the New York Times wrote a piece aptly headlined, "Vietnam Gives U.S. 'War Laboratory.'" And in that era, there were a couple of American commanders who publicly said as much. For instance, General Maxwell Taylor, who served as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, noted that "we have recognized the importance of the area [Vietnam] as a laboratory. We have teams out there looking at equipment requirements of this kind of guerilla warfare." But as Raymond pointed out, most American officials were loath to make such boasts for fear of comparisons to the Nazis, who had, only three decades earlier, used the Spanish Civil War as a training ground for World War II.
These days, the American military evidences no such fear. In fact, America's recent small wars from Grenada in 1983 to Iraq in 2003 have tumbled upon each other so regularly that the military and its industrial partners have come to rely on them as living laboratories for battle-testing and improving their weaponry.
In a recent piece in the Los Angeles Times, military analyst William M. Arkin reported that the Marines being deployed in Iraq this month will bring along the newest high-tech gadget in America's ever-expanding arsenal to try out on whatever resistant Iraqis they may happen to run into. The Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) emits a powerful tone which brings agonizing pain to those within earshot. While Woody Norris, chairman of the American Technology Corporation which manufactures the device, refuses to call it a "weapon," he claims, "It will knock [some people] on their knees." But Arkin asks a crucial question seldom heard these days: "Is actual combat in a foreign country the appropriate place to test a new weapon?"
The military and its industrial partners sure think so. As the fears of the Vietnam era continue to fade, successive, sometimes concurrent wars and foreign adventures provide the means to constantly improve and upgrade weapons, early versions of which are rushed into battle for real-world testing, re-tooling and perfecting on what increasingly seems to be the global assembly line of the military-industrial complex.
For example, in the mid-1990s, the Balkans became the proving grounds for the Predator drone, an intelligence-gathering unmanned air vehicle (UAV). A contract for the Predator was only awarded to manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in January 1994, but by 1995 a first generation Predator was already in the skies over Bosnia. The drone then saw service in Kosovo and, by 2001, no longer purely observational, it had been armed with Hellfire laser-guided missiles. It soon began living up to its name when, in February of that year, it successfully fired one of them in a flight test. Later that same year, the upgraded and armed UAV was off to the Balkans and then Afghanistan for real-world combat testing; by 2002, the Hellfire-equipped Predator drone was being used as a judge-jury-and-executioner assassination weapon in Yemen -- where it attacked a civilian vehicle, incinerating six occupants, all allegedly al Qaeda terrorists. Today, the Predator sees service in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Says Maj. Russell Lee of the Air Force, "There is always a Predator airborne around the world."
While the Predator has already seen plenty of service in Iraq, the so-called "Mother of all Bombs," the 21,500-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast super-bomb (MOAB) arrived too late, despite a very public rush to ready the first of them for the war. Rear Admiral (Ret.) Stephen Baker, who was the battle-group chief of operations during Gulf War I and is now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, has offered this vision of what it would be like to unleash weapon on Tikrit in the Sunni heartland of Iraq. "It would," he wrote, "essentially vaporize everything... Shards and fractures would travel at 6,000 feet per second. There'd be a shock wave of several thousand pounds per square inch. You've got over 8,500 [degree] Fahrenheit temperatures."
Unfortunately for its makers at the Air Force Research Laboratory, the advance on Baghdad happened so swiftly that, although a single bomb was readied for use (after tests at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base in March 2003) and in April sent to an "undisclosed forward base" in the Iraq "theater," it didn't reach the region in time to "vaporize" anyone or anything. For the last near-year, however, it has been sitting in the "Iraq war region," presumably waiting to be to be unleashed on the next "evil-doer" or regional rogue state.
In this election year, we're almost assured that a new weapons-lab nation will not be opened for business. But after November, who knows? Regardless, the LRAD will undoubtedly be thrust into action in Iraq, and, according to an Associated Press report, another new weapon, the Active Denial System, which utilizes "a painful energy beam," will also "be tested in the field soon.." Just what "field" remains to be seen.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military used Southeast Asia as a military laboratory for testing out all sorts of weaponry ideas. Perhaps best remembered are the many half-baked high-tech weapons systems -- such as Robert McNamara's famed "electronic battlefield" of remote sensors and landmines and the various "people-sniffing" devices using both live bedbugs and chemical-mechanical apparatuses -- that were tested with less than stellar results. Southeast Asia, however, also saw the testing of many effectual lethal technologies like the M-16 rifle; a new generation of enhanced anti-personnel munitions (like cluster-bomb units that represented a sea-change in lethality over World War II-era armaments) and upgraded weapons such as napalm-B, the jellied gasoline that and burned hotter and longer than its World War II predecessor. Basically, whatever could be tested in action was.
Still, the military, generally cowed from crowing about it by the rise of an antiwar movement, was even forced to engage in debate and feel the weight of public opinion when utilizing such agents as chemical gases and defoliants. Today, the military is remarkably unintimidated and there's almost no debate about using America's seemingly endless string of wars (including the possibly never-to-be-ended "war on terrorism") as proving grounds for whatever super-bombs or energy-beam devices the Pentagon and its industrial partners can come up with. Thanks to nearly nonstop conflicts, interventions, engagements, and attacks during the presidential administrations of both parties, including among others: Iraq in 1991, Somalia in 1992-1993, the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo from 1992 onwards, Haiti in 1994, Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, Afghanistan in 2002, Iraq in 2003 and Haiti in 2004, what was once taboo is now the norm.
Using a stock phrase from the Vietnam War, Gerry J. Gilmore of the American Forces Press Service, recently made the case for employing new LRAD-type technologies "to win hearts and minds during 21st-century military operations." Gilmore quoted Alan R. Shaffer, director for plans and programs with the Pentagon's Office of Defense Research and Engineering, as stating that the military will be able to use its active-denial system effectively on crowds. "You get hit with the high-powered microwave," Shaffer says, "and you run away."
Iraq, with its low-level guerrilla war, is just the latest living laboratory for American weapons developers. Predators, which were once a surveillance tool but are now lethal attack weapons, will soon be joined there by the LRAD non-weapon and, perhaps, the active-denial system (which, according to one test-subject, felt like an explosion of heat and pain) as well as who knows what other exotic weaponry. But where's the debate? Why isn't the government called to account for embarking on wars that are functionally laboratories for experiments in lethality and pain?
Some of the same chemical gasses unleashed in Vietnam were then brought home and used on demonstrators at street protests and on college campuses. Its exceedingly improbable that the Long Range Acoustic Device or the Active-Denial System will be used in the streets around the September 2004 Republican National Convention protests in New York City, but is that the only act that would suffice to spark some serious debate -- a high-powered pain beam being used on American crowds? Will Americans only demonstrate concern when their fellow citizens become test subjects for weapons systems?
It's time for Americans to recognize that people across the globe are now, essentially, being used as experimental material -- the test subjects for weapons technologies built for the benefit of an ever-expanding, taxpayer-financed military-industrial complex. Only after this is understood can we hold the military and their corporate partners accountable for fostering a cycle of test-tube warfare where the world's people, from the Balkans to Baghdad, are guinea pigs for the American war machine.
Nicholas Turse is doctoral candidate at the Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He continues to write on the military-industrial-entertainment-scientific-[you add on here] complex for Tomdispatch
----
Shiites Organize to Block U.S. Plan
Spurred by Sistani, Iraqi Clergy Mobilizes Followers Against Constitution
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31905-2004Mar28?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- With the turban of the clergy and the talk of a politician, Hashem Awadi, a young Shiite Muslim cleric, thumbed through papers that described the latest challenge to Washington's political blueprint for Iraq.
Here, the gaunt, 38-year-old said, was a leaflet that enumerated the objections of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's most powerful cleric, to Iraq's interim constitution. This, he said, was the letter the ayatollah sent to the United Nations in protest. And here, displayed proudly, was the petition denouncing that constitution in what he said amounted to a "popular referendum."
"We want to make clear the will of the people," said Awadi, who heads the Ghadir Foundation, a religious institute in Baghdad that, by his count, has distributed as many as 10,000 of the petitions. "The people are burning."
Awadi, whose speech veers from Islamic law to Western freedoms, is one of the leaders of a vociferous grass-roots campaign unleashed by the edict published by Sistani's office March 8 questioning the legitimacy of the interim constitution.
In the weeks since, the vast network of Shiite Muslim mosques, religious centers, foundations and community organizations that make Sistani Iraq's most influential figure has led a campaign to amend the constitution or discard it. Posters have gone up at universities in Baghdad and elsewhere, leaflets have circulated among prayer-goers and Sistani's cadres -- from young clerics to devoted laymen -- have gathered tens of thousands of signatures on the petitions. Demonstrations are next, they warn.
"This is freedom of expression," Awadi said, thumbing yellow worry beads. "This is freedom of opinion."
The clergy's campaign is steeped in the religious symbolism that binds much of the country's Shiite majority, whose political ascendancy is a defining feature of postwar Iraq. It turns on a term -- legitimacy -- that is far easier to deny than to bestow. The campaign signals a willingness to confront U.S. authorities at a moment when time is short, as the American administration prepares to formally end the occupation on June 30 and turn over authority to an interim Iraqi government.
Sistani's edict was never uttered aloud. The reclusive, 73-year-old cleric did not deliver it publicly. But the statement -- six lines penned in the meticulous handwriting of Sistani's son -- was enough to seriously imperil a document American and Iraqi leaders have hailed as a model for the Arab world and the clergy have denounced as the work of an unelected body unduly pressured by U.S. officials.
Sistani's followers make clear that their campaign is not simply driven by the hope of altering the constitution. In a country where pledges of democracy are not yet supported by representative institutions, religion is by far the best-organized force. Its leadership views the constitution as an opportunity to mobilize the still unfulfilled potential of the country's Shiite majority.
"For a long time, we had lost our rights," said Saad Taher, 40, a community activist and municipal worker, sitting in a tailor's shop in the religiously mixed neighborhood of New Baghdad. "We're trying to help the people to take their rights back."
The room, a dingy second-floor workshop that overlooks a teeming street market of rickety stalls, is the headquarters of Taher's Committee of Heavenly Books, one of an abundance of Shiite community groups that have sprung up since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government on April 9. Most have names imbued with religious imagery, like the Committee of Rescue Ships or Committee of the Followers of Hussein, Shiite Islam's most beloved saint. Most are long on devotion and short on money.
"We're from the people," Taher said. "We're the children of this neighborhood."
With about 400 members, the committee has worked on the front lines of the constitutional campaign. Taher and his co-director, Talal Jaafari, a vendor in the market outside, meet every day in the workshop with five or 10 of the most committed.
For the past week, they have gone to universities, to Shiite community centers known as husseiniyas, to mosques and door to door with the petitions, which describe the constitution as illegitimate and list objections that run from the document's liberal definition of citizenship to the power of an unelected government to make lasting decisions. So far, the two men have filled more than 400 petitions, each with 15 signatures, along with a name, address, occupation and birth date.
Some were reluctant to sign, fearing political involvement that, until a year ago, was particularly dangerous, Taher said.
"But we've overcome our fear," he said, smiling. "Thank God and praise him."
"We've come to the point where others are scared of us," a friend, Jassem Qureishi, said, drawing laughs from the group.
"America has a term: the rebuilding of Iraq," Taher said, sitting along a wall crowded with religious portraits and a tailor's tools. "We are rebuilding ourselves. We want to create a new Iraqi personality. That's our task. That's not the Americans' task."
Asked about the next step the group plans in the campaign, Taher answered succinctly.
"We take our instructions from Sheik Sahib," he said.
Lieutenant in Baghdad
Sheik Sahib Abdullah Warwar Qureishi is a wakil, or religious representative. He is one of about 200 in Baghdad who answer to Sistani, many of them providing the organizational power behind the campaign's momentum.
Unlike many of the wakils, Qureishi is young, his bushy beard making him appear older than his 34 years. But he has spent more than a decade as a seminary student in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Sistani has his headquarters. His words come slowly and are often unexpectedly cheerful, in the mentoring tone of a teacher.
"We refuse the constitution in its entirety and its details," he said, sitting under three shelves full of law books.
Qureishi is responsible for a sprawling swath of New Baghdad known as the Gulf neighborhood, which is majority Shiite. More than 70,000 people live there, and the area has 10 husseiniyas and 12 mosques. Qureishi spends half the week in Najaf, where he visits Sistani's office daily. On his three nights in Baghdad, he teaches three one-hour courses to about 37 students who, along with the activists of the Committee of Heavenly Books, have become the foot soldiers in the petition campaign.
On this night, six stacks of petitions were laid out in front of him, spread like a feast.
"For 35 years, Najaf could never lift its head. The people couldn't breathe," he said, as the ceiling fan blew the scent of burning incense across the room. "Now we speak as we like, we worship as we like. What we have now feels like democracy."
Until late in the night, students and activists streamed into his small brick house, bordered by three palm trees, with pools of sewage outside. Each carried a bundle of petitions. Over the past week, he estimated, he had gathered at least 6,000 petitions with 90,000 signatures. Every day or so, he has the documents scanned onto a computer disc and sent to Sistani's office in Najaf.
"We had more than 1,000, and it wasn't enough," said one activist, Qassim Hassan, 42, as he entered the home.
"If you need a billion, I'll give them to you," Qureishi told him.
Kadhim Atshan, a member of the committee, said a third of the people wanted to sign with pens dipped in their own blood.
Qureishi shook his head. Sistani, he said, "has refused people doing this. He said it's disgusting, and he doesn't accept it."
Sitting together on red carpets, their backs against pillows along the walls, the men talked about what they considered the constitution's faults.
The campaign already resembles a movement led by Sistani against a U.S.-devised plan for Iraq's transition, announced Nov. 15, calling for regional caucuses that would choose a transitional government. A month later, Sistani made his reservations to the plan public. By February, amid popular opposition, the U.S. administration was looking for an alternative that has yet to be decided.
In both campaigns, the question was who would decide Iraq's political future and under what authority.
Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, which negotiated and signed the interim constitution on March 8, "doesn't represent the majority of the people," Qureishi said. "They must represent themselves." He turned the discussion to the U.S. occupation, as the men listened patiently. "The coalition forces didn't come for your interests or my interests," he said, wagging his finger, "not at all."
"The solution is for you to vote, for me to vote, for him to vote," he said, pointing to those gathered. "That's the solution."
The enthusiasm grew. At one point, electricity was cut and the lights went out. Most of the men pulled out lighters. The conversation never missed a beat. Some of the youngest of the sheik's followers pleaded for more direct action. "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," said Jawad Rumi, 33. "The shortest distance from Earth to Heaven is jihad."
Over tea and cigarettes, other men spoke up, addressing the sheik or their colleagues, and nearly all seemed to have read the law. One pointed out the constitution's provision for Iraqis to reclaim citizenship. Several pointed out that the provision would allow Iraqi Jews who left for Israel in the 1940s and 1950s to return. "It will let the Israelis do as they like in Iraq," Jaafari said to the nods of others.
What about Iraqi armed forces remaining under U.S. control in the interim? one man asked. Why wasn't the constitution put to a vote? asked another. Others objected to a three-member presidency that would allow a vice president, likely a Sunni Arab or Kurd, to overrule a presumably Shiite president -- a clause that U.S. officials and some Iraqi leaders describe as essential for protecting minority rights.
The sheik spoke up again. From a poster embossed with red and black type on a blue background, he pointed out what he said was his biggest objection: a provision that gives Kurds an effective veto over the permanent constitution to be written next year.
"This decision was imposed on us," Qureishi said.
'They're Ready to Act'
The poster the sheik read from has gone up in many parts of Baghdad. It bears a picture of Sistani, with flowing beard and turban, reading from a book. In large type, it asks, "What do you know about the Iraqi State Law for the Transitional Phase?" It was published by the Najaf-based Murtada Foundation which, like Awadi's Ghadir Foundation, is among the handful of institutions that are nominally independent but under the loose supervision of the offices of Sistani and other senior ayatollahs.
The literature is ubiquitous -- in husseiniyas and mosques, on the walls of universities and in markets. Qureishi, the sheik, had foot-high stacks of the group's leaflets and interviews, piled next to blank petitions. At a mosque in a nearby neighborhood, banners along the walls copied the slogans: "Any law not ratified by a nationally elected group will not be legitimate."
Jassim Jazairi, a 35-year-old cleric in a black turban, runs the branch of the Murtada Foundation on Baghdad's Palestine Street, one of two in the capital. On his untidy desk were 170 petitions, marked either with signatures or with the thumbprints of the illiterate. Alongside them were copies of an interview with "a source close to" Sistani, reprinted from the foundation's magazine, Holy Najaf. Next to those was a red Koran.
"Even now, when we hold forums and we talk about [Sistani's] reservations, the people almost respond with violence," Jazairi said. "They're emotional, and they're ready to act."
Jazairi predicted that protests would come next, to force amendments to the constitution. He insisted they would stay nonviolent -- "peaceful resistance," as he put it. To him, they were another step in the politicization of the Shiite community, led by the clergy.
"We lost so much over 35 years of repression," he said. "The fear remains, and it still affects Iraq's people. We want to restore people's confidence in themselves. We want them to know they can change the political situation they face."
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Four Killed in Mosul; Shiite Newspaper Shut
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31402-2004Mar28.html
BAGHDAD, March 28 -- Two foreign civilians and a driver and a bodyguard assigned to an Iraqi official were killed in separate attacks Sunday in the northern city of Mosul.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, U.S. troops closed a newspaper, charging the Shiite Muslim weekly with "intent to disrupt general security and incite violence" against occupation forces.
The attacks in Mosul capped a violent weekend in the third-largest Iraqi city, which for much of the past year has been regarded as a pocket of relative calm.
The charred bodies of a Briton and his Canadian colleague, in blue bullet-proof vests, were found beside their burning, bullet-riddled sport-utility vehicle on a highway on the east side of the city. The men were part of a security detail assigned to protect foreign engineers operating a nearby power plant for General Electric, according to U.S. officials.
The other vehicle in the convoy, which carried the engineers, arrived safely at the power station after the attack, officials said. The destroyed SUV appeared to have been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
The second attack targeted a convoy carrying Nasreen Mustafa Sadiq Barwari, a Kurd appointed by U.S. officials to head the Public Works Ministry. The vehicles came under fire while en route from a town meeting in Dahuk, a Kurdish city north of Mosul. A driver and a bodyguard were killed, and two other people in Barwari's entourage were wounded, occupation officials said.
Insurgents launched attacks throughout the day in the city of 2 million, and it was not known whether the 11 a.m. attack on Barwari's convoy was an attempt to assassinate her.
In other incidents in the city, four assailants were killed after an armored Stryker military vehicle was struck twice by rocket-propelled grenades, military officials said; a grenade wounded a police officer in the center of the city; and a rocket-propelled grenade struck a school but did not explode, the Reuters news agency reported.
The newspaper closed in Baghdad is controlled by Moqtada Sadr, a young cleric who has invoked his revered family name to organize a volatile following among the young and dispossessed in the Shiite slums of the capital. Hours after U.S. military officers shut down the newspaper, minibuses had ferried in enough protesters to fill the square opposite its padlocked offices.
"We don't want another Saddam!" the crowds chanted, alluding to the country's U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer. The order to shutter the newspaper for 60 days was delivered by the soldiers, who offered apologies as they led writers and editors out of the building, staff members said.
"That chain you see on the door is one of the American symbols of freedom," said Ali Alyassari, the editor, in a park across the street from the offices. "Do you think this is political freedom?"
U.S. officials say Sadr has come close to arrest for preaching resistance to the occupation and maintaining a militia that U.S. officers blame for a lethal attack in October on a U.S. patrol. A letter signed by Bremer charged the newspaper with fomenting attacks by falsely reporting that an Apache helicopter was responsible for damage that was caused by a car bomb and carrying a headline in the same issue that read: "Bremer follows in the footsteps of Saddam."
-------- israel / palestine
British MP wants economic sanctions against Israel
March 29, 2004
(AFP)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1075727.htm
A British Member of Parliament from the ruling Labour party, Gerald Kaufman, has called for economic sanctions against Israel, including cutting off arms supplies, to force it back to the negotiating table with the Palestinians.
"It is not enough for the world community, including our own Government, to condemn the Israeli Government's brutal policies of repression," he said, addressing members of his Manchester constituency.
"Only widespread economic sanctions on Israel, together with cutting off arms supplies, can make any impact on this Government without a conscience".
Mr Kaufman, himself Jewish, said US President George W Bush's father, the former president Bush, had "understood the importance of forcing the Israelis to the conference table by imposing economic sanctions on a previous Likud Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir".
Mr Kaufman, once a frontbench Labour foreign affairs spokesman when the party was in opposition, criticised a decision by Mr Bush to receive Mr Sharon in Washington.
"Bush has shown whose side he is on in this grossly unequal struggle by refusing to invite the Palestinian Prime Minister, even though the ostensible purpose of the invitation to Sharon is the Middle East peace process," Mr Kaufman said.
Mr Sharon has received an invitation to meet Mr Bush on April 14.
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Call to Indict Sharon Ignites Political Storm
March 29, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/middleeast/29MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, March 28 - Israel's state prosecutor cast a shadow over Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday when, the Israeli news media reported, she recommended that the attorney general indict him on charges of taking bribes from a developer.
Officials close to Mr. Sharon said they had long expected such a recommendation, while adding that they also expected the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, to impose a far higher standard of proof before proceeding with an indictment.
Politically, if not legally, an indictment would almost surely compel Mr. Sharon to step down, Israeli politicians said.
The Justice Ministry confirmed that the prosecutor, Edna Arbel, had made a recommendation, but declined to discuss its substance. Mr. Sharon has not been charged with a crime.
Mr. Mazuz is likely to take at least a month and probably longer to decide whether to proceed, the Justice Ministry said. If he concludes that an indictment is warranted, Mr. Sharon will have the opportunity to request a hearing before a final decision on whether to indict.
The news leak of the prosecutor's recommendation outraged Mr. Sharon's office. It ignited a political storm around him just as he was seeking American agreement to his announced plan to withdraw soldiers and settlers unilaterally from most or all of the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank.
"The timing is devastating," said a top adviser to Mr. Sharon. "It's terrible, because it's so irresponsible."
He argued that Ms. Arbel's view that an indictment was warranted had been known for months. She has a reputation as an aggressive prosecutor of suspected public corruption, and legal experts said her recommendations for indictment were not always accepted.
"There is absolutely nothing new in this so-called news," the Sharon adviser said. "The whole thing is a media event." Mr. Sharon is planning to meet with President Bush in Washington in mid-April.
Legal experts also objected to the disclosure of the recommendation to the Israeli news media, saying it generated improper pressure on Mr. Mazuz. "It's really unheard of," said Uriel Reichman, a professor of law who is president of the Interdisciplinary Center, a nonprofit academic institution in Herzliya. "It creates a difficulty for the attorney general to exercise his discretion, and creates a prejudgment in public opinion."
He said the leak risked politicizing the atmosphere around the attorney general's decision, putting Mr. Mazuz in the position of looking like "an obedient follower of Arbel, or somebody who is for the prime minister."
Legal experts are divided over whether an indictment would immediately force Mr. Sharon to resign. But with his far-right partners in the governing coalition already furious over his withdrawal plan, he would be unlikely to sustain his government in the face of an indictment, politicians said.
Members of one crucial coalition faction, the centrist, good-government Shinui Party, have said they would no longer support Mr. Sharon as prime minister if he was charged.
Joseph Paritzky, the minister of infrastructure and a Shinui member, speaking on Israel's Channel Two television, called on Mr. Mazuz to "fix a date, as close a date as possible, for a decision one way or the other, to close the issue," adding, "We have already declared that if the prime minister is indicted, we shall demand his resignation."
Mr. Sharon must also contend with restive members of his own party, Likud. Uzi Landau, a Likud minister who opposes the withdrawal plan, said Sunday that Mr. Sharon must at least suspend himself if charges are filed against him.
Adding the left-of-center Labor Party to his coalition would be Mr. Sharon's clear recourse to remain in power if the pro-settler parties eventually bolted because of his withdrawal plan. But Labor would be unlikely to join in the event of an indictment, Labor politicians said.
Indeed, Mr. Sharon came under immediate pressure on Sunday from opposition politicians over Ms. Arbel's recommendation. "The most important thing is that in the reality we are in, the prime minister cannot continue to function," Haim Ramon, a Labor leader, told Israeli radio. "He is in great distress. We are all in great distress."
Mr. Sharon and his son, Gilad, are under investigation in what is known as the Greek Island Affair, a series of land deals that raised suspicions of influence-buying.
In January, an Israeli court indicted a politically connected Israeli developer, David Appel, on charges of trying to bribe Mr. Sharon with about $700,000, most of it paid to Gilad Sharon. The court said that beginning in the late 1990's, when Mr. Sharon was foreign minister in a previous government, Mr. Appel sought his influence in deals that included a resort and casino on a Greek island.
The indictment of Mr. Appel said he had told Mr. Sharon that his son would make a lot of money, but it did not disclose Mr. Sharon's response. It did not lay out evidence that Mr. Sharon had knowingly taken a bribe.
For proposed payments of $3 million, Mr. Appel hired Gilad Sharon to promote the development of the Greek island resort, though, as the indictment put it, 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.
Prosecutors have also been examining at least one land deal by Mr. Appel in Israel. They have also been weighing a possible indictment of Gilad Sharon.
Some Israeli politicians and legal experts said Mr. Mazuz, who was appointed in January, would find it difficult to reject Ms. Arbel's recommendation.
"He is in a way an unknown quantity," said Moshe Negbi, a commentator who teaches public and constitutional law at Hebrew University. "But it's hard for him to go against the recommendation, because he is, on the one hand, new on the job, and on the other, he is not an expert, and he does not have much experience in criminal law." He said Mr. Mazuz was more experienced in administrative and constitutional law.
But others said Mr. Mazuz must find a balance between competing public interests in maintaining governmental stability at a difficult time, protecting the integrity of the prosecutor's office and policing possible abuse of power.
If Mr. Mazuz indicted Mr. Sharon and failed to convict him, they said, he would jeopardize the standing of his own office while throwing the government into turmoil.
"He has to review the evidence and decide on the basis of the evidence presented him whether he as a judge would convict the prime minister," Professor Reichman said. "Anything less than this standard is, in my view, very problematic."
--------
Draft Indictment Charges Sharon
Israeli Attorney General to Decide Whether to Prosecute Prime Minister
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30842-2004Mar28.html
JERUSALEM, March 28 -- Israel's top prosecutor Sunday recommended indicting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on charges of taking bribes in return for political favors, fueling calls for his resignation and jeopardizing his proposals for disengagement from the Palestinian territories.
State Attorney Edna Arbel submitted the draft indictment Sunday to the newly appointed attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, who will make the final decision on whether to pursue criminal charges. The Justice Ministry declined to discuss details of the case.
Sharon's attorney, Avigdor Klagsbald, in a statement called the case "media manipulation by the state attorney, which is conducting a campaign of unfair leaks against the prime minister."
"This is an attempt to exert pressure on public opinion and especially the attorney general, who is the exclusive authority for deciding on the issuing of indictments," he said.
The proposed indictment came as Sharon, 76, confronts plunging popularity in polls at home and harsh international criticism for the assassination last week of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Sharon also faces a political battering over his proposals to withdraw Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip as part of a unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians. Sharon is scheduled to travel to Washington in two weeks to lobby President Bush for support of the disengagement plan.
Political analysts said Sunday that even though a potential indictment against Sharon remained in a preliminary legal stage, the prosecutor's action damaged his ability to rally support for his disengagement plans and to prevent a government built on disparate political factions from unraveling.
"This is a setback for the peace process," said Dan Korn, a professor of public policy at Tel Aviv University and an activist in the opposition Labor Party that Sharon has been courting for support of his disengagement proposals. "More and more he's unable to move forward."
The proposed indictment was presented the same day that an Israeli parliamentary committee recommended a major overhaul of the country's intelligence services. The committee's eight-month investigation determined that the spy agencies had severely inflated reports of Iraq's capabilities for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare which it said were based on "speculation and hypothesis" and lacked reliable evidence. Investigations in the United States and Britain are examining similar allegations against their respective intelligence services.
The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of Israel's Knesset, or parliament, reported that the country's intelligence agencies were rife with systemic problems that led to what the committee's chairman, Yuval Steinitz, described as "inexplicable" evaluations of Iraqi weapons capabilities before the U.S-led invasion last year.
In one case cited by the report, Israeli intelligence services increased their estimates of the number of missiles in the Iraqi arsenal capable of hitting Israel from "isolated missiles" in 2000, to "tens of missiles" in 2001 to "50-100 missiles" in the last weeks of 2002 based on nothing more than "speculation and hypothesis."
Steinitz, a member of Sharon's Likud Party, said the committee found that Israeli, U.S. and British intelligence services traded unsubstantiated reports in order to "strengthen one another and increase self-confidence" when none had sufficient intelligence to support many of the claims.
The chief prosecutor's recommendation to indict Sharon is based on allegations that Sharon, during the time he was foreign minister, accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from David Appel, a businessman and Likud Party activist, in return for agreeing to try to promote real estate developments. A Tel Aviv court charged Appel in January with giving Sharon "a bribe in recognition of activities connected to fulfillment of his public positions." The charges allege that Appel hired Sharon's son, Gilad, at an inflated salary of about $100,000 to serve as marketing adviser for a Greek island real estate project in 1999, and transferred about $580,000 to the Sharon family ranch in the Negev Desert.
Sharon has denied wrongdoing in connection with each of a series of corruption scandals.
Some of Sharon's cabinet members said Sunday that the prime minister should resign if the attorney general accepts the indictment.
"Under the circumstances, the prime minister should resign," National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Partizky told Israel Radio.
Partizky, a member of the centrist Shinui Party, which is crucial to Sharon's governing coalition, also said: "I would expect him to say today that he is ready to go home today and fight from there to prove his innocence."
Uzi Landau, a minister from Sharon's Likud Party, agreed that the prime minister should step aside if charges are filed.
--------
Sharon's Son Told to Hand Over Papers in Corruption Cases
March 29, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/middleeast/29CND-SHAR.html?hp
JERUSALEM, March 29 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered another setback today when Israel's Supreme Court ordered his son to hand over documents in two separate corruption investigations that involve Mr. Sharon.
The court decision comes a day after a state prosecutor recommended that Israel's attorney general indict Mr. Sharon on charges that he accepted bribes from a real estate developer, according to the Israeli news media.
Mr. Sharon has not been charged with any crime, and has denied wrongdoing. But political rivals are calling for Mr. Sharon to step aside while the investigations proceed. Even some of Mr. Sharon's own cabinet members say he should resign if he is indicted.
Mr. Sharon, who has a long history of surviving controversies, has insisted that he will stay in his post.
The decision of Attorney General Menachem Mazuz on whether to indict Mr. Sharon is not expected for several weeks, or perhaps even a couple of months. If Mr. Sharon is indicted, he would face heavy pressure to resign.
The legal questions arise as the Middle East violence grinds on and Mr. Sharon is raising the possibility of unilateral Israeli action, such as withdrawing Israeli soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip and some parts of the West Bank. In today's ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision that Mr. Sharon's son, Gilad, must produce documents like bank records in the two investigations.
Prosecutors contend that Gilad Sharon has crucial documents, but the son, through his lawyer, has disputed this. Gilad Sharon's lawyer, Micha Fettman, said that his client did not have the papers that the police were seeking but that Gilad Sharon would cooperate with investigators.
In one inquiry known as the Greek Island Affairs, investigators are trying to determine whether a wealthy Israeli real estate developer tried to bribe Mr. Sharon by making large payments to Gilad Sharon.
The developer, David Appel, has been indicted on bribery charges for the nearly $700,000 he paid to Gilad Sharon and the Sharon family ranch beginning in the late 1990's. Mr. Sharon and Gilad Sharon both live on the ranch.
At the time the dealings began, Mr. Appel was trying to build a resort on a Greek island, and needed permission from the Greek government. Mr. Sharon was then Israel's foreign minister.
Mr. Appel hired Gilad Sharon to promote the project, though the son had little business experience.
The Greek government never gave Mr. Appel permission to proceed with the project, which ultimately collapsed.
---------
Hamas Leader Calls Bush Foe of Muslims
March 29, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/middleeast/29HAMA.html
JERUSALEM, March 28 - The new Hamas leader, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, said Sunday that President Bush is the enemy of Muslims and that God has 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 oratory, against it. But since last week, when Israel killed the 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 the United States must have given its blessing to the attack on Sheik Yassin. The United States has said it had no warning.
Dr. Rantisi criticized the American 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 is now 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 Nablus, in the West Bank, Israeli troops on Sunday arrested a 16-year-old, Taher Hariwi, who was suspected of planning to carry out a suicide bombing, the military said.
Also Sunday, the military shot and killed a wanted Palestinian during a raid in a village near Hebron, in the West Bank, the military said.
-------- mideast
Scrapping of Arab Summit Sparks Recriminations
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31831-2004Mar28.html
TUNIS, March 28 -- Foreign ministers were hammering out a list of political reforms in advance of an Arab League summit when their Tunisian counterpart, Habib Ben Yahya, left the room and took a phone call from the host president. He returned, participants said, and told everyone to go to dinner.
"It's over," Yahya told the gathering late Saturday night. "There is no summit."
The surprise cancellation of the long-awaited meeting on reform and Middle East peace set off a round of recrimination and finger-pointing. On Sunday, delegates expressed embarrassment and shock at the collapse, which took place two days before the summit was set to begin in the Tunisian capital.
"This was not our finest moment," the Arab League secretary general, Amr Moussa, said.
Several participants complained that Tunisia's president, Zine Abidine Ben Ali, had single-handedly sunk the effort in a fit of pique. He was angry, they said, because his own reform proposals had been rejected and because several countries had decided not to send their heads of state to the summit.
Other participants said the exercise was already doomed: The countries were far from agreeing on the scope of reforms or ways to implement them.
"Many were hesitant in the first place, so things were always delicate," Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, said. "Weighty reform proposals were just going to be used as doorstops anyway."
The Arab League, a 22-member organization dedicated to unity but frequently at odds, is in a race against time. The Bush administration hopes to gain support for a democratic reform initiative for the Middle East at a meeting of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations this summer. Arab leaders had expressly set out to preempt the proposal with plans of their own in such areas as civil rights, women's rights and economic modernization.
In Cairo, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt quickly offered to host a new summit, but no date was set. In a statement, Mubarak, who is scheduled to visit Washington next month, expressed "astonishment and regret" at the cancellation of summit. Jordan also offered to host a retry.
Arab societies have been debating the issue of democratization in recent months, partly in the wake of a wave of terrorism around the world. The war in Iraq has also upset the region, with some U.S. officials suggesting that the lack of democracy in the Middle East itself represents a danger.
The varied Arab response to this ferment was on vivid display at the preparatory meetings for the summit on Friday and Saturday, participants said. Syria and Saudi Arabia fought against the inclusion of the word "democracy" in a summit paper that was to be ratified Monday. Egypt ensured that no timetable or formula for implementation would be attached.
Tunisian officials made a pitch to include language that explicitly endorsed democracy and rejected "extremism, fanaticism and terrorism."
"Not only is the concept of democracy absent, so are other equally important ones like civil society, dialogue of the civilizations, the fight against terrorism," the government said in a statement issued to explain the breakup of the meeting. The statement said that some countries supported Tunisia's position, but others "unfortunately opposed."
Shaath, the Palestinian delegate, said the Tunisian proposals had not been discussed. "It would have opened a new can of worms," he said.
In any event, as the foreign ministers scurried to arrange for flights home, many were perplexed by Ben Ali's cancellation of the summit. "I don't understand why our brothers in Tunis decided to do this," said Abu Bakr Qirbi, Yemen's foreign minister.
Moussa, the league's general secretary, said his request to meet with Ali was rebuffed. "Our request could not be granted due to the fact that it was too late for the president, who has been down with a bad cold," Moussa said.
The summit's demise torpedoed plans to revive a 2-year-old pan-Arab peace proposal that offered Israel recognition in return for its withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The league had also planned to criticize Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, for ordering assassinations, including that of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, which has asserted responsibility for numerous suicide bombings and other attacks against civilians in Israel. "Now the message we are sending is that Sharon can do what he wants," said Jean Obeid, Lebanon's foreign minister.
For the Palestinians, the truncated meeting had a more immediate negative consequence. Past Arab League meetings have approved funding for the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority. The league has pledged $760 million to the Palestinians, Shaath said, and he said he hoped that governments would pay up anyway.
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Summit's Collapse Leaves Arab Leaders in Disarray
March 29, 2004
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/middleeast/29ARAB.html?pagewanted=all&position=
TUNIS, March 28 - Arab governments were in disarray on Sunday after the Arab League summit meeting, set to grapple with vital regional issues like democratic reform, Arab-Israeli bloodshed and the American occupation of Iraq, was abruptly called off just before it was to open Monday.
The exact reason is a matter of some dispute, but all sides viewed the meeting's collapse - even as some heads of state were on their way - as an embarrassment. It was a stark public admission that the commitment to change voiced by Arab leaders risks becoming just more words.
The Arab League is infamous for its fractious gatherings, but even its most experienced bureaucrats described the cancellation as extraordinary. Some commentators thought the collapse inevitable from the start. The very idea of reform remains too divisive, and many nations' governments have yet to decide how to deal themselves with issues like elections.
"Every Arab country has its own deep problems, so I don't believe you can find a general answer," said Khairallah Khairallah, a political commentator and former editor in chief of Al Hayat, a London-based Arabic newspaper.
There were still attempts on Sunday to salvage the collective effort, however. The office of Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, issued a statement expressing his "surprise and regret" over the cancellation. President Mubarak offered to have the gathering in Egypt, arguing that differences of opinion were hardly sufficient cause to abort the meeting.
Foreign ministers said they were exploring possible dates in April. Tunisia still objected, however, saying the problem was the issues, not the setting.
Given the the American invasion of Iraq, and spiral of violence in the region, including terrorist bomb attacks from Casablanca to Riyadh, there had been some expectation that Arab leaders might commit themselves to change.
Certainly the Bush administration had hoped for some kind of broad endorsement of reform that might demonstrate that its decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was having a positive echo.
Senior officials and analysts here said events in Tunis, while not without precedent, represented in stark colors the Arab world's inability to cope with American efforts to redraw the region's political map.
"You feel they are completely lost," said Mr. Khairallah, the political commentator. "The Arab League is finally feeling the impact of the fall of Baghdad. It took them a whole year."
A reluctance to take the first step toward reform was evident in the two days of preparatory talks about the agenda, which bogged down in details like how to present Arab culture at the Frankfurt book fair next fall, said several foreign ministers who took part.
Meanwhile, crucial issues like a joint statement of principles on political change and the league's reformulated position toward peace with Israel had barely been discussed and remained unresolved, they said.
Late Saturday night, as the 22 foreign ministers were reaching a strained if amicable consensus on those major points, Tunisia pulled the plug, announcing that it would not preside over a gathering willing to make what it called only a tepid commitment to reform.
"There was real horror on their faces," said Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, describing the mood as Tunisia announced its decision. "They felt that despite all their disagreements, this summit was important."
Another foreign minister described the rush to grab cellphones to call home and tell the various kings, presidents and princes due to start arriving Sunday to stay home. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, was reportedly on his way to Tunis, while the Iraqi delegation, led by a Shiite Muslim cleric in a remarkable break from the past, had journeyed along Iraq's treacherous roads as far as Kuwait.
On the crucial issue of political reform, the general consensus had divided into two broad groups, participants said. One group was made up of those who wanted to resist what was seen as a fiat from the Bush administration for the Arab League to push for sweeping changes. The other group included those who said the call for change was not a Washington monopoly and that a wider demand for greater democracy had to be addressed.
Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt, the leaders of the former group, had hammered out a joint call for political reform, insisting it was not being foisted on them by outsiders and emphasizing that each country would develop according to its own cultural norms.
But smaller states, including Tunisia, resented being dictated to by their larger neighbors, several foreign ministers said. The smaller states proposed making the general principles more specific.
Tunisia, angry that its proposal was being shunted aside and worried that more and more leaders, including Crown Prince Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, and most of his Persian Gulf neighbors were not coming, decided to call off the summit meeting, they said.
Tunisian officials denied acting in pique, saying they merely wanted the summit meeting's final communiqué to be something of substance. Three hundred fifty million Arabs want a sense that the repression that scars their region is ending, the Tunisians maintained.
"The Arab world will not advance unless it faces to this reality," said an Arab diplomat familiar with the Tunisian assessment. "It's not just the paper you field; it's the attitude."
Many Arab observers considered that stance to be remarkable, as Tunisia's president, Zine el-Abidine ben Ali, suppresses dissent and shows every sign of remaining president for life. On the other hand, Tunisia does have some of the region's most advanced laws for women's equality and has been making changes to modernize its schools for a decade.
The differences were not just over reform, however. The Jordanians and the Palestinians presented a joint proposal to try to reinvigorate the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations despite Israel's killing last week of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas. Syria and Lebanon objected, arguing that Arab public opinion would not abide such an overture to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel at a time when he seemed bent on more violence.
In addition, some of the tension stemmed from the perception of many Arab foreign ministers that Amr Moussa, the league's Egyptian secretary general, was being overly aggressive in pushing changes in the organization itself, and specifically in enhancing his role.
Consensus was reached fairly easily on Iraq, participants said. The foreign ministers had decided to endorse evolving self-rule there and to condemn attacks against civilians. The Iraqi delegation was disappointed at the summit meeting's cancellation; its members had hoped to return home with a clear Arab endorsement for the political steps it is taking.
Arab foreign ministers lined up Sunday to criticize Tunisia, and there were broad hints from analysts that its president must have come back from a visit to Washington earlier this year with specific instructions to wreck the summit meeting.
But other officials suggested that the problem lay elsewhere, that in failing to address the larger aspirations of the Arab world, the area's governments were giving yet another opening to extremists.
"To fail to even hold a meeting is a disaster, taking into consideration all the challenges of the region," said Hoshar Zubairy, the Iraqi foreign minister. "This encourages extremism, when people see that even the formal Arab system is not functioning, not operating. The sense of frustration will only deepen."
-------- nato
NATO fighters ready to defend Baltic states: NATO chief
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Mar 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040329153640.uhbrgilg.html
NATO aircraft were to begin air defense patrols over the Baltics Monday as the alliance expands eastward to encompass seven former European east bloc states, but the alliance's chief said the enlargement should not cause friction with Russia.
"At this very moment fighters are in the air to land at Lithuania airport very shortly," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told defense reporters here.
When the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Romania plus Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia deposit the instruments of accession to the alliance at the State Department later in the day "NATO air space will be covered," he said.
NATO's expansion and its decision to station fighter aircraft in Lithuania and extend air cover of the Baltics has drawn expressions of concern from Russia mixed with threats to build up its nuclear forces.
But De Hoop Scheffer said he did not believe the enlargement would create greater difficulties in relations with Russia.
He said the decision to extend NATO's air defenses to the Baltics had been fully explained to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was expected to come to Brussels Friday when the alliance formally marks the addition of the seven new members.
"NATO needs a partnership with the Russians. It's in NATO's interest and at the same time it is in Russia's interest that we have a strong partnership," he said.
He said Russia understood NATO had "no ulterior motives" in policing the Baltic airspace.
"If they would make this into a big thing, which they don't, minister Lavrov would certainly not have come to Brussels on Friday. I welcome his decision," he said.
NATO will be conducting the air patrols with Belgian fighter aircraft supported on the ground by Norwegian crews, Lithuanian officials have said.
The Baltics states have been encouraged to focus their military contributions to the alliance in areas such as peacekeeping, rather than acquiring expensive new fighter jets, the NATO chief said.
Russia raised its worries about the bigger NATO again on Monday, hours before US President George W. Bush was to meet the leaders of the seven new nations.
"Without doubt, NATO's expansion touches Russia's political, military and, to a certain extent, economic interests," Russia's top foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in an official statement.
Moscow conceded that NATO has made efforts to change, yet still viewed Russia as a military threat rather than an ally in international missions like the war on terror.
"We do not deny that recently, serious transformation have been happening in NATO. The number of troops and armaments is being reduced, and it is relying less on its nuclear arsenal," Yakovenko said.
"At the same time, our analysis shows that this transformation is happening slowly, at times haphazardly," said the Russian statement.
----
NATO chief says "some nuts to crack" in Russia relations
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Mar 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040329162343.p1g40z8g.html
NATO's secretary general said Monday there were still "nuts to crack" in relations with Russia as the alliance expands eastward with the addition of seven new members, including three former Soviet Baltic republics.
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said he did not believe the expansion would cause new tension with Russia but acknowledged there were problems over the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treat which limits troop numbers in eastern Europe.
"There are some nuts to crack, of course," he said.
"When I say we have some nuts to crack it's, of course, Russian worries about the effectiveness of the CFE treaty. NATO worries about the Russians still having their forces in Moldova-Transdniestra and Georgia," he said.
Nevertheless, he said, "NATO needs a partnership with the Russians. It's in NATO's interest and at the same time it is in Russia's interest that we have a strong partnership."
De Hoop Scheffer said it was good sign that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov plans to attend a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in Brussels Friday, the same day NATO will formally welcome in its new members.
The NATO chief said he planned to visit Moscow in early April, and would see Russian Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov Monday at a Russia-NATO meeting on terrorism in Norfolk, Virginia.
De Hoop Scheffer spoke shortly before the seven new members deposited instruments of accession to NATO at a ceremony here, effectively expanding the alliance to 26 members.
The new members include four from the former East bloc -- Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia -- and the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.
Admission of the Baltic countries has been the bitterest pill for Moscow to swallow.
Russian officials last week warned that Moscow might build up its nuclear forces in response to the expansion, and expressed concern over NATO air patrols over the Baltics, which de Hoop Scheffer said were set to begin Monday.
"Without doubt, NATO's expansion touches Russia's political, military and, to a certain extent, economic interests," Russia's top foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko reaffirmed Monday in an official statement released in Moscow. The statement underlined that the three states and Slovenia have not signed up to the CFE as they did not exist as independent nations when the treaty was signed. The limbo status could leave open the possibility of NATO stationing unlimited number of troops at Russia's western front.
Moscow also fears NATO air patrols over the Baltics will be used to spy on its territory.
De Hoop Scheffer said the decision to use NATO fighters to patrol the Baltics was fully explained to Lavrov when it was taken two weeks ago by the alliance's decision-make North Atlantic Council.
"At this very moment fighters are in the air to land at Lithuania airport very shortly," he said.
"It's NATO airspace and NATO airspace has always been patrolled and covered, which will always be the case when later today the alliance will be formally enlarged by seven new member states," he said.
-------- pakistan / india
Conflict Ends in Pakistani Tribal Lands
Militants Release 14 Hostages; Criticism of Government Operation Widens
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31940-2004Mar28?language=printer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 28 -- A deadly, 12-day confrontation between government troops and Islamic fighters in a remote tribal region reached a peaceful settlement Sunday after the militants released 12 paramilitary fighters and two civilian officials held hostage for more than a week and soldiers began pulling out of the area.
Officials claimed victory in the operation in South Waziristan, a rugged tribal area near the Afghan border, in which 5,000 troops participated in the largest anti-terrorist raids ever conducted by Pakistan. A military spokesman said the government had killed 60 foreign militants or their local supporters, arrested 163 others and dismantled "a hardened den of miscreants."
But even as calm was restored, political fallout from the episode continued to widen. The operation, which left 130 people dead, has embroiled the government in a controversy that pits tribal traditions and religious passions against the need to establish state authority across Pakistan and root out Islamic terrorism from the region. Initially, officials hoped the Waziristan operation would yield important members of the al Qaeda terrorist network, who they believed were being sheltered in village compounds. President Pervez Musharraf, who is also the army chief, heightened such expectations by hinting last week that his troops were zeroing in on a "high-value target."
But by Sunday, government forces had not identified any senior terrorist figures among the captured or killed fighters, and a number of others appeared to have escaped. Analysts said the ambitious operation was marred by poor intelligence, hasty planning and mistrust between officials and tribal leaders. The grimmest development came Friday when eight captured Pakistani soldiers were found executed in a ditch.
Meanwhile, the protracted operation has drawn increasingly vocal and widespread public criticism. Tribal groups accustomed to self-rule protested the military intrusion into their way of life and vented their anger with scattered rocket and grenade attacks on government targets. Muslim politicians called Musharraf a traitor to Islam and a slave of the United States, while secular parties staged a walkout from parliament.
"Some people are playing politics, but there has also been a genuine sense of outrage," said Rifaat Hussain, a scholar who specializes in defense issues. "This has given the army a bloody nose and a black eye. After blood was spilled, the state had to send a strong signal that it would not tolerate such a challenge, but in the long run the problem cannot be solved by force."
Many Pakistanis support the war against terrorism, and there was an outpouring of sympathy for Musharraf after he was nearly assassinated twice in December. But there is a competing public perception that Musharraf has bowed to U.S. pressure at the expense of Pakistan's political and religious sovereignty.
Azizuddin Ahmad, a columnist for the Nation newspaper, wrote Thursday that the government was being pushed to produce a "dazzling achievement," such as capturing Osama bin Laden or another senior al Qaeda leader, to help President Bush win reelection, "irrespective of the price our citizens have to pay."
In northwestern Pakistan, where conservative Islamic values and informal but harsh tribal codes govern daily life, there is also a radically differing perception of the foreign Muslim militants in Waziristan, including Chechen, Uzbek and Arab fighters, whom Western and Pakistani officials have called criminals and terrorists.
Experts and tribal leaders described the militants as longtime residents who had participated in the U.S.-backed Afghan guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, then settled in Pakistan, bought land and married into local tribes.
"The Americans and Pakistanis brought these people among our tribes," Mohammed Mirajuddin, a legislator and Islamic cleric from South Waziristan, said on a television news program. "They are humble people who just want the right to live. We can ask them to surrender, but if you want to hand them over to the United States . . . and shave off their beards, we will never help."
Rahimullah Yusufzai, a journalist in northwestern Pakistan, noted that the training these fighters received in Pakistan during the anti-Soviet struggle had enabled them to put up a fierce resistance this month to the Pakistani army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps, whose troops were mowed down and taken hostage in ambushes and firefights.
"We call them terrorists, but a lot of people . . . call them freedom fighters," Yusufzai said Friday, referring to people in the tribal areas.
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan's military spokesman, said the government had repeatedly offered amnesties to the militants and waited for local elders to negotiate settlements with them. But several tribal leaders said that by staging surprise raids inside their territory, the army had sabotaged the talks and offended tribal traditions of self-rule. They also said many tribes felt compelled to protect foreign guests who lived among them. "Most of our people are behind the government and want the situation resolved. But we have our own way of life, and we are very xenophobic about intrusions by outside armies," said Javed Hussain, a physician and legislator from the Kurrum tribal area. "I would never call these people freedom fighters, but they are guests. We tribals have a saying: If you kill one of my guests, I will kill 100 of yours."
According to experts, though, the way of life in the semi-autonomous tribal region has long included blood feuds, commercial smuggling and drug trafficking. Now that the region has also become a haven for al Qaeda, some Pakistanis argue, it may be time to do away with the tribal system. Others disagree, saying the only way to win over the rebellious areas is to provide them with services that other Pakistanis receive, such as roads and schools.
"A threshold has been crossed, one the world would not tolerate even if Pakistan did. The state has to win this battle or its credibility will be destroyed," said Talat Masood, a retired army general. "But you can't change [the tribal areas] overnight, or by being punitive. You have to use political and economic instruments, or you will create more problems than you solve."
In addition to breaching tribal codes, the raids in Waziristan trampled on ethnic sensitivities by sending army troops of mostly Punjabi origin into a region of ethnic Pashtuns and handed Pakistan's Islamic political parties a rallying cry by targeting an area dominated by conservative Islamic beliefs.
Leaders of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a coalition of five Islamic parties that formed an alliance with Musharraf last year, excoriated him in protests Friday for killing innocent fellow Muslims.
The lowest blow, though, came from Ayman Zawahiri, the "high-value target" many people initially believed had been cornered in Waziristan. In an apparently authentic audiotape made public Thursday, the senior al Qaeda ideologue accused Musharraf of sending his "miserable" army to slaughter fellow Muslims and called on Pakistani troops to revolt.
On Saturday, Musharraf dismissed Zawahiri's statements as empty threats and vowed to "eliminate" all al Qaeda forces from Pakistani territory. In a television interview, he said the assassination attempts and recent bombings had been "masterminded" by foreign extremists such as those living in Waziristan. "We will not allow this damage to come to Pakistan," he said.
-------- spies
Lawmakers Rebuke Israeli Intelligence Services Over Iraq
March 29, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/middleeast/29ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, March 28 - A parliamentary subcommittee on Sunday delivered a rare criticism of Israel's intelligence services, saying the agencies overestimated Iraq's weapons programs before the beginning of the war because they could not obtain "hard facts."
The subcommittee on Israel's intelligence agencies cited the same kinds of apparently inaccurate assessments on unconventional weapons that have also prompted 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 did not play 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 led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Despite Israel's vaunted 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 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 had 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 Persian Gulf war in 1991, 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 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," Mr. Steinitz added. "Then it comes back around to Israel without any substantiation from the field."
A leftist lawmaker, Yossi Sarid, a critic of Mr. Sharon's government, has alleged that Israel knew Iraq had no unconventional weapons 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."
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 that Mr. Hussein was trying to rebuild his nuclear program, "but this was not the claim of Israeli intelligence," Mr. Steinitz noted.
-------- us
Iraq Friendly Fire Blamed On Marine
Reuters
Monday, March 29, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31907-2004Mar28.html
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 yesterday.
Ten Marines were killed and three were wounded in the incident near the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. An investigation report -- to be released today by the U.S. Central Command -- said the dead were so shot up by Iraqis and A-10 Air Force jets that it was almost impossible to determine 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 administrative discipline, but stipulated that "he didn't act with any negligence or reckless disregard," said one of the defense officials, who asked not to be identified.
Marine Corps officials spent the weekend discussing the report with the families of Marines involved. The officials declined to comment except to say that no action had been taken against the ground controller because the report had not been released.
Investigators found that the captain, in the city of Nasiriyah 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.
Eighteen Marines were killed and 17 wounded in the area as Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment from Camp Lejeune, N.C., sought to seize bridges and a canal near Nasiriyah.
The investigation concluded that 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.
--------
Marine Is Blamed in Marine Deaths
March 29, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/worldspecial/29MARI.html
WASHINGTON, March 28 (Reuters) - The worst American case of troops having been killed by their own side in the Iraq war has been ascribed to a Marine captain who called fighter jets to strike suspected Iraqi positions last March, unaware that dozens of marines were in the area, defense officials said Sunday.
Ten marines were killed and three were wounded in a firefight near the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya in which fire from the American side played a partial role. An investigation report, to be released on Monday by the United States 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 had died.
But the report, from a year-long inquiry by an 11-member 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 administrative discipline but also made clear that the officer had not acted negligently or recklessly, said one of the defense officials.
-------- propaganda wars
Cut disputed scenes from `Jenin, Jenin,' Israeli court proposes
By Yuval Yoaz
Mon., March 29, 2004
Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/409633.html
High Court Justice Eliahu Mazza yesterday proposed the removal of several scenes from "Jenin, Jenin," director Mohammed Bakri's controversial film about a 2002 battle between Israel Defense Forces soldiers and Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank refugee camp. In this way, additional hearings that could further delay the film's release could be avoided, he said. The hearings were requested by the state and representatives of soldiers who fought in the battle in Jenin, which took place in April 2002 as part of Operation Defensive Shield, following the Park Hotel Passover bombing that killed 29 people. The film's opponents maintain that it should not be screened. Relatives of the IDF soldiers who died in the battle described in the film, attended the hearing.
The controversy surrounding the film stems from the fact that while it is presented as a documentary, the story is filmed from the Palestinian point of view and depicts disputed issues as fact.
"The movie contains controversial statements and four or five scenes that are very problematic," said Mazza, adding that he had seen the film several times and determined that some scenes should be cut to satisfy those who oppose its screening.
The state prosecution said it would bring Mazza's proposal to the censorship board.
"Perhaps the less controversial segments should not be deleted, but a caption be added, saying that the IDF denies the statements, or that they were found to be untrue by international bodies," Mazza said.
A High Court panel decided in November to overturn a ban on the film's release by the censorship board and paved the way for commercial screenings.
--------
G.I.'s Padlock Baghdad Paper Accused of Lies
March 29, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/worldspecial/29PRES.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 28 - American soldiers shut down a popular Baghdad newspaper on Sunday and tightened chains across the doors after the occupation authorities accused it of printing lies that incited violence.
Thousands of outraged Iraqis protested the closing as an act of American hypocrisy, laying bare the hostility many feel toward the United States a year after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
"No, no, America!" and "Where is democracy now?" screamed protesters who hoisted banners and shook clenched fists in a hastily organized rally against the closing of the newspaper, Al Hawza, a radical Shiite weekly.
The rally drew hundreds and then thousands by nightfall in central Baghdad, where masses of angry Shiite men squared off against a line of American soldiers who rushed to seal off the area.
The closing of the newspaper illustrated the quandary Americans faced in trying to strike a balance between their two main goals - encouraging democracy while maintaining stability. But as the days wind down to the June 30 target date for handing sovereignty back to the Iraqi people, security seems increasingly elusive.
On Sunday, the Iraqi public works minister narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in the northern city of Mosul, and two foreign workers were shot to death nearby in front of a power plant.
Many Iraqis said closing down a popular newspaper at such a crucial time would not curtail anti-occupation feelings but only inflame them.
"When you repress the repressed, they only get stronger," said Hamid al-Bayati, a spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a prominent Shiite political party. "Punishing this newspaper will only increase the passion for those who speak out against the Americans."
The American authorities said Al Hawza could reopen in 60 days. The paper's editors, however, said they had been put out of business.
"We have been evicted from our offices, and we have no jobs," Saadoon Mohsen Thamad, a news editor, said as he stared at a large padlock hanging from the front gate. "How are we going to continue?"
Among Iraqi journalists, Al Hawza was known for printing wild rumors, especially anti-American ones. A broadsheet of about eight pages, the paper is considered a mouthpiece for Moktada al-Sadr, a fiery young Shiite cleric and one of the most outspoken critics of the Americans.
The letter ordering the paper closed, signed by L. Paul Bremer III, the top administrator in Iraq, cited what the American authorities called several examples of false reports in Al Hawza, including a February dispatch that said the cause of an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits was not a car bomb, as occupation officials had said, but an American missile.
Many newspapers and television stations have sprouted in Iraq since the fall of the Hussein government. But under a law passed by the occupying authorities in June, a news media organization must be licensed, and that license can be revoked if the organization publishes or broadcasts material that incites violence or civil disorder or "advocates alterations to Iraq's borders by violent means."
But the letter outlining the reasons for taking action against Al Hawza did not cite any material that directly advocated violence. Several Iraqi journalists said that meant there was no basis to shut Al Hawza down.
"That paper might have been anti-American, but it should be free to express its opinion," said Kamal Abdul Karim, night editor of the daily Azzaman.
Omar Jassem, a freelance reporter, said he thought that democracy meant many viewpoints and many newspapers. "I guess this is the Bush edition of democracy," he said.
Tom Rosenstiel, vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, said there was a basic irony in Americans' practicing censorship in Iraq.
"If you're trying to promote democracy in a country that has never had it, you have to lead by example," Mr. Rosenstiel said. "I'm not in Iraq. But it's hard for me to see how the suppression of information, even false information, is going to help our cause."
Many Iraqi journalists said they feared that closing Al Hawza would only increase the support for Mr. Sadr, the 31-year-old son of a revered Shiite cleric who was assassinated in 1999 by hit men working for Mr. Hussein. In the prelude to the June 30 transfer of power, Mr. Sadr has been increasingly abrasive, issuing statements denouncing Americans and any Iraqis who work with them. Thousands of his followers can be summoned to the streets at the snap of a finger, as demonstrated Sunday.
Unlike Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the influential Shiite cleric who has also criticized the occupation but not in militant terms, Mr. Sadr has threatened to form his own militia.
The American authorities said that before they decided to close Mr. Sadr's newspaper, they weighed the risks of further provoking him.
"But we basically concluded that we couldn't afford to wait for another issue to hit the streets," said Al Elsadr, the media liaison for the occupation government. "The false information in that paper was hurting stability. It was stirring up a lot of hate. It was making people think we were out to get them."
Mr. Elsadr said that incitement of violence could come in many forms and that it did not have to be direct to be considered a violation of the administrative law.
"If people actually believed that coalition forces were slaughtering civilians," he said, "it could be real dangerous. That's incitement."
Mr. Elsadr said the occupation authorities had invited the paper's editors to discuss with them what had been printed, but it was unclear if the paper would be able to appeal the closing order.
In July, the American authorities permanently closed down another newspaper for similar reasons, provoking similar demonstrations. An Arabic television network was suspended from broadcasting in Iraq for 30 days after coverage that was considered irresponsible.
The protests outside the Hawza offices on Sunday faded with the day's light. After the brief but tense standoff with American forces, Mr. Sadr's followers rolled up their flags and climbed back into their buses. No injuries or property damage were reported.
Earlier on Sunday, the public works minister, Nasreen Barwari, was attacked by gunmen while her convoy was speeding through Mosul, an increasingly dangerous city. A spokeswoman for the occupation authorities said that a driver and a guard had been killed, but that the minister had not been hurt. Two other people were wounded.
"It was a close call," the occupation spokeswoman said.
Not far away, gunmen shot to death two foreign security staff members outside an East Mosul power plant. The two guards, one from Britain and the other from Canada, were killed while trying to protect a team of engineers working for General Electric.
Later on Sunday, and also in Mosul, American soldiers got into a shootout with a band of armed men. Two Americans were wounded, and four Iraqis were killed.
--------
The Question We Should Be Asking
By William Raspberry - willrasp@washpost.com
Monday, March 29, 2004
Washington Post; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32143-2004Mar28?language=printer
I suppose I should be more interested in what is (or was last week) the question of the day: Did our government have reason to know that something like Sept. 11 would happen and, if so, who failed to take appropriate preventive action?
But I can't get past the previous question: Why are we in Iraq?
The reason I can't get worked up about the question that dominated last week's hearings before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is pragmatic. Suppose we had been pretty sure that the al Qaeda network had something in mind, but we weren't sure what. What would have been an appropriate response? To heighten security at the World Trade Center, which, after all, had been targeted in a terrorist attack in 1993? To step up security at all very tall buildings in America? To intensify security everywhere?
Even supposing our intelligence suggested something involving airplanes, what might we have done? If we knew flight numbers, we could cancel those flights (or run every passenger through a particularly thorough screening). But without that specific knowledge, should we have shut down certain airports? All airports? For how long?
The flap over who ignored the terror warnings leaves me feeling as I do when the Homeland Security Department ups the threat level from yellow to orange. Just what am I supposed to do?
And so I return to the question I've been worrying over for more than a year: the war in Iraq. I wish they'd form a commission to answer my questions. Was a naive President Bush duped into war by those in his administration who had a deeper purpose? Or was Bush himself calling the shots while members of his administration scrambled to provide the necessary pretext?
I had tended toward the Bush-as-puppet theory, primarily because of the president's preelection incuriosity about the rest of the world, and because certain members of his administration were on record as having a keen interest in rearranging the Middle East.
But now a second former member of the Bush administration is painting a picture of a president for whom Sept. 11 was merely a convenient pretext for making war on Saddam Hussein.
Richard A. Clarke, who was Bush's counterterrorism coordinator, recalls in his newly published memoir that Bush pulled him aside the day after the attacks and told him, "Go back over everything, everything; see if Saddam did this."
Reminded that all available intelligence showed al Qaeda to be behind the attacks, Clarke writes, the president said: "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."
Then as the still-resisting Clarke left the room, he says, the president said -- "testily" -- a third time: "Look into Iraq, Saddam."
This account comes after former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's assertion (in Ron Suskind's book) that the president was planning from the very first days of his administration to get rid of Hussein.
Did key White House advisers conspire to get the president fixated on Hussein, or was the fixation the president's own?
And even as I ask the question, I have to acknowledge that the answer doesn't really matter -- for two reasons.
First, I don't imagine that President Bush, no matter how misguided I believe him to be, would have acted as he did in Iraq if he hadn't truly believed it to be in America's interest. Second, just as the question of who knew and failed to act before Sept. 11 has become largely irrelevant, so has the question of how we wound up in Iraq.
The fact is, we're there -- and no one I know would suggest that we simply turn and leave the Iraqis to the chaos we've largely created.
The real question (though I'd love to see it preceded by an honest confession or two) is: How the devil do we get out?
Is there a commission for that?
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Rice Defends Refusal To Testify Compromise Sought With 9/11 Commission
By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31904-2004Mar28?language=printer
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, at the center of a controversy over her refusal to testify before the Sept. 11 commission, yesterday renewed her determination not to give public testimony and said she could not list anything she wished she had done differently in the months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Administration officials were searching for a compromise last night with the commission that would limit the political damage from her refusal to testify. But a defiant Rice gave no hint of that as she defended the Bush administration's counterterrorism performance on CBS's "60 Minutes" -- the same venue used a week earlier by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke to launch his criticism that the Bush administration did too little on terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001, and wound up strengthening al Qaeda by pursuing war in Iraq.
Rice's appearance, and that of three other top Bush officials on the airwaves yesterday, came at the end of a week in which the Bush administration labored to discredit Clarke, who challenged the White House yesterday to release more classified counterterrorism documents.
Rice, the top foreign-policy official in President Bush's White House, brushed aside the notion that the U.S. government should apologize to Sept. 11 victims' families for not stopping the attacks, saying, "It's important that we keep focused on who did this to us." Rice asserted that "we are safer today than we were on September 10," and, asked whether there were any mistakes or misjudgments before the attacks, replied: "I think we did what we knew how to do."
But Rice gave no ground on the administration's decision that she will not appear in public before the panel or testify under oath because Bush officials believe doing so would compromise the constitutional powers of the executive branch. The renewed refusal came despite the panel's unanimous plea for her testimony.
Republican commissioner John F. Lehman, who has written extensively on separation-of-power issues, said that "the White House is making a huge mistake" by blocking Rice's testimony and decried it as "a legalistic approach."
"The White House is being run by a kind of strict construction of interpretation of the powers of the president," he said on ABC's "This Week." "There are plenty of precedents that the White House could use if they wanted to do this."
Two Republican officials, who declined to be identified because they are not supposed to talk to reporters, said White House aides are discussing ways they could compromise with the commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, perhaps by agreeing to the declassification of Rice's private testimony. "That would show people that she is cooperating, and make it clear that her testimony is consistent with her public pronouncements," one official said. "That would help our credibility."
Rice said she has "absolutely nothing to hide" and "would really like" to testify but will not because of the constitutional principle.
While the White House privately sought a compromise over Rice, Clarke called for a more extensive declassification of government documents from before the Sept. 11 attacks. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), saying Clarke may be guilty of perjury, last week called for declassifying testimony Clarke gave a congressional committee in 2002 that was favorable toward the Bush administration.
Clarke said he would support declassifying the earlier testimony as long as it was not done selectively. Clarke, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," also said Rice's testimony before the commission should be declassified, as well as a key memo he gave Rice on Jan. 25, 2001, the national security directive on al Qaeda developed eight months later, and all e-mails Clarke sent to Rice and her deputy.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," said he would have no problem with the declassification of the national security directive.
Clarke insisted that there is no inconsistency between the testimony he gave the commission last week and his still-classified 2002 testimony. He said his critical book should be believed over his previous statements flattering Bush's counterterrorism efforts "because I have no obligation anymore to spin." Clarke said he was just being polite by praising Bush in a resignation letter that the White House released; he displayed a handwritten note from Bush saying, "You served our nation with distinction and honor."
Clarke said it was at his request -- and not a demotion -- that he be transferred from his terrorism post to a cybersecurity position, because he was "so frustrated with the administration's lackadaisical attitude toward terrorism." He also challenged the White House charge that he unsuccessfully sought the No. 2 job in the new Homeland Security Department, saying he "was interviewed for it" but was not eagerly seeking it.
In his hour-long "Meet the Press" interview, Clarke continued to defend Bill Clinton's counterterrorism record as president and continued to criticize Bush administration officials. "I think they deserve a failing grade for what they did before, because, frankly, they never got around to doing anything," he said.
Clarke said he voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election but declined to say whether he would support Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumed Democratic nominee, this year. On the Iraq war, Clarke said: Bush's "political advisers sought to capitalize on it, just as his political advisers are seeking to capitalize on 9/11 by the ads that they're running."
Clarke said that by invading Iraq, the Bush administration built support for al Qaeda by inflaming Islamic opinion, diverted resources from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and spent money that could have been better used to fortify domestic security. While saying he thinks bin Laden will be killed or captured this year, he warned: "We're going to face a second generation of al Qaeda."
In their bid to counter Clarke's allegations, three administration officials gave televised interviews yesterday to argue that they did more on counterterrorism before Sept. 11 than Clinton had done. Powell pointed to Bush taking direct briefings almost every morning from CIA Director George J. Tenet as "something President Clinton had not been doing." Rice said Tenet briefed Bush 46 times on al Qaeda.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on ABC's "This Week," disagreed with Clarke that going to war in Iraq hurt the overall war on terrorism. Asked about charges by Clarke and others that CIA and Army Special Forces units, with key personnel who spoke Arabic, were moved from Afghanistan in early 2002 and sent to help prepare the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld said, "I don't think that is accurate."
The same Special Forces unit, Task Force 21, that was used to search for Saddam Hussein was redeployed a month ago to Afghanistan to support the search for bin Laden.
Rice said that when Bush met with his top advisers on Sept. 15, 2001, "not a single one of the president's principal advisers suggested that he do anything more than go after Afghanistan, and that's what we did." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was at that meeting and did suggest that Iraq should be attacked, as described in detail in Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War."
Rice said the Bush administration's development of a counterterrorism plan before Sept. 11 was brisk.
The Bush administration has been sharply critical of Clinton and his antiterrorism policy for depending on diplomacy and law enforcement and not having military intervention as part of his plan to attack al Qaeda.
But Rice said yesterday that the United States is safer today because "we have an umbrella of intelligence and law enforcement worldwide."
Rice argued that "al Qaeda is not more dangerous today than it was on September 11" but said it is still dangerous. She also said, "The world is a lot safer and the war on terrorism is well-served by the victory in Iraq." When it was noted that there have been more terrorist attacks in the 30 months since Sept. 11 than in the 30 months prior, she replied: "That's the wrong way to look at it."
Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.
--------
President Asked Aide to Explore Iraq Link to 9/11
March 29, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/politics/29PANE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, March 28 - The White House acknowledged Sunday that on the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush asked his top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, to find out whether Iraq was involved.
Mr. Bush wanted to know "did Iraq have anything to do with this? Were they complicit in it?" Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, recounted in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes."
Mr. Bush was not trying to intimidate anyone to "produce information," she said. Rather, given the United States' "actively hostile relationship" with Iraq at the time, he was asking Mr. Clarke "a perfectly logical question," Ms. Rice said.
The conversation - which the White House suggested last week had never taken place - centers on perhaps the most volatile charge Mr. Clarke has made public in recent days: that the Bush White House became fixated on Iraq and Saddam Hussein at the expense of focusing on Al Qaeda.
In his new book, "Against All Enemies," Mr. Clarke recounts that the president pulled him and several other aides into the White House Situation Room on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, and instructed them "to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."
Mr. Clarke was incredulous, he said in the book. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this," he said he responded.
Mr. Bush answered: "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred," according to Mr. Clarke's account. Mr. Clarke added in later interviews that he felt he was being intimidated to find a link between the attacks and Iraq.
Last week, the White House said it had no record that Mr. Bush had even been in the Situation Room that day and said the president had no recollection of such a conversation. Although administration officials stopped short of denying the account, they used it to cast doubt on Mr. Clarke's credibility as they sought to debunk the charge that the administration played down the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks and worried instead about Iraq.
The political fallout over Mr. Clarke's charges intensified on Sunday, as he and four of the president's top advisers traded jabs in separate televised appearances over the question of whether the Bush White House did enough to deter terrorism before Sept. 11.
Mr. Clarke, in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," urged the Bush administration to make public the testimony he gave in 2002 to a joint Congressional committee that was investigating the attacks.
He said declassifying his testimony - as well as other memorandums and materials from Ms. Rice and the administration - would show he had long complained that the Bush administration failed to take aggressive action against Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks.
In particular, he urged the administration to make public a memorandum on counterterrorism initiatives that he wrote just days after Mr. Bush took office, as well as a counterterrorism plan that the White House ultimately approved more than seven months later, a week before the attacks.
"Let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't," he said. "And what we'll see when we declassify what they were given on Jan. 25 and what they finally agreed to on Sept. 4 is that they are basically the same thing, and they wasted months when we could have had some action."
Meanwhile, members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks pressed Ms. Rice to appear publicly before the commission to explain the events leading up to the attack.
Ms. Rice "has appeared everywhere except my local Starbucks," Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the commission, said in an interview. "For the White House to continue to refuse to make her available simply does not make sense."
Ms. Rice met with the commission in February to discuss pre-Sept. 11 initiatives, but an official involved in that meeting said the White House insisted that she not be put under oath and that the session not be recorded. Commissioners were allowed to take notes, but no transcript of her comments is thought to exist.
The White House says that having the national security adviser testify in public would compromise executive privilege and the president's ability to get confidential advice.
The commission and the White House are continuing to discuss the possibility of Ms. Rice's reappearance. Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey governor who is co-chairman of the panel, said on "Fox News Sunday" that "we are still going to press and still believe unanimously as a commission that we should hear from her in public," although he added that a subpoena was unlikely.
Ms. Rice, for her part, said on "60 Minutes" that "nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify."
Analysts say Mr. Clarke's charges could do significant political damage to a president who has built his foreign policy record largely around the campaign against terrorism. Republican leaders have responded in force, suggesting that Mr. Clarke's testimony last week was at odds with the closed testimony he gave before the joint Congressional panel in 2002 and that he may have lied in one or both appearances.
But intelligence officials familiar with his classified briefing said they were aware of no obvious contradictions. Mr. Ben-Veniste said he thought Mr. Clarke's earlier testimony should be declassified to resolve any dispute, but he added that "it is not my recollection that there were any notable or substantive differences in testimony."
Mr. Clarke's Congressional testimony, given while he was still at the White House, put a more "positive spin" on the administration's counterterrorism efforts, just as he did in a 2002 press briefing that was released last week, said a senior Democratic Congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. But factually, it did not appear to contradict what Mr. Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week, the aide said.
Mr. Clarke's assessment last week is also generally consistent with journalistic and Congressional accounts of the early Bush administration's approach to terrorism.
In Bob Woodward's "Bush at War," the president himself acknowledged that Osama bin Laden had not been a central focus in the eight months before the attacks.
"I was not on point," Mr. Bush was quoted in the book as saying. "I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."
Similarly, the public report of the joint Congressional inquiry into Sept. 11 intelligence failures, released last December, said that the Bush administration did not begin a major counterterrorism policy review until April 2001 and that "significant slippage in counterterrorism policy may have taken place in late 2000 and early 2001," in part because of Mr. Clarke's "unresolved status" as head of counterterrorism. He had that role under Clinton and for the first few months of the Bush administration. After Sept. 11, 2001, he had a more limited role as cyberterrorism adviser. The public report does not describe Mr. Clarke's testimony before the joint committee in great detail, but it does suggest that he found areas of concern in counterterrorism coordination during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Although Mr. Bin Laden would become an urgent priority in the late 1990's, "Mr. Clarke told the Joint Inquiry that Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah were the most important terrorist concerns during the first Clinton administration," the report said.
In general, the report said, "Mr. Clarke noted that the White House `never really gave good systematic, timely guidance to the Intelligence Community about what the priorities were at the national level,' " although the time period he described was unclear.
The Bush administration, which fought successfully to keep sensitive parts of last year's joint inquiry out of the public report, did not say if it would agree to declassify material from Mr. Clarke or Ms. Rice.
But Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," said he would prefer publicizing as much relevant material as possible. "We're not trying to hide anything," he said.
Mr. Powell said an examination of Mr. Clarke's assessment in 2002 showed "inconsistencies and contradictions between what he is saying now and what he said then." And he said it was wrong to suggest the Bush administration simply abandoned the counterterrorism priorities of the Clinton administration.
"That's not the case," he said. "They weren't out bombing Afghanistan and invading Afghanistan and we suddenly said stop."
Ms. Rice, in particular, "is getting a bit of a bum rap," Mr. Powell said. She and other key advisers aggressively formulated counterterrorism policy, he said, but "unfortunately, we never got the information or intelligence that we needed to tell us that these 19 guys were in the country and already there was a plot under way."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared on "Fox News Sunday" and ABC's "This Week," disputing Mr. Clarke's charges that the administration had not devoted sufficient attention to terrorism and had been unduly focused on Iraq. And Terry Holt, the chief spokesman of the Bush campaign, called Mr. Clarke "a political opportunist" on CNN's "Inside Politics Sunday."
Mr. Clarke said the administration is intent on attacking him personally through a "character assassination campaign" rather than debating the arguments he has raised about Mr. Bush's prosecution of the campaign against terrorism.
"After 9/11, I say that by going into Iraq he has really hurt the war on terrorism," he said. "Now, because I say that, the administration doesn't want to talk on the merits of that. They don't want to talk about the effect on the war on terrorism of our invasion of Iraq." To rebut the administration's criticism of his credibility, he produced a handwritten letter from Mr. Bush at the time of his resignation, dated Jan. 31, 2003, that read: "Dear Dick: You will be missed. You served our nation with distinction and honor. You have left a positive mark on our government."
Last week, the White House produced a resignation letter of its own - one from Mr. Clarke to Mr. Bush - in which the seasoned adviser praised the president for his "courage, determination, calm and leadership" on Sept. 11.
-------- death penalty
Kerry a firm foe of death penalty
March 29, 2004
By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040328-115812-7206r.htm
Sen. John Kerry opposes the death penalty almost without exception, making him the first major-party presidential candidate in more than 15 years to take such a strong stand against capital punishment.
"I know something about killing," he sometimes says when asked about it, a reference to his months in Vietnam as a swift-boat commander. "I don't like killing. That's just a personal belief I have."
He did, however, slightly amend his view in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Before then he had opposed the death penalty, even for terrorists, but he now says he supports it, in limited cases, for foreign terrorists.
The reason Mr. Kerry opposes the death penalty in most cases is because he believes it is unfairly applied by the U.S. criminal justice system.
"Sen. Kerry is outside the American mainstream," said Dianne Clements, president of Justice for All, a victims' advocacy group that favors the death penalty.
Not since the candidacy of Michael S. Dukakis, who served as Massachusetts governor while Mr. Kerry was lieutenant governor, has a major-party candidate run for president who was opposed to the death penalty.
Mr. Dukakis' 1988 campaign against President Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, began collapsing after Mr. Dukakis was asked hypothetically in a debate if he'd want the death penalty for a man who raped and murdered his wife.
"I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime," responded Mr. Dukakis in a detached manner. "We've done so in my own state."
It's been nearly 25 years since a sitting president was against the death penalty. President Carter generally opposed it, though as governor he signed legislation reinstating Georgia's death penalty.
But today is not 1988, when killings were rampant and crack-cocaine use was peaking in many cities.
"It was much more of a political hot potato in those days," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
The debate has drifted into calmer waters in recent years because DNA analysis has exonerated some death-row inmates.
Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said more than 100 such inmates have been cleared through DNA.
Polls, however, still show Americans overwhelmingly support the death penalty, though that support has waned since the 1980s.
"There are 30 percent of Americans who are absolutely against the death penalty for any reason," said Josh Noble, coordinator of Students Against the Death Penalty Project, part of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It should not be seen as a radical position."
This year's White House race pits two extremes on this issue against one another. Mr. Bush's home state of Texas has executed more murderers than any other state, while Mr. Kerry's Massachusetts is among only 12 states that still bans the death penalty.
In the early 1990s, before the issue cooled, former President Bill Clinton led the way among many Democrats to compromise on the issue. He supported the death penalty and even returned to his state during the 1992 presidential campaign as governor to oversee the execution of a mildly retarded murderer.
"It was still strongly debated in public, but I think many of the candidates sought to remove themselves from the debate," Mr. Dieter.
Mr. Kerry was not one of those. When Students Against the Death Penalty rated the nine candidates seeking the Democratic nomination last fall, it gave only Mr. Kerry and Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich perfect scores.
-------- homeland security
Homeland Security's Early Test
By Al Kamen
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A21
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31787-2004Mar28?language=printer
After a week of exceptionally bitter political warfare over Sept. 11, 2001, it might be worth reflecting how far the country has come in terms of homeland security.
A new account of the incident of eight Nazi saboteurs sent here in 1942 to blow up bridges and railroads makes any bureaucratic bumbling or infighting these days look like child's play.
As recounted in colleague Michael Dobbs's "Saboteurs," the tussles between J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Coast Guard and other agencies over who would get credit for rounding up the Nazis were such that President Franklin Roosevelt fumed one day after breakfast, "I am going to go over to my office and will spend the day blowing up various people."
The FBI was fighting with the Navy and the Secret Service, the secretary of war could not stand the attorney general and, from the beginning, U.S. efforts resembled a Keystone Kops routine.
One quartet of saboteurs had been dropped off by a German U-boat, which ran aground on a sandbar 200 yards off Amagansett, Long Island, and right by a Coast Guard station.
Even the ear-splitting noise of the U-boat's engines as it worked its way back into the Atlantic was not enough to help the Coast Guard capture the Nazis. The four caught the 6:59 a.m. train to Manhattan, where they had a fine time shopping and boozing it up. One of them called the FBI to give himself up, but the call was dismissed as a crank. The fellow finally made his way down here and was able to convince people he was the real thing.
That sparked a manhunt that eventually led to the capture of the three others in New York and a group that had landed at Ponte Vedra Beach in Florida.
Shockingly, the FBI refused to share information with anyone else, and Hoover was obsessed that some other agency would make a "flamboyant announcement" about breaking the case. The Coast Guard, angry about not getting any credit, leaked a largely fictitious story to The Washington Post describing how it had broken the case. The next day, Hoover leaked his version to his favorite reporters at the New York Times and other papers.
Makes the Department of Homeland Security look well oiled indeed.
Quote of the Week
After former Bush White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke apologized last week to the families of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, for failing to stop al Qaeda, PBS "Newshour" anchor Jim Lehrer asked Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday if he had "any sense of failure concerning what happened on 9/11?"
"Well, I hate to separate myself as secretary of defense," Rumsfeld said, but his agency, "of course, is oriented to external threats. This was a domestic airplane that was operated by people who were in the United States against a United States target, which makes it a law enforcement . . . issue. The Department of Defense's task is one that deals with external threats coming into the United States, and that's what the department is organized, trained and equipped to do."
So we take that to be "No"?
The Washington Read
The commission hearings into Sept. 11 last week were most revealing, especially about the peculiar way Washingtonians read books.
"Have you read this [Clarke's] book?" commission member and former Illinois governor Jim Thompson (R) asked Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage.
"I'm the only honest person in Washington," Armitage said, prompting a laugh from Thompson. "I gave it the Washington read."
"You looked in the index to see if your name was in it," Thompson said.
"And then what was said about me," Armitage acknowledged as the crowd laughed.
A Sense of Urgency
Few participants in the Clarke Wars seem inclined to look for at least some areas of common ground that might narrow the chasm.
But perhaps there are things everyone can agree on?
For example, Clarke has said that while the Bush administration didn't ignore concerns over terrorism, he felt it didn't consider the threat to be a matter of great urgency before Sept. 11.
And here's President Bush, asked whether he would have ordered Osama bin Laden taken out before Sept. 11, telling The Washington Post on Dec. 11, 2001:
"There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11th. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."
So they agree? Well, perhaps not.
-------- terrorism
Madrid attacks may spur Basque group to rethink terrorism
By Geoff Pingree and Lisa Abend
The Christian Science Monitor
March 29, 2004
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0329/p07s01-woeu.html
MADRID - Among the casualties of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid may be ETA, the Basque separatist group that for the past 30 years has waged its own terror campaign in Spain.
Singled out as the culprit immediately after the early-morning attacks, ETA soon receded from public view as mounting evidence pointed to an Islamic terrorist group. To date, 20 people have been arrested in connection with the attacks.
Yet Spain's newly reinforced intolerance for violence is likely to handicap the Basque group, despite its apparent innocence - and perhaps push it to abandon terrorism in favor of other political tactics.
"ETA is going to be caught in the shadow of March 11," says Petxo Idoyaga, an ETA expert at the University of the Basque Country. "If they have any common sense, any military sense, they will realize that any further attacks will be catastrophic for them."
The attacks - and the election of a new government - present ETA and its political wing, the banned party Herri Batasuna, with a rare opportunity to rethink the use of terrorism. Indeed, Batasuna's spokesman, Arnaldo Otegi, recently told the Basque newspaper Gara that he was convinced the Madrid attacks had "provoked reflection within the ranks of ETA."
Already weakened in recent years, ETA finds itself at an unexpected crossroads. "Since 1997, it has been shrinking and losing its legitimacy," says Sebestyén Gorka, a strategic analyst with Jane's Terrorism and Security Monitor in London, and director of the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security in Budapest. He argues that now would be the moment for ETA to parlay its position into a political one. "One of the concrete ramifications of [the Madrid attacks] is that Spain has sent a strong message that it will no longer countenance the use of violence for political ends."
The day after the attacks, demonstrations across the country drew more than 11 million in an overwhelming display of public resolve against what most believed was an act of ETA terrorism. It is a resolve echoed by the country's new government. Responding to ETA's request last week that the new government make "strong and valiant efforts on behalf of Euskal Herria" (the name of the hoped-for independent Basque nation), Prime Minister-elect José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said, "The only communication I await is one saying that ETA has abandoned violence."
Rumors have circulated since March 11 that ETA may be on the verge of declaring a truce. Leading Basque nationalists, including members of Herri Batasuna, met Saturday in San Sebastian to discuss how to bring an end to the Basque conflict and achieve an independent Euskal Herria. Mr. Idoyaga expects that a truce may emerge from that meeting, perhaps timed to coincide with the Basque national holiday onApril 11, Easter Sunday.
But others remain doubtful. "It's a widespread rumor, but we have no objective information that proves [ETA] will declare a truce," says Joseba Garcia Bengoetxea, secretary of communication for the Basque government. "If they do it, they will do it, like all terrorist groups, when they think it will most destabilize the democratic system."
Spain is more accustomed than most countries, including the US, to weighing the threat of organized violence in its political process. Indeed, the Popular Party made stamping out ETA a key element of its election campaign and characterized its principal opponent, the Socialist Party, as soft on terrorism.
With the Socialist victory, many nationalists now hope there will be room for negotiation about Basque autonomy. "We [in the Basque National Party, or PNV] have offered to sit down at the table and talk with Zapatero, to try to resolve our problems. We all have to keep in mind that there is something that unites us, which is our common rejection of terrorism," Mr. Begoetxea says.
Few, however, expect the new government to negotiate with ETA. "Negotiating with ETA is always counterproductive. It only convinces them that they are strong, and that leads them to kill more in order to prove their strength," says Juan Avilés, director of the Institute for the Investigation of Domestic Security in Madrid. "There will be no political negotiation, not even by the democratic nationalist parties."
That refusal - and the relative strength of the PNV - may mean that ETA and Herri Batasuna will continue to use terrorist tactics. "Batasuna may need violence for its identity," Mr. Avilés says.
Bengoetxea cautions against too much speculation about ETA's presumed weakness. "Politicians are always saying that a terrorist group is weaker, and just when they have their citizens convinced, there is another bloody attack."
--------
19 Killed in Uzbekistan Attacks and Explosion
March 29, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Uzbekistan-Explosion.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (AP) -- A series of bombings and attacks linked to Islamic militants, including the first known suicide missions in Uzbekistan, killed 19 people and injured 26, officials said Monday in this nation closely allied with Washington in the war on terrorism.
The regime of President Islam Karimov, the former Communist boss, had held Islamic extremists in the Central Asian in check through brutal policies that forbid political or religious freedom. The last known terrorist attack of this magnitude came in an assassination attempt against Karimov 1999 that led to the arrests of thousands.
Prosecutor-General Rashid Kadyrov said the blasts Sunday and Monday were connected and aimed at destabilizing Uzbekistan.
Female suicide bombers carried out the blasts at the Chorsu market, the biggest bazaar in Tashkent, near the ``Children's World'' store, and at a nearby bus stop, Kadyrov said.
Police and intelligence agents closed off the market in the capital's Old City, a bustling bazaar where the smell of fresh produce and grilled lamb hangs in the air.
A witness who did not give her name said she felt the ground shake when one of the explosions went off. She said she saw a woman crying over the motionless body of a child.
Karimov said the attacks had been planned six to eight months in advance and had been originally set to take place before the March 21 Central Asian new year holiday Navruz. He blamed outsiders.
``As the president, I promise all measures will be taken to stop such terrorist acts,'' Karimov said on state TV in a Russian translation of remarks in Uzbek, adding that citizens should remain alert.
Karimov said several arrests had been made, but gave no details. Kadyrov said one suspect had been arrested and that authorities were searching for others, but declined to say how many people might have been involved.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, Karimov allowed Washington to base at least 1,000 troops in his country in advance of the war in Afghanistan. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave tacit approval of the plan.
Karimov, who ruled Uzbekistan as party leader before the 1991 Soviet collapse and since then as president, has come under sharp criticism by human rights advocates for repressing political and religious freedoms.
Nevertheless, the United States has dramatically increased aid in conjunction with receiving basing rights.
Kadyrov said the attacks began Sunday night with a blast that killed 10 people at a house being used by an extremist in the central province of Bukhara, an ancient city on the Silk Road trading route that led from Europe to China. It is home to several Islamic monuments.
There were also two attacks on police Sunday night and early Monday in Tashkent, killing three policemen. The two suicide bombings near the Chorsu bazaar, killed three policemen and a young child, he said.
The suicide bombings were the first ever reported in Uzbekistan. Kadyrov said the attacks were carried out by Islamic extremists, singling out the banned Hizb-ut-Tahrir group and followers of the strict Wahhabi sect of Islam.
``The character and method of this act is not common to our people. It was probably exported from abroad,'' Kadyrov said.
In London, where Hizb-ut-Tahrir operates openly, the group denied responsibility.
``Hizb-ut-Tahrir does not engage in terrorism, violence or armed struggle,'' said spokesman Imran Waheed. ``We feel these explosions come at a very opportune moment for the Uzbek regime. ... One has to wonder whether the finger of blame should be pointed at the Uzbek regime itself.''
Uzbekistan sits in the midst of a geographic band of Islamic militancy that stretches from eastern Turkey to western China, including the separatist Russian republic of Chechnya. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan through Uzbekistan in 1979, fearing a spread of Muslim fundamentalism to its Central Asian republics.
Foreign Minister Sadyk Safayev said the situation in Uzbekistan was stable.
``The terrorists aimed to create panic and chaos, but they didn't manage to do so,'' Safayev said. He also tied the attacks to ongoing terrorist violence in Iraq.
``Police are a soft target,'' he said, when asked about why police were targeted. ``We see a repeat of that which was tested abroad.''
Kadyrov said the materials used in the explosives were similar to those used in a series of bombings in Tashkent in 1999, an alleged assassination attempt against Karimov that was blamed on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
After that attack killed 16 people, the government began crackdown on religious extremists. About 7,000 young men deemed political threats were arrested between 1999 and 2001, human rights groups say. The State Department's human rights report on Uzbekistan for 2002 put the number of political prisoners at about 6,500.
Safayev declined to say whether Monday's attack could have been linked to ongoing operations in Pakistan's border regions, in which a top leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yuldash, was wounded, according to Pakistani officials.
If the link to Hizb-ut-Tahrir is confirmed, it would mark the first time the group has been implicated directly in a terrorist attack. The group claims to be nonviolent, but Uzbek authorities have insisted it was a breeding ground for terrorists, justifying their crackdown on independent Muslims.
The U.S. Embassy in Tashkent warned that ``other terrorists are believed still at large and may be attempting additional attacks.'' It cautioned Americans to be on ``highest alert,'' and closed an embassy office in central Tashkent, although the main building remained open.
A resident of the city of Bukhara said on condition of anonymity that there were at least two explosions Monday in the Roshtan district, nine miles west of Bukhara. He said they were carried out by suicide bombers and killed several people.
One of the explosions, occurred near a mosque and another near a private house, he said, adding that the area was cordoned off by police and soldiers.
At Tashkent's First City Hospital where Interior Ministry officials said victims were taken, a man in the hallway was crying ``Where is my daughter? Is she alive or dead?''
A nurse tried to the comfort him before a doctor scolded her, telling her not to give any information to anyone -- even victims' relatives. Another government official down the hall also warned doctors and nurses not to talk.
Information is tightly controlled in Uzbekistan, with no independent media and opposition political parties are banned.
Other bazaars and shops were closed across Tashkent, and soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs stood outside the city's central department store.
The Chorsu bazaar has been the site of frequent protests by religious women against the detentions of their husbands and sons, part of a crackdown on independent Muslims.
Atonazar Arifov, whose opposition Erk party is allowed to exist but cannot participate in elections, said he feared a new crackdown on dissent.
He also said there were suspicions it had been staged. He said Interior Minister Zokijon Almatov had visited Chorsu on Thursday and that was ``the start of the whole thing'' and that police had been preparing a diversion for a while.
Neighboring Kazakhstan stepped up border security and anti-terrorism measures Monday, said Kenzhebulat Beknazarov, Kazakh National Security Committee spokesman. Kyrgyz border guards also tightened patrols along the Uzbek frontier.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
No Health Risks Found Near Intel Plant - Study
REUTERS USA:
March 29, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24465/story.htm
SAN FRANCISCO - An air quality assessment around an Intel Corp. factory in New Mexico found no evidence that chemicals in the air had caused health problems, though it did not rule out the possibility, New Mexico's Environment Department said.
The health risk assessment is the final piece of a 15-month study into complaints that fumes from an Intel factory were causing rashes, asthma and other ailments in residents of nearby Corrales.
Corrales, which has about 7,300 residents, is just north of Albuquerque, the state's largest city.
"This risk assessment did not find evidence that any of the measured or modeled chemicals are associated with increased acute or chronic health risks," the report stated. "It still remains possible that the health complaints of Corrales citizens are related to local pollutant emission sources."
The electronics industry has long attracted criticism from environmental activists, who have tied chemicals from electronics and computer chip plants to air and water pollution as well as workplace illnesses.
The Corrales study was funded by grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and carried out by Gradient Corp., which relied on EPA risk assessment guidelines, the New Mexico Environment Department said in a statement.
The assessment will be combined with other data and included in a draft final report to be issued in April, the department said.
----
Rapid growth of "dead zones" in oceans threatens planet
JEJU, South Korea (AFP)
Mar 29, 2004
http://www.terradaily.com/2004/040329044912.eqbbhxra.html
The spread of oxygen-starved "dead zones" in the oceans, a graveyard for fish and plant life, is emerging as a threat to the health of the planet, experts said here Monday.
For hundreds of millions of people who depend on seas and oceans for their livelihoods, and for many more who rely on a diet of fish and seafood to survive, the problem is acute.
Some of the oxygen-deprived zones are relatively small, less than one square kilometre (0.4 square miles) in size. Others are vast, measuring more than 70,000 square kilometres.
Pollution, particularly the overuse of nitrogen in fertilizers, is responsible for the spread of dead zones, environment ministers and experts from more than 100 countries were told.
The number of known oxygen-starved areas has doubled since 1990 to nearly 150, according to the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), holding is annual conference here.
"What is clear is that unless urgent action is taken to tackle the sources of the problem, it is likely to escalate rapidly," UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer said.
"Hundreds of millions of people depend on the marine environment for food, for their livelihoods and for their cultural fulfilment."
The world at present gets 17 percent of its animal protein from fish, UN figures show.
That supply is now endangered on at least two fronts: overfishing that has depleted stocks in recent decades and now the challenge of widening dead zones.
The issue was identified as a key emerging problem in the Global Environment Year Book 2003, a health report on the planet released at the start of the UNEP's three-day conference that concludes Wednesday.
The spread of low-level oxygen zones in seas and oceans, identified as early as in the 1960s, is closely related to the overuse of fertilizers in agriculture, whose main ingredient is nitrogen.
On land, nitrogen boosts plant growth. But when it washes into the sea in rivers and rainwater overrun, it triggers an explosive bloom of algae.
When these tiny plants growing on the ocean surface sink to the bottom and decompose, they use up all the oxygen and suffocate other marine life.
Fossil fuel waste from motor vehicles and power plants increases nitrogen content in oceans.
With oxygen depletion, fish, oysters and other marine life eventually die out along with important habitats such as sea grass beds.
Relatively large zones are found in the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay off the US East Coast, the Baltic and Black seas, and parts of the Adriatic.
Others have appeared off South America, Japan, China, Australia and New Zealand. Some zones are permanent, while other occur annually or intermittently.
Most of the 160 million tonnes of nitrogen used as fertiliser annually ends up in the sea.
UNEP said efforts should focus on cutting back on overuse of nitrogen to bring the seas back to life.
With a joint accord, European states within the Rhine River basin successfully cut the amount of nitrogen entering the North Sea by 37 percent between 1985 and 2000, it said.
The UNEP advocates planting of more forests and grasslands to soak up excess nitrogen and better sewage treatment.
Its conference is the first ever held in Asia with more than 100 ministers and high-level officials attending from 155 countries.
----
Type Of Buckyball Shown To Cause Brain Damage In Fish
Mar 29, 2004
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/carbon-04e.html
Anaheim - Researchers have found that a type of buckyball-a carbon nanoparticle that shows promise for electronic, commercial and pharmaceutical uses - can cause significant brain damage in fish.
The small preliminary study, the first to demonstrate that nanoparticles can cause toxic effects in an aquatic species, could point to potential risks in people exposed to the particles, they say. The study was described today at the 227th national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.
"There are many potential benefits of nanotechnology, but its hazards and risks are poorly understood. This study gives us additional cause for concern," says study leader Eva Oberdörster, Ph.D., an environmental toxicologist with Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Buckyballs are pure carbon structures shaped like soccer balls that differ from other forms of pure carbon, like diamond and graphite, in the way their atoms are bonded. The structures, also known as fullerenes, are thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Experts predict the widespread use of these and other nanoparticles in the future. Buckyballs show promise as components of fuel cells, drug delivery systems and cosmetics that delay aging. Although promising, their health risk is unknown.
In a controlled laboratory study, the researcher exposed nine juvenile largemouth bass - confined to 10-Liter aquaria - to a form of water-soluble buckyball (C60) at a dose of 0.5 parts per million.
After 48 hours, the animals developed significant brain damage as measured by lipid peroxidation, or the breakdown of lipids, as shown by laboratory analysis of brain tissue samples. The brain damage seen in the fish exposed to the nanoparticles was severe: 17 times higher than that seen in nine unexposed animals, the researcher says.
"Given the rapid onset of brain damage, it is important to further test and assess the risks and benefits of this new technology before use becomes even more widespread," says Oberdörster. Until further studies are done, no one knows yet whether these and other buckyballs will cause similar brain damage in humans, she emphasizes.
To date, there have been no human studies of the health effect of buckyballs or other manufactured nanoparticles, the researcher says. A few animal studies have shown that nano-sized particles are capable of moving into the brain after being inhaled, but the current study is believed to be the first to show that the particles can actually cause damage to the brain, Oberdörster says.
In addition to damage to the brain, the researcher also investigated altered gene expression in the liver of exposed fish. "We found a variety of genes that were turned on or turned off, indicating a whole-body response to fullerene exposure," she says, adding that these studies represent the first steps in a longer process of studying changes in gene expression.
In particular, Oberdörster found chemical markers in the liver of the exposed fish that indicated the onset of inflammation, a process that has been implicated in an increasing number of diseases.
The researchers still do not know the mechanism by which buckyballs cause damage in the fish. "We don't know if the fullerenes are directly causing lipid peroxidation in the brain tissue or whether it is a secondary effect caused by inflammation," Oberdörster says.
The researcher is planning additional studies in the future to determine the mechanisms of action and to find out how many buckyballs get into the fish's body and where the particles are distributed. She expressed concern that nanoparticles could begin to accumulate throughout the food chain, affecting not just fish, but other animals, plants and possible people.
Researchers worldwide are just beginning to test manufactured nanoparticles for signs of possible toxicity, but it may be years before any reliable human data are available, Oberdörster stresses. As several companies are beginning to manufacture engineered fullerenes, an initial concern is workplace exposure to the particles, she says.
People are not currently exposed to engineered fullerenes in consumer products, but their use is expected to increase in the future. This study suggests that an evaluation of human exposure levels should be completed before these particles are widely used in consumer products, the researcher says.
-------- health
D.C. Knew Of Lead Problems In 2002 Timing of E-Mails Contradicts Claims
By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31556-2004Mar28.html
Senior D.C. government officials knew that the city's water contained unsafe levels of lead 15 months before the public learned of the problem but failed to flag the issue as a major concern, according to internal documents that contradict the account provided recently by top managers.
Officials at the D.C. Department of Health, who have publicly maintained that they did not know of the lead problem until this year, first discussed the contamination in October 2002 with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, according to e-mails between the two agencies.
But after assisting WASA in drafting a 2002 educational brochure that has since been criticized for glossing over the high lead levels, Health Department officials largely ignored the mounting health threat last year and failed to issue clear instructions to residents about how to reduce their risk of lead poisoning.
Not until last month -- three weeks after a Washington Post article revealed the lead problem to most residents -- did the Health Department issue a health advisory urging at-risk people to drink filtered water and get blood tests.
Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said he was "deeply disturbed" that his administration had not shared information earlier about the lead threat with him and city residents.
"I always suspected this . . . that somebody in District government knew about this," said Williams, who added that he has ordered a complete review of the Health Department's actions. "People keeping crucial information from the higher-level management and the mayor is completely unacceptable."
Last week, City Administrator Robert C. Bobb notified Health Department Director James A. Buford that he was being removed from his job, in part because Buford failed to respond to letters, sent in December and January, in which WASA asked for help with the lead contamination issue. But interviews and internal documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that the communication problems go beyond Buford.
WASA General Manager Jerry N. Johnson declined to comment about the Health Department for this article. Buford could not be reached. But other D.C. leaders joined the mayor's call for an internal review.
Since the lead problems were disclosed publicly, city and federal leaders have criticized WASA, the Washington Aqueduct and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to ensure a safe drinking-water supply and for failing to warn the public about health risks when the problem first arose. Now, the health agency's lack of engagement and pattern of playing down bad news have drawn new ire.
The lack of coordination between WASA and the Health Department has worried many city leaders. WASA, a quasi-independent agency, manages the city's drinking water and sewer systems but has no senior staff members who are experts in public health.
That, Johnson said, is the domain of the Health Department. "I think that in most municipalities you rely on the public health agency of that community to provide that information and react to those kinds of issues," Johnson said.
Johnson contacted the Health Department in fall 2002. Oct. 22 of that year, Robert B. Vowels, an Environmental Health Administration physician in the Health Department, sent an e-mail to several staff members.
"We have received an urgent, time-sensitive request from Mr. Johnson of DCWASA to partner with DCWASA in its lead reduction program," Vowels wrote. "This program is an action that was triggered by EPA because lead levels had risen and were actionable this summer."
Vowels also wrote that Theodore Gordon, in charge of the department's Environmental Health Division, had spoken with Johnson and directed staff to help WASA work on the education program. The next day, Health Department staff, including Lynette Stokes, head of the city's lead prevention program, guided WASA to general lead information and passed along logos, such as the city's flag, to put on the brochure.
On Oct. 24, 2002, Johnson thanked Gordon by e-mail. "I owe you a BIG ONE!!" Johnson wrote.
But that appears to be where the Health Department's involvement ended, until last month.
D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4) was appalled by the sequence of events.
"We need more accountability from the Health Department, which has been asleep at the wheel," Fenty said. "There was plenty of information for the Health Department to go on -- the e-mails, the attempt to get them involved. This should trigger an investigation and report."
Jerome Paulson, a pediatrician and leading specialist in lead poisoning who serves on the Health Department's advisory committee, said the department's mandate to protect is clear.
"There is no safe level of lead exposure," Paulson said. "If the Health Department was getting information that people are getting exposed to high levels, it's their responsibility to do something to protect them."
But in recent public statements, Gordon has said he did not know the city had unsafe lead levels in the water until media reports in January.
In an interview last week, Gordon called it "absolute nonsense" to think he and his staff would withhold information from his superiors. He said he was out of town at a training course at Harvard University when he heard of the high lead levels in fall 2002, didn't think it was serious and directed the staff to assist WASA's general manager.
"What motive would I have for not alerting the mayor to this?" Gordon said. "Why didn't Jerry Johnson notify the mayor or the city administrator? Why not the [EPA]? Or my director?"
Gordon and other health officials have said that they did not understand how widespread the lead problems were in fall 2002 and that WASA did not offer any specific test results. At that point, WASA had found that about half of 50 homes tested had excessive lead levels in the water. In November 2003, WASA sent the Health Department 150 more test results, many of them showing elevated levels.
Meanwhile, WASA expanded the testing and found that 4,075 of 6,118 homes tested last year had water with high lead levels. However, the Health Department did not receive that list until this year, according to health officials.
A Health Department manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering supervisors, said the department clearly knew a lot about the lead problem in 2002 but relied on EPA and WASA to gauge its importance.
"The argument here is that the alarm was not sounded by WASA and EPA loudly enough to get the appropriate attention," the manager said. "That may not be our fault, but what we know today we knew then, and there should have been a greater horn sounded."
EPA regulators and some Health Department colleagues say that Gordon, a 30-year city employee, is generally skillful at managing a crisis but that his demand for control can paralyze the agency and squelch information.
In 2001, Chris Ball, EPA's liaison to the District, contacted the mayor's office to report that he could not get through to Gordon for several days and that the EPA was going to have to take direct action against the Kennedy Center because of exposed asbestos there. Soon after, Gordon called the EPA's Region III administrator, Donald S. Welsh, to complain. Gordon insisted that all communications about future EPA matters come to his office, according to two EPA staff members familiar with Gordon's complaint.
Gordon denied that he made such a blanket request and said that his concern related only to the Kennedy Center asbestos problem.
In a written statement Friday, Welsh declined to discuss Gordon's request but said he will bring public health matters to the mayor's attention "if necessary."
"The important thing is that we get the word to the District one way or the other -- either through the Department of Health or through the mayor's office," Welsh said.
In the past two months, the city has tried to make up for the Health Department's lack of oversight.
The department's health director, Buford, has been replaced temporarily by Herbert R. Tillery, the city's deputy mayor for operations. The city administrator has seized control of the government's response to the lead crisis, and interim Chief Medical Officer Daniel R. Lucey has led the Health Department's effort.
Williams acknowledged that "a number of agencies, including ours, have failed us."
WASA leaders said they may make changes of their own. The board has recommended that the mayor appoint a new member with a public health background, and it is considering hiring a new public health director for its staff.
WASA Board Chairman Glenn S. Gerstell said last week that a health director could help ensure that WASA managers weigh decisions with an eye on health, although Johnson has opposed the idea.
On Oct. 24, 2002, Johnson seemed pleased with the Health Department's assistance on the educational brochure.
"Your staff has been great to work with and their assistance is greatly appreciated," Johnson wrote. "It's good to know that when you're in a bind there are a group of true professionals that can be called on."
Staff writers Avram Goldstein and D'Vera Cohn and researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
------- ACTIVISTS
Protesters gear up for N.Y.
March 29, 2004
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040328-115810-1534r.htm
Thousands of protesters plan to converge on New York this summer for the Republican National Convention and already are promoting their antiestablishment events through Web sites and word of mouth.
One site facilitates lodging in the nation's largest city; another collects postings on street demonstrations; and yet another provides a map of Manhattan with a large red star next to Madison Square Garden, where the convention's official proceedings will take place from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.
"Over 1,000 groups have filed applications for demonstration permits," said Kevin Sheekey, special adviser to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. "Some are large, some are small. And we've got the people to handle this."
The protesters expect opposition to President Bush will lead to big turnouts for their events.
"There is a high level of interest in New York City, where so many people did not support the war in Iraq and the city was used as a reason for the war on terror, quote unquote," said Bill Moss, media coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, which is organizing an Aug. 29 march down Eighth Avenue.
"This will be a summer weekend, there will be people coming from out of town, and there are plenty of people in the city who are going to be part of the activities during the week," he said.
The 36,000-officer New York Police Department will handle most of the street action, which usually results in arrests and detentions, and sometimes violence.
In a passionate plea for funding earlier this month, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau told the City Council that arrests during the convention could reach 1,000 a day, three times the city's normal volume.
Mr. Morgenthau's request is indicative of the weight that the city - emotionally devastated by the September 11 attacks - is giving to convention security.
"New York is a unique target, and it always will be, which is why we now also require resources from the federal government," Mr. Sheekey said, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's designation of both major party conventions as national special security events.
Mr. Ridge's declaration hands over coordination of security to the Secret Service.
The Secret Service was not available to comment. Mark Pfeifle, director of communications for the convention, did not return calls.
Before September 11, 2001, protests routinely were handled as impediments to traffic and pedestrians, said Paul Browne, deputy police commissioner for the New York Police Department.
"But post 9/11, we have to assume that any large gathering that is highly publicized might be a target," Mr. Browne said. "In the past, we did not have officers assigned to intelligence to make sure there are no efforts to create havoc or loss of life. Now, we have a counterterrorism overlay."
Although the Democrats' convention in Boston also is expected to draw demonstrators, the New York gathering is the big event, partly because of the presence of Mr. Bush.
The massive Aug. 29 march down Eighth Avenue starts at Madison Square Garden and ends in Central Park. Another group, Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, is planning a march at the United Nations on Aug. 30.
Others are promising 20,000 campers in Central Park. Although United for Peace and Justice says it is the largest antiwar coalition in the country, with more than 750 groups under the umbrella, dozens of other groups are ready to descend on the city.
Counterconvention.org, for example, is "part of a collective," said Will Etundi, who helps run the site. "Only we're intended for people in New York, from the neighborhoods who are angry that Bush is going to exploit the city for his own gain."
----
Daniel Ellsberg sees a new trend -- telling all while the issue is hot
Matthew B. Stannard,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/03/29/MNGK75SR5A1.DTL
When famous whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg boarded a plane to Cincinnati earlier this week, he took along a little light reading: a stack of articles about former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who has stirred controversy with allegations in his book and testimony before a special panel that the Bush White House was somewhat indifferent to al Qaeda before Sept. 11 and obsessed with Iraq afterward.
Ellsberg, who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers documenting government misrepresentations about the Vietnam War, sees Clarke as part of a trend: well- placed individuals in the government who have gone public with books or interviews outlining their concerns and criticisms about their country's government -- while that government is still in power.
Ellsberg is not alone in that observation -- observers from across the political spectrum, whether they support Clarke's actions or not, agree that a new willingness exists to tell all far sooner, and far more publicly, than in the past.
Ellsberg cites officials such as Scott Ritter, the former lead inspector for the U.N. Special Commission on Concealment and Investigations team, and Katharine Gun, a British government linguist who leaked an e-mail purportedly from U.S. intelligence services asking for help spying on U.N. ambassadors.
Opinions differ on whether the willingness to tell all is a good thing, but to Ellsberg, who has been sharply critical of the war in Iraq and even written articles encouraging current government employees to leak what he calls "Iraq's Pentagon Papers," the phenomenon is a source of optimism.
"I think these people are heroes. They're really acting appropriately in a very dangerous situation," he said. "It's as if we are learning about the Tonkin Gulf a month or two later instead of years later."
Although Ellsberg, now 72 and living in Kensington, considers Clarke somewhat of a kindred spirit, he doesn't quite see him as a whistle-blower. Clarke was no longer an employee of the administration when he spoke out and did not provide documentation to back up his accusations -- accusations the administration has rejected.
Ellsberg said the only real whistle-blower of recent times is Gun, who briefly faced charges under the British Official Secrets Act and supported her claims with documents.
"I find her really admirable," Ellsberg said, but he considers the rest remarkable, too, for being willing to go public in a way and with a speed that simply didn't occur 40 years ago.
"Why are they acting differently from people in my generation?" he said. "We knew (Vietnam) was just as deceptive and the policy was just as bad, but we certainly weren't tempted to leak."
At least, not until Ellsberg did it. But since then, a number of observers said, going public early and often has become more and more acceptable, even among ranking government officials.
It certainly wasn't acceptable in the 1950s, said Stephen Hess, who was a speechwriter for President Dwight Eisenhower and is now with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
"It was a rule of thumb that no one spoke until the president did. When the president wrote his memoir, told his story, that was when the others did," Hess said. The exceptions, he said, were books that were rarely very critical -- and even then, they were considered scandalous.
"We on the staff thought that was just in such poor form ... it just wasn't done," he said.
The ideal at the time, Hess said, was the White House staff described by pre-World War II political scientist Louis Brownlow, who recommended that President Franklin Roosevelt's staff should "remain in the background, issue no orders, make no decisions, emit no public statements ... They should be possessed of high competence, great physical vigor, and a passion for anonymity."
That changed markedly with the release of the Pentagon Papers. Another step came, Hess said, during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, who was criticized in public by some former staffers and was himself critical of his predecessors and later his successors -- another taboo. After that, the genie was out of the bottle.
"Over time, it became an avalanche. By the time you reached Clinton, you had people that secretly had book contracts," he said. "You had people sitting around the table keeping notes."
Both former Clinton political consultant Dick Morris and former senior adviser George Stephanopoulos had books published while Clinton was still in office.
But Clarke's book, because of his position, may be taking the trend to a new level, said Peter Berkowitz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of law at George Mason University Law School.
"I do think what Clarke has done is really unprecedented in our history: somebody who served as a national security adviser to the president stepping down and, while that president is still in office, blasting him," he said. "That just hasn't been done before."
It is also surprising, Berkowitz said, that comments by Clarke, O'Neill, and Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector in Iraq, have such an impact on public policy and public discourse -- even though, in his opinion, they fit into the category of disgruntled ex-employee as comfortably as whistle-blower.
"That's actually one reason, it seems to me, to take this criticism with a grain of salt," Berkowitz said.
But regardless of the motivation, telling all is probably going to be increasingly popular, said UC Berkeley political science Professor Bruce Cain, for commercial reasons if not ideals.
It is increasingly difficult, because of conflict-of-interest laws, for former government officials to move easily back and forth between the government and the private sector, and the growth of cable and the publishing industry ensures that they can seek lucrative post-government employment in the media, Cain said.
And because books sell better when the author's name is fresh in people's minds, he said, it is likely such books will continue to be published as soon as possible -- and sooner all the time.
"It's part of this whole speeding up of the cycle of everything. Now, even our memories have to come faster," he said.
Michael Kohn, general counsel for the private National Whistleblower Center, agreed with Cain's prediction of faster and faster revelations, but with a different premise.
"You're seeing an evolution of our society. Ellsberg is essentially the first modern whistle- blower. As a result, the news media observed how important obtaining this type of information was and how it was the ultimate lifeline to a free society," he said. "As this message began to take root, the will of people to expose information at an earlier point of time has just gone with it."
The main brake on the phenomenon, Kohn said, are federal laws that he feels inadequately protect people who try to speak up while still employed, causing more to delay revelation until they quit or are fired.
With more protective laws, he said, "you would have heard from (Clarke) before Sept. 11."
Hess and Berkowitz said the consequences of this new willingness to tell all include the loss of a kind of loyalty in government service that had been a tradition, and the possibility that future administrations may appoint more party loyalists and be less willing to keep on longtime civil servants from prior administrations.
"There is a very good reason why there is executive privilege and why a president should feel they have a right to receive confidential information from their aides and that their aides owe" loyalty to them, Hess said.
But to Ellsberg, the fact that a number of Bush's own people have been willing to break that presumption of loyalty is a strong condemnation of the president and his neo-conservative allies, something Clarke himself has hinted at in public statements.
Asked on "60 Minutes" whether he owed loyalty to the president, Clarke responded, "Up to a point. When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside." THOSE WHO TOLD
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers three decades ago, cited these people as part of what he sees as a new trend of those who criticize governments still in power:
-- Scott Ritter, the former lead inspector for the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) Concealment and Investigations team in Iraq.
-- Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector in Iraq.
-- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, whose January book about his tenure inside the Bush administration was based, in part, on classified documents.
-- Rand Beers, who quit as President Bush's antiterrorism adviser to become John Kerry's foreign policy adviser.
-- Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who investigated whether Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger and later publicly accused the White House of manipulating his findings.
-- John Brady Kiesling, a career U.S. diplomat who resigned to protest the Bush administration's policies on Iraq.
-- Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst on the steering committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
-- Robin Cook, a former British foreign minister who quit and wrote a book saying the threat of Iraq was overblown.
-- Katharine Gun, a British government linguist who was charged under the British Official Secrets Act for leaking an e-mail purportedly from U.S. intelligence services asking for help spying on U.N. ambassadors.
-- Anthony Zinni, retired Marine general and former U.S. commander for the Middle East who has criticized the handling of postwar Iraq.
-- Clare Short, a former international development secretary who resigned from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government in protest after the invasion and later said she had seen transcripts of bugging of Kofi Annan's office.
-- Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired lieutenant colonel formerly assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans who wrote an article critical of the war on the online site Salon.com -- entitled "The New Pentagon Papers."
E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.
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It's the end of the world as we know it
Monday, March 29 2004
by Susan Thompson
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php?story=20040326120338159
It's the End of the World as we Know it: "On the Beach" and "The Day of the Triffids Argue Against our WMDs"
With all the talk of creating a "national" missile defence program, and what seems to be a general abandonment of long-held principles of nuclear non-proliferation in the U.S., Canada and abroad, I've been in the mood for some topical reading.
There are two excellent novels that I want to recommend. They are the classic On the Beach by Nevil Shute, and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Both portray a world destroyed by weapons on our own making.
On the Beach is the book that inspired renowned anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott to begin working for a non-nuclear world. Set in Australia, it takes place after a nuclear war that wipes out the northern hemisphere. Although life proceeds generally as normal despite failing oil supplies and other problems, there is a growing sense of desperation and despair among the Australian populace as the deadly radiation heads slowly southward, and finally into Australia itself.
Those who read this book expecting it to be the typical Mad Max, Terminator etc end of the world scenario will find that it isn't by any means the conventional, action-packed type of apocalyptic fiction you'll see in most movies. (Forgive me for comparing cinema with literature but the fact is that movies have created certain expectations about the genre in people's minds.) The characters in the book are generally concerned about the things we are all concerned about--their jobs, dating, having kids, and gardening. In fact, Shute captures the everyday language and concerns between married couples in a true-to-life way that I have rarely seen, if ever. The world of the novel is normal and immediately recognizable, even if set in Australia--so much so that the details reported seem almost painfully inconsequential and mundane.
And this is precisely what gives the novel its quiet power. It feels absolutely real. The small details that the author captures are the essence of the fabric of our lives, which are not generally heroic journeys filled with stirring dialogue but rather remain caught up in the millions of details we all have to deal with every day, from finding our keys to putting gas in the car to picking what kind of flowers to plant in the spring.
Also unlike most U.S.-produced Hollywood end-of-the-world blockbusters, it is not built around a last-ditch effort to save the world from destruction by a handful of dedicated heroes, who eventually win out against the odds (see The Core, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Independence Day, etc etc). Such movies seem to celebrate America's power (and the power of individual Americans) to conquer obstacles and heroically save the day in the end, a national myth that is evident not only in theatres, but in the country's real-life foreign policy.
In this novel, America is somewhere "other"--somewhere that can not be easily accessed or seen, and somewhere that is already gone. Whatever action has taken place in America is alreaady over, and if there were any last ditch efforts to save the planet, they've failed. It's not America that saves the world--it is a war involving America that has already destroyed it. It is made clear to the reader over time that there is no chance of escape, that despite some initially hopeful theories the deadly radiation is there and coming and final. It will kill all of the characters involved and all animal life as well. There is no way to fight it. America lives on only in the memories of the few Americans currently working out of Australia as part of the U.S. Navy, themselves doomed to death by radiation sickness in the near future when the dust finally reaches them. Those Australians who are left ask why they have to die for a war they had no part in, a war for which they only provided "moral support".
This is a profound comment and one which would probably never be found in U.S. culture itself. The novel makes it clear that nuclear war has no survivors. It makes it clear that death is inevitable. It makes it clear that the arrogance of a few can punish many.
It seems to me that American culture, and specifically American culture under George Bush, is mainly concerned with denying these ideas, not examining them. Death can be delayed by science, as can ageing. There is little or no acceptance of the fact that death comes to us all eventually, that no heroics can save us for more than a little while. That idea is essentially taboo in a culture where youth is prized above all else. But it is in fact a profound truth about human existence, a fact which other cultures have not shied away from (think if the Mexican day of the dead, or the central teachings of Buddhism).
More importantly, these days nuclear war seems to be viewed as a practical strategic tool rather than the doorway to Armageddon. There has already been talk of using small nuclear bombs as part if the U.S. arsenal. Depleted uranium is already used in "bunker busters" and armour-piercing weaponry, and there seems to be no official acknowledgement of the costs to health these weapons are almost certainly causing. Perhaps this is because there is always the sense that whatever happens, there will be a way to survive--some sort of bunker, or ark, or technological solution that will save the day. The heroes will step in and sacrifice themselves to save us all at the last minute. Those heroes will of course be American.
But in this novel the reality is that the world is dying and there is nothing that can help. Rather than working desperately on some scheme to survive, people spend their time finding ways to come to terms with the inevitable end. For some it's drinking, or fishing, or working. For many it is denial, but the always-encroaching reality of the situation breaks through that denial in the end. And it is precisely the mundane things that people cling to, and treasure the most, as they slowly lose them.
The Day of the Triffids offers a similar scenario but one that has more elements of sci-fi. Namely, along with it being the end of the world there are some pretty freaky plants running around. Literally.
If you haven't read this book before and you've seen the zombie flick 28 Days Later, you're going to feel a pretty strong sense of deja-vu when you read the opening passages. Like Jim in the movie, the protagonist awakes in a very quiet hospital in a very quiet London, wondering what the heck is going on. Just remember that this book came first--in fact the people behind 28 Days Later openly acknowledge their debt to it.
And The Day of the Triffids does, again, make a more interesting comment in my view than the similarly-themed movie. While in 28 Days Later the people who expect help from America are proven right and the Americans do eventually come through in the end (as evidenced by the fighter plane that eventually finds the survivors) in The Day of the Triffids it is underlined again and again that to expect the Americans to come save everyone (as many people throughout the novel do) is to cling to false hope and to decrease the chance of survival. The protagonists, who are certainly the most successful survivors, do not cling to this hope and as a result are more able to cope with the reality of the situation. Again, this has interesting implications for the real world. I wonder if it marks a shift in British consciousness that the more recent 28 Days Later does look to America for help, while the older Day of the Triffids does not, especially since more recently Britain has been such a close U.S. ally in wars such as the war on Iraq. Perhaps it was just more marketable to American audiences. Either way, I think the movie plays in to American national myths far more than this book does.
The Day of the Triffids may also be easier reading for those who find the absence of attempts to survive in On the Beach frustrating. The protagonists do go about finding ways to cope with the situation in this book and are generally successful, although many others are not. They do continue to hope for re-establishing human dominance in the world, where in On the Beach this is out of the question.
However, like in On the Beach it is clear that the loss and destruction forcing the need for survival is the result of human arrogance. The freaky walking plants that like to kill and eat people (the triffids) are the result of human genetic experimentation and lust for profit. The original disaster, which is that most of the population wakes up blind, is likely the result of human satellite weapons. The novel specifically says that humans were walking a tightrope and "fell off." Implied is that America, Russian etc were the ones who created the satellite weapons in the first place, and therefore responsible. But it is the whole world that must deal with the consequences, even if that is unfair.
So despite other more superficial differences, the message here is the same as the message in On the Beach--it's foolish to put such powerful weapons in place and not expect them to eventually hurt the entire populace of the world. And while the novel concludes on a more generally hopeful note, it makes clear that the future remains uncertain, and the question of whether it is the humans or the triffids who survive is not yet resolved. There is more hope that with the brains and courage of a few people some solution can be found. But it is not found within the pages of the novel, and so the reader is left to draw her or his own conclusions.
All in all, I highly recommend both of these books and I am personally of the opinion that everyone needs to read them in order to develop as human beings. They are classics because they are the kind of books that will remain in your consciousness forever.
And most importantly, they bear a message that is being all too quickly forgotten in today's nuclear-friendly world.
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