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NUCLEAR
Radioactive material in I-75 wreck had low levels of radiation
Nuclear Experts Form International Safety Group
UK Given 60 Days to Expedite Nuclear Waste Inspection
Government told to clean up Sellafield
Brussels gives Sellafield ultimatum
Records Show British Fear of Nuke Attack
DEPLETED URANIUM - Nellis ponders range cleanup
Pakistan policy sends dangerous signal
Pakistan government cleared in selling of nuclear material
Bush to notify Congress on MNNA status soon
Britain, France, Germany condemn Iran's work on nuclear fuel cycle
France, UK, Germany Criticize Iran Nuclear Plant
Diplomats: New Data Suggests Secret Iran Atomic Plan
Iraqis living around nuclear site fear radiation contamination
Weapons Inspector Testifies on Hill
Iraq Arms Inspector Says Search Is a Tangle
South Korea says North Korea must clarify nuclear freeze offer
Pyongyang unlikely to go the Libyan way on nukes
N.Korea slams planned US air defence deployment as preparation for war
New Russian Weapon Called 'Revolutionary'
'Suitcase Nuke' Fears Present A Stern Test For Defense Experts
Hopes of Building Nation's First New Nuclear Plant in Decades
Consortium Seeks Nuclear Plant License
Consortium to Seek Nuclear Plant License
INEEL cleanup prep work reveals broken drum
Utah Lawmaker Apologizes for Remark
Reason to Run? Nader Argues He Has Plenty
Is Fix in at 9/11 Commission?
The Defector
The Dogs That Didn't Bark
MILITARY
Pakistan police recover large cache of weapons near Afghan border
Cambodia destroys anti-aircraft missiles in fiery display
Never mind the torture and political prisoners, he's Bush's man
Two Dozen Killed in Wave Of Violence in Uzbekistan
3rd Day of Violence Claims 23 Lives in Uzbekistan
Cost of Iraq war leaves Forces facing cuts
Navy building unmanned warfare research facility in Panhandle
Moving Electrolux jobs to Hungary could help Sweden land fighter jet deal
Boeing snags 189 million Pentagon space contract
Fear of Terrorism Inspired Scheme to Bilk Area Malls
A majority of Norwegians want to bring troops home from Iraq: poll
Enraged Mob in Falluja Kills 4 American Contractors
Iraqis training for defense role worry about lack of time or money
Jewish Settlers Spark Clash in Arab Area
Sharon, Facing Criticism, Plans Vote on Gaza Pullout
Philippines foils Islamic bomb plot
US creeping towards weapons in space
U.N. tackles link between war and environment at global forum
Pentagon Drops Plan To Test Internet Voting
Military Sex Assault Likened to 'Friendly Fire'
Radiation claims power to frighten
A Clash on Classified Documents
Publicist Hired to Tell Iraqis of Democracy
US newspaper ban plays into cleric's hands
10-Year Term for a Serb in War Crimes Called Light
Serbia Votes to Pay Milosevic During His War Crimes Trial
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
President to Let Rice Testify About 9/11
When Goals Meet Reality: Bush's Reversal on 9/11 Testimony
Commissioners Eager to Question Rice
Court Hears Cases on Agents' Actions Abroad
Supreme Court upholds tank searches at border
Court considers foreigners' right to sue
U.N. Court Orders U.S. to Review Cases of Mexicans
Airports' Security Level Lowered
China Rebuts U.S. Criticism on Rights
U.S. Warns Against Attacks on Commercial Vessels
OTHER
EPA Faulted on Clean-Water Violations
ACTIVISTS
Liberal Voices Get New Home on Radio Dial
U.K.'s one-man band weathers 3-year protest
Police attempting to move Brian Haw
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Radioactive material in I-75 wreck had low levels of radiation
By CHRISTIAN CZERWINSKI
Englewood Sun Herald Staff Writer
03/31/04
http://www.sun-herald.com/NewsArchive2/033104/tp8ew13.htm?date=033104&story=tp8ew13.htm
A Charlotte County Sheriff's Office deputy was one of the first people to arrive at Monday afternoon's fatal wreck on Interstate 75.
The deputy found Justin Thomas Bare, 24, of Tamarac, didn't have a pulse, according to a report. The deputy started performing CPR and an off-duty emergency medical technician went to the patrol car to get a breathing mask.
Their efforts were unsuccessful and Bare died.
Bare was in a pick-up truck with Matthew Gonzalez, 22, of Plantation, who was driving south on I-75 when he lost control and hit a tree about 4:55 p.m.
Gonzalez was removed from the torn shell of the truck and flown to Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers where he died, according to a Florida Highway Patrol report.
Sgt. Conner Cardwell, of the Florida Highway Patrol, said the truck was traveling southbound, when it apparently veered left, and "over-corrected," and slammed into a tree about 40 feet to the right of the road.
The wreck closed the southbound lanes of the highway for about three hours because the truck was carrying radioactive material used in surveying to test the density of asphalt and stone.
The Charlotte County Fire & EMS Special Operations Team responded to the crash as a matter of routine since there was a hazardous material involved.
No radiation leaks were found in the lead case which held the surveying equipment. The case was ripped from the rear of the truck during the crash and was still wrapped in a chain which kept it from easily opening.
Lindsey Weaver, regional manager of Universal Engineering in Punta Gorda, said a nuclear density moisture meter is a piece of equipment that tests soil and asphalt density with very low levels of radioactive sources.
Weaver said the box-like machine has a probe that reaches into the ground, which emits the radiation. He said the machine is common in that type of work and operators need a state-issued license to operate it.
"It gives off really low levels of radiation and it's all encapsulated within the box. The source is the size of a thumbnail," Weaver said.
"The box has several different fail-safes. When the probe is in the machine, it's probably shielded by three different things."
According an official, almost anything radioactive can travel on the interstate, just as long as it's packaged right.
Maj. Ken Carr, of the Florida Department of Transportation, said transporters must abide by federal hazardous materials regulations.
There are some limits on materials that can be transported, Carr said.
For example, he said it's permissible for trucks to transport nuclear fuel rods and plutonium-234 -- commonly used in nuclear weapons -- provided the regulations are met.
"Generally speaking, the packaging, markings and labeling must be right and the requirements met," Carr said.
"Most radioactive materials have such high regulations, it's not likely to pose a problem," he said, "You see other things transported like pharmaceutics and medical devices, and those things present a low risk."
Carr said forbidden materials range from electrical devices that create sparks and high levels of heat and mixed materials that form poisonous gases.
"The primary mission is to ensure that it's transported safely without being released or causing danger to the environment," he added.
FHP investigators continue to try to determine the cause of the crash. No other vehicles were involved.
You can e-mail Christian Czerwinski at cczerwinski@sun-herald.com.
----
Nuclear Experts Form International Safety Group
VIENNA, Austria, (ENS)
March 31, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-31-03.asp
Experts from 15 countries have joined to form a new International Nuclear Safety Group to provide authoritative advice and guidance on safety approaches, policies and principles at nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities. Dr. Richard Meserve, chairman of the group, announced its existence Friday at a press briefing in Vienna.
Dr. Richard Meserve of the United States (Photo courtesy Carnegie Institution) "The evolution of nuclear safety is increasingly international," said Meserve, who formerly chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now heads the Carnegie Institution. He said the new group will work to "identify major safety issues and recommend ways and means to resolve them."
Members of the group are from Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, the Russian Federation, Spain, the United Kingdom, United States, South Africa, South Korea,Spain, United Kingdom, United States, and the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Econmic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Meserve says the group will be focused on serving the United Nations's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as the nuclear community, and the public.
The IAEA will serve as the group's secretariat, under the office of Ken Brockman, director of the IAEA Division of Nuclear Installation Safety.
Meserve says the experts have high professional competence in fields of safety working in regulatory organizations, research and academic institutions, and the nuclear industry.
They will focus on fundamental safety issues, and current and emerging matters relevant to the safety of nuclear power plants, research reactors, and other nuclear fuel cycle facilities.
Issues of nuclear security will be addressed insofar as they relate to safety at these installations.
The group was newly formed at the request of IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. Its first meeting took place at the IAEA in late October 2003, and additional meetings were held in Vienna last week. Meetings are planned twice a year, with the next scheduled in Vienna this November.
Two conferences are set for this year that are expected to foster an exchange of information among countries with civilian nuclear capability.
"Fifty Years of Nuclear Power - the Next Fifty Years" wil be held in Moscow from June 27 to July 2. It marks two 50th year anniversaries - the first production of electricity by nuclear power for a national grid, which took place in Obninsk, Russia in June 1954. In the United States the first large nuclear power plant went online at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1958.
The second milestone is the 50th anniversary of the UN General Assembly resolution that called for international co-operation in developing the peaceful uses of atomic energy, expressing "the hope that the International Atomic Energy Agency will be established without delay" and declaring "the interest and concern of the General Assembly in helping in every feasible way to promote the peaceful applications of atomic energy."
Fifty years later, the administration of Russia's atomic energy program is undergoing fundamental changes. Twelve years of public protests have resulted in the deconstruction of the ministry that lobbied for the interests of the nuclear industry.
The Ministry of Atomic Power of Russia (Minatom) has been disbanded by newly elected President Vladimir Putin, and replaced by the Federal Agency of Atomic Power under the Ministry for Industry and Energy. It will be headed by Alexandr Rumyantsev, former Minatom minister, and will be responsible for non-weapons issues, such as construction and decommissioning of reactors, the nuclear fuel cycle, and science.
Nuclear weapons issues will be handled by the Russian Ministry of Defense headed by Sergey Ivanov and controlled by President Putin directly.
In October, safety at civilian nuclear plants will be the subject of an international conference in Beijing."Topical Issues in Nuclear Installation Safety: Continuous Improvement of Nuclear Safety in a Changing World," is scheduled from October 18 - 22.
The conference will develop an international consensus on the basic approaches for dealing with nuclear safety, and will propose recommendations for future activities for the IAEA, nuclear utilities and regulatory authorities, and emerging issues with international implications.
------- britain
UK Given 60 Days to Expedite Nuclear Waste Inspection
BRUSSELS, Belgium, (ENS)
March 31, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-31-02.asp
The European Commission has ordered British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. to clean up an old nuclear waste pond at its Sellafield facility to a standard that will allow international inspectors to see whether or not any of the radioactive material has been diverted to make bombs.
The EU executive Tuesday gave the state-owned company that operates Sellafield until June 1 to present an overall plan that ensures adequate accounting for the nuclear material in question, as well as physical access to the Cumbrian nuclear processing plant or face fines.
Loyola de Palacio, the EU Vice-President responsible for Energy and Transport, said the UK must comply with the provisions of the Euratom Treaty and permit the inspections.
"This problem has been known for a long time, but no concrete initiative has been taken by the operator to rectify it," said the vice president. "The situation had therefore become untenable for the Commission. It calls into question the credibility of our safeguards, which our team of inspectors has been carrying out for 50 years in accordance with very high standards."
An open air spent nuclear fuel storage pool at Sellafield (Photo courtesy U. Wales, Aberystwyth) The nuclear material in question is held underwater in a concrete pond known as B30. Built in 1959 to store and unpack uranium fuel rods used to power Britain's first generation of military and civil reactors, B30 was phased out in the 1970s after some fuel started to corrode, and it was closed down in 1992.
The open air pond contains uranium, plutonium, and other radioactive wastes such as caesium and strontium.
In accounting terms, the Commission said Tuesday, "it is impossible to determine accurately the quantities of material stored, and on-the-spot inspections cannot take place because of the high level of radiation and poor visibility in the part of the facility concerned."
Estimates for uranium in the pond range between 300 and 450 metric tons, and there may be as much as 1.3 tons of plutonium but it is impossible to tell because pond visibility is restricted by algae.
Confidential British Nuclear Fuel (BNFL) documents leaked to the London "Sunday Herald" last July indicate that the company does not know precisely how much radioactive material is in the pond.
BNFL documents published by the newspaper and dated 1999 give a glimpse of what corrosion and decay have done to the underwater waste. "Individual elements have also fallen from various process operations," the company wrote. "Poor pond visibility and accumulated sludge in the pond make it difficult to retrieve spilt fuel and undertake visual inspections."
BNFL's Sellafield nuclear facility on the Cumbrian coast (Photo courtesy BNFL) For years, the Commission said, its inspection service has warned BNFL that the nuclear material held in B30 could not be inspected properly, in contravention of the Euratom Treaty.
Recognizing that technical difficulties prevented an immediate solution, the Commission has regularly requested BNFL, the last time in March 2003, to submit an overall plan detailing the measures needed to put an end to the situation.
In the past, BNFL has made commitments to remedy the problem, but has so far failed to come up with a formal action plan or adopt the measures needed to put an end to the infringement once and for all.
Now the EU executive has lost patience with the delay and is demanding an action plan within 60 days.
In addition, the UK authorities are required to submit to the Commission every six months a report on progress towards implementing the plan.
Greenpeace says it supports the European Commission's move to force BNFL to clean up the B30 spent nuclear fuel pond at Sellafield but it is a move that should have been made years ago.
Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Jean McSorley said, "The UK Government and BNFL have prevaricated for years about this waste, despite the fact that they knew there was a huge problem. The Commission has also failed to act on this for the past 14 years, and during that time has repeatedly told the European Parliament and the Council that the situation at Sellafield was fine."
----
Government told to clean up Sellafield
Wed 31 March, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=485850§ion=news
STRASBOURG, France - The European Union has told Britain to clean up Sellafield nuclear plant or face fines, losing patience with London's long refusal to allow full safety inspections.
The EU executive said Britain had failed to allow EU inspections to make sure nuclear material did not end up in nuclear weapons.
"The UK operator British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) has failed to comply with the... rules concerning accounting for nuclear material," European Commission chief spokesman Reijo Kemppinen told a news conference on Tuesday.
BNFL had also not allowed full access to "Commission inspectors to nuclear material to check the nature and quality and quantity of the material," Kemppinen said.
The Commission, which polices nuclear safety across the 15-nation bloc, has asked Britain to devise a plan to clean up Sellafield by June 1, extending London's deadline by an extra month than originally planned.
The problem centres on B30, a series of reinforced concrete ponds that store radioactive waste under water at Sellafield.
"It is impossible to determine accurately the quantities of material stored and on the spot inspections cannot take place because of the high level of radiation and poor visibility in the part of the facility concerned," the Commission said in a statement.
If state-owned BNFL does not comply with the decision, the Commission could fine the company.
Greenpeace welcomed the decision, saying the 50-year old B30 ponds contained 1.3 million tonnes of plutonium, posing a major risk for workers and people living nearby.
"The UK Government and BNFL have prevaricated for years despite the fact that they knew there was a huge problem," said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Jean McSorley, adding that the Commission should have acted 14 years earlier.
----
Brussels gives Sellafield ultimatum
Ian Black in Brussels
Wednesday March 31, 2004
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,9061,1182616,00.html
Britain has been given until June 1 to come up with a detailed plan to clean up spent nuclear fuel stored at BNFL's Sellafield plant in Cumbria.
The European commission said yesterday that safety checks would have to be carried out under the Euratom treaty and six-monthly reports submitted.
Brussels objects to Britain's failure to say exactly how much plutonium waste is stored in an outdoor "pond" known as B30. Radioactivity levels are so high that workers can only safely spend an hour a day there.
The ponds have existed since the 50s, when no proper records were kept, and the commission has been asking for improvements since 1986. Britain admitted last year that "conditions in B30 mean the safeguard verification activities that can be carried out are limited".
But officials suggested the commission's decision may be politically motivated and rejected the implication that radioactive material may be vulnerable to smuggling.
Ireland has long complained about pollution from the plant.
Greenpeace said the threat to punish BNFL smacked of political opportunism. "The UK government and BNFL have prevaricated for years despite the fact that they knew there was a huge problem, and the commission has also failed to act until now," said the environmental group.
Failure to comply with the deadline may lead to penalties for BNFL.
--------
Records Show British Fear of Nuke Attack
March 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Nuclear-Attack.html
LONDON (AP) -- British officials feared 12 million people would be killed instantly and four million seriously injured if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack during the Cold War, according to government documents from the 1950s and 1960s released to the public Wednesday.
Papers written to advise the Cabinet assumed Britain could be facing a massive nuclear attack which would have annihilated around a quarter of the population.
Military officials made detailed plans to govern Britain from a series of fortified bunkers and formulated a campaign of retaliatory action in the event of the prime minister's death, according to the papers, which form part of the ``State Secret'' exhibition which opens at the National Archives at Kew in southwest London on Friday.
Many of the plans were so sensitive that even Cabinet ministers would have been shown details on a need-to-know basis.
The scale of casualties in a worst-case scenario attack was predicted by civil servant Sir William Strath in a 1955 report passed to the Cabinet.
He wrote: ``Life and population would be obliterated by blasts and fire on a vast scale. An attack of the size assumed would unleash an explosive force equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT.
``This is 45 times as great as the total tonnage of bombs delivered by all the Allies over Germany, Italy and occupied France throughout the whole of the last war,'' Strath added.
``A single megaton bomb could destroy any of our cities (exception Greater London) and all or nearly all its inhabitants.
``While much could be done to reduce the number of casualties, loss of life on a massive scale would be unavoidable. No part of the country would be free from the risk of radioactive contamination.''
Peter Hennessy, who put together the exhibition, described the document as ``the most chilling the document ever prepared for British Cabinet ministers.''
The exhibition also details how 210 senior Whitehall staff and ministers would have been evacuated to a secret bunker, believed to be situated at Corsham Quarry west of London.
The rest of the country would have been governed from a series of regional centers housing a total of 350 officials, the papers show.
-------- depleted uranium
DEPLETED URANIUM - Nellis ponders range cleanup
By MARK WAITE PVT,
Nellis Air Force Base,
March 31, 2004
http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2004/03/31/news/uranium.html
The plans to dump 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain aren't all that's glowing in the desert not far from Pahrump.
A sparse crowd attending an open house at the Pahrump Community Center Thursday evening heard U.S. Air Force representatives talk about 68,000 pounds of depleted uranium that have accumulated in 130 tanks used at a test range near Indian Springs by pilots training at Nellis Air Force Base.
Air force officials are conducting an environmental assessment at the request of the State of Nevada to determine how to dispose of the depleted uranium.
The depleted uranium - so-called because it's 40 percent less radioactive than normal uranium - is touted for its strength, being twice as dense as lead. However the radioactivity is weak enough it can't pass through paper or skin, according to a fact sheet provided at the open house.
Nellis AFB spokesman Mike Estrada said depleted uranium was first introduced by the Air Force in 1975.
"A tank killer is what it's originally designed for," Estrada said. "We think it'll be used in the force another 20 years. It was scheduled to be retired after the first Iraq war."
The famous television footage of the "Highway of Death" leading out of Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991 showed tanks destroyed by rounds of depleted uranium fired from A-10 aircraft, he said.
"We stopped testing it for several years at the request of the Fish and Wildlife Service because there just wasn't a lot of studies out there. We resumed testing a few years ago," Estrada said.
"We think there's about 68,000 pounds of depleted uranium out there. Each round is about six-tenths of a pound," he said.
The U.S. Air Force fact sheet on depleted uranium notes a study conducted by the Air Force from 1994-2001 showed there was no detectable migration of depleted uranium in the soil after the rain; the particles remained concentrated in the target strike zone.
U.S. Air Force Capt. Tony Dao said the first environmental assessment limited the Air Force to firing 7,900 rounds of depleted uranium per year. He said the hazards of heavy metals like lead and tungsten are probably more hazardous than the uranium.
Depleted uranium is also used in the armor plating in tanks, X-ray shielding and drill bits, Dao said.
Jim Campe, program manager for Nellis AFB compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, said contractors clean the projectiles on the ground. Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas will be in charge of disposing of the depleted uranium in a licensed facility, he said. One of the options for a disposal site is at the Nevada Test Site, which already accepts low level nuclear waste.
There were published news reports veterans in the Gulf War were suffering health effects from the depleted uranium.
"There hasn't been a direct relation between exposure to DU and what they call Gulf War Syndrome," U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mike Flynn said. But he added, "People exposed to friendly fire incidents are being monitored." "That's been studied, there's lots of studies by the Department of Defense," Estrada said when asked the same question. "To my knowledge there haven't been any health effects."
The training range, target 63-10, is located past the Point Bravo entrance to Nellis AFB off U.S. Highway 95, about 12 miles southeast of Indian Springs, Flynn said. Cameras focus on the site to see if pilots hit the tank targets, which take up the size of two football fields, he said.
Flynn said with only 7,900 rounds permitted per year, only a small number of sorties carry the depleted uranium payloads. "That's more than 24 trigger pulls on an A-10," he said.
If a plane crashes, Flynn said the first question that is asked is if the pilot is OK, the second question is what was on the aircraft.
"For the most part, every airplane that leaves we know what's on it," Flynn said. When asked if the depleted uranium was in a safe storage container in case of a crash, he said, "For the most part it's all self-contained."
The environmental assessment is due out in June. The fact sheet handed out at the hearing noted the Nevada Test and Training Range is the only air-to-ground gunnery range in the U.S. cleared to use depleted uranium munitions. The air force is debating whether to cut out the uranium from the tanks, dispose of the contaminated tanks entirely or take no action at all.
Written comments may be addressed to Mike Estrada, Air Warfare Center/Public Affairs Office, 4370 N. Washington Blvd. Suite 223, Nellis AFB 89191. The comment deadline is April 20.
----
Pakistan policy sends dangerous signal
By Matt Schroeder and Rachel Stohl
March 31, 2004
Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.pakistan31mar31,0,6862051.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines
WASHINGTON - The United States has rewarded Pakistan yet again for its support of the U.S. war on terror with increased access to U.S. weapons and technology even though the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted supplying nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
The reward is the U.S. designation of Pakistan as a "major non-NATO ally," or MNNA. Pakistan thus joins an exclusive club that includes Australia, Japan, Egypt, Kuwait, South Korea, Argentina, New Zealand, Israel and the Philippines.
MNNA allies don't receive the same mutual defense guarantees as NATO countries. But they do enjoy priority delivery of excess defense items, stockpiling of U.S. defense gear, purchase of depleted uranium antitank rounds and participation in cooperative research and development programs.
MNNA status is the latest in a series of dramatic changes to U.S. policies on arms exports to Pakistan. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration banned all arms sales to Pakistan following its 1998 nuclear weapons tests and the 1999 military coup that brought its current leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to power.
Sanctions remained in place until after Sept. 11, 2001, when the United States suddenly found itself in need of Pakistan's cooperation in the war against al-Qaida. Overnight, Pakistan went from being an outcast to an indispensable ally. It has received $596.3 million in weapons and military aid since 9/11. In the most recent budget request, the Bush administration has called for an additional $300 million to underwrite future arms sales to the South Asian country, which borders Afghanistan.
Compared with other recent changes in U.S.-Pakistani relations, designation as an MNNA country is not the most worrisome. Pakistan will not automatically receive the F-16 fighter aircraft it has sought for so long, and barriers to other particularly sensitive military technology will not suddenly disappear.
What is truly remarkable and troubling about this announcement is that it comes only weeks after international inspectors confirmed the existence of a global proliferation network that peddled Pakistani military technology to rogue regimes, and the pardoning of its ringleader, Mr. Khan.
Despite the potentially catastrophic consequences of his malfeasance, Mr. Khan's punishment hardly even qualifies as a slap on the wrist. In 2001, he was forced to step down as the director of A. Q. Khan Laboratories. No prison time, no fines - not even a trial. The decision to proceed with the MNNA designation despite these developments speaks to a disturbing trend in post-9/11 U.S. policy: Regardless of past (or even current) behavior, if a country is on the right side of the war on terror, sins will be forgiven.
In light of General Musharraf's precarious domestic political position, it is understandable that he would want to go easy on a national icon. And in light of his cooperation in the war on terrorism, it is understandable that the United States would want to go easy on him.
But by appearing to increase the amount of U.S. weapons and equipment made available to Pakistan so soon after such a grave discovery, Washington is sending a message that, in the case of a strategically important country, it will wink at that country's inability to maintain control over its military technology and stockpiles.
Even so, providing General Musharraf with new multimillion-dollar military aid packages and special access to U.S. military aid programs might be more palatable if they came with guarantees that the holes in Pakistan's leaky arsenals have all been plugged.
But U.S. officials are in no position to offer such assurances. The U.S. investigation into Mr. Khan's network has just begun, and until it is complete and corrective action is taken, the risk is real that U.S.-made weapons and military technology will find their way out of Pakistan and into the hands of America's enemies.
Maintaining good relations with, and shoring up, General Musharraf's moderate regime is not merely desirable, it is crucial. But there are real costs to providing more U.S. weapons to a regime whose ability to keep them secure is questionable.
By adding Pakistan to its short list of weapons recipients despite unresolved proliferation concerns - and then showering it with money to buy those weapons - the Bush administration is sending a very dangerous message to other importers of U.S. arms and to the rest of the world.
Matt Schroeder is a research associate at the Federation of American Scientists' Arms Sales Monitoring Project. Rachel Stohl is a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan government cleared in selling of nuclear material
March 31, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040330-105345-9821r.htm
A Pakistani network that covertly sold nuclear goods used government aircraft but the Islamabad government was not involved in the transactions, a senior State Department official told Congress yesterday.
John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, said the network led by A.Q. Khan sold nuclear material to Iran, North Korea, Libya and other states. The group, which helped rogue states obtain centrifuges used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, is still being investigated.
"Based on the information we have now, we believe that the proliferation activities that Mister Khan confessed to recently, his activities in Libya, in Iran and North Korea, and perhaps elsewhere, were activities that he was carrying on without the approval of the top levels of the government of Pakistan," Mr. Bolton said in testimony before the House International Relations Committee. "That is the position that President [Pervez] Musharraf has taken, and we have no evidence to the contrary."
Mr. Bolton said, however, that officials working for the Pakistani government at the Khan Research Laboratories and probably in the military participated in the network's covert sales.
The officials "probably enriched themselves just as Khan himself did," he said.
The activities were carried out independent of state sponsorship or approval and yet the "black market in weapons of mass destruction" was "extraordinary successful," he said.
Asked by Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, New York Democrat, about reports that Pakistani military aircraft ferried nuclear goods from Pakistan to North Korea, Mr. Bolton said the aircraft may have been operated outside official military control.
"The understanding we have is that Khan Research Laboratories had extraordinary autonomy and quite likely could use military aircraft for purposes that others in the military would not necessarily know the purpose of because of compartmentation of the information," Mr. Bolton said.
Mr. Bolton said that if information surfaced linking the Pakistani government to the transfers, "we would act on it" and impose sanctions.
Mr. Musharraf fired Mr. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program, as head of the nuclear laboratory in 2000 and pardoned him last month after he confessed to the nuclear black market extending from Southeast Asia, to the Middle East to Europe.
The pardon is conditional on the scientist halting the nuclear transfers and fully cooperating in revealing the extent of the nuclear proliferation, Mr. Bolton said. "We believe those conditions are currently being met," he said.
On North Korea, Mr. Bolton said the administration is negotiating with Pyongyang to end its nuclear arms programs, including a plutonium-based bomb program and a covert uranium-based program.
Mr. Bolton also said steps have been taken to cut off North Korea's funding sources for its nuclear arms program, and its missile programs.
On Iran, Mr. Bolton said scrutiny by the International Atomic Energy Agency, has not led to an end of Tehran's nuclear arms program.
"The recent discovery of Iran's development and testing of uranium enrichment centrifuges of an advanced design is a clear indicator that Iran continues its quest for nuclear weapons," Mr. Bolton said.
Iran's nuclear and missile programs are "one of the most serious proliferation challenges we face today," he said, noting that Tehran is engaged in a "massive denial and deception program" designed to fool the world.
----
Bush to notify Congress on MNNA status soon
March 31 2004
Hi Pakistan
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en59363&F_catID=&f_type=source
ISLAMABAD: US President George W. Bush will soon notify the Congress about his decision to grant Pakistan a 'major non-Nato ally (MNNA)' status, US embassy spokesman told Dawn here on Tuesday.
"Congress is to be informed shortly," the spokesman said in reply to a question as to when the relevant presidential notification would be sent to the Congress. To a related query, he said under the US law the MNNA status becomes effective 30 days after the Congress is informed.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell had made the announcement about the Bush administration's decision to confer the MNNA status on Pakistan during his visit here on March 18.
The MNNA status increases military-to-military cooperation and eases access to armaments and defence articles. Major non-Nato allies are eligible for: priority delivery of excess defence articles, stockpiling of US defence articles, purchase of depleted uranium anti-tank rounds, participation in cooperative research and development programmes, and participation in the defence export loan guarantee programme which backs up private loans for commercial defence exports.
Referring to Pakistan's efforts as an ally in the global war on terror, the spokesman said President Bush had pledged to address Islamabad's 'legitimate defence needs'.
He made it clear that 'there has been no decision at any level of the US government to provide F-16s' to Pakistan. The spokesman did not completely rule out the possibility either.
Acknowledging Pakistan as a full partner in the war on terror, he said: "President Musharraf and his government work actively to stop terrorist funding, shut down terrorist groups, and conduct military, police and intelligence operations to fight terrorist groups on Pakistani soil and bring terrorists to justice".
The spokesman underlined the US commitment 'to a positive, long-term relationship' with Pakistan. He recounted the US president's promise to work with the Congress on a $3 billion multi-year assistance package designed to improve Pakistan's economic prosperity, help address health and education needs and to enhance border security.
On last week's announcement about the waiver of coup-related sanctions on Pakistan, he said the US president had waived the sanctions for one year under the authority given to him by the Congress.
"A waiver is important to the US efforts to respond to, deter, or prevent acts of international terrorism, and will facilitate transition to the democratic rule in Pakistan," he asserted.
"The FY 2004 bilateral democracy assistance will allow us to continue to help Pakistan reform and strengthen its democratic institutions at all levels, including the legislature, political parties, advocacy groups, and the independent media," explained the US embassy spokesman.
-------- iran
Britain, France, Germany condemn Iran's work on nuclear fuel cycle
LONDON (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331170546.n2sxta82.html
Britain, France and Germany united Wednesday to condemn Iran's decision to resume work on a key nuclear programme in apparent breach of a deal with the United Nation's nuclear watchdog.
Their criticism came after Iran's atomic energy chief Gholam Reza Aghazadeh said Sunday that work had resumed at the Isfahan installation in the centre of the country.
"This announcement sends the wrong signal about Iranian willingness to implement a suspension of nuclear enrichment-related activities," said a Foreign Office spokesman in London.
"It will make it more difficult for Iran to re-establish international confidence in her undertakings," he said, in a statement identical to ones issued in Paris and Berlin.
In a deal with the International Atomic Enegy Agency (IAEA) brokered by Britain, France and Germany last year, Tehran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and related activities while UN inspectors delved into suspicions Iran was using atomic energy as a cover for developing nuclear weapons.
Iran, under massive international pressure to maintain the suspension, has consistently emphasised its right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to produce nuclear fuel for what it insists are strictly peaceful purposes.
"The uranium processing plant in Isfahan will produce all raw materials for the fuel cycle," Aghazadeh said on Sunday.
Britain, France and Germany have for the past seven months been working together in an effort to resolve international concerns about Iran's nuclear programme.
Foreign ministers from the three countries visited Tehran last October.
"Iran must explain her statement and her intentions," the Foreign Office statement said. "We reaffirm our firm support for the IAEA's ongoing work on this matter."
IAEA inspectors arrived in Iran on Saturday for a visit which Tehran had delayed earlier this month after the body condemned Iran for failing to report that it had designs for sophisticated P2 centrifuges for enriching uranium to levels that could be weapon-grade.
The IAEA has been investigating since February 2003 whether Iran's nuclear programme is peaceful, or devoted to secretly developing atomic weapons, as the United States alleges.
The body is to report its findings at a meeting in Vienna in June.
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.
--------
France, UK, Germany Criticize Iran Nuclear Plant
March 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-criticism.html
BERLIN (Reuters) - France, Britain and Germany toughened their stance on Iran Wednesday by criticizing its decision to start a uranium conversion plant and demanding Tehran explain itself.
In a strongly worded statement, Europe's ``Big Three'' powers said Iran's announcement that it was starting up the plant near its central city of Esfahan sent the wrong signal and would make it harder for the country to regain international confidence.
The United States says Iran's nuclear program is a front for building an atom bomb, while Britain, Germany and France defied Washington in September by offering to share technology with Tehran if it stopped its nuclear fuel enrichment program.
Wednesday's statement reflected the Big Three's frustration with Iran, which has repeatedly violated its obligation to inform the United Nations of its nuclear activities.
EU diplomats have privately complained that they have been far too soft on Iran. Tehran insists its nuclear program is solely for the peaceful generation of electricity.
``This announcement sends the wrong signal regarding Iran's readiness to implement a suspension of its activities relating to uranium enrichment,'' the German Foreign Ministry said, adding that France and Britain had issued the same statement.
``It will make it more difficult for Iran to restore international confidence in its activities. Iran must explain its announcement and its intentions.''
GROWING CONCERN
Iran pledged to suspend activities related to uranium enrichment in October as a goodwill gesture while under intense U.S. pressure to prove it was not seeking nuclear weapons.
Last month Iran promised to suspend all ``remaining enrichment activities'' after Tehran sparked a row by interpreting the suspension in the narrowest possible sense.
Uranium conversion plants are key to the enrichment process. They convert uranium oxide concentrate into uranium hexafluoride gas, which is placed in centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium. The element can then be used to make fuel or weapons.
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said Saturday there was nothing controversial about the plant.
But an internal IAEA report obtained by Reuters said some inspections in Iran had been ``managed'' by the Iranians, who refused to let inspectors take pictures with U.N. cameras or use their own electronic devices.
A group of Western diplomats who follow the IAEA said recent intelligence had provoked suspicion that Tehran had not stopped enriching uranium but moved enrichment activities to smaller sites that are part of a parallel program U.N. inspectors have not uncovered.
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Pirooz Hosseini, told Reuters the charges that smaller plants were continuing enrichment were ``baseless'' and ``an attempt to destroy the fruitful cooperation between the IAEA and Iran.''
--------
Diplomats: New Data Suggests Secret Iran Atomic Plan
March 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - New intelligence on Iran has fueled suspicions the Islamic Republic has a secret uranium- enrichment program, possibly aimed at producing fuel for an atom bomb program, Western diplomats say.
The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been investigating Iran's atomic program ever since an exiled opposition group reported in August 2002 that Tehran was hiding a massive enrichment plant at Natanz.
Under fire over U.S. suspicions that its nuclear power program is a front for building atomic weapons -- a charge Iran denies -- Tehran agreed last year to submit to tougher IAEA inspections and suspend all enrichment-related activities.
But a group of Western diplomats who follow the IAEA said recent intelligence has provoked suspicion that Tehran moved enrichment activities away from Natanz to smaller sites that are part of a parallel program U.N. inspectors have not uncovered.
``We've got lot of intelligence about small enrichment plants (in Iran) for some months, going back to the November (IAEA) board meeting,'' one Western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The diplomat gave no details about the form of this intelligence.
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Pirooz Hosseini, told Reuters in a telephone interview that the latest charges were ``baseless'' and ``an attempt to destroy the fruitful cooperation between the IAEA and Iran.''
An IAEA spokeswoman declined to comment.
``HIDE-AND-SEEK''
Allegations that Tehran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful, may be hiding facilities from the IAEA are nothing new. However, the specific allegation that Tehran had shifted enrichment activities away from Natanz to smaller sites was first made publicly by an Iranian exile last month.
Alireza Jafarzadeh, formerly a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and now president of the Washington-based Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc., told Reuters on March 9 about a ``recent meeting'' of top Iranian officials who decided to shift enrichment activities to small, secret plants.
He said the group, which included Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had also decided to ``speed up the nuclear weapons program'' to get a bomb by the end of 2005 and that Tehran ``would pursue a deliberate game of hide and seek with the IAEA.''
Washington lists the NCRI as a terrorist organization and shut down its offices last year.
However, the NCRI has a good track record on Iran's atomic program. Jafarzadeh said his latest information came from the same ``well-informed sources inside Iran'' that told him about Natanz and a heavy-water production facility at Arak in 2002.
Jafarzadeh's allegations appeared to receive support from a recent intelligence report, an analysis of which was obtained last week by the Los Angeles Times. This analysis, seen by Reuters, said Iran had set up a committee last year whose task was to hide activities from the IAEA's nuclear sleuths.
Among the allegedly hidden sites are some 300 plants making parts for centrifuges, which spin at supersonic speeds to purify uranium for use as fuel for power plants or in bombs.
Iran had suspended IAEA inspections on March 12, ostensibly in retaliation against an IAEA resolution that ``deplores'' Iran's failure to inform the U.N. of sensitive research on items like ``P2'' centrifuges capable of producing bomb-grade material.
Two weeks later Tehran let the inspectors return, though several Western diplomats said the retaliation may have been an excuse to buy more time to hide activities from the IAEA.
One Western diplomat said that the intelligence could not be considered the ``silver bullet'' that proved these allegations about a parallel enrichment program beyond any doubt.
``Intelligence gives you well-founded suspicions,'' said the diplomat, who is convinced the suspicions about Iran's secret enrichment sites ``are well-founded.''
All the diplomats said that if Tehran had decided to hide enrichment facilities from the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA would have great difficulty finding them without specific leads.
``An enrichment facility can be the least visible part of the fuel cycle. It looks like any other industrial site,'' one said.
-------- iraq
Iraqis living around nuclear site fear radiation contamination
AL-TUWAYTHA, Iraq (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331063626.8mx1d9sn.html
Hundreds of Iraqis living near the country's largest nuclear plant fear for their lives as dozens of radioactive barrels from the site looted at the end of the war a year ago remain there.
Residents of Al-Tuwaytha compound, south of Baghdad, are reporting strange ailments and doctors say the number of children suffering from blood-related diseases is on the rise.
"There are people who are losing their hair, others find spots on their skin and the colour of the face is changing," said Mohammad Abbas, a tailor.
"One of my clients knows an entire family who gets sick at nightfall. They only get better when the sun rises," he added.
Fuad Obeid, 27, has no doubts that these people "came into contact with radioactive barrels" from Al-Tuwaytha.
Looters ransacked the nuclear station at the end of the 20-day US-led war that ousted former leader Saddam Hussein.
Thieves broke into Al-Tuwaytha, emptied the barrels of their contents and then washed them in the Tigris River before selling them for a profit.
The environmental group Greenpeace sounded the alarm at the end of the war and launched a campaign to retrieve the toxic barrels, which many residents had begun to use to store water and food.
"More than 2,000 came into contact with these containers. It was a disaster for our health and the environment," said Hatem Karim, an optician who also sits on the municipal council.
"Children have been stricken with blood diseases and brain tumors and new cases are coming in regularly," he added.
Karim said he had begun investigating the pollution affecting the area along the Diyala river which is home to 125,000 people, and has piles of documents to press his case.
"Most of the people here are poor and ignorant. They are totally unaware of the danger or the repercussions of radioactivity. These people don't even have sewers," he said.
According to Karim some of the barrels from Al-Tuwaytha have never been found while others surfaced in Mosul, in northern Iraq.
Last summer residents of Al-Tuwaytha staged a protest in Baghdad during a visit of a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who came to Iraq to probe reports of radioactive material.
"Ever since no one has worried about us. We need technicians to measure the level of radioactivity," said Karim.
At the Diyala out-patient clinic, Doctor Rabih al-Assadi recalls that a Greenpeace team which visited the region measured the level of radioactivity but Karim complains that the results have not been made public.
--------
Weapons Inspector Testifies on Hill
Suspected Iraqi Bid To Produce Arms on Short Notice Noted
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36066-2004Mar30.html
The new chief U.S. weapons inspector for Iraq told Congress yesterday that no breakthrough has been made in the search for chemical or biological weapons but said new information supports a theory that Saddam Hussein may have been developing an ability to produce them on short notice.
In his first appearances since replacing weapons inspector David Kay in January, Charles A. Duelfer told two Senate committees meeting in closed session that he has refocused the work of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) to determine Hussein's intentions. Duelfer said this has included trying to discover what the former Iraqi leader had ordered, whether weapons were hidden and whether there was a plan "for a breakout production capacity," according to an unclassified statement Duelfer released to reporters.
Making that task more difficult, Duelfer's statement said, was that "some of these decisions may not have been recorded in traditional ways," and that they "may have been orally transmitted or conveyed to only a select group, a trusted inner circle."
While interrogation of top Hussein aides continues, he said, "obtaining clear, truthful information from the senior Iraqi leadership has been problematic even at this point in time." Recently, senior administration officials reported that Hussein has been uncooperative with his questioners and continues to deny that he kept a weapons program after 1991.
"The ISG has developed new information regarding Iraq's dual-use facilities and ongoing research suitable for a capability to produce biological or chemical agents on short notice," Duelfer said in the statement. The statement provided little information to back up that position.
After a morning session with the Senate Armed Services Committee, ranking Democrat Carl M. Levin (Mich.) said that the publicly released document left out information in Duelfer's classified testimony that "would lead one to doubt" what he described as Duelfer's "suspicions as to Iraq's activities."
Levin called on the CIA to declassify, "to the extent possible, the whole report so the public can reach their own conclusions." Duelfer testified privately in the afternoon before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Duelfer's predecessor, Kay, testified before Congress in January, around the time of his resignation, deepening the controversy over whether the Bush administration exaggerated the Iraq threat before the war. Kay went to Iraq expecting to find weapons of mass destruction, but he said in January that he had concluded that U.S. prewar intelligence was wrong and that there were no stockpiles.
Duelfer has characterized his mission differently, saying he is seeking a full explanation for what happened to Hussein's weapons programs.
Duelfer, who in the early 1990s served as deputy director of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), the first Iraq inspection group, said in his statement yesterday that a major problem he is facing is "the most extreme reluctance of Iraqi managers, scientists and engineers to speak freely." He said they fear prosecution for actions under the former government or retribution from die-hard Hussein supporters, if they cooperate with the United States
While ISG interrogators have interviewed hundreds of Iraqi scientists, they have been unable to find individuals who may have been running the key prohibited programs. He said that one former nuclear scientist he found was managing the crash construction of chemical plants "capable of making a variety of chemicals" within a year, but that the chemicals specified in the Iraqi program were for "conventional commercial" purposes.
Duelfer said, as Kay did before him, "it is clear that Iraq was in violation of U.N. resolutions." But the examples he used were previously mentioned missile programs, purchases of prohibited military equipment and the hiding of plans that could lead to the making of barred weapons, rather than the weapons themselves or stocks of agents such as VX nerve gas or anthrax spores.
The examination of sites previously suspected of holding weapons or such agents has uncovered nothing, he said, but he noted that the ISG continues to receive "quite intriguing and credible [information] about concealed caches."
In the nuclear field, which Kay had described as involving only rudimentary efforts, Duelfer reported finding scientists working on diagnostic techniques "applicable for nuclear weapons development," but not directly leading to such a program. He also said the search for a definitive finding on Iraq's prewar purchase of high-tolerance aluminum tubes -- and whether those were meant for nuclear centrifuges or antiaircraft rockets -- continues.
He emphasized that he had been in Iraq only six weeks and that it is too early to say how long it will take to reach some final judgments. "I do not believe we have sufficient information and insight to make final judgments with confidence at this time," his statement said.
--------
Iraq Arms Inspector Says Search Is a Tangle
March 31, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/politics/31WEAP.html
WASHINGTON, March 30 - The new chief weapons inspector in Iraq told Congress on Tuesday that a lack of cooperation from ousted Iraqi officials was thwarting American efforts to untangle the many remaining mysteries surrounding Iraq's suspected illicit weapons program.
In the public version of testimony delivered behind closed doors to two Senate committees on Tuesday, the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, acknowledged that American inspectors had still not found any evidence of an illicit arsenal. But he seemed less inclined than his predecessor, David Kay, to close the door on the possibility that such weapons might yet be found, saying that inspectors were continuing to pursue leads - "some quite intriguing and credible" - about concealed caches.
A top Democratic senator, Carl Levin of Michigan, later complained that the public version of Mr. Duelfer's testimony had omitted information contained in the classified version that would have raised further doubts about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons at all.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Duelfer responded by saying that the two versions of his testimony "mirror each other, consistent with the protection of sources, methods and other classified intelligence information."
Senator Levin, who serves on both panels that Mr. Duelfer addressed in closed session, asked the Central Intelligence Agency to declassify the entire report, to the fullest extent possible, "so the public can reach their own conclusions."
Mr. Duelfer, who took charge of the search in January, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill that the picture of Iraq's suspicious activities "is much more complicated than I anticipated going in." He said he could not predict how much more time he might need before he reached final conclusions about what illicit weapons, if any, Iraq possessed at the time of the American invasion last March.
"The people we need to speak to have spent their entire professional lives being trained not to speak" about illicit weapons, Mr. Duelfer said in a public version of his testimony. He said that Iraqi scientists and engineers were keeping silent both out of fear of prosecution or arrest by American officials, and out of fear of retribution from supporters of the former government of Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Duelfer took over from Mr. Kay, who at the time of his resignation in January said that American officials were "almost all wrong, probably" in assessing before the war that Mr. Hussein's government possessed illicit weapons.
Mr. Duelfer said Monday that inspectors had uncovered new information that Iraq had in place before the war at least the technical ability to use civilian facilities to quickly produce the biological and chemical agents needed for weapons.
Still, Mr. Duelfer said: "We do not know whether Saddam was concealing W.M.D. in the final years or planning to resume production once more sanctions were lifted. We do not know what he ordered his senior ministers to undertake. We do not know how the disparate activities we have identified link together."
The status report issued by Mr. Duelfer was the first such update since October, and it came nearly 10 months after Mr. Kay and his Iraq Survey Group began their hunt last June.
The failure of American inspectors to find illicit weapons in Iraq has prompted Democrats, including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the party's presumptive presidential candidate, to press the Bush administration to acknowledge having been wrong in the prewar assessments in which senior officials described Iraq's weapons program as a principal reason for going to war.
In urging patience, however, Mr. Duelfer was echoing the calls made by President Bush and by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to whom he reports as a special adviser.
Two Republican senators, Pat Roberts of Kansas, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, and John W. Warner of Virginia, who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, both joined Monday in asking for more time before any final judgments are reached.
Mr. Duelfer expressed a particular frustration about what he described as "the extreme reluctance of Iraqi managers, scientists and engineers to speak freely."
Even a year after the American invasion, he said, "obtaining clear, truthful information from the senior Iraqi leadership has been problematic even at this point in time." While officials of the Iraq Survey Group had met with "hundreds of scientists," he said, it had yet to identify who in any particular program had played the most critical roles.
"Many people have yet to be found or questioned, and many of those we have found are not giving us complete answers," he said. And while American investigators had recovered millions of documents, he said, millions more were destroyed, while a shortage of people who can translate Arabic meant that only a "tiny fraction" of the whole had yet been fully translated.
Among former Iraqi officials willing to talk, he said, "they oftentimes are the ones we know were not in the inner circle."
-------- korea
South Korea says North Korea must clarify nuclear freeze offer
31 March 2004
AFP
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/77954/1/.html
SEOUL: South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon said a North Korean proposal for a nuclear freeze would be unacceptable unless the hermit state shuttered all its nuclear facilities.
Speaking after returning from visit Beijing where he met with his Chinese counterpart Ban said, "The North should clarify its position on what it means exactly when it talks about a freeze and the extent of such a freeze."
North Korea has offered to freeze its nuclear facilities in return for concessions from the United States including its removal from the US blacklist of terrorism-sponsoring nations.
However, Ban said the offer would be "unacceptable" if North Korea's nuclear freeze means simply going back to a 1994 deal under which it agreed to mothball its facilities that could be used to produce nuclear weapons based on plutonium.
"It must be something more than the 1994 deal in Geneva. All nuclear-related facilities must be frozen," Ban said.
The 1994 Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea unravelled after October 2002 when Washington presented North Korea with evidence that it was running a clandestine nuclear programme based on enriched uranium.
Ban returned home Tuesday after a three-day visit to Beijing where he was briefed by his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing, following Li's return from Pyongyang where the Chinese diplomat held a rare 90-minute meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.
Two rounds of six-nation talks bringing together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States have failed to narrow differences over a key US demand for the complete dismantling of Pyongyang's nuclear programs.
At the last meeting in February in Beijing, participants agreed to set up working groups ahead of new six-way talks scheduled to take place before the end of June.
Ban said the North Koreans had told Li that they would take part in planned working groups.
"North Korea's position is that the process for resolving the nuclear issue through six-nation talks should continue," Ban said, citing Li's briefing.
"North Korea is willing to take part in the working groups' meeting and wants the meeting to deal with its demand for rewards in return for a freeze," Ban said.
North Korea has made no proposal on when the working groups should meet, Ban said.
But Ban said he and Li were in agreement that the momentum of dialogue to resolve the nuclear impasse should be kept alive by ensuring that a third-round of six-way talks take place by the end of June as previously agreed.
----
Pyongyang unlikely to go the Libyan way on nukes
By MICHAEL RICHARDSON
THE STRAITS TIMES,
March 31, 2004
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/commentary/story/0,4386,243135,00.html
IT WOULD be comforting to think that North Korea will emulate Libya, which announced in December that it would dismantle all programmes to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Tripoli promised to do this under international supervision and, so far, it has done what it pledged to do. Now, it is starting to reap the rewards.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair sealed Libya's return to the international fold last Thursday when he shook hands with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a bedouin tent outside Tripoli. It was the first visit to the North African country by a British leader since 1943 and marked the symbolic mending of a bilateral relationship broken by Libyan involvement in terrorism aimed at Britain.
Two days before Mr Blair met Colonel Gaddafi, the United States Assistant Secretary of State William Burns sat down with the Libyan leader to discuss normalising Libya-US relations, ruptured since the 1980s for the same reasons as those with Britain.
Libya needs foreign investment to rehabilitate and upgrade its oil and natural gas fields, to expand exports and boost a languishing economy hit hard by international sanctions. On the day of the Blair-Gaddafi meeting, Shell, the British-Dutch petroleum giant, signed a deal with Libya's state oil company to explore for oil and gas.
British officials said that Britain would help Libya improve its conventional defences and would, in time, push for a European Union arms embargo to be lifted.
The Bush administration has said that it will move step by step to improve relations with Tripoli as Libya proves by its actions that it has given up weapons of mass destruction (WMD), renounced terrorism and actively supported the campaign against the Al-Qaeda network.
So far, the US has lifted travel restrictions to Libya by American citizens and allowed US firms, including oil and gas companies, with assets in the country, to begin negotiating agreements to return.
North Korea wants the same kind of rewards being given to Libya in exchange for giving up WMD and connections with terrorism: US recognition, security guarantees and aid for its ailing economy, not to mention re-integration with the world without a change of regime, or even domestic political reform as a precondition.
But there are some important differences between Libya and North Korea that suggest Pyongyang won't follow Tripoli down the road to international acceptance any time soon.
First, North Korea, unlike Libya, isn't coming clean on the full extent of its nuclear programme. Pyongyang has offered to 'freeze' only the plutonium part of its programme in exchange for the benefits it wants.
It refuses to acknowledge or discuss the second part of its programme - using highly enriched uranium to make nuclear bombs. Indeed, just last Saturday, Pyongyang rejected a complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of all its nuclear programmes, calling the main US demand at the six-party talks on North Korea hosted by China a plot that would result in subjugation.
Yet, Libyan disclosures about its sources of supply helped uncover the nuclear black market masterminded by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and provided more evidence that North Korea seeks a uranium enrichment route, in addition to a plutonium path, to bomb-making. Second, North Korea is likely to have hidden away at least a couple of crude nuclear weapons made from plutonium, according to the US Central Intelligence Agency. And it may be amassing the plutonium to make more bombs.
By contrast, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and other experts say Libya was at least several years away from producing a nuclear weapon. North Korea is also developing ballistic missiles with a much longer range than those it supplied to Libya.
The US bombed Libya in 1986 for supporting terrorism, and could have done so again using modern precision-strike conventional weapons to destroy WMD facilities in the desert nation. But the US does not know where in North Korea's mountainous terrain any nukes are stored. The mountains are reportedly riddled with rock tunnels and caves dug for military purposes.
America would need a new generation of burrowing, bunker-busting small nuclear weapons to be sure of destroying North Korean nuclear arms and facilities hidden deep underground if they could be accurately located.
The US is years away from developing these weapons. And such a strike would almost certainly trigger a devastating North Korean reprisal, if not against America then against South Korea and Japan as allied substitutes.
Libya concluded that it was likely to be more secure and have a stronger economy without WMD, than with them. Impoverished and reclusive North Korea, which has no big oil and gas reserves, seems convinced that the only real assurance of regime survival is to have nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to fire them as the ultimate checkmate.
The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South-east Asian Studies in Singapore. This is a personal comment.
----
N.Korea slams planned US air defence deployment as preparation for war
SEOUL (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331191916.2uk7cpfv.html
North Korea condemned Wednesday a US plan to deploy a destroyer equipped with the high-tech Aegis air defence system off the Korean coast this year as a preparation for war.
North Korea will boost its nuclear deterrent force to protect itself against war, a foreign ministry spokesman said in an official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report.
The US plan "is the most outright hostile act against the DPRK (North Korea) as it is a system to wage a war against the DPRK and, furthermore, a part of its unchallenged attempt to dominate the Asia-Pacific region," the spokesman said.
"The DPRK will increase its nuclear deterrent force in every way and take a decisive counter-measure for self-defence when necessary in order to avert a war and defend peace in the Korean peninsula and the rest of northeast Asia," he said.
The planned deployment and US and Japan military exercises "indicate that they are stepping up the preparations for the second Korean war in real earnest behind the scene of dialogue and this has already gone beyond the danger line," he said.
The US plan to deploy the destroyer equipped with the Aegis radar-combat system in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) in September has been welcomed by Japan as a deterrent against ballistic missiles.
Japan has been conducting joint research with the United States on developing a sophisticated missile defence system since 1999, a year after North Korea launched a ballistic missile over the Japanese islands and into the Pacific.
The United States has demanded that North Korea completely and verifiably dismantle its nuclear programmes. Two rounds of six-nation talks on the impasse have made little progress.
-------- russia
New Russian Weapon Called 'Revolutionary'
Globe And Mail.com
3-31-4
(AP)
http://www.rense.com/general50/newrussianweapon.htm
Moscow - Russia has designed a "revolutionary" weapon that would make the prospective American missile defence useless, Russian news agencies reported Monday, quoting a senior Defence Ministry official.
The official, who was not identified by name, said tests conducted during last month's military manoeuvres 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 defences, which are proving extremely costly to develop.
Russia, meanwhile, also has continued research in prospective missile defences and has an edge in some areas compared to other countries, the official said.
The statement reported Monday was in line with claims by President Vladimir Putin's that experiments performed during last month's manoeuvres proved that Russia could soon build strategic weapons that could puncture any missile-defence 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 manoeuvre between space and the earth's atmosphere.
Military analysts said that the mysterious new weapons could be a manoeuvrable ballistic missile warhead or a hypersonic cruise missile.
While Mr. 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 defence 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 countrywide 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.
-------- terrorism
'Suitcase Nuke' Fears Present A Stern Test For Defense Experts
BY DOUG TSURUOKA
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Internet & Technology
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
http://www.investors.com/editorial/tech.asp?v=3/31
Homeland security officials are rushing defense labs to make sensors that can detect small nuclear weapons that some authorities fear terrorists might use to devastate a U.S. city.
A March 22 Australian TV report highlighted the need. The story claimed the al-Qaida terror group has bought nuclear "briefcase bombs" on the black market in Central Asia.
Use of the word 'briefcase' sent a shudder through security authorities everywhere. It would mark a huge threat if nuclear bombs that small were developed, let alone in dangerous hands. Almost all experts doubt briefcase bombs exist.
But suitcase bombs do exist. The Soviets developed such trunk-sized nuclear bombs during the Cold War. Moscow has always maintained that no suitcase bombs have escaped its close watch, but reports pop up from time to time that rogue Soviet scientists have helped develop suitcase - and now briefcase - nuclear bombs for the black market.
Such a threat is almost unimaginable. But experts are forced to use the word "almost."
So Far, No 'Breakthroughs'
A big problem is most nuclear experts say the government is far from developing sensors that reliably detect such weapons despite the urgency sparked by 9-11.
"The detection problem is a hard nut to crack," said Richard Lanza, a senior scientist and nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I don't think there have been any breakthroughs."
Pinpointing bomb-grade nuclear material is difficult, says Kyle Olson, a former Senate terrorism prober. Many items give off as much radiation as a nuclear bomb, which itself actually emits little radiation.
"Any detector compact and sensitive enough to pick up trace levels of radiation from (suitcase bombs) is also readily spooked by natural environmental or industrial radiation," said Olson.
There are promising products, though. One is called an active detector, says Tom Cochrane, director of the nuclear program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental policy group.
It's being developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, says Cochrane, a nuclear physicist and former arms control monitor.
The device shines a stream of photons or neutrons through an object that might carry a small nuclear weapon, like a shipping container or suitcase. It would produce gamma rays if it hit any nuclear material, which would show up on the device's display screen.
Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear physicist at the Federation of American Scientists, a policy group in Washington, D.C., has another approach.
"You can shoot neutrons through a shipping container. If the pattern of neutrons coming out the other side is different, it would suggest there's a bomb inside," said Oelrich, who directs the federation's strategic security project.
The methods mentioned by Cochrane and Oelrich take an active approach to sensing nukes by creating tiny atomic reactions that can be detected. But neither device has been built, and many glitches could still surface, Cochrane concedes. One big glitch could be the cost, which could reach the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Homeland Security officials, meanwhile, have put stop-gap detectors in place.
In October 2001, President Bush ordered that hundreds of nuclear sensor devices be installed at major U.S. ports, border posts and key public buildings. He did this after officials got a report that terrorists planned to smuggle a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon into New York City. (The A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima carried 15 kilotons.)
The report proved false. But some estimated such a bomb, detonated in an area like Manhattan, could kill 100,000 to 500,000 people.
These stop-gap sensors, called gamma ray and neutron flux devices, sense radioactive materials or generate images of bombs inside luggage, crates or vehicles.
But the devices aren't that reliable, says Cochrane.
He says both types of detectors can be beaten by breaking a suitcase bomb into small parts and rearranging them to avoid detection.
He says the gamma-ray devices can't detect radiation emissions from some bomb materials, including uranium.
The government also is using older products such as Geiger counters, which can pick up radiation.
But such radiation sensors can be foiled by lead shielding. And suitcase bombs that use highly refined plutonium emit little radiation, making them harder to detect.
"If it's a well-designed, military-style weapon, the radiation signatures are tiny," said Oelrich of the science policy group.
Death Deepened Mystery
Besides being reliable, an effective sensor must work fast at ports, airports and other checkpoints. As a practical matter, screenings must be selective, Cochrane says.
Said Oelrich, "The process can't take more than a minute or so because the U.S. moves millions of shipping containers a year."
There's another big challenge, says MIT's Lanza. Terrorists might find ways to booby-trap nukes to explode if detected. "We're not dealing with stupid people," he said.
This is scary stuff. Most experts don't know if terrorist groups have anything close to an atomic bomb. One bright spot is there might be no briefcase-sized nukes.
"It still isn't possible for the U.S. or the Russians or anyone to build a nuclear device as small as a briefcase," Oelrich said. As for Russia's suitcase bombs, "We don't have any evidence that any are missing."
Still the only major reference to missing suitcase bombs remains a 1997 U.S. TV interview with former Russian National Security Adviser Alexander Lebed.
He said Russia's military had lost track of over 100 suitcase-sized nuclear bombs.
He later recanted. His assertion was never proved, and Lebed, a rival to Russia's current leadership, died in a helicopter crash in April 2002 that some authorities considered suspicious.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Hopes of Building Nation's First New Nuclear Plant in Decades
By MATTHEW L. WALD
NY TIMES
March 31, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/politics/31NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, March 30 - In an effort to revive the nuclear reactor construction industry, seven major companies plan to announce on Wednesday that they will apply for a license to build a new commercial power plant. The last time a plant was ordered but not later canceled was 1973.
The companies, including the two largest nuclear plant owners in the United States and two reactor manufacturers, have not specified what they would build or where. In fact, they have not made a committment to build at all. But they have agreed to spend tens of millions of dollars to get permission to build, and they anticipate tens of millions from the federal government, which requested such proposals in November. The money would go to finish design work useful for a new generation of reactors and to develop a firm estimate of what such plants would cost.
"In order to keep the nuclear option open for the future, we've got to take this next step," said Gary J. Taylor, president and chief executive of Entergy Nuclear, a participant.
The industry successfully operates existing plants, Mr. Taylor said, but it must build more to sustain itself. "Without a future, there's an inability to attract new talent," he said.
"It can't be just any one company," Mr. Taylor added. "Entergy believes it's going to have to be some sort of consortium."
Other executives said the consortium would help the industry. "Somebody needs to take the responsibility to advance the momentum, or there won't be an option," said an executive at another company who asked not to be more closely identifie d before the announcement. "There haven't been any orders since Three Mile Island, we've got an aging fleet, and at some point they won't be there any more."
The Three Mile Island accident occurred 25 years ago this month. The last orders were placed nine months later, in December 1979, but every one after 1973 was canceled, mostly because of soaring costs. There are 103 commercial reactors now operating; those in service the longest began operation in 1969.
The consortium's other goal is to test a simplified licensing system created by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 12 years ago to help the industry go from reactor order to electricity production in 5 years, as opposed to the 10 or 12 years it took under the previous system.
Industry executives say the prospects for new reactor construction are encouraging because of problems facing competing fuels: natural gas prices are persistently high and coal power stations face stiff environmental requirements. Some executives said they hoped their companies would be compensated for making power without emitting gases that contribute to global warming.
The generating companies announcing the consortium on Wednesday are Exelon Nuclear, a unit of the Exelon Corporation that owns 17 reactors and is the nation's largest operator; Entergy Nuclear, a unit of the Entergy Corporation that owns 9 reactors, manages a 10th under contract and is the second-largest operator; Constellation Energy; the Southern Company; and EDF International North America, a subsidiary of Électricité de France, which owns shares in reactors in this country. As for manufacturers, the Westinghouse Electric Company, a BNFL subsidiary that has a design in the late stages of review by the N.R.C., and General Electric, which has a design under preliminary review, are also partners.
Whether investors will take the risk depends on estimates of future fuel and electricity prices at the time of approval, participants said. They said that they hoped to submit an application in 2008, and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission might rule by 2010. By then, the fate of the government's plan to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, might also be clear. The lack of a site for waste disposal is another barrier to new reactor construction.
---
Consortium Seeks Nuclear Plant License
By REUTERS
March 31, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-utilities-nuclear.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two separate groups of companies have formed recently with an eye toward applying for licenses that could allow the first new U.S. nuclear power plant to be built in more than 25 years.
The two consortiums intend to work with the U.S. Department of Energy to test a new process from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for obtaining a license for an advanced nuclear power reactor.
There is no plan at this time to actually build a new nuclear reactor, members of both groups emphasized. No company has followed through with plans to build a new nuclear plant since the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history, at the Three Mile Island plant 25 years ago.
Dominion Resources said the first group of four companies submitted a proposal a week and a half ago for a license for Dominion's North Anna site in Virginia. The proposal is a precursor to the actual application.
The application process is expected to take six years and cost about $500 million, said David Christian, senior vice president of nuclear operations at Dominion Resources, which is part of the consortium.
Dominion's group also includes AECL Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Canada's nuclear power reactor developer and designer AECL; Hitachi America, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Hitachi Ltd.; and privately held engineering company Bechtel.
A second consortium of seven companies on Wednesday said it plans to submit its own proposal ``in the next few weeks,'' said Marilyn Kray, vice president of project development at Exelon Nuclear, a division of Exelon Corp.
Exelon Corp. is a member of the second group, which has yet to decide on a potential site.
The energy companies in the second consortium are Exelon and Entergy Corp., the No. 1 and 2 U.S. operators of nuclear plants; Constellation Energy Group; Southern Co.; and France's state-owned electric company Electricite de France.
It also includes two nuclear reactor vendors: Westinghouse Electric Co., a unit of British state-owned nuclear company BNFL Plc; and General Electric Co.
Both groups want to take advantage of a cost-sharing initiative where the Department of Energy would pay for half the application cost and the companies the other half.
Should the DOE agree to pick up half the cost of its proposal, Dominion said it would pay no more than $61 million over the six-year application process.
For the other consortium, each of the five energy companies will contribute a total of $35 million, or $1 million a year in cash plus other services for seven years. The amount the two vendors contribute will depend on the project's cost.
That consortium plans to complete its application and submit it in 2008. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to make a decision on the application by late 2010, after which any of the consortium's members could build a plant under the license.
As for the projected cost of a plant, a spokesman for Exelon Nuclear said: ``Nobody really knows. In fact, one of the outcomes of the application will be a much better understanding of what one of these plants will actually cost.''
Soaring construction costs and safety concerns after the partial reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island power plant in 1979 have kept U.S. utilities from building new nuclear plants. Environmental groups also argue that subsidies handed out to nuclear plants are expensive for taxpayers.
``After you massively subsidize these plants, what you get is a dangerous reactor that generates highly radioactive waste,'' said Anna Aurilio, legislative director for U.S. PIRG, a consumer and environmental advocacy group. ``This energy source is simply too expensive and too dangerous for America.''
But because of a growing shortage of natural gas in the United States and concerns over emissions from older coal-fired plants, utilities are looking at the nuclear option again.
The planned applications come at the behest of the Department of Energy. The DOE last November asked energy companies to test the licensing process the Nuclear Regulatory Commission established in 1992 in a bid at streamlining. The new process has never been tested.
``I believe nuclear energy in this country is on the verge of a renaissance,'' said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici. ``But now, nuclear power is so much cheaper than natural gas that the steep cost of licensing a new reactor is suddenly doable.''
--------
Consortium to Seek Nuclear Plant License
March 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Nuclear-Plant-Application.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Seven companies have agreed to jointly apply for a license to build a new commercial nuclear power plant, the first new reactor application to be filed in three decades, the companies announced Wednesday.
The five energy companies and two reactor vendors emphasized that none of the companies have made a commitment to actually build a new plant, but are taking the move to test the government's streamlined licensing process.
The companies intend to commit $7 million a year to the effort under a cost-sharing program with the Energy Department. The goal is to get license approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by 2010.
While three utilities previously have submitted applications for early site approval for reactors, this represents the first time the industry has actually said it would seek construction and operating approval for a new nuclear power plant since 1973.
Interest in new reactors faded after the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. Many projects were canceled after the accident, although 51 reactors in the pipeline were completed.
The consortium includes four of the country's largest electricity generating companies: Chicago-based Exelon Corp., which owns 17 reactors; Entergy Nuclear, a unit of New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., operator of 10 reactors; Baltimore-based Constellation Energy; and Atlanta-based Southern Co.
Also in the group are EDF International North America Inc., a subsidiary of Electricite deFrance, which owns interest in a number of U.S. reactors, and two reactor vendors, General Electric and Westinghouse Electric Co. Westinghouse is a subsidiary of the British nuclear company, BNFL.
Both vendors have designs for next-generation reactors before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
In the announcement, the participants emphasized that the decision to submit a license application is aimed at testing the government's new approach to licensing, which for the first time would have the NRC approve a generic reactor design and consider in one process both a construction permit and operating license.
Such a test is considered a major step in the gradual move toward building new reactors. The consortium gave no indication when or where a plant actually might be built. The announcement said neither the consortium nor its members ``are making a commitment to build a new nuclear unit at this time.''
Any decision on a future plant would be left to the individual participants in the consortium, the announcement said.
``We must keep the nuclear energy option open for the future,'' said Chris Crane, president and chief nuclear officer at Exelon.
Michael Wallace, president of Constellation Energy Group, said while his company ``has no immediate plans'' for building a new reactor ``our decision to join this consortium is indicative of our strong desire to see the process by which new plants are sited streamlined to support efficient construction in the future.''
The consortium hopes to complete the application process by 2008 and get a decision from the NRC by 2010. After that, any company or combination of participants can use the permit to proceed with a construction plan.
-------- idaho
INEEL cleanup prep work reveals broken drum
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
The Times-News and The Associated Press
http://www.magicvalley.com/news/localstate/index.asp?StoryID=9106
IDAHO FALLS -- The federal government is digging again at the nuclear waste burial ground at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.
The Pit 4 project was agreed on within the past few months by the state and federal agencies to remove waste with high concentrations of contaminants, officials said Tuesday. Removal of topsoil already has begun on a half-acre of Pit 4, but the final planning document has not been released or been available for public comment. The U.S. Department of Energy said it did not have a solid cost estimate yet. The plan will be issued May 3 for a 30-day public comment period.
Tim Jackson, an INEEL spokesman, said the Superfund law allows INEEL to take measures on the ground to prepare for the project before it must finish all of the documentation and public comment requirements. Actual waste retrieval has not begun.
But topsoil removal has been temporarily stalled after workers discovered a broken waste drum buried only 4 feet below the surface. A crew had been working on preparing a portion of the site for two days when an excavator uncovered the broken drum on March 20, officials said.
The 88-acre radioactive landfill used until 1970 sits above the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer, which supplies water to much of southern Idaho including the Magic Valley. Officials say contaminants that have reached the aquifer haven't migrated off INEEL borders.
Pit 4 follows the quick success seen this year in the small Pit 9 test project. Retrieval at Pit 9 went fast once it got started in December after years of delays.
"I think the Pit 9 success is enabling Pit 4 to move ahead in a more simplified and common-sense approach," said Kathleen Trever, director of the state's INEEL monitoring program.
The Pit 9 removal technique created by contractor Bechtel BWXT Idaho cost about $80 million and removed only about 78 cubic yards of debris. Officials said it was too expensive to use across the rest of the landfill.
The Pit 4 project includes removal of waste where disposal records show high concentrations of plutonium, other radioactive wastes and volatile chemicals used as solvents and degreasers. Officials described targeting Pit 4 as getting "more bang for their buck." Pit 4 contains waste from nuclear weapons production at Rocky Flats in Colorado.
Digging at Pit 4 stopped when the barrel was discovered, Department of Energy Project Manager Jeff Perry said.
"We want to look at what went wrong and what could happen next," he said.
It was no surprise that the drum was broken, Jackson said. Many of the waste containers buried in the area are broken or decomposing.
Tests done of the area with ground-penetrating radar, geomagnetic and probing surveys and reviews of historical records indicated the drums were covered with at least 6 feet of soil, Perry said.
"We were going to leave about 2 feet of soil over the drums until we built the containment structure over that section of the pit," Jackson said. "Now we're re-evaluating exactly how to prepare that section of pit before we build the containment structure."
Inside the tent, employees would work in specially designed backhoes and forklifts to remove the drums and dirt and package the radioactive waste for shipment out of Idaho.
The worker who discovered the shallow drum was not exposed to anything dangerous, Jackson said. The crew covered the drum back up with clean soil. The temporary halt is expected to last through Tuesday, and it will not delay the waste retrieval project, Jackson added.
There still is a dispute between the state and federal government over whether the Energy Department must remove all of the buried waste.
-------- utah
Utah Lawmaker Apologizes for Remark
Associated Press
03/31/04
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/8321134.htm
SALT LAKE CITY - A Utah lawmaker apologized for an insult that prompted nuclear waste activists to call for his resignation.
In a letter to the Healthy Environmental Alliance of Utah, state Sen. Curt Bramble said he regretted saying that the group's acronym, HEAL, stood for "Help Educate Anal Liberals."
"I apologize," the Republican lawmaker wrote in a letter dated Monday. "Those of you who have scrutinized the issue know the context in which my remarks were given, and that no harm was intended."
Bramble made the remark on March 5 at a rally supporting Envirocare, which operates a landfill in Utah that is one of just three in the nation that accepts low-level radioactive waste.
Bramble co-chairs the Legislature's Hazardous Waste Regulation and Tax Policy Task Force, which is to make recommendations next year on whether Envirocare should be allowed to accept hotter radioactive wastes than its current state and federal licenses allow.
HEAL activists had called for Bramble's resignation, expressing concern he could not remain neutral on the issue.
Bramble promised the group he would act fairly, but HEAL Director Jason Groenwold said he was not sure what to make of the apology.
"It does nothing to resolve his bias toward Envirocare," Groenwold said.
-------- us politics
Reason to Run? Nader Argues He Has Plenty
March 31, 2004
By TODD S. PURDUM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/politics/campaign/31NADE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, March 30 - Ralph Nader knows all the arguments against him. He can recite, word for importuning word, the letters from old friends urging him not to run for president - "all individually written, all stunningly similar" - and he does so with the theatrical relish of a man whose public life has been one long, unyielding argument with the world.
"Here's how it started," he said, his soft voice taking on mock oratorical tones over dinner with a group of aides in Charlotte, N.C., last week: "For years, I've thought of you as one of our heroes." He rolled his eyes. "The achievements you've attained are monumental, in consumer, environmental, etc., etc." He paused for effect. "But this time, I must express my profound disappointment at indications that you are going to run."
"And the more I got of these," Mr. Nader said, "the more I realized that we are confronting a virus, a liberal virus. And the characteristic of a virus is when it takes hold of the individual, it's the same virus, individual letters all written in uncannily the same sequence. Here's another characteristic of the virus: Not one I can recall ever said, 'What are your arguments for running?' "
So ask him already. He is bursting with answers.
No, he says, he is neither a nut nor a narcissist. Yes, he agrees with his sharpest Democratic critics that defeating President Bush is essential. In the end, he believes, out-of-power Democrats will rally around John Kerry, and Mr. Nader will take votes from disaffected Republicans and independents. He is running as an independent, but might accept the endorsement of the Green Party, which nominated him four years ago, though not if doing so means refraining from campaigning in swing states, as some in the party insist.
His goal is to raise $15 million to $20 million ("Very tough to do," he said, noting, "We had $8 million last time.") He aspires to get on the ballot in all 50 states, a daunting task demanding tens of thousands of signatures in each state. He vows to conduct a creative campaign, "opening up new areas in August, September and October as the two parties zero in on five issues and beat them to a vapid pulp." He has asked for a meeting with Mr. Kerry next month to make his case that he can offer fresh ideas "field-tested by a second front," and Kerry aides say a session is being arranged.
"We are going to focus on defeating George Bush and showing the Democrats, if they're smart enough to pick up on it, how to take apart George Bush," Mr. Nader told a rally of a couple of hundred students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh last Thursday, his shoulders no more slumped and his chest no less concave at 70 than when he began addressing another generation almost 40 years ago. "Things have gotten so bad in this country, you look back at Richard Nixon with nostalgia."
But even some of Mr. Nader's admirers remain skeptical of most or all of those arguments. They remember how his presence in the razor-close 2000 election helped deprive Al Gore of victory in states like New Hampshire and Florida, and they worry about some early polls that showed Mr. Kerry leading Mr. Bush in a two-way race, but trailing if Mr. Nader is added as an option.
"He's made his decision, and now all of us have to live with it," said Mark Green, the former New York City public advocate and co-chairman of Mr. Kerry's campaign in New York who was one of dozens of old friends urging Mr. Nader not to run. "I'm hopeful that we who admire Ralph and are ardent Kerry supporters are all vindicated in the end. First, that his numbers shrink to under 1 percent, because Kerry is such a strong progressive, and second that Ralph does not make the margin of difference in any swing state that he manages to get on the ballot of."
"Ralph can bring a lot to a campaign," Mr. Green said. "But it's still, in my mind, not worth the risk."
Mr. Nader countered, as he has since 2000, that Democrats "know who beat Gore: it was Gore." He added: "The reason why I'm convinced I'm going to get more votes away from Bush than the Democrats is the wholesale abandonment of our campaign by the big donors in 2000 and our prominent liberal supporters: Michael Moore, Phil Donohue, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, I could keep going. They're out of here. And I keep saying to our new adherents, `It's a big country out there.' And it's proving true."
Public Citizen, the consumer and political advocacy group that Mr. Nader founded in 1971, lost about 20 percent of its members and roughly $1 million in support in apparent protest after his 2000 campaign, even though he has not held any post with the organization since 1980. The group has posted statements on its Web site this year, noting that it has no involvement with Mr. Nader's campaign, and no influence over his decision to run.
"We've worked really hard," the group's president, Joan Claybrook, said, "and we've almost come back up, but you never recover the funds you lost. I'd really hate to see our missions compromised. This year, I can't tell you the effect yet. We did get about 600 e-mails in the week or two after Ralph announced his candidacy, and 200 letters. It's hard to tell whether that's going to translate into money. I don't know. We're not doing as well as we were last year at this time."
Favorable public opinion about Mr. Nader has sharply declined since 2000, while the percentage of Americans who view him unfavorably has increased, according to the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey. Four years ago, Republicans were the most negative, with 33 percent viewing Mr. Nader unfavorably; now that figure is 42 percent.
And Mr. Nader's argument that he can draw more support from Mr. Bush than from Mr. Kerry has yet to be proved. A New York Times/CBS News poll earlier this month found that when voters were asked to choose between Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, 46 percent chose the president and 43 percent Mr. Kerry. When Mr. Nader was added to the mix, Mr. Bush's support stayed at 46 percent, Mr. Kerry's dropped to 38 percent and Mr. Nader drew 7 percent. More than half of Nader supporters preferred Mr. Kerry in a two-way race.
"Conservatives for Nader," the comic Jon Stewart mused recently. "Not a large group. About the same size as 'Retarded Death Row Texans for Bush.' "
But Mr. Nader insisted in an interview: "There's a lot of disgruntlement among conservatives and Republicans out there. I mean, we're talking on the margins here," and on "Crossfire" on CNN on Tuesday, he urged: "Don't prejudge it. Just wait and see how it develops."
Mr. Nader acknowledged that four years ago he seemed to be tougher on Mr. Gore and Bill Clinton than he was on Mr. Bush. But he said that was partly because the Democrats were the incumbents then, with a record to defend, just as Mr. Bush is now. He also made it clear that his own relationship with Mr. Gore, once friendly, had soured over lack of access to Mr. Gore in the second Clinton term and the Clinton administration's lack of interest in Mr. Nader's ideas.
"He changed," Mr. Nader said quietly of Mr. Gore. "I don't know why he changed."
Mr. Nader does not dispute that there are real differences between Republicans and Democrats on social issues like abortion and gay rights, and over judicial appointments. But he said that both parties' exaggerated rhetoric tended to mask the reality that conservatives did not have the votes in Congress to pass constitutional amendments banning abortion or gay marriage and that Democrats failed to block judicial conservatives from the bench, even when they controlled the Senate.
He maintained that big breakthroughs in American politics, from women's suffrage to industrial regulation, have always begun outside the mainstream - and he challenged his student audience in Raleigh to think about what that meant in terms that suggested how he must sometimes feel. "How would you have liked," he asked, "to be an abolitionist in North or South Carolina in the 1830's?"
--------
Is Fix in at 9/11 Commission?
by Paul Sperry,
March 31, 2004
http://antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=2209
In finally accepting the 9/11 Commission's request for public testimony under oath from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the White House was not the one that flinched. It was the 9/11 Commission.
The fine print of the deal takes the chance of the commission taking sworn public testimony from any other White House official - including Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley, Bush's political adviser Karl Rove, President Bush himself or Vice President Dick Cheney - completely off the table. It also precludes the panel from having the option of calling Rice, who's made media statements contradicting evidence and sworn statements by other officials, back to testify.
It's a one-shot deal. And it stinks.
Even under oath, Rice can dodge tough questions by claiming her answers would jeopardize national security or the war on terror. "I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, but again, that's a classified area, and I just can't get into it," she could say. Or she could come down with Washington amnesia - "I have no recollection of that." And she and everyone else in the White House could skate. The commission has no recourse at that point.
Other compromises are curious. Why did the panel, which has subpoena power and could compel Rice to testify, originally bow to White House demands not to even tape-record the statements they were "allowed" to take from her in private? Why will it let Bush tag-team with Cheney in a joint Q&A in the White House without oaths or even tape recorders? Why has it agreed to let just four panel officials lay eyes on a key intelligence briefing Bush got a month before the 9/11 attacks?
Why is the commission bending over backwards to please the White House when it's supposed to be fiercely independent and bipartisan, made up of five Republicans and five Democrats?
The answer may lie in the little-known fact that the White House has a friend on the inside. And not just any friend, either.
His name is Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the commission. Though he has no vote, the former Texas lawyer arguably has more sway than any member, including the chairman. Zelikow picks the areas of investigation, the briefing materials, the topics for hearings, the witnesses, and the lines of questioning for witnesses. He also picks which fights are worth fighting, legally, with the White House, and was involved in the latest round of capitulations - er, negotiations - over Rice's testimony. And the commissioners for the most part follow his recommendations. In effect, he sets the agenda and runs the investigation.
He also carries with him a downright obnoxious conflict-of-interest odor, one that somehow went undetected by the lawyers who vetted him for one of the most important investigative positions in U.S. history. There's a raft of evidence to suggest that Zelikow has personal, professional and political reasons not to see the commission hold Rice and other Bush officials accountable for pre-9/11 failings, and may be the de facto swing vote for Republicans on the panel. Here are just a few of them:
Philip D. Zelikow
- He and Rice worked closely together in the first Bush White House as aides to former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Zelikow was director of European security affairs, and Rice was senior director of Soviet and East European affairs, as well as special assistant to the president. Rice reportedly hired Zelikow. Both started in 1989 and left in 1991.
- A few years after leaving the White House, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together called, "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft."
- The two associated again when Zelikow directed the Aspen Strategy Group, a foreign-policy strategy body co-chaired by Rice's mentor Scowcroft. Rice, along with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, were members.
- Zelikow also directed the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age under co-chairman James Barksdale, a Bush adviser and major Bush-Cheney donor. A 9/11 commissioner, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, also served with Zelikow on the task force. (Interestingly, the pair serves together on yet another panel - The National Commission on Federal Election Reform - with Gorton acting as vice-chairman and Zelikow as executive director.)
- After the 2000 election, Zelikow and Rice were reunited when George W. Bush named him to his transition team for the National Security Council. Rice reportedly asked Zelikow to help organize the NSC under the Scowcroft model, which was insular and steeped in Cold War worldview.
- Former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke says he briefed not only Rice and Hadley, but also Zelikow about the growing al-Qaida threat during the transition period. Zelikow sat in on the briefings, he says.
- A month after the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks, President Bush appointed Zelikow to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is chaired by Scowcroft.
- Zelikow's regular job, the one he'll return to after the commission releases it final report in late July, is director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center is dedicated to the study of the presidency, and maintains contact with the Bush White House, which fought the creation of the commission.
Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, insists Zelikow has a "clear conflict of interest." And she suspects he is in touch with Bush's political adviser, Rove, which she says would explain why the White House granted him, along with just one other commission official, the greatest access to the intelligence briefing Bush got a month before the 9/11 suicide hijackings.
The two-page memo in question mentions "al-Qaida" and "hijackings," that much we know. What we don't know is if it gets any more specific about the threat. And the White House won't let us find out. It refuses to declassify any of the August memo (or any of the other briefings Bush got before 9/11, for that matter), and it won't even let most commissioners review it.
Bush and his top security adviser insist they have nothing to hide.
Rice pal Zelikow, for his part, says he's recused himself from any part of the probe that deals with the roughly one-month period after the election when he worked with Rice on the transition, as if any potential conflicts he might have would end there. Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg doesn't understand the fuss over Zelikow. "He has not served in the Bush administration," he argues more technically than convincingly.
The fuss, Mr. Felzenberg, is that 9/11 relatives like the wife of the late Ronald Breitweiser want to know they are getting an honest investigation into what their government did to protect their loved ones from a foreign-ordered attack on American soil.
But the way key pre-9/11 documents and sworn testimony from top officials are being denied the public, it looks like the fix is in.
To be sure, Zelikow could be a remarkably objective fellow and not let his close ties to the Bush administration influence his final report in any way.
But with the commission still refusing to subpoena the documents and caving to White House ground rules on testimony, the stench of political bias has become too strong, and Zelikow should nonetheless step down, immediately, for the sake of the families, many of whom are demanding his resignation. And the commission should vote to further extend its deadline while it finds a more politically detached replacement for him and redoubles its efforts to deliver the "full and complete" and "independent" investigation it originally promised the country.
----
The Defector
by Patrick J. Buchanan,
March 31, 2004
CREATORS SYNDICATE
http://antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=2210
Both the ferocity of the White House attacks and his lionization by the liberal press testify: Richard Clarke has drawn blood.
The former counter-terrorism chief seeks to dynamite the central pillar of the Bush presidency: that the president has bravely and brilliantly led us in the War on Terror and that the war on Iraq made us more secure.
According to Clarke, the White House, especially Condi Rice, was diffident if not indolent in coping with the threat of Al Qaeda prior to 9-11. And the obsession with Iraq blinded the White House to the real threat.
As Clarke tells it, at a meeting of sub-Cabinet officers he called in April 2001 to discuss Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Paul Wolfowitz dismissed the "little terrorist" in Afghanistan and sought to refocus the meeting on Iraq.
On 9-11 itself, Clarke was stunned to hear Donald Rumsfeld call for bombing Iraq -- not Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was -- because there were better "targets" in Iraq, though Baghdad had had nothing to do with the atrocities.
On Sept. 12, Clarke was enraged as he watched Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz try to steer the president's wrath away from Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, toward Iraq and Saddam. Clarke contends the eventual invasion of Iraq was a disaster for the war on terror.
First, it diverted vital resources, such as U.S. Special Forces, away from the hunt for Osama when we might have caught and killed him. In the two years since bin Laden escaped, the cancer cells he created have multiplied. Now we face Al Qaeda clones all over the world.
Second, the Iraqi invasion played into bin Laden's hand. He had long predicted the United States would invade an oil-rich Islamic nation to seize its resources, and in the eyes of the Arab and Islamic world, we have done exactly that.
Third, the pandemic hatred of the United States, as seen in the recent Pew polls, is, Clarke believes, a direct consequence of our invasion.
Fourth, we ignited a war of national resistance in Iraq that has given the Islamic young a cause in which to believe and for which to fight -- i.e., to expel imperialist-infidel America from Baghdad, which for 500 years was the seat of the caliphate.
Bush's grand strategy is the Bush Doctrine. By it, the United States asserts a right to launch pre-emptive strikes and preventive wars on rogue nations to deny them weapons of mass destruction. After 9-11, said Bush, we cannot risk a rogue nation giving a biological or nuclear weapon to Al Qaeda. To prevent it, we take down rogue regimes and disarm them, before they strike.
Under the Bush Doctrine we invaded Iraq. Yet, we now know that Saddam had no links to 9-11, no ties to Al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no plans to attack us.
The White House has fallen back on the argument that Saddam and his Baathist regime constituted a terrorist state with a horrific record on human rights that would forever be a threat if ever it did acquire the weapons for which it still had plans, if not programs.
Moreover, our long-term policy for ending the terrorist threat is to use our resources to advance a "world democratic revolution." When all Islamic states are free and democratic, the threat of terror will pass away.
The test case is Iraq, but only the early returns are in.
What do they show? Clearly, the Iraqi people are glad to be rid of the tyrant and his regime. And while no roses were strewn in the path of U.S. troops, the Iraqis are not all hostile. The Libyans have come around, and the Iranians want to talk. Progress is being made.
Yet, the price in U.S. and Iraqi dead and wounded is high, and the cost in resources, $150 billion and counting, is prohibitive of any new war on Iran or North Korea, whose arsenals are far more advanced. Much of our Army is tied down. Our alliances are strained. The cancer of terrorism appears to have metastasized. The Islamic world appears to be against us.
By our old standards -- America does not attack nations that do not attack us -- Iraq was not a war of necessity, but a war of choice. Was it wise? Bush says yes, Clarke no.
The verdict of history is not yet in. But if Iraq collapses in chaos or civil war to become a spawning ground of Islamic terror, Bush will be a failed president and America will need a new foreign policy.
However, by then, the architects of the Iraq war could still be in power. We are headed for interesting times, made more interesting by Richard Clarke.
--------
The Dogs That Didn't Bark
Why Colin Powell and George Tenet aren't bashing Richard Clarke.
By Fred Kaplan
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098067/fr/rss/
In the short story "Silver Blaze," Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of a stolen racehorse by observing that the stable's guard dog didn't bark-hence, the intruder was not a stranger.
The mystery of whether Richard Clarke is telling the truth about President Bush's counterterrorism policies might be solved the same way: Which dogs aren't barking? Amid all the administration officials bombarding the airwaves with denunciations, who has stayed mum?
The answer: Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet, and their silence speaks loudly.
Tenet is central to Clarke's case that Bush was negligent on terrorism. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others have said many times-in what they present as a defense against Clarke's charges-that Bush received an intelligence briefing from Tenet every morning and was therefore well aware of the threat from al-Qaida. But Clarke's point is that Bush didn't take Tenet's warnings seriously. Here's a key passage from Clarke's book, Against All Enemies (Page 235):
[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. Sometimes I would walk into my office and find the Director of Central Intelligence sitting at my desk or the desk of my assistant, Beverly Roundtree, waiting to vent his frustration. We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.
This is where the famous "swatting flies" story appears.
President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals [the Cabinet secretaries] in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.
If Clarke is spewing nonsense-if the president and his national security adviser really did consider al-Qaida an urgent matter-Tenet is the man to say so. It's hard to imagine that the White House hasn't tried to recruit him to do so. Yet so far he hasn't.
Tenet is not the only quiet dog. One of the hounds that the White House did unleash-Secretary of State Powell-not only declined to growl, but practically purred like a kitten. Interviewed on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour, Powell said: "I know Mr. Clarke. I have known him for many, many years. He's a very smart guy. He served his nation very, very well. He's an expert in these matters." His book "is not the complete story," but, Powell added, "I'm not attributing any bad motives to it."
Asked if he had been recruited to join the campaign against Clarke, Powell replied, "I'm not aware of any campaign against Mr. Clarke, and I am not a member."
His choice of words here is fascinating. Note: He did not say "There is no campaign," but rather "I'm not aware of any campaign." As has been widely observed, Powell truly is out of the loop in this administration; it's conceivable he is unaware. He then went on to say, "[A]nd I am not a member"-suggesting there might be a campaign, but he's not part of it.
It may be a stretch to parse these words so closely. This was an interview, after all, not a written statement. Then again, Powell must have given some careful thought to what he would say. In any case, his answer doesn't exactly amount to a denial of an anti-Clarke campaign. In fact, it's a textbook case of the "non-denial denial."
Powell also circled around an answer when Lehrer asked if Clarke was right in saying the Bush administration did not give "urgent priority" to fighting al-Qaida. He replied:
We knew that al-Qaeda was a threat to our country. We knew that the Clinton Administration understood this and was working against al-Qaeda. We did not ignore al-Qaeda. We spent a lot of time thinking about terrorism, what should we do about it. ... We were working on terrorism and trying to understand it.
You don't need to be a literary critic to realize that this is an amazing statement. In a few sentences, Powell tells us that Clinton "understood" and "was working against" al-Qaida-while the Bush administration "did not ignore" al-Qaida (not quite the same thing) and "spent a lot of time thinking" about it and "trying to understand it."
In the middle of all this, Powell managed to throw in the following: "I met with Mr. Clarke four days after I was named to be the Secretary of State." Clarke has said, in his book and in many interviews, that he didn't get a chance to brief Bush's Cabinet secretaries on al-Qaida until one week before 9/11. In this context, Powell is telling Jim Lehrer that he met with Clarke even before the administration got underway.
Powell's implicit support of Clarke is significant. In his book, Clarke portrays Powell as his ally in the administration's internecine disputes over terrorism. He writes that when he briefed Bush's transition team in January 2001, "Colin Powell took the unusual step ... of asking to meet with ... the senior counterterrorism officers from NSC, State, Defense, CIA, FBI, and the military. ... When we all agreed at the importance of the al Qaeda threat, Powell was obviously surprised at the unanimity" (Page 228).
Three months later, at the first deputies meeting on terrorism, when Paul Wolfowitz challenged this view and insisted that Iraq posed the greater threat, Clarke writes, "Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. 'We agree with Dick. We see al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority.' The briefings of Colin Powell had worked" (Page 232).
Finally, the day after 9/11, when Donald Rumsfeld advocated "broadening the objectives of our response and 'getting Iraq,' " it was Powell who "pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda." Clarke writes, "Relieved to have some support, I thanked [Powell and Armitage]. 'I thought I was missing something here,' I vented. 'Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.' Powell shook his head. 'It's not over yet' " (Pages 30-31).
If Powell has any disputes with this account-of his role, his position, the positions of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, or the conversations he and Armitage had with Clarke in January, April, or September 2001-he could have noted them in response to several of Lehrer's questions during the NewsHour interview. Powell, too, didn't bark.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. Photograph of CIA director George Tenet by Larry Downing/Reuters.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Pakistan police recover large cache of weapons near Afghan border
QUETTA, Pakistan (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331174349.fa9sm88u.html
Pakistani police said Wednesday they had recovered a large cache of arms, ammunitions and explosives from a remote town near the Afghan border that were intended for "terrorist" activities.
The cache includes several rockets, hand grenades, mortar shells, incendiary agents, detonators, anti-aircraft gun shells, timer fuses for bombs and mines, police officer Gul Khan said.
Police, acting on a tip-off, found the cache buried underground in Ghazloona Badini village in southwestern Baluchistan province, bordering Afghanistan, Khan told AFP
"The cache was brought from Afghanistan by unknown saboteurs for terrorist activities in Quetta," he said.
--------
Cambodia destroys anti-aircraft missiles in fiery display
KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331071846.12axm1r5.html
Cambodia exploded 80 of its outdated anti-aircraft missiles in a fiery display Wednesday and will become the first Asian nation to destroy its entire cache by the end of the week.
The ceremony at an armed forces armour centre in the western province of Kampong Speu included the firing of 20 missiles without warheads into the ground, one of which instead shot across the centre's fields to steal the show.
The warheads themselves were safely detonated in a huge black smoke cloud a kilometre away from the audience, which included Cambodian co-defense ministers Tea Banh and Prince Sisowath Sirirath and US Ambassador Charles Ray.
"Cambodia is the first nation in Asia to take the responsible step to protect itself from terrorist acts by destroying these weapons," Ray said.
"Cambodia is leading Southeast Asia to a safer tomorrow."
The United States, which funded the destruction, has launched a global drive to secure or eliminate Man Portable Air Defense Systems, or MANPADS, which it fears terrorists could use to launch devastating attacks on civilian aircraft.
It provided 233,000 dollars to destroy the MANPADS and develop stockpile management techniques for the remainder of Cambodia's weapons.
The destruction will help in "weapons control and strengthening international cooperation ... to efforts of combating terrorism and keeping peace, stability and security in the region and around the globe," Tea Banh told the crowd of diplomats and hundreds of troops.
He brushed off the errant missile, which plunged into the base of a palm tree a few hundred metres away and burned a small patch of grass, as a "technical problem".
The destruction of 233 Russian-made and now obsolete MANPADS imported into Cambodia in the 1980s will be completed on Friday by US experts and staff from the mine-clearing group Halo Trust, Cambodian officials said.
Cambodia is accused of being a major source of illegal weapons which arm rebel groups across Asia including the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and militants in Indonesia's Aceh province.
Thai authorities said last October that they were hunting for missiles believed to have been smuggled in from Cambodia, which it feared were destined for use in attacks during a summit attended by US President George W. Bush.
Global alarm over MANPADS escalated last year when two of the weapons were fired at a chartered Israeli commercial jet as it was taking off in the Kenyan city of Mombasa.
-------- asia
Never mind the torture and political prisoners, he's Bush's man
By Anne Penketh
UK Independent
31 March 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=506773
In the rogues' gallery of Soviet dinosaurs, the rulers of the central Asian states have pride of place.
Islam Karimov, who has ruled the impoverished republic of Uzbekistan as a dictator for 15 years, may not be the looniest.
That reputation could probably be claimed by his neighbour, President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, who in 2002 renamed the months of the calendar - January after himself. But President Karimov could well be the cruellest, accused of torture of opponents, muzzling freedom of speech and jailing up to 6,500 political prisoners.
Mr Karimov, 66, has rarely troubled with elections. In 1989, he became Communist Party leader in Uzbekistan in the then Soviet Union. After independence in 1991, he was the natural choice to become president as the communists kept power.
In 1995, his term of office was extended until 2000 when he was re-elected unopposed. The next presidential elections are next year, when the term is to be extended from five years to seven.
Mr Karimov was born in Samarkand, the orphan son of an ethnic Tajik mother and Uzbek father. He is a former economist who rose through the ranks of the party to the Politburo. "If we remain part of the Soviet Union, our rivers will flow with milk. If we don't, our rivers will flow with the blood of our people," Mr Karimov predicted in 1991 as his beloved Soviet empire collapsed.
He took office with one hand on the Koran and the other on the constitution. But his term of office has been troubled by opposition from Islamic militants, who tried to assassinate him in 1999. Since 11 September 2001, he has come into his own, however, thanks to George Bush and the war on terror. After opening an air base to the US military for the war against the Taliban, he was thanked with a visit to the White House.
Despite the human rights abuses in his one-party state, Mr Karimov looks likely to stay as the Bush administration's man in central Asia.
--------
Two Dozen Killed in Wave Of Violence in Uzbekistan
Bombings, Shootouts Claim Mostly Suspected Militants
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36299-2004Mar30.html
MOSCOW, March 30 -- A wave of suicide bombings and street shootouts in Uzbekistan killed about two dozen people on Tuesday in the bloodiest outbreak of violence in the former Soviet republic since it enlisted as a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.
Special forces laid siege to an apartment complex where suspected Islamic radicals holed up during an hours-long confrontation near the country home of President Islam Karimov on the outskirts of the capital, Tashkent, according to officials and witnesses. By day's end, 20 suspected militants and three police officers had been killed, the Uzbek Interior Ministry said. A witness said a civilian was also slain.
The surge of violence followed bombings and attacks that killed 19 other people in recent days and unsettled Tashkent, where stores shut their doors, kindergartens sent children home and a U.S. Embassy annex temporarily closed.
Uzbekistan has emerged as an important partner for the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, hosting an American military base that serves as a forward staging post for operations in Afghanistan. As it struggled to respond to the attacks Tuesday, Uzbekistan portrayed itself as the latest U.S. ally targeted by international terrorists after countries such as Spain, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
"It's a great tragedy, of course," Abdulaziz Kamilov, the Uzbek ambassador to the United States, said in a telephone interview from Washington. "We don't want violence in Uzbekistan or the region. But at the same time, the war on terrorism is going on and unfortunately it takes time, it takes dedication and it takes a big effort."
Uzbekistan has a history of homegrown terrorism, however, and some independent analysts pointed out that the attacks of the past three days were mostly aimed at police rather than foreign targets. Karimov's harsh repression of devout Muslims has only fueled radical opposition to his rule, according to human rights groups.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spoke with Uzbek Foreign Minister Sodik Safoyev on Tuesday and offered U.S. assistance in the investigation of the attacks.
The latest bloodshed began Tuesday morning when a car was stopped at a traffic checkpoint a couple of miles from Karimov's home. A woman got out and detonated an explosives belt she was wearing, killing herself and three police officers, according to a duty officer at the Interior Ministry.
Other passengers in the car ran away and joined up with masked companions who took refuge in a nearby neighborhood, according to the duty officer, who declined to give his name. Police and commando units soon swarmed the area and the two sides exchanged gunfire, according to officials and witnesses, although accounts of what happened after that were contradictory.
Authorities said all 20 of the slain militants killed themselves with grenades and other explosives, but witnesses said they saw bodies riddled with bullet holes. The Associated Press, citing a resident, described a second suicide bomber who was shot in the legs by police after ignoring an order to stop as she approached a bus. She then set off her explosives.
"We could see shooting, and then we saw that one of the houses caught fire," Natalya Bushuyeva, an Uzbek journalist at the scene, said by telephone. "The shooting lasted for a long time. The shooting was so messy that the special services were shooting at each other."
Bushuyeva said she saw several bodies that had been shot or burned, including one slain man found naked on the ground with bullet holes in his stomach. "Local people said he didn't have enough time to blow himself up," she said. "Local people also said he was shouting 'Allahu akbar,' " the Arabic phrase meaning "God is greatest."
While Karimov said the violence was carried out by a radical but historically nonviolent Islamic group, investigators said Tuesday that it was too soon to draw a firm link. "I can say for sure that it's an attempt to destabilize the social situation in the republic," said Svetlana Artykova, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office. "The criminals will be captured. Sooner or later they will face a court and get their punishment."
The group singled out by Karimov -- Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation -- advocates the overthrow of secular governments in favor of a strict Islamic state but officially eschews violence.
"None of those involved in this violence is involved with Hizb ut-Tahrir," Imran Waheed, the group's representative in London, said in a telephone interview. "It is contrary to Hizb ut-Tahrir's philosophy to raise arms against authorities even in retaliation."
But analysts and even some Hizb ut-Tahrir members interviewed in the past have said that some faction might resort to violence because Karimov's oppressive rule leaves them little choice. At least 6,000 people remain in Uzbek prisons because of their religious or political beliefs, according to human rights groups.
Human Rights Watch issued a 300-page report Tuesday on Uzbekistan's repression of Muslims, documenting what it called "systematic torture, ill-treatment, public degradation and denial of due process."
Two other groups, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, condemned the terrorist attacks of recent days but warned that they should not be used as a pretext for further persecution.
Uzbekistan first faced large-scale terrorism in 1999 when a series of bombings in Tashkent killed 16 people. The explosions were attributed to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which was largely destroyed during the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan in 2001. The group's survivors fled with members of al Qaeda to the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border, according to former members and regional officials. The movement's political leader, Tahir Yuldash, was reported to have been among the militants besieged by Pakistani troops in South Waziristan this month, although his whereabouts remain unknown.
--------
3rd Day of Violence Claims 23 Lives in Uzbekistan
March 31, 2004
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/international/asia/31UZBE.html
MOSCOW, March 30 - As many as 23 people were reported dead on Tuesday in bombings and gun battles in Uzbekistan during a third day of violence in a strategic ally of the United States that borders Afghanistan.
Bombs and shootings had already taken the lives of at least 19 people on Sunday and Monday in the Central Asian nation, where the United States has maintained a military base since shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
The Interior Ministry issued a statement that seemed to oversimplify the violence on Tuesday.
"In the process of being detained, 20 terrorists blew themselves up" in a suburb of Tashkent, the capital, the ministry said. "Along with this, three policemen died and five sustained wounds of various seriousness."
There were many other reports from witnesses and local reporters of suicide bombings aimed at police officers and of a gun battle that lasted nearly five hours. The Associated Press reported that five bodies lay on the ground after that battle.
In one attack, two witnesses described a female suicide bomber chasing police officers who finally shot her and detonated her bomb.
The identity of the attackers was not immediately known, and it is also unclear whether they included fighters from outside Uzbekistan. Reports of the number of deaths varied.
The government immediately blamed local Muslim militants with ties to international terrorism. Human rights groups and independent analysts said they feared a new crackdown in a nation that already holds an estimated 7,000 political prisoners.
Human rights groups and other analysts say the Muslim organization blamed by the government, Hizb ut-Tahrir, does not have a record of violence and has been the target of repression for years.
"What we are afraid of now is, are we going to see an intensified crackdown as a reaction to today's events," said Acacia Shields, the author of a 319-page report by Human Rights Watch on religious repression that was released Tuesday in Tashkent.
"Since Sept. 11 the government has tried to characterize its campaign against these nonviolent, independent Muslims as part of its program of counterterrorism," she said in a telephone interview.
The United States has described torture in Uzbekistan as systematic and is to review the country's human rights record in April to determine if it is eligible for $50 million in new aid, including military assistance.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld underscored Uzbekistan's strategic importance on a visit in February, during which he said relations between the two nations were "growing stronger every month."
The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said in Washington, "These attacks only strengthen our resolve to defeat terrorists wherever they hide and strike, working in close cooperation with Uzbekistan and our other partners in the global war on terror."
One expert on Central Asia with the Carnegie Foundation in Moscow, Aleksei Malashenko, said the latest attacks on an American ally had been coordinated and politically focused in a manner similar to that of the recent bombings in Spain.
He said it remained to be seen whether the armed fighters in Uzbekistan had international connections. But he said: "Of course there are ties between local nationalist Islamists and global Islamism, global jihad.
"From that point of view we can make parallels between the events in Madrid, New York, Turkey, Afghanistan, because its aim is to punish all American allies who participate in combating international terrorism."
The other Central Asian nation with an American base is Kyrgyzstan. "The point is that it will continue," Mr. Malashenko said. "No one knows how to put an end to this kind of evolution."
Domestic repression has created fertile ground for recruitment into militancy, said Alain Deletroz, an expert on Uzbekistan with the International Crisis Group, an independent monitoring organization.
"By destroying any normal lay political parties in that country," he said, "the only opposition groups which have structures and know-how to operate underground are not the `normal' Western-like parties."
A number of the attacks in the current violence have made police officers a target, particularly at checkpoints. Mr. Deletroz said that could be intended to touch off a government crackdown that would in turn inspire increased opposition.
During the current violence, witnesses described chaotic scenes involving combatants who appeared to be ready to die. In one case, Agence France-Presse quoted a witness named Marina who said she had seen a female suicide bomber trying to kill police officers.
"I saw a woman chasing after a group of policemen," the witness was quoted as saying. "Then a bus came between them, a policeman shot her in the leg and she exploded."
A security officer was quoted as describing another bombing in which two men had jumped from a car at a checkpoint and killed themselves and three police officers.
-------- britain
Cost of Iraq war leaves Forces facing cuts
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
31/03/2004
UK Telegraph
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&xml=/news/2004/03/31/nforce31.xml
The Armed Forces face a series of cuts because the Ministry of Defence had to borrow £500 million from the budget for the Eurofighter to pay for the war on Iraq.
There has been a major crisis within the defence budget for several months. Officials have spoken openly about the need to cut at least one programme, possibly two. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, let it be known this month that he had written to Tony Blair warning that the Armed Forces could not continue to fight the war on terrorism properly without better funding.
Officials have claimed that the budget problems, and the anticipated defence cuts, were caused by the MoD's failure fully to understand a new accounting system introduced by the Treasury.
However, the authoritative journal Defence Analysis reports today that the defence cuts were the result of an MoD decision to borrow from the Eurofighter programme in the false belief that it was so delayed that the money would not be needed until next year.
But the programme has moved forward so fast that Britain and its partners in the programme, Germany, Italy and Spain, now need to pay out large sums on the second tranche of the programme.
Tight contractual agreements originally designed by Britain to ensure that Germany did not try to default on its agreement to buy Eurofighters are now rebounding on Britain, which is under pressure to find the money it has already used elsewhere.
Defence Analysis says there may be a number of reasons why the money was borrowed from the next year's budget for Eurofighter, including the need to pay out unexpected sums on the Hawk training aircraft and the Nimrod surveillance aircraft. But Mr Hoon said that "a combination of the new accounting system of substantial deployment overseas, and extra equipment for Iraq has put more pressure this year on the budget".
Francis Tusa, the editor of Defence Analysis, said that "in the short term, the war in Iraq is very likely to have put the greatest amount of pressure on the budget".
The immediate costs of the war were put at £500 million. That soon rose and is now put at £3 billion. Although Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, promised to fund the war in full, the money had to be found immediately in the defence budget.
The expenditure on the war also has to be justified before the Treasury hands over any money. The Treasury will not, for instance, pay for fuel, ammunition or maintenance expended during the war that would have been used in any event during routine training.
"It's not unusual for the procurement budget to be raided for immediate cash sums to cover operational costs," Mr Tusa said. "For the 1999 Kosovo war, procurement officers in the UK were asked to find 10 per cent cuts immediately and this was raised to 15 per cent."
Although much of this money should be refunded by the Treasury, that could take many months and even years, Mr Tusa added.
The MoD said negotiations on the Eurofighter programme were continuing, and affordability and capability were key considerations for Britain.
-------- business
Navy building unmanned warfare research facility in Panhandle
Associated Press
Wed, Mar. 31, 2004
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/8320902.htm
PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. - The Navy plans to build an $8.4 million research center here for unmanned vehicles and systems that operate in the air, on the ground or at sea.
The Haskell Co., based in Jacksonville, has received a $10 million contract to design, build and provide five years of maintenance for the three-story littoral warfare research complex. The contract includes $1.6 million for the maintenance.
It is expected to be completed in two or three years at the Panama City Naval Support Activity, where it will expand existing unmanned warfare research conducted at the base, Navy officials said Tuesday.
"This facility will allow us to transform the way we do warfare," said Delbert "Ace" Summey, who oversees littoral technology and systems at the base's Naval Surface Warfare Center.
Unmanned systems can limit casualties by doing "dirty, dull or dangerous" jobs, such as mine hunting, Summey said.
They are key elements in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's push to transform the military into a more modern and efficient fighting force, Summey said.
----
Moving Electrolux jobs to Hungary could help Sweden land fighter jet deal
STOCKHOLM (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331083706.001lxoo2.html
If Swedish white goods producer Electrolux decides to move a vacuum cleaner factory from Sweden to Hungary, it could help Sweden land a massive fighter jet contract, Swedish media reported on Wednesday.
Electrolux said in February that it was considering closing its vacuum cleaner factory in the southeastern town of Vaestervik, where it is the largest private employer, in an attempt to save money on lower salaries in the eastern European country.
According to a report in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter on Wednesday, however, the plan to move more than 500 jobs to Hungary is part of a larger strategy to convince that country to purchase the 14 Jas 39 Gripen fighter jets it is currently leasing from Sweden.
"The fact that Electrolux made this decision (to move from Vaestervik to Hungary) will be counted in (the Jas deal)," Electrolux CEO Hans Stråberg told Dagens Nyheter.
In 1995, Electrolux and some 40 other Swedish companies said they would participate in so-called "offset" deals, in which the business they do in potential Gripen buyer countries counts in favor of a contract for the Swedish fighters.
"Anything we produce in Hungary is counted in, so it would be strange if moving our factory there, if we decide to do so, doesn't count as well," Electrolux spokesman Jacob Broberg told AFP.
He insisted however that a possible Swedish fighter jet deal would have nothing to do with Electrolux's final decision on whether or not to move its factory.
"Any decision we make is made for our own business reasons. We don't get anything out of a Jas Gripen deal, so that's not why we would do this," Broberg said.
----
Boeing snags 189 million Pentagon space contract
ST. LOUIS, Missouri (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040330232730.nvjoo2h7.html
The Boeing Company said Tuesday that it has snagged a 189 million dollar contract to develop and operate a space-based surveillance system (SBSS) for the US Air Force.
The contract calls for Boeing and its partner Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. to develop and launch a satellite capable of tracking the movement of objects through space by late 2007.
The Department of Defense will utilize data generated by SBSS to support military operations, the aircraft and defense giant said.
Additionally, the National Aeronautics and Space Administrationcould use the information to protect International Space Station and Space Shuttle missions from orbital debris.
Boeing's Phantom Works unit will have operational responsibility for the system for up to one year, before moving it to the Air Force.
Boeing hopes the contract could strengthen its hand in future bidding contests for further programs related to two billion dollar Space Situation Awareness (SSA) market.
--------
Fear of Terrorism Inspired Scheme to Bilk Area Malls
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37520-2004Mar30?language=printer
Christian A. Kerodin fixed heaters and air conditioners for a living. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he found something new to repair: what he saw as the vulnerability of major Washington area shopping malls to terrorism.
With no experience, Kerodin started an international consulting firm and issued reports criticizing security at the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, Tysons Galleria and Landmark Mall in Alexandria, saying they had failed to prepare for biological, chemical or other attacks.
The 37-year-old Alexandria businessman hawked his reports in news releases and convinced the editor of a national real estate publication to feature him as an expert with 20 years of foreign policy and counter-terrorism experience. His reports were quoted by Wall Street analysts. He was even scheduled to speak at an emergency preparedness conference in the District alongside a senior Treasury Department official.
Federal law enforcement officials say Kerodin exploited a climate of fear stemming from the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Kerodin has admitted to extorting money from some of the region's biggest mall owners by threatening to expose their alleged vulnerabilities to "Islamic terrorism" if they did not hire him as a consultant. He was sentenced last week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria to 21/2 years in prison.
Officials said Kerodin's case highlights a disturbing trend of people trying to profit from concerns about terrorism in the post-Sept. 11 era. It was not unlike the case of a Maryland man convicted last year of providing bomb dogs that couldn't smell out explosives to guard key government installations.
U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty, whose office prosecuted Kerodin and has brought a number of similar cases recently, said Kerodin "took advantage of the heightened concern we all have to protect ourselves from terrorism. It is reprehensible that he exploited that concern for personal gain.''
Kerodin was indicted last fall on extortion charges after a sting in which a U.S. Secret Service agent posed as a vice president of the company that owns the Pentagon City mall, court documents say. He pleaded guilty in January to extortion and a firearms count. Federal agents found an illegal, sawed-off shotgun when they swarmed Kerodin's one-bedroom apartment last fall.
The telephone number for Kerodin's company was disconnected, and a home number could not be found this week.
Kerodin's attorney, Michael Nachmanoff, portrays him as an aspiring businessman who genuinely wanted to help businesses improve their security. "Mr. Kerodin clearly was well read and had researched issues of security before he went into this business,'' Nachmanoff said in an interview yesterday.
Nachmanoff compared his client to a college student who was charged last year by federal authorities in Maryland after disclosing that he had placed box cutters aboard two airliners to test security.
But federal officials say Kerodin had no such noble intentions.
"It was basically just a scam, a means to get money from these mall owners,'' said John McDonough, spokesman for the Secret Service's Washington field office. He said Kerodin International Security & Policy Consultants had no office, only a Web site, and that Kerodin "didn't have any legitimate experience in the security business.''
Kerodin hatched the idea to start a security consulting business in the fall of 2002, his attorney said in court papers. After putting an ad in Washingtonian magazine, he wound up doing $7,500 worth of work for one client, a Maryland company that owned shopping malls, the papers said.
In May 2003, Kerodin wrote and posted on his Web site a report, "Terrorist Target List: American Retailers and Restaurants." It concluded that "shopping venues are likely to be prime targets" and suggested that businesses contact his company for security advice, court records said.
Matt Valley, editor in chief of National Real Estate Investor magazine, saw Kerodin's news release promoting the report and wrote a column quoting him as an expert. "He had great knowledge of public policy," Valley recalled. "There was no reason for me to believe he was anything but a consultant."
Kerodin began showing up at security industry events. At one, he met the then-president of the local chapter of the Association of Contingency Planners, an industry group, and persuaded him to schedule Kerodin to present his report at the group's next meeting.
"He was such a smooth talker, and his focus on shopping malls and the risks to them seemed relatively unique at that point,'' said Gaston Boisson, current president of the association's DC/Mid Atlantic Chapter. The group yanked Kerodin's appearance when it learned about the court case.
Last spring, Kerodin began sending letters to General Growth Properties Inc., which owns Landmark Mall and Tysons Galleria, and Simon Property Group, which owns Pentagon City. According to court records, the letters said Kerodin was planning to release another report that would blast D.C. area mall security and highlight deficiencies at those three malls in particular. But if the companies hired him to do security assessments, Kerodin wrote, he would not include their names in the report. Both companies declined.
On July 8, Kerodin issued a report that singled out those three malls as vulnerable to -- and failing to prepare for -- terrorist attacks. He then wrote both companies again and threatened to release similarly negative assessments of other Simon and General Growth properties nationwide, prosecutors said.
Malachy Kavanagh, a spokesman for the New York City-based International Council of Shopping Centers, said the mall security industry, composed in great part of former FBI and Secret Service agents, had been suspicious of Kerodin for months.
"People were wondering, 'Who was this guy, and what was he doing?' Nobody knew him," Kavanagh said.
A company that provides security for Simon and General Growth contacted the Secret Service in June 2003, court records said. A Secret Service agent, posing as a Simon vice president, had several conversations with Kerodin and offered to pay him $40,000 to keep Simon out of future reports. Kerodin rejected the offer and wound up accepting a check for $122,500 from the agent Sept. 4. He was promptly arrested.
Officials from Simon and General Growth declined to comment, but said in court papers that Kerodin's actions caused them considerable anguish. One report almost caused a Wall Street analyst to downgrade General Growth stock, the company said.
For Valley, the editor taken in by Kerodin, it was a hard lesson. "I feel betrayed and angry,'' Valley said. He said he will now conduct "background checks on anyone who claims to be a consultant.''
-------- europe
A majority of Norwegians want to bring troops home from Iraq: poll
OSLO (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331162339.3vhmvt3l.html
More than half of Norwegians want Norway's 150 troops stationed in Iraq to come home, according to a poll published by local news agency NTB on Wednesday.
The poll, conducted by Visendi for NTB, showed that 51.2 percent of the population wants the government to repatriate the Norwegian soldiers, who are stationed in southeastern Iraq under British command.
Only 32.7 percent of Norwegians said they wanted the troops to stay.
Women were especially opposed to maintaining a Norwegian presence in the war-torn country.
While 60 percent of all women polled said they would prefer that the troops leave, 44.9 percent of men said they were in favor of their removal, while 45.2 percent of men said they thought the troops should stay, according to NTB.
Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, said on Wednesday that he wished that more of the the population agreed with his support for keeping troops in Iraq.
"It is problematic when only three out of ten people support the Norwegian troops' presence in Iraq, but we can't let opinion polls determine what Norway's policy should be in such important foreign policy questions," he said.
"Norway isn't in Iraq as a part of the occupation forces, but as a part of the stabilizing forces. That's an important difference. We are there to stabilize the situation and to help the Iraqi people with important humanitarian contributions and to help rebuild infrastructure," Bondevik added.
The Norwegian parliament is set to determine within the next couple of months whether or not the Norwegian troops should stay in Iraq.
-------- iraq
Enraged Mob in Falluja Kills 4 American Contractors
March 31, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/international/worldspecial/31CND-IRAQ.html
FALLUJA, Iraq, March 31 - An enraged mob attacked four American contractors here today, shooting them to death, burning their vehicles, dragging their bodies through the downtown streets and then hanging the charred corpses from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
A State Department spokesman, Lou Fintor, confirming the nationalities today, said neither the names of the victims nor the name of the company for which they worked would be immediately released.
Meanwhile, less than 15 miles away, in the same area of the increasingly violent Sunni Triangle, five marines were killed in one of the deadliest roadside bomb incidents for coalition troops in weeks. The marines were traveling through a dusty village along a supply route when the explosion ripped into their vehicles.
The steadily deteriorating security situation in the Falluja area, west of Baghdad, has become so dangerous that no American soldiers or Iraqi security staff responded to the attack against the contractors.
There are a number of police stations in Falluja and a base of more than 4,000 marines nearby. But even while the two vehicles burned, sending plumes of inky smoke over the closed shops of the city, there were no ambulances, no fire engines and no security.
Instead, Falluja's streets were thick with men and boys and chaos.
Boys with scarves over their faces hurled bricks into the burning vehicles. A group of men dragged one of the smoldering corpses into the street and ripped it apart. Someone then tied a chunk of flesh to a rock and tossed it over a telephone wire.
"Viva mujahadeen!" shouted Said Khalaf, a taxi driver. "Long live the resistance!"
Nearby, a boy no older than 10 put his foot on the head of a body and said: "Where is Bush? Let him come here and see this!"
Many people in the crowd said they felt as if they had won an important battle. Others said they thought that the contractors, who were driving in four-wheel-drive trucks, were working for the Central Intelligence Agency.
"This is what these spies deserve," said Salam Aldulayme, a 28-year-old Falluja resident.
The attack on the American military vehicle occurred in Al Anbar province, a wellspring of resistance to occupation forces, said Sgt. James Oleen, a military spokesman in Baghdad. The military offered no further information on the incident.
Witnesses said the attack occurred in Malahma, 12 miles northwest of Falluja, The Associated Press reported.
After the attack in Falluja, residents told The A.P. that the burned cars contained weapons and that some of the bodies were dressed in flak jackets. The A.P. television network showed one American passport near a body and a United States Department of Defense identification card belonging to another man.
The series of deadly attacks on American troops and foreign civilians in the Sunni Triangle area of central Iraq, particularly around Falluja, and a similar spate of attacks in the northern oil city of Mosul, have raised doubts about the cautiously optimistic appraisal of American progress in the war that has been common among United States generals since the beginning of the year.
Military officials have said that the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13 and documents seized with him had allowed them to penetrate the cell structure of that part of the insurgency that sought to restore a "Saddamist" or Baathist government to Iraq, with the Sunni minority once again dominating the majority Shiites.
American generals have said that these breakthroughs had given them the upper hand in the battle against Saddam loyalists and created the conditions for the American occupation authority to move forward with confidence to the planned handover of sovereignty under an interim government on June 30 and to an elected government in January 2006.
At the same time, the generals have been saying that their main focus in the conflict has shifted to Islamic terrorists who they believe to have been responsible for many suicide bombings and other attacks on the Iraqi police, civilians and foreigners. These attacks, they say, have effectively carried the Iraqi conflict into a new landscape that makes the fighting here part of the worldwide war on terrorism.
But today's events at Falluja indicate that the war may not have changed as much as the generals have suggested.
The fact that the attack on the civilian vehicles occurred in Falluja, an overwhelming Sunni city that is the most volatile stronghold of support for Mr. Hussein, and that it followed a 10-day offensive by United States marines aimed at gaining effective control of the city, suggested that the current war may, in practice, be an extension of the conflict that began last year.
Capt. Chris Logan of the Marine Corps said today that the city was becoming "an area of greater concern."
He added: "This is one of those areas in Iraq that is definitely squirrely. The guerrillas in Falluja are testing us. They're testing our resolve."
In a modulation of their assessments in recent days, the generals had begun to say that there may be a merging of diehard loyalists to Mr. Hussein and Islamic militants, with the two groups at least loosely coordinating their attacks.
On Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for the American command, who had previously emphasized the growing role of Islamic terrorists in the conflict, said at a news conference that the military no longer considered the distinction between Saddam loyalists and militant Islamists to be so significant from the viewpoint of military operations.
"I'm not sure trying to over-classify these different groups is helpful," he said. "It might help somehow in the intelligence community, in terms of trying to find out where they come from and trying to find some trails onto them. But on the operations side we just call them targets."
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Falluja for this article and John F. Burns reported from Baghdad.
--------
Iraqis training for defense role worry about lack of time or money
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Mar 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040331112613.icemx68a.html
Time and money are the biggest challenges facing the new Iraqi army, Iraqis taking a crash course for future defense officials here said Tuesday.
"We are in a hurry to establish the army because it is part and parcel of security and sovereignty. However, the time element is not always on our side, and the army requires a lot of financial resources," said a former Iraqi general.
"That is the major challenge for us, therefore: time and money," he said, speaking through an interpreter.
The Iraqi Defense Ministry, which was abolished after the war, is scheduled to reopen April 15, according to coalition officials in Baghdad.
The Pentagon is racing to get an Iraqi defense establishment up and running well before the handover sovereignty June 30.
About 50 Iraqis have been put through a three-week program here on how to manage a military in an open, democratic society, and another 25 more are scheduled to take the crash course.
Devised by the US Institute for Peace and the National Defense University's Near East/South Asia Center for Security Studies, the program introduces future officials to developing national security strategies, allocating resources and accounting for them in a representative government.
Human rights and military-civilian relations also are part of the curriculum.
Six Iraqis taking the course sat down with reporters here to talk about their experiences. Pentagon officials insisted that they not be identified because of security fears.
They included the former general, a former brigadier, two former colonels, and two civilians -- one of them a woman.
Many spoke bitterly of their experience with political repression under the regime of ousted president Saddam Hussein, and said they were taking back ideas about how to create a military that coexists with civilians and preserves human rights.
The group's sole woman, an engineer who identified herself as Numa, said she had learned, "How to define a problem, how to define risk, and how to deal with them in the right manner."
Hassan, a chemical engineer and former colonel who left the army in 1984, said he had learned the value of "listening to other opinions without any anger."
Some said concerns about ethnic rivalries within the military were overblown, insisting a new, professional army would remove the need for militias.
"We have no problem with who is going to hold a certain post, regardless of his faction or his race," said the general, a Shiite who identified himself as Fahid. He said he was married to a Sunni and had sisters married to Kurds.
"If a Kurdish person is going to have a certain post, or a Sunni or a Shia or whatever, nobody is going to ask what is his background. Otherwise, we will have realized nothing," he said.
"We have already agreed that the army is out of the political game, and if right now a person is a part of a political party and he is going to join the army, he has to get rid of his political relations with his party," he said.
The group foresaw the formation of a much smaller military than during the Saddam years, oriented at defending the country's borders.
They pointed to the country's unprotected borders as the source of militant Islamic violence plaguing Iraq since the US invasion.
"The real danger is that Iraq has been an open field for anyone who hates the United States," said Hassan, the former colonel.
Another former colonel, who also identified himself as Hassan, noted that other countries of the region "did not feel the wind of freedom" that Iraqis felt with the fall of Saddam, and were unhappy with the country's new direction.
"I would like to assure all of you, that the Iraqi people -- both our elite and the men of the street -- are going to defend freedom," he said.
-------- israel / palestine
Jewish Settlers Spark Clash in Arab Area
March 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Jewish settlers with assault rifles slung over their shoulders moved into two buildings in a crowded Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem on Wednesday, sparking clashes between Israeli troops and Arab residents.
Palestinians, who claim east Jerusalem as the capital of a future state, condemned the incident, saying it proved Israel was more interested in expanding settlements than in making peace.
Israel says it will never relinquish the sector of the city it captured from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war. In recent years, hawkish Jewish groups, with the backing of hardline governments and foreign investors, have bought several east Jerusalem properties to strengthen Israel's hold there.
Also Wednesday, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia cautiously welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, but only as a first step in peace efforts. Israel should not use the Gaza withdrawal as a cover to annex West Bank settlement blocs, as some in Sharon's government have proposed, Qureia said.
``In principle, we welcome the Israeli withdrawal from our Palestinian land,'' Qureia told Palestinian lawmakers. ``But for any withdrawal to have meaning for us ... it should ... be followed by a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, too.''
Qureia also condemned Palestinian suicide attacks, which have killed more than 400 Israelis over the past 3 1/2 years of violence, saying they are deepening hatred between Israelis and Palestinians and are an obstacle to peace. The attacks also damaged the Palestinian economy and gave Israel cover to continue building settlements and a controversial West Bank barrier, Qureia said.
At daybreak Wednesday, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews lugged boxes, chairs, tables and potted plants into buildings in the Silwan neighborhood of east Jerusalem. A van packed with sofas and couches arrived. Settlers hauled a water tank onto the roof of one building and installed a generator.
Settlers said eight families are to move into two buildings -- a seven-story apartment building and a smaller house -- that investors bought for them. The Arab owner of the house disputed the settlers' ownership.
Clashes erupted in a narrow alley, and Palestinian residents began throwing stones from rooftops.
Police and soldiers ran onto nearby rooftops and fired tear gas at the demonstrators. Troops pulled young men out of nearby homes, beat one with a nighstick and dragged away six others in handcuffs.
Nine Palestinians were arrested for stone-throwing, and six police officers were hurt, police spokesman Shmulik Ben-Ruby said. At least three Palestinians were seen bleeding.
The settlers said they were members of the Committee for the Renewal of the Yemenite Village in Shiloah -- Hebrew for Silwan. They said their aim was to re-establish a Jewish presence in the neighborhood, home to the hotly disputed holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Al Aqsa Mosque compound.
Daniel Luria, a committee spokesman, said a community of Jews from Yemen had been established in the area 122 years ago. In 1938, the last of the families were forced to leave during Arab riots, he said.
``Sixty-six years later we have returned Jewish families to the area with the idea of living side-by-side with the Arabs,'' Luria said, adding that three of the eight families are of Yemenite heritage so ``it's really closing a circle.''
Sharon adviser Raanan Gissin said the Jewish group had the right to live where it wanted in the city. ``There are no Jerusalem settlements ... all of Jerusalem is under Israeli sovereignty since 1967,'' he said.
Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat accused Israel's government of supporting settlers.
``(The settlers) have taken the law into their own hands before; they are taking the law into their hands now with the assistance of the government,'' he said.
About 200,000 Israelis live in 11 Jewish neighborhoods built on land captured in 1967, said Menachem Klein, a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. Another 2,000 Israelis live among 220,000 Arabs in Muslim and Christian neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, about half of them in the Muslim Quarter and as many as 400 in the Silwan neighborhood, Klein said.
Early Wednesday, Israeli soldiers destroyed the Hazon David settlement outpost -- a tent and a shack used as a synagogue -- near Hebron in the southern West Bank.
Several hours later, about 300 settlers trying to rebuild the outpost clashed with security forces. Police said a police officer was lightly wounded and a 14-year-old boy was brought to the hospital in moderate condition.
Sharon said Tuesday he would hold a binding referendum within his hardline Likud Party on his withdrawal proposal. The pullout would mark a reversal for Sharon, who has long been a driving force behind expanding Jewish settlements. In 1987, he moved into an apartment in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, but he has rarely used it.
Meanwhile, Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian militant who tried to launch an attack on a Gaza Strip settlement, Palestinian security sources said. The army said its soldiers opened fire when they saw three men crawling toward a military outpost.
Also Wednesday, a member of the Islamic militant group Hamas was charged in an Israeli military court with planning to kill former Foreign Minister David Levy.
Majdi Abu Khamis was accused of trying to solicit another Palestinian to murder Levy, a Likud Party lawmaker. The second Palestinian backed out of the plot, according to the indictment issued by the military prosecutor.
--------
Sharon, Facing Criticism, Plans Vote on Gaza Pullout
March 31, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/international/middleeast/31MIDE.html
TEL AVIV, March 30 - Faced with sharpening opposition from his coalition partners and catcalls from leaders of Likud, his own rightist party, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon moved Tuesday to shore up his political base by agreeing to hold a party vote on his plan to withdraw from some Israeli-occupied territory.
At a deeply unsettled moment in Israeli politics, Mr. Sharon was greeted with applause and boos at a meeting here of Likud's governing body, its central committee.
The members were pleased with Israel's killing last week of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas. But they were angry or confused about the withdrawal plan and worried about Mr. Sharon's legal difficulties, including a corruption inquiry that could lead to an indictment.
"We are at a crossroads," said Dubi Sandrov, 55, a settler from the northern West Bank. "Things are very difficult, both the situation itself and the way we feel."
Mr. Sharon led Likud to its present dominance in Israeli politics. He was introduced with praise for the killing of the Hamas leader, whom the Israeli government called a terrorist mastermind. But he had to raise his voice to be heard over the clamor of critics and supporters in an auditorium of the Palace of Culture here.
"We shall have to take very difficult decisions," Mr. Sharon warned, in a reference to his withdrawal plan. He added that the prime minister bore "the supreme authority," but that "major decisions of this kind should be brought to a democratic vote."
He said he would hold a referendum among the party's 200,000 members. The vote will not take place until after a scheduled meeting on April 14 between Mr. Sharon and President Bush.
Mr. Sharon's action came as the United States stepped up its own efforts to win international support for Israel's proposed pullout. Mr. Bush's top aides on the Middle East met Tuesday with senior envoys from the European Union, the United Nations and Russia in Brussels to discuss ways they can all encourage Mr. Sharon to proceed with the withdrawal, while continuing talks with the Palestinian leadership, according to a European diplomat familiar with the Brussels session.
The most fervent members of Likud dream of a Greater Israel that includes the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the lands Israel occupied in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Unlike Mr. Sharon, the party officially rejects the creation of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.
Some of the central committee members gave voice to a feeling of betrayal. "When the old Arik takes responsibility for destroying Ahmed Yassin, the terrorist, we have nothing to do but clap and say, `Go for it, Arik,' " said Gidon Ariel, 40, a marketing consultant from the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim, using Mr. Sharon's nickname. "But when he talks about withdrawal, I know what our enemies are hearing: Terrorism works."
Saying the Palestinian leadership is not now a partner for a peace agreement, Mr. Sharon is seeking to create what he calls more secure boundaries by withdrawing settlers and soldiers unilaterally from most or all of the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank. He says Israel otherwise risks eventually losing more of the territory in some sort of internationally imposed agreement.
To blunt the attacks of his right-wing critics, Mr. Sharon wants Mr. Bush's agreement to the plan, including support for Israel to retain some large blocks of settlements in the West Bank.
An adviser to Mr. Sharon said that the prime minister could not be certain of winning the referendum, but that support from Mr. Bush would clearly help. "I think it's going to be a tough battle," he said, adding that it would be at least a month before the vote could be held. "And God knows what could happen in that month," he added.
Mr. Sharon is newly vulnerable because Israel's attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, is weighing whether to indict him in a bribery investigation. That process is likely to take more than a month. Two far-right government ministers seized on the issue on Tuesday to argue that he should not go to Washington until the matter was resolved.
Mr. Sharon, who has not been charged with a crime, is suspected of accepting bribes from an Israeli developer. An indictment would probably bring down his government, Israeli politicians and political analysts say.
"For the prime minister's honor, he shouldn't go to the United States in a situation where his political future is uncertain," Effie Eitam, the housing minister and the leader of the National Religious Party, told Israel radio.
Within Likud, Mr. Sharon's legal predicament appears to have earned him more sympathy than suspicion. Likud members have traditionally nursed a sense of grievance against Israel's social establishment - the source, members appeared to think, of Israel's prosecutors.
"It's character assassination," Avi Amit, 29, an employment counselor, said of the furor in the Israeli news media over the corruption inquiry. He said he supported a withdrawal from Gaza, though not the West Bank. He rejected any suggestion that Mr. Sharon, a general turned politician, had broken the law.
"My father raised me on Sharon, on the wars, on the victories," he said. "It's not serious to say that a man like this, a real hero of Israel, would do something like this."
Others rejected any withdrawal. Yoav Bloom, 43, of Tel Aviv, said he had been a member of Likud since he was 17. But he said he would not remain a member if the referendum passed, as he believed it would. The general membership of Likud is on the whole not as far right as its 3,000 elected representatives on the central committee.
"I will not be a member of a movement that will give up one stone of the state of Israel," Mr. Bloom said.
Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
-------- philippines
Philippines foils Islamic bomb plot
By Stuart Grudgings Manila
March 31, 2004
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/30/1080544487286.html
The Philippines yesterday foiled a "Madrid-level" terror attack in the capital, Manila, arresting four suspected Islamic militants and seizing a large amount of explosives.
Security officials said four suspected members of the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah militant groups were arrested in raids in Manila.
"We have pre-empted a Madrid-level attack on the metropolis by capturing an explosive cache of 80 pounds (36 kilograms) of TNT, which was intended to be used for bombing malls and trains in Metro Manila," President Gloria Arroyo said on national television.
"The most dangerous terrorist cell of the Abu Sayyaf has been dismantled," she said, crediting a police-military taskforce that conducted the raids in the suburbs of Manila.
The disclosure of the plot comes three weeks after bombs exploded in four packed commuter trains in the Spanish capital Madrid just before national elections, killing 190 people in an attack blamed on militants linked to al-Qaeda.
In Britain, anti-terror police said they had arrested a number of suspects in dawn raids yesterday across London and south-east England.
A police spokeswoman said the operation was still going on and could not confirm TV reports that bomb-making equipment had been discovered.
Detectives from London backed up by officers from four other police forces carried out the raids under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Britain's most senior police officer, Sir John Stevens, has said British police and MI5 were investigating a "definitive link" between this month's Madrid bombings and al-Qaeda supporters based in Britain.
They are trying to establish whether Islamic militants based in Britain gave money and logistical support to the Madrid bombers.
Sir Stevens also said an attack on Britain was "inevitable" following the Madrid attacks.
The Madrid attacks precipitated the defeat of Spain's government in the elections in a backlash against its support for the Iraq war.
Dr Arroyo is considered a firm backer of the US war on terror. All the candidates running against her in the national elections on May 10 have expressed support for the US-led war on terror and the Iraq invasion.
Abu Sayyaf is a Muslim kidnapping group based in the south, but security officials said some members had moved to Manila after the Government cracked down on kidnappings there. Washington and Manila have linked it to the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.
Jemaah Islamiah, also linked to al-Qaeda, has been blamed for a series of bomb blasts in Manila in December 2000, including one on a train, that killed 22.
The southern Philippines is home to four Muslim rebel groups, including Abu Sayyaf, and it is suspected that the region is a training ground for Jemaah Islamiah.
-------- space
US creeping towards weapons in space
31/03/2004
BreakingNews.ie
http://breaking.examiner.ie/2004/03/31/story140741.html
The United States is "crossing the rubicon into space weaponisation" with a little-known missile programme, a senior government official said today.
The unnamed Bush Administration figure said the US military was trying to "creep up" on the issue of putting weapons in space.
It comes amid reported fears in the White House that America could one day face a "space Pearl Harbour" attack.
"We're crossing the rubicon into space weaponisation," the official told the US network ABC.
He said: "A lot of folk in the Air Force are leery of lobbing weapons into space, so they want to creep up on this issue.
"It's very hard to kill anything in the Missile Defense Agency budget - it's politically protected." The US Missile Defence Agency has set aside €55.4m for a new satellite weapons programme called the Near Field Infrared Experiment.
Officials have said the programme is a defensive one, and designed primarily to collect data on exhaust plumes from rockets launched from earth.
But the satellite also contains what is called a "kill vehicle" which can destroy objects - such as a missile - moving through Earth's lower orbit, or knock out other satellites.
The Missile Defence Agency was created out of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
It was tasked with developing missile defence systems, including those in space.
About a year earlier, before he was appointed as Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld chaired a commission investigating space security.
The commission concluded in January 2001 that space defence had to be taken seriously to prevent a "space Pearl Harbour".
But space experts warned that putting weapons into orbit could mark the start of a new arms race.
"There are two paths and we are at a crossroads now," Laura Grego, space weapons expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists told ABC.
She added: "Space is a beautiful research laboratory above the atmosphere. Putting that in danger to fulfil a Star Wars fantasy doesn't make sense."
-------- un
U.N. tackles link between war and environment at global forum
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
By Hans Greimel,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-03-31/s_22342.asp
JEJU, South Korea - The United Nations was examining ways environmental problems trigger war with the hope of developing an early warning system to avoid conflict, at a global summit that closes Wednesday.
The hope was to appoint a scientific team to research connections between regional conflict and water shortages, soil degradation, and pollution, said Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
Identifying the links can serve as an early warning system, letting policy makers know that if certain environmental problems crop up they could spur political tensions, he said.
It is commonly assumed by conservationists that environmental degradation can spike tensions and possibly trigger conflict. Problems are often thought to stem from environmental refugees who flee floods, water shortages, dust storms, or pollution and venture into new areas where they are not always welcome.
But more research is needed because the links aren't well understood, Nuttall said.
Global environment ministers gathering for the three-day U.N. conference are considering a resolution to appoint a group of scientists to study the matter, Nuttall said. The discussions in Jeju, a South Korean resort island, will also form a basis for talks next month in New York with the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development
That meeting will assess progress toward the United Nation's target of halving the number of people with no access to safe drinking water or basic sanitation by 2015. Globally about 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, while another 2.4 billion lacked access to basic sanitation, UNEP said. Nearly 5,000 children die every day from diseases caused by a lack of water.
The current forum will try to generate a Jeju Initiative that will identify concrete measures to be taken to reach the U.N. goals of improvement, Nuttall said.
Supplying safe water is increasingly difficult because the world population is growing so fast, by about 77 million people a year, UNEP said.
-------- us
Pentagon Drops Plan To Test Internet Voting
Security Fears Derail $22 Million Experiment
By Dan Keating
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37319-2004Mar30.html
The Pentagon has decided to drop a $22 million pilot plan to test Internet voting for 100,000 American military personnel and civilians living overseas after lingering security concerns, officials said yesterday.
The program ran into trouble late in January when a group of academics who had been invited to review the system released a report saying the Internet was so insecure that the integrity of the entire election could be undermined by online voting. Two weeks later, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz decided not to allow Internet ballots to be counted in the presidential tally. At the time, the Pentagon said the program would go forward on an experimental basis.
Now, the Pentagon has decided that even the experiment is over.
"It's not that it's never going to go in test mode," said Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood. "It's that right now we're not going to do it. We have to step back and look at everything that we've done for two or three years in this thing. But right now we're not going forward."
Academics hired to monitor online voting and Accenture eDemocracy Services, the firm running the system, said the experiment could have been an important learning experience. Since the electronic ballots wouldn't really count, the experiment could have included "white hat" hackers hired specifically to test the security of the system by attacking it.
The program had been set up to run in 50 counties in seven states. The cancellation came while the online system was being tested for certification with the federal voting standards, so no certification decision was ever made, said Meg McLaughlin, head of eDemocracy Services.
Under legislation passed in 1986, the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program is responsible for helping about 6 million military and civilians overseas cast ballots. The difficulty of getting paper ballots to foreign countries and back to election offices in every county was highlighted during the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida, when different counties adopted different rules for accepting or rejecting late ballots from overseas.
The American pullback is in direct contrast to Europe, where governments are pursuing online voting in an attempt to increase participation. The United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium have been testing Internet ballots.
"In Europe, they have such a well-developed process for doing experiments in elections, which provides them with so much good information compared to the ad hoc way that we do things. They're able to learn stuff and improve their elections," said Thad Hall, co-author of "Point, Click and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting."
"The Europeans are much more willing to move slowly and experiment. It's how they do public policy. In the U.S. we can't be bothered. Instead, we buy things and implement things."
Hall and other advocates have said that the security concerns have to be weighed against the advantages of improving access and turnout.
"It is a way that young people might be brought more into the system," said Georgetown political scientist Diana Owen, who has studied how new media are used in politics. "You could say it's more convenient and a technology that they're comfortable with."
The French government decided last year to test Internet voting for citizens living abroad. Because it was adopted only three months before the election for the Expatriates High Council, the pilot was done only for people living in the United States. More than 60 percent of the voters used the Internet system rather than mailing ballots or going to an embassy or consulate to vote in person. The trend in declining turnout among French expatriate voters was stemmed in the United States, while it continued elsewhere.
"It proved that people agreed and accepted voting through the Internet," said Robert Del Picchia, a member of France's Senate who represents French citizens living abroad and who sponsored the proposal.
Online voting will be expanded to other countries in the next Expatriates High Council vote in two years, he said, and there's a proposal to allow online voting for citizens abroad in the presidential election that year, too.
"So now we will try with more people, 450,000, and we will see the results," Del Picchia said. "We have to go slowly. We start with one and then another, and then we will go on."
--------
Military Sex Assault Likened to 'Friendly Fire'
Wed Mar 31, 2004
By Deborah Zabarenko
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=SXVHOQTIREXQMCRBAELCFFA?type=domesticNews&storyID=4716638
WASHINGTON - Sexual assaults by U.S. military men against their female comrades-in-arms amount to a different kind of "friendly fire" in the Iraqi-Afghan theater, victims' advocates told members of Congress on Wednesday.
"While these friendly fire attacks leave no trail of blood, they leave many damaged souls in their wake," Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, told a panel of women lawmakers. "They rob our country of the services of many we have trained and nurtured to protect us."
There have been 129 cases of sexual assault reported to the independent Miles Foundation in the current theater of operations -- Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Bahrain -- but only 27 were reported to military officials, according to foundation chief Christine Hansen.
One reason victims are reluctant to tell their commanding officers is the lack of confidentiality and a blame-the-victim mentality within the military, Hansen told the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues.
Others may fear that simply reporting an attack will hurt their careers, especially for victims who are officers, who may be charged with such disciplinary infractions as fraternization, conduct unbecoming an officer or adultery while their rapists face nominal penalties and stay in the military, Hansen said.
"The more you report, the more they say you're making it up," said Jennifer Machmer, a U.S. Army captain who was sexually assaulted in Kuwait in 2003 and is being medically discharged from the military as a direct result.
RAPE AND 'DEJA VU'
Machmer said she had reported extreme sexually abusive language by a subordinate in 2001, and was sexually abused by a military chaplain to whom she went for marital counseling in 2002.
She did not report the 2002 incident, but when she was assaulted in Kuwait in March 2003, "There was no way I could file away another violation, so I went and I reported it within a half hour."
The investigation took until August, but Machmer said the man was never punished and remained in the military, while she is being discharged with a 30-percent temporary retirement benefit.
Rep. Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat who chairs the panel, said the U.S. military's inadequate response to sexual assault "brings on a disconcerting sense of deja vu ... and once again, military leaders are 'shocked, shocked' that there's a problem."
Slaughter said she had monitored the issue since the 1991 hearings into the Tailhook scandal, when 140 male Navy and Marine officers were accused of abusing 90 women at a meeting in Las Vegas.
More recently, an Army sexual scandal involved the rape in 1996-97 of female recruits by male drill sergeants. Last year, U.S. legislators pointed to a "culture of discrimination" at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs after female cadets made allegations of sexual assault.
Anita Blair, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for personnel, told the panel that a Pentagon task force on military sexual assault was due to report to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by April 30.
-------- propaganda wars
Radiation claims power to frighten
Wed, Mar 31, 2004
http://www.bordermail.com.au/newsflow/pageitem?page_id=707960
AFTER viewing a recent report on a current affairs television program regarding "dangerous levels of magnetic radiation in the home", I am compelled to make a comment.
For many years we have been regaled with stories of hidden threats to our health and welfare by various electrical appliances.
Mobile phones, microwave ovens, radio stations, to name three, appear to be claimed to have an as yet unexplained link with health, possibly related to the high electrical frequencies used by these items.
But in my observation there |has never been a problem with |the normally accepted magnetic radiation from the 50HZ AC power supply.
The television program interviewed a purported electrical engineer who conducts magnetic radiation surveys in homes and factories.
It was claimed that the radiation from toasters and plug-in power packs from minor appliances had "engulfed the home in strong magnetic fields" which "from latest research can cause damage to our DNA".
Also, the radiation in this case was overcome with a "professionally fitted plastic sleeve" (to the water-pipes) which "broke the high current through the house".
There seems to be an anomaly here.
How can a plastic sleeve prevent radiation?
It is a well-established fact that the entry point of the water pipes to any home is (or was) normally connected to the earth point at the meter box.
In some cases the water pipes may unintentionally conduct part of the current supply.
But if this is so, enclosing it in plastic will not prevent magnetic radiation.
If a plastic sheath is the answer to radiation, surely all the electrical wiring of a house is shielded?
The plastic case enclosing the plug-in power-pack would also prevent any radiation!
It was claimed that a radiation of up to 5mG (milli-Gauss) was okay and that radiation levels up to 3000mG were common and a serious risk to health.
This is odd, because the Earths magnetic field is said to be 1 Gauss, that is, 1000mG.
Another point I cannot reconcile is that the electricity generation industry and related power lines must be of extreme danger to its workers.
Thousands of people are working in extremely high voltage environments, such as in power stations and substations and on power line structures, where the voltages are many thousands of volts and the electro-magnetic radiation would be really "sky high" (a term used to describe a home in the program being cited).
Just wait until the unions hear about this!
Why is it that there are so many "experts" who make odd claims such as this one?
All they are doing is raising the FUD level Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the average layperson.
ERIC EULENSTEIN,
Wodonga
--------
A Clash on Classified Documents
Politics Drives Some Releases, Critics Say
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37357-2004Mar30.html
The Bush administration's uneven decision-making on which sensitive documents it declassifies has prompted criticism that the White House is selectively releasing information to justify its foreign policy decisions and respond to political pressure. Before the war, for example, the administration kept classified the intelligence community's significant dissents to the overall assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It later released those dissents, however, after the CIA was criticized for failing to accurately assess Iraq's weapons -- a reversal cited by those who argue such decisions are being based on politics, not national security.
To make its case for war at the United Nations, the White House also released recent audiotapes of intercepted conversations -- usually among its most highly guarded secrets -- between Iraqi military officers.
Last week, in the most recent case under scrutiny, the CIA began reviewing for declassification testimony that former White House counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke gave last year to the congressional panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The CIA launched the effort at the White House's request, after Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, asked it to do so.
Goss said his staff made the request after he "was absolutely sure there was going to be a huge uproar" over Clarke's claims that Bush had ignored terrorism before September 2001. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) also asked for the declassification.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), ranking member of the committee, criticized Goss yesterday for bypassing what she said were normal House procedures in seeking declassification.
"This is a stunning violation that can only feed the impression that sensitive materials are being selectively declassified for political reasons, rather than national security or the public interest," Harman said. "The message this sends is that for partisan political reasons, classified material can be reviewed and selectively released."
The House rules permit the chairman to request a declassification review but say he must get the committee's approval for release, which Goss said he intends to do.
Harman also called on the White House, which often reviews CIA declassifications before documents are released, to "recuse itself from any declassification decisions and preserve the integrity of this process."
Goss disputed Harman's allegations that he had broken House rules: "I've followed the committee's procedure, and I'm puzzled by this eleventh-hour protest" from someone who has pushed to get as much of the joint inquiry's work declassified as possible.
But on the broader issue of classification, Goss, a former CIA officer, said that "the whole classification process is mayhem," and that too much is classified by U.S. agencies.
Declassification of material for political reasons "is not unheard of, but it's not routine, and every administration confronts it," said the nation's top classification manager, J. William Leonard, director of the government's Information Security Oversight Office. "But you don't have to be a whiz to figure out these are unprecedented times we're living in."
For information to be classified, the agency that produced it must describe the damage to national security that its release would create, Leonard said. But, he added, policymakers may consider other, subjective issues, such as the public interest served by disclosure.
"What we're learning is that classification is a political tool," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "It can be used to advance or retard a particular agenda."
A 25-page version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was released in October 2002. It made clear-cut statements about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capabilities in two pages of "Key Judgments."
"Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons. . . . [I]t will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade," the section said, adding that "most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
When a fuller, eight-page version of the key judgments section was released after the war, it contained lengthy, well-marked dissents by some in the intelligence community. On the question of whether certain aluminum tubes were imported to Iraq for use in nuclear weapons programs, the first document said: "Most intelligence specialists assess this to be their intended use, but some believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs."
The second document included a dissent by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research (INR), which said it did not believe there was "a compelling case" that Iraq was working to acquire nuclear weapons. And INR and the Department of Energy questioned whether the tubes were well-suited for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
The second declassification, said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a group devoted to declassifying secrets, showed the administration was not "protecting sources and methods. They were creating a document for public consumption that argued for the war."
--------
Publicist Hired to Tell Iraqis of Democracy
March 31, 2004
By HEATHER TIMMONS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/international/europe/31SPIN.html
LONDON, March 30 - The United States-led occupation in Iraq has enlisted a British public relations firm to help promote the establishment of democracy in the country.
The firm, Bell Pottinger, based in London, is creating television and radio commercials that will explain to Iraqis how and why the United States is handing over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government in June. The campaign will begin next week on local and satellite stations in Iraq.
Bell Pottinger, a subsidiary of Chime Communications, has decades of political experience. The chairman, Lord Tim Bell, ran publicity campaigns for Margaret Thatcher.
Earlier this month, Bell Pottinger signed a $5.6 million contract with the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. The company hopes to work for the United Nations after the June transition, in order to publicize Iraq's first democratic election.
The commercials will carry a "message of participation in the democratic process, and the hope for the future that democracy brings to Iraq," said the occupation's communications planner, Michael Pierson, in a telephone interview from Baghdad.
"We're trying to keep people informed about the process and persuade them to participate in it," Lord Bell said in a telephone interview. He declined to provide other details.
Some advertising experts said they were wary about the idea of using television spots to push political change and encourage the growth of democracy.
Learning about democracy through advertising could make it seem like a product that should be blamed or abandoned if things do not go well, said Harry C. Boyte, senior fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
Others noted that early efforts to advertise in Iraq, particularly a 2001 campaign conducted by the former advertising executive Charlotte Beers, fell flat.
"I hope Bell Pottinger learns from the real fiasco that was Charlotte Beers' campaign," said a London Business School professor, Patrick Barwise. Bell Pottinger should be sure to ask basic questions, he said, including "Why are we here?" and "Why is there a problem?"
--------
US newspaper ban plays into cleric's hands
By Nir Rosen,
Mar 31, 2004
Asia Times
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FC31Ak01.html
BAGHDAD - Thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites staged a demonstration in Baghdad's al-Hurriya square on Sunday to protest the closure of al-Hawza newspaper, the mouthpiece for radical Shi'ite leader Muqtada Sadr. They demanded an apology from the Americans for insulting the Shi'ite seminary, and all Iraqis.
Al-Hawza was published every Thursday and sold throughout Iraq. The text of Muqtada's sermon from the previous Friday was displayed on the front page. News of Muqtada's latest activities, such as an invitation to all his representatives in Iraq to meet him in Najaf, or his latest pronouncement, were also on the front page. Al-Hawza contained articles obliquely critical of moderate leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Typical headlines were "Kurdistan always belonged to Iraq", "America kills then apologizes" (with a picture of Americans abusing an old man), "America releases prisoners after the Hawza threatens them", "Iraqis of all religions and sects refuse to watch half naked women on television".
A very large headline in block letters was "Facing the arrests and assassinations from our common enemy: And do not let them tell you that we have many enemies, we only have one [implying the Americans]". Muqtada is quoted in headlines as saying "America benefited from the events in Karbala to make a war against me", "even if they establish a government I will not be a part of it", and "the American veto makes the Iraqi Governing Council unimportant, but if it removes its veto I will support it".
An article called "Pens serving the Zionists" was about a Kuwaiti journalist who criticized Muqtada. "The Iraqi Governing Council appoints American woman as Iraqi ambassador to US" says a disapproving article. Another one criticizes the Kurds for "killing the nation".
"We are still under the rule of Saddam [Hussein] but with an American face" began one article, explaining that "one of the successes of America's occupation here is the distribution of moral corruption by selling the pornographic movies and liquor and hashish that America brought with it to Iraq. They are showing pornographic movies in the cinemas and people are drinking alcohol in the streets and showing bad and immoral movies on the Hebrew media network [a reference to the American-established Iraqi media network] and Hura TV [a US government-produced television station] and even in children's movies in order to create a new generation that is far from the Islamic religion and has Western ideologies that do not oppose the Anglo-American Zionist ideology. We ask the Governing Council about these malicious operations against Islam and why they do not prevent them."
After many American threats to arrest Muqtada in the past, the American occupying forces accused al-Hawza of fomenting violence against them and closed its offices for 60 days, padlocking and chaining the doors, handing the editor a letter signed by US civilian administrator L Paul Bremer, explaining that the newspaper had violated a ban on fomenting violence. The letter cited several instances in which the paper had slandered the occupying forces, such as an article entitled "Bremer follows the steps of Saddam" and an article accusing American helicopters of firing rockets at an Iraqi police station. Buses brought protestors into the central Baghdad al-Hurriya circle, where they waved flags and shouted "No to America!" and "We don't want another Saddam!"
Though the Americans might be attempting to silence a vocal and vitriolic critic of their efforts in Iraq, the move plays directly into Muqtada's hands. Hamid Bayati, the spokesmen for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, confirmed that the move would only "provoke Muqtada Sadr's supporters", and confirm Iraqi suspicions that Americans are hypocritical and selective in their application of democracy. The occupying forces have already punished alJazeera and al-Arabiya, two Arabic satellite news networks, for broadcasting programs the Americans found distasteful.
In other articles in al-Hawza, it accused American soldiers of "killing policemen in Faluja, even though they knew they were police", and it urged the police to "stop protecting the occupation forces from the Iraqi armed resistance".
Interestingly, unlike other Shi'ite leaders and publications, the resistance was not referred to negatively with words such as "terrorist" or "criminal". Instead of the typical pejorative descriptions, al-Hawza chose the more positive "Iraqi armed resistance".
Another article warns that "America is untrustworthy and this is why [Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini called it the big devil because it came specifically to destroy Islam and to halt the export of the Islamic Revolution from Iran". Yet another article claims that "American forces have started throwing their dead into the sea, fearing public opinion [in America] and also fearing that people will vote against the young [George W] Bush in the next elections". The newspaper urged people to "watch the Iranian Sahar channel [which specializes in Islamic programming] because it shows the real aims of American politics and the hidden truth of the British and their goals ... After [US Secretary of State] Colin Powell failed in the United Nations he came to Iraq to represent the American leadership of the coalition forces and to visit the areas attacked with chemical weapons in order to harm the people. They want to show that America is the peacemaker of the world. America hates Islam and Muslims as proven by the American slogan the war against terror."
Another article called "Our enemies the Masons" describes Masons as "a secret movement joined with the Zionists and possessing millions of soldiers throughout the world of all nations and religions and it takes over the weak minds and weak spirits who have no religion. It is founded by Jews and it aims to destroy all other religions."
An editorial stated that "everyone knows that the West is a bitter enemy to Islam. No sane man can believe that America supports the interests of Muslims". The editorial speaks of "the many insults against religious figures ... statements denigrating the religion of Muslims ... the perversion of anything said by Muslims to make it sound like they support terrorism".
The editorial describes Bremer as "a Zionist Christian follower of US President George Bush. Because Bremer is as foolish as the man who sent him, he thought that it would be easy to erase Islam from the souls of 25 million people in Iraq and complete his and the West's desire to erase Islam from the earth ... does this third rate intelligence agent and terrorism expert think he can erase the religion of God? Bremer does not know more than the intelligence officers of the previous regime who tried to remove Islam from the hearts and minds of men and women whose faith was strengthened as a reaction. Bremer is foolish because he failed in the goal of trying to erase Islam from the lives of people who lived with and by Islam for many centuries. These people were only defeated when they strayed from Islam."
The author complains that "the great religious leaders kept silent". He quotes the Prophet Mohammed as saying that "He who witnesses a bad deed must change it with force. If he cannot he must try giving advice. If he cannot he must try to change it with his heart." The author states that the "religious leaders" (implying Sistani) cannot even do these things. Bremer is accused of being hostile to Islam and giving tacit approval to the looting of Iraq's cultural heritage and oil as well as the violence in Iraq.
The punishment of yet another media outlet can only confirm the worst views Iraqis have of Americans and draw parallels with the censorship imposed by the previous government. Shi'ites view themselves as an oppressed and persecuted sect. Muqtada Sadr himself often warns of his impending martyrdom. By closing down the newspaper the Americans are supporting these fears. and continuing to squander the goodwill they might have received from Shi'ites in the beginning of the occupation, when they had disposed of Saddam. Al-Hawza only had a circulation of a few tens of thousands. Muqtada reached his supporters through his sermons, CDs of which were then sold throughout the country, through statements posted on the walls of his local offices, and through the sermons of his local representatives. Closing al-Hawza will not prevent him from reaching his audience, it will only increase his supporters.
-------- war crimes
10-Year Term for a Serb in War Crimes Called Light
March 31, 2004
By MARLISE SIMONS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/international/europe/31TRIB.html
THE HAGUE, March 30 - Miroslav Deronjic, a confessed war criminal and an important prosecution witness in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the United Nations tribunal here, received a modest 10-year sentence on Tuesday. The sentence, suggested by the prosecution and accepted by two judges, seemed so light that it openly angered the leading judge in the case.
Mr. Deronjic, 49, once a high Bosnian Serb official, painted many powerful pictures in court. He described how weapons, advice and plans flowed into Bosnia from Belgrade in the early 1990's while Serbs and Bosnian Serbs prepared for war.
He spoke with eloquence and detail of the strategy to drive Bosnian Muslims from lands wanted for Serbs. He took responsibility for ordering the burning and razing of Glogova, a Muslim village where at least 64 people were killed.
For Mr. Deronjic, his guilty plea and the evidence he subsequently provided in five different trials appear to have paid off. But Judge Wolfgang Schomburg, in a strongly worded dissent, wrote that Mr. Deronjic's 10-year sentence was not proportional to the "heinous and long-planned crimes," and violated the spirit and the mandate of the tribunal.
Instead, he wrote, the crimes deserved a sentence of "no less than twenty years."
The judge's reaction is the latest example of the discomfort felt by a number of court officials since the tribunal has embarked on its new strategy to encourage plea bargaining as a way to speed up cases and clear its backlog.
The tribunal is under intense pressure, from the United States among others, to prepare itself for closing down, which means ending all investigations this year and completing trials by 2008.
As part of that exit strategy, the court is aiming to focus on the most senior suspects of war crimes from the 1990's wars and to send lower-level cases back to special courts now starting up in the Balkans.
But several judges have complained that the haste and the recent series of plea bargains is leading to sloppy work and to sentences that are too lenient.
In his dissent Tuesday, Judge Schomburg also criticized the prosecution for focusing only on the crimes of one day, in one village, Glogova, when the accused had far wider responsibilities.
He noted that there had been three different indictments, and that the last one selected only limited and arbitrary facts from one small village that was part of "a larger criminal plan."
Glogova was a small, almost entirely Muslim village of 1,913 people in eastern Bosnia that the Crisis Staff, or local war command, wanted for ethnic Serbs, according to the indictment of Mr. Deronjic.
In 1992, he ordered the police to disarm the people of Glogova, while a Serbian police chief from Belgrade assured them they would be safe because they had turned over their weapons.
But on May 9, 1992, Mr. Deronjic ordered an attack in which, he admitted in court, the village was razed and burned by members of the Yugoslav Army and the local police.
At least 64 men, women and children were killed on the spot, terrorizing the others. He said that survivors were forced on to buses and deported to Muslim-held territory.
Mr. Deronjic confessed that he was present during the operation. No appeal is expected.
--------
Serbia Votes to Pay Milosevic During His War Crimes Trial
March 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/international/europe/31SERB.html
BELGRADE, Serbia, March 30 - Serbian lawmakers on Tuesday awarded salaries, legal fees and other financial perks to former President Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian war crimes suspects who are being tried by a United Nations tribunal in the Netherlands.
The new law will also cover travel and mailing expenses incurred by families of the two dozen Serbian war crimes suspects who are imprisoned in The Hague.
It was adopted by a 141-to-35 vote in Parliament and illustrates the surge of nationalism in the Balkan republic.
"Serbia is finally defending itself against the fabricated charges in The Hague," said Zarko Obradovic, a lawmaker who is a member of Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party. "We will never forget how Milosevic was kidnapped and illegally sent there."
The law was opposed by the pro-Western Democratic Party, which led the rebellion in 2000 against Mr. Milosevic and extradited him to the United Nations tribunal in 2001 to face charges stemming from the Balkan wars of the 1990's.
"The law is basically intended to help Slobodan Milosevic," Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic told Parliament, calling him "the one who impoverished this country."
"The poor country will be financing its rich citizens," Mr. Svilanovic said.
The Democrats lost the elections in December and the nationalists, who consider the United Nations tribunal anti-Serb, took over Serbia's government.
The new law was drafted by the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, whose leader, Vojislav Seselj, is awaiting trial in The Hague. It was approved by Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia and the ruling conservative coalition.
The law, government officials say, is intended to give Serbian suspects a better defense at the United Nations tribunal. The defendants' telephone calls and other legal expenses would be covered, and families would be able to mail packages to the prisoners at government expense.
Until now, the United Nations tribunal paid basic fees for the lawyers and covered some family visits.
Because Mr. Milosevic is defending himself, the law will pay the fees of his numerous legal advisers. Prison visits by his wife, one of the toughest critics of the previous Democratic-led government, and his two children will be paid for by Serbia's taxpayers.
Serbian government officials fear that if Mr. Milosevic and other top Serbian suspects are convicted and sentenced on war crimes charges, Croatia and Bosnia - where Mr. Milosevic led his war campaigns - could win multibillion-dollar lawsuits against Serbia in the World Court, a separate United Nations institution also based in The Hague.
"If the genocide charges against Milosevic are dropped by The Hague tribunal, so will be the genocide charges against Serbia" in the World Court, said the hard-line nationalist leader Tomislav Nikolic.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
President to Let Rice Testify About 9/11
Bush Will Submit to Session With Entire Panel
By Mike Allen and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37465-2004Mar30?language=printer
President Bush reversed himself yesterday and agreed to permit his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify in public and under oath before an independent commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Capitulating on a second point, Bush said he will submit to questions in a private session with all 10 commissioners, backing off his previous demand to meet only with Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton. Bush added a new restriction by saying he will appear only with Vice President Cheney at his side.
Rice and other Bush aides had said repeatedly, and as recently as Monday, that her refusal to provide formal testimony was a matter of constitutional principle and that to do so could erode the separation of powers between the executive branch and Congress, which created the commission.
Bush said yesterday that he was willing to make the concession because he had received written assurances by the commission and congressional leaders that he will not be setting a precedent for future inquiries. He told reporters he had "ordered this level of cooperation because I consider it necessary to gaining a complete picture of the months and years that preceded the murder of our fellow citizens on September the 11th, 2001."
The decision represented an effort to quiet a controversy that threatened to undercut Bush's credibility on his handling of terrorism, a credential that is vital to his reelection strategy. It also resulted from his aides' conclusion that the showdown with the commission was drowning out White House messages on other issues. A top Bush political adviser called the controversy "a thick layer of smoke that you couldn't pierce with any other messages."
The standoff between the White House and the commission had been going on for weeks, but public attention increased greatly after last week's testimony by Richard A. Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism director, that the administration failed to respond quickly enough to warnings about al Qaeda in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Commission members, who questioned Rice in private for four hours in February, have said they are anxious to get her public testimony regarding discrepancies between White House statements and Clarke's assertions.
As Bush left the White House press room after reading a four-minute statement, he ignored questions about why he had changed his mind and why he did not do so sooner.
Kean and other commissioners praised the White House decision. "We want to understand the nature of the decision-making at the highest levels of government," Kean said. "We've got to try to clear up those discrepancies as best we can."
But Kean warned that the commission may not be able to release a public version of its report by the July 26 deadline because the document will have to undergo an extensive review of classified material by the Bush administration. The timing raises the possibility that the White House and the Sept. 11 commission could be locked in another dispute in the middle of the presidential campaign season.
The White House accommodation marked a setback for a three-year effort, led by Cheney, to enhance the powers of the presidency in relation to those of the legislative branch. In addition to using the separation-of-powers argument, the White House had also contended that such an appearance could inhibit the candor of the advice that would be provided by advisers to future presidents.
The White House had made a similar argument in fighting the release of the records of an energy group led by Cheney, a dispute that is before the Supreme Court. Democrats argued that the sequence of events in the Rice matter showed that Bush's principles lasted only until they conflicted with political expedience.
Bush allies on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington said Rice had undercut her position by repeatedly granting high-profile television interviews to rebut Clarke, and in the process discussing at length the very subjects that were of interest to the commission.
"The president's aides finally realized that the most important element of this president retaining power was for him to remain president," said the political adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Bush's inner circle does not like to discuss deliberations.
Administration officials said Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser, and some other top aides had been arguing for some time that Rice should testify. The officials said White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales had been exploring for 10 days or more how she could be forthcoming while protecting the institution of the presidency.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett said that with the attention given to the commission hearings in the past week, "the process was beginning to obscure the substance and the president had to then make a decision about competing principles." Bartlett described those principles as cooperation with the commission and defending the powers of the presidency.
Bush discussed possible options during phone calls from his Texas ranch Saturday, and Sunday he directed Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. to find a way for Rice to satisfy the commission without setting a dangerous precedent.
White House aides had said they were seeking a compromise, such as the public release of a transcript of a future private commission session with Rice, but officials said commission members refused to yield.
The final agreement on the Rice testimony and the Bush and Cheney interview was reached about 8 p.m. Monday during a conference call between Gonzales and the commission leaders, Kean and Hamilton, according to an account by Kean. The White House then set to work on its formal offer to the commission, which was considered and unanimously accepted by the 10-member panel at a closed-door meeting yesterday morning, Kean said.
The agreement specifies that the commission cannot tape-record the session with Bush and Cheney but can bring along one note-taker, Kean said. The deal does not preclude the White House from recording the session, he said. Bush and Cheney will not be under oath, Kean said.
Gonzales made the offer yesterday morning in a two-page letter to Kean and Hamilton stipulating that the commission "must agree in writing that Dr. Rice's testimony before the Commission does not set any precedent for future Commission requests" and "must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice."
Gonzales said he had received assurances from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) that "in their view, Dr. Rice's public testimony in connection with the extraordinary events" of Sept. 11 "does not set, and should not be cited as, a precedent for future requests for a National Security Advisor or any other White House official to testify before a legislative body."
Over the past six months, the commission has battled the White House over access to documents and witnesses. The panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, has issued two subpoenas to the federal government for aviation and military records and twice threatened to do the same for access to presidential briefing materials. The panel also fought with the White House over an extension of its statutory deadline for issuing a report, which was originally set for May 27.
Former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), a commission member, said yesterday that by resisting reasonable requests from the commission, the White House kept repeating the same error. "Given their political expertise, it's surprising they keep making these kinds of mistakes," Kerrey said.
The families of several Sept. 11 victims had increased pressure on the White House by calling on Rice to testify after they hailed Clarke's public apology to them. The Family Steering Committee, a group that advocated the commission's formation, said in a statement that the restrictions demanded by Gonzales could hinder the commission's ability to pose follow-up questions and to share the results with the public.
Bush said Rice will testify "so that the public record is full and accurate."
"The commission knows its responsibility: to collect vital information and to present it to the American people," he said. "And I know my responsibility, as well: to act against the continuing threat and to protect the American people."
--------
NEWS ANALYSIS
When Goals Meet Reality: Bush's Reversal on 9/11 Testimony
March 31, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/politics/31ASSE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ASHINGTON, March 30 - When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took office three years ago, they made no secret of their intention to restore presidential powers and prerogatives that they believed had withered under the onslaught of Washington's cycle of televised, all-consuming investigations.
But time and again, that effort by the Bush White House has fallen victim to political reality. It did so once more on Tuesday, when the president made a four-minute appearance in the White House press room to announce that he was giving in to demands from the 9/11 commission that he had resisted for months.
His decision to reverse course, dropping his claim of executive privilege preventing public, sworn testimony by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was part of a distinct pattern that has emerged inside this highly secretive White House.
The first reaction to most demands for outside inquiries, or for details about energy policy decisions or intelligence concerning Iraqi weapons or Nigerian uranium, has been to build walls: Mr. Bush, or more often Mr. Cheney in his stead, asserts a clear, inviolate principle that the president and his advisers need the freedom to gather information, develop policy and exchange ideas in private.
But eventually other forces come into play. Gradually pressure builds until Mr. Bush's advisers - including Ms. Rice herself in this case, several officials said - determine that the cost is too high.
"It was only in the last few days, down at the ranch, that the president began to think that the public wasn't getting the right impression about our cooperation with the commission," one of Mr. Bush's most influential advisers, Dan Bartlett, his director of communications, said Tuesday. "It was a debate all about process, and he wanted to shift it back to the substance."
Mr. Bartlett did not explain why that decision had taken so long, since the sparring with the commission had been going on for months. Other administration aides say it takes time to move the president and Mr. Cheney, citing an ingrained reluctance on their part to give ground.
"I think it goes to a deep feeling, much of it surrounding Cheney and his office, that the powers of the presidency were eroded for years and that this administration has to claw them back," one senior American diplomat who has sat in on some White House strategy meetings said Tuesday. "Then the pressure grows. And grows. And now people know that if you keep it on long enough, these guys will give way."
In fact, Mr. Bush and the vice president resisted the creation of the 9/11 commission itself for more than a year after the terrorist attacks, saying a public airing of what had gone wrong among intelligence agencies, in the White House and at the F.B.I. would inevitably detract from a focus on fighting terrorism. They cited the example of the Pearl Harbor inquiry, which was not undertaken until years after the Japanese attack.
But eventually the demand, even from some Republicans, for a full inquiry into what had led to history's biggest attack on American soil overwhelmed the Bush team.
The next fight concerned whether the commission could see the most highly classified documents in government: the President's Daily Brief, the intelligence warnings that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice and only a handful of others receive each morning. After months of negotiations, Mr. Bush granted access to four commission officials.
Mr. Bush has also resisted the forming of another commission, to examine the intelligence failures that led to a great overestimation of Iraq's weapons stockpiles; as Democrats cried cover-up, he created one. Most telling was the uproar over how the president had come to assert, in a State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa. It took a month of news accounts before the White House declassified a National Intelligence Estimate, and conceded that the evidence was so weak that Mr. Bush should never have uttered the statement.
"They wait until a gallon of blood has been shed," one administration official said.
The leaders of the 9/11 commission seemed to sense that, this official added, and bided their time as pressure built and Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief, declared that Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice, in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, dragged their feet in developing efforts to fight Al Qaeda. On Monday the chairman of the commission, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean, Republican of New Jersey, upped the ante and demanded that Ms. Rice testify under oath and "under the penalty of perjury." The deal was struck within hours.
The exception to this dynamic has been Mr. Cheney himself, who, despite the shaking of heads within the White House, has steadfastly resisted all calls that he release information from the administration's energy task force, which he headed. That case has become fodder for Democrats, and on April 27 it goes to the Supreme Court. White House officials say this refusal to make some accommodation is the exception precisely because the issue is Mr. Cheney's own and so has only an indirect political effect on the president.
Not surprisingly, though, White House officials see events in a light very different from one that depicts a president prepared to cave in to intense pressure. Mr. Bartlett argues that such an image is a creation of Washington's talking heads.
"We never said we were opposed to a 9/11 commission," he said, "only that we had concerns about timing."
Similarly, he argued that Mr. Bush's initial resistance to the idea of creating a Department of Homeland Security had arisen from concerns about reorganizing the government "in the midst of a war."
Certainly other administrations have had to back down, on issues big and small.
"Everybody does this sometimes," said Samuel R. Berger, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, who could be seen chatting with Ms. Rice at a White House ceremony Monday afternoon, just as the administration was deciding to give in to the commission's demands. "And whenever you do it, you say you are not setting a precedent."
But Mr. Berger, who is advising Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign, said he thought that in the case of the 9/11 commission, "the position that they would not fully cooperate was always untenable, in the light of public opinion."
Mr. Bush's bet now appears to be that by having Ms. Rice testify, possibly as early as next week, he can get the issue of cooperation off the front pages and try to regain ground on the substantive questions: Did the administration do all it could before 9/11 to prevent the attacks? Have the miscommunications between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. been resolved?
Ms. Rice's testimony will pave the way for interviews the commission tried to seal for months, with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves. As part of the same deal, they will answer questions in private and not under oath, but will permit questioning from all the commissioners and have dropped limits on how long they will testify.
They will appear together, and thus presumably be able to correct each other's memories. And in the end, it is their performance - behind closed doors but likely to leak quickly - that may prove the most politically crucial.
--------
Commissioners Eager to Question Rice
Focus on Pre-9/11 Policy Development For Terrorist Threat
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37470-2004Mar30.html
Members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said yesterday that they will closely question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on the claims made last week by former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke: that the White House did not urgently react to warnings of an impending terrorist attack and waited too long to develop a response plan.
The battle between the two White House aides that has played out for more than a week in Clarke's book, at the commission's most recent hearing and in the media will be reenacted to some extent when Rice testifies publicly and under oath.
"We want to hear from Dr. Rice about the development of policy in the first eight months of the Bush administration to the kind of threats and dangers that were apparent to her before 9/11," commission chairman Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and a former New Jersey governor, said at a news conference yesterday.
"We want to talk about the day of, and the immediate response of, the White House," he continued. "We want to understand what substantive differences there are, perhaps in testimony, between Dr. Rice and any other witnesses."
The disagreements between Rice and Clarke center more on matters of emphasis than questions of fact. Clarke, who led counterterrorism efforts under three presidents, proposed on Jan. 25, 2001, a series of measures to combat the al Qaeda terrorist network and its Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan, but the administration did not adopt a formal set of policies until the days before the attacks on New York and Washington.
Clarke pointed to this delay and other alleged incidents to bolster his argument that, while the Clinton administration made battling al Qaeda "the highest priority," the Bush administration "considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue" during its first eight months.
While the Clinton White House held near-continuous meetings and actively sought information in response to warnings of a terrorist attack before the millennium celebrations, the Bush White House was more lackadaisical when confronted with similarly urgent warnings during the summer of 2001, Clarke has claimed.
Rice has heatedly disputed those characterizations during recent television interviews and media events, portraying the Bush White House as keenly focused on the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda but intent on undoing the mistakes of the previous administration. In an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" broadcast Sunday, Rice said: "We needed to build a new strategy that had a chance this time to eliminate al Qaeda."
Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska senator and a Democratic member of the commission, said in an interview yesterday that two key questions for Rice will be whether the Bush team ranked terrorism as a significant priority before the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and, if not, why not.
"The contradictions [between Rice and Clarke] are really centered on how serious did you regard terrorism and where did you put it on the list?" Kerrey said. "When you came into transition, what did you regard as the number one strategic threat to the United States? What did you regard as the number two threat? . . . They had criticized the Clinton administration's policies during the campaign and set out to change those policies. That's really the central question."
Timothy J. Roemer, another Democratic commissioner, said he will focus on several topics when questioning Rice: how urgently the administration viewed the al Qaeda threat; how quickly they responded with strategies; and whether there was a workable plan handed over by the Clinton administration.
"The administration engaged in a bottom-up review of the al Qaeda policy," said Roemer, a former Indiana congressman who participated in a congressional inquiry into intelligence failures before Sept. 11. "Did that review ultimately result in a continuity of policy [rather than] subsequent policy?"
Clarke writes in his book, "Against All Enemies," that senior Bush officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, were largely uninterested in bin Laden and al Qaeda and were focused instead on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Furthermore, Clarke writes, President Bush approached him the day after the hijackings and urged him to investigate any possible Iraq tie to the attacks.
Rice said "the president asked a perfectly logical question. . . . 'Did Iraq have anything to do with this, were they complicit in it?' This was a country with which we'd been to war a couple of times. . . . It made perfectly good sense to ask about Iraq." She also said "Iraq was put aside" when it became clear al Qaeda was responsible and that the administration would focus on invading Afghanistan.
It is not clear how much the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States will focus on the question of Iraq and its impact on U.S. counterterrorism policy, however. The panel's reports have so far largely avoided the issue, and Lee H. Hamilton, the panel's Democratic vice chairman, cautioned yesterday that examining the Iraq war "is not in the mandate of the commission. That's a very important foreign policy question, but it's really not in our responsibility."
-------- courts
Court Hears Cases on Agents' Actions Abroad
U.S. Calls Laws Crucial in Terror, Drug Wars
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37663-2004Mar30.html
A Bush administration lawyer urged the Supreme Court to uphold the authority of federal agents to make arrests abroad and to curtail the rights of foreigners to sue the U.S. government or corporations for human rights violations abroad, in a pair of cases the administration has called crucial to its ability to fight terrorism and drug trafficking.
Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement told the court that U.S. law enforcement would be crippled by a federal appeals court's rulings in favor of a Mexican doctor who alleges he was kidnapped in Mexico by the U.S. government and one of its Mexican agents.
Those rulings, Clement said, "turn the established separation of powers regime for dealing with issues of international law on its head," giving the judiciary more foreign-policy power than the executive branch and precluding "federal agents from making arrests abroad even when foreign governments consent."
At issue are the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and the Alien Tort Statute. The first one provides for lawsuits against the federal government for alleged personal injuries, while the second has been interpreted by courts to permit suits in U.S. courts for alleged torture or other violations of international human rights law abroad.
Humberto Alvarez-Machain, a Mexican doctor seized in the slaying of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena -- but later acquitted by a federal court -- says his arrest in Mexico was illegal. He sued the U.S. government under the FTCA, and Jose Francisco Sosa, the Mexican who seized him on the United States' behalf, under the Alien Tort Statute.
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, ruled that Alvarez-Machain could sue the United States because drug enforcement agents have no authority to carry out arrests on foreign territory, and that he could sue Sosa because the "arbitrary" arrest violated international law.
The Bush administration and Sosa are supported by business groups and foreign governments, which see in the case an opportunity to end litigation against them spawned by the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that a federal appeals court interpreted in 1982 to permit human rights lawsuits.
In their view, the law, which says that "district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action for an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States," did not create a right to sue.
U.S. corporations have been the target of recent lawsuits that seek damages for alleged collaboration in human rights abuses in such countries as Burma and apartheid-era South Africa.
"There are too many cases creating too much havoc for no good reason," Sosa's attorney, Carter G. Phillips, told the court. "Enough is enough."
Alvarez-Machain is backed by human rights organizations that say the Alien Tort Statute has evolved into a powerful tool for holding accountable wrongdoers who would otherwise be outside the reach of law. They note that, in more than two decades, no federal court has held otherwise -- and the executive branch supported that view until the Bush administration.
In the background of the case is concern that, during the current war against terrorism, the United States may make common cause with foreign governments and individuals whose actions may run afoul of international law.
Upholding the 9th Circuit's judgment "will not undermine national security. It will only uphold the values that made this country great," Alvarez-Machain's attorney, Paul Hoffman, told the high court.
Because these cares are so complicated, the court held 90 minutes of argument instead of the usual hour. But the justices' questions gave little indication of how they might ultimately rule.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor hinted she thinks the court could uphold the government's authority to arrest terrorists abroad without ruling on the Alien Tort Statute.
"I wonder if it isn't wise to look at the statutory grounds used by the 9th Circuit and let Congress deal with the law," she observed to Clement.
The cases are Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, No. 03-339, and U.S. v. Alvarez-Machain, No. 03-485. The court is expected to rule by July.
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Supreme Court upholds tank searches at border
March 31, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040330-105259-2912r.htm
U.S. border inspectors can disassemble and search a vehicle's gas tank for drugs or other contraband that might be hidden without violating the owner's constitutional privacy rights, the Supreme Court said yesterday.
The unanimous decision, based on the high court's ruling that the government has a "paramount interest" in protecting its borders, was described as a victory for the Justice Department, which had argued in support of the searches as a way to capture drug smugglers and would-be terrorists.
The court said border inspectors could conduct random searches even if they did not have specific information a gas tank contained contraband, because the United States, as sovereign, had the "inherent authority to protect, and a paramount interest in protecting, its territorial integrity."
"The government's interest in preventing the entry of unwanted persons and effects is at its zenith at the international border," wrote Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. "Time and again, we have stated that searches made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact they occur at the border."
The ruling overturned a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in San Francisco that the searches violated constitutional guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure. That ruling involved the 2002 indictment of Manuel Flores-Montano, arrested when 80 pounds of marijuana were found in his gas tank after entering California from Mexico.
Chief Justice Rehnquist noted that in the past five years, there have been 18,788 vehicle drug seizures at Southern California ports of entry, and that 4,619 of those seizures were made from gas tanks - about 25 percent. In addition, he said, instances of people smuggled in and around gas tank compartments were discovered at the ports of entry of San Ysidro and Otay Mesa in California "at a rate averaging 1 approximately every 10 days."
"We have long recognized that automobiles seeking entry into this country may be searched," he wrote in the seven-page opinion, adding that while the border inspectors were justified in disassembling the tanks because of the potential for drug trafficking or other crimes, they had to put them back together if nothing was found.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Robert C. Bonner called the decision "a forceful and reasoned affirmation" of the agency's border search authority, which he described as "a cornerstone of our nation's ability to prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering this country."
"Now, more than ever before in our history, the need to secure our borders is basic to the safety of the United States," Mr. Bonner said. "The Supreme Court's strong opinion reaffirms the broad legal authority we need to accomplish our mission."
After his indictment, Mr. Flores-Montano filed a motion in court to suppress the marijuana found in the gas tank, discovered at the Otay Mesa port of entry on the California border with Mexico.
A Customs Service inspector said Mr. Flores-Montano avoided eye contact and his hands shook when he was asked for his passport. The inspector also said the gas tank sounded solid when he tapped it with a screwdriver and a customs drug-sniffing dog signaled that the vehicle contained narcotics.
The inspector said a mechanic removed the tank, where the inspector discovered the marijuana.
Justice Department Solicitor General Theodore Olson told the appeals court its ruling had created "an appreciable risk of encouraging terrorists to use gas tanks as a means to avoid the detection of explosives or other hazardous substances crossing the country's borders."
Mr. Olson said the need to protect the border outweighed the "modest intrusion" of an individual's privacy rights.
----
Court considers foreigners' right to sue
March 31, 2004
By Jeffrey Sparshott
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20040330-090550-9382r.htm
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday considered whether foreign citizens have the right to sue in U.S. courts for breaches of international law in their home country.
The final ruling may affect U.S. companies that operate overseas, human rights cases and national security efforts.
The court considered the Alien Tort Claims Act, passed by the first Congress in 1789 - probably to combat piracy and assaults against ambassadors but increasingly used by human rights groups against multinational companies operating in developing nations.
The case before the Supreme Court does not involve any companies but legal experts said it could set a precedent for dozens of cases working their way through lower courts.
Justices may also set aside the question of whether foreign nationals can sue for human rights abuses in U.S. court, and rule on a narrower question of whether U.S. law enforcement can make arrests in foreign countries, the starting-point for the case before the court.
Humberto Alvarez-Machain, a Mexican citizen, was kidnapped from his Guadalajara, Mexico, office in 1990 and brought to the United States, where he was wanted for participating in the torture and murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agent. Mr. Alvarez-Machain was acquitted and subsequently sued one of his abductors, Jose Francisco Sosa, in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort statute.
Lower courts found for Mr. Alvarez-Machain and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed the decision.
Attorneys for the Bush administration and Mr. Sosa yesterday said that the original act does not create a right for aliens to use U.S. courts for personal injury claims based on violation of international law.
If the Supreme Court accepts the argument, lawsuits under the Alien Tort law would be severely restricted or eliminated.
Several Alien Tort cases are pending, including complaints against ChevronTexaco Corp. for abetting the Nigerian military as it killed villagers who protested the company, energy firm Unocal for abuses in Burma, and 20 firms such as IBM, Citigroup and General Motors for activities in apart-heid-era South Africa.
Business groups said that a raft of such suits could chill investment and trade, limit economic policy as a tool of foreign policy and ultimately harm the U.S. economy.
Human rights groups contend that the law is one of the few tools available to force torturers, perpetrators of genocide and other political killings to pay for their actions.
Justices yesterday probed both sides, asking why Congress would not simply amend or remove the law if they did not want foreign citizens to use it, how national security and actions against terrorists would be affected, and how broadly they should rule to close the case.
"Let Congress have a look at this," said Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, suggesting a legislative change would be easy.
Justice Antonin Scalia questioned why the case would be brought in the United States, rather than Mexico. He also asked why courts, and not the executive and legislative branches, should be left to determine what constitutes international law.
"I find it to be a serious interference with the ability of the political branch to conduct foreign affairs," he said.
-------- death penalty
U.N. Court Orders U.S. to Review Cases of Mexicans
March 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-World-Court-Mexico-US.html?hp
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- The International Court of Justice ruled Wednesday that the United States violated the rights of 51 Mexicans on death row and ordered their cases be reviewed.
The United Nations' highest judiciary, also known as the world court, was considering a suit filed by Mexico claiming 52 convicted murderers weren't given their right to assistance from their government.
``The U.S. should provide by means of its own choosing meaningful review of the conviction and sentence'' of the Mexicans, presiding judge Shi Jiuyong said.
Shi said the review, in all but three cases, could be carried out under the normal appeals process in the United States.
But for three men who have already exhausted all other appeals, the court said the United States should make an exception and review their cases one last time.
The court found that in the remaining case, the convict had received his rights and his case didn't need to be reviewed.
Mexican officials praised the ruling as ``a triumph of international law'' and said they were confident the United States would comply with the court's order.
Arturo Dager, a legal adviser with Mexico's Foreign Relations Department, said it will be an important legal tool for Mexican inmates in the United States.
``Of course we have full confidence that the United States will comply with the court's ruling,'' Dager said, adding that if it doesn't, Mexico could ask the U.N. Security Council to issue a resolution urging it to do so.
``Mexico was not vindicated. The rule of international law was vindicated. Of course we are confident the United States will fully comply with the ruling,'' said Juan Gomez Robledo, Mexico's ambassador to the Netherlands.
He said Mexico ``doesn't contest the United States' right as a sovereign country to impose the death penalty for the most grave crimes,'' but wants to make sure Mexico's citizens aren't abused by a foreign legal system they don't always understand.
Washington had no immediate reaction. U.S. Ambassador Clifford Sobel referred comments to the Justice Department.
Even if Washington accepts the decision, it was unclear if federal authorities will be able to enforce it or compel individual states to abide by it.
Under the court's statute, its judgments are ``binding, final and without appeal.'' Its rulings have rarely been ignored.
At the heart of the Mexico-U.S. case is the 1963 Vienna Convention, which guarantees people accused of a serious crime while in a foreign country the right to contact their own government for help, and that they be informed of that right by arresting authorities.
The world court is charged with resolving disputes between nations and has jurisdiction over the treaty. It found that U.S. authorities hadn't properly informed the 51 men of their rights when they realized they were foreigners.
In hearings in December, lawyers for Mexico argued that any U.S. citizen accused of a serious crime abroad would want the same right, and the only fair solution for the men allegedly denied diplomatic help was to start their legal processes all over again.
The United States had argued the case was a sovereignty issue, and that the 15-judge tribunal should be wary of allowing itself to be used as a criminal appeals court, which is not its mandate.
U.S. lawyer William Taft argued the prisoners had received fair trials. He said even if the prisoners didn't get consular help, the way to remedy the wrong ``must be left to the United States.''
In its written arguments, the United States said Mexico's request would be a ``radical intrusion'' into the U.S. justice system, contradicting laws and customs in every city and state in the nation.
``The court has never ordered any form of restitution nearly as far reaching as that sought by Mexico,'' the arguments said.
The three men whose cases the court ordered specially reviewed were Cesar Fierro and Roberto Ramos, both in prison in Texas, and Osbaldo Aguilera Torres, in Oklahoma.
Other Mexicans are on death row in California, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Oregon.
In November, the U.S. Supreme Court declined without comment to hear an appeal from Torres based on the Vienna Convention, although Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer wrote opinions.
``It surely is reasonable to presume that most foreign nationals are unaware of the provisions of the Vienna Convention (as are, it seems, many local prosecutors),'' Stevens wrote.
Torres had been scheduled to be executed May 18.
In all, there are 121 foreign citizens on U.S. death row, 55 of whom are Mexican, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
In 2001, a similar case came before the court filed by Germany to stop the execution of two German brothers who also had not been informed of their right to consular assistance. One brother was executed before the court could act. The judges ordered a stay of execution for the second brother, Walter LaGrand, until it could deliberate, but he was executed anyway by Arizona.
When the court finally ruled in 2001, it chastised the U.S. government for not halting the LaGrand execution, and rejected arguments that Washington was powerless to intervene in criminal cases under the authority of the individual states.
Mexican President Vicente Fox canceled a visit to President Bush's ranch in 2002 to protest the execution of a Mexican citizen not mentioned in the world court suit. The visit finally took place earlier this month.
-------- homeland security
Airports' Security Level Lowered
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37344-2004Mar30.html
Washington's three major airports, along with a select handful of others, stepped down from "elevated yellow" alert yesterday, ending more than three months of intense security procedures put in place in December over concerns about a possible terrorist attack during the holidays.
The Department of Homeland Security elevated the nation's alert level to code orange on Dec. 21, amid concerns that international flights bound for the United States and large public events over the holidays would be targeted by terrorists. Dozens of flights to the United States, including British Airways flights bound for Dulles International Airport, were canceled because of security concerns.
The department lowered the alert level to code yellow on Jan. 9. But eight airports, including Washington's three major hubs and other unspecified facilities, were kept on an elevated alert, which many airports came to call elevated yellow.
Brian Roehrkasse, a Homeland Security spokesman, said yesterday that the agency decided to lower the alert level for the airports because of a decline in credible threats to the aviation system.
He said all airports would still have a "significant security presence."
Yesterday, spokesmen for Washington's Dulles International, Reagan National and Baltimore-Washington International airports said they had stopped conducting random vehicle checks, which were required by Homeland Security as part of the elevated security precautions.
Other airports in Los Angeles, New York and Las Vegas also were removed from the heightened alert level, according to aviation sources.
Tow trucks that had been stationed at the curbs of Dulles and National terminals to remove unattended vehicles would be gone , according to Tom Sullivan, spokesman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. BWI spokesman Jonathan Dean said the state transportation police would continue to inspect vehicles as needed, but they had stopped the 24-hour vehicle inspection operations at the airport.
-------- human rights
China Rebuts U.S. Criticism on Rights
As Beijing Touts Progress, Arrests of 3 Women Related to Tiananmen Victims Reported
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35455-2004Mar30.html
BEIJING, March 30 -- Accused by the United States of backsliding on human rights, the Chinese government issued a 40-page white paper on Tuesday describing 2003 as "a year of great, landmark significance for progress in human rights in the country."
The document amounted to a detailed response to the Bush administration's March 22 proposal for a resolution by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights condemning China's human rights record. The paper asserted that rather than backsliding last year, China "adopted a series of distinctively epochal measures for respecting and safeguarding human rights."
These included constitutional amendments adopted March 14 that for the first time offered specific guarantees that the state must respect human rights and legally obtained private property, the white paper said, "thus further confirming the prominent status of human rights protection in China's legal system."
The paper cited new rules limiting the authority of police to jail suspects without trial or arrest itinerants without residence permits. It also declared that authorities have "firmly dealt with violations of human rights involving the extortion of confessions by torture, the abuse of guns and police instruments and other coercive measures." Cases involving 25,736 people in extended detention were resolved, the paper reported, without saying what happened to those whose cases were cleared up.
But even as the white paper was being distributed here, the New York-based organization Human Rights in China reported that three women active in a group called Tiananmen Mothers were arrested Sunday, citing unspecified sources in China.
The three -- Ding Zilin, Zhang Xianling and Huang Jinping -- lost sons or husbands during the bloody crackdown on student protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Since then, they have been campaigning for legal reparations and a reappraisal of the official government version, which says the demonstrators were counterrevolutionaries who had to be put down to ensure stability.
Human Rights in China, which also has offices in Hong Kong, said police told Zhang's husband, Wang Fandi, that the women were being used by foreign and Chinese groups conspiring to harm national security and incite subversion. It suggested the detentions may have been triggered by a video released in Hong Kong featuring Ding, Zhang and Huang that has been taken to Geneva for presentation to the Human Rights Commission.
The white paper on human rights, the seventh since 1991, underlined the Chinese government's irritation at the Bush administration's decision to seek a condemnation of China in Geneva this year after abstaining from doing so last year.
"The Chinese government remains extremely sensitive to international pressure and this white paper is an attempt to rebut that criticism in a comprehensive fashion," Liu Qing, president of Human Rights in China, said in an e-mail from New York.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said last week: "Our goal in sponsoring this resolution is to encourage China to take positive, concrete steps to meet its international obligations to protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the Chinese people." He said the United States was disappointed by China's failure to meet commitments made in U.S.-China talks in December 2002 and is also "concerned about backsliding on key human rights issues that has occurred in a variety of areas since that time."
The U.S. decision has become a rare sore spot in otherwise steadily improving relations.
The paper "will help the international community understand the situation of human rights in China," said a spokesman for the government Information Office, which issued the paper. Without specifying the United States, he added, "It is a strike back and a rebuttal to the distortion and condemnation by foreign anti-China forces."
A day after U.S. envoys introduced the resolution in Geneva, the Chinese government suspended human rights dialogues with the United States, saying the proposal was "severe interference in China's internal affairs" and a breach of good faith given the diplomatic discussions underway.
The resolution, if passed, would not be binding, but would identify China as a human rights violator. Its main significance, as seen from Beijing, is that the United States again criticized China publicly for its human rights record, following on the annual State Department human rights report earlier this year that charged China with regressing on human rights.
Chinese leaders repeatedly have said the country's conditions require slow, careful movement toward human rights standards as understood in the West. Economic development and the need for stability for now must enjoy the highest priority, Premier Wen Jiabao said at a news conference recently.
"Despite the fact that China has made great efforts to promote and safeguard human rights, there is still much room for improvement of the human rights conditions, as China is a developing country with a big population and natural, historical, development-level and other limitations," the paper said. "The Chinese government attaches great importance to existing problems and will continue to take active and effective measures to steadily improve China's human rights conditions and earnestly raise the level of human rights enjoyed by the Chinese people."
In addition, Chinese leaders have stressed that rights to health care, education and freedom from poverty are just as important as rights stressed in the United States such as freedom of speech and assembly or the right to organize politically. As a result, the white paper cited numerous improvements to living standards of China's 1.3 billion people as evidence of improved human rights.
-------- terrorism
U.S. Warns Against Attacks on Commercial Vessels
March 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-philippines-maritime.html
MANILA (Reuters) - An Al-Qaeda-linked regional Islamic militant group might attack commercial shipping in Southeast Asian waters, officials told a conference on transport security Wednesday.
The Malacca Straits west of Malaysia, the world's busiest shipping lane where over a quarter of the world's trade, half of its oil and LNG pass through daily, is a prime target, a U.S. official told a meeting of the 23-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF).
``With terrorists now focused on soft targets, as demonstrated through attacks in Bali, Jakarta and Madrid, we have every reason to believe they will also be attracted to one of the softest targets of all, commercial shipping,'' said William Pope, the State Department deputy coordinator for counter-terrorism.
Asia controls and operates over 40 percent of the global commercial fleet, supplies the vast majority of its crews and builds most of its ships, an Australian government paper said.
``There is every likelihood that al Qaeda or an associated group would use a crude nuclear explosive device or radiological bomb if it could get hold of either and set it off in a port city, shipping strait or waterway,'' the paper said.
Pope said the region is vulnerable to terrorist attacks and maritime piracy.
``We must prepare now to counter this threat,'' he said, reminding delegates of suspected al Qaeda involvement in attacks on a U.S. Navy warship in Aden in 2000 and a French supertanker off the coast of Yemen in 2002.
``We believe al Qaeda continues to have maritime assets that could be used in terrorist attacks,'' he said.
During the two-day conference about transport security, ARF member states agreed to increase cooperation to stop attacks on planes, ships, trains and commuter buses.
Tuesday, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said her government had foiled a ``Madrid-level'' terror attack on shops and trains in Manila by arresting four suspected Islamic militants and seizing a large amount of explosives.
The suspected plot by members of the Abu Sayyaf group comes ahead of May 10 presidential elections, in which Arroyo is seeking a new term, and three weeks after bomb attacks on Madrid commuter trains killed 191 people.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
EPA Faulted on Clean-Water Violations
Consumer Interest Group's Study Details Lax Enforcement at Major Facilities
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37356-2004Mar30.html
The Environmental Protection Agency is failing to act against widespread violations of the Clean Water Act by plants and factories across the country, the U.S. Public Research Interest Group said yesterday based on a study it conducted.
More than 60 percent of all major facilities in the United States, or 3,700 out of 6,184, exceeded their Clean Water Act permit limits on discharges into waterways at least once between January 1, 2002, and June 30, 2003, according to the report. The facilities include manufacturing and electronic plants, as well as wastewater treatment and sewage plants.
"The numbers point out that enforcement is not a priority for this administration, and clearly little to nothing is being done to deter polluters from breaking the law," said Richard Caplan, the environmental advocate who authored the report for PIRG, a consumer advocacy group.
EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman responded that the agency "is already addressing several of the concerns outlined in the report."
"In 2003, EPA conducted its own internal study of EPA and state enforcement programs under the Clean Water Act and identified several areas for improvement," Bergman said. "We are in the process of creating a facility watch list to target state or EPA action at facilities which have a pattern of significant noncompliance. We believe the watch list, when fully implemented, will result in improved compliance of these facilities."
The Clean Water Act, passed more than 30 years ago, aimed to make all waterways fishable and swimmable and eliminate the discharge of pollutants by the mid-1980s. PIRG's study found that many plant operators are violating the federal permits aimed at achieving those goals. The report focused on facilities the EPA classifies as major based on a scoring system that includes such factors as stream flow and proximity to coastal waters. The federal permits govern the amount of pollutants plants can release.
The PIRG report said many major facilities are flouting those rules, exceeding their permit limits on average by more than 600 percent. Nationwide, 436 major facilities exceeded their permit limits for at least 10 of the 18 reporting periods during the 18-month study period. Thirty-five facilities exceeded their permit limits during every reporting period.
"Two decades after the drafters of the Clean Water Act hoped that all waterways would be fishable and swimmable, we find that facilities across the country continue to violate the letter of the law, at times egregiously," the report said.
In a separate report, the public watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) found that EPA's enforcement actions have slowed under the Bush administration. In 2000, for example, the agency made 105 criminal referrals to the Justice Department. But in 2001, after the turnover in administrations, EPA made 42 referrals. The number dropped to 26 in 2002.
"The enforcement doesn't come anywhere close to the extent of noncompliance," said Jeff Ruch, PEER's executive director. "There's high levels of violations, and the EPA's response has been anemic."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Liberal Voices Get New Home on Radio Dial
March 31, 2004
By JACQUES STEINBERG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/arts/31AIR.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Lady Olivia was on the phone from Washington.
And Sam Seder, a nighttime host on Air America Radio, the fledgling liberal talk-radio network, had a question about the clientele of his guest, who identified herself as a dominatrix.
"More Republicans or more Democrats?" Mr. Seder asked.
"Seventy-30," Lady Olivia said.
Mr. Seder's broad grin suggested that that was precisely the answer he had hoped for. Sitting in a windowless studio 41 floors above Midtown Manhattan during a rehearsal on Thursday for the program, "The Majority Report," he shuffled through a sheaf of testimonials downloaded from Lady Olivia's Web site, operated under a different name. He soon inquired about the identities of those Republicans, displaying a particular interest in learning more about "Jon from Washington," who had written, "I enjoyed the corporal punishment more than I thought I would."
"Does his last name," Mr. Seder asked, "rhyme with Chriscroft?"
The exchange yielded no information about the attorney general of the United States. (Lady Olivia's response was little more than a coy laugh.) But it did provide some clues to how Air America, which makes its debut at noon today on five stations with Al Franken, the comedian and political satirist, at the microphone, intends to challenge the hegemony of conservatives on commercial talk radio.
"It needs to be entertaining, it needs to be compelling, it needs to be laugh-out-loud funny," said Jon Sinton, a veteran of radio who is a founder of Air America, a subsidiary of Progress Media. "It needs to foster water-cooler conversation. You need people to go to work and say, `Did you hear what Franken said yesterday?' "
"When people begin to say that," he added, "we will have arrived."
Beyond the satiric, sometimes sophomoric humor displayed during the dress rehearsal for "The Majority Report," which Mr. Seder shares with the comedian Janeane Garofalo, Air America plans to offer a mixture of issue-oriented interviews (with conservatives, as well as liberals), commentary, listener phone calls and news reports, delivered straight, at regular intervals.
But this liberal radio network faces numerous obstacles in capturing a substantial audience, in particular finding a critical mass of stations that will broadcast its voices. The network has already fallen behind in its initial goal, announced last year, of owning five stations by the time it went on the air. As of today it owns none.
Instead Air America has bought programming time on stations with moderately strong signals, but previously low ratings: WLIB-AM in New York, WNTD-AM in Chicago, KBLA-AM in Los Angeles, KCAA-AM in Riverside and San Bernadino, Calif., and KPOJ-AM in Portland, Ore. A San Francisco station is expected to be announced in early April.
By contrast Rush Limbaugh, whom Air America has identified as a chief competitor, is heard on more than 600 stations, including WABC in New York. Sean Hannity, another conservative talk-show host, has a similar reach.
Air America, which has raised more than $20 million, has grand plans for buying stations, or at least all of the broadcast time on stations, in more than a dozen cities by year's end. Many are in Ohio, Florida and other states considered battlegrounds in the presidential election. But since the media ownership rules were eased in the mid-1990's, much of the broadcast spectrum is owned by a handful of companies. Few stations are for sale, and few station owners will give over all of their broadcast day to untested programming.
Then there is the question in radio and conservative circles whether liberals can be entertaining enough for talk radio.
"Sometimes they just sound so grim," said Neal Boortz, a libertarian whose Atlanta-based program is syndicated to more than 180 stations. "My god, the foreboding."
Mr. Sinton said Air America needed to be wary of that tendency.
"The problem with really wonkish policy discussion is that it does not attract or hold a mass audience," he said.
As a result the network's 17-hour weekday lineup has as much if not more in common with "Saturday Night Live" than with National Public Radio. For example, its midmorning show, which begins tomorrow at 9, will have as its hosts Lizz Winstead, a comedian and a creator of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, and Chuck D, the frontman for the rap group Public Enemy.
They will be followed at noon by Mr. Franken, the "Saturday Night Live" alumnus who has evolved into a satirist, and whose co-host is Katherine Lanpher from Minnesota Public Radio. Martin Kaplan, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, will be the host of a one-hour show about the news media in the early evening.
He will be followed, from 8 to 11 p.m., by Ms. Garofalo, whose main experience in radio was playing the role of a talk-show host for pet owners in the 1996 film "The Truth About Cats and Dogs," and by Mr. Seder, who has worked as a comedian, screenwriter and filmmaker.
There were times on Thursday during the three-hour run-through, which was recorded with the expectation of using portions of it on actual shows, that Ms. Garofalo, 39, and Mr. Seder, 37, sounded - surprisingly - not unlike their right-leaning competition.
In an interview with Craig Crawford, a columnist for Congressional Quarterly, the two hosts spent several minutes clobbering the news media, a favorite target of Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Hannity.
"It seems the journalists have really put themselves in the center of the story in a partisan political way," Ms. Garofalo said, speaking of what she called a new form of participatory journalism. Moments later Mr. Seder observed, "Really, most reporters are whores."
And yet the content of most of the program sounded nothing like the fare provided by Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Hannity. Those two popular hosts can usually be counted on to defend President Bush - Mr. Hannity's Web site declares that he is "fed up with all the Bush-bashing" - and whose favorite punching bags include the president's presumed Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry. ("Kerry injured changing positions," Mr. Limbaugh's Web site declared.)
Among others, Ms. Garofalo and Mr. Seder poked fun at Mr. Bush's former spokesman Ari Fleischer ("Is he not shoveling coal in hell now?" Mr. Seder asked); Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser and political strategist (said by Ms. Garofalo to be pursuing "the elusive 18-25 Klan demo"); and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. Seder said he felt sure that he could see Mr. Cheney's hand moving Mr. Bush's mouth on "Meet the Press" earlier this year.)
Ms. Garofalo said that "The Majority Report," its name inspired by a reference to Al Gore's presidential victory in the popular vote in the 2000 election, would also feature substantive interviews. Among the invited guests, she said, are Ben Cohen (the activist founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream), Dr. Joyce Riley (an advocate of Persian Gulf war veterans) and Howard Dean. (Ms. Garofalo was in the audience on the night of the Iowa caucus, before he gave what she described as his "so-called `I have a scream' speech.")
"It's not like we're here to say we're going to be as nasty as right-wingers," Ms. Garofalo said in an interview. "On the left, traditionally, you've got a nicer type of person. You've got a person who is more willing to engage in conversations that have context and nuance, who tend to have more educable minds."
Whether all of these elements can be brought together to make great radio remains an open question. Kipper McGee, the program director of WDBO-AM (580) in Orlando, Fla., which is owned by Cox Communications and carries Mr. Hannity's syndicated program, said that Air America could count on listeners from all bands of the political spectrum, at least early on.
"The old adage, `Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,' sometimes it's true with the remote control or the radio tuner," said Mr. McGee, who has worked in radio for three decades. "In the final analysis, though, whether they survive depends on how good the shows are."
-------
U.K.'s one-man band weathers 3-year protest
British demonstrator began outdoor antiwar vigil before 9/11
March 31, 2004
Henry Deedes / NBC News
By Henry Deedes Reporter NBC News
From the pavement outside London's Houses of Parliament, Brian Haw has been protesting against Western policy in the Middle East since June 2001.
In the Westminster district, Parliament Square is a picture-postcard of the British capital.
Red double-decker buses race black London cabs in the hectic lunchtime traffic. The Houses of Parliament bustle with activity as politicians rush in and out of grandiose doorways.
Overlooking the whole scene, Big Ben chimes gloomily as the midday hour arrives. And, of course, the customary British rain is pouring it down.
But for the past three years another institution has been forged at the heart of London's political center.
"He's down there on the left," sighed a policeman. "You'll see all his banners laid out."
And sure enough, there he stood, busily rearranging protest placards in the cold March rain.
Brian Haw has been protesting against Western policy in the Middle East since June 2001. Leaving his wife and seven children at the family home in Worcestershire, he has sat waving his placards on the pavement outside the Houses of Parliament, washing out of a bucket, and sleeping under a tarpaulin.
"One thousand and twenty-eight days and counting," he said, offering welcome refuge under an umbrella. "And I'll be here a while yet."
Calls for peace Behind him sit a mass of posters and vigils calling for peace in the Middle East. Cartoons lampoon the close relationship between Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush. On one board he has arranged photographs of Iraqi children killed, he said, by American and British bombs during the last gulf war.
"Laser-guided missiles, oh, they're great, aren't they?" he cried.
Henry Deedes / NBC News Brian Haw's posters in Parliament Square protest the sanctions imposed on Iraq, as well as the U.S.-led war, and subsequent occupation of the country.
"Well, we hit the target but we also managed to kill a couple of innocent kids as well. What kind of use is that? He'll bomb anything, that Blair."
Haw originally set up camp in 2001 to protest against sanctions imposed on the Iraqi government. When the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq gave his protests new resonance, he decided to stay.
"They had it all planned out, those Americans," he said. "Cheney. Rumsfeld. They were going to go into Iraq as soon as Bush got in. It was inevitable."
Well-wishers often stop by and give their support.
"I get all sorts here," he said. "Americans who believe what their country did was wrong. Politicians. All types. Not all friendly, mind you. I have had my nose broken three times by people having a go at me while I was asleep."
As cars pass by, a number of drivers vocally make their opinions known. Some of them would rather Haw went back home.
'Freedom of speech' Recently the British press has reported that Blair himself is known to want to get rid of this resilient protester.
"If they banned me they'd look ridiculous," said Haw. "I mean, all that bragging they did about the freedom of speech they brought the Iraqi people and there they are trying to ban me."
Efforts on Haw's removal have been made before. In 2002 however, a high court judge ruled that his protests were an expression of freedom of speech and so he remained.
Haw says he's had enough of Blair. "They used to fly the U.N. flag around here. Can you believe that?" he asked.
"If they'd gone through there to get permission to go to war it would have been veto, veto, veto. They should have kicked Blair and us out."
Of course there is something comical about this one-man band who has defied the government, heckled the visiting president of the United States, and achieved national notoriety all while living it rough on the streets for the past three years.
But since last April, public support in Britain for their involvement in the war in Iraq has plummeted from 64 percent to below 50 percent and many Britons have questioned Blair's motivation for joining the military action.
There may not be a rush to join Brian Haw and set up camp on a cold wet London pavement, but some British people might be starting to believe him.
----
Police attempting to move Brian Haw, Parliament Sq peace protestor
Emma,
31.03.2004
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/03/288262.html
The Metropolitan Police have given Brian Haw until Thursday 1 April to move his peace protest from Parliament Square.
The Metropolitan Police are attempting to remove Brian Haw from Parliament Square. Brian has been protesting against US/UK policy on Iraq (sanctions, war, occupation) and the war on terror since June 2001.
The Police have not decided on what legal basis to remove Brian. Recent newspaper reports suggest that the move may be politically motivated ( http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2696993). A report in the Mail on Sunday on 7 March said that Downing Street are considering introducing a special law against protest in Parliament Square based on the embarrassment being caused by the protest to Tony Blair. The consequences of future protest outside Parliament could be serious. In October 2002 Brian won a High Court action brought by Westminster City Council to remove him on the grounds that Brian was exercising his freedom of expression and assembly under the Human Rights Act. See press release below.
COMPLAIN If you would like to register a complaint about this phone Charing Cross Police Station on 020 7240 1212. Ask for Charing Cross then say you want to register a complaint about the police trying to move Brian Haw. They should make a note of your concern and take your details if you want someone to get back to you.
You could also make a complaint to Commissioner John Stevens' office on 020 7230 1212.
SUPPORT BRIAN There is a chance that the police may try and evict Brian tomorrow. Brian would appreciate any support in case this happens. If you would like to be informed if this happens and kept up-to-date please send an email to emma@drifting.demon.co.uk
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------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
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