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NUCLEAR
GIs Tested For Uranium Exposure
Exposing Bush the liar, the mass murderer, the war criminal
Pakistan Proposes May 25-26 For Talks On Nuclear CBMs
Indian lobby moves bill in US Congress
Iran vows to accelerate cooperation with impatient UN nuclear watchdog
U.N. Presses Iran on Nuclear Program
IAEA raps Iran's nuclear stance
Brazil, UN Negotiating Nuclear Plant Inspection, Ministry Says
Brazil: U.N. Can See Part of Nuke Plans
Brazil Says It Adheres to Conditions of Nuclear Pacts
Brazil says nuclear program purely peaceful
Oyster Creek to spend $10M on security upgrade
It's time for aging Oyster Creek plant to retire
Federal plan announces transportation of nation's nuclear waste
Kennedy Accuses Bush of 'Credibility Gap'
If Bush is So Weak, Why is He so Strong?
MILITARY
Yemen Bought $8Bln Worth Of Russian Arms
EU turns to India's arms market
Tamil Tigers renew threat of war over self-rule
This relationship isn't working
Beijing Moves to Curb Hong Kong's Drive for Democracy
Beijing Asserts New Control Over Election Laws in Hong Kong
Bulgaria and US to hold first joint military exercise
Iraqi Militia Provokes More Clashes
A year on, occupation has failed
Marines, Iraqis join forces to shut down Fallujah
U.S. and Iraqi Forces Seal Off Fallujah as Operation Looms
Transition Date Still Firm, President Says
7 G.I.'s Killed in Iraq Fights Since Weekend, U.S. Says
Face to face with mastermind of Jerusalem suicide bombs
Sharon in a New Threat to Arafat: A Deterrent Message?
US Defense of Israeli Assassinations Is Counterproductive
Jordan Military Court Convicts Militants
Don't Expand NATO!
Serbian Orthodox church says NATO troops beat up priest
Los Alamos Lab helps heat things up in space
Russian Researcher Convicted of Spying
Crunch time for Special Ops forces
US may send more troops as deaths rise
The chaos theory in action
Generals in Iraq Consider Options for More Troops
Private Guards Repel Attack on U.S. Headquarters
U.S. Military Aims To Bolster Response Troop Level Is Called Sufficient
Rumsfeld Leaves Door Open to More U.S. Troops for Iraq
Blade wins Pulitzer: Series exposing Vietnam atrocities earns top honor
Violence in Iraq, Gibson's 'The Passion' and the Forgetting of Empire
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Justices to Rule on Drug Dog at Traffic Stop
Government Workers May Face Drug Test Changes
Air Force master sergeant from Alaska joins no-fly lawsuit
9/11 Panel Plans Hard Questions for the F.B.I. and Justice Dept.
Bombers threaten to create 'inferno'
ENERGY
Danish Parliament Bets on Wind Power
Strict Rules Needed to Prevent Future Blackouts
OTHER
Lead Burden to be Lifted From Diamond Head
Law Would Protect EU Workers From Electromagnetic Fields
IUCN Fosters Middle East Water Solutions
Urban Waves Sicken Surfers
Study heralds molecule in soybeans as baldness beater
ACTIVISTS
From his jail cell, radical environmentalist Tre Arrow
Jump on our Bandwagon
Purged Chinese Reformer Gravely Ill, Haunting His Successors
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
GIs Tested For Uranium Exposure
Associated Press
April 6, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--soldiertesting0406apr06,0,7042521.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_uranium_040604,00.html
FORT DIX, N.J. - The U.S. Army is conducting medical tests on a handful of GIs who complained of illnesses after reported exposure to depleted uranium in Iraq.
Up to six soldiers from a National Guard unit based in Orangeburg, N.Y., have undergone exams at Fort Dix, and three of them remain there under observation, Fort Dix spokeswoman Carolee Nisbet said Monday.
"We are following up on this. We are on top of it. It's not something that has fallen by the wayside," she said.
Of nine members of the unit examined by a doctor at the request of the New York Daily News, four had "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from spent U.S. artillery shells containing depleted uranium, the newspaper reported Monday.
Six of the nine contacted the newspaper after unsuccessfully appealing to the Army for testing because of unexplained illnesses, the Daily News reported.
The soldiers complained of headaches, fatigue, shortness of breath, nausea, dizziness, joint pain and unusually frequent urination.
The exposures apparently occurred last summer when the 442nd Military Police Co. served in Samawah, Iraq. Most members of the unit, which includes many New York police officers, firefighters and prison guards, remain in Iraq.
Military medical officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine conducted testing at Fort Dix, Nisbet said.
The Army would not identify the soldiers or say whether testing revealed contamination or illness.
All National Guard and Reserve soldiers mobilized through Fort Dix receive physical exams upon their return from overseas, Nisbet said. The soldiers who complained of ailments asked for and received a second round of evaluations, she said.
Depleted uranium, which is left over from the process of enriching uranium for use as nuclear fuel, is an extremely dense material that the U.S. and British militaries use for tank armor and armor-piercing weapons. It is far less radioactive than natural uranium.
According to a Depleted Uranium Information Web page posted by the Army, depleted uranium recently provided to the Pentagon by the U.S. Department of Energy contained trace amounts of contaminants like neptunium, plutonium, americium, technitium-99 and uranium-236.
"These contaminants in (depleted uranium) add less than one percent to the radioactivity of (depleted uranium) itself," the Web page said.
"Medical scientists consider this insignificant."
Army spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith would not comment Monday on whether other troops have complained of similar ailments or whether the Pentagon would take precautions aimed at preventing future exposure.
On the Net:
http://www.deploymentlink.osd.mil/du_library/
----
Exposing Bush the liar, the mass murderer, the war criminal
The crude and cruel truth about Iraq
04/06/2004
Pravda (Russia)
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/98/387/12429_Iraq.html
Pravda.Ru presents the bare facts about what George W. Bush and his evil regime has done in Iraq, making the US troops and civilian workers hated among the people who were supposed to welcome them with open arms. We expose the lies and present the truth, based on media reports and eye witness accounts.
The attack against Iraq was planned long before 9/11 - the Bush family had some unfinished business with Saddam Hussein, the man Washington had placed in Baghdad as the equilibrium point between various forces of chaos. The decision not to use the UN Security Council was a sign that there was no causus belli and the order to remove the UNMOVIC and IAEA inspection teams a show of arrogance, based on the fear that nothing would be found. It wasn't.
Colin Powell then lied through his teeth at the UN building in New York, presenting what he claimed as magnificent intelligence work, complete with reports, satellite photographs and mock-ups with arrows and labels, such as "mobile laboratory", which he later claimed were being "driven around the desert in vehicles". A year on, he now claims that the intelligence was faulty. A more decent man would admit that he told a tissue of lies.
There are not, and never were, Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Bush and his regime quite simply lied to their people, lied to the citizens of the world, lied at the UNO and lied to the international community of states.
The heroic liberators of Iraq were supposed to be welcomed by a grateful population. Great care was taken to photograph what were supposed to be cheering throngs. What we saw were a few dozen bemused and shocked citizens watching on as US troops committed acts of vandalism and wanton destruction, to add to the purposeful targeting of civilian infrastructures which have not recovered today.
Western TV reporters are beginning to say they cannot leave their hotels and US reporters are wearing the Canadian maple leaf - or hide behind hijabs.
Why this hatred? Because the United States of America decided to utterly and totally destroy Iraq to pave the way for reconstruction contracts to be doled out to the clique of the corporate elite which dictate the White House's policy (not the voters), some of these without tender.
Paul Bremer is selling Iraq and its people to foreign institutions controlled by Washington. Last October, a law was passed linking the economy to foreign control (Order 39, which cannot be changed by the new government) and instituted special powers for special institutions, controlled by Washington, which will supervise the new Iraqi ministries. Long after the US troops pull out (or retreat), the Project Management Office and the US Embassy in Baghdad will continue to control the reconstruction process and funding. Neither will all the troops leave, since there are plans to station over 100.000 in the country for several years at the 14 permanent military bases being set up around the country, advance bases for strikes against other countries as Washington goes for the throat of the world's richest region in mineral resources.
This is the truth, not the lies spun by Washington about freedom and democracy and evil dictators and WMD.
George Bush's freedom and democracy is translated into horrific statistics about human casualties, the people he said God had told him to save. The "great care" taken by Washington to reduce civilian casualties included the dropping of brightly-coloured, shiny cluster bombs into civilian areas for children to mistake as sweets, only for the explosive fragments to blow up, blowing away their faces, their hands, their legs, their eyes or even their lives. UNICEF estimates that at least 1.000 children - one thousand children - were mutilated for life in this way.
Independent estimates point towards a civilian death rate of between 7.500 and 9.500 and a further 20.000 wounded, including women and children, the elderly and babies, blasted through their roofs by George Bush's freedom and democracy and by the great care of his murderous forces. As for Iraqi soldiers, the estimates are between 13.500 and 45.000 dead and between 40.000 and 135.000 wounded.
Allied casualties are impossible to estimate because of Washington's lies.
Official declarations from the Pentagon stated that 1927 had been wounded, when the Washington Post quoted reliable sources declaring that the number was at least 6.000, three times more.
Between one and two thousand tonnes of depleted uranium was deployed by the invading forces, polluting the atmosphere and water supply for years to come. The country is strewn with unexploded cluster bombs, mines, grenades, 40% of the water supply was destroyed, sewage treatment plants devastated, spreading disease among a population purposefully weakened by a decade of cruel sanctions, while Iraq was disarming.
Electricity supply systems were targeted with such savagery that experts estimate it will take three years to rebuild (a juicy ten billion dollar contract). 7% of the hospitals were hit in military strikes, the country's vaccine supplies were hit, placing 210.000 newborn babies at risk of dying.
As for schools, while Washington likes to show a model school with smiling children to Middle America, the truth is that school frequency rates have dropped to just over 60%, the lowest in the recent history of the country.
George W. Bush is a war criminal, a mass murderer and a barefaced liar. Let this document prove as testimony for any institution with the courage to take this man and his evil clique of cronies, who hijacked their country, democracy and the world, on a murderous ecstasy of assassination and destruction, just because of corporate greed, to the dock in a court of law, where they belong.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan Proposes May 25-26 For Talks On Nuclear CBMs
2004-04-06
Pakistan News Service
http://www.paknews.com/main.php?id=5&date1=2004-04-06
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan : April 06 (PNS) - Pakistan Monday proposed hosting talks on nuclear Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) to India on May 25-26, as part of the road map agreed to between the two sides.
The proposal for hosting expert level talks on Nuclear CBMs was conveyed by Director General South Asia to the Indian Deputy High Commissioner in Islamabad. The proposal forms part of a series of CBMs proposed by the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries who met in Islamabad on February 18. The road map aims at settlement of all outstanding disputes between the two countries and to move towards a durable peace.
The Foreign Secretaries of the two countries are also scheduled to meet again in May or June this year to discuss peace and security, Confidence Building Measures and Jammu and Kashmir. The experts will hold discussions on measures needed to increase confidence on nuclear related matters and report their findings to the Foreign secretaries. The two countries already follow a MoU which elaborates nuclear and some missile CBMs. Some CBMs are already being observed by the two sides.
Pakistan and India annually exchange information on exact location of each others nuclear installations and facilities, through diplomatic channels. The two countries exchange the information according to Article-II of an agreement between the two sides on Prohibition of Attacks against each other's nuclear installations and facilities. The two nuclear armed rivals are gradually moving forward on to the path of improving ties after having fought three wars over Kashmir. The CBMs are to lead to a meeting of the Foreign Minister of Pakistan and the External Affairs Minister of India in August 2004.
----
Indian lobby moves bill in US Congress to deprive Pak from 'ally status'
Tuesday April 06, 2004
Pakistan Tribune
http://www.paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=60914
WASHINGTON, April 07 (Online): Following announcement of US decision to designate Pakistan a "major non-NATO ally" status by US secretary of state Collin Powell on March 18, Indian lobby has become active to press US not to go ahead in its intent to get a final seal of approval by Congress, investigation conducted by this news agency reveals.
The State Department is in the process of notifying Congress of this decision.
If this decision becomes final, Pakistan will obtain priority delivery of defense material and the purchase, for instance, of depleted uranium anti-tank rounds Stockpile US military hardware, participation in defense research and development programs benefit from a US Government loan guarantee program, which backs up loans issued by private banks to finance arms exports.
Sources having access to the US congressmen told Online that the Hindu Lobby had initiated a coordinated response in which they are using many different methods to stop Pakistan's designation.
Their current steps include, a Bill in the Congress: H.R. 4021 By Gary Ackerman (D-District 5 NY) to stop this process was initiated on March 24th, 2004, sources added.
It is further learnt that Multiple petitions, emails, phone calls are currently going out to the members of the Congress to support this bill and to consider other ways to restrict any positive relationship development between US and Pakistan.
The bill moved to Congress by Indian lobby reads: "To amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to require that only countries that have a democratic form of government and that support United States non-proliferation objectives may be designated as major non-NATO allies for purposes of that Act and the Arms Export Control Act".
Section I of the bill contains criteria for designation of MNNA status including (a) Designation- Section 517 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2321k) is amended by striking subsection (a) and inserting the following new subsection: `(a) Designation- `(1) Requirements- The President may designate a country as a major non-NATO ally for purposes of this Act and the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2751 et seq.) only if--(A) the country has a democratic form of government; `(B) the country participates in the international agreements or arrangements described in paragraph (2), or pursuant to an international understanding to which the United States is a party, controls exports of goods and technology in accordance with the standards and criteria set forth in each or those agreements and understandings; and `(C) at least 30 days before designating the country pursuant to this paragraph, the President notifies Congress in writing that the country meets the requirements of subparagraphs (A) and (B). `(2) International agreements or arrangements- The international agreements or arrangements referred to in paragraph (1)(B) are the Waasenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies, the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australia Group, the Nuclear Suppliers' Group, the Zangger Committee, and any other international agreement or arrangement to which the United States is a party that restricts the export of chemical, biological, nuclear, and other weapons and their delivery systems, and effectively restricts the export of dual use components of such weapons and their delivery systems.'. (b) Termination- Section 517 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended by subsection (a), is further amended by adding at the end the following new subsection: `(c) Termination- The President shall notify Congress in writing at least 30 days before terminating the designation of a country pursuant to subsection (a).'
-------- iran
Iran vows to accelerate cooperation with impatient UN nuclear watchdog
TEHRAN (AFP)
Apr 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040406195259.e6vowzpe.html
Iran agreed Tuesday to a timetable to finally answer charges it is trying secretly to develop nuclear weapons, UN atomic energy chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in Tehran.
After five hours of intensive negotiations with Iran's nuclear point-man -- national security chief Hassan Rowhani -- ElBaradei announced Iran had pledged to file a new report on its nuclear activities before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) next meets in June.
ElBaradei said Iran had agreed to a tough action plan and timetable aimed at clearing up serious questions over its bid to generate atomic power -- seen by the United States and Israel as a convenient cover for weapons development.
"Today I was reassured by Dr. Rowhani that Iran is committed to continue to actively cooperate," said ElBaradei.
"I can tell you that I am quite satisfied," ElBaradei added, saying his talks had yielded "welcome and positive steps".
But the United States sniffed at Iran's promises, noting that the Islamic republic had reneged on similar vows in the past.
State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said in Washington: "It's great if they actually live up to their promise, but so far they haven't done that."
Last October, Iran gave the IAEA what it said was a complete declaration of its nuclear activities.
It was later found to have made a number of omissions, including its acquisition of designs for sophisticated P-2 centrifuges that can produce weapons-grade uranium, way above the level of enrichment required for atomic reactors.
In December, it signed the additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which sets tougher conditions for IAEA inspections and commits the country to filing a new and more detailed declaration to the Vienna-based agency within six months.
"Dr. Rowhani assured me that we will get some important information before the end of this month and that we would also hope to get information under the additional protocol by mid-May," ElBaradei said.
Sources close to the talks said the main outstanding issues were the P-2 centrifuge and accounting for traces of highly enriched uranium, which could be weapons-grade, found by the IAEA at two sites here.
Iran says the traces came into the country on equipment bought on the black market from Pakistan. To verify this, ElBaradei said he hoped Pakistan would allow the IAEA to take so-called "environmental samples" there.
An IAEA official said Iran had promised to give a better accounting of where it has stored equipment, which could explain where traces of highly enriched uranium have been found.
But Iran was still balking over certain issues, such as how much work it should be allowed to conduct on the nuclear fuel cycle while the complex IAEA investigation is still running.
Iran's atomic energy chief, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, said negotiators had rejected a call from ElBaradei to delay resumption of uranium conversion work -- or producing the precursors for the enrichment process -- at a facility in the central city of Isfahan.
Iran insists such work does not violate its suspension of enrichment-related activities.
And while Aghazadeh told reporters Iran would stop the construction and assembly of centrifuges used to enrich uranium as of April 9, it was a repeat of a promise made earlier this year.
ElBaradei said a team of IAEA inspectors would arrive in Iran on April 12 to verify the suspension of uranium enrichment was being respected.
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said Iran expected the IAEA investigation to end in June.
"The deadline to us is June," he told reporters.
Rowhani said Iran would "react firmly" if, after the IAEA meeting in June, the Iran dossier still looked as if it was a long way from being settled.
"But personally I do not think Iran will leave the NPT," he said.
If Iran is judged to have failed to meet IAEA demands, the IAEA board could declare the country in breach of the NPT and refer the matter to the matter to the UN Security Council, which could choose to impose sweeping sanctions.
But with a new declaration to verify and more environmental samples to examine, analysts say the fruits of ElBaradei's latest visit are likely to remain unclear until after the June meeting.
----
U.N. Presses Iran on Nuclear Program
April 6, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/international/middleeast/06IRAN.html
FRANKFURT, April 5 - Mohammed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear monitoring group, said Monday that he wanted Iran to speed up cooperation over remaining questions on its nuclear program.
"Iran has been actively cooperating, but I sense some slowdown in the process," he told reporters in Frankfurt before flying to Iran for talks with President Mohammad Khatami and other senior officials.
Last month, the I.A.E.A. passed a resolution deploring Iran's failure to declare potential arms-related activities. Iran initially blocked inspections after the resolution, but said Sunday that a new team would arrive in two weeks.
Dr. ElBaradei is expected to focus on Iran's omissions, in an October statement, of some nuclear technology, including undeclared research on advanced centrifuges that can make bomb-grade uranium.
"It is in the interests of Iran to show from now until June maximum transparency, maximum accelerated cooperation," Dr. ElBaradei said.
The I.A.E.A.'s board of governors meets in June, when it is expected to issue a new report on the status of inspections in Iran.
A Western diplomat said Friday that inspectors had found traces of bomb-grade uranium in Iran at sites other than two already identified.
Iran has told the I.A.E.A. that contaminated centrifuge components originally came from Pakistan, and the agency has asked Pakistani authorities to let it take samples to verify Tehran's position.
--------
IAEA raps Iran's nuclear stance
Tuesday, 6 April, 2004
BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/3602217.stm
IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei says Iran has not been co-operating as openly and quickly as it should to dispel claims that it wants to build nuclear weapons.
The UN nuclear agency head said the pace of Iranian assistance had slowed and there had been inspection delays.
Mr ElBaradei prior to his arrival in Tehran early on Tuesday for talks.
He said he hoped to make it clear during his visit that restoring and accelerating the pace of co-operation was in everyone's interests.
Claims rejected
Mr ElBaradei added that he hoped to cover two key issues during his talks: the origins of the highly-enriched uranium found in the country; and details about advanced nuclear centrifuges that can be used to produce weapons-grade material.
"We need to satisfy ourselves that there are no undeclared activities that have taken place in Iran," Mr ElBaradei said. "I and the international community would like to bring the issue to a conclusion. It obviously cannot go on forever."
His remarks came after Britain, France and Germany expressed concern last week over Iran's announcement that it was resuming uranium conversion - a crucial stage in the production of both nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel. Iran hit back after the criticism, with UN ambassador Pirooz Hosseini telling Reuters that the plant near Isfahan was not in breach of Iran's commitment to suspend uranium enrichment.
Iran insists that its nuclear programme is peaceful and only aimed at producing electricity.
But analysts in the US and elsewhere have expressed concern that Iran is not revealing all of its activities.
-------- latinamerica
Brazil, UN Negotiating Nuclear Plant Inspection, Ministry Says
April 6, 2004
(Bloomberg)
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000086&sid=aUOo3pScdwSg&refer=latin_america
Brazil and the International Atomic Energy Agency are in talks to allow inspection of a facility to be used for plutonium-enrichment, while preserving proprietary information, the Foreign Affairs Ministry said.
The plant under construction in Resende, Rio de Janeiro state, will enrich plutonium for power plants, using commercially sensitive technology developed by Brazil, the ministry said in a statement.
Brazil's nuclear program is aimed at peaceful goals, consistent with the Brazilian constitution, the statement said. The program has been operating under the regulations of the UN's IAEA since 1994, the statement said.
----
Brazil: U.N. Can See Part of Nuke Plans
Tue Apr 6, 2004
By VICTOR CAIVANO,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=589&ncid=734&e=10&u=/ap/20040407/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/brazil_nuclear_program
RESENDE, Brazil - Brazilian officials said Tuesday the United Nations would be allowed to monitor uranium-enrichment plants here but would not have access to all equipment because that would compromise industrial secrets.
The country's foreign minister challenged other nuclear powers to respect the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty with Nonproliferation Treaty, which asks them to enter into negotiations to elimate all nuclear weapons."the same rigor as Brazil.
"Brazil has complied in an exemplary manner," Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said. "This has not been true of the nuclear powers who are not meeting their obligation in accord with article 6 of the Nuclear
Carlos Bezerril, technical director for Brazilian Nuclear Industries, denied reports that Brazil was stonewalling inspectors. He said the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency was already installing cameras in the facility.
On Monday, the country's science and technology ministry confirmed that U.N. nuclear inspectors were denied access to the centrifuges in February and March.
Bezerril said only the centrifuges, which purify uranium ore for use in nuclear power plants or in weapons, would remain off-limits for visual inspection.
He said the inspectors don't have to see the centrifuges because "they have the means to know the level of uranium we're enriching. Even without seeing anything, they have equipment that can detect everything."
International inspectors want to verify whether Brazil is enriching uranium solely for use at its nuclear power plants or whether it will process weapons-grade uranium in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which Brazil has signed.
Brazil has not signed the so-called additional protocol of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which authorizes spot inspections.
In Brasilia, Amorim said Brazil might not sign the additional protocol.
He said Brazil would offer guarantees that its nuclear research and activity were exclusively for peaceful ends. But the country also wants the ability to research and develop cheap energy.
Brazil expects to begin enriching uranium this year and will use it to fuel the country's two nuclear plants, the government says.
Brazil has the world's sixth largest uranium reserves. Although it has been able to enrich uranium since the 1980s, the country has so far done so only for research purposes.
----
Brazil Says It Adheres to Conditions of Nuclear Pacts
Reuters
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53426-2004Apr5.html
RIO DE JANEIRO, April 5 -- The Brazilian government on Monday denied it was refusing to allow U.N. inspectors into a uranium enrichment plant, saying it was strictly following the conditions set out in international treaties.
Foreign Minister Celso Amorim acknowledged, however, that Brazil was negotiating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) so a proposed expansion of its inspections regime would not put Brazil's proprietary research at risk.
On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that Brazil was denying IAEA inspectors full access to its Resende facility, which is under construction.
"We have not banned access to any facilities," Amorim told reporters. "We are rigorously following the conditions of the Vienna Non-Proliferation Treaty and of the bilateral pact with Argentina."
The treaties call for both regular and surprise inspections by the IAEA. The Brazilian Nuclear Energy Association said inspections and IAEA-controlled cameras monitor all facilities where uranium is handled.
A senior Brazilian diplomat quoted by The Post acknowledged that inspectors are not permitted to see all equipment at the Resende plant, but said the IAEA is free to conduct sensitive tests on the surroundings, as well as on uranium fed into the centrifuges and exiting the other end.
--------
Brazil says nuclear program purely peaceful - report
REUTERS BRAZIL:
April 6, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24599/newsDate/6-Apr-2004/story.htm
SAO PAULO, Brazil - A top Brazilian official responded to a U.S. newspaper report on the weekend that the nation is denying international inspectors access to its nuclear facilities by saying Brazil's atomic program is geared exclusively for peaceful use, a local news agency said.
According to an article in The Washington Post, the Brazilian government has refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to examine a uranium-enrichment facility under construction near Rio de Janeiro.
Although the facility will be used to produce low-enriched uranium for use in power plants, not the highly enriched material used in atomic weapons, Brazil is refusing to let IAEA inspectors into the plant, saying it needs to protect its propriety information.
Brazil's science minister, Eduardo Campos, who oversees the nation's nuclear program, told the Globo news agency that any speculation casting doubt on the program's peaceful intentions was unacceptable.
"The Brazilian nuclear program's objective is exclusively for peaceful purposes. Apart from the fact that our constitution determines this, we are signatories of the non-proliferation treaty of nuclear weapons," Campos was quoted as saying.
Neither the Ministry of Science nor the Foreign Ministry were immediately available for comment.
Several Western diplomats have told Reuters that Brazil is not considered a problem state and that there are no concerns that it is developing nuclear weapons.
However, after Iran was discovered covering up potential arms-related atomic research, the IAEA - the United Nations atomic watchdog - is pressing all countries to open up their nuclear programs.
Brazil has some of the world's largest uranium reserves and the most sophisticated nuclear program in Latin America. The government has said the new plant will begin enriching uranium this year to produce fuel for its atomic power plants.
In January 2003, just as the United States was grappling with a possible nuclear crisis with North Korea and preparing for war with Iraq, Brazil's former science minister made headlines by arguing that Brazil should not rule out acquiring the ability to produce an atomic bomb.
The government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva swiftly distanced itself from the remarks, saying Brazil favored research in nuclear energy "solely and exclusively for peaceful purposes."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
Oyster Creek to spend $10M on security upgrade
Asbury Park Press
4/06/04
By NICHOLAS CLUNN MANAHAWKIN BUREAU
http://www.app.com/app/story/0,21625,939007,00.html
LACEY -- The Oyster Creek nuclear power plant will spend $10 million this year on guard towers, razor-wire fences, more potent weapons for guards and other security measures to better protect the Route 9 facility from terrorists.
Plant owner AmerGen also will invest in assault rifles and armor-piercing bullets for its guards, who had been restricted to handguns, rifles and shotguns before state lawmakers decided in September to allow them to use more powerful weapons.
The investment is the first major security upgrade since measures taken right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said plant spokeswoman Gina Scala.
Similar steps to thwart intruders are being taken at all 103 commercial nuclear power plants in the country. The plants have been identified as prominent targets for terrorists.
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has mandated that all plants have adequate defenses against terrorism by October.
Federal law enforcement agencies and intelligent experts conduct twice-yearly reviews on how assailants would most likely attempt to breach plant security, according to the commission. AmerGen plans to install seven guard towers and surround the plant perimeter with razor wire. It also wants to build a deceleration lane on Route 9, which would improve traffic flow entering and leaving the plant, said township Mayor John C. Parker.
Guards will have AR-15s and ammunition clips each loaded with 30 shots, he said. Dum-dum, or hollow-nose, ammunition that can pierce body armor is now permissible.
Parker said that he regrets that land around the 650-megawatt reactor will soon resemble security outside federal prisons but that he realizes improved security is paramount. Parker added he hopes the additions make residents feel safer.
"People are worried about security," he said. "That's what everyone is talking about today."
Nicholas Clunn: (609) 978-4597 or nclunn@a...
---
It's time for aging Oyster Creek plant to retire
Asbury Park Press
4/06/04
By SUZANNE LETA
As we discuss the causes and repercussions of the Three Mile Island accident that occurred 25 years ago last Sunday, another plant, reaching the end of its lifetime, poses a similar risk in New Jersey.
Oyster Creek in Lacey is the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the country. The plant's current operation is threatening public health, degrading local waterways and putting the safety of New Jersey residents in jeopardy.
As Oyster Creek ages, the chances of an accident escalate. Nuclear experts have concluded that nuclear plants across the country are more likely to have mechanical and equipment problems at the beginning of operation and during the wear-out phase, when a plant nears the end of its lifetime. Thirty percent of recent equipment failures at nuclear plants were due, at least in part, to the plant's age.
Oyster Creek's major components, including the reactor vessel, were built with a lifetime of 40 years in mind. The plant is approaching its 35th birthday this year. Just last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cited a cable failure, damaged by water as a result of worn-out insulation, at Oyster Creek. This type of cable failure caused a loss of power to a backup generator that sends electricity to safety-related equipment. Equipment failures are a very serious matter. If an accident should occur at Oyster Creek, the health, environmental and economic impact on the community would be devastating.
Ignoring public opinion and motivated by profits, Exelon Corp. is applying to the NRC to keep Oyster Creek open for another 20 years. Unfortunately, the NRC has rubber-stamped every license extension application: 23 nuclear reactors nationwide.
The NRC does not address a laundry list of public-interest concerns when evaluating license extensions. The agency is not even required to conduct a formal public hearing during the decision-making process. A few of the most troubling facts are:
- The NRC does not consider the ability of the plant to evacuate residents in a timely fashion when reviewing license extensions. This is problematic since it is nearly impossible to evacuate just a 10-mile radius of the plant.
- The NRC does not consider population levels relevant to the licensing process. When Oyster Creek was built in 1969, the population in Ocean County was around 200,000. Ocean County is now the fastest-growing county in the state with more than a half million residents.
- The NRC safety considerations have not changed in a post-9/11 environment, despite serious security risks associated with Oyster Creek's spent fuel pools and the reactor building. The plant's last security test-run failed, yet the NRC did not take any proactive measures to ensure plant security was improved.
- The NRC does not review any past or potential effects of a plant's operation on public health, even though Oyster Creek has one of the highest levels of radioactive iodine emissions in the country. To this day, the NRC refutes evidence that links increases in cancer rates to the accident at Three Mile Island.
- The NRC does not adequately address the buildup of hundreds of thousands of pounds of radioactive waste. Despite several studies concluding that dry cask storage is significantly more secure than spent fuel pools, the NRC regards both forms of storage as equally safe. In addition, the NRC does not address problems associated with the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada or the transportation of nuclear waste.
- The NRC does not require Oyster Creek to meet today's safety standards. In licensing decisions, the NRC reviews plants based on standards from when the plant was originally built. Even Oyster Creek's faulty design, a design that was prohibited from further construction in 1972, is not considered to be an appropriate risk factor.
Keeping all of these factors in mind, New Jersey should not be the test case for a 60-year-old nuclear plant.
Oyster Creek's operation is unnecessary. We can retire the plant safely and will continue to get plenty of energy from the regional Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland electricity grid. Because the grid's reserve margin far exceeds energy demand, New Jerseyans will be able to keep the lights on, even if Oyster Creek is retired tomorrow.
We cannot depend on industry executives and agency officials in Washington alone to make the right decisions about Oyster Creek's future. New Jerseyans are depending on Gov. McGreevey to stand up for their welfare and call for the plant's retirement.
Suzanne Leta is an energy associate for the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group.
Coalition for Peace and Justice
(http://www.coalitionforpeaceandjustice.org);
and the UNPLUG Salem Campaign (http://www.unplugsalem.org);
321 Barr Ave., Linwood, NJ 08221; 609-601-8583/37; ncohen12@c....
The Coalition for Peace and Justice is a chapter of Peace Action (http://www.peace-action.org).
-------- us nuc waste
Federal plan announces transportation of nation's nuclear waste across New Mexico by rail
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
By Ken Ritter,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-04-06/s_22521.asp
LAS VEGAS - Radioactive waste bound for a planned national nuclear dump in Nevada would be transported by trains on a 319-mile rail line to be built across the state, the federal government announced Monday.
The department has not said what routes it intends to use to transport the waste from 127 sites across the nation to a planned rail head near Caliente, 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas near the Utah line.
Nevada officials and antidump activists have derided the Caliente-to-Yucca Mountain route - which loops around the vast Nevada Test Site and Nellis Air Force Base bombing range - as expensive and dangerous.
Bob Loux, state nuclear projects chief, predicted Monday that despite the announcement, the Energy Department eventually will decide to ship nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain almost exclusively by truck.
Nevada consultants say it would take nearly 10 years to acquire necessary land and build the rail line, at a cost of more than $2 billion.
Allen Benson, spokesman for the federal project, said the Energy Department believes the rail line will cost $880 million and take four years to build.
Loux said state officials will challenge the rail plan. Nevada has accused the federal government of neglecting to inform ranchers, miners, and rural residents about its plan.
Making rail the preferred method for shipping nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, with the Caliente corridor as the preferred route, becomes official when the decision is published in the Federal Register, Benson said.
The Caliente-to-Yucca route was one of five originally considered. One of the rejected routes skirted Las Vegas and its 1.6 million residents.
In July 2002, the Bush administration and Congress approved Yucca Mountain as the site to store 77,000 tons of radioactive waste now held in 39 states.
-------- us politics
Kennedy Accuses Bush of 'Credibility Gap'
GOP Leaders Defend President as Senator Attacks Him on Foreign, Domestic Issues
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53051-2004Apr5.html
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), broadening his criticism of President Bush from foreign policy to domestic issues, accused Bush yesterday of having "created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon" on education, health and jobs, as well as the war in Iraq.
"He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people," Kennedy said at the Brookings Institution in a speech that was clearly aimed at challenging Bush's credibility with voters, especially by comparing him with Nixon, who resigned as president in disgrace as a result of the Watergate scandal 30 years ago.
In response, Senate Republican leaders defended Bush's credibility, and the Bush-Cheney campaign accused Kennedy of serving as the "hatchet man" for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. "Issuing personal attacks against the president is just another way of saying they have no agenda to lead America," said Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign.
Kennedy, one of Bush's most vocal critics on Capitol Hill and a prominent Kerry backer, has made a series of speeches criticizing Bush's foreign policy and continued the attack yesterday, charging that Iraq was "George Bush's Vietnam."
In his speech, which was among his most sharply worded critiques of Bush, Kennedy also linked Iraq to domestic concerns, saying the war "diverted attention from the administration's deceptions here at home -- especially on the economy, health care and education." On domestic as well as foreign policy, "saying whatever it takes to prevail has become standard operating procedure in the Bush White House," he said. "In this administration, truth is the first casualty of policy."
Kennedy accused the administration of trying to "backdate" the recent recession to blame President Bill Clinton. He condemned the administration for focusing on tax cuts for the wealthy as budget deficits deepened and for letting supplemental unemployment benefits expire.
On health care, he said the administration hid its own updated price tag for the Medicare prescription drug benefit that Congress passed last year, which indicated the program would cost far more than Congress believed. The bill itself was "a triumph of right-wing ideology masking as moderate reform," Kennedy said, adding that the administration "misused" millions of dollars in Medicare money to promote it in commercials and mailings.
As for education, Kennedy said Bush reneged on promises of adequate funding to carry out accountability provisions in the No Child Left Behind law passed with Kennedy's help in 2001. The current Bush budget "leaves over 4.6 million children behind" by excluding funding to cover their needs, he said.
Responding to Kennedy's speech, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said Bush's "credibility is strong" and challenged Kennedy's contention that Bush has shortchanged health care and education. Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called Kennedy's charges "completely outrageous" and said, "Americans would be much better served if the senator from Massachusetts would remember who the enemy is."
----
If Bush is So Weak, Why is He so Strong?
Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor
The Crisis Papers
April 6, 2004
http://www.crisispapers.org/essays/weak-bush.htm
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The primary rule in any contest is "know your adversary." Study his strengths and his weaknesses. Strengths can, judo-like, be turned against the foe. Weaknesses, if skillfully exploited, can subdue the enemy. This is especially true when the enemy is himself unaware of his own weaknesses.
All these are elementary precepts of gamesmanship and military science. And yet, the Kerry/Democratic strategists appear to be disregarding these basic rules, as they take on old habits and tactics that have failed them in the past.
"On the merits," the Bush candidacy should be one of the weakest and most vulnerable in historical memory. Through a constant stream of demonstrable lies, he has hoodwinked the public, impoverished their social services, mortgaged their future, and besmirched the reputation of our country among the community of nations, as he has sacrificed the lives of hundreds of our soldiers, and thousands of Iraqi civilians, to his delusions and folly. Yet, somehow, he remains a formidable contender in the pending election.
This should not, and need not, be so.
The strength of the Bush candidacy is supported by a "tripod" of factors: (a) a huge "war chest" of campaign funds, (b) a compliant media, and (c) a failure of the Democrats to exploit the weaknesses of Bush and his associates. There is little that the Democrats can do about the financial resources of the GOP except to make an issue of that very opulence, and the corporate sellouts of the public interest that enabled the party to accumulate those funds. Similarly, the corporate media has been solidly enlisted into the Bush camp. Defections will be difficult to obtain, but not impossible. If the media find that they are losing their audience, their partisanship may be muted. Even now, there is an erosion of media credibility with the public, as awareness of the betrayals, iniquities and lies of the Bush administration seeps through the media curtain and into the public awareness. Read the public opinion polls: the sleeping giant is beginning to stir.
The best means for the Democrats and the progressive opposition to topple the Bush regime, is to cut off the third leg of the tripod: recognize and exploit the intellectual incapacities and moral turpitude of the Bush administration. Space will allow little more than an enumeration. I hope to spell out these deficiencies in more detail in later essays.
Dogmatic and fixated thinking. The Bushistas have a tenuous "reality principle." Instead of being open and adaptive to incoming data, they project their dogmas outward. The world is what they "know" it to be, a priori. Evidence be damned! Budget surpluses? Cut taxes. Budget deficits? Cut taxes. Has "trickle-down" economics failed under Reagan, and was it refuted by the Clinton prosperity? No way! Try it again!. The CIA tells them Saddam is no threat? Then they install the "Office of Special Plans" -- their own "in house" intelligence group that will supply the answers they want. "What, you can't find WMDs in Iraq? No matter: 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'" (Rumsfeld). In general: "that's the wrong answer! Don't come back to us until you have the answer we want."
Accordingly, Bushistas are arrogant and supremely sure of themselves. It is an unusually myopic opponent who fails to recognize these qualities as acute vulnerabilities. Arrogant and inflexible individuals can be led to their downfall. "Pride goeth before the fall."
An inability to publicly admit error, combined with a readiness to blame others. Remember Bush's mangled aphorism: "fool me once, shame on you - fool me, you can't get fooled again." The correct completion, of course, is "fool me twice, shame on me." Mark Crispin Miller suggests that this flub reveals a deep moral defect in George Bush: an inability to acknowledge, and thus to articulate, personal error. Instead, blame is attached to any available individual - such as Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and perpetually, Bill and Hillary Clinton. "The buck" flows unimpeded through and past the Oval Office. Buck-passing is not an endearing quality among the general public, which appreciates heart-felt apologies. Witness the public response to Richard Clarke's apology before the 9/11 Commission.
Unscrupulous lying. All politicians lie, or at least distort and mislead - everyone knows that. What is truly remarkable about this pack of politicians, is both the quantity of the lies and their disposition to lie about trivial matters, and about matters that can readily reveal the lying. For example, the Bush team insisted that the "Mission Accomplished" banner was spontaneously put up by the ship's crew. That was readily shown to be false. And now we have the "Letterman Lie." When David Letterman showed the hilarious footage of the yawning kid at a Bush speech, the White House shot back with a charge that the footage was faked. And when Letterman held his ground, the White House compounded their lie by then denying that they ever suggested that the footage was faked - it was CNN's fault (buck-passing again). The plot thickens: the latest word is that Letterman has countered by citing an "indisputable" and "highly placed" (if anonymous) source that verifies that the White House did, in fact, contact CNN. (Farrell -- search "Letterman")
What's remarkable about both the banner and Letterman incidents is their triviality - both could be dealt with by simply asserting the plain truth, with little harm done. But no, the first impulse was to lie, and so they did. And that kind of disposition is not trivial, for it reveals a fundamental moral flaw. For if the Busheviks lie without qualm about such trivial matters, they are all the more capable of lying about portentous matters. And, of course, there is abundant evidence that they have done just that. As for these more serious lies, space constraints forbid elaboration. But elaboration is not necessary, since several books have been written exposing hundreds of authenticated Bushista lies.
The Bush gang lies and passes the buck because they are thin-skinned and ruthless. They are readily provoked to anger and retaliation. Witness the abuse and personal injury piled upon such dissenters as Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and most acutely, upon Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. The blind spite and viciousness of the Bush gang can be counter-productive. As Marc Cooper points out, when Richard Clarke's book was published,
All the White House had to do ... was say that Dick Clarke - who had been named crisis manager the morning of September 11 - was a great guy, a loyal public servant, that he has, indeed, a few policy differences with the president, but his critique enriches the public debate. Thank you very much and, gosh, all of us, like our old friend Dickie, are sorry we didn't better anticipate al Qaeda's attacks.
Instead, the Republican attack machine went on tilt. The always execrable Dick Cheney went so low as to use the Limbaugh show as a venue to discredit Clarke. Majority Leader Bill Frist made an ass out of himself on the Senate floor, hysterically calling for Clarke to be busted for perjury (though he admitted he had not read his book). The White House vehemently denied the decisive post-9/11 meeting between Rice and Clarke (and later had to recant).
Bush and his coterie have a grotesque and cruel sense of humor. Consider Bush's performance while Governor of Texas, as he mimicked the pleas of the condemned Carla Faye Tucker: "Please don't kill me!" Consider too his skit this past month at the Correspondents Association dinner, at which he pretended to look under the desk and chairs of the Oval Office for the missing WMDs. At that dinner, The Nation correspondent, David Corn, reflected: "Over 500 Americans and literally countless Iraqis are dead because of a war that was supposedly fought to find weapons of mass destruction, and Bush is joking about it." Yet Bush, and astonishingly, most of the correspondents, somehow felt that this performance was funny.
Finally, the Bush regime displays traits that border on the sociopathic; they appear incapable of recognizing, much less caring about, the humanity of others, or of the pain that they cause these other human beings: the impoverished, the wage-earners who lose their jobs, the investors who lose their savings to corporate criminals . They will not count Iraqi casualties. Bush will not attend military funerals. The Bush policies betray little thought about the human costs of cutbacks in social services, or burdens placed upon future generations. Furthermore, the Bushistas apparently have a "tin ear" when it comes to anticipating the moral responses of others. Somehow, they failed to perceive the inappropriateness of using for political advantage an advertisement depicting scenes of the 9/11 "ground zero," including an image of a flag-draped body being carried out from the wreckage. When most of the public was properly offended, that political ad fell with a thud and was promptly withdrawn.
The above account describes the personal qualities of a group of individuals intellectually and morally unfit to lead a great nation. That unfitness is borne out by the disasters that have befallen and will yet befall this country and the unfortunate nations it has dealt with, as a consequence of the policies adopted and enacted by this regime.
How, then, does an opposing party and an opposing candidate respond?
It must draw public attention to these unsavory qualities and make the unscrupulous campaign methods of the Bush gang a campaign issue. If the public's moral sense is effectively addressed, it will not respond favorably to the ruthlessness and bullying of Bush and his associates.
The arrogance, dogmatism and cruelty of the Bush gang could prove to be their undoing. The Democrats might be well advised to tease, taunt and provoke the Bushistas to extreme and self- defeating behavior. More by accident than by design, arrogant excesses led to the downfall of Senator Joe McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. The decline and fall of these three were facilitated by the initiative of courageous individuals such as Edward R. Murrow, Daniel Ellsberg, and John Dean. Similarly, George Bush is not invulnerable, for Johnson and Nixon were both far more capable and intelligent politicians than Bush.
Finally, Kerry and the Democrats must make abundantly clear to the public that the stakes in this election transcend partisanship. The libertarians recognize that the emerging theocracy and moral police state violates their most fundamental principles. The business community must appreciate that when the economy collapses, as it surely will if these policies persist, no one will escape the devastation which follows. Where the Bush Administration leads, no American aware and appreciative of his political heritage, should want to follow.
An opposition party and candidate, sufficiently intelligent and creative to recognize and exploit the opportunities afforded by the weaknesses of the Bush regime, and sufficiently inspired and inspiring to revive in the public our traditional American sense of justice and devotion to liberty, would, by so doing, display precisely those leadership qualities so desperately needed in these difficult times.
By recognizing the intellectual and moral failings of the Bush administration, and utilizing these traits as weapons against that administration, the Democrats can disarm their opulently funded GOP propaganda machine and then direct the voters' attention to essential public issues: education, health care, jobs, equitable taxation, the environment, political reform, international peace and security, etc.
The Bush-Cheney team regards the American public as an unorganized aggregate of passive dolts who can be led to believe whatever misinformation they are fed, and thereafter may be exploited as the privileged few gather wealth and power from the labor and skill of the rest of us.
There is another view: That the American nation is a community whose domestic tranquility and economic product arises from a foundation of cooperation, trust, mutual respect, and shared civic values. This view, the traditional American view, is articulated in our founding document which affirms that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." And so we have established, in Lincoln's words, a government "of the people, by the people and for the people."
The behavior of the American public during next eight months will determine which view of America will prevail.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Yemen Bought $8Bln Worth Of Russian Arms
06.04.2004
MosNews - Write us: info@mosnews.com
http://www.mosnews.com/money/2004/04/06/yemenarms.shtml
The development of the cooperation between Russia and Yemen, especially in the weapons sector, is beneficial and promising for both sides, a representative of the Russian military industrial complex was quoted as saying by the Newsru.com Internet news agency. The representative also said that "Yemen is a solvent state which occupies a strategically important position in the region. It is in Russia's national interest to develop multilevel cooperation with this country."
The delivery of Russian military equipment to Yemen began in 2000 when Russia supplied the country with 31 modern T-80 tanks. In 2001 Moscow and Sanaa signed a contract for the delivery of MiG-29 fighter planes. The first batch was delivered to Yemen in 2002.
The visit of Yemen's president Ali Abdallay Salih to Moscow opens up new vistas for the further cooperation in the military trade area. Sources in the Russian military industrial complex say that in the nearest future several new contracts may be signed. The sources name anti-aircraft missile Favorit systems, Kamov fighter helicopters as well as fighter planes among the equipment that could be delivered to Yemen.
Over the last few years, the volume of Russia's military equipment sales to Yemen reached $8 billion.
----
EU turns to India's arms market
By Stephen Blank,
Apr 6, 2004
Asia Times
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FD06Df04.html
Much diplomatic and journalistic ink has flowed recently concerning China's efforts to get the European Union to terminate its sanctions and resume arms sales to it. France and Germany, too, have each expressed the desire to persuade the European Commission, the EU's governing authority, to lift the sanctions. On the other hand, Washington weighed in strongly against this move, creating substantial pressure on the EU. Therefore it is not surprising that at its meeting on March 25-26, the commission said nothing publicly about the entire issue.
However, the EU has already decided conclusively to move in a big way into the Asian arms market, and not only with China, at least for now. Instead, its flagship arms company, the European Aeronautical Defense and Space Company (EADS) is pushing joint ventures with India, China's main continental rival in Asia.
The EU's motives are quite obvious. EADS executives predict that 20 percent of its arms sales will come from the Asia-Pacific by 2009, and 30 percent by 2015, and that does not necessarily include China or the Chinese defense market. Since current sales account for 7 percent of its revenues, this means a tripling and then quadrupling of current sales within a decade.
Moreover, India is increasingly viewed as a promising market for all kinds of high-tech ventures. Its economy is expected to grow nearly 10 percent this year, and Indians hope that this means the breakthrough to sustained long-term development, like China's trajectory in the past decade. But even if the Indian economy grows at about 6 percent annually, as it has over the past decade, this opens up substantial opportunities for foreign arms companies, especially as India has recently undertaken a vast modernization of its weapons systems, and is also trying to overhaul its dysfunctional defense industry.
Although EADS concluded an agreement in 2003 with China's state-owned AVIC II aircraft manufacturing group, the sanctions still in place inhibit military sales to China. No such barrier exists regarding India. And it is highly unlikely that Washington, which is itself expanding its defense sales to India, will object on the same grounds to EADS or the EU's presence in India, although the commercial rivalry between them may cause tensions. EADS' civilian center of gravity is the Airbus to deal with an expected increase of Asian passenger traffic, which will be considerably fueled by India and China. But its defense sales to India are equally, if not more interesting. The EU, like other sellers to India: Russia, Israel and the United States, will move away from "sub-contracting helicopters or selling missiles" to a more elaborate system. As reported by Aviation Week and Space Technology, this system entails long-term partnerships with both state and privately owned Indian defense firms.
This development is in line with India's program for reforming its indigenous defense industry through privatization and opening it up to foreign competition so that it will be forced to become more competitive and allow India to become a major weapons exporter in its own right.
Thus Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, (HAL), India's major defense company, will become a global supplier for EADS of parts, components and assemblies. In other words, EADS and HAL will become partners in designing, developing and producing specific versions of helicopters, and this relationship might then spread to other weapons plants. In this respect, the development of EU relations with India's defense industry will resemble the Indo-Russian agreement to design, develop and produce a fifth-generation fighter aircraft.
So this kind of relationship is now becoming a common one in international defense relationships. Similarly, other EU members' firms are now submitting proposals to India's Ministry of Defense to build engines and air-to-air, air defense and anti-tank missiles. Undoubtedly, such partnerships will spread to other weapons systems and create a network that goes beyond leasing and sub-contracting to encompass joint design, development, production and marketing for a whole range of weapons. This goes far beyond anything now possible with China.
And it certainly accords with the growing diversification of India's foreign weapons purchases, a process that has led to major contracts with France, Israel, Great Britain and Italy, not to mention the US and Russia. Indeed, Indian analysts suspect that India will further Westernize its purchases due to the high price and relatively low quality of Russian weapons, parts and servicing compared to European, Israeli, and American systems. While this does not mean suspension of purchases from Russia, it does raise disturbing trends for the Russian defense industry. Both official and expert commentaries have expressed growing resentment and concern over India's excessive dependence on Russian arms, high prices, poor quality and service, and the slow pace of negotiations with Russia. For example, the negotiations for the Gorshkov aircraft carrier lasted for 10 years, almost as long as it would take to build one, and India ultimately had to pay dearly for the retrofitting of the carrier's Mig-29 fighters, which are no longer state of the art.
If India turns away from Russia it will represent a major blow to Russia's struggling defense industry, which gets 40 percent of its foreign sales revenues from exports to India, its largest customer. It will become even harder for that industry to compete globally or to become a reliable supplier to Russia's armed forces, a condition which it has yet to achieve. In turn, this could seriously set back Russia's industrial, defense industrial and overall military modernization.
EU sales to China, if they do materialize, will similarly affect Russian defense manufacturers, who now sell about 30 percent of their annual exports to China. Though China now buys between US$2 billion and $2.5 billion annually from them, increasingly it is buying technology and know-how rather than new weapons. Certainly, China, too, would prefer, all things being equal, to buy high quality foreign systems that it could then indigenize as India is now trying to do. Its track record with Russian purchases suggests as much to foreign observers. Thus if the EU lifts sanctions, not only will that seriously affect its relations with Washington and US ties to major EU producers like France and Germany, that decision will also seriously hurt Russian interests.
Though the Russian angle has not been explored publicly in the diplomatic moves and countermoves now under way, one can rest assured that the Kremlin fully understands what is at stake. Its efforts to obtain or at least retain market share in these two countries will necessarily increase, making the international arms market even more of a buyers' market, where India and China can make demands of sellers that would hitherto have been unthinkable.
Moreover, if the Asian-Pacific market becomes so much more competitive, we can expect a renewed push by Russia elsewhere: Southeast Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South America in particular. But it is by no means clear that these areas can make up for what the Russian defense industry might lose if these projects go through and if sanctions are lifted. Nevertheless, the growth of Asian-Pacific economies clearly coincides with growth in their overall technological, and especially defense technological, and defense capabilities. And these growing capabilities may well come at the further expense of Russia's already fragile economic and strategic position in Asia.
Stephen Blank is an independent security affairs analyst residing in Harrisburg, PA.
-------- asia
Tamil Tigers renew threat of war over self-rule
KRISHAN FRANCIS IN COLOMBO
Tue 6 Apr 2004
Scotsman
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=389412004
SRI Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels yesterday threatened to renew fighting against the government if a solution to their claim for self-rule was not found.
The threat came as an alliance headed by the country's hard-line president tried to put together a coalition government after voters failed to deliver a clear mandate on how to revive the stalled peace process.
The Tamil Tigers said they hoped a political solution could be found to their demands for sweeping autonomy. If not, "the Tamil people will fight to establish the Tamil sovereignty in their homeland", the pro-rebel TamilNet website said.
The Norwegian-led Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission - which oversees a ceasefire that has held since February 2002 - said there were no changes on the ground yesterday and a top military analyst discounted war fears.
"Technically, the [Tamil Tigers] can resume fighting any time, but I think they will wait and see if they get that autonomy by talking," said retired air marshal Harry Goonetilleke.
President Chandrika Kumaratunga's alliance, which has taken a tough stand on negotiations with the rebels, emerged just eight seats short of an absolute majority after Friday's elections. An official at the presidential secretariat said the United People's Freedom Alliance, which secured 105 seats in the 225-member parliament, was holding talks with smaller parties and considered a coalition a certainty.
Mrs Kumaratunga's plan to swear in a close aide, Lakshman Kadirgamar, as prime minister, had to be cancelled because of opposition within her party, officials said. Instead, Mahinda Rajapakse, the opposition leader in Sri Lanka's outgoing parliament, has been appointed and said he would be sworn in today.
Under the constitution, the Sri Lankan president has the power to administer the oath of office to a prime minister, but the latter must have a majority in the parliament.
The outgoing prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who initiated the most recent attempts to seal a lasting peace with the rebels, warned that an unstable government may hinder the peace process.
"At the moment there is no stable government. That itself can be a problem to the peace process," he told reporters. "In my view, the peace process has been accepted by the country."
Earlier, Mrs Kumaratunga's top aide said peace talks with the rebels was top of her agenda. "The top priority of the Freedom Alliance is to take steps to resume negotiations" with the Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam, said Harim Peiris. What remains unclear is the direction those talks, on hold for the past year, could take.
While the Tigers have said they would negotiate with whichever political party emerged on top, the president, who was blinded in one eye by a rebel assassination attempt, has made no secret of her distrust for them.
Prior to the election, peace talks had been handled by Mr Wickremesinghe, who Mrs Kumaratunga described as a weak negotiator willing to cede too much to the rebels.
After hammering out the cease-fire that halted Sri Lanka's civil war, Norwegian negotiators withdrew at the peak of a power struggle between Mrs Kumaratunga and Mr Wickremesinghe last year, saying they would return only after the two settled their differences.
The two long-time rivals failed to stop their bickering, eventually leading to Friday's snap poll, which came more than three years ahead of schedule.
Although the shaky ceasefire has held for two years, the main Tiger leadership has warned the government not to negotiate with the breakaway faction.
Mrs Kumaratunga has refused to give the Tamils, who have long faced discrimination from the Sinhalese, the degree of autonomy they want, saying that would all but formalise the de facto state they have created.
-------- britain
This relationship isn't working
Let's seize this once-in-decade opportunity to open up the UK's nuclear dependency with the US to serious public scrutiny
Dan Plesch <danplesch@aol.com>
Tuesday April 6, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1186508,00.html
Britain must loosen its military ties with the United States. Whatever their value in the past, today the relationship is dragging Britain into operations that are against its interests - while providing Americans with a false sense that they are speaking for what is called the international community. But this year presents a once-in-a-decade opportunity to open up the linchpin of that relationship to public scrutiny. This is the year that parliament and the United States Congress have to renew the treaty governing their cooperation on nuclear weapons.
The understanding is formally known as the 1958 Agreement for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes, but is usually called the Mutual Defence Agreement, or the 58 Agreement. It governs the two countries' trade in weapons of mass destruction. Trading in weapons of mass destruction is pretty controversial right now - given all the fuss about Libya, Pakistan, Iran and so on. But the negotiations between London and Washington are going on in secret, and the treaty is likely to be slipped in at the end of the year without anyone noticing.
Without the agreement, Britain would not have its Trident nuclear weapons system, or be a nuclear power at all. Britain has test-fired over 40 hydrogen bombs in Nevada and, in return, supplied the US at times with plutonium. Britain continues to use Nevada for tests that don't involve nuclear explosion. For example, the UK conducted experiment Vito to check that a warhead would explode correctly on Valentine's day 2002.
The Trident nuclear warheads are dependent on the US. They are manufactured in Berkshire according to US designs and under management that includes the US arms producer Lockheed Martin. Specialist joint working groups include nuclear weapons engineering and manufacturing practices.
Neither Tony Blair nor George Bush has made any public statement about what deals are being struck over the renewal of the treaty, but they are likely to involve both specific technologies and political agreements. Tony Blair wants a successor to Trident supplied from the US. In return, the UK will help American WMD manufacturers where it can. For example, by doing some design work if Congress bars American firms from working on new weapons.
The broader political trade-off is likely to include support for Washington's military policies, which include: building new nuclear weapons; starting to test them again "if necessary"; putting non-nuclear weapons in space; and preparing anti-satellite weapons. All these programmes are under way in Washington.
There are more fundamental objections to the nuclear special relationship than signing up for the next round of Star Wars and H-bombs. The Mutual Defence Agreement encourages the British delusion that it is an independent nuclear power and therefore a force to be reckoned with. This self-deceit among British officials has been the greatest obstacle to any sensible discussion about Britain's foreign policy for half a century. And it relies on the full extent of the agreement being kept both from the public and even from almost all officials and politicians.
As with most dependent relationships, its defining characteristic is that nothing must be done to upset the controlling partner, so that partner gets more and more control. The CIA now often sits on the joint intelligence committee. So, even there, at the very heart of the British state, there is no independence of thought. You can be sure that the favour is not reciprocated.
The other side of the coin is that the agreement allows Washington to pretend to the American people that it has real allies even over reckless adventures such as the invasion of Iraq. But there, too, the truth is kept from the public and even from specialists. I only ever found a handful of defence advisers in Congress who had even heard of the programme.
Today, were the agreement to be debated, many Americans would oppose trading weapons of mass destruction with anyone, let alone the British. The moral majority that believes that gun control is tyranny, abortion the modern holocaust and gay marriage a threat to public order would not want to give America's precious nuclear secrets to a nation that is comfortable without its own guns, with a woman's right to choose and with human rights for gays.
Internationally, the US-UK trade in WMD sets a terrible example of double standards in which we are clearly arguing that our trade in WMD is good and other peoples' is bad.
Confronted with such huge issues, it is easy to think that there is nothing we can do. But pressure has made an impact before. Remember when France was blowing up nuclear bombs in the Pacific? Bill Clinton was pushing to get a nuclear test ban signed because it was popular. But the Tory government, with secret encouragement from some US officials, was opposed. When myself and other researchers told members of Congress about British obstruction, they threatened to cancel the cooperation agreement, John Major caved in, and the agreement went ahead. And so from 1996, for the first time since Hiroshima, neither Britain, China, France, Russia nor the US has been conducting nuclear tests.
So make a fuss and who knows, Congress might even decide to cancel the agreement. Without any extra pressure, there will be a couple of speeches by anti-nuclear MPs, and perhaps a secret discussion in the defence committee just before the treaty goes through. Since this agreement is supposed to be there to defend democracy, the government should have an adult conversation with the people about what is really involved.
· Dan Plesch's The Beauty Queens' Guide to World Peace is published in the summer by Politico's.
-------- china
Beijing Moves to Curb Hong Kong's Drive for Democracy
April 6, 2004
By JOSEPH KAHN and KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/international/asia/06CND-HONG.html
BEIJING, April 6 - Chinese authorities declared today that they will determine if and when the people of Hong Kong can elect their local leaders, squashing hopes that the former British colony could chart its own course toward democracy in the coming years.
The ruling, delivered as an interpretation of Hong Kong's miniconstitution by the Communist Party-run congress of China, rebuffs popular demands for faster political liberalization and limits the territory's leeway to change election laws.
Opposition parties in Hong Kong attacked the ruling as an infringement on the 50-year period of autonomy that China promised when it replaced Britain as Hong Kong's sovereign power in 1997, and as a big step back for democracy. The Civil Human Rights Front, a broad coalition of pro-democracy groups, announced late tonight that it would protest Beijing's decision with a march on Sunday afternoon.
The Bush administration has urged China to let Hong Kong hold free elections and protested Beijing's decision to issue an interpretation of the miniconstitution. Today's ruling seems likely to add to political tensions between Washington and Beijing, which are already rising over trade issues, human rights abuses and arms sales to Taiwan.
Chinese officials characterized their decision as mild and did not officially rule out allowing universal suffrage in the next elections for Hong Kong's leader in 2007. Beijing officials declared that they intended to "push forward" Hong Kong's political development, but only when the "actual situation" permits and only according to a "gradual and orderly process."
But after huge street demonstrations in Hong Kong against a Beijing-backed internal security law last year, today's move seemed tailored to ensure that the territory does not fall under the control of people that the Communist Party considers dangerous or disloyal. That category includes Hong Kong's most popular advocates for greater democracy.
Chinese leaders are especially nervous about the threat that democracy poses to their one-party system after Taiwan voters re-elected Chen Shui-bian as president last month. Beijing sees Mr. Chen as plotting to formally separate Taiwan from China and had hoped that voters would elect Taiwan's opposition party, which promised to improve ties across the Taiwan Strait.
Hong Kong, which is much richer and more Westernized than the Chinese mainland, had been widely expected to become a local democracy - although under Beijing's oversight - by 2008. That is the earliest date permitted in the Basic Law, or miniconstitution, for free elections for all legislative seats and for the chief executive, the top official in the territory.
But after public demands for more democracy intensified in Hong Kong in the past few months, China asserted a prerogative to interpret two key clauses in the Basic Law that set out the process for introducing and implementing changes to the electoral system.
In the ruling issued by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress today, the central government decreed that it has the right to decide whether there is "a need" to introduce democratic changes. If it agrees that there is a need, then it mandates that the chief executive - and, pointedly, not the now partly democratic Legislature - should draft and introduce such changes. The current chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, was handpicked by Beijing for the job.
Finally, China also declared that it would review any changes in the way the legislators or the chief executive are chosen and decide whether they are acceptable.
"The right to amend the law belongs to the National People's Congress," the deputy secretary general of the body's standing committee, Qiao Xiaoyang, said at a news conference today.
Mr. Qiao said that under China's centralized political system, local governments, even Hong Kong's nominally autonomous government, could not pass or implement laws without central approval.
"A locality has no fixed power," he said. "All powers of the locality derive from the authorization of the central authorities."
The Basic Law already outlines a process for changes in the way Hong Kong selects its chief executive and members of its Legislative Council. The document calls for changes to be agreed by the chief executive and two-thirds of the Legislature, and only then sent to the National People's Congress for review.
By insisting that the congress must give its approval before the legislative process here can even start, the interpretation issued today essentially gives Beijing an insurance policy. Even if residents in Hong Kong elect a new Legislature with a democratic majority during the next elections for the territory's Legislative Council in September, such a majority would have limited ability to pursue further democratization.
Repeating Beijing's alarmed warnings that Hong Kong is becoming unruly, Mr. Qiao said the decision to assert the central government's authority was necessary to ensure stability.
"If we allowed the discussion and debate to go on and on without limit, that would affect the stability, living standards and overall development of Hong Kong," Mr. Qiao said.
Democracy advocates condemned Beijing's action.
"A barrier has been imposed on the government's autonomy," said Yeung Sum, the current chairman of the Democratic Party. "This is not acceptable to us."
Mr. Tung, Hong Kong's chief executive, said that he and his aides would move quickly to draft some changes to the electoral process. "We will not drag our feet deliberately, we will try to complete it," he said.
Donald Tsang, the chief secretary and second-ranking official in Hong Kong, said that a constitutional review task force that he is running had found strong support for some modification of the electoral process. But he declined to say how far the government might go, and gave no suggestion that he was considering the universal suffrage demanded by the city's democracy movement.
Joseph Kahn reported from Beijing for this article and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.
--------
Beijing Asserts New Control Over Election Laws in Hong Kong
April 6, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/international/asia/06HONG.html
HONG KONG, Tuesday, April 6 - The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress in Beijing on Tuesday approved new rules interpreting how far Hong Kong can go in pursuing greater democracy.
Jiang Zhenghua, the committee's vice chairman, said in a telephone interview that the new interpretation of Hong Kong's mini-constitution required the government here to work with the congress before making any changes regarding how leaders are chosen. But the new interpretation, which is legally binding under Chinese law, does say that changes can be made "if necessary" before the next chief executive is chosen in 2007, he added. "If we don't give the explanation, then Hong Kong will trapped in endless arguments, which will be harmful for Hong Kong's development," Mr. Jiang said.
Hong Kong's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, says that chief executives elected after 2007 can be elected by more democratic means. But there has been considerable debate here over whether that would include the elections in 2007 itself.
Current laws only allow a committee of 800 prominent citizens, mostly loyal to Beijing, to select candidates among whom the public is allowed to choose in the general election.
But democracy advocates here also contend that the city should be allowed to work out changes in election laws on its own and only then submit them to the congress in Beijing for final approval, with Hong Kong's legislature, half of it elected democratically, playing a central role. Mr. Jiang said that the National People's Congress would deal with the chief executive on the issue, adding that the Standing Committee had approved the new interpretation with no dissenting votes and only one abstention.
Democracy advocates here find themselves divided even as Beijing is castigating them as unpatriotic and reinterpreting the law.
On one side of the split are the pro-democracy political parties, which have a lot of political savvy but few members.
On the other side is the Civil Human Rights Front, a coalition of civic and Christian organizations that can bring thousands of supporters into the streets but has a wide range of agendas that encompass not just democracy but also the rights of gay men, lesbians, women, workers, the poor and the disabled.
While the front supports the introduction of universal suffrage, there remains some ambivalence among its leaders about the virtues of majority rule. They are especially concerned that greater democracy may result in fewer protections for minorities, given the conservatism of much of Hong Kong society.
The Civil Human Rights Front organized a march last July 1 that drew 500,000 people, nearly one-tenth of the population of this autonomous Chinese territory, and forced the local government to withdraw a stringent internal security law. On July 1 this year, the front will hold a commemorative march to promote women's rights, gay rights and other civic causes, as well as democracy, Ms. Hung said. "We are not a political organization; we are a coalition of civil groups coming together to build civil society," said Rose Wu, a longtime campaigner for liberal Christian causes here who is the leader of the Civil Human Rights Front.
The political activism of nonprofit groups here, coupled with their exclusion of actual politicians, could have broad implications for the rest of China, according to China experts.
China has tolerated the rapid expansion of nonprofit groups on the mainland in recent years, but strictly bans them from engaging in political activity.
-------- europe
Bulgaria and US to hold first joint military exercise
SOFIA (AFP)
Apr 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040406185933.bdv54gs9.html
Bulgaria, which has just joined NATO, will next summer hold a joint military exercise with the United States army for the first time, the US embassy in Sofia said on Tuesday.
Some 1,100 US soldiers, some of them based in Germany, will take part in the exercise which will be code-named Bulwark 04 and take place over three weeks in July and August at Novo Selo, in eastern Bulgaria.
They will practice combat techniques used by NATO, the embassy said in a statement.
Lubomir Ivanov, the president of the influential Bulgarian NGO Atlantic Club, on Tuesday told the news agency BTA that US military was testing the ground in Bulgaria as part of its plan to move bases from western to eastern Europe.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Militia Provokes More Clashes
U.S. Declares Shiite Cleric an Outlaw As Widespread Battles Test Occupation
By Anthony Shadid and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50836-2004Apr5?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 5 -- U.S. officials declared Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr an outlaw on Monday and said a warrant had been issued for his arrest as the confrontation in Baghdad between his armed militia and the American military entered a second day. Fighting was reported in Shiite-populated areas in southern Iraq, and U.S. Marines surrounded Fallujah, the western city where four American security contractors were killed last week.
In Karbala, Sadr's followers attacked a police station and a television station. In Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, they occupied the governor's office and traded fire with British troops. In nearby Amarah, members of Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, marched in the streets, clashing with British soldiers near the governor's office. Two Iraqis were killed, witnesses said.
In Najaf, near the Spanish military base where some of the fiercest fighting occurred Sunday, government offices were closed, as were schools and colleges. Members of the Mahdi Army were out in force near the Imam Ali shrine. In nearby Kufa, Sadr's militiamen controlled police posts and government offices.
U.S. military commanders, who have nearly completed a massive troop rotation, said the clashes between their forces and the Mahdi Army on Sunday amounted to the heaviest fighting since nearly a year ago, when President Bush said major combat had ended in Iraq.
"They've essentially declared themselves hostile to us, and so now we're looking for them specifically," said Maj. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the commander in charge of troops in Baghdad.
More than 1,000 U.S. Marines and Iraqi troops, meanwhile, sealed off Fallujah, about 35 miles west of Baghdad, and set in motion an operation aimed at tracking down people responsible for the slaying of the four Americans. The military announced the death of a Marine "as a result of enemy action" in Anbar province, where Fallujah is situated, but a military spokesman gave no details as to the location or circumstances of the death.
The military also said a 1st Infantry Division soldier died in Kirkuk in northern Iraq as the result of a car bombing Sunday that wounded six other U.S. soldiers. Another soldier, with the 2nd Infantry Division, was killed by a roadside bomb in the northern city of Mosul on Sunday, a spokesman said.
The day's deaths brought to 614 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq in hostile and non-hostile situations.
The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, hastily canceled a planned trip to Washington to testify before Congress.
"We will reassert the law and order which the Iraqi people expect," Bremer said. "We have a difficult security situation. We have a group under Moqtada Sadr that has basically placed itself outside the legal authorities, the coalition and Iraqi officials. . . . Effectively he is attempting to establish his authority in the place of the legitimate authority. We will not tolerate this."
A spokesman for Bremer, Daniel Senor, announced that Sadr was wanted for conspiracy to commit murder in the death of a Shiite cleric, Abdel-Majid Khoei, in Najaf on April 10, 2003, the day after the fall of president Saddam Hussein's government.
Twelve suspects were arrested in connection with the stabbing of Khoei and another cleric soon after the killings, officials said Monday. Warrants for 13 others -- including Sadr and one of his top aides, Mustafa Yaqoubi -- were signed early last fall but were not executed until Saturday, when Yaqoubi was arrested.
The arrest was one of the incidents that precipitated the weekend's mass protests and clashes.
Senor would not say if or when Sadr, 30, who remains in seclusion in his mosque in Kufa, would be detained. "There'll be no advance warning," he said.
Dempsey, who lost eight soldiers under his command in Sunday's fighting, declined to say whether Sadr should be arrested but added: "If he makes an appearance in Sadr City, he'll be detained, or in Baghdad -- anyplace that we control."
The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, suggested that there was only one way for Sadr to prevent further violence.
"He's free to surrender," Kimmitt said. "He's free to walk into any police station. He's free to have that warrant served upon him. He'll be treated with dignity. He'll be treated with respect. He'll be treated the same way every other alleged criminal in the Iraqi justice system is treated."
Bush said the unrest would not interfere with the planned transfer of political power to an Iraqi interim government June 30, and he joined in the criticism of Sadr.
"This is one person who's deciding that rather than allow democracy to flourish, he's going to exercise force, and we just can't let it stand," Bush told reporters in Charlotte after meeting a family of a soldier killed in Iraq.
In Kufa, where Sadr's father had cultivated grass-roots support before being assassinated in 1999, the young cleric responded defiantly.
"I'm accused by one of the leaders of evil, Bremer, of being an outlaw," he said in a statement read at the city's sprawling brick mosque. "If that means breaking the law of the American tyranny and its filthy constitution, I'm proud of that and that is why I'm in revolt."
The unrest showed signs of turning into a political crisis.
Iraq's 25-member Governing Council, which has struggled for popular legitimacy since its creation by the United States last summer, issued a statement condemning the violence and calling for militia members to turn over weapons and government buildings seized throughout southern Iraq. "It must be clear to all that there should not be anyone above the law in the new Iraq," council members said in a statement.
Violence across Shiite areas of Baghdad and southern Iraq -- which claimed the lives of eight American troops, a Salvadoran soldier and at least 43 Iraqis on Sunday -- signals a second front for U.S.-led forces already stretched thin trying to fight insurgents in Sunni Muslim areas.
In parts of Baghdad where Sadr enjoys his most fervent support, streets were ceded to his militiamen. Dressed in black, some of them were armed with rifles, grenades, machetes and swords. In two neighborhoods populated by the poor -- from whom Sadr draws his following -- armed supporters set up blockades of concrete, steel beams and scrap metal across streets, often with U.S. forces just a few hundred yards away. Smoke from burning tires wafted overhead, and shops in those areas stayed shuttered through the day.
In one Shiite neighborhood, residents said two AH-64 Apache helicopters fired on a street, damaging a row of restaurants, sweet shops and photo stores and shattering their windows.
The Army acknowledged that attack helicopters fired on targets in the Shuala neighborhood. Kimmitt, the military spokesman, said insurgents fired five to six rounds from small arms at the helicopters. One helicopter was hit by a round, he said, but the crewmen were uninjured. The aircraft returned fire with about 100 rounds of 20mm ammunition, Kimmitt said.
Four people were detained in an Army raid at one of Sadr's offices in Sadr City, the Shiite slum named after the cleric's father, officials said.
A crackdown on Sadr and his followers could prove to be one of the most dangerous tasks the military has faced. Keeping the support, or at least acquiescence, of Iraq's Shiite majority has been a long-standing priority for the Bush administration, which has viewed a Shiite uprising as its nightmare scenario.
Although Sadr has been a strident critic of the occupation since last May, his rhetoric was rarely echoed among mainstream clergy at first. In recent months, however, U.S. standing among Shiites has suffered as clerics and their followers have become more assertive in their demands for elections and reforms of an interim constitution signed in March.
By Monday, an uneasy calm had descended over Sadr City. On the main street, militiamen and Sadr's supporters gathered in front of the movement's headquarters, with a heavy U.S. military presence less than a mile away. Some held guns, pistols or grenades aloft. Others broke into impromptu chants.
"Long live Sadr!" they shouted.
Inside Sadr's offices, tribal elders rushed to see a director of the movement, Amr Husseini. One cleric was overhead saying, "We have the money, we have the weapons, we're waiting for the word of jihad."
The Americans "came as liberators and now they're making the people suffer," said Kadhim Hamza, 55, standing in the street near Sadr's headquarters. "Is this our country or is this not our country?"
In Shuala, angry men strolled through the streets blackened by burning tires. Militiamen directed traffic, and residents angrily gestured at the damage their shops sustained in the attack by Apache helicopters.
"They talk about human rights. That means freedom of expression. We reject the occupation and the presence of the Americans, so they fire on us. They're supposed to respect human rights," said Hussein Kadhim, 24.
Standing before his photo shop, its windows reduced to shards on the sidewalk, Kadhim said: "Even in the time of Saddam, this didn't happen."
In the street outside, the conversation was reminiscent of the anger in the more restive Sunni regions north and west of Baghdad. No one spoke in favor of Hussein, but the complaints were similar, the anger familiar.
"They don't want Iraq to be stable," said Ziad Tareq, 18.
A friend, Ahmed Saadi, 35, interrupted. "They don't want Iraq to be an Islamic state," he said.
Ali Kadhim, his brow sweaty, ran up to them. He gestured to a U.S. tank transport smoldering in the background.
"This is the future," he said.
----
A year on, occupation has failed
by Munir Chalabi, a member of Arab Media Watch
Tuesday 06 April 2004
Media Monitors Network
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/6085/
A year has passed since the start of the Anglo-American war and the end of Saddam's 40-year brutal regime, which consisted of mass slaughter, genocide against the Iraqi uprisings, over 8 years of unjustified wars and 12 years of brutal Anglo-American sanctions in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died from starvation and the effects of depleted uranium. Since the occupation started, what did the Iraqi people gain from the promised American democracy? Free elections? Reconstruction? And the promises to bring peace and prosperity to every Iraqi man woman and child?
Since the start, the occupation has shown its true colours, revealed by the obliteration of the Iraqi state institution, the mass destruction of public and government buildings and mass looting including the historical headstone of the people's civilisation and culture, the dissolving of the Iraqi army, state organisations and the closing of most of the state's industry, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unemployed Iraqis with millions left without any income. American armaments replaced Saddam's tanks in horrifying civilians and shooting peaceful demonstrators asking for jobs, food and freedom.
Since then, Saddam's prisons started to fill with new groups of people who were imprisoned under accusations of terrorism. This was the start of a new type of occupation terrorism, which consisted of the assassination and imprisonment of many Iraqi scientists, intellectuals and anti-American politicians. This was going hand in hand with the daily explosions, resulting in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of men, women and children. They accused extreme religious movements and foreign fighters of committing such atrocities, while most of the Iraqi people accused the American occupiers and Israel intelligence of being behind many explosions. These included the bombings of the UN centre, the Jordanian and Turkish embassies, and the civilian demonstrations in Najaf, Karbola and Kademia, which resulted in the killings of thousands of civilians. One thing we are certain about in accordance to international laws - the occupying forces are responsible for the safety of civilians in occupied territories.
Iraq is becoming a country without peace and stability, where the occupying forces have completely lost control, and where the only change we see is that the American army has replaced Saddam's forces in residing in his palaces, prisons and army camps, while the "Revolutionary Council" has been replaced by the Coalition Provisional Authority and possibly "Paul Bremer replacing Saddam".
The sacking of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, policemen and government employees has taken place, as well as the closure of the largest public industries, seizing sophisticated equipment and resulting in over 50% unemployment within the working population. The only exception to this mass unemployment was the increased salaries of some sectors of Iraqi society such as teachers, doctors, engineers, and what was left of government employees and the increased income of some businessmen from trade imports or the black markert.
As for reconstruction, nothing has actually changed since the end of the war. All the ministries, administration buildings and communication centres are still in the same derelict condition we've seen them in since the end of the war. The occupation seems to have bypassed time for a whole year. During the last year the economic crisis has been hitting civilians, starting with shortages in drinking water, petrol for transport and oil for heating and cooking. But the biggest shortage has been the loss of electricity, which has affected the lives of millions of people all over Iraq. It is frustrating to see that even Saddam's regime managed under severe international sanctions to return most of the electricity and water supply to large cities within 3 months after the Gulf war in 1991. The whole might of the American economy could not return the electricity, petrol and fresh water to the Iraqi people even after one year.
Reconstruction has become nothing but business contracts to American companies, costing billions of dollars, whilst nothing has been done to improve the economic infrastructure of Iraq, apart from some refurbishment in some schools and hospitals, building new garrisons needed for the occupation and 4-metre-high concrete walls around the palaces, police stations, hotels and other CPA and Governing Council buildings.
In addition and due to the mass resistance of the Iraqi people, the CPA and the GC had no alternative but to freeze most of their privatisation laws, which would have handed all the Iraqi wealth, including the oil industry, to American multinational companies for a fraction of what they are worth.
American companies such as Halliburton and Bechtel have become a source of ludicrous contracts to hundreds of corrupt companies and thousands of Iraqis and foreign pro-occupation businessmen, who have stolen as much as they can while leaving little for real reconstruction. Such people include many American businessmen and generals, as well as many of the Saddam regime's supporters from within Iraq and abroad.
As for the political agenda, the failure of the American plans has been more obvious than the failure of the economic and security plans. The failure of the GC, appointed by the occupiers, is an example of the failure of the American political line, as they have been unable to reach any of their major political goals, even with some of the patriotic Iraqi political parties within the council working hand in hand with organisations arriving in Iraq on American tanks. The Council was born dead. This was recognised by many international political observers in addition to most representatives of Iraqi society. The council had no real power and became subsided to an advisory organisation for the occupying forces in all major decisions. Several Iraqi democratic organisations and religious movements have put forward plans to get rid of the occupation by continuing all means of struggle for free and democratic elections. We cannot see other ways to end the occupation and suffering of the Iraqi people other then free elections supervised by the UN. This will give the Iraqi people freedom to decide their future, to end the occupation and bring democracy to Iraq without allowing the return of a new dictatorship similar to Saddam's regime.
The American plan between the CPA and GC signed on the November 15, 2003, was to continue the occupation under the so-called "Transfer of Sovereignty" and the "Law of Administration for the State of Iraq". This is no more than continuing the occupation 'indirectly' through an un-elected and appointed "Enlarged Governing Council", which has no legitimacy within Iraqi society. Such undemocratically appointed organisations will fall in the same way as its predecessor, the GC, as it has no authenticity. All the decisions of such an illegitimate council will have no legal status locally or internationally. The Iraqi people who are mass-demonstrating these days against the new unlawful occupying laws will bring down this plan as they have done with the previous one. Indications are pointing that the new plan will fail and the struggle of the Iraqi people will intensify using all means to resist occupation, and that the occupying forces will lose their ability to have any success in establishing any security and achievement in the political and economic future of Iraq.
----
Marines, Iraqis join forces to shut down Fallujah
Coalition seeks to arrest Shiite cleric
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
(CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/04/05/iraq.main/index.html
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- U.S. Marines fought skirmishes with Iraqi fighters Monday in and around the restive city of Fallujah, closing off the city in response to the killing and mutilation of four American security guards last week.
Marines killed at least one Iraqi and called in airstrikes late Monday after coming under fire from mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns on the outskirts of town.
About 1,300 troops from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, along with Iraqi armed forces, set up a cordon around the city Monday, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. The push has been dubbed "Operation Vigilant Resolve."
"These are the first of a series of actions taken to attack anticoalition and anti-Iraqi forces, to re-establish security in Fallujah and begin the process of civil military assistance projects in Fallujah," Kimmitt said.
U.S. forces also had their hands full Monday morning with the aftermath of violence in Baghdad and Najaf that left at least nine coalition forces and dozens of Iraqis dead over the weekend. The violence followed the arrest of a deputy of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Meanwhile, all roads into Fallujah were closed, and the city's mayor imposed a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew. One Marine was killed in a gunbattle earlier Monday, the Coalition Press Information Center said, and reports from sources inside the city said at least seven Iraqis were killed Monday morning.
Troops closed the main highways between Baghdad and the Jordanian border during the operation, and the only people allowed to pass through the checkpoints are those with Fallujah license plates, military sources said. Retaliation for civilian killings
Fallujah is part of Anbar province in the so-called Sunni Triangle, a region north and west of Baghdad that has been a hotbed of opposition to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
The men were killed by attackers who hit their vehicles with grenades and small-arms fire, and a mob dragged their bodies from the burning vehicles and mutilated them. The charred remains of two of the men were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River as a crowd celebrated below.
Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, promised that the deaths of the contractors would "not go unpunished." U.S. officials said they were trying to isolate and identify the faces of people seen on the videotapes participating in the abuse of the corpses and may offer rewards for their capture.
The Fallujah operation may unfold over several days, and the Marines may not attempt to control the center of the town, military sources said.
"Our concern is precise," said Lt. James Vanzant, a Marine spokesman. "We want to get the guys we are after. We don't want to go in there with guns blazing."
The Marines came under intense fire late Monday, with Iraqi insurgents firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at their positions from a mosque and from an open field.
U.S. forces moving against those positions also came under attack from Iraqis who fired machine guns and threw grenades at them from a BMW sedan. The Marines killed one and wounded at least two of their attackers, taking the survivors into custody.
An Air Force AC-130 Spectre gunship, armed with a 105 mm cannon, was called in to push back the attackers, and no Marines were hurt.
The operation involves troops from the U.S. Marines' 2nd battalion, 1st Marines, and the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, both stationed at Camp Pendleton, California, Vanzant said. Coalition plans to arrest Shiite cleric
Meanwhile, officials in Baghdad announced an arrest warrant for al-Sadr, who has been an outspoken critic of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
Coalition forces handed over Mustafa al-Yaqoubi, a deputy of al-Sadr, to Iraqi police Monday after arresting him Saturday on a warrant from an Iraqi judge, coalition officials said.
Al-Yaqoubi, al-Sadr and 23 others are charged with complicity in the death of rival Shiite cleric Abdul Majeed al-Khoei by a mob of al-Sadr supporters in Najaf a year ago. Thirteen, including al-Yaqoubi, are in custody, officials said.
Monday, coalition forces raided and took control of al-Sadr's office in Baghdad's al-Shaala neighborhood, bringing in ground forces and Apache helicopters, witnesses said. Several people were wounded in the raid, sources said.
When asked why the coalition waited so long from the time arrest warrants were issued -- last fall, officials said -- before taking action, spokesman Dan Senor said it was the Iraqi judge's call.
Meanwhile, President Bush reaffirmed the U.S. plan to turn over sovereignty to an Iraqi government June 30, saying during a speech in North Carolina that "the date remains firm."
Over the weekend, a key Republican senator, Richard Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had suggested it might be necessary to extend the June 30 deadline.(Full story)
And because of new violence generated by illegal militia loyal to al-Sadr, U.S. Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid has asked his senior staff to submit options within 48 hours for sending more troops to Iraq, sources said Monday.
A senior Central Command official told reporters "we have asked the staff to look and see what forces are available in quick response if needed."
Quick-response forces are generally helicopter-borne troops that can rapidly respond to a crisis.
The added troops would either be additional U.S. troops or coalition forces from other countries.
Abizaid is said to be particularly concerned that unrest in the Shiite community could grow, and those radical elements could join forces with Sunni radicals.
Al-Sadr is believed to have about 600 hardcore followers and as many as 3,000 militia members at his command.
Bremer accused al-Sadr on Monday of trying to usurp "the legitimate authority of the Iraqi government and the coalition."
In recent weeks, al-Sadr has incited violence against the United States and called the attacks of September 11, 2001, a gift from God.
Al-Sadr is believed to have taken refuge in the al-Kufah mosque, near the holy city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, a senior coalition official said.
In Baghdad over the weekend, eight U.S. forces were killed in clashes with al-Sadr's banned militia, Mehdi's Army, and at least 45 Iraqis were killed.
Since the war began in March 2003, 615 U.S. troops have been killed; 421 of them under hostile fire. After President Bush announced the end of major combat in May, 476 troops have died, 306 from hostile fire. Overall, 717 coalition troops have been killed, 545 of them after the president's speech.
Meanwhile in Basra, British military officials were negotiating Monday with protesters who seized the governor's office there, a British spokesman said. The protesters were described by the British as "peaceful." (Full story)
CNN's Jane Arraf, Jim Clancy, Barbara Starr, Kevin Flower and Kianne Sadeq contributed to this report.
----
U.S. and Iraqi Forces Seal Off Fallujah as Operation Looms
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51806-2004Apr5.html
BAGHDAD, April 5 -- U.S. and Iraqi military forces sealed off the city of Fallujah on Monday and prepared to launch a major operation aimed at hunting down those responsible for the killing of four American security contractors there last week.
As more than 1,000 U.S. Marines and two battalions of Iraqi forces surrounded the city, military officials said several of their positions were hit by rocket and mortar fire, and one unidentified Marine was killed. Sporadic gunfire was heard all day and into the evening.
U.S. troops dispatched tanks and armored Humvees to block all major highways and roads leading to Fallujah, a city of about 250,000 situated 35 miles west of Baghdad. In the city they distributed leaflets warning people to stay at home. They said that no one would be permitted to carry a weapon and that a 7 p.m.-6 a.m. curfew would be imposed.
Iraqi and other Arabic-language television stations reported that six to 10 Iraqis had been killed in Fallujah, and there were reports that a U.S. helicopter had attacked a residential area of the city, but U.S. officials did not confirm those reports.
"The city is surrounded. It's an extended operation. . . . We are looking for the bad guys in town," Lt. James Vanzant of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force told journalists at a U.S. military base several miles from Fallujah. "We want to make a very precise approach."
U.S. officials here have vowed to hunt down those responsible for the slayings Wednesday of the four security contractors, two of whose bodies were burned, mutilated and dragged through the streets of Fallujah.
Officials said the operation, called Vigilant Resolve, would not involve massive or random searches but would focus more narrowly on finding individuals believed linked to the killings. Fallujah has long been a hotbed of anti-American violence, and the operation had already been planned as part of a broader crackdown.
No raids had been launched by Monday evening, but Fallujah residents reached by telephone said that they could hear gunfire into the evening and that most shops and services had been shut down all day.
"I stayed inside all day, but I can still hear guns and explosions," said a man named Abu Mohammed who answered the phone at the home of a city official. "The coalition surrounded the city last night. The students went to school this morning but then went home again, and the schools were all closed. The water was cut off but then restored."
Al-Jazeera, an Arabic-language satellite television channel, broadcast interviews Monday with Fallujah residents who were asked to explain the gleeful fury of the mobs that clapped and cheered during the attacks on the four Americans.
"They humiliate us. They raid our mosques. Some people have had their brother and relatives killed," said one resident, referring to repeated raids by U.S. troops in the city. "So this is out of revenge."
Another man told an al-Jazeera interviewer that the city was tense and fearful, but he was interrupted by another man who said: "We are not scared. We are in complete readiness. We will fight them with the phrase, 'There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.' "
--------
Transition Date Still Firm, President Says
Bush Is Calm in Reaction to Violence
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51478-2004Apr5.html
CHARLOTTE, April 5 -- President Bush asserted Monday that he would not postpone the June 30 transfer of power in Iraq, as the administration gave an understated public reaction to flaring violence in that country and some of the heaviest fighting since Saddam Hussein's fall.
Bush and his press secretary blamed the Shiite resistance in Baghdad -- where bloody clashes killed scores over the weekend -- on the work of "one man," cleric Moqtada Sadr, who helped trigger a Shiite Muslim uprising. And except for a seven-minute exchange with reporters that was added to his schedule to address the turmoil, the president went about his schedule, including his last fundraiser for his reelection campaign and an appearance at a baseball game in St. Louis.
"The intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same," Bush said when asked about the scheduled transfer of civilian authority from the U.S.-led coalition to Iraqis on June 30. "The date remains firm."
The president's studied calm was in contrast to spreading worry at home and abroad about the Iraq situation. Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested over the weekend that the transfer date may need to be delayed.
Qatar's foreign minister, Hamad Bin Jasim Thani, warned Monday that he fears "we are facing a civil war" in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, canceled plans to travel to Washington so he could remain in Baghdad to deal with the crisis. There, U.S. helicopters fired on Shiite insurgents Monday, a day after 48 Iraqis, eight U.S. soldiers and a Salvadoran died in clashes. At least 610 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.
Vice President Cheney also threw out a first pitch on Monday -- his was in Cincinnati -- and spoke at a Republican fundraiser. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice worked on Iraq and other issues but spent part of the day reviewing notes for her testimony Thursday before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was in Haiti. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made no public appearances.
Administration officials bristled at the idea that they were either disconnected from events in Iraq, or trying to appear so. They said they view Iraq as part of a long, hard war that will have daily ups and downs, and said they will not allow Bush to be trapped into responding to every development.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett said the president decided to speak Monday because he wanted to send a message of resolve to Americans and Iraqis, but that he is intentionally selective about such moments. "When the president speaks, it must mean something and must speak to a larger point," Bartlett said. "He uses these events as an opportunity to educate the public about the struggle we face and how we will prevail. In a war on terror, there will be difficult days and good days. He has spoken out on both, and will continue to do so."
Bush kept to his schedule last Wednesday when four Americans working as security contractors in Iraq were killed and then mutilated by a jubilant throng, producing some of the most disturbing images to emerge from the occupation. His only public event that day was a luncheon with members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He did not add to his public schedule, and did not mention the horror in Fallujah while raising money for his campaign that night.
In Bush's remarks in Charlotte, he predicted more violence as the deadline for the handover of power approaches, saying, "It provides a convenient excuse to attack." But he resisted any suggestion that the rebellion against U.S. forces has spread from the Sunni minority to the Shiite majority.
"[W]ith Sadr, this is one person who is deciding that rather than allow democracy to flourish, he's going to exercise force," he said. Noting that U.S. authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest, Bush added: "This is one person, this is a person, and followers, who are trying to say, 'We don't want democracy.' "
Bush also addressed the continuing furor over counterterrorism policies and whether his administration did enough to combat al Qaeda and other terror groups before the Sept. 11 attacks. He said Rice will "lay out the facts" when she testifies Thursday in front of the commission investigating the attacks.
"Let me just be very clear about this: Had we had the information that was necessary to stop an attack, I'd have stopped the attack," Bush said. "And I'm convinced any other government would have, too. I mean, make no mistake about it; if we had known that the enemy was going to fly airplanes into our buildings, we'd have done everything in our power to stop it."
Bush's comments came a day after the commission's Republican chairman and Democratic vice chairman reiterated their view that the Sept. 11 attacks could have been prevented, if not for a long series of missteps and mistaken judgment by government agencies.
In his speech and his exchange with reporters, Bush vowed repeatedly to "stay the course," but he did not specify what additional measures might be taken to pacify Iraq.
A poll for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center released Monday found that although 57 percent believe the United States was right to use force in Iraq, only four in 10 approve of the way Bush is handling Iraq, down from 59 percent in January, and only 43 percent approve of Bush overall.
After touting his job-training proposals at a community college in Charlotte, Bush met with the family of Chris Hill, who was killed in Fallujah last month, leaving a wife and 1-year-old daughter. "We're being challenged in Iraq because there are people there that hate freedom," Bush said after meeting with Hill's kin. "But the family was pleased to hear that its son would not have died in vain."
"We've got to stay the course and we will stay the course," he said.
Other than the unscheduled remarks on Iraq, Bush did not alter his plans for the day. His stops in Charlotte and St. Louis were en route to an eight-day stay on his ranch in central Texas.Allen reported from Washington. Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
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7 G.I.'s Killed in Iraq Fights Since Weekend, U.S. Says
April 6, 2004
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/international/middleeast/06CND-IRAQ.html?hp
Seven American soldiers died in clashes in Baghdad and Falluja since the weekend, the American military said today, as fighting between the American-led military coalition and Iraqi militia continued to roil Iraq.
An aide to the radical Shiite cleric who has inspired some of the resistance and is wanted by the American and Iraqi authorities said today that the rebellion among the cleric's followers would continue until the coalition troops withdrew from cities and towns.
But the top American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, said today that the uprisings would not derail the plan to hand sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30.
"The attacks that have gone on against coalition forces will be dealt with," Mr. Bremer said on CBS's "Early Show" this morning. "We will suppress these minor-sized militia, which are illegal. And we will proceed with the political process."
Four of the most recent American deaths occurred on Monday in Falluja, where the American military and Iraqi security forces have encircled the city and are seeking to crush strongholds of Sunni Muslim insurgents held responsible for the ambush of four American civilian guards last Wednesday. A military spokesman in Baghdad said no further details of the Monday deaths were available.
The three other American deaths occurred in separate attacks in the Shiite-dominated Kadhimyar district of Baghdad, where coalition troops battled militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric whose followers mounted an uprising over the weekend in at least six Iraqi cities, the military said.
One soldier died when his Bradley fighting vehicle was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade early today, a military spokesman said in Baghdad. The other two deaths occurred on Monday, one when a military convoy came under attack by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, and the second during a firefight with militia members, the spokesman said. The deaths brought to 11 the total number of American soldiers killed in fighting in Baghdad since Sunday.
In Najaf, an aide to Mr. Sadr said at a news conference that the uprising by the cleric's supporters would continue until occupying troops were withdrawn from populated areas and prisoners were released, Reuters reported.
The aide, Qays al-Khazali, also read a statement from Mr. Sadr denouncing President Bush as "the great evil."
"This insurrection shows that the Iraqi people are not satisfied with the occupation and they will not accept oppression," the statement said.
He called on all countries to withdraw their soldiers from Iraq.
Mr. Sadr, who is being sought by American and Iraqi authorities, had been holed up in a mosque in the city of Kufa, but said he had decided to leave the sanctuary because he feared it would be raided by foreign troops. He had vowed to stay in the mosque until his demands were met. Mr. Sadr was reported to have traveled to Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, earlier today.
On Monday, American administrators declared Mr. Sadr an "outlaw" and disclosed that an Iraqi judge had issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the murder of a rival cleric last April.
Mr. Bremer, in an interview on CNN today, vowed to arrest Mr. Sadr.
"He believes that in the new Iraq, like in the old Iraq, power should be with the guy who's got the guns, and that's an unacceptable vision for Iraq," he said. "He represents a fundamental challenge to the rule of law in Iraq, and it will not stand."
American and Iraqi forces that have amassed on the outskirts of Falluja have begun conducting raids in the city in what Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, called "a methodical effort" to find and capture the people responsible for killing the four American military contractors last week in Falluja. Speaking at a televised news conference in Norfolk, Va., this morning, Mr. Rumsfeld said that coalition forces had targeted "high-value targets" and captured or killed several people since the weekend.
Explosions and gunfire were heard in the city throughout the night and into this morning, though the majority of the American-led force remained on the outskirts of the city, The Associated Press reported. Marines pushed into an industrial zone in the eastern part of the city, clashing with guerrillas.
Elsewhere in Iraq, fighting flared up between coalition troops and guerrillas. Italian troops clashed with Mr. Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, Reuters reported. Four Italian vehicles were set ablaze during the predawn fighting and 12 Italian soldiers were injured.
Militants also clashed with British troops in Amara, Ukrainian troops in Kut and Polish troops south of Kerbala, the news agency said.
A Bulgarian civilian driver was killed today near Nasiriya, on the road between Basra and Baghdad when a convoy of six trucks came under attack, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said, according to Reuters.
-------- israel / palestine
Face to face with mastermind of Jerusalem suicide bombs
Abdul Rahman Makdad planned attacks this year on two Israeli buses. Nineteen were killed.
Donald Macintyre
06 April 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=508887
He sat in the middle of the room, a few feet away from the Shin Bet interrogator he had got to know so well since he was arrested just under a month ago. With his well-kept beard, and dressed in a beige zip-up jacket over a white T-shirt, dark trousers, his feet sockless under brown lace-up shoes without laces, Abdul Rahman Makdad looked relaxed, perhaps even a little truculent.
As he began to speak, in a clear, unhesitant voice, it required effort, here in the heart of the Russian Compound prison, to conjure the full enormity of the mission Makdad was describing in such calm, matter-of-fact terms. On Saturday 21 February, just six weeks ago, he had sent his wife and infant son away to his parents-in-law, leaving him free to concentrate on the work ahead.
At 4pm Mohammed Za'ul, at 23 five years younger than Makdad, arrived at Makdad's home in Bethlehem so that the older man could give the younger one final instructions and spend the night meticulously preparing the explosives before packing them into the blue rucksack Za'ul would be wearing when he boarded the number 14 bus in Jewish West Jerusalem the following morning.
Neither man had slept that night; Makdad took the customary video of Za'ul's last testament as a man who had volunteered for martydom. Makdad saw to it that Za'ul was wearing clothes suitable for the Jerusalem weather that morning - jeans, jacket and a nondescript hat. The object, he explained, was to make Za'ul as unobtrusive - and as Jewish looking - as possible. "In general he wasn't frightened," said Makdad. "But I told him not to look at any police and security people and not to be frightened." Za'ul did not speak any Hebrew; so he had been under a standing instruction to detonate the bomb if he was spoken to by the bus driver. "But this is a rare situation."
Although only religious, by his own account, "in a general way, not an extreme one", Makdad had joined Za'ul in his last prayers. The two men ate breakfast together before Za'ul left at 6pm, to be guided by a construction worker carefully chosen for his local knowledge through the security cordon dividing Bethlehem from Jerusalem and on to the centre of the city. It was after 8.30am that Makdad got the news that the bomb had detonated as a bus headed north along Kind David Street in rush hour, killing eight Israeli civilians and wounding more than 60. "I heard it on the radio," he said. "And I was happy."
If Makdad had somehow been broken by his interrogation he showed no sign of it. Asked early on in this rare hour-long interview whether he accepted the principal Israeli accusation that he had organised the February bomb on the number 14 bus and the one just a month earlier which had killed 11 people on a number 19 Jerusalem bus, he answered coolly: "I was responsible for the last two operations. I don't recall the numbers of the buses."
He showed impatience - turning to his unnamed Shin Bet interrogator, an Arabic speaker in his 30s dressed in jeans and a check shirt, to enjoy a joke with him at the expense of the sheer "Westernness" of our questions - when he was asked repeatedly exactly how the two men had spent the last 14 hours before Za'ul left on his mission. What had they eaten for breakfast? Did it matter? Maybe a little humus; he couldn't really remember. Why were we so obsessed with food? Were we hungry?
What had they spoken about when Makdad wasn't working on the explosives? "Ordinary conversation. There was no need at all to convince this man to carry out the operation. He himself chose to be a martyr." Indeed "the easiest thing [about such operations] is to find a martyr. In our nation we have thousands of people who want to be martyrs."
Makdad's journey to the leadership of a cell of four men, according to Makdad - which was part of a larger, interlocking, 20-strong Bethlehem-based cell according to the Israelis - had been a relatively long one. He was born in Egypt. His family had fled there as refugees after 1948 from near Ashkelon. Makdad lived there until he was 14, moving on to Libya, where he joined Fatah's Palestinian Liberation Army and took a commando course.
But with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the wake of the Oslo accords he came to Gaza and then to Jenin, where he served in the Palestinian Security Services. At this point, he said: "I believed in peace. I served with the police force." But then, as he put it: "I noticed that Israel didn't want peace."
The manifestations of the occupation remained in place - including what Makdad described as "Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people." He was transferred to Bethlehem, where he became a bodyguard to the PA governor, Mohammed Madami, and then to the man who took over the governate from Madami five months ago, Zuhair Manasra. He was in that job until he was arrested; indeed, as Makdad confirmed, his family continue to receive his salary now he is in detention. To Makdad this is entirely natural, despite the Authority's stated opposition to suicide bombings. "They treat me as a political prisoner not as a criminal. If I had been found out as a collaborator, they would have stopped my salary."
The Israeli charge sheet against Makdad is lengthy, going back to shooting attacks in 2001. In 2003, the Israelis say, he took instructions from Ahmed Mugrabi, whom Makdad had first met in Libya. Makdad managed to stay in contact with Mugrabi after his detention for his part in a 2002 suicide bombing in Beit Yisrael.
As late as last month, just a week after dispatching the second bus bomber to Jerusalem, Makdad is accused of planning a spectacular but foiled hijacking of an Israeli bus. Two suicide bombers would have driven the bus to Bethlehem, forcing it and its passengers into the Church of the Nativity to negotiate the release of Palestinian prisoners in return for the passengers' lives. If anything had gone wrong, the bombers would have blown up the bus.
So why had he agreed to talk to us, five reporters from European and American newspapers, invited to the Russian Compound by his Israeli enemies? "The main purpose of this meeting is to give a clear picture of our strategy, which is reacting to killing by killing." He used this last phrase several times, justifying the killing of innocent civilians as a response to the deaths caused by Israeli targeted assassinations and incursions into the occupied territories. Makdad told us: "We prefer to do the explosions in a bus. Sometimes it has to be in Jerusalem in a crowded area. But the main thing is to create more casualties."
What had the tactic, internationally reviled as it was, achieved for the Palestinian cause? If the Israelis continued to kill Palestinians, this would eventually help to achieve the Palestinian goals "in the long term and in the future".
If we had asked about his interrogation, the Israeli officials supervising the interview would have ended it immediately. Although officials admit privately that prisoners like Makdad sometimes give information because they are allowed to believe falsely that their wife and children are under threat of detention, this prohibition was not, they insisted, because he might reveal maltreatment at the hands of his captors. Five years ago, after repeated and well-documented accusations that the Israelis had regularly tortured prisoners, the Supreme Court ruled against any physical abuse of prisoners.
But in any case, what had been the gain in this, at times surreal, meeting for the Israeli authorities themselves? Occasionally, perhaps, a prisoner may give information in such circumstances that he will withhold from his interrogators. Explaining that his cell was a freelance one, beholden to none of the well-known armed factions, Makdad disclosed, apparently for the first time, that the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade had been allowed to claim responsibility for the bombing in return for providing 3,000 shekels (£400) through Makdad's brother, Maher. The "credit" for the operation had, in effect, been sold.
But the other, more potent factor may well have been Makdad's role as an employee of the PA, particularly in Bethlehem where from 2002 until two months ago the Authority was in theory left in charge of security. According to the Israelis, this allowed the militant factions to establish themselves in the town.
Makdad himself insisted that if the PA - or the Bethlehem Governor - had known about his activities he would have been arrested. Seven miles away in his office in Bethlehem, Governor Manasra indeed said he had been "astonished" at Makdad's arrest and subsequent confession. "All I ask of my bodyguards is that they are polite to people and balanced in their behaviour. He was both these things." But while adamant that he opposed attacks on innocent civilians he warned that incursions, checkpoints and seizure of land to accommodate the route of the security barrier which were stopping "patients getting to their doctors, children to their schools, students to their universities" and devastating the local economy created a feeling of hopelessness among Palestinian youth. "Give me one day in 2003 or 2004 in which the Israelis did not kill a Palestinian," he added. "What the Israelis do is going to make more and more Palestinians radical and violent. They leave no way for a reasonable or pragmatic way of doing things."
He claimed that even though the Israelis had not backed a security plan to transfer known militants to Jericho, the PA was "every day stopping actions [by militants] because we think that to kill civilians is to escalate the conflict". He had been obliged in January to release a dozen prisoners held in Bethlehem only when the Israeli Army had raided the city and demanded they be handed over to them.
Back in Jerusalem, awaiting what is likely to be life sentence, an unrepentant Makdad insisted he "had no regrets. I have done nothing wrong" Two more questions. Why, if he was strong believer in martyrdom, had he not carried out of the bombings himself? If he went on such a mission, he would no longer be able to organise others to do so. But he had been ready to do the February bombing himself if it had been necessary because no martyr could be found. And was his career of organising attacks on Israelis over? Well, prisoner swaps are a feature of the conflict. "No I don't think it is over."
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Sharon in a New Threat to Arafat: A Deterrent Message?
April 6, 2004
New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/international/middleeast/06MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, April 5 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel has suggested that he no longer feels bound by a three-year-old commitment to President Bush not to harm Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
The prime minister's spokesman, Raanan Gissin, said Monday that Israel had no immediate intention to act against Mr. Arafat. But the substance and timing of Mr. Sharon's threatening remarks, in an interview published here on Monday, were significant.
His comments came as Israelis entered the Passover holiday braced for threatened retaliation by the militant group Hamas for the killing two weeks ago of its spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Mr. Gissin said that with 58 intelligence warnings of possible attacks, "the level of alerts is at an all-time high today."
Mr. Sharon appeared to be signaling that he felt new freedom to act against Mr. Arafat in the event of a devastating terrorist attack.
Further, he is trying to shore up support among right-wing Israelis who are alarmed by his plan for a unilateral withdrawal from most or all of the Gaza Strip and possibly from part of the West Bank. At a cabinet meeting on Sunday, he clashed over the plan with far-right members of his governing coalition.
Finally, Mr. Sharon is concerned that his withdrawal proposal might be perceived as a reward for terrorism, emboldening Palestinians to take violent action.
"The important thing is to exert a stern warning: `Don't even try to use this to instigate more terrorist activity,' " Mr. Gissin said. "It's more of a deterrent measure than an operational message."
But Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official, said the threat was "very serious."
"It's consistent with Sharon's exit strategy from the peace process," Mr. Erekat said. "That is, destroy the Palestinian Authority, kill Arafat, throw it all into chaos and anarchy and extremism, and say, `I don't have a partner.' "
On Friday, the Israeli newspaper Maariv released an excerpt of an interview in which Mr. Sharon threatened Mr. Arafat by saying he had "no insurance policy." At the time, his aides said he still felt bound by his pledge to Mr. Bush.
But according to the transcript of the interview, published Monday, Mr. Sharon noted that since he made his vow to Mr. Bush, Mr. Arafat's circumstances had changed. "That was a time when he was still walking on the red carpets," he said of Mr. Arafat. In a reference to the United States and other governments, he added, "Today, all these people also know the exact extent of the damage he has caused."
In another interview, with the Israeli radio, Mr. Sharon said when asked about Mr. Arafat, "Those who kill Jews and order that Jews be killed, because of the fact that they are Jews, are sentenced to death."
On Friday, the Bush administration said it opposed any action to harm Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Arafat says he is committed to a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict. But Israel accuses him of fomenting terrorism, and the Bush administration, regarding him as an obstacle to peace, has refused to deal directly with him for almost two years.
In his interviews, granted to Israeli news organizations in advance of Passover, Mr. Sharon repeatedly said his plan to "disengage" from the Palestinians would rule out a Palestinian state, at least for years.
"These steps of ours will harm the Palestinians severely," he told Maariv. "It will bring their dreams to an end. When you fence in regions and settlements with fences, you end a lot of their dreams. They can get a lot more through negotiations."
Mr. Sharon says he will not hold substantive negotiations with the present Palestinian leadership because it has not acted to stop terrorism. Mr. Erekat and other Palestinian officials accuse him of trying to avoid negotiations that would force him to yield more territory than he plans to give up unilaterally.
Mr. Sharon, in an effort to secure American support for his plan, is to meet with Mr. Bush on April 14. He told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that the Americans had insisted that Israel withdraw from some West Bank settlements as part of the plan.
"The Americans' position was that the evacuation of Gaza alone would only serve Israel," he said.
The prime minister plans to propose withdrawing from four small settlements in the northern West Bank. But he said he would take that step "only if we are satisfied with the negotiations with the Americans."
He said he had already reached an understanding with the Bush administration that after a withdrawal, Israel would remain free to send its forces back into any area from which it is attacked. He said he also expected the Bush administration "not to criticize" the route of the barrier Israel is building against West Bank Palestinians.
Israeli officials say Mr. Sharon is also seeking some kind of assurance from Washington that as part of any eventual peace agreement, Israel will not be expected to withdraw from all territory it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. He wants in particular to retain three large blocks of West Bank settlements.
Mr. Sharon is under pressure from his right to gain a commitment from the United States to oppose any "right of return" to what is now Israel for refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and their descendants.
He also wants the United States to help secure international financing to develop Gaza and Israel's Negev region, one possible home for the 7,500 settlers now living in Gaza.
Late Sunday, Israeli forces near a Jewish settlement in Gaza killed three Palestinian men that the army said had entered an area it has declared off limits to Palestinians. Palestinian medics who recovered the bodies said the three were unarmed, Reuters reported.
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US Defense of Israeli Assassinations Is Counterproductive
by Stephen Zunes,
April 6, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=2255
The U.S. veto of a proposed UN Security Council resolution criticizing Israel's March 22 assassination of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin has once again placed the United States both on the fringe of international public opinion and in opposition to international legal norms. Despite the proposed resolution condemning "all attacks against civilians," the United States once again was the lone dissenting vote, marking the 28th time since 1970 that the U.S. has blocked a Security Council resolution criticizing the actions of its most important Middle Eastern ally.
This is more than all the other permanent members of the Security Council have used their veto power on all other issues during that period combined.
The Fourth Geneva Conventions - to which both Israel and the United States are signatories, and which the UN Security Council, in previous unanimous resolutions, has determined applies to the Israeli-occupied territories - explicitly prohibits "the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people." [Article 3(I)]
Furthermore, even if Ahmed Yassin was complicit in earlier acts of terrorism, the elderly, quadriplegic sheik would still be considered a "protected person," which the 1949 treaty describes as those "taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces ... placed hors de combat [out of combat] by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause."
Sheik Yassin and Terrorism
Sheik Yassin had been imprisoned twice in recent years by Israeli occupation forces, but Israel set him free without any charges of involvement with acts of terrorism. Though the Israeli military launched frequent raids in the Gaza Strip and other Palestinian areas to arrest suspects, they made no attempt to re-arrest Yassin. Similarly, the Israelis made no formal extradition request to the Palestine Authority.
Yassin was a spiritual leader, not a military leader. Despite his reactionary interpretation of Islamic teachings and his rationalizations for attacks against Israeli civilians, he was not generally considered to be in the chain of command regarding Hamas terrorist operations. Indeed, his failing health alone - at the time of his assassination, he was largely blind and deaf - limited his effectiveness as anything more than a symbolic figure.
In any case, Hamas was never a cult of personality centered around one person. Its multifaceted operations - which, in addition to its military wing, include a network of schools, health care clinics, and other basic social services - operated well during periods in which Yassin was jailed.
In more recent, years Sheik Yassin had been considered a relatively moderate voice, supporting a series of ceasefires with Israel (each of which Israel broke by assassinating Palestinian leaders). He had also insisted that military operations take place only within the boundaries of historic Palestine and not in the United States. He recently stated that Hamas would stop attacks against Israel from the Gaza Strip in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the territory. His successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, disagreed with Sheik Yassin on each of these matters, and will likely expand the deadly reach of Hamas' military wing.
The attack - consisting of three missiles fired from a U.S.-supplied helicopter - also killed seven other people: two bodyguards and five unarmed bystanders. The Israeli government has not even claimed these other victims were guilty of any crimes.
In light of such moral, legal, and tactical questions regarding the assassination, the Bush administration's response is particularly disturbing.
The Bush Administration's Response to the Assassination
While not overtly endorsing the attack, President Bush declared on March 23 that " Israel has a right to defend herself from terror." A day earlier, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice defended the assassination by saying "Let's remember that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and Sheik Yassin has himself, we believe, been involved in terrorist planning." (She gave no evidence to back up her claims of Yassin's personal involvement in planning terrorist operations.)
The strongest language against the attack the Bush administration could use was uttered by spokesman Scott McLellan on the day of the attack, when he said that "the United States is deeply troubled by this morning's action in Gaza." Democrats in the House of Representatives, however, attacked the Bush administration from the right, with Rep. Gary Ackerman (NY) - joined by Robert Matsui (CA), Barney Frank (MA), Nita Lowey (NY), Shelley Berkley (NV), Brad Sherman (CA), Carolyn McCarthy (NY), Ed Markey (MA), Martin Frost (TX), and other Democratic leaders - demanding that President Bush "immediately repudiate" McLellan's statement.
In any event, the Bush administration response to Israel's assassinations policy was a lot milder than it had been previously. Last summer, for example, following Israel's unsuccessful assassination attempt against Rantisi, which killed a female bystander and wounded dozens of others, President Bush declared, "I regret the loss of innocent life. I'm concerned that the attacks will make it more difficult for the Palestinian leadership to fight off terrorist attacks. I also don't believe the attacks help the Israeli security."
The Democratic response to this moderate response from the administration, however, was even more vociferous. The entire House Democratic leadership - Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (CA), Deputy leader Steny Hoyer (MD), Caucus Chair Robert Menendez (NJ), ranking House International Relations Committee ranking member Tom Lantos (CA), and dozens of others - wrote a letter to President Bush saying that they were "deeply dismayed" by his comments. The Democrats claimed that " the attack on Hamas leader Abdel Rantisi was clearly justified as an application of Israel 's right to self-defense," and that Israel 's assassination policy must have "the full support of the United States."
It is noteworthy that the majority of the Democratic leaders signing these letters are on record opposing the death penalty, even in cases where a mass murderer like Timothy McVeigh has been granted a fair trial by jury and other Constitutional guarantees. McVeigh, however, is a white American. By contrast, if the suspect is a Palestinian, these Democrats appear to believe that not only is execution an appropriate punishment, no due process is required. This is yet another example of the vicious and endemic anti-Arab racism in the Democratic Party.
The Assassination Debate within Israel
It would be wrong to attribute the Republicans' and Democrats' support of Israel 's assassinations as support for Israel . Indeed, Israelis themselves are deeply divided on the wisdom of such provocative actions. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's own interior minister, Avraham Poraz, declared, "I think the damage is greater than the usefulness." Even more significantly, Shin Bet, the Israeli security service charged with protecting Israelis from terrorist attacks, was also in opposition to the Yassin assassination, according to Israeli press reports.
Danny Rubenstein, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, observed, "The more Israel hits Hamas leaders and rank-and-file members, the more their popularity climbs. In tandem, they become increasingly immune to operations by the PA's security force, since any such operation would only be interpreted as treacherous collaboration with Israel."
Prominent Israeli journalist Uri Avneri reacted by observing, "There seems to be no limit to the stupidity of our political and military leaders. They endanger the future of the State of Israel." Indeed, public opinion polls show that 80% of the Israeli public fear more violence, since virtually every Israeli assassination has resulted directly in terrorist attacks against civilian targets in Israel. Indeed, political scientist Steve Niva of Evergreen State College has demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks by Hamas have come in direct response to such Israeli assassinations and assassination attempts.
Similarly, Yediot Ahoronot's military affairs correspondent Alex Fishman has observed that such assassinations appear to be designed to inflame militant groups rather than deter them, noting the pattern of Israeli attacks when there has been a lull in Palestinian violence and when Hamas had agreed to or was considering a cease-fire.
Furthermore, the killings have dramatically raised the standing of Hamas relative to the more moderate secular groupings that make up the Palestine Authority (PA). Despite PA president Yasir Arafat's corruption, ineptitude, and autocratic rule, the PA has accepted the principle of peace, security guarantees, and normalized relations with Israel in return for the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from the 22% of historic Palestine occupied by Israel in 1967. By contrast, Hamas wants no less than 100% of historic Palestine.
A Revival of Nonviolent Resistance
Over the past two months, there has been a revival of nonviolent resistance to the occupation, with Palestinians (sometimes joined by Israeli peace activists) engaging in sit-ins, blockades, and other forms of nonviolent direct action against the Israeli occupation and colonization of the West Bank. A number of Israeli analysts, including political science professor Neve Gordan of Ben-Gurion University, believe that the assassination of Sheik Yassin will short-circuit this nonviolent movement and turn the tide back in a more violent direction.
It is noteworthy that, during the first and largely nonviolent intifada in the late 1980s, the Israelis closed down the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence (PCSNV) while allowing Hamas to operate openly. Israeli occupation authorities arrested and exiled PCSNV's founding director Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian native of Jerusalem and a disciple of Gandhi, while allowing Sheik Yassin to remain free and to openly call for armed struggle against Israel.
The major reason for the bipartisan American backing for Israel's policy of assassination, then, is not out of concern for Israeli security interests, which are clearly compromised by such policies. The main reason is that Israeli policy is not very different from current U.S. policy.
In September 2001, President Bush rescinded President Gerald Ford's 1976 executive order banning agents of the U.S. government from engaging in assassinations and lowered the standard of proof for assassinations to those merely "suspected" of being terrorists.
For example, in November 2002, President Bush ordered the assassination of a suspected al Qaeda operative in Yemen. Not only has the administration not released evidence of why it believed the victim was an al Qaeda leader, but the missile attack on his car killed four other people, including a U.S. citizen.
In effect, the Democratic Party is now to the right of Ford administration, and - as indicative in these recent "Dear Colleague" letters - to the right of the Bush administration as well. By opposing international legal standards even more vociferously than President Bush, it will make it very difficult for voters who support these principles to vote for either major party this fall.
The sad fact, then, is that even a Democratic victory in November is unlikely to bring much change from the Bush administration's ongoing assaults against international law and the United Nations. As a result, it is all the more imperative that those who support such principles not waste their time trying to elect Democrats who support nearly identical foreign policies as their Republican opponents, but demand that both parties end their opposition to basic international legal principles and institutions which are upheld by virtually every other democratic nation.
-------- mideast
Jordan Military Court Convicts Militants
April 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Jordan-Terror-Trial.html
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- Jordan's military court convicted eight Muslim militants Tuesday and sentenced them to death for the 2002 killing of a U.S. aid official in a terror conspiracy linked to al-Qaida.
The court also handed down jail terms ranging from six to 15 years for two other men convicted in the conspiracy, which began with the killing of Laurence Foley, 60, an Amman-based administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Foley was gunned down outside his Amman home on Oct. 28, 2002.
Col. Fawaz Buqour, the court's president, acquitted the 11th defendant, Numan al-Hirsh, saying there was no evidence to implicate him in the conspiracy.
The guilty verdicts can be appealed.
Among those sentenced to death was Jordanian militant Ahmed al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is thought to be a close associate of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. Al-Zarqawi was among six defendants who were tried in absentia; his whereabouts are unknown.
U.S. officials have offered a $10 million reward for al-Zarqawi's capture, saying he is trying to build a network of foreign militants in neighboring Iraq to work on behalf of al-Qaida, which is blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks.
The five defendants in custody, standing in the dock wearing dark blue prison uniforms, shouted ``allahu Akbar,'' or ``God is great,'' and ``this verdict is unfair'' as Buqour read the verdict in a small courtroom guarded by military policemen armed with machine guns.
Outside the courtroom, a military helicopter hovered overhead during the hearing.
The U.S. Embassy issued a statement thanking Jordan for ``bringing those responsible for Larry's murder to justice.'' The statement vowed to ``remain resolved to continue his (Foley's) work to improve the lives of ordinary Jordanians and to bring the people of our two nations closer together.''
Jordan, a moderate Arab nation with close ties to the United States and a peace treaty with Israel, has been the target of several terror plots.
Foley's death was the only attack linked to the Jordan conspiracy, which allegedly targeted unspecified American and Israeli interests in Jordan.
Eleven Libyan, Syrian, Palestinian and Jordanian men had been charged in the conspiracy. Their trial began in the military State Security Court 10 months ago.
The five in custody -- Salem bin Suweid, Yasser Freihat, Mohammed Amin Abu-Saeed, Numan Al-Hirsh and Mohammed De'mes -- had pleaded innocent. They told the court their guilty confessions had been extracted under duress.
Bin Suweid and Freihat also had produced witnesses who testified the men were not at the crime scene when Foley was killed.
Military prosecutors charged bin Suweid, 41, with firing the gun that killed Foley, and Freihat, 29, with driving the getaway car. Bin Suweid and Freihat were sentenced to death, as were all six fugitives: al-Zarqawi, Palestinian Shaker Yousef al-Absi, Jordanian Moamar Ahmed al-Jaghbeer and Syrians Mohammed Ahmed Tayourah, Ahmed Hussein Hassoun, Mahmoud Abdul-Rahman Thaher.
De'mes was given 15 years with hard labor.
Abu Saeed, a Jordanian of Palestinian descent, was initially sentenced to 15 years in jail with hard labor, but Buqour immediately commuted it to six years, saying he wanted ``to give this young man another chance'' and that it was not believed he had been deeply involved in the terror plot.
The government has blamed Foley's killing on bin Laden's al-Qaida network. Prosecutors did not mention al-Qaida in the initial indictment, but said at least half of the suspects had links with al-Zarqawi, who allegedly provided bin Suweid with weapons and $62,000 to finance the plot.
The indictment said bin Suweid began recruiting militants to his cell in Syria in 1997. He came to Jordan late in 1999, using a forged Tunisian passport bearing the name ``Ali Lafi.'' Automatic machine guns, explosives and detonators had been smuggled from Iraq in batches starting in June 2002.
Earlier, 22 Islamic extremists were convicted of plotting to attack U.S. and Israeli tourists using bombs and poison gas during Jordan's millennium celebrations. The plot, in which al-Zarqawi also allegedly was involved, was foiled in November 1999 and blamed on bin Laden.
-------- nato
Don't Expand NATO!
by Rep. Ron Paul
April 6, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=2256
Further expansion of NATO, an outdated alliance, is not in our national interest and may well constitute a threat to our national security in the future.
More than 50 years ago the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed to defend Western Europe and the United States against attack from the communist nations of Eastern Europe. It was an alliance of sovereign nations bound together in common purpose - for mutual defense. The deterrence value of NATO helped to keep the peace throughout the Cold War. In short, NATO achieved its stated mission. With the fall of the Soviet system and the accompanying disappearance of the threat of attack, in 1989-1991, NATO's reason to exist ceased. Unfortunately, as with most bureaucracies, the end of NATO's mission did not mean the end of NATO. Instead, heads of NATO member states gathered in 1999 desperately attempting to devise new missions for the outdated and adrift alliance. This is where NATO moved from being a defensive alliance respecting the sovereignty of its members to an offensive and interventionist organization, concerned now with "economic, social and political difficulties...ethnic and religious rivalries, territorial disputes, inadequate or failed efforts at reform, the abuse of human rights, and the dissolution of states," in the words of the Washington 1999 Summit.
And we saw the fruits of this new NATO mission in the former Yugoslavia, where the US, through NATO, attacked a sovereign state that threatened neither the United States nor its own neighbors. In Yugoslavia, NATO abandoned the claim it once had to the moral high ground. The result of the illegal and immoral NATO intervention in the Balkans speaks for itself: NATO troops will occupy the Balkans for the foreseeable future. No peace has been attained, merely the cessation of hostilities and a permanent dependency on US foreign aid.
The further expansion of NATO is in reality a cover for increased US interventionism in Europe and beyond. It will be a conduit for more unconstitutional US foreign aid and US interference in the internal politics of member nations, especially the new members from the former East.
It will also mean more corporate welfare at home. As we know, NATO membership demands a minimum level of military spending of its member states. For NATO's new members, the burden of significantly increased military spending when there are no longer external threats is hard to meet. Unfortunately, this is where the US government steps in, offering aid and subsidized loans to these members so they can purchase more unneeded and unnecessary military equipment. In short, it is nothing more than corporate welfare for the US military industrial complex.
The expansion of NATO to these seven countries, we have heard, will open them up to the further expansion of US military bases, right up to the border of the former Soviet Union. Does no one worry that this continued provocation of Russia might have negative effects in the future? Is it necessary?
Further, this legislation encourages the accession of Albania, Macedonia, and Croatia - nations that not long ago were mired in civil and regional wars. The promise of US military assistance if any of these states are attacked is obviously a foolhardy one. What will the mutual defense obligations we are entering into mean if two Balkan NATO members begin hostilities against each other (again)?
In conclusion, we should not be wasting US tax money and taking on more military obligations expanding NATO. The alliance is a relic of the Cold War, a hold-over from another time, an anachronism. It should be disbanded, the sooner the better.
----
Serbian Orthodox church says NATO troops beat up priest, son in raid
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina (AFP)
Apr 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040406185443.kh4ugd81.html
The Serbian Orthodox church accused NATO on Tuesday of "savagely beating up" an Orthodox priest and his son during a recent swoop on their home in a bid to nab top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic.
NATO-led peacekeepers have "tied and savagely beat up grievly wounded priest Jeremija (Starovlah) and his son with rifle butts, boots and everything that they could," said a letter by Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle to the peackeepers' US commander.
"You are familiar with those facts," the letter to US General Virgil Packett, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, said.
Bosnian Serbs authorities and clergy have already hinted that NATO troops beat up the priest and his son during the raid but NATO strongly denied the allegations.
According to the NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR), the two were wounded when the troops used explosives to blast their way into the priest's house near a church in Thursday's raid in Karadzic's wartime stronghold of Pale, near Sarajevo.
he priest and his 28-year-old son Aleksandar were still in a coma and on life-support machines on Tuesday.
The raid involving some 40 US and British troops followed credible NATO intelligence that Karadzic, charged in 1995 by the UN court for atrocities during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, was hiding in the priest's house.
It was SFOR's third failed attempt to nab Karadzic in Bosnia since he went into hiding after the war.
The UN court's chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has repeatedly accused the Bosnian Serb authorities and some members of the Serb Orthodox church in both Serb-run parts of Bosnia and neighbouring Serbia-Montenegro of helping Karadzic evade arrest.
However, Patriarch Pavle assured that "Serbian priests do now hide those charged for war crimes."
The Orthodox Church in Bosnia is part of the Belgrade-based Serbian Orthodox Church.
-------- space
Los Alamos Lab helps heat things up in space
By Sue Vorenberg
April 6, 2004
Tribune Reporter
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news04/040504_news_bright.shtml
Los Alamos National Laboratory gives the Mars rovers a warm feeling all over.
That feeling isn't love - not exactly.
It's plutonium heat.
For more than 40 years the lab has supplied the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with plutonium-based devices that provide power and keep spacecraft warm in the frigid temperatures of space.
A bit of lab plutonium has been on just about every major NASA mission, including navigational satellites in the early 1960s, Apollos 12 through 15, Pioneer II, Vikings 1 and 2, Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo and most recently the Cassini mission - which arrives at Saturn on July 1 - and the Mars Exploration Rovers, which landed early this year.
"Without our devices the Mars rovers would have to use battery power to keep their electronics warm," said Jeff Huling, a Los Alamos scientist. "That would cut down on the lifespan of the mission. Our heaters have extended the lifetime of each rover from 20 days to 90 days or more."
That translates to more time to explore, more data to gather and ultimately more scientific understanding of our solar system, said Horton Newsom, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico Institute of Meteoritics.
"In order to explore the outer solar system, including Mars and beyond, nuclear heaters and power systems are essential," Newsom said. "Without the nuclear technology, we would not have had the Voyager missions, the missions to Jupiter. We would know almost nothing about the outer solar system. Even the Viking landers on Mars in the 1970s wouldn't have happened."
The rovers use batteries and solar panels for energy, but that isn't enough to keep electronics warm through the night. The Los Alamos plutonium keeps them warm - protecting delicate electronic leads from cracking - without wasting valuable energy.
In fact, components on the rovers are working so well that NASA now thinks the missions will last about 240 days each, almost three times the amount previously thought, Huling said.
Los Alamos stores a part of the U.S. supply of plutonium in a vault. The supply is used for nuclear weapons experiments and NASA projects, Huling explained.
Plutonium 238, a different type than the plutonium used in bombs, decays quickly to uranium 234. When it decays, particles break off and bump around, creating heat.
"That's kinetic energy," Huling said. "It's like when you clap your hands together quickly and they get warm, or if you drive your car a lot the air in the tires gets hot."
For some craft, that heat is used to keep things warm. In others, like Cassini, a much larger supply of plutonium is used to generate electricity, he said.
"What we do with probes like Cassini is take the heat and convert it to electrical energy that can power instruments," Huling said. "It's difficult to get reliable power in space, especially as craft travel farther from the Sun, but our energy units don't rely on solar power or heavy chemical battery components."
Each Mars rover uses eight evenly spaced film-container-sized plutonium capsules for heat.
Cassini, on the other hand, has four 5-foot-long modules that together generate about 300 watts of power - or enough to power three 100 watt light bulbs.
"That might not sound like much," Huling said. "But NASA and other science organizations compete vigorously to use every last fraction of a watt."
Next on the lab's agenda will be to build a power system for NASA's planned New Horizons mission to Pluto, scheduled to launch in 2006 and arrive in 2015.
NASA could use more of the power and heat sources than Los Alamos can make. The lab's plutonium was originally created at the Savannah River Site in Georgia, but the site doesn't make plutonium anymore.
In fact, nobody in the United States makes it, Huling said.
"We have a very large backlog of missions that the Department of Energy and NASA want us to provide heat sources for," Huling said. "We have enough plutonium for the short term, but DOE is already planning on establishing a domestic source."
-------- spies
Russian Researcher Convicted of Spying
Defense Says Information Was Public
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53058-2004Apr5.html
MOSCOW, April 5 -- A Russian arms control researcher was found guilty of treason and espionage Monday for selling information on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British company that prosecutors alleged was a front for U.S. intelligence. He faces a possible 20-year sentence.
Igor Sutyagin, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada in Moscow, was found guilty by a 12-member jury. Four jurors then voted for leniency in a subsequent late-night sentencing recommendation, according to the defendant's attorneys. The judge, Marina Komarova, plans to hand down a sentence Tuesday.
Attorneys for Sutyagin 39, have decried the case as nothing more than trumped-up charges against a researcher who carried out legitimate research using publicly available information and who had no access to classified data. The case has been punctuated by procedural twists and turns, including the replacement of the judge and jury, that defense attorneys contend were part of an effort to bolster prospects for a conviction.
"I'm shocked and surprised," Vladimir Vasiltsov, one of Sutyagin's attorneys, said in a telephone interview after the verdict. "I'm shocked that the jury members didn't get it. At the same time, I understand that the judge did everything to make them come up with this verdict." The defense said it will likely appeal.
The trial was held behind closed doors and neither the judge nor prosecutors made any public statements Monday.
Sutyagin became one of the most prominent of a series of Russian academics and others charged with spying since the rise of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and head of its domestic successor agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. Human rights groups have said the FSB has zealously pursued scholars for little more than having contacts with the West.
"You can paint anyone as a spy. It's quite easy," said Grigory Pasko, a military journalist convicted of treason in 2001 after exposing the dumping of nuclear waste by the Russian navy. He was released last year.
Russian courts have rendered mixed rulings on some of the recent cases. Last year, courts convicted two Russian researchers of spying for the United States and China but gave each of them a suspended sentence. In the first jury trial in an espionage case, a panel acquitted space scientist Valentin Danilov in December, and prosecutors appeared determined not to let that happen again with Sutyagin.
After Sutyagin's case went to trial and a jury was selected in November, the trial was abruptly suspended. Then in February, the presiding judge was removed without explanation and the jury was dismissed. Komarova, who has handled other cases brought by the FSB, was named the new judge.
"They were looking for a judge who would be able to manipulate everyone, including the jury," said Vasiltsov, the defense attorney.
Vasiltsov said the judge refused to allow expert testimony intended to show that the information Sutyagin passed along was not secret and instructed the jury to vote solely on whether the defendant provided information to the British, not on whether the data were sensitive or harmful.
Sutyagin was arrested in October 1999, two months after Putin was named prime minister, and has been behind bars ever since.
Prosecutors alleged that Sutyagin sold sensitive military information to a British firm called Alternative Futures that purportedly acted as a front for U.S. intelligence. Sutyagin denied the charges, saying he was a consultant collecting information from public documents, newspapers and other open sources, and said he was not aware of any alleged ties between the firm and the CIA.
The first court to hear the case at length found the evidence inadequate in December 2001. After a closed trial, the court, based in Kaluga, about 100 miles south of Moscow, refused to convict Sutyagin on the grounds that the charges were vaguely formulated. The court sent the case back to the FSB for further investigation.
Sergei Rogov, director of the institute where Sutyagin worked, called Monday's verdict "very sad" for "a gifted young man," but added that he thought his former employee brought trouble on himself by working for foreigners and then hiding it. Sutyagin never disclosed his work for the British firm and sometimes even left the country to meet with company officials in Warsaw, Budapest and elsewhere without telling him, Rogov said.
"He was doing it outside the normal rules, behind my back, and that's why he invited trouble," Rogov, who testified at the trial, said by telephone. Sutyagin's British clients were "pretty strange characters" not widely known in the academic community, adding to the suspicion, Rogov added.
"What I can't understand is what kind of information he was giving to these people," Rogov said. "In his work, he did not have access to classified information. Since he didn't have classified information, what was he paid for? Newspaper clippings."
-------- us
Crunch time for Special Ops forces
From Iraq to the Horn of Africa, every branch of the elite force has seen its biggest deployment in history.
April 06, 2004
By Ann Scott Tyson
The Christian Science Monitor
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0406/p02s01-usmi.html
"Tanks!" the American sergeant yelled.
From out of a thick haze and tall grass on the northern Iraqi highlands, obscured by three trucks feigning surrender, an Iraqi armored company was bearing down on a small band of US Special Forces. "For about 15 seconds we were in awe - nobody even fired a shot," said Sgt. 1st Class Frank Antenori of the surprise attack. Moments later, a T-55 tank shell exploded just behind his Humvee. "We all knew we were in big trouble," he said.
One year ago, with quick wit and good aim, 31 Americans and 80 Kurdish fighters rolled back an Iraqi armored force of hundreds in an abrupt showdown known as the "Alamo," aimed at gaining a key crossroads.
But the success of such handpicked, highly trained forces has a downside: Today, as their missions grow exponentially, they're in shorter and shorter supply. "This is the highest [operational] tempo Special Operations ever had," says Gen. Bryan Brown, head of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM). While manageable now, "it's not sustainable forever."
From Iraq to the Horn of Africa, the 49,000-strong command is spearheading a global campaign against terrorists and the hunt for "high value targets" like Osama bin Laden. As a result, over the past year the elite force - including Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and Civil Affairs, Navy SEALs, and Air Force Special Tactics - has seen its biggest deployment ever. In Iraq, US Special Operations Forces (SOF) controlled operations in two-thirds of the country. Some 100 Special Forces teams took part, compared with 85 to 90 in Vietnam, says Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, commander of Army special operations.
But SOCOM may no longer be able to meet all requests for from US regional commanders, says Thomas O'Connell, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Topping his list of concerns: "Are we going to be able to continue to support the combatant commanders with Special Operations Forces that are working for them?"
SOCOM gained new authority as a fighting command in 2003, including control over where its troops deploy. Before, it served mainly to train forces for missions directed by regional commanders. "In many respects, force management is the most critical problem facing SOF," Mr. O'Connell says. "SOF cannot be mass produced."
In the post-9/11 world, demand for the commandos is not only soaring within the military. Private firms and government organizations - including the CIA - are luring away troops with bigger salaries.
"It is a very lucrative opportunity right now for special operations folks to get out and take very high-paying jobs" with private security firms, says General Brown. A 20-year veteran leaving Special Operations receives about $23,000 in retirement pay, but can earn $100,000 to $200,000 in private industry, military officials say.
With no end to the demand in sight, the military must carefully allocate SOF while increasing their ranks. To fill the current gap, it is accepting added risks with less experienced forces.
Some Special Forces troops are now recruited directly from the civilian population, as drawing candidates from a stretched Army gets harder. So far, 120 of the "off-the-street" recruits have undergone schooling, and 38 are deployed abroad.
Special Forces teams are also being assigned outside the regions of their language and cultural expertise to meet the needs in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The strains have required SOCOM to step up the pace of rotations. For example, a recent surge in the deployment of Navy SEALs - from 25 percent to 34 percent of the force - means that SEALs now spend six months abroad every 18 months rather than every two years. "I worry about sustaining the force as we move through these multiple marathons," says Navy Capt. Robert Harward, who commanded SOF forces in Afghanistan and southern Iraq.
Finally, SOCOM has handed off some missions, like training foreign troops in Georgia and Afghanistan, to the Marine Corps and Army.
In the longer term, SOCOM seeks to ease the stress by ramping up training capacity. Schooling for a Special Forces soldier still takes 18 to 24 months, but with greater capacity the number of graduates annually has gone from 450 to 550.
Overall, the Special Operations Forces are to grow by 3,700 over five years, with hundreds of new regionally oriented civil affairs and psychological operations troops in both reserve and active duty units, two Navy SEAL teams, Special Forces, Army and Air Force aviators, and a new detachment of Marines.
The crunch is especially acute for civil affairs soldiers, who are playing key roles in rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq. Out of a total of 28 civil affairs battalions, 27 are from the Reserves and National Guard, with a two-year limit on calls to active duty. "We are coming up to a mobilization problem with them," said Brown in Congressional testimony.
SOCOM is also seeking to retain its experienced cadre for longer, and is formulating new pay, benefits, and educational incentives to entice mature veterans to stay on for 26 or 28 years - well beyond the usual 20-year retirement point.
Meanwhile, the relentless pace of deployments continues. In Afghanistan, where Special Operations Forces led the fight to topple the Taliban, a large SOF contingent is likely to remain for years to stabilize the country and track down leaders of terrorists and insurgents, officials say. Recently, a CIA-SOF team was dispatched to Afghanistan to step up the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Afghanistan's rugged terrain has tested the commandos' skills, both on the ground and in the air. In one precarious night mission, for example, an Air Force Special Operations crew maneuvered its MC130 H aircraft through jagged mountains and a barrage of enemy artillery to drop supplies to Special Forces troops in a firefight.
"As we got closer to the airdrop, there were ... a lot of people shooting at us," says Capt. Benjamin Maitre of Boston who banked and weaved as his copilot spotted fast-flying tracer rounds. Captain Maitre and his seven-man crew executed their airdrop within seconds of the assigned time, for which Maitre earned a Silver Star.
In Iraq, thousands of elite troops have carried out many of the riskiest tasks and captured dozens of regime leaders in a vast but largely invisible campaign. Early on, they hunted for Scud missiles, seized dams, and foiled a suspected plan to flood the Persian Gulf with crude oil.
"[Enemy] elements were popping up all around," says Capt. Terry Sears, an Air Force Special Operations AC-130 U navigator who played a lead role in capturing the oil pipeline valve station on Iraq's Al Faw Peninsula last March 20. Iraqi forces, alerted by US air strikes on Baghdad, massed in unexpectedly large numbers, outnumbering the US ground force. Captain Sears spotted the Iraqi forces and his gunship attacked them as close as 200 yards from US troops, and earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross.
In Iraq today, a new infusion of Special Forces has "significantly" boosted their numbers, Brown says. Known for their ingenuity, language skills, and ability to mobilize indigenous fighters, these forces are now taking on the essential job of strengthening Iraqi security forces. As the planned June 30 transfer of power nears "you will see a large number of American Special Forces ... assigned to Iraqi units to mentor, train, and provide linkages with the air system and other combat multipliers," Gen. John Abizaid, head of US Central Command, told Congress last month.
It's a job for which SOF are uniquely qualified, as shown last year at Debecka Pass. With no armored protection but their own flak vests, two 12-man teams of Special Forces soldiers in sturdy trucks called GMVs unexpectedly took on the Iraqi armored force after Turkey blocked the invasion of northern Iraq by the Army's 4th Infantry Division.
Initially without overhead surveillance, teams debriefed shepherds to learn of dug-in positions of Iraqi tanks. On the way to the crossroads, they drove through a surface-laid minefield to circumvent a 10-foot dirt berm. Lacking sufficient explosives, they defused Iraqi mines and used those.
When the Iraqi company surprised them, the Americans responded swiftly . "Nobody had to really even get on their radios. Everyone knew exactly what to do," says Sergeant Antenori. Using machine guns, grenade launchers, and shoulder-fired Javelin antitank missiles, they threw the Iraqi force into disarray - with several close calls. One Iraqi artillery round struck just 50 yards away. "Lucky for us," says Antenori, "it was a smoke round."
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US may send more troops as deaths rise
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
06 April 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=508890
The Bush administration was last night considering sending more troops to Iraq to reinforce the 130,000 already there as a Shia uprising continued to rock parts of the country and threaten Washington's plans to hand over sovereignty this summer.
With 1,200 US Marines and two battalions of Iraqi security forces poised to march into the sealed-off city of Fallujah, and with an arrest warrant having been issued for a radical Shia cleric, many observers were predicting an increase in the bloodshed.
An edgy President George Bush tried to brush off the problems, insisting America's plan to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis on 30 June would not alter. In a speech in North Carolina, he said: "The deadline remains firm. Terrorists can't stand freedom. We're still being challenged in Iraq and the reason why is a free Iraq will be a major defeat in the cause of freedom."
He added: "We will stay the course. We will do what is right. We will make sure that a free Iraq emerges, not only for our own security, but for the sake of free peoples everywhere. A free Iraq will change the Middle East. A free Iraq will make the world more peaceful. A free Iraq will make America more secure. We will not be shaken by thugs and terrorists."
But there is little doubt that the violence that broke out across Iraq over the weekend causing the deaths of at least 52 Iraqis, eight US troops and a Spanish soldier, has unsettled Washington and that questions are increasingly being asked about the planned transfer to a provisional Iraqi government and the staged withdrawal of coalition troops.
The US authorities in Baghdad yesterday announced that an Iraqi judge had issued an arrest warrant for Muqtada al-Sadr, the 31-year-old Shia Muslim cleric, whose supporters are behind much of the most recent violence.
The authorities said the warrant was for Mr Sadr's alleged involvement of another Shia cleric last year, but given that the warrant had supposedly been issued last summer, yesterday's announcement seemed designed simply to try to put pressure on him after his recent calls to his supporters to rise up against the US's forces.
The authorities were unable to explain why the existence of the warrant was only now being disclosed. Asked how and when Mr Sadr might be detained, coalition spokesman Dan Senor, said: "There'll be no warning."
Mr Sadr, whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein's agents in 1999, is with his supporters in a mosque in the southern city of Kufa. He is accused of involvement in the killing last May of Abdel-Majid al-Khoei, who was stabbed to death by a mob at a Shia shrine in the city of Najaf. On Saturday an aide to Mr Sadr, Mustafa al-Yaqubi, was arrested in connection with the murder of Mr Khoei, who had been brought back to Iraq from London by the US authorities in an effort to encourage the Shia establishment to adopt a pro-American stance.
The Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's leading religious figure, called for an end to the violence but said the cause of Mr Sadr's supporters was "legitimate". He urged calm so the problems could be "resolved through negotiations".
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The chaos theory in action
Asia Times
April 6, 2004
By Mark LeVine
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FD06Ak01.html
It is perhaps hard for Americans to understand their occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization. But Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of that trend, and in this context chaos is king. Here, military force was used to seize control of the world's most important commodity, oil. While corporate prospectors allied with the US search the country like safari hunters on elephants for any opportunity to profit from Iraq's misery - that's how conspicuous they are - inside the Green Zone their innocuous-looking counterparts draft regulations for privatizing everything from health care to prisons.
It is chaos that makes this whole system possible. Without the chaos, Iraqis would not allow the country to be sold off wholesale, or allow the US troops to remain after the June 30 "transfer" of sovereignty. Without chaos, there is little reason to assume that the imposition of neo-liberal globalization, which has wreaked such havoc in so many other countries of the developing world, would be in the process of entrenchment in Iraq. Without the chaos, there would be more reporting on the appalling conditions in the hospitals and schools, which are violations of the US obligations as occupying power under the Geneva and Hague Conventions.
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) contractors would have to budget more than US$10,000 to "rehabilitate" each school, and certainly couldn't get a way with a $1,000 paint job, pocketing the rest. Anesthesiologists wouldn't be stuck with surplus needles that are so long they can't be used on children and shorter people, who have to get the more dangerous c-line procedure for lack of the correct $1 instrument.
It is also chaos that allows the mainstream press to focus on the overt violence without addressing what an unmitigated disaster the occupation is viewed holistically. As I was writing this article, I received a call from a major TV news program to join a panel on Falluja. After a 40 minute pre-interview, the producer decided that I "didn't fit into the mix" of the guests he was putting together, which wound up being three middle-aged men: a retired general, colonel and a professor, none of whom had driven on the road to Falluja, and none of whom dared discuss the roots of the deepening quagmire in Iraq.
If Iraq is sliding toward chaos, this is exactly where most Iraqis believe the US wants them to be. A prominent Iraqi psychiatrist who has worked with the CPA and US military explained to me that "there is no way the United States can be this incompetent. The chaos here has to be at least partly deliberate." The main question on most people's minds is not if his assertion is true, but why. In this context, the sending of foreign contractors into Falluja in late-model SUVs with armed escorts - down a street clogged with traffic where they would literally be sitting ducks - only feeds suspicion that the US is deliberately instigating more violence as a pretext for "punishment" and further chaos courtesy of the US military.
Not surprisingly, the angry mob dragging the mutilated American corpses down those streets carried posters of Sheikh Yassin, the slain Hamas leader. In the minds of most Iraqis, America greenlighted his assassination by the Israelis.
If we realize that companies like Blackwater Security services (whose personnel were killed in Falluja) constitute a $100 billion a year business, it's hard to imagine how the people in charge - all well-trained military personnel with lots of combat experience - couldn't foresee they were sending their people into a death trap. Or is it possible that they are that arrogant and that ignorant? I'm not sure which is worse.
Colgate University professor Nancy Ries describes the chaos in Iraq as "sponsored chaos", which fits into the broad definition of chaos theory as an ordered system or purpose underlying seemingly random events. That is, war and occupation are wonderful opportunities for corporations to make billions of dollars in profits, unchecked by the laws and regulations that hamper their profitability in peace time.
Because of this, in the postmodern global era, global corporations and the government elites with whom they work have great incentive to sponsor global chaos and the violence it generates. Several recent books, such as Joma Nazpary's Post-Soviet Chaos or Vadim Volkov's Violent Entrepreneurs, explore how the chaos of the post-Soviet era enabled a "counter-revolution" in Russia and countries like Kazakhstan, where competing networks of groups, from criminal gangs and political parties to families and friends, all compete for resources in the decidedly one-sided contest for power and wealth that is the globalized market economy. Iraq is sadly following this trend.
Yet if Jonathan Steele argued in the Guardian that the US is "creating its own Gaza" through the chaos in Iraq, for me the application of the chaos theory there has created a strange mix of Gaza and Tel Aviv: on the one hand there's the violence of the resistance against the occupation, which feels like Gaza or Nablus - at least you know who your enemy is and who's shooting at whom. But on top of it is the violence of Iraqis against Iraqis - the suicide bombings and assassinations whose randomness gives one the feeling of living in Tel Aviv. Put the two together and the tenseness and violence of daily life in the main cities of Iraq is hard to bear, and it's only going to get worse. Worst of all, the chaos and insecurity make it impossible for civil society to produce an alternative political discourse either for collaboration with or violent religious opposition to the occupation.
The day I returned home I spoke to a leading scholar of Iraqi Shi'ism, who firmly argued against the notion that the US was deliberately stoking the flames of chaos: "Believe me," he said, "they are that incompetent." And perhaps he's right - at least from 10,000 miles away a lot of the mess that is Iraq can be explained by the combination of arrogance, ignorance and ideological bolshevism of the political and military leadership in the Bush administration, coupled with the greed of their corporate sponsors.
But when you're on the ground and you experience the daily impact and scale of the chaos, it's much harder not to understand the situation at least as a combination of what one activist described as "the chaos that is the occupation, plus the chaos the US is specifically creating to further the occupation". Whatever the cause, a lot of Iraqis and Americans are dying needlessly - unless you consider that the billions being made off the occupation, and the larger war on terror, is worth the price in blood and hatred.
Mark LeVine is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is the co-editor, with Pilar Perez and Viggo Mortensen, of Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation (Perceval Press, 2003) and author of the forthcoming tentatively titled Why They Don't Hate Us: Islam and the World in the Age of Globalization (Oneworld Publications, 2004).
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WAR POLICY
Generals in Iraq Consider Options for More Troops
April 6, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER and DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/politics/06PREX.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, April 5 - American commanders in Iraq are developing contingency plans to send more American forces to the country if the situation worsens, and administration officials said Monday that the new surge of violence by Shiites represented a worrying challenge to their plans to turn over power in less than 90 days.
President Bush, speaking in Charlotte, N.C., said he intended to stick to the June 30 date for giving control of the country to an interim Iraqi government, even as he conceded that the new government's structure had not been settled. He vowed that the violence - which he said was being instigated by Moktada al-Sadr, a young Shiite cleric - would be put down, saying, "We just can't let it stand."
Mr. Bush appeared eager on Monday to dispel any thought that the new wave of attacks on American forces, in which Shiites as well as Sunnis have now joined, would shake his resolve. "If they think that we're not sincere about staying the course, many people will not continue to take a risk toward - take the risk toward freedom and democracy," he told reporters.
The weekend of violence - which included the deaths of eight American soldiers in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City - did not appear to touch off crisis meetings in Washington. The president was campaigning and throwing out the first pitch at an opening-day game in St. Louis. His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was preparing for testimony on Thursday before the commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks. One of her chief advisers on Iraq strategy was in Baghdad. One official said there were "many conference calls, but no big decisions."
British officials said Monday, though, that Prime Minister Tony Blair was expected to meet with Mr. Bush in Washington next week and that the meeting was expected to be dominated by concerns over Iraq.
Senior military and White House officials said the attacks by Mr. Sadr's forces did not represent a full-scale Shiite uprising, or portend a broader civil war. Still, a senior military official described the violence led by Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, as part of "a power grab at a very difficult time," and one that administration officials said could interfere with their efforts to reduce the number of American troops as the presidential election approached.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior commander in the Middle East, has asked for contingency plans for increasing the number of troops in Iraq. No decision has been made to supplement the 134,000 troops now there, and White House officials said it was unclear whether such a move would help the situation.
The task of disarming and disbanding Mr. Sadr's followers, military officials said Monday, could be complicated by concern that it might incite further rebellion among Iraqi Shiites. Despite those concerns, though, American forces in Iraq stepped up their confrontations on Monday, both with the young cleric and in the restive Falluja area.
Hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims will be traveling in the days ahead to Iraq's holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, and senior military officials said the United States wanted to avoid "doing something stupid that would put more people into the camp of anticoalition forces."
Democrats, led by Mr. Bush's presumptive opponent in the presidential race, Senator John Kerry, seized the moment to question the underlying logic of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy.
"We can't allow this to continue," Mr. Kerry said, meeting with reporters on Monday. "There has to be a political, diplomatic solution which, regrettably, this administration seems stubbornly determined to avoid."
He called the absence of Arab neighbors as part of the stabilization force "staggering," saying, "All have a major stake in not having a failed Iraqi state, no matter how they feel about our getting there."
"I think the president owes it to the American people to explain who we're turning over sovereignty to and how on June 30th and what is the security plan for after June 30th," Mr. Kerry concluded.
But he left it to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, his old friend and occasional campaign surrogate, to compare the events in Iraq to the war in Southeast Asia four decades ago. While Mr. Kerry said he would not make analogies to past conflicts, Mr. Kennedy said, "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, and this country needs a new president."
In fact, there were hints that the administration might be reconsidering the feasibility of the June 30 transfer of sovereignty. L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator in Iraq, had been scheduled to return to Washington this week for a consultation with administration officials and lawmakers, but on Monday evening, those plans appeared all but canceled. Mr. Bremer was too busy managing the response to the new violence, officials said.
Moreover, it was unclear what he would say about administration policy to lawmakers who made it clear over the weekend that they planned to grill him on the role of the United Nations and the plans to improve security during and after the June 30 transfer.
Mr. Bush himself sounded less than fully definitive about the transfer date when first asked about it on Monday, initially telling reporters that "the intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same - I believe we can transfer authority by June 30." But he ended by saying, "The date remains firm." White House officials say the Iraqis themselves have taken that date as an article of faith. "They expect it," a senior official said, "and I don't know what the reaction would be if it changed. That's why we have every expectation of meeting the deadline."
Still, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, joined a prominent Republican, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, in calling on the administration to leave the door open to the possible postponement of the transfer if the situation worsens.
In a telephone interview on Monday, Mr. Levin said he had spoken to Republicans as well as Democrats who shared his view that the administration should be open to delaying the transfer, particularly if prominent Iraqis outside the current Governing Council favored such a postponement. "I don't want to see President Bush in a position where flexibility will be seen as a political defeat," Mr. Levin said.
A senior military officer from the United States Central Command, who spoke by telephone to reporters at the Pentagon, sought to play down General Abizaid's request for contingency plans for more troops, and declined to say how many might be needed.
"In my view, as we look at right now, we've got adequate forces to do the job," the officer said. But he said General Abizaid had asked his staff to consider what forces might be available, including those capable of being deployed fairly rapidly to Iraq, "given the events of the weekend and the obvious potential for more demonstrations and more violence."
The officer said marines had put a cordon around the restive Sunni city of Falluja, in preparation for actions aimed at killing or arresting those responsible for the killing and mutilation there last week of four American contractors. But from a military standpoint, the senior officer said, that violence was "not nearly as troublesome as the Shiite demonstrations that have occurred."
The officer took issue with news reports that described the violence by Mr. Sadr's forces as an uprising. But he said the attacks in Sadr City represented "a great deal of violence by an outlaw militia group."
The officer made clear that American officials were concerned about inciting more violence, particularly with the Shiite holiday approaching.
"The last thing we want to do is to go into a mosque and take significant action there," he said, adding that any effort to arrest Mr. Sadr would be coordinated with Iraqi policy and civil defense forces.
The officer described the Mahdi Army as a force of about 3,000 followers of Mr. Sadr, and said no more than 10,000 Shiites in all had taken part in the weekend of protests. He said that they would be disbanded, but that American forces would do so "deliberately" rather than rushing into action that might widen anti-American sentiment.
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Private Guards Repel Attack on U.S. Headquarters
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53059-2004Apr5.html
An attack by hundreds of Iraqi militia members on the U.S. government's headquarters in Najaf on Sunday was repulsed not by the U.S. military, but by eight commandos from a private security firm, according to sources familiar with the incident.
Before U.S. reinforcements could arrive, the firm, Blackwater Security Consulting, sent in its own helicopters amid an intense firefight to resupply its commandos with ammunition and to ferry out a wounded Marine, the sources said.
The role of Blackwater's commandos in Sunday's fighting in Najaf illuminates the gray zone between their formal role as bodyguards and the realities of operating in an active war zone. Thousands of armed private security contractors are operating in Iraq in a wide variety of missions and exchanging fire with Iraqis every day, according to informal after-action reports from several companies.
In Sunday's fighting, Shiite militia forces barraged the Blackwater commandos, four MPs and a Marine gunner with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 fire for hours before U.S. Special Forces troops arrived. A sniper on a nearby roof apparently wounded three men. U.S. troops faced heavy fighting in several Iraqi cities that day.
The Blackwater commandos, most of whom are former Special Forces troops, are on contract to provide security for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Najaf.
With their ammunition nearly gone, a wounded and badly bleeding Marine on the rooftop, and no reinforcement by the U.S. military in the immediate offing, the company sent in helicopters to drop ammunition and pick up the Marine.
The identity of the Marine and two other wounded men could not be established, but their blood was still fresh hours later, when the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt arrived to survey the battle zone.
Without commenting at a news conference yesterday on the role of the Blackwater guards, Kimmitt described what he saw after the fighting ended. "I know on a rooftop yesterday in An Najaf, with a small group of American soldiers and coalition soldiers . . . who had just been through about 3 1/2 hours of combat, I looked in their eyes, there was no crisis.
"They knew what they were here for," he continued. "They'd lost three wounded. We were sitting there among the bullet shells -- the bullet casings -- and, frankly, the blood of their comrades, and they were absolutely confident."
During the defense of the authority headquarters, thousands of rounds were fired and hundreds of 40mm grenades shot. Sources who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of Blackwater's work in Iraq reported an unspecified number of casualties among Iraqis.
A spokesman for Blackwater confirmed that the company has a contract to provide security to the CPA but would not describe the incident that unfolded Sunday.
A Defense Department spokesman said that there were no military reports about the opening hours of the siege on CPA headquarters in Najaf because there were no military personnel on the scene. The Defense Department often does not have a clear handle on the daily actions of security contractors because the contractors work directly for the coalition authority, which coordinates and communicates on a limited basis through the normal military chain of command.
The four men brutally slain Wednesday in Fallujah were also Blackwater employees and were operating in the Sunni triangle area under more hazardous conditions -- unarmored cars with no apparent backup -- than the U.S. military or the CIA permit.
One senior Blackwater manager has described those killings to U.S. government officials as the result of a "high-quality" attack as skilled as one that can be mounted by U.S. Special Forces, according to a copy of a report on the incident obtained by The Washington Post.
The four victims of that attack, according to Blackwater spokesman Chris Bertelli, were escorting trucks carrying either food or kitchen equipment for Regency Hotel and Hospitality. Regency is a subcontractor to Eurest Support Services (ESS), a division of the Compass Group, the world's largest food service company.
ESS provides food services to more than a dozen U.S. military dining facilities in Iraq, according to news accounts.
Blackwater, a security and training company based in Moyock, N.C., prides itself on the high caliber of its personnel, many of whom are former U.S. Navy SEALs. It has 450 employees in Iraq, many of them providing security to CPA employees, including the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and to VIPs visiting Iraq.
Blackwater has applied to occupy a former MIG air base near Baghdad as a counterterrorism training facility for Iraqi forces. The training range will mirror the 6,000-acre Moyock site, which is frequented by U.S. law enforcement and military personnel.
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U.S. Military Aims To Bolster Response Troop Level Is Called Sufficient
By Bradley Graham and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53052-2004Apr5.html
Facing a surge of violence in Iraq, U.S. military authorities said yesterday they were looking at options for bolstering emergency response forces in the country.
A senior officer with U.S. Central Command, the military authority overseeing operations in Iraq, told reporters that commanders remained confident no increase in the overall level of U.S. forces will be needed.
But he said the spate of clashes with armed supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr had prompted a fresh review of additional emergency troops that could be mustered if security conditions in Iraq worsen.
"Given the events of this weekend and the obvious potential for more demonstrations or more violence, we have asked the staff to at least take a look and see what forces are available out there in a quick-response mode in the event that they should be needed," said the officer, who spoke in a conference call from Central Command headquarters in Tampa on condition he not be named.
Another senior military officer said in a separate interview that the planning is limited to repositioning U.S. forces already in the region and does not involve the possibility of dispatching more troops from the United States. With fresh U.S. military units still pouring into Iraq as part of a rotation begun earlier this year, officials noted that the number of troops in the country -- 134,000 -- is higher than it has been in months.
As the deadline nears for transferring power to Iraqis at the end of June, U.S. authorities had been predicting a rise in attacks by elements intent on disrupting the process. But the eruption of fighting with Sadr's militia appeared to surprise Pentagon officials, who had thought the group was being held in check by moderate Shiite authorities and losing supporters.
The new Shiite unrest compounds the threat to U.S. forces already hard-pressed to quell violent opposition from Sunni insurgents loyal to former president Saddam Hussein in cities such as Fallujah, where four U.S. civilian contractors were killed and their bodies desecrated last week. Although Pentagon officials strongly rebutted suggestions yesterday that the military situation in Iraq was tumbling into deeper crisis, several acknowledged that the militancy by Sadr and his militia, the Mahdi Army, posed a particularly worrisome development.
"It's a much more serious focus for us than Fallujah," said one senior Pentagon officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, "because the militia has the potential of being organized and coordinated in targeting police stations, government officers, TV stations and other places."
After yesterday's announcement in Baghdad that Sadr had been declared an outlaw and was wanted in connection with another cleric's slaying last year, U.S. officials also spoke of their intention to crack down on his militia. But going after the Mahdi Army is a risky proposition for the Bush administration, which had avoided such action out of concern it could incite even greater Shiite opposition.
"What you do from now on must be very focused, very quick and precisely targeted on those who are clearly guilty," said Anthony Cordesman, a senior military specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "And you need to understand that many of the young Iraqis involved, no matter how violent they may be, are not some sort of organized target, but simply people caught up in a process which in many ways is beyond their understanding.
"That's a difficult thing to do in an urban firefight,'' Cordesman continued, "particularly with a religious leader who may well provoke religious solidarity among his fellow Shiites."
Complicating the timing of any move against Sadr and his followers, the senior Central Command officer acknowledged, is the start later this month of the Shiite religious holiday of Arba'in, which is expected to bring hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Iraq. Nonetheless, the officer said, U.S. forces are drawing up plans to disband and disarm the Mahdi Army, which the Pentagon estimates has about 3,000 fighters.
"We'll do that deliberately and with a plan, so as not to just go in with all -- you know, all guns blazing and hurt or kill or damage those folks that live in the neighborhoods and are innocent bystanders to all of this," the officer said.
Asked why there had been no earlier move to arrest Sadr even though the arrest warrant was issued months ago, the officer said the Shiite community had done "a pretty good job of marginalizing Sadr on their own." Additionally, he said, the cleric had been difficult to find, except when speaking in mosques, where military action was ill-advised.
The deteriorating security situation in Iraq brought renewed warnings yesterday from Republicans and Democrats in Congress who have urged an increase in U.S. troop strength and wider international involvement.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the United States is now "dangerously close" to losing control on the ground. "We're talking not only about the insurgency, partly by outsiders, but also about a religious dynamic that is very difficult to deal with," he said.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the committee's senior Democrat, said Iraq could become another Vietnam if the United States does not move quickly to deploy a "fairly large" number of American forces. He also called on the White House to press NATO to get more involved.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the Pentagon should dispatch thousands of additional troops with specific skills, such as Special Forces, counterintelligence and civil affairs experts, and linguists.
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Rumsfeld Leaves Door Open to More U.S. Troops for Iraq
April 6, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/international/06CND-PENT.html?hp
WASHINGTON, April 6 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that there wee no immediate plans to increase the number of United States troops in Iraq. But he said that the American commanders there would get more soldiers if they asked for them.
"They will decide what they need, and they will get what they need," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "At the present time, they've announced no change in their plans. But they could make such a request at any time."
As he spoke, it was early evening in Iraq, where American forces were working to quell a Shiite militia uprising. The fresh bloodshed has unsettled the peacekeeping effort, but the Bush administration asserts that it has not derailed plans to transfer sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on June 30.
Mr. Rumsfeld refused to be drawn into a discussion about whether he personally thought the present American troop strength, about 135,000, was sufficient. "I don't know that I would be the best judge," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters in Norfolk, Va. "It takes someone who's on the ground in the military who is assessing it on a daily basis, and we have superb people leading our military out there."
The secretary said he and President Bush often asked commanders if they had everything they needed, in terms of equipment and support as well as troop strength.
Mr. Rumsfeld spoke at the navy base in Norfolk, where he appeared with the secretary general of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. Mr. Rumsfeld said he would welcome help from NATO in Iraq, once the alliance had completed its peacekeeping duties in Afghanistan.
The NATO secretary general did not rule out an eventual NATO presence in Iraq, but emphasized, "Afghanistan is NATO's No. 1 priority."
Mr. Rumsfeld held out the possibility that the people who had killed and mutilated four American civilian contractors in Fallujah might yet be brought to justice. "The forces have cordoned off the city, they have photographs of a good many people who were involved in the attacks against the individuals, and they have been conducting raids in the city against high-value targets," he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld said that "a number of people" had been captured in the past three days. "A number of people have resisted and been killed," he said. "And it will be a methodical effort to find the individuals who were involved."
-------- propaganda wars
Blade wins Pulitzer: Series exposing Vietnam atrocities earns top honor
By KELLY LECKER
April 6, 2004
TOLEDO BLADE STAFF WRITER
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200440406001
Three Blade reporters won the Pulitzer Prize -- journalism's highest honor -- yesterday for uncovering the atrocities of an elite U.S. Army fighting unit in the Vietnam War that killed unarmed civilians and children during a seven-month rampage.
Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss, and Joe Mahr received the investigative reporting prize for their series -- "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths" -- which detailed how the Army failed to stop the atrocities after commanders were told about them. The reporters also discovered that the Army failed to prosecute soldiers who killed unarmed civilians after an investigation found the platoon had committed war crimes .
It was The Blade's first Pulitzer Prize.
"We won!" Ron Royhab, The Blade's executive editor, shouted as the newsroom erupted in cheers and applause. Mr. Sallah, Mr. Weiss, and Mr. Mahr exchanged hugs with each other and their colleagues, then urged the crowd to remember the victims of the Army unit's actions.
"I'm glad we won, but it's really a somber victory," Mr. Weiss said. "Tiger Force killed innocent men, women, and children and the men who committed these acts continue to go unpunished."
Mr. Sallah agreed.
"What's important to me is the Army get to the bottom of who killed this investigation 29 years ago," he said.
The New York Times and The Washington Post were other finalists in the investigative reporting category.
John Robinson Block, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Blade, said the award was the result of a team effort by a newspaper with a tradition of producing quality journalism. He praised the other staff members who worked on the series.
"They had to live and breathe this story for most of last year," he said. "My father always said The Blade is a good newspaper every day it's published."
The Blade reporters scoured government records, interviewed 43 former Tiger Force members, and went to Vietnam to talk to family members of the victims to detail a pattern of violence by the unit during a seven-month period in 1967.
What the series found was that the highly trained reconnaissance unit killed unarmed civilians, including children, and that Army leadership knew of and in some cases encouraged the unit's actions (See Kirk's editorial cartoon).
Managing Editor Kurt Franck called the series "old-fashioned reporting," noting that the reporters dug up records that had been buried for more than 30 years and tracked down Vietnam War veterans to find out the truth about Tiger Force.
"We had a moral obligation to report this news," he said. "Where the government failed, The Blade closed that chapter."
The reporters went beyond detailing the violence and showed how the atrocities continue to haunt the veterans nearly 40 years after the killings. A dozen Tiger Force members expressed remorse for their actions - nine have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder - and several described vivid flashbacks or nightmares.
Even though the Army investigated the actions of Tiger Force for 4 1/2 years, finding that 18 soldiers committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty, the case never reached a military court and no one was ever charged.
Mr. Royhab, The Blade's executive editor, pointed out that the reporters did not know what they would find when they started digging through thousands of military records. It wasn't until the team made countless trips to Washington, scoured documents, and tracked down veterans that the truth about Tiger Force became clear.
"We proved to the world that we can expose a wrong that has been done and truly play in the major leagues," Mr. Royhab said.
A Vietnamese military official said in October that he plans to investigate the Tiger Force unit's actions to try to determine how many people died in the rampage. Since the series ran, the Army has begun interviewing former Tiger Force soldiers as part of a new review of the platoon's actions in Vietnam.
Rion Causey, an Army medic during the war who witnessed the Tiger Force unit's atrocities, said he hopes the prize brings more attention to what happened so many yuears ago. Former Army journalist Dennis Stout, another witness, said The Blade's series was the impetus for the investigations.
"There wouldn't have been anything happening without the series. It's the only reason the Army did anything," he said.
In the midst of the newsroom celebration, Allan Block, managing director of Block Communications, Inc, The Blade's parent company said: "I have never seen a day like this in The Blade newsroom."
"We have a lot more coming," John Robinson Block, his brother, replied.
Toledo Mayor Jack Ford and City Council President Louis Escobar presented proclamations honoring the three reporters yesterday.
"There were those who questioned this, but what you did was right. The public does always have the right to know," Mr. Ford told them. "This is going to define The Blade and Toledo."
Mr. Sallah, 47, is The Blade's national affairs reporter. He came to the paper in 1989 and has covered everything from the Florida presidential election controversy in 2000 to the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church. Mr. Sallah has twice been named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists' reporter of the year.
Mr. Weiss, 44, came to The Blade in 1998 and has been the state editor. Before joining The Blade, he spent 12 years with the Associated Press. Mr. Weiss has reported on the subway World Series in New York in 2000 and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.
Mr. Mahr, 31, is a general assignment/special projects reporter. He came to The Blade in 2000 and won awards for his coverage of Toledo's 2001 mayoral race and northwest Ohio's decades-long economic slide.
The principal photographer for the series was Andy Morrison. Dave Murray edited the project. Graphic artist Wes Booher coordinated the graphics, and Doug Koerner was the project page designer and primary copy editor.
The investigative reporting prize comes with a cash award of $10,000.
In 2000, former Blade reporter Sam Roe was nominated as a Pulitzer finalist for investigative reporting for his Blade series detailing a pattern of misconduct by the government and the beryllium industry, which resulted in deaths and injuries to dozens of workers.
Ohio newspapers have won the Pulitzer Prize nine times in the past. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also owned by Block Communications, won a Pulitzer prize in 1998 for spot news photography, and in 1992 a photographer for Block Newspapers won the feature photography prize. The Post-Gazette won a Pulitzer for reporting in 1938 for a series of articles by Raymond Sprigle exposing the one-time membership of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black in the Ku Klux Klan.
John Robinson Block told the crowd assembled in the newsroom that the prize reflects the work journalists have been doing at The Blade for decades.
"For many, many years it has been our objective to publish in Toledo a newspaper that would be respected and would have the highest ethics and the highest quality journalism that we can give people every day," he said. "This award belongs to all of you."
Contact Kelly Lecker at: klecker@theblade.com or 419-724-6168.
----
Violence in Iraq, Gibson's 'The Passion' and the Forgetting of Empire
by Mark Lewis Taylor
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0406-10.htm
As Christians observe Passion Week this year, American viewers are confronted with two dramatic renderings of shed blood.
On TV screens, of past days, there are the dismembered U.S. civilian bodies strung up on a bridge in Fallujah, showing the festering wound of war and occupation in Iraq that daily sucks in Iraqi and American lives.
On the movie screens, of course, is Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, showing the last 12 hours of Jesus of Nazareth's life, as he is captured, scourged and hung on a cross at Golgotha. 1 in 10 Americans, reportedly, have seen the film.
These screened events about the shedding of blood are very different in numerous ways. Yet, they both portray dramatic suffering that occasions overwrought emotional states in viewers that detracts from reflection on the imperial forces providing the context, and often the cause, of the blood-letting.
In America, public outrage over the Fallujah images easily spills over into talk of retaliation. In Fallujah, this apparently means ratcheting up U.S. soldiers to punish Iraqis. American outrage over jarring scenes of death from Iraq often blocks intelligent debate, allowing occupiers to become only recyclers of blood feuds.
When the Fallujah events broke, many Americans were beginning to ponder how the Iraq war was long desired by Bush, and by his "neoconservative" administrators (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others). Richard Clarke, Bush's own former counter-terrorism expert, bore dramatic testimony of this before the committee investigating September 11, and his recent book, Against All Enemies, drives home the point.
Past U.S. governments have often played the imperialist card, but the empire-building of today has outrun any effective "war on terrorism," made Americans less safe, and demanded of them a sacrifice of civil liberties for nearly unending imperial war. (For those wishing an introduction to U.S. as empire today, Chalmers Johnson's book, Sorrows of Empire, is one good start.)
Tied to their television screens and to their outrage over images of dying Americans and Iraqis, chances are that the sorrows of American empire-building will remain forgotten.
On the screens of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ there is a similar forgetting of empire, this time of the Roman setting crucial for understanding Jesus' execution. As historian Paula Fredriksen noted, the fact that Jesus was publicly executed by crucifixion "can only mean that Rome wanted him dead." Rome frequently used crucifixion as a political deterrent. Gibson insufficiently focuses the imperial politics of Jesus' death.
First, he sets up Christ's passion as primarily a work of Jewish scheming. In this, it is an anti-Semitic film. The film's devotees retort that it is the Romans who are portrayed as so brutal to Jesus. Yes, and there is also a scene where the film's devil-figure is shown walking amid Roman torturers. But the bulk of the devil's work is imaged in scenes of Jewish leaders arresting Jesus in the garden, providing blood money to Judas, and approvingly standing watch at the scourging. These images were key elements of the post-medieval Christian passion-plays, which, as Fredriksen notes, were "dress rehearsals for Shoah" and holocaust.
Gibson images the Romans largely as roguish soldiers, mostly instrumental to Jewish planning. Or, Roman officials are as Pilate is portrayed: well-meaning, vacillating rulers under control of Jewish design. As Len Weltenshier observed in The New Republic, "You would think Rome was a colony of Judea."
This foregrounding of Jewish agency in killing Jesus has the function of masking the imperial dynamics that gave Jesus' life, message and death their full meaning. The movie fails to show the many ways that Jesus' teachings on love and prophetic justice positioned him outside acceptable lines of Rome's imperial, political milieu.
But Gibson has a second way of aiding in the forgetting of empire. He keeps viewers steeped in a visualized brutality that emotionally distracts from political and historical themes. Many, today, mistake this jarring viciousness on screen for strong doses of "reality" or "history." If he wanted reality, though, Gibson might also have shown the sexual abuse that often went with Roman imperial crucifixion, or the final devouring of the body by dogs at the cross, a final, dishonoring fate of so many of the crucified. And are we to suppose that Jesus was in every moment an agonizing, stoic figure, not also a real screaming, whimpering, breaking torture victim?
In place of "reality" and "history," Gibson actually idealizes bloodletting, from Mary's loving use of linens to daub at the scourged Jesus' blood around the whipping stone, to a later scene of a Roman soldier falling to his knees for a showering of blood and water from Jesus' punctured side. This reverence reminds of pietist, Count Von Zinzendorf, and his wish to make a bed in the savior's wounds. Such piety is alive today, especially when Christians make Jesus' historical suffering into an event of bloodletting for their own personal journeys from guilt to salvation. "Now I know how horribly Jesus suffered for me," said one moviegoer.
Michael Novak also recasts Jesus imperial execution as personal meditation. Novak had argued in 2003 at the Vatican that the U.S. invasion of Iraq (which later involved sacrificing thousands of innocent Iraqi civilian lives) was a "just war." After viewing The Passion, he wrote in The Weekly Standard: "I wanted to weep, and to be silent, and to commune with my God, on whom my sins had heaped such afflictions."
Novak's comment suggests how Gibson's anti-Semitic shifting of focus from imperial Roman history to Jewish plotting, together with overwrought Christian fascination with Jesus' shedding of blood, can enable viewers to absolve themselves of a need to attend to the imperial settings of war and execution - in Jesus' time, or their own.
It should be noted, too, that the same film that circulates Christian anti-Semitism against Jews, also disables effective Arab critique of the exploitative policies of Israel. Arabs' and others' critique of Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, or of Israel's alliance with the Bush regime's imperial interests in Iraq today, needs to foreground a critique of empire. To have that critique of empire displaced by anti-Semitism against Jews in general, instead of focused against particular imperial formations like the Israeli-US axis of power, ultimately derails Arab peoples' own aspirations for liberation.
How convenient for American imperial politicians today, that Christians (and also elements in Arab nations today) lose themselves in a movie's bloody, anti-Semitic show about the one man Jesus, while the brutal sufferings of the many (some 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, thousands of Iraqi soldiers, 600 U.S. soldier men and women, more than 3,000 maimed U.S. military personnel) are revealed as the cost of imperial occupation in Iraq.
Who will look behind the bloodletting of screened violence in Iraq, to challenge the power plays of American neocons who stay ready to sacrifice Iraqis and Americans on the altar of U.S. empire?
Who among Christians in these violent times will look behind Gibson's anti-Semitic screen, see through his fascination with sacrifice, to remember empire - and so resist it in the way of their Jesus, executed on a Roman cross?
Mark Lewis Taylor (mark.taylor@helsinki.fi) is professor of theology and culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. His most recent book is 'The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America' (Fortress Press, 2001).
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
SUPREME COURT ROUNDUP
Justices to Rule on Drug Dog at Traffic Stop
April 6, 2004
New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/politics/06SCOT.html
WASHINGTON, April 5 - The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether the police need a special reason to subject a car they have stopped for a traffic violation to a drug-sniffing dog.
The case is an appeal by the State of Illinois from a ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court. That court found last year by a vote of 4 to 3 that use of a drug-sniffing dog, without any particular reason to suspect that the car contained drugs, had unconstitutionally broadened the scope of a routine traffic stop. In this case, the dog alerted the police to a large quantity of marijuana in the trunk.
The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that exposure of luggage at an airport to a trained dog was not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches. The canine sniff is in a class by itself, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said in that case, explaining that the sniff was less intrusive and revealing than an ordinary search.
For that reason, Illinois is arguing that in the new case, the State Supreme Court was incorrect to find a Fourth Amendment violation in the addition of a trained dog to a legitimate traffic stop. The driver, Roy I. Caballes, was stopped by a state trooper for going 71 miles per hour in a 65 m.p.h. zone.
"A Fourth Amendment non-event (here, a canine sniff) remains a Fourth Amendment non-event even if conducted during a legitimate traffic stop," the state argued in its brief.
The Illinois Supreme Court did not maintain that a dog sniff, by itself, was a search. Rather, the court said, the use of the dog "impermissibly broadened the scope of the traffic stop in this case into a drug investigation because there were no specific and articulable facts to support the use of a canine sniff."
The trooper who stopped Mr. Caballes originally told him that he would get a warning. The trooper asked for consent to search the car, and Mr. Caballes refused, as was his right under the circumstances. While the trooper was writing the warning, an officer appeared with a drug-sniffing dog, which immediately alerted the officers to the trunk. The trooper searched the trunk, found the marijuana and arrested Mr. Caballes.
After the trial judge rejected his objection to the search, Mr. Caballes was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 12 years in prison and a fine of $256,136, representing the street value of the drugs.
Four years ago, the Supreme Court invalidated a drug-detection roadblock program in Indianapolis in which the police stopped cars at checkpoints and subjected them to drug-sniffing dogs. Without addressing the use of the dogs, the court found that the Fourth Amendment did not permit roadblocks for the general purpose of crime control.
The new case is Illinois v. Caballes, No. 03-923.
These were among the court's other actions on Monday:
International Tax Case
The court agreed over the Justice Department's objection to hear an appeal by three men convicted of federal wire fraud for a scheme to smuggle liquor into Canada from Maryland without paying Canadian liquor duties and excise taxes. The question is the validity of a federal prosecution for the avoidance of foreign taxes.
Under a doctrine known as the revenue rule, which dates from English common law and is generally recognized, although not codified, by American courts, courts generally will not enforce foreign tax judgments. This doctrine has been invoked by a number of courts recently to dismiss suits by foreign governments to recover taxes they claim have been lost to cigarette smuggling originating in the United States.
The new case, Pasquantino v. United States, No. 03-725, is atypical in that it involves a federal criminal prosecution. The wire fraud statute makes it a crime to use interstate communications - in this case, telephone calls - to obtain "money or property" by fraud or false pretenses. The specific legal issue is whether Canada's potential tax claims amount to money or property under the statute. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., upheld the prosecution. Other federal appeals courts have disagreed in other cases.
The Justice Department, while generally supporting the revenue rule, maintained in its brief that the rule did not apply to this case, where the prosecution sought not to collect taxes but to "vindicate the United States' sovereign interest in preventing persons from using the wires in this country to commit fraud."
Wetlands Regulation
Without comment, the court turned down three cases challenging federal regulatory power over wetlands that are not directly connected to navigable waterways. Landowners, supported by the building industry, contested the government's interpretation of the Clean Water Act in light of a 2001 Supreme Court decision that rejected federal jurisdiction over isolated ponds visited by migratory birds.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, that decision was a narrow one that did not remove federal jurisdiction over wetlands that are part of the drainage area or tributary systems of navigable waterways. The plaintiffs and their allies pressed for a broader interpretation of the 2001 ruling.
One, John A. Rapanos, a Michigan landowner who acted without a permit to fill wetlands that were 20 miles from a navigable river, was criminally convicted and now faces a 10-month prison sentence. His appeal was Rapanos v. United States, No. 03-929. The others were Deaton v. United States, No. 03-701, and Newdunn Associates v. United States Army Corps of Engineers, No. 03-637.
-------- drug war
Government Workers May Face Drug Test Changes
April 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Drug-Testing.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The hair, saliva and sweat of federal workers could be tested for drug use under a government policy proposed Tuesday that could set screening standards for millions of private employers.
The proposal will expand the methods to detect drug use among 1.6 million federal workers beyond urine samples. It is being implemented with an eye toward the private sector, however, because it would signal the government's approval for such testing, which many companies are awaiting before adopting their own screening programs.
The rule is subject to a 90-day public comment period. A final plan could be issued by year's end.
About 400,000 federal workers -- such as those who have security clearances, carry firearms, are involved in national security or are presidential appointees -- must undergo testing. Others are tested only if they show signs of drug use or are involved in a work-related accident.
``What we think is going to happen with the introduction of alternative specimens is, it's going to make it much tougher for individuals to be able to adequately prepare and to avoid detection,'' said Robert Stephenson, director of the workplace programs division in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
However, the number of federal workers that attempt to defraud urine tests already is ``virtually zero,'' Stephenson said. The positive rate for federal workers has fallen to less than 0.5 percent, from 18 percent early in the program, which began in 1986 when President Reagan issued an executive order declaring that the federal work force must be drug-free.
``We expect other interested parties to use the same standards and benefit from the quality assurance procedures and certification of laboratories and products that we are in fact putting out there for federal employees,'' Stephenson said. ``We understand that it is a broader mission.''
About 95 percent of the government's testing is conducted by private companies, he said.
The testing industry was involved in creating the plan, but unions representing federal employees were not. The National Treasury Employees Union, with members in 29 agencies, has opposed sweat tests, claiming scientific studies have shown they are unreliable.
``One of things we would want to look at closely ... is the issue of how reliable and accurate these new tests will be, and to ensure that federal employees will not suffer from a high degree of false positives or other scientific shortfalls,'' said Colleen M. Kelley, the union's president.
SAMHSA said the proposal is based on scientific evidence that hair, saliva and sweat specimens can be tested ``with the same level of confidence that has been applied to the use of urine.'' Agencies will not be required to use the tests.
The Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association, with about 1,200 members, has lobbied for the regulations since the mid-1990s, said Laura Shelton, executive director of the Alexandria, Va.-based group. The rules are expected to be a boon to the industry.
``It will greatly increase the use of them,'' Shelton said, speaking of the alternative tests. ``A lot of employers have been sitting in the back saying, `Well, these aren't approved for federal testing, so maybe something is not quite right' -- even though there are studies out there showing they are effective.''
A survey by the American Management Association found that drug testing by employers is declining. About 68 percent of the companies responding to a 2001 survey said they conducted medical testing, down from 77 percent in 1998.
Tests can cost $20 to $50, with hair testing being the most expensive, Shelton said. Saliva and sweat tests cost only slightly more than urine tests.
Uniform standards for drug testing has been ``sorely lacking,'' said Los Angeles lawyer Anthony Oncidi, a partner in the labor and employment practice group of Proskauer Rose LLP.
The ease and accuracy of such tests, combined with the legal basis the government standards could provide employers who might be sued by workers, should expand the use of alternative testing, he said.
It would be ``harder to poke a hole in it,'' Oncidi said. ``To the extent that it's been accepted on the federal level for government workers, that's a pretty good endorsement.''
Saliva testing, done using a swab that looks much like a toothbrush but with a pad instead of bristles, is best at detecting drug use within the past one or two days, experts said.
Hair testing, in which a sample about the thickness of a shoelace is clipped at the root from the back of the head, allows detection of many drugs used as far back as three months.
Sweat testing, in which workers are fitted with a patch that is worn for two weeks, is used to screen people who have returned to work after drug treatment.
On the Net:
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: http://www.samhsa.gov/
-------- homeland security
Air Force master sergeant from Alaska joins no-fly lawsuit
By JIM COUR
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/aplocal_story.asp?category=6420&slug=WA%20No%20Fly%20Lawsuit%20Wash
SEATTLE -- Air Force Master Sgt. Michelle Green quit flying commercial planes with her children this year.
That's because Green, 36, a single parent, believes she has been singled out by the Transportation Security Administration for extra scrutiny by airport workers. It's too hard to watch her two adopted toddlers, 2 and 3, while she tries to clear security before a flight, she said.
"I have to get there a couple of hours early," Green told a news conference at the American Civil Liberties Union office in Seattle Tuesday. "You just don't know what's going to happen.
"It might be 45 minutes or it could be two hours," she said. "I'm not allowed to take care of my kids or their needs. So I can't travel with them."
Green, based at Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska, is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU Tuesday. Filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, the lawsuit challenges the government's "no-fly" list of suspected terrorists who may not board commercial flights and its "selectee" list of travelers singled out for extra security because they're considered a potential threat.
A 16-year Air Force veteran, Green doesn't have any idea how she may have gotten on the list. Since early in January, she has been unable to board flights without significant delays.
"I've been humiliated and embarrassed in front of my supervisors and fellow passengers," Green said. "One of the most frustrating parts if that every time I change planes, I must undergo the same security measures.
"I'm frustrated and I'm tired. I'm looking for a way to change the process and clear my name. You just don't know what put you on that list."
Green said she went to the ACLU as a last-ditch attempt to get her name taken off the list after failing in repeated attempts with the TSA.
Other plaintiffs who appeared at the news conference here were Mohamed Ibrahim, 51, a coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia who immigrated to the United States from Sudan, and Sarosh Syed, 26, a special projects coordinator at the ACLU of Washington in Seattle who immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan. Both are U.S. citizens.
"I am an anti-terrorist person," Ibrahim said. "This is a funny thing. I don't know how it happened."
Syed said the country has changed since 9-11.
"This is definitely not the America that I immigrated to," he said.
Aaron Caplan of the ACLU's state chapter said thousands of innocent Americans were being stopped at the nation's airports because of the lists.
"Imagine how this would feel if it was happening to you," he said. "This 'no fly' list is not making us safe. We still don't know how a person gets on the list. We still don't know how a person gets off the list."
-------- investigations
9/11 Panel Plans Hard Questions for the F.B.I. and Justice Dept.
April 6, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/politics/06PANE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, April 5 - Current and former leaders of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are expected to come under criticism from the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at public hearings next week, with Attorney General John Ashcroft and Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director, being called to account for their agencies' failures before the attacks, panel officials say.
Commission members say the hearings will bolster what will almost certainly be a major recommendation of the panel's final report this summer: an overhaul of domestic counterterrorism programs, possibly through creation of a domestic counterintelligence agency separate from the F.B.I. The Bush administration has said it opposes such a move.
Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Freeh have defended their efforts before Sept. 11 in testimony to other investigators and in other forums.
Again on Monday, a Justice Department spokesman, Mark Corallo, said, "I don't think anyone can argue with the fact that this president and this attorney general have made preventing terrorist attacks their No. 1 priority, and that was true before Sept. 11, 2001, and it is true today."
But the chairman of the commission, Thomas H. Kean, said Justice Department and F.B.I. officials could expect "some very hard questions" at the hearings.
Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview that despite the Federal Bureau of Investigation's insistence that it had made broad changes in its long-beleaguered counterterrorism division since the attacks, he was concerned the bureau would "go back to business as usual" within a few years.
"We've got to seriously consider whether our whole counterintelligence apparatus has to be changed," added Mr. Kean, who has said in the past that the United States may need the equivalent of MI-5, Britain's domestic spy agency.
Commission officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the panel had been eager to schedule long-awaited testimony from Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, for this week in an effort to avoid blunting the effect of hearings next week on law enforcement and intelligence failures. Ms. Rice is scheduled to testify on Thursday.
Besides Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Freeh, the witness list for the hearings next Tuesday and Wednesday includes Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, who became F.B.I. director a week before the attacks.
Panel members said the most probing questions were likely to be directed at Mr. Ashcroft, who was sworn in as attorney general seven months before the attacks, and at Mr. Freeh, who ran the F.B.I. from 1993 until he retired in June 2001. He is now an executive with the MBNA Corporation, a large financial-services company.
Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Freeh have said that their agencies did what they could to try to pre-empt a catastrophic attack in the United States.
But commission officials said evidence gathered in their investigation, when added to the detailed public record about law enforcement failings before Sept. 11, showed that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had never given adequate attention to counterterrorism, and that the bureau had not seen connections among seemingly obvious danger signs in the summer of 2001.
Those signs included a July 2001 memorandum from an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix warning that Al Qaeda appeared to be training terrorists in American flight schools; the arrest the next month of Zacarias Moussaoui, a flight school student who was later connected to the German terrorist cell that carried out the attacks; and the discovery in late August that two Qaeda operatives had entered the United States.
Commission officials said their evidence showed that Mr. Ashcroft had taken little interest in counterterrorism before Sept. 11 and, days before the attacks, had rejected pleas from senior F.B.I. officials for more money for counterterrorism even as intelligence agencies warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic, terrorist attack.
They said the commission may make public a series of internal memorandums written by Thomas J. Pickard, who was the F.B.I. acting director in the summer of 2001, criticizing what he perceived to be Mr. Ashcroft's disinterest in counterterrorism. Mr. Pickard, who did not return phone calls seeking comment, is also expected to testify next week.
Mr. Ashcroft may also be confronted with an internal administration budget document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, showing that he had gone along with a White House plan to sharply cut an emergency F.B.I. request for $1.5 billion in extra counterterrorism money after the attacks.
Justice Department officials said the attorney general, who returned to work last month after he was hospitalized for emergency gallbladder surgery, had consistently championed the government's counterterrorism efforts.
His aides cited Mr. Ashcroft's testimony before the Senate in May 2001 when he called for more than $100 million in extra money for projects on counterterrorism and said that the department's "No. 1 goal is the prevention of terrorist acts." The aides said Mr. Ashcroft would also testify that he had been repeatedly advised in 2001 that Qaeda attacks would almost certainly take place overseas and that there was no clear domestic threat.
Commission officials said that Mr. Freeh would be asked why the F.B.I., despite a tripling of its budget for counterterrorism during the 1990's, had failed to develop evidence of a serious domestic threat from Al Qaeda before Sept. 11 and had failed to establish clearer procedures for sharing terrorism information internally and with other agencies.
Commission officials said that evidence gathered by the commission showed that Mr. Freeh had become so involved in managing a handful of criminal investigations, most prominently the investigation of the 1996 bombing of American military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and in other struggles with the Clinton White House that the potential for a domestic terrorist attack by Al Qaeda received relatively little attention.
Mr. Freeh did not return telephone calls seeking comment. In testimony in October 2002 before Congressional investigators, he said that the bureau's counterterrorism program had been hampered by inadequate budgets.
But in that testimony he defended the bureau's record in combating terrorism and said he did not believe the F.B.I. had adequate information to pre-empt the attacks. "I am aware of nothing that to me demonstrates that the F.B.I. and the intelligence community had the type of information or tactical intelligence which could have prevented the horror," he said.
Commission officials said Mr. Freeh would also be harshly questioned about why, under his leadership, the bureau had not been able to obtain basic computer and communications equipment that would have allowed agents around the country to share information about terrorist threats. The communications system was so outdated at the time of the attacks that agents could not even share e-mail on bureau computers.
In hearings before the commission two weeks ago, the bureau was subjected to withering criticism, both from members of the commission and from some of its witnesses.
Richard A. Clarke, who was the White House counterterrorism chief during the Bush and Clinton administrations, said that long before Sept. 11, he had discounted an F.B.I. assessment that Al Qaeda did not have a major presence in the United States.
"I know how this is going to sound, but I have to say it: I didn't think the F.B.I. would know whether or not there was anything going on in the United States," Mr. Clarke said, a comment that drew nods of agreement from several members of the commission.
Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser to President Clinton, was equally dismissive. "I've learned since 9/11 that the mechanisms of information-sharing within the F.B.I. and between the F.B.I. and the rest of government were even worse than I thought," he said.
"I think there was a sclerosis," Mr. Berger said of the bureau. "We've learned since 9/11 that not only did we not know what we didn't know, but the F.B.I. didn't know what it did know."
Panel Sets Hearings for New York The commission will hold hearings in New York City on May 18 and 19, and among those expected to testify is former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who essentially led the emergency response effort.
Mr. Giuliani is likely to provide evocative testimony on what he saw and how the city responded. His successor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, has already testified.
In the New York hearings, Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff is expected to testify about the economic effect the attacks had on the city.
-------- terrorism
Bombers threaten to create 'inferno'
April 06, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040405-092828-6754r.htm
MADRID - Authorities announced another arrest in the Madrid terror bombings yesterday and sent police to patrol subway and bus stations, as a newspaper said a group linked to al Qaeda threatened to turn Spain into "an inferno."
Court officials in Spain said the arrest came Saturday in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast. No details were given on the man's identity or suspected role in the March 11 train attacks, which killed 191 persons. The arrest raises to 16 the number of persons in custody, including six charged with mass murder.
Interior Minister Angel Acebes confirmed yesterday that one of those killed in a suicide blast Saturday in an apartment south of Madrid was Moroccan Jamal Ahmidan, a prime suspect in the bombings.
The newspaper ABC reported that hours before the terrorists killed themselves Saturday, it received a fax from the group that had claimed responsibility for the March 11 bombings. This time, the group warned it would turn Spain "into an inferno" unless the country withdrew its support for the United States and pulled Spanish troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, ABC said.
"If these demands are not met, we will declare war on you and ... convert your country into an inferno and your blood will flow like rivers," the letter said.
It gave the next day as the deadline for compliance. ABC said the letter was handwritten in Arabic and signed "Abu Dujana Al Afgani, Ansar Group, al Qaeda in Europe." A videotape found outside a Madrid mosque March 13 showed an Arabic-speaking man reading a statement signed by Al Afgani in which he claimed responsibility for the train bombings.
Meanwhile, authorities in France detained 13 suspected militants, including one about to flee the country, in a dawn raid yesterday stemming from deadly terrorist attacks in Casablanca, Morocco, police said.
In France, agents raided eight locations in search of suspects connected to last year's bombings in Casablanca, police sources said.
Morocco had issued arrest warrants for three of the suspects, including Moustapha Baouchi, a Moroccan who reportedly underwent explosives training in militant camps in Afghanistan and is thought to have headed a six-member Islamic cell in Paris. His brother also was detained.
The names of the others were not released. Under French law, they can be held for up to 96 hours without being placed under formal investigation.
The operation was part of an investigation into near-simultaneous suicide attacks in Casablanca that killed 33 persons and 12 bombers on May 16, authorities said.
Paris prosecutors opened an investigation three days after the attacks because three of the victims were French.
The DST, France's domestic security agency, conducted the roundup in the suburbs of Paris on orders of two French antiterrorism judges, Jean-Louis Bruguiere and Jean-Francois Ricard.
One person was detained at Charles de Gaulle Airport as he tried to leave the country, Paris prosecutor Yves Bot said.
Those detained for questioning are suspected of belonging to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, Mr. Bot said. The organization, which reportedly has links to al Qaeda, has been blamed by the Spanish government in the March 11 railroad attacks in Madrid.
However, Mr. Bot said authorities do not have evidence linking the suspects in France to the Madrid bombings.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Danish Parliament Bets on Wind Power
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, (ENS)
April 6, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-06-19.asp#anchor5
A new Danish energy policy will provide funding for more large windmills and triple the number of mills inaugurated in 2003 when one of the biggest windmill parks in the world came on line to supply power to Lolland.
Cutbacks were imposed on the environmental and energy sector when the current coalition replaced the Social-Democratic led government in 2001.
But now, Minister of Economic and Business Affairs Bendt Bendtsen, has signed a major energy agreement with all the parties represented in the parliament except the Red-Green Alliance that includes expansion of wind energy.
The new agreement in the Danish Parliament ensures continuity on the Danish market, pleasing the wind energy industry. "The agreement shows that there is a broad consensus in the Danish Parliament behind wind power development in Denmark," says Bjarne Lundager Jensen, managing director of the Danish Wind Industry Association.
The agreement will result in upwards of 750 MW new wind power capacity in Denmark over the next five years. Electricity provided by wind will increase from 20 percent to more than 25 percent of the annual national consumption.
Already this year two new offshore wind farms of a combined total of at least 400 MW have been announced, and a new five year repowering scheme onshore will be initiated, Jensen explained.
Under the new policy grants will be made available to remove some 900 older mills that produce 450 kilowatts or less.
The agreement could generate several thousand new jobs. "Danish politicians recognize that the wind industry is an important engine for growth and welfare which contributes billions of euro to the Danish balance of payments as well as employment for more than 20,000 Danes," Jensen said.
Just over half the spending will be devoted to the two windmill parks at Horns Rev and Omø Stålgrunde, which in strong winds will supply electricity to 375,000 Danish houses.
"This comes at a very important time," says Jensen. "Global competition is very strong these years, and if Denmark wants to maintain its strong foothold on the global market now is the time to do an extra effort to stay in the game. The agreement is an important step in the right direction."
-------- energy
Strict Rules Needed to Prevent Future Blackouts
By J.R. Pegg
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
April 6, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-06-10.asp
Last summer's massive blackout was preventable and immediate steps should be taken to limit the chances of it happening again, investigators said on Monday. The binational team probing the disaster said power plant operators should be held legally accountable for failing to follow reliability standards and procedures that should have prevented the worst blackout in North American history.
"Voluntary compliance with reliability rules is no longer adequate," according to the final report of the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force.
The report calls for the implementation of mandatory and enforceable electricity reliability standards in both the United States and Canada, with penalties for noncompliance and appropriate government oversight.
The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), a nonprofit corporation comprised of all segments of the electric industry, currently administers the rules, but it does not have authority to punish companies that fail to comply.
That must change, said the task force, which also recommended greater independence and additional funding for NERC and the regional reliability councils in order to ensure their independence from the parties they oversee. Experts say upgrading the nation's power grid will cost at least $50 billion to $100 billion. (Photo courtesy Oak Ridge National Laboratory) "Failure to implement the final report's recommendations could threaten the reliability of the electricity supply that is critical to the economic, energy and national security of our countries," said U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
"The final report is a thorough examination of the electricity system before and during the blackout," said John Efford, Minister of Natural Resources Canada. "It is very important that these recommendations be implemented."
The blackout on August 14, 2003 left some 50 million people across eight U.S. states from Michigan to New York and the Canadian province of Ontario.
Power was not restored to some parts of the United States for four days and the blackout cost the two nations as much as $10 billion combined.
The final report identifies seven violations of the voluntary reliability standards administered by NERC and four systemic groups of causes of the blackout - inadequate system understanding, inadequate situational awareness, inadequate tree trimming, and inadequate reliability coordinator diagnostic support.
It reaffirms the task force's interim report, which blamed Ohio based FirstEnergy for setting off a sequence of events that caused the widespread power loss.
Three high-voltage transmission lines operated by FirstEnergy in Ohio short-circuited and went out of service when they came into contact with trees that were too close to the lines, according to the task force.
Investigators criticized the energy company for not following industry policies and for reacting slowly and inadequately to the initial event.
FirstEnergy's control room alarm and monitoring systems were not working properly, and the control room operators were unaware it was not working, so they were unaware that transmission lines had gone down.
The task force said the Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO), the reliability coordinator for FirstEnergy, shares some of the responsibility for the spread of the blackout.
MISO failed to provide effective diagnostic support to FirstEnergy once the power outages began to cascade, according to the report.
It lacked an effective means of identifying the location and significance of transmission line breaker operations, and so was not aware of important line outages in time to prevent the blackout, the task force said.
The poor communication and inadequate equipment allowed the one relatively small event in Ohio to cascade into the massive blackout, the report concluded.
The cascade rolled through power lines running from Ohio through Michigan, into Canada and down through New York state.
The task force reviewed previous major North American power outages and found that the causes of the August 14, 2003 blackout were strikingly similar to those of earlier outages. New Yorkers spilled into the streets around Times Square as power went out across the city on August 14. (Webcam image courtesy Webcams Aus Aller Welt) This finding reinforces the need for effective implementation of its recommendations, the task force reported.
Abraham said the report "makes clear that this blackout could have been prevented and that immediate actions must be taken in both the United States and Canada to ensure that our electric system is more reliable."
"It is vital that the U.S. Congress pass comprehensive energy legislation that includes mandatory reliability standards," Abraham said.
But it is the Bush administration's comprehensive energy bill that many blame for the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass mandatory reliability standards.
Republican leaders in the Congress have balked at attempts to pass the standards as standalone legislation, an approach favored by Democrats who do not support the energy bill.
If Congress fails to pass mandatory reliability standards, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should explore its options to put such standards in place, the task force recommended.
But reliability standards would only address some of concerns that have emerged as the nation asks its aging transmission infrastructure to do a job it was not designed to carry out. Much of the nation's transmission system was built to move electricity from massive utilities to local customers, but the grid now handles massive power transmissions that zip across the nation.
This is a lucrative business for utilities, but some argue it is putting undue pressure on the transmission infrastructure. And deregulation at the state level - prompted by a 1992 federal energy bill - means utilities are no longer required to reinvest ratepayer money into the transmission system.
According to NERC, utilities spent some $300 million less on upgrades and maintenance to the nation's transmission system in 2000 than they did in 1990 and now have fewer people to carry out such projects.
Experts believe the nation's grid could do with some $50 billion to $100 billion in upgrades and maintenance but there is little sign the utilities are eager to foot the bill.
The final report of the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force can be found here.
http://reports.energy.gov/
-------- environment
Lead Burden to be Lifted From Diamond Head
HONOLULU, Hawaii, (ENS)
April 6, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-06-09.asp#anchor8
The famous Diamond Head Crater, the extinct volcano at the end of Waikiki beach, is about to receive an environmental lift. The federal government is planning to spend $3.4 million to remove lead remaining in the soil inside the crater from the days when it was used as a training range for pistol and rifle fire by the National Guard.
The lead is not considered a danger to visitors today. The Hawaii Army National Guard sampled the air for dust along visitor trails and near the rifle and pistol ranges on a hot, dry day, July 24, 2003. It was found that dust is not a concern in the crater at this time.
The concern is that as the bullets left in the soil degrade over time, there may be a risk to human health, said the Hawaii Army National Guard in a new report on the soil cleanup project. The fine soil that can be carried by wind as dust and breathed in by people is of particular concern because that is the most likely way that people would be affected.
Lead can affect almost every organ and system in the body. The most sensitive is the central nervous system, particularly in children. Lead also damages kidneys and the reproductive system. The effects are the same whether it is breathed or swallowed.
The soil reclamation project, a joint effort that includes the Department of Land and Natural Resources, will begin in August and will use a soil washing technique similar to gold mining that uses gravity to separate the lead from the rest of the soil.
The Hawaii Army National Guard has determined that this technique will be more efficient and less costly than the other alternatives considered such as excavating all the soil and taking it to a landfill or putting down a layer of clean soil to cover the pistol and rifle rangers.
Six to 12 inches of soil will be taken off the range floor and up to two feet off higher land forms called berms. The removal of this material will be done at times that provide the least impact to visitors. In all, it is estimated that about 21,000 tons of soil will be collected, stockpiled, and processed.
The soil washing plant will be located at a location within the crater away from visitor areas and is expected to have a minimal noise and visual impact. The entire operation is expected to last three to four months. Once completed, the soil washing machinery will be removed and range areas will be restored and replanted with grass.
Historically, one endangered species, a flowering plant called pu'uka'a sedge, Cyperus trachysanthos, and one rare species, kiilio'opu sedge (Torulinium odoratum), are known to occur in a seasonal wetland area located east of the former rifle range. No rare, threatened or endangered species were observed during the biological reconnaissance survey conducted on January 8, 2004.
The soil washing is one in a long series of projects undertaken by the state and federal governments that aim to return Diamond Head to its natural state.
----
Law Would Protect EU Workers From Electromagnetic Fields
STRASBOURG, France, (ENS)
April 6, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-06-19.asp#anchor4
A new law to protect workers against the dangers of exposure to electromagnetic fields is working its way through the European parliamentary system. This environmental danger has been controversial, and many groups and individuals warning against it have been dismissed and subjected to ridicule in the past.
The workers most affected are people working long hours near TV and radio broadcasting equipment, radar equipment and mobile phone masts, and even cash desk operators exposed for lengthy periods to the anti-theft devices used in shops, the law states.
Exposure to electromagnetic fields can cause shocks, burns and absorption of thermal energy, the Parliament acknowledged, saying that people working in heavy industries such as steel and other metal industries are also at risk.
Late last month, the European Parliament approved a report that is acceptable to the Council of Ministers with only five amendments. By approving the report, the Parliament signaled that the law can be adopted swiftly once the Council signs off on it.
The law sets maximum values for exposure to electromagnetic fields to protect the health of workers against all known short-term harmful effects.
It also establishes reference values above which employers must take preventive measures, and includes provisions to ensure that workers are given information and training.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) want stricter medical surveillance measures to be introduced for these at-risk workers. They say that where there is reason to believe that a worker's exposure has exceeded the limit values, the worker must have the right to a medical examination. This is important because internal lesions resulting from overexposure of which the worker is not aware can only be detected by a health professional.
The law also requires the European Commission to inform Parliament every five years of any steps needed in the light of new scientific knowledge, particularly in connection with exposure to static magnetic fields, for which the directive lays down no exposure limits.
The EU member states will have four years to enact it in their national laws. On May 1, 10 new countries from eastern and northern Europe will join the current 15 member states. MEPs are calling for all 25 member states to provide for penalties if their laws governing exposure to electromagnetic fields are broken.
----
IUCN Fosters Middle East Water Solutions
AMMAN, Jordan, (ENS)
April 6, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-06-19.asp#anchor1
The IUCN-World Conservation Union has waded right into the center of one of the most intractable environmental issues in the world - water sufficiency for the arid Middle East. The world's largest conservation organization intends to challenge the common notion of water being a source of conflict in the region, in the belief that water also brings people together.
Experts on conservation and development are gathered in Amman, Jordan this week for the 5th IUCN Regional Conservation Forum, seeking to strengthen knowledge and networking for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development in the West and Central Asia and North Africa (WESCANA) region.
To that end, the IUCN-World Conservation Union Monday signed an agreement to move its WESCANA Regional Office from IUCN headquarters in Switzerland to Amman.
The Forum opened on Monday under the patronage of the Jordanian Minister of Environment Dr. Alia Bouran. During the opening ceremony IUCN Director General Achim Steiner and Bouran signed an agreement to launch the new WESCANA office in Jordan. The government of Jordan will provide financial and technical support to the office for five years.
"The opening of the office brings IUCN to the heart of the region four years after its successful World Conservation Congress in Amman," said Steiner.
"The world knows so little about what is being done on conservation and sustainable development in the region," said Steiner during the opening ceremonies. "This new office, which brings together 24 countries, will help IUCN engage the world community in supporting what are vital and pioneering efforts in a very diverse region. The biodiversity in these countries matters to people - the world needs to pay attention."
"The Jordanian venue for this high level water workshop is particularly relevant as seven of the 10 most water-scarce countries in the world come from the WESCANA region," says Dr. Ger Bergkamp, coordinator of the Water and Nature Initiative at IUCN.
At the forum in Amman, participants are preparing for regional participation in the upcoming 3rd IUCN World Conservation Congress, to be held in Bangkok, Thailand this November. The forum will be held under the slogan, "People and Nature: Water for Peace and Prosperity" and will discuss the most pressing natural resource problem in the region - water.
Water resource management practices in the WESCANA region are up for discussion, and so is the potential of a newly developed IUCN regional water program that is currently gathering funding support in Europe as well as locally.
The workshop will discuss whether markets, traditions and religious teachings can be combined in the pursuit of water conservation for human well-being and peace.
The results of these efforts will provide input to the upcoming UN Commission on Sustainable Development in New York April 14-30, which will focus on water, sanitation and human settlements.
"Despite its complexities, IUCN has shown for a half century that civil society and governments can jointly manage an environmental union, said the newly appointed WESCANA Regional Director Dr. Odeh Al Jayyousi.
"The Union has spread across 140 countries, growing into an extraordinary movement of over 1,000 member organizations, a union in which governments are increasingly willing to invest," he said. "No individual organization can cover all of the issues. By joining forces, IUCN is able to do this."
----
Urban Waves Sicken Surfers
IRVINE, California, (ENS)
April 6, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-06-01.asp
Urban beach water is making surfers sick to their stomachs twice as often as the surf in more rural areas, according to new research from the University of California-Irvine. Surfing is not so much fun when accompanied by fever, nausea, stomach pain and diarrhea, sore throat, red eyes or skin infection.
The research team was led by Ryan Dwight of the University of California-Irvine (UCI) Environmental Health Science and Policy Program and Dr. Dean Baker, professor of medicine and director of the UCI Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. Study results appear in the April edition of the "American Journal of Public Health."
Their research is the first to quantify the health effects of ocean water by monitoring beach users from both urban and rural areas.
"Surfers are an excellent group to study, because they are in the water almost every day and are exposed to more bacterial pathogens from runoff than casual beach users," said Dwight, a surfer as well as a scientist.
The findings suggest that exposure to urban runoff at beaches in highly populated areas increases health risks to all swimmers, even when pollution levels are within current environmental monitoring guidelines.
"These potential health risks warrant greater public health surveillance, as well as greater efforts to reduce pollutants discharged on public beaches," said Dwight.
The researchers compared rates of reported health symptoms among California surfers in urban north Orange County and rural Santa Cruz County during the winters of 1998 and 1999.
The urban surfers reported almost twice as many symptoms as the rural surfers during the rainy El Niño winter of 1998.
During both study years, reported symptoms for both groups increased by about 10 percent for each 2.5 hours of weekly water exposure.
North Orange County - which includes America's Surf City, Huntington Beach, and the popular vacation destination, Newport Beach - was designated as the urban site. Its watershed is in one of the most developed areas in the world and generates polluted runoff, discharged through the Santa Ana River.
Santa Cruz County was selected as the rural site because of its cleaner coastal water quality and watershed characteristics. Both are popular surfing locales.
According to Baker, this study differs from others because it looked into the health impacts of general exposure to beach water, not to specific sites where pollutants released by sources such as industrial plants or wastewater treatment plants can be monitored.
"Because our study looked at the health effects associated with open beaches," Baker said, "it suggests that the current guidelines to monitor and close beaches in urban areas such as Orange County may not be sufficient to protect the public's health from general water runoff."
Chad Nelsen, Surfrider Foundation's environmental director is also concerned about pollution in the waves. Founded in 1984, Surfrider Foundation now has 60 chapters located along the East, West, Gulf, Puerto Rican, and Hawaiian coasts. International Surfrider Foundation chapters and affiliates have been established in Japan, Brazil, Australia, France and Spain.
"Most people simply take for granted that our beaches are healthy, and unfortunately this is not the case," says Nelsen. "While our ocean waters make look safe to swim or recreate in, they're not."
On Monday, an article complaining about sewage seeping into Florida surf appeared on the Surfermag.com website. One billion gallons a day of partially treated sewage from 300 separate wells is being pumped into the Florida ground, say the surfers, and they can see it in the waters.
In 1997, Tom Warnke founded the Palm Beach chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. Warnke claims that anecdotal evidence of sewage seeping through Florida's porous limestone into the sea is "everywhere."
"Dead dolphins, killer algae, horrible sea lice infestations, biblical red-tide outbreaks, sea turtles with horrendous lesions and dying reefs in the Florida Keys," he writes.
For the past four years the Surfrider Foundation has issued a State of the Beach report which documents which beaches are safe and which are less so. The most recent Surfrider State of the Beach report, released in May 2003, concludes that while states are doing a better job collecting and reporting beach access and surf zone water quality information, public information is very limited.
The indicator information that is available is often confusing, the Surfrider report states. Results are inconsistent within and between states because the studies they are based on use different standards and criteria. Indicator information is also often not easily interpreted by the general public and elected officials.
Because there are gaps and limitations in beach health indicator information, it is difficult to know the extent to which our coastal and ocean resources are at risk. But even with limited information, the report warns, "Increasing beach closures and health advisories tell us that surf zone water quality is often getting worse."
-------- health
Study heralds molecule in soybeans as baldness beater
April 06, 2004
By Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040406-121315-1117r.htm
Gentlemen, forget the steak and french fries. And lay off the cheeseburgers, pizza, eggs, bacon and all the other hallmarks of he-man cuisine.
It's soybeans you want, guys: We're talking tofu, edamame, soy butter, miso soup, soy milk, tempeh and that mysterious "textured vegetable protein" lurking in the freezer case at the supermarket.
That's what real men eat, at least according to a research team from Colorado State University and two other universities. Soy products, they say, may stave off baldness, prostate cancer and even improve troubled skin.
It all rests with something called equol, a bold but enigmatic molecule created in the intestine when soy is digested.
It is tiny but mighty. The equol molecule chemically binds itself to dihydrotestosterone (DHT), the male hormone that causes male-pattern baldness, acne and excess body hair and that stimulates prostate growth - hazardous for men already suffering prostate cancer or an enlarged prostate.
"This molecule is remarkable," said Kenneth Setchell, a biochemist with Cincinnati Children's Hospital, which was part of the research team, along with Brigham Young University.
"These findings are of immense critical importance because blocking the action of the potent androgen DHT has been one of the holy grails of the pharmaceutical industry as a strategy for treating prostate cancer and related disease," Mr. Setchell said.
The news could make edamame (green soybeans), tempeh (fermented soybean patty) and miso (soup made from soybean paste) part of the male snacking vocabulary.
Researchers are excited because equol has no side effects, unlike powerful drugs that prevent DHT from being made in the body. The equol molecules function as "handcuffs," they say, not altering the hormone level in the body but simply blocking its effects.
The research team made its determination after injecting male rats with an equol solution and measuring its effects on their DHT function.
Ironically, women of a certain age have been urged to eat more soy products in recent years to alleviate annoying symptoms of menopause. Soy contains phytoestrogens, which some doctors believe can supplement dwindling natural estrogen and alleviate hot flashes, dry skin and fuzzy memory, among other things.
Equol itself is defined as a "nonsteroidal estrogen of the isoflavone class," according to research that Mr. Setchell conducted two years ago, which found that some people were more prone to create the molecule from soy than others. Some proved to be "equol producers," some were "non-equol producers."
Though Mr. Setchell and his team did not address this issue in their current study, soy consumption does not cause feminization in men or affect sexual function, according to the American Dietetic Association.
Meanwhile, researchers have filed patent applications on equol and hope to commercialize the technology, Mr. Setchell said.
"The novelty of equol is that it inhibits androgen hormone and influences estrogen hormone action," said Edwin Lephart, a biologist with Brigham Young University who was part of the research team. "We don't know of any other molecule that possesses these important biochemical properties," he said.
Other research has heralded the positive health effects of soy on men, according to the Missouri-based United Soybean Board, which tracks farming and consumer aspects of the legume.
Penn State University sports physicians found last year that athletes who drank a "soy carbohydrate beverage" after weight training and aerobics had a lower risk of muscle damage.
Researchers at both the University of Alabama and Wayne State University have shown that the soy component genistein had a positive influence on prostate cancer treatment.
In addition, studies at the University of Kentucky found that soy protein reduces abdominal fat and promotes more rapid weight loss among those on a high-protein diet.
-------- ACTIVISTS
From his jail cell, radical environmentalist Tre Arrow says he's no terrorist
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
By Andrew Kramer,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-04-06/s_22528.asp
VICTORIA, British Columbia - For 19 months, Tre Arrow was one of the most wanted fugitives in America. He was accused of firebombing logging and cement trucks in Oregon and having links to a group of radical environmentalists viewed as terrorists by the FBI.
Now he's in a jail cell here, facing charges of trying to shoplift bolt cutters. He's begun a hunger strike to protest what he calls injustices in the U.S. legal system and is eager to talk about the evils of corporate culture - although not the FBI's case against him.
"As an activist, I stand tall. I hold my head high," Arrow said at the Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Center.
Arrow, 30, was born Michael Scarpitti but says the trees told him to change his name. He gained notoriety by scaling the offices of the U.S. Forest Service in Portland in 2000 and perching on a narrow ledge for 11 days to protest logging on Mount Hood.
Arrow says he is not a terrorist.
"They (the FBI) want to label me the 'T' word," said Arrow, a veteran of antilogging protests in Oregon who likes to go barefoot to protect the Earth and is seen as something of a folk hero among environmental militants.
Arrow said he will fight deportation to the United States, contending he wouldn't get a fair trial because of the FBI's assertion that the crimes he is accused of are acts of terrorism.
Arrow has been accused in Oregon on federal charges of use of fire to commit a felony, destruction of vehicles used in interstate commerce, and use of incendiary devices in a crime of violence. The charges carry combined penalties of up to 80 years in prison.
The FBI believes he's more than an activist. He is accused of firebombing logging trucks and cement trucks in two separate attacks in Oregon in 2001 and is suspected of having links with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a shadowy group that has claimed responsibility for scores of acts of destruction and vandalism over the past dozen years.
Arrow was arrested in March. His capture had become a top priority for the FBI, said Julie Thornton, the agent in charge of domestic terrorism investigations in Oregon.
Although the FBI's focus has been on preventing attacks from the likes of al-Qaida, the agency has not let up in its battles against the ELF and similar groups, Thornton said.
"It's a huge part of what we do," she said.
The FBI has had some successes against the ELF. Across the country, at least eight people with suspected ties to the group have been arrested over the past few years.
According to Canadian officials, Arrow was captured when he took bolt cutters from a home improvement store in Victoria and a check of his fingerprints showed he was wanted by the FBI.
Arrow is among four activists charged with setting logging trucks on fire outside Portland on June 1, 2001, to protest a planned timber cut on Mount Hood. Three other suspects were captured after one of them, Jake Sherman, told a girlfriend about the crime, according to arrest papers. The girlfriend's father is a deputy state fire marshal.
Arrow grew up in Florida. He was a wrestler and art club president at Martin County High School in Stuart, Florida, said former wrestling coach R. J. Costillo.
"He was a real hardworking kid," said Costillo, who described Arrow as clean-cut and popular.
Arrow lifted weights, jogged, and surfed, developing a strong physique - something that later proved a boon during days when he participated in antilogging tree sits and eluded officers by leaping from tree to tree.
After dropping out of Florida State University he decided he had to "put my own body between the chain saws and the ancient forest." He moved to Oregon in 1996 to join other environmental activists.
Arrow was indicted in August 2002 for the firebombing attacks a year earlier. And now he is sitting inside a Canadian jail where he eagerly denounces what he considers the militarization of U.S. society, cruelty to animals, and corporations.
"Corporations need to be held accountable for endangering the lives of humans and making a profit off it," he said.
So far, it is unclear when Arrow will be sent back to the United States to stand trial. The Canadians could drop the shoplifting charges against him and extradite him.
"I don't care about me. We're talking about ancient forest that doesn't grow back in a couple of years. We're talking about a planet that cannot be replaced," he said. "That to me is far more important than one person's individual case."
----
Jump on our Bandwagon
The corporations' Achilles heel is the environment. It's time for the left to hit it.
by George Monbiot
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 6, 2004
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/April2004/Monbiot0406.htm
Beside the disaster in Iraq, the new Islamic terror campaign and the battle over immigration policy, the survival of the black-browed albatross may not look like the most pressing political issue. For many of those on the left, environmentalism is at a best a distraction, at worst a regression. As Christopher Hitchens said in a debate last week, "Environmentalism and ecology ... are conservative positions. They may be honourable ones, they may be defensible ones, they are not radical ones." [1]
This was once true. The modern European green movement began as a response by landowners to the rise of the middle class and the industries which empowered it. Industrialism threatened both the landscapes which reflected an unchanging social order and the aristocracy's economic control.
Today, it would be foolish to claim that this tendency has entirely disappeared. Much of the movement's funding in this country is provided by people with inherited wealth, the most prominent of whom, Teddy Goldsmith, happily describes himself as a reactionary. By reasserting the traditional Tory policy of trade protectionism, the British Green party, which in other respects is a radical force, finds itself allied to such ultra-conservative bodies as America First. [2]
But while some of the policies of its adherents haven't changed, the political meaning of environmentalism has. Corporations have become the new aristocracy: an enthroned power which shows no sign of being usurped from within. Far from becoming a catalyst for revolutionary change, they have ensured that all that once melted into air becomes solid, as intangible assets - the genome, the internet, even the weather - are bound up by a new generation of property rights. Financial speculators establish the limits of political action: if a government steps over the political line and "loses the confidence of the markets", the economy collapses, and the government soon follows.
Their world order is as dangerous to social welfare as feudalism. While industrialization still has liberating potential for the poorer nations, its global impact on the climate means that it could now destroy more lives than it saves. Environmentalism and social justice have become indivisible. To ignore the environmental impacts of economic decisions, as some on the left still do, is to ignore one of the major sources of oppression.
This is not to say that the classic leftist analysis of power relations has become redundant. At the global level we can discern a dialectic of precisely the kind Marx foresaw. As the same corporations seek to enforce the same conditions everywhere, they create a universal class interest in confronting them. No one needs to persuade the people fighting Monsanto in Britain that they have common cause with the people fighting Monsanto in Bangladesh or Bolivia. But because the corporations have so effectively crushed the global workforce, much of the pressure for change now comes from outside the factory gates.
Partly as a result of the changes they have engineered, partly as a result of the depletion of natural resources, the corporations now appear to be more vulnerable to environmental protest than they are to industrial action. Having exhausted the most accessible reserves of oil, minerals, timber, fish and freshwater, they are now forced into ever wider conflicts with the local people whose land and water they must seize to maintain production. As a result, the theft of resources and the ensuing pollution have become major political issues almost everywhere.
At the same time, the drive to cut labour costs and find new markets requires constant technological innovation. Science in countries like Britain has been subordinated to the corporate demand for profitable new technologies. To deploy these technologies, companies must also demand ever lower regulatory standards. These are the reasons why science policy has become such a battleground, and why so many of those who claim to be defending science instead appear to be defending corporate power.
The limiting factor for corporations, in other words, is no longer labour, but the ecosystem and the regulations which protect it. This is why battles over the environment are among the few that the world's dissident movements are winning.
This might seem an odd thing to say, at a time when climate change seems to be accelerating, the US government insists on raising the production of an ozone-destroying chemical, [3] and a new UN report suggests that vast "dead zones" caused by sewage and farm pollution are spreading across the oceans. [4] But over the past week in Britain alone we've won four resounding victories.
On Tuesday, Bayer, the company which just a month ago received permission to start growing GM maize commercially in Britain, pulled out. This means that no GM crops can be grown in Britain until at least 2008, and perhaps never. On Thursday, the European Commission, having prevaricated for 14 years, finally ordered the nuclear power station at Sellafield to clear up the plutonium it has been dumping. Since the 1950s Sellafield is believed to have thrown 1.3 tonnes of plutonium - enough to make 162 atom bombs - into an open pond. [5]
On Friday executives from the Lafarge conglomerate visited the Hedridean island of Harris to announce that they have abandoned their plans to turn Mt Roineabhal, part of a protected landscape, into roadstone. [6] The mountain, according to one of the quarry's backers, would have become the biggest hole in the world. [7]
On Saturday, the British foreign office, after threatening to sink it, finally dropped its objections to a new treaty, enforceable in British territorial waters in the South Atlantic, protecting albatrosses from longline fishermen. [8] So many albatrosses were being caught on baited hooks that all 21 species are now threatened with extinction. [9]
In all these cases, victory against some of the world's biggest corporations was achieved by small groups of local people and roving campaigners, armed with a tiny fraction of their opponents' budgets. They haven't liberated the working class from oppression, but they have restrained the power of the oppressors. These are victories for the common people against the new aristocracy.
And we need these victories. Nothing so undermines a cause as repeated failure. By showing that we can win, and win against great odds, we revitalize the campaign not only against environmental destruction, but also against other forms of oppression. Those leftists who still see environmentalism as someone else's mobilization are missing a massive opportunity.
But if these victories are to spread, then both sides need to be more consistent. The Green Party, for example, claims to support the doctrine of "contraction and convergence", in which the use of resources by the different nations converges to equality. Yet it seeks, through protectionism, to prevent the transfer of manufacturing and service jobs from rich nations to poor which would assist this process. [10] Similarly, if the traditional left is to take a truly internationalist position, it must cease to press for the kind of development at home which, through climate change, destroys the lives of other people. If the greens junk their past and the reds grasp their future, the new aristocracy will find itself in serious trouble.
George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper of London. His recently released book, The Age of Consent (Flamingo Press, 2003), puts forth proposals for global democratic governance. His articles and contact info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com.
References
1. Christopher Hitchens, 29th March 2004. Debate on the ABC National Radio Breakfast Programme: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/brkfast/.
2. See http://www.americafirstparty.org/.
3. eg Timothy Gardner, 24th March 2004. "US Pushes to Boost Use of Ozone Damaging Fumigant," Reuters News Service.
4. Michael McCarthy, 30th March 2004. "'Dead Zones' in World's Oceans are Growing, say Alarmed UN Scientists," The Independent.
5. Greenpeace press release, 30th March 2004. Greenpeace backs moves to force BNFL to clean up plutonium wastes.
6. Lafarge Press Release, 2nd April 2004. Lafarge withdraws from Scottish quarry project at Lingerbay and calls for a public debate on long term mineral supply in the UK; Rob Edwards, 4th April 2004. Stone Dead. The Sunday Herald.
7. Ian Wilson, owner of the mineral rights, cited in Alastair McIntosh, 2002. Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power, updated edition. Aurum Press, London.
8. The Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels.
9. BBC News Online, 4th April 2004. "Britain to Ratify Seabird Treaty," http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3596313.stm.
10. See for example the "site here to sell here" policy, explained by Caroline Lucas and Colin Hines, 2001. Time to Replace Globalization: A Green Localist Manifesto for the World Trade Organization Ministerial. The Greens/European Free Alliance in the European Parliament.
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Purged Chinese Reformer Gravely Ill, Haunting His Successors
April 6, 2004
By JOSEPH KAHN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/international/asia/06ZHAO.html
BEIJING, April 5 - Zhao Ziyang, a former Communist Party chief who became a potent symbol of thwarted political reform after he was purged during the crackdown on dissent in 1989, is critically ill and is being kept alive by a respirator at his home in Beijing, people close to Mr. Zhao's family said Monday.
Though Mr. Zhao has long been under house arrest and out of public view, his death could pose a challenge to China's leadership.
Analysts say advocates of faster political change inside and outside the Communist Party may view his passing as an opportunity to highlight demands for more open government and for a reassessment of the army's violent suppression of student-led protests in 1989.
In a nation where deaths of respected leaders and anniversaries of official atrocities have become occasions for public displays of dissent, Chinese leaders now potentially face a confluence of bad omens.
Officials have already been trying to squelch demands that they revise their own account of what happened in Beijing on June 3 and 4, 1989, as the 15th anniversary of the incident approaches.
They now face the possibility that Mr. Zhao, who was removed from power after taking a soft line on the 1989 protests, could die and provide an additional impetus to those seeking redress for the crackdown, which killed hundreds around Beijing.
Mr. Zhao, 84, suffering from lung and heart problems, had a serious case of pneumonia in late February and early March and was considered close to death at that time, according to a person who maintains contact with the former leader's children. Doctors told his family that they felt that his condition was potentially fatal, this person said.
Another individual who is close to people who worked with Mr. Zhao confirmed that his health had deteriorated sharply. The matter was first reported Monday by Reuters.
Mr. Zhao was treated in a Beijing hospital and returned home when his condition stabilized, those people said. He now uses a respirator to breathe and his condition remains critical, they said.
Underscoring the sensitivity of the matter, doctors who work closely with China's top leaders, including Hu Jintao, the president and Communist Party chief, and Jiang Zemin, the former party chief who remains China's top military official, visited Mr. Zhao in the hospital and have kept close tabs on his condition, the individuals said.
Anointed as a successor to Deng Xiaoping, the country's paramount leader, Mr. Zhao favored a relatively bold pace of political and economic reform. His hold on power weakened when the mainly state-run economy overheated, causing high inflation, and students organized peaceful but large-scale demonstrations in the heart of the capital.
Mr. Zhao's last public appearance came on May 19, 1989, when he made an impromptu visit to Tiananmen Square, where the protests were centered. He pleaded with students to leave the square, apologizing for having arrived "too late" and warning them that the police planned to remove them by force.
Martial law was declared the next day and Mr. Zhao was stripped of power, to be replaced a short time later by Mr. Jiang, who had been mayor of Shanghai. The army moved in the night of June 3, driving tanks and armored personnel carriers and gunning down hundreds who tried to stop their advance.
After a period of severe repression and sluggish growth after the crackdown, China rebounded. Now, after a decade of nearly double-digit annual growth, the pain of the 1989 events has been largely forgotten by most people. The country is far more open socially and economically than it was in Mr. Zhao's day.
Most analysts say they believe that the leadership is united in its view that the crackdown was a necessary price to pay for a long period of political stability.
There have been signs of divergent approaches to political and economic management since Mr. Hu took power in late 2002. But the fissures are not viewed as wide enough for some leadership faction to try to use the Tiananmen incident as leverage to tar opponents or grab power.
Nonetheless, it remains possible that lower-level party officials, or students or intellectuals outside the party, may make Mr. Zhao's death an occasion to press for political liberalization. China's long tradition of paying homage to the dead makes it unseemly for the police to repress mourners, potentially opening a window for people to express grievances along with condolences.
In fact, the 1989 demonstrations first gathered steam after the death of the reform-minded leader who preceded Mr. Zhao as Communist Party chief, Hu Yaobang, who died 15 years ago this month.
"It is clear that leaders will have taken every measure to prevent any protests from happening," said one Chinese political analyst who asked not to be quoted by name. "But the impact of such an event would be very unpredictable and risky for the leadership."
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