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NUCLEAR
Beware of Beijing opportunism
Cheney to Promote Nuke Reactors to China
Viequenses ask for depleted uranium tests
U.S. offered to supply India with nuclear weapons: PM
Japanese Opposition to forces in Iraq
North Korea says standoff with US at 'brink of nuclear war'
N.Y. Lab to Clean Radioactive Reactor
Nuke Site Workers Fear Health Problems
Clinton Expresses Doubts His Response To al-Qaeda Attacks
Kerry Assails Bush's Foreign Policy
Powell Calls U.S. Casualties 'Disquieting'
MILITARY
Warlord's Force Seizes a City In Afghanistan
Lamenting Sudan's War And Working for Peace
A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity
US drops ban on sales of lethal military equipment to Iraq
Philippines, Mongolia to join US-Thai Cobra Gold exercises
Malaysia to haul some 10,000 national service AWOL youths to court
Pentagon: Tanker Plan Needs Major Changes
Bulgaria will not pull troops out of Iraq: FM
General May Bolster Force in Iraq;
In Fallujah Marines Try to Quell 'a Hotbed of Resistance'
U.S. Declares Cease-Fire in Falluja, but Clashes Continue
Signs That Shiites and Sunnis Are Joining to Battle Americans
Iraq Council Demands Immediate Cease - Fire
Why Falluja Remains a Crossroads for Collision
The Phantom Sovereign
Putin Doubts Expanded NATO Meets New Threats
The Battle for Chechen Oil
Dark Matter
A Little Light Is Shed on Intelligence Digests
Governors ask Army to reconsider dumping byproducts of deadly nerve agent
War Funding Is Adequate For Year, Pentagon Says
Marshal Orders Tapes Of Scalia Talk Erased
Legal Experts Express Concern About Erasure of Scalia Tapes
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Going the Extra Mile
Rice Defends Pre-9/11 Anti-Terrorism Efforts
Zeroing In on One Classified Document
In Testimony to 9/11 Panel, Rice Sticks to the Script
White House Works to Declassify Al Qaeda Threat Memo
Kidnap: the new weapon of terror
ENERGY
Reliant Indicted for Manufacturing California Energy Crisis
Power Firm Charged in Calif. Energy Crisis
Reliant Goes to Court Over Energy Crisis
OTHER
Hong Kong-bound Chinese water heavily polluted, says Greenpeace
Indian River Lagoon Restoration Wins Florida Approval
Reliant Indicted for Manufacturing California Energy Crisis
Does the Great White North deserve its green reputation?
New Drug Law's Cost Impact Debated
Past Season's Flu Worst in 4 Years
ACTIVISTS
Peace trekkers set off for British nuclear arms facility
Protest of IMF Planned This Month
More Than 1,000 Protesters Held in Nepal
20,000 Armenian Protesters Demand President Quit
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
Beware of Beijing opportunism
04/09/2004
GIO Taiwan Commentary
By S.P. Seth
http://publish.gio.gov.tw/FCJ/current/04040962.html
The on-again, off-again Beijing-sponsored talks aimed at persuading Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear arms program are off again. Though a further meeting of the six participants--North and South Korea, the United States, Russia, China and Japan--will likely be held in a few months, for now the likelihood of a breakthrough is nowhere in sight.
At the recently concluded Beijing conference, Pyongyang offered a nuclear freeze in return for security guarantees, economic aid and diplomatic recognition. It wants the scope of the freeze to be limited to the terms outlined in the 1994 agreement. In other words, the freeze would apply only to its plutonium-based program, allowing it to continue the uranium-based program it claims is limited to peaceful applications; and the United States and its allies would be obliged to abide by their earlier promise to build two nuclear power plants without the capacity to produce weapons-grade fuel.
Washington is not buying into it because, as one U.S. delegate put it, "I'm not aware of any 'peaceful' nuclear program" in North Korea. According to James Kelly, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, "The U.S. seeks the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of all nuclear programs, including plutonium and uranium-based weapons." Pyongyang denies having a uranium-enrichment program, although some time ago it apparently admitted its existence.
Though there has been no substantive progress toward a resolution, the United States and its allies at least appear to be relieved in the belief that Beijing is likewise unhappy with Pyongyang's nuclear program. They seem beholden to China for its intercession, feeling that without it, there probably would be no talks, bringing Northeast Asia to the brink of catastrophe.
This perception of Beijing's attitude seems questionable, however. It is known that China helped Pakistan with its atomic weapons program and that Pakistan's nuclear weapons program director Abdul Qadeer Khan and other highly placed Pakistani officials and military leaders sold Chinese nuclear know-how to North Korea, Libya and others. Referring to Libya's coming clean to International Atomic Energy Agency investigators, the Sydney Morning Herald commented editorially, "A tale emerged of an illicit global supply chain peddling nuclear secrets, to which Libya had turned. The trade went back at least two decades to China, which had aided Pakistan's chief scientist in developing his nation's illegal nuclear arsenal." It strains credibility to imagine that Beijing was totally unaware of what these Pakistanis were up to. Indeed, it is reasonable to conclude that Beijing intentionally fosters the emergence of multiple small nuclear entities as a diversionary tactic to dilute U.S. power while keeping India's attention confined to South Asia and thwarting its aspiration to compete as an Asian power center.
The point to make is that China has not been averse to using dissemination of its nuclear know-how and encouragement of nuclear proliferation as a strategic tool. Similarly, it is not averse to using North Korea to maximize its leverage with the United States and expand its regional influence.
Washington is banking on China's playing a constructive role in bringing about North Korea's de-nuclearization, and Beijing has professed that it shares U.S. concerns and is doing its best to accommodate them. At the same time, however, Beijing has claimed that its influence with the quirky Kim Il-sung regime is limited and that Washington must therefore grant China latitude in trying to moderate its intransigence. Consequently, China has taken on the image of honest broker and peacekeeper.
Beijing is playing a skillful diplomatic game, in no hurry to exhaust its usefulness as middleman. In any case, the issue will be around for quite a while, assuring Beijing's stage play a long run. If it were really serious about squelching North Korea's nuclear aspirations, it could put the squeeze on Pyongyang by cutting off fuel and food supplies from China. It is amazing, then, how successfully Beijing has been able to sell itself as peacemaker in the North Korean nuclear imbroglio.
As long as Pyongyang is assured of its lifeline from China, it can hold out against U.S. pressure indefinitely. Dragging out the crisis in this way gives Beijing room to maneuver so as to reinforce U.S. dependence on it. As an indication of its confidence in that dependence, Beijing had no compunctions about omitting from a Xinhua News Agency report on the talks Kelly's demand for complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of all North Korean nuclear programs. Evidently, it believes that Washington's bottom line need not be taken seriously.
Over-extended as it is in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington is in no position to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korean nuclear installations. Depending upon Beijing but without any real help from it, Washington, Tokyo and Seoul can only look forward to a widening conflict with Pyongyang, enabling Beijing to continue to prey on others' fears. If the United States and its allies do not rethink their strategic goals, China is likely to expand its regional influence at their expense.
--S.P. Seth is a free-lance writer based in Sydney, Australia.
--------
Cheney to Promote Nuke Reactors to China
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China-Reactors.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- On a trip to China next week to talk about high-stakes issues like terrorism and North Korea, Vice President Dick Cheney will have another task -- making a pitch for Westinghouse's U.S. nuclear power technology.
At stake could be billions of dollars in business in coming years and thousands of American jobs. The initial installment of four reactors, costing $1.5 billion apiece, would also help narrow the huge U.S. trade deficit with China.
China's latest economic plan anticipates more than doubling its electricity output by 2020 and the Chinese government, facing enormous air pollution problems, is looking to shift some of that away from coal-burning plants. Its plan calls for building as many as 32 large 1,000-megawatt reactors over the next 16 years.
No one has ordered a new nuclear power reactor in the United States in three decades and the next one, if it comes, is still years away. So, China is being viewed by the U.S. industry as a potential bonanza.
Cheney's three-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai next week is part of a weeklong trip to Asia that will also include a stop in Tokyo. He departed Washington on Friday.
A senior administration official, briefing reporters about the trip, said Cheney will not ``pitch individual commercial transactions.'' But he intends to make clear ``we support the efforts of our American companies'' and general access to China's markets, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Some critics are concerned about such technology transfers.
``This pitch could not be more poorly timed,'' Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, told a hearing of the House International Relations Committee recently.
Citing recent Chinese plans to help Pakistan build two large reactors that are capable of producing plutonium, he said it is not the time for China to be rewarded with new reactor technology. U.S. officials said the Chinese have given adequate assurances that such sales will not pose a proliferation risk.
Bid solicitations for four new reactors are expected to be issued by the Chinese within months.
The leading competitors are U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric Co. and a French rival, Areva, which is peddling its next-generation reactor built by its Framatome subsidiary.
Westinghouse is putting its hopes on its 1,100 megawatt AP1000 reactor, an advanced design that is still waiting approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before it can be built in the United States. Westinghouse, owned by the British nuclear firm BNFL, is the only U.S.-based manufacturer of a pressurized water reactor, the type of design China has said it wants to pursue.
``Clearly the China market is very important to the industry and a supplier like Westinghouse,'' said Vaughn Gilbert, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh-based reactor vendor. ``The Chinese market is one that we're pursuing.''
Each of the AP1000 reactors are expected to cost about $1.5 billion. ``We would assume there would be more than one order,'' Gilbert said, since China has indicated it wants a standardized design across its reactor program. A successful bid could mean 5,000 American jobs, Gilbert said in an interview.
For the nuclear industry, the potential windfall goes beyond building the power plants.
``The opportunity is not just in selling the Chinese a number of reactors, but engaging them for a longer term in a strategic partnership,'' says Ron Simard, who deals with future plant development at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. That could mean future construction contracts as well as plant service business.
The reactor business has been nonexistent in the United States since the 1970s. No American utility has ordered a new reactor since the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
So, vendors like Westinghouse are relying on business elsewhere, especially Asia.
China currently has nine operating reactors, including French, Canadian, Russian, and Japanese designs as well as their own model, producing 6,450 megawatts of power, or about 1.4 percent total capacity. Chinese officials have estimated that by 2020 the country will need an additional 32,000 megawatts from its nuclear industry, or about 32 additional reactors.
Even with the surge in reactor construction, nuclear power will only account for 8 percent of China's future electricity needs. Chinese officials said at an energy conference in Washington last year their country must more than double its coal-fired generation and build more dams, erect windmills and tap natural gas to meet future electricity demands.
-------- depleted uranium
Viequenses ask for depleted uranium tests
Friday, April 9th, 2004
(AP)
http://www.puertoricowow.com/html/general-detail.asp?amaspHidden_listActive=true&amaspField_newshd=Viequenses%20ask%20for%20depleted%20uranium%20tests&amaspHidden_newshd_dataType=string
SAN JUAN - The recent controversy regarding soldiers alleging to have been contaminated in Iraq with depleted uranium has prompted the Committee for the Rescue & Development of Vieques to demand that the government test Viequenses for that specific pollutant.
At least two soldiers of Puerto Rico descent who are members of the New York National Guard stationed in Iraq have claimed to have been contaminated with depleted uranium found in U.S. armed forces' weapons.
The U.S. Navy has confirmed the use of uranium capped bullets in the military practices it used to conduct in Vieques.
"The local Health Department has been completely negligent in not developing a comprehensive program to test our population for depleted uranium," said committee spokeswoman Nilda Medina.
The group demanded that the Health Department conduct a study promised several years ago and to test for traces of heavy metals.
"We have no doubt that the high cancer rate among our people is directly related to bullets capped with depleted uranium and other toxic material accumulated here after decades of military training," Medina said in a prepared statement.
-------- india / pakistan
U.S. offered to supply India with nuclear weapons: PM
Friday, Apr. 9, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040409.windia9/BNStory/International/
Bhubaneshwar, India - The United States offered to supply India with nuclear weapons in an attempt to dissuade it from launching nuclear tests in 1998, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told an election rally Friday.
Mr. Vajpayee told the rally in Bhubaneshwar, capital of eastern Orissa state, he rejected Washington's offer because India needed to demonstrate it was capable of building its own nuclear arms.
"When I told them (Americans) you also have made that bomb, they replied when required you can take that from us. I told them frankly this bomb needs to be made and not borrowed," Mr. Vajpayee said.
He said the offer came as the United States encouraged India not to go ahead with nuclear tests in 1998.
"But we went ahead with the tests," Mr. Vajpayee said.
Both India and its rival, Pakistan, have an undeclared number of nuclear weapons.
The prime minister reiterated the government's position that India would never be the first to launch a nuclear attack, but added: "We will not hesitate to use it if somebody used the bomb against us."
Mr. Vajpayee made the comments during a rally for a general election that will be held in four phases between April 20 and May 10.
-------- japan
Japanese Opposition to forces in Iraq
April 9, 2004
(Save Iraqi Children Nagoya)
We -- large numbers of ordinary Japanese citizens -- opposed to the participation of Japanese military forces in the illegal attack on the people of Iraq by the United States and Great Britain, appeal to the Iraqi Mujahiddin not to kill our three fellow Japanese brothers. They share with us the same determination to stop the Japanese government from occupying your country.
We do not accept your hostage-taking, which only provide fuel to terrorism by states such as USA. We want you to know that very large numbers of Japanese people have been strongly opposing the presence of Japanese military forces in your country. However, please remember killing the three innocent Japanese you are now holding hostage, will not solve the problem. Instead it will only create hatred towards your country by our people.
We, the people of Japan, are in solidarity with the people of Iraq. Please be patient, and give us more time to convince our Government to withdraw from Iraq.
Till then, we urgently call upon your patriotism to avoid breaking the historical friendship between the Japanese and the Arab people.
Sincerely, Nobue Kugimiya (Save Iraqi Children Nagoya)
-------- korea
North Korea says standoff with US at 'brink of nuclear war'
SEOUL (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409115806.6oukxw6z.html
North Korea said Friday the standoff over its atomic ambitions was on the brink of nuclear war as US Vice President Dick Cheney headed to the region for talks with key Asian allies.
The Stalinist state's official news agency accused Washington of "driving the military situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war" with plans for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea.
Cheney is expected in Tokyo on Saturday on the first leg of an Asian tour that also takes him to China and South Korea.
North Korea described six-party talks held in Beijing in February as "fruitless," their harshest assessment so far of the meeting that brought together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
"The US demand that the DPRK (North Korea) scrap its nuclear programme first is the main obstacle in the way of solving the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the US," the Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary.
"It is a well-known fact that the second round of the six-way talks held in Beijing last February proved fruitless due to the US demand that the DPRK dismantle its nuclear program first."
Washington is demanding the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear prorgammes, both plutonium and enriched uranium schemes, before it will offer concessions to the impoverished state.
Pyongyang denies having a uranium programme and has said it will freeze its plutonium weapons programme in return for simultaneous rewards from Washington.
A new round of six-party talks is expected before the end of June while working parties are supposed to be set up to resolve address contentious issues.
South Korea's foreign ministry said all participating countries were ready for working level talks apart from North korea, which has yet to give the go ahead.
In the commentary the North Korean news agency said Pyongyang had no choice but to boost its nuclear weapons drive in the face of US intransigence and its "moves to put the strategy of pre-emptive nuclear attack into practice."
Cheney's trip to Asia has been overshadowed by the deteriorating security situation in Iraq where insurgents are threatening to kill three Japanese hostages unless Tokyo pulls out troops from the war-torn region.
Seven South Koreans were released earlier Friday after also falling into the hands of insurgents.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
N.Y. Lab to Clean Radioactive Reactor
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Reactor-Cleanup.html
UPTON, N.Y. (AP) -- The Energy Department has proposed a $96.8 million cleanup plan to remove radioactive material from a shuttered reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, scrapping a proposal to entomb it in concrete instead.
The proposal, made Thursday at a meeting of the lab's citizens advisory committee, was hailed by environmentalists who had criticized the agency's plan, announced in December, to entomb the reactor for up to 87,000 years.
``This is a major victory for environmentalists and the public,'' advisory committee member Adrienne Esposito said.
The plan, which would remove more than 99 percent of the radioactive graphite from the reactor, still requires review from regulatory agencies as well as a public comment period starting in June. The project should take two to four years, said Frank Crescenzo of the Department of Energy's Brookhaven office. Some surrounding soil would also be taken away under the plan.
The graphite reactor operated from 1950 to 1969. The removal of graphite and the cleanup of mercury from the nearby Peconic River is part of the final process of decommissioning the reactor at the Brookhaven National Lab.
``I am pleased that local families will not have to wait 87,000 years wondering about the safety of their drinking water,'' said Rep. Tim Bishop, who had helped organize discussions to consider new ways to deal with the reactor.
Both New York senators and Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy also hailed the decision.
Said Crescenzo: ``The congressional delegation and the public made it clear that the graphite was a big concern for them. Their concern certainly influenced the process.''
Brookhaven Lab, located in eastern Long Island, employs more than 2,800 scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff, and has an annual budget of $463 million. Major programs include nuclear and high-energy physics, physics and chemistry of materials, environmental and energy research, nonproliferation, neuroscience and medical imaging.
On the Net:
http://www.bnl.gov
-------- washington
Nuke Site Workers Fear Health Problems
By SHANNON DININNY
04/09/04
Associated Press
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/ap/ap_story.html/National/AP.V3296.AP-Hanford-Workers.html
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP)--Steve and Virginia Wallace know the symptoms of exposure to chemical vapors: headaches, nosebleeds, a metallic taste.
With a combined 30 years working at the Hanford nuclear site, the two respiratory equipment specialists believe workers there aren't being adequately protected.
The state and federal governments are investigating procedures at Hanford's so-called tank farms amid allegations that corners are being cut--and workers endangered--to speed cleanup of the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.
More than 90 workers have sought medical care for exposure at the tank farms in the past two years, according to data gathered by the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group. Few workers will speak publicly.
A 1997 draft report by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory concluded that the risk of contracting cancer from exposure to the vapors could be as high as 1.6 in 10.
In the industrial world, normal risk is for one worker in 10,000 to contract cancer from exposures in the workplace, according to Tim Jarvis, a former researcher at the laboratory and peer reviewer of the report. Jarvis now is a private consultant often contracted by the Government Accountability Project.
``The report shows that exposure to tank vapors is extremely hazardous and will most likely lead to fatal cancers in the workers if exposure is continued,'' he said.
``My own personal opinion is I'm not being protected,'' said Virginia Wallace, who takes samples inside the tanks. Her husband is an instrument technician. ``People are afraid to seek medical attention. I've been scared.''
For 40 years, the Hanford reservation made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. Today, work there centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup to be finished by 2035 under an accelerated schedule pushed by the Bush administration.
The most deadly waste, about 53 million gallons of radioactive liquid, sludge and saltcake, sits in 177 underground tanks less than 10 miles from the Columbia River. Plans call for turning much of that waste into glass logs and burying it at a nuclear waste repository.
Experts have identified as many as 1,200 chemicals, including some known cancer-causing agents, in the tanks.
CH2M Hill, the Colorado-based contractor hired to handle cleanup, and the Energy Department, which manages the cleanup, say most of the chemicals are diluted and pose no danger to workers. Only three--ammonia, nitrous oxide and butanol--have been found in the tanks' air cavities at levels exceeding occupation exposure limits, CH2M Hill said.
``No one has received a toxic dose of these chemicals,'' said Rob Barr, director of environment safety and quality for the Energy Department's Office of River Protection.
``We are concerned and they should be concerned,'' Barr said. But, he added, ``We have a very high assurance that there are no long-term effects of the chemicals that are out there, because they are at such a low level.''
CH2M Hill says the rising number of exposures are, in part, a result of educating workers about vapors and encouraging them to report unusual smells.
More than 800 people work in the tank farms for CH2M Hill. The total work force at Hanford is about 11,000 people.
Following four vapor incidents in two weeks last month--which sent nine workers for medical evaluations--CH2M Hill halted routine work in the tank farms. The company has restarted some work since, but employees who enter the tank farms must wear respirators.
Critics argue that respirators can't protect against all 1,200 chemicals.
Last month, the Energy Department began formally investigating the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, the private contractor that monitors and provides health care to Hanford workers. The contractor has denied allegations that include fraud and medical-records mismanagement. Officials there did not return telephone messages seeking comment Friday.
A report CH2M Hill commissioned last fall by four independent experts cited failures to communicate procedural changes or safety issues about vapors.
Susan Eberlein, vice president of safety for CH2M Hill, said the company is continuing to educate employees about vapors and improve communications.
``We're trying to minimize exposures as much as possible,'' she said.
-------- us politics
Clinton Expresses Doubts His Response To al-Qaeda Attacks
Big News Network.com
Friday 9th April, 2004
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=2c35ecf240ec5422
The commission probing the Sept. 11 terror attacks met Thursday with former President Bill Clinton in a three-and-half hour, closed-door session during which, commissioners said, he expressed some doubts about his administration's response to terrorist attacks by al-Qaida.
"He was very frank, he gave us a lot of very helpful insight into things that happened (and his) policy approaches (to them)," said Reagan-era Navy secretary commissioner John F. Lehman.
The meeting -- though likely to be overshadowed by the public testimony under oath the commission heard the same day from current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice -- brings into sharp relief long-standing allegations that Clinton's response to a series of attacks by Islamic terrorists made the United States appear weak, and encouraged al-Qaida in their belief that they could strike the United States with impunity.
"We did go into some of the obvious criticisms of the eight years under his tenure," Lehman told CNN, after news of the Clinton meeting broke late Thursday afternoon.
He added that the former president was now second-guessing some of the decisions that he made at that time. "He was very frank, very open about talking about some decisions where, had he known some things, (they) might have gone one way or another way."
The commission -- formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Against the United States -- has already reported that there were several occasions after the attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa when senior officials might have had an opportunity to order terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden killed, either with cruise missiles, or by locally recruited Afghan CIA agents.
On four occasions in 1998-99, commission investigators told a hearing last month, officials -- including counter-terror tsar Richard A. Clarke, CIA Director George Tenet and Clinton national security advisor Samuel R. Berger -- opted not to strike locations where bin Laden was thought to be. Officials said their information was not certain enough, and the number of innocent civilians who might be killed was unacceptably high.
Commissioners said they also asked Clinton about policy matters. "We asked him a host of big questions, big policy recommendations," said former Indiana Democratic congressman and commission member Tim Roemer.
The former president's office said in a statement that Clinton was "pleased" to have had the opportunity to meet the panel "and believed it was a very constructive meeting."
Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, who was Clinton's deputy attorney general, told CNN that the former president -- as he is wont -- was very voluble.
"He even answered questions we didn't ask," she joked.
Commissioner Slade Gorton, the former GOP senator from Washington State added that the meeting over-ran by almost an hour, but was "very valuable," because "President Clinton has done a lot of thinking since he left office on issues like this," and said the commission was grateful for his advice.
Both panelists also took the opportunity to comment on papers from the Clinton White House which -- though provided to the current administration by the former president's archive -- were not turned over to the commission.
After the issue was brought to light by former Clinton official Bruce R. Lindsey, commission lawyers were given access to the papers and concluded that -- of more than 10,000 documents, less than 70 were relevant to their inquiry and not duplicative of material already obtained elsewhere.
"We haven't gotten them yet," Gorton said of the documents, "and they are relevant to our mission... We fully expect that we will get all of them so that they can inform our ultimate report."
"Now that we found out why it was that we didn't get certain Clinton administration documents that were withheld by the White House," added Gorelick, "we're going to issue a parallel request for similar bush administration documents."
--------
Kerry Assails Bush's Foreign Policy
Why Is U.S. Almost Alone in Iraq? Senator Asks in Meeting on Economy
By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62741-2004Apr8.html
MILWAUKEE, April 8 -- Sen. John F. Kerry criticized President Bush's foreign policy Thursday, questioning why the United States is virtually alone in Iraq and pledging that as president he would work closer with the international community.
"Why is the United States of America almost alone in carrying this burden and the risks which the world has a stake in?" the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee asked a packed town hall gathering here.
On a day when the economy was his main message, Kerry used the opening minutes of his town hall meeting to challenge Bush's credentials as commander in chief at a time when events in Iraq have put the administration on the defensive.
"There is no Arab country that is advanced by a failed Iraq. There is no European country that is safer by a failed Iraq. Yet, those countries are distinctly absent from risk-bearing. . . . This is essentially an American occupation," the Massachusetts Democrat said.
"We ought to be engaged in a bold, clear, startlingly honest appeal to the world to see their interests," he said.
Kerry declined to comment on the testimony of Condoleezza Rice, saying he wanted to read the entire transcript first. But he said that he hopes her appearance before the Sept. 11 commission contributes to "our finding out what we need to do to protect the security" of the country.
Instead of the stature of the United States in the world community being enhanced, Kerry said that "every poll shows that the United States is held in lower regard than it ever has been. I pledge that when and if you elect me president . . . I will return to the United Nations, and we will rejoin the community of nations in a proper way."
Kerry demanded an explanation for the administration's insistence on sticking to its deadline for exiting Iraq. "The president needs to explain to who are we turning over power to on the 30th of June. What will we be protecting on the 30th of June?" Kerry said.
At one point, Susan McGovern, daughter of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern and a member of the audience, told Kerry that Wisconsin voters want to hear strong statements against Bush's foreign policy and environmental record.
"You tell me if this is strong enough," Kerry replied. "George Bush and the Republicans in Washington today have run the most arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of this country."
Kerry eventually segued into his intended goal of the day: bringing his new economic message to this significant Midwest battleground state, and pledging to restore to Americans the prosperity of the 1990s.
Speaking at a downtown YMCA center one day after his major economic address in Washington, Kerry reiterated his intention to reduce the federal budget deficit by cutting spending and raising taxes on the wealthy. He said he would create ample tax incentives for companies to maintain manufacturing plants in the United States rather than outsourcing their work overseas -- a practice that continues to cause significant job losses domestically. Kerry also said he would review all the free trade agreements if elected to ensure that other nations abide by labor and environmental standards.
Wisconsin, which has 10 electoral votes, is viewed as a key battleground. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore prevailed in the state by a hair. Bush has already visited Wisconsin at least 10 times since the past election, and strategists for his campaign have said the state is a high priority in its electoral plan. In February, Kerry won a narrower than expected primary victory here over Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.). "In order for John Kerry to become the next president the United States, he must carry Wisconsin, " said Gov. Jim Doyle (D), who appeared with Kerry at the town meeting.
Kerry was greeted at the Milwaukee airport by a group of Hmong veterans, originally from a tribe in southeast Laos and Vietnam. An enthusiastic and diverse crowd of several hundred chanted Kerry's name at the local YMCA. The candidate seemed relaxed and happy, shaking hands despite his doctors' orders to hold off for a few weeks after recent shoulder surgery.
Kerry, who embarked this month on a major fundraising effort across the county, collected $2 million Thursday night in Chicago at a dinner attended by 1,500 prominent Democratic supporters. A similar event in Washington on Wednesday night brought in $3 million.
---------
Powell Calls U.S. Casualties 'Disquieting'
By Dana Milbank and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62524-2004Apr8.html
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday gave the administration's most sober assessment yet of the uprising in Iraq, calling the recent rise in U.S. casualties "disquieting" and acknowledging that coalition allies are "under the most difficult set of circumstances."
Powell served as the administration's point man while President Bush spent the second straight day out of public view on his ranch in Crawford, Tex. In congressional testimony, Powell said that despite the troubles in Iraq, the U.S. military will be able to quell both the new Shiite unrest and the Sunni insurgency within "the next few days and weeks."
"Whether we are confronted by an outlaw and his mobs claiming to themselves the mantle of religion, or by disgruntled members of the former tyrant's regime, or by foreign terrorists, we will deal with them. In that we are resolute," Powell said. Alluding to the first signs of fraying among the 33 nations that have deployed troops in Iraq, Powell also said that the U.S. coalition partners are "staying the course, even under the most difficult set of circumstances."
Bush spent the morning watching national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's televised testimony to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then toured his ranch with Wayne LaPierre Jr., chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and other leaders of hunting groups and gave an interview to Ladies' Home Journal. On Sunday, he is to appear in public at nearby Fort Hood, the home base for seven soldiers recently killed in Baghdad.
Democrats criticized Bush for taking the Easter-week vacation while U.S. forces are struggling to put down an uprising in Iraq. Campaigning in Milwaukee, Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, said: "I notice President Bush is taking some days off down at Crawford, Texas, and I'm told that when he takes days off, you know, he totally relaxes: He doesn't watch television, he doesn't read the newspapers, he doesn't make long-term plans, doesn't worry about the economy. I thought about that for a moment. I said, sounds to me like it's just like life in Washington, doesn't it?"
White House communications director Dan Bartlett retorted that Bush is "not skiing" in Texas, as Kerry did on a recent vacation in Idaho. He said Bush remains in contact with his military advisers and is spending Easter weekend with his family. "Most Americans will understand that," Bartlett said.
This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.
The anti-Bush group America Coming Together issued a news release yesterday noting that Bush was on his ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, when he received a crucial intelligence briefing that was prominent in Rice's testimony yesterday.
The president and his White House aides have not changed their public claims that the uprising in Iraq is the work of a relatively small number of extremists who will inevitably be crushed. But, in private, Bush is apparently expressing a more grim view. According to the Kremlin, he placed a 20-minute call to Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday, and "serious distress was expressed" about the "escalation of violence." Bush aides refused to discuss the details of the conversation.
While the White House has been sanguine about the turmoil in Iraq, some of its allies are calling for a more frank acknowledgment of trouble. Kenneth L. Adelman, a Reagan administration official who is close to several Bush officials, said he is surprised that "it's a lot tougher slogging than I expected" in Iraq. He said Bush should make new overtures both to Democrats and to traditional allies urging them to condemn the violence. He should tell them that "now is not the time to say I told you so, and urge the allies to become more heavily involved," he said.
Powell, in his testimony to the foreign operations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, conceded that the new provisional Iraqi government is likely to face serious security challenges after the June 30 transfer of power, making it reliant on ongoing U.S. military support. "This will be a new government that is still getting its sea legs, that is still developing institutions of democracy, that has not yet finished a constitution and has not yet held an election to give it full legitimacy," Powell said.
"It will be challenged by the kinds of forces that you see challenging us today," he said.
Powell said U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is exploring three broad options for the handover of power to a new provisional Iraqi government: keeping the current 25-member Iraqi Governing Council; expanding it to bring in broader representation; and holding a "mini loya jirga," or national conference of prominent people, the approach used to select a new government for Afghanistan in 2002. Powell said that expanding the governing council "seems the most practical" option.
U.S. officials hope that Brahimi, who has just started holding talks in Iraq, will come up with a workable formula within the next two or three weeks, although there is growing concern that the unrest will make his ability to travel to other parts of Iraq impossible.
After the handover, Powell predicted, the United States will continue to be able to use its billions in reconstruction aid and political leverage to influence the policies and shape of Iraq as it debates a new constitution and holds its first election.
Powell also held out the prospect that members of the 26-nation NATO alliance might be willing to contribute to security in Iraq, particularly after June 30. "I think that in due course we will be able to structure a role for NATO that may add to the number of nations that are here, but more significantly, will give a collective tone, an alliance tone, to what we are doing," he said.
In a briefing at NATO headquarters in Brussels during Powell's trip last week, however, a senior official cast doubt on a NATO role in Iraq soon, since the priority is expanding control of Afghanistan's fragile new government beyond Kabul.
Milbank reported from Crawford, Tex.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Warlord's Force Seizes a City In Afghanistan
By Stephen Graham
Associated Press
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62511-2004Apr8.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 8 -- Militia forces tied to a powerful warlord overran a provincial capital in Afghanistan on Thursday, forcing the governor to flee in what could be the biggest challenge yet to the U.S.-backed interim government of President Hamid Karzai.
The takeover of the city of Meymaneh hinders efforts to establish stability in Afghanistan, where elections were postponed in part over security concerns.
Militia forces loyal to Abdurrashid Dostum stormed into Meymaneh, the capital of Faryab province, about 260 miles northwest of Kabul, said Ali Ahmad Jalali, the Afghan interior minister.
"They have control of the city," Jalali said, adding that the "massive" force had met little opposition. Jalali said the government would deploy forces to the area to oust the militia and reinstate the Kabul-appointed governor, Enayatullah Enayat, who had fled to the airport.
Last month, Karzai deployed 1,500 troops from the U.S.-trained Afghan army to the western city of Herat after bloody factional fighting left 16 dead, including a cabinet minister.
U.S. officials had hoped the Afghan army would play an important role in U.S.-led operations along Afghanistan's border area with Pakistan in pursuit of militants tied to the ousted Taliban militia and al Qaeda. But the force consists of only 8,000 men, despite increased training programs.
U.S. military and embassy officials in Kabul had no immediate comment on the latest fighting or deployment plans.
In unrelated violence, two Afghan army soldiers were among seven people killed across the insurgency-torn south and east, officials said. One died in a gun battle during an operation in southern Helmand province. An American soldier was wounded in the battle.
Another Afghan soldier was killed by a mine in neighboring Uruzgan province. Three militants and two police officers were also reported killed in Helmand.
-------- africa
Lamenting Sudan's War And Working for Peace
By Nora Boustany
Friday, April 9, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63066-2004Apr8.html
A ldo Ajou Deng, one of 100 children born to Deng Akuei, a Dinka tribal chief in southern Sudan, said that when he was a young man, he could trek miles across Africa's largest country without worrying about food or safety.
Villagers often invited young travelers into their homes for communal meals of millet porridge, okra stew and dried fish served on spongy layers of flat bread.
"I remember the civility and generosity of the Sudanese, not this violence," he said, reminiscing about the weeklong journey from a southern province to Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. "I used to walk for miles, take the lorry to the nearest train station and then head to Khartoum without taking provisions. Strangers always took me in."
"If I left my belongings by the side of the road, no one touched them," said Deng, 63, who first became a member of parliament in 1967 and later served in several governmental posts, including chairman of a parliamentary human rights committee. "We have lost this hospitality. I keep wondering now, can it come back?"
By the early 1990s, Deng had grown disillusioned with the government's aim of an Islamic state and frustrated with efforts to block his human rights investigations. In 1993, he sent his nine children out of the country, ostensibly to attend school in Egypt. It was only in midair that he confided to his wife, Martha Leon John, that the family was forever leaving behind their home in Khartoum, property in the south, cars and bank accounts.
Deng was in Washington this week to meet with U.S. officials and nongovernmental organizations about his vision for a peaceful Sudan, where fighting has occurred for most of the years since the country gained independence in 1956. The current civil war began in 1983, when a group of southerners formed the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to fight the northern government and its imposition of Islamic law. Two million Sudanese are estimated to have died during the past 20 years of warfare, many of starvation and disease. The government of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, president and prime minister since 1989, has proclaimed an Islamic state.
"I want Sudan to maintain its geographic borders," Deng said in an interview Wednesday, "but I want to see power distributed equally to all areas in a federal system."
"I have known Sudan very well, I know the people in the south, in the north, west and east. My only conclusion is that its governments, of which I had been a part once, neglected the country by not ever drawing a real constitution that makes room for its diverse traditions, ethnicities and religions," Deng said.
During the first 10 years of his life, Deng helped raise cattle owned by his father, who wedded 20 wives before he died in 1995. Deng attended a Catholic missionary school, where Italian priests nicknamed him "Aldo," which stuck, and taught him hymns that he still likes to sing. He left for secondary school, where he was tutored by British instructors. And at 6 feet 8, he excelled at basketball and mastered the high jump.
He was drawn into politics at age 22, when Col. Jaafar Nimeri sought to appease southerners by involving them in national politics.
Deng currently lives in exile in London and shuttles among Cairo, Nairobi and southern Sudan. He has been actively negotiating with Sudanese government officials and the rebels to help bring a measure of peace to Sudan.
At least three of Deng's nine children are on basketball scholarships at American universities. He came to the United States to watch his son Luol, 18, a 6-8 freshman forward at Duke University, play in the NCAA tournament semifinals against the University of Connecticut in San Antonio. His daughter Arek, 21, is a 6-4 center at the University of Delaware.
Deng said that even if the problems in southern Sudan are solved, fighting in the western Darfur region of the country remains a hurdle to peace and democracy. Thousands of people have died in the area, and Doctors Without Borders has spoken of the need for militarily secured havens. The Sudanese government signed a cease-fire with rebels in the region Thursday to allow humanitarian agencies access to the area.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan warned Wednesday that a Rwanda-style genocide was in the making in Sudan and said an international military force could be necessary, a suggestion promptly rejected by the government.
Oil concessions granted by the government to Canadian, Swedish and Chinese firms have involved the clearing of villages and an exodus of refugees, Deng said.
"When the government built pipelines through the Nubian mountains, entire villages were wiped out, even mosques were burned down while preachers were giving their sermons," Deng said.
"So far, no one has benefited from this oil, $3 billion in annual revenues that are not even on the books," he added. "Now we are going to call for an investigation into the atrocities committed by these governments with the help of foreign companies. They all participated in these crimes against humanity."
--------
A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity
April 9, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/africa/09RWAN.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
KIGALI, Rwanda, April 8 - Although he is not a government spokesman, Ernest Twahrwa can recite Rwanda's official view toward ethnicity with great precision: "There is no ethnicity here. We are all Rwandan."
Mr. Twahrwa, a Hutu, is halfway through a six-week government re-education camp set up to purge him and other former fighters of any ethnic ideologies that they may still harbor from 1994, when extremist Hutu massacred 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu.
"They're trying to change what we think," Mr. Twahrwa said. "There have been many changes in this country. I need to change too. I need to be a new person."
This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinctions by decree.
The re-education camp is one way of driving the point home to people who once lived by the motto "Hutu power." As Hutu fighters who fled to Congo after 1994 return to Rwanda they are sent to the camp. Along with civics they are taught some hands-on skills like carpentry. They leave with $75 and, at least in theory, a whole new way of thinking.
That new thinking has its critics - those who say that denying that ethnicity exists merely suppresses the painful ethnic dialogue that Rwanda requires.
But the government insists that if awareness of ethnic differences can be learned, so can the idea that ethnicity does not exist. Rwanda has an entrenched culture of obedience, and the populace has been quick to pick up on the government's no-ethnicity policy, at least in conversations with an outsider.
To hear Mr. Twahrwa put it: "Ethnicity is bad. I want it to go away."
Ethnicity has already been ripped out of schoolbooks and rubbed off government identity cards. Government documents no longer mention Hutu or Tutsi, and the country's newspapers and radio stations, tightly controlled by the government, steer clear of the labels as well.
Most dramatic is how Rwanda's eight million people now shun the identifications that seemed to loom so large 10 years ago as Hutu extremists began their mass killings.
"We don't like to use the terms at all in class," said Bosco Manishaka, the assistant director of a Kigali primary school. "The children do learn about the history of the country and how we were divided. We advise them to learn from the past."
It is not just considered bad form to discuss ethnicity in the new Rwanda. It can land one in jail. Added to the penal code is the crime of "divisionism," a nebulous offense that includes speaking too provocatively about ethnicity.
Rwanda's approach contrasts markedly with that employed in neighboring Burundi, which has the same ethnic makeup as Rwanda and the same recent history of ethnic violence. Burundi's transitional government has opted to set aside certain positions for Hutu and certain positions for Tutsi. The two ethnic groups rotate the presidency. A Tutsi held it for 18 months, and now a Hutu fills the seat.
Critics argue that Rwanda's crackdown on "divisionism" has turned into a way of quashing dissent toward the governing party of President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebel movement that swept in from Uganda in 1994 to oust the Hutu militias known as Interahamwe, which were responsible for much of the violence. His administration has shut down opposition parties for being too divisive and jailed journalists and activists for the same.
The government does not want to hear suggestions that one ethnicity or the other has too much power. Those are divisive thoughts. It is not possible to know, or even discuss, whether the majority Hutu population is well represented in universities. No such records are kept.
To try to repair tensions that still linger from 1994, and reduce a huge backlog in the judicial system, Rwanda has created community courts called gacacas. Locals gather together to rehash the killings. They are encouraged to point fingers at suspected killers. The accused are given a chance to stand up and defend themselves, or to apologize.
Confessions can sometimes bring the most extraordinary result: a hug from the accuser and an offer of forgiveness. More often, though, there are arguments.
At one such court in the Gikondo neighborhood of Kigali, a Hutu man stood up to deny that he was responsible for the dead bodies that were found in his yard during 1994. He said he had just found them there.
A man in the crowd challenged him. "Tell us what happened," the man said.
"You're lying," said another.
But the accused, fidgeting with his glasses, stuck to his story.
Despite the government's policy, the terms Hutu and Tutsi do sometimes manage to come to the surface.
"To deny that ethnicity exists in our country is lying," Jean Nayinzira Nepomuscene, a Hutu who ran against Mr. Kagame last fall but garnered just 1 percent of the vote, said in an interview. "If a person is a Tutsi you can't tell him not to be a Tutsi. A Hutu, you can't tell him not to be a Hutu."
Mr. Kagame's main opponent in the election was a Hutu, Faustin Twagiramungu, who overtly appealed to the Hutu majority for support. Mr. Kagame's government likened his approach to the techniques used by Hutu extremists in 1994 to foment the mass killings, and threatened to jail him.
When the Belgians ruled colonial Rwanda they favored the Tutsi over the Hutu and issued identification cards to institutionalize the difference.
After Rwanda's independence, political battles and periodic massacres revolved around the ethnic labels. Still, intermarriage remained common, with children taking on the ethnicity of their father. Physical differences between the two groups blurred.
Abudallah Shabami, another student at the re-education camp, located several hours north of Kigali in Ruhengeri, says he has fought on behalf of the Hutu even though his family is a blend. "There are both Hutu and Tutsi in my family," he says. "My wife is a Tutsi. My mother was a Tutsi."
He caught himself and remembered his lessons. "I see myself as a Rwandan now, because there are no more ethnicities here," he said.
Ethnicity has not been dislodged from peoples' minds, though.
A Tutsi woman, who was raped in 1994 by so many Hutu militiamen in the village of Taba that she lost count, said she has difficulty interacting comfortably with Hutu.
"I don't trust them," said the woman, who, identified only as J.J., testified about her ordeal before the international tribunal on Rwanda.
François Ngarambe, who is president of Ibuka, a group representing survivors, said his young children had only a vague notion of the ethnic differences that led to the killings in 1994. "They don't see themselves that way," he said. "That's what gives me hope."
-------- arms
US drops ban on sales of lethal military equipment to Iraq
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409185815.cnasoclf.html
The United States on Friday dropped its longstanding ban on the export of lethal military equipment to Iraq, on the one-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to US forces.
The State Department eliminated the restriction by amending its arms export regulations to allow for such sales to the Iraqi army and police should the president determine them to be "in the national interest of the United States."
"Exports may be authorized of lethal military equipment designated by the secretary of state for use by a reconstituted (or interim) Iraqi military or police force ... if the president determines ... that the export is in the national interest of the United States," it said in a notice published in the Federal Register.
The change also allows the export of small arms to Iraq "for private security purposes," according to the notice, which adds that the president must notify Congress of the sales within five days of the approval.
A ban on the export of non-lethal US military aid to Iraq was dropped last year, but the restriction on lethal assistance had remained in place until Friday.
Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the announcement had not been timed to coincide with the anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's government but was rather an element of US preparations for the June 30 restoration of sovereignty to Iraq.
"This is an authority that gives us an added tool in our bilateral relationship with the future Iraqi government," Ereli told reporters.
-------- asia
Philippines, Mongolia to join US-Thai Cobra Gold exercises
BANGKOK (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409093705.vbl7wp1e.html
The Philippines and Mongolia will join the United States, Thailand and Singapore next month in the largest annual war games for American troops in Asia, with nearly 20,000 personnel involved, officials said Friday.
"This year Cobra Gold has expanded to five participants, including the Philippines and Mongolia," which are due to send for the first time a total of just 24 troops to the massive joint exercises scheduled May 13-27 along the Thai coast, a US embassy official here told AFP.
The air, land and sea manouvers scheduled May 13-27 will include the participation of about 13,500 US service members, approximately 6,000 Thais and 95 Singaporeans, he added.
The 2003 drills involved a total of 13,000 military personnel.
This year's expanding multilateral nature of Cobra Gold "is injecting a little more of a real world scenario into the exercises," he said, referring to the international scope of peace enforcement operations which are a key component of the training.
The live-fire exercises, launched 23 years ago and originally limited to US and Thai troops, will include an anti-terrorism component for the third straight year.
According to an embassy statement, Cobra Gold "is designed to improve US, Thai, Singaporean, Mongolian and Filipino combat readiness ... enhance security relationships and demonstrate US resolve to support the security and humanitarian interests of US friends and allies in the region."
Ten other nations will observe this year's drills, including Australia, China, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
Malaysia declined a Thai invitation to be an observer, citing its lack of readiness to join.
----
Malaysia to haul some 10,000 national service AWOL youths to court
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409090514.chs8do5w.html
Some 10,000 Malaysian youths who have failed to turn up for a fledgling national service training programme will be hauled to court and may face a possible jail sentence, a senior official said Friday.
Ahmad Fawzi Mohamad Basri, national service training council chairman said the names of those absent from the programme would submitted to its legal department.
"We will submit their names to the legal department for action," he was quoted by Bernama news agency as saying.
Ahmad Fawzi said under the National Service Act, those who failed to turn up could be fined 3,000 ringgit (789 dollars) or sentenced to six months jail or both upon conviction.
Malaysia started non-military national service training for 18-year-old youths in February to boost patriotism and racial integration.
But reports of fighting, riots, extortion and sexual harassment have prompted opposition politicians to call for a suspension of the two-month-old scheme.
Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is also defence minister, was quoted as saying that the trouble should not be blown out of proportion.
"One or two incidents have happened and we are looking at them. However, it does not warrant the suspension of the whole program," he said Tuesday.
-------- business
Pentagon: Tanker Plan Needs Major Changes
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Pentagon-Boeing.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon should not move forward on a $23.5 billion plan to acquire 100 midair refueling tankers from Boeing Co. until significant changes are made to the deal, the Pentagon's inspector general said Friday.
In a highly critical report, Inspector General Joseph Schmitz said procedural and financial problems with the deal could cause the government to spend up to $4.5 billion more than necessary.
Once the changes are made, however, there is no compelling reason not to complete the deal, the report said.
The long-anticipated report said the Air Force's decision to acquire the tankers as a commercial item put the Pentagon at ``high risk for paying excessive prices and profits and precludes good fiduciary responsibility'' for Defense Department funds.
It also said senior Air Force officials failed to comply with military contracting laws; accepted insufficient or inaccurate Boeing data during negotiations; and wrongly waived any right to audit the program once it gets started.
The Air Force, in a response included in the report, said it followed procedures outlined by Congress ``and reviewed and improved within the (Defense) Department using approved acquisition processes.''
The Air Force and Boeing also disputed the report's claim that the Air Force ``cannot ensure to the war fighter'' that the tankers will meet the military's operational requirements.
In a detailed statement, Boeing said it met 26 key performance standards set out in a November 2001 Air Force document and modified the following March. The company created ``a totally compliant design'' that meets all Air Force requirements, as well as standards set by senior Pentagon officials, Boeing said.
The Air Force said in its response that the new KC-767s ``will be the world's newest and most advanced tanker'' and are ``critical to the defense of our country.''
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a leading supporter of the deal, said the report ``confirmed what I have been saying for nearly three years: We need these airplanes, and there is no reason to stop the tanker lease from moving forward.''
The planes will be made at Boeing's Everett, Wash., plant, and modified for military use in Wichita, Kan. In the unusual deal, the Defense Department would lease 20 767 tankers and buy another 80 planes.
``The bottom line is that the IG found no reason not to proceed with the tanker deal -- and that's good,'' said Jim Albaugh, president and CEO of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems.
Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy, an Air Force spokeswoman, said the report demonstrates ``fundamental differences in interpretation'' between the audit team's experts and Air Force acquisition and legal experts.
``Although this was an admittedly complex and novel proposal to lease commercial aircraft modified to serve as tanker aircraft, the audit team found no compelling reason to not proceed with the leasing arrangement,'' Cassidy said.
The Air Force believes that language enacted by Congress in late 2001 supports the lease program, and that its terms provide sufficient protection for taxpayers, Cassidy said.
The inspector general has been looking into the deal since last year, after questions arose about ethical issues surrounding the way Boeing pursued the multibillion-dollar contract.
A grand jury in Virginia is investigating potentially illegal actions by Darleen Druyun, a top Air Force official involved in the contract talks who was later hired by Boeing. Druyun was fired last year, after an internal review found improprieties in her hiring.
Boeing also fired its chief financial officer over what it depicted as an attempted cover-up of the hiring procedures. The Pentagon later suspended the contract pending completion of the inspector general's report and separate studies by the Pentagon's general counsel, the Defense Science Board and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.
The report released Friday outlines three options for the Pentagon, including delaying the entire project until an analysis of alternatives is completed -- which could force officials to reopen the project to new bids.
In the best option for Boeing, the report advises the Pentagon to alter more than a dozen aspects of the deal before moving forward with the existing plan.
Another option calls for the Pentagon to make changes and acquire 100 tankers, and then initiate an analysis of alternatives for any remaining planes.
On the Net:
Boeing Co.: http://www.boeing.com
-------- iraq
Bulgaria will not pull troops out of Iraq: FM
SOFIA (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409173500.hrok9nyb.html
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy on Friday said his country would not heed an ultimatum from Shiite militia to pull its troops out of the strife-torn southern Iraqi city of Karbala.
"Bulgaria's position with regard to our military contingent cannot change," Passy told Bulgarian radio station Darik during a visit to Turkmenistan.
"Each one of us has to do our job regardless of the risks it carries," he added.
The United States on Thursday rushed 120 soldiers to Karbala to reinforce Bulgaria's 480-strong contingent amid fierce fighting between Shiite militia loyal to radical leader Mosqata Sadr and coalition troops.
Sadr's chief of staff in Karbala has given the Bulgarians an ultimatum to pull out ahead of a major religious festival in the city this weekend.
Bulgaria's left-wing press on Friday called on the government to immediately withdraw its troops, who form part of an international force under Polish command in southern Iraq.
Four Bulgarian soldiers were injured in an ambush in the city this week and on Wednesday a Bulgarian truck driver was killed in the southern city of Nasiriyah.
Five Bulgarian soldiers were killed in a multiple bombing in Karbala on December 27.
----
General May Bolster Force in Iraq;
Militias Kidnap a Dozen Foreigners Fighting Continues;
Troop Deployments May Be Extended
By Thomas E. Ricks and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62460-2004Apr8?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 8 -- The top U.S. commander in the Middle East said Thursday that he is considering holding several thousand troops here beyond their planned departure this spring in an attempt to squelch continuing uprisings by Shiite militiamen and Sunni insurgents.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the chief of the U.S. Central Command, said he might extend the combat tour of the Army's 1st Armored Division and might also request that the 3rd Infantry Division, which left Iraq last summer, be brought back much sooner than planned.
Meanwhile, militia forces loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr controlled two key cities in southern Iraq, Abizaid's top ground commander acknowledged. Shiite militiamen also kidnapped a dozen foreigners on Thursday, the fifth day of their armed campaign to oust the U.S.-led occupation.
The abductions of seven South Koreans, three Japanese, and two Arab residents of Israel suggested that the Shiite militias had adopted a strategy of targeting foreigners seen as cooperating with the occupation. Although the Koreans were released by the evening, images of the Japanese and Israeli captives were broadcast on Arabic-language satellite television, along with demands that U.S. allies withdraw from the country.
In the western city of Fallujah, where U.S. Marines are trying to crush a Sunni Muslim rebellion and establish control of the city, street-by-street fighting continued. In Kut and Najaf, south of the capital, Shiite militiamen maintained control of government buildings and police stations, while foreign troops remained quartered outside the cities. Shiite militiamen also occupied much of Kufa, which neighbors Najaf, and prepared for a battle with Italian troops farther south in Nasiriyah.
In Baghdad, Iraq's interim interior minister suddenly resigned, stunning Iraqi and U.S. officials. The departure of Nouri Badran, a Shiite Muslim, reflected severe dissatisfaction with the performance of the national police, which Badran oversaw. While many police officers have fought alongside U.S. troops to quell the urban unrest, others have ceded their stations, vehicles and weapons to the insurgents.
In an interview with two reporters at a U.S. base on the outskirts of the tense Iraqi capital, Abizaid hinted at imminent U.S. combat operations in parts of central Iraq where Shiite militiamen hold positions that were supposed to be under the control of troops from Poland, Spain, Ukraine and other nations participating in a U.S.-led military coalition.
"I think it's safe to say that U.S. units will be used anywhere in this country," said Abizaid, who would not elaborate on his plans to reassert control of cities overtaken by members of Sadr's Mahdi Army and other armed Shiite groups.
Abizaid also indicated that the next phase of U.S. combat operations would be lengthy and could be more extensive than the Marine action in Fallujah. "I think you'll see a series of very clear military moves over the next couple of weeks that will get ourselves in position to do what needs to be done," he said.
"We're going to do whatever it takes to ensure that we're successful out here, and if that includes bringing in more troops, we will," he said. "We will do whatever is necessary to get the situation under control, to include bringing in additional forces [and] extending forces."
"Everything is on the table," he said.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, Abizaid's top ground commander, said he expected that "a sustained campaign" would be needed to quell the insurgency initiated by Sadr, the young Shiite cleric who has called for an end to the occupation.
"My assessment is that we will continue to see this violence for some time, until Moqtada Sadr turns himself in or his militia is destroyed," Sanchez said.
While Sanchez vowed to retake Kut imminently, he said the military is avoiding entering Najaf -- where Sadr is protected by hundreds of followers -- because of a major Shiite religious festival that involves a procession through the city. The festival of Arbaeen is to start Friday.
To date, most of the military action against Sadr's militia has been in a teeming Shiite slum in Baghdad, where U.S. troops have struck at facilities used by the Mahdi Army and fought running battles with the cleric's followers. In areas under the jurisdiction of other foreign forces, those troops have assumed a defensive posture as Sadr's militiamen have sought to seize government buildings.
In Baghdad, a U.S. helicopter fired at a Sadr office before dawn, heavily damaging it and injuring several Iraqis. In Karbala, southwest of the capital, Polish and Bulgarian soldiers repelled an attack by Sadr followers near the municipal hall during an intense firefight that began Wednesday evening and lasted until dawn, a Polish spokesman said. Nine attackers were killed and 20 wounded.
In Nasiriyah, a city south of Najaf where Sadr's men have repeatedly clashed with Italian troops, gunfire echoed through the city's deserted streets around midnight. At least two mortar rounds detonated, and the dull echo of explosions could be heard from the direction of the horizon, against the backdrop of heavy machine-gun fire.
Earlier in the day, Italian troops had withdrawn across the Tigris River, ceding streets to small knots of militiamen armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Police were in the streets, but paid no attention to the militiamen.
The provincial governor of Nasiriyah, Sabri Rumayidh, said Italian forces had informed him of a 6 a.m. deadline Friday for the Sadr militia to withdraw from the streets and disarm. If it did not, Rumayidh said, the Italians planned to reenter the city and disband the group by force. U.S. officials declined to comment.
In Kut, where Ukrainian forces withdrew from the city center Wednesday after two days of clashes in which a soldier was killed, several U.S. Humvees could be seen near the base where the Ukrainian forces had regrouped.
The U.S. military announced that six troops died Wednesday and Thursday, bringing to at least 38 the number killed in combat since Sunday.
The three deaths on Thursday involved a Marine killed in Fallujah, a soldier killed by a roadside bomb in the northern city of Mosul and a soldier killed by a roadside bomb, a grenade and gunfire near the town of Khan Bani Saad, northeast of the capital.
On Wednesday afternoon, a soldier from the 1st Armored Division died when two rockets hit Camp Cooke, an Army base north of the capital. That evening, a member of the 1st Infantry Division was shot to death at a checkpoint near the northern city of Samarra. Also, a Marine was killed in western Iraq that day, the military announced.
Badran, the former interior minister, said he was pushed out of the job by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq. According to Badran, a Shiite Muslim, Bremer told him Wednesday that Shiites could not head both the interior and defense ministries. Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, another Shiite, was sworn in as defense minister Thursday morning before members of the Iraqi Governing Council.
"Bremer told me they nominated a Shiite name as minister of defense and that we cannot have two Shiite ministers in the interior and defense positions, because this would disrupt the balance in the administration of the country," Badran said at a news conference. "I asked him what the solution would be. He said, 'You have to give up the position.' "
Badran added: "I was forced to do it."
In a statement, Bremer and Massoud Barzani, a Kurd who holds the Governing Council's rotating presidency, said they regretted Badran's resignation.
"He has served with skill and courage in a difficult position at a difficult time," the statement said. "He deserves the thanks of the Iraqi people, and he certainly has ours." The statement did not address Badran's allegations.
Badran has been criticized for the mixed performance of the Iraqi police, particularly in the clashes that started Sunday.
Images of three Japanese abducted Thursday -- two men and a female aid worker, all blindfolded -- were broadcast on the al-Jazeera satellite television network along with a demand that Japan withdraw its forces from Iraq within three days or the hostages would be burned alive. Masked men carrying guns, knives and rocket-propelled grenade launchers were shown surrounding the weeping hostages.
Japan has 550 noncombatant soldiers, the first deployment of troops outside Japan since World War II, stationed in Samawah to work on water purification and reconstruction projects. Japanese Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda called the abductions "unforgivable" but said they did not justify a Japanese withdrawal.
In a separate incident, seven South Koreans -- Christian missionaries who are trying to set up a church and school in Mosul -- were kidnapped near the northern town of Taji but released after a few hours. In Nasiriyah, the governor announced that a 37-year-old British citizen working for a Qatari company was kidnapped Monday, and officials there held meetings into the night to try to negotiate his release.
In addition, a Canadian humanitarian aid worker for the International Rescue Committee was taken hostage Wednesday by a local militia in Najaf, the agency said Thursday. Fadhi Ihsan Fadel was the first Canadian to be abducted in Iraq, Canadian Foreign Affairs spokesman Sameer Ahmed said in Toronto, the Associated Press reported.
Abizaid said he was looking at ways to increase his combat power by about two brigades, or almost 10,000 troops.
As part of his discussions with commanders, he said, "we've decided to take a look at force structures throughout the entire theater, and I'm not releasing anybody from the theater" until he has had additional discussions with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld "about what we need here to get through the transitional period" -- a reference to the planned turnover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30.
It is possible, he said, that the 3rd Infantry might be sent back to Iraq ahead of schedule, or the 1st Armored Division might remain there longer than planned.
Either move could prove politically volatile and extremely unpopular with Army families. When the 3rd Infantry, which led the charge into Baghdad a year ago with a series of tank raids, had its tour of duty extended last summer, the unit's morale plummeted, and some soldiers in the division were openly critical of Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Likewise, the 1st Armored has been in Iraq since last May and for months has counted on going home about now. Army wives said in a recent Washington Post/Kaiser Foundation/Harvard University survey that unplanned extensions of deployments were a major cause of hardship and demoralization in their families and had eroded their trust in the Army.
In addition, either move would boost arguments by congressional Democrats that the Army, which has about 480,000 active-duty troops, is too small for the tasks it is being assigned by the Bush administration.
Overall, Abizaid's assessment of the situation in Iraq was more optimistic than the picture painted by many of the week's news reports, but sounded slightly more pessimistic than recent comments by Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials.
"First of all, we are not headed for disaster as long as we are resolute, courageous and patient," he said. "Secondly, I believe that the only shock that has registered is in the minds of the media and not in the minds of the American people.
"The American people are tough. They know this is going to be hard."
Correspondent Anthony Shadid in Nasiriyah and special correspondents Hoda Ahmed Lazim in Baghdad and Khalid Saffar in Kut contributed to this report.
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In Fallujah Marines Try to Quell 'a Hotbed of Resistance'
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62632-2004Apr8.html
FALLUJAH, Iraq, April 8 -- After four days of round-the-clock street clashes with elusive, heavily armed urban guerrillas, U.S. Marines moved Thursday to beef up their fighting capacity and take more aggressive action against an enemy that is proving both stubborn and resourceful. Helicopter gunships over the city made repeated dives at clusters of fighters, and artillery was brought in for the first time.
Sporadic firefights continued throughout the day, with snipers firing automatic weapons and grenades at U.S. troops who patrolled the city's deserted factory zone, searching dozens of buildings for weapons. After dark, dozens of mortar rounds and rockets were launched at the main Marine command headquarters here.
Earlier, the Marines uncovered large quantities of weapons from the industrial area they now control, including suicide-bomb kits, discoveries they said revealed both the formidable arsenal and the fanatical nature of their foes.
The U.S. military reported that one Marine had been killed Thursday and another Wednesday in fighting in central Iraq, including Fallujah. At least 38 U.S. troops are now believed to have died since Sunday throughout the country, making it one of the deadliest periods for U.S. forces in the year since the U.S.-led invasion.
The U.S. operation in Fallujah has still not moved beyond the industrial zone and into the densely crowded residential areas, a far more difficult task because insurgents can hide there easily and there is also a greater likelihood of endangering civilians.
"This tells me that Fallujah is everything we thought it was -- a hotbed of resistance with a huge amount of weapons," said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, who commands one of two Marine battalions involved in an operation dubbed Vigilant Resolve. "But today, we unhinged them and put a large crimp in their ability to resupply themselves."
Byrne said his troops had found plastic explosives, large bags full of rockets and mortars, bomb-making equipment and a variety of exploding vests and belts that are used by terrorists and other fanatical groups. One was a money belt sewn full of explosives with a detonator and lead fishing weights inside.
Byrne insisted that his operation was still "on plan" and that the Marines had not been surprised by the intensity of the resistance. He said the new weapons discoveries had given him "a much better perspective on what I'm fighting against. I'm learning more about the enemy on a daily basis."
But troops and officers, racing in armed convoys to their command headquarters to pick up supplies before heading back to the embattled streets, described the frustration of seizing blocks or buildings, only to see them retaken by insurgent forces.
"They shoot at us and fall back, and we don't have enough men to seal the area they fall back to," said Lt. Andrew Terrell, 24, who was impatiently waiting to be treated for a shrapnel wound so the troops in his Humvee could return to action. "Every time guys come back here, I'm taking guns off my line."
Despite the bombing Wednesday of a mosque where armed men had taken refuge and shot at U.S. troops, officers said insurgents had returned there overnight and were ferrying weapons inside, undeterred by the prospect of a further American assault.
Doctors at Fallujah's main hospital told journalists that up to 280 civilians had been killed in the operation, but Byrne denied this, saying any bodies were those of insurgents. He estimated that 80 percent of Fallujah's populace was neutral or in favor of the American military presence.
But there were reports that members of the Iraqi civilian defense forces in Fallujah had joined with the insurgents, and that ambulances as well as police cars had been used to carry weapons to them.
At the same time, a caravan of medical and food supplies collected by mosques in Baghdad approached this sealed-off city 35 miles west of the capital, along with several thousand marchers, some of whom shouted anti-American slogans and carried banners sympathetic to the insurgents. The Marines tried to assuage public anger and concern over the military operation by allowing the caravan to enter the turbulent city Thursday morning.
Marine officers said the caravan was mostly peaceful and that they allowed a number of supply trucks and ambulances to enter the city after they were searched by troops and sniffer dogs. But the crowd of about 1,500 marchers was turned back at a highway roadblock, and some participants shouted insults.
"We allowed more than half of the vehicles in. We used no physical force at all, and we wanted people to know we were there to help," said Capt. Will Dickens. But he added that when several mortar rounds were fired toward the highway post, the crowd cheered.
As the Marines contemplated how to intensify attacks on the enemy without alienating the general populace, several officers said they were keenly aware that one mistaken shooting could create hundreds of enemies, and that coming under constant fire could numb military forces to the humanity around them.
"I hope we don't get to the point where we are so jaded we start rolling down the streets in tanks and shooting at everything that moves," said Capt. Chris Chown. "If you start to lose that sense of humanity, you've lost your mission."
But the intensifying battle for Fallujah seemed likely to deepen the gulf between the U.S. forces and local residents and to obscure the more positive goals of American military actions here. As a result of the fierce fighting, all civil affairs programs planned by the Marines have been suspended until the city is secure.
Maj. Lawrence Kaifesh, who commands a civil affairs unit, said his plan had been to contact local religious and tribal leaders, find out what Fallujah's residents needed most and arrange for money to be spent on local projects. Now, all that is on indefinite hold.
"It's hard to do civil affairs until the area becomes stable and secure," he said as a mortar boom echoed loudly overhead. "The enemy seems determined, but I like to think this is one last gasp for breath before their day is ended."
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U.S. Declares Cease-Fire in Falluja, but Clashes Continue
April 9, 2004
By TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/middleeast/09CND-IRAQ.html?hp
The Marines halted most offensive operations in Falluja today so that talks could be held with a delegation of sheiks and the city's residents could collect their dead and wounded, the top American official in Iraq said.
The official, L. Paul Bremer III, added that coalition forces reserved the right of "self defense" and that they remained prepared to resume offensive operations "unless significant progress in these discussions occurs."
After the announcement, American military officers reported sporadic exchanges of gunfire in Falluja, which is about 30 miles west of Baghdad and the scene of fierce fighting in the past five days.
The announcement came on the anniversary of the fall of Baghdad and the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdaws Square, which was greeted at the time with wild celebrations by Iraqis.
Today the usually bustling square was quiet, sealed off by razor wire and squads of heavily armed American soldiers. Some took down posters of Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has led the insurrection in the south, that had been put on the modernist statue that has taken the place of Mr. Hussein's.
Near Falluja, Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, told reporters that his forces continued to respond to insurgent attacks.
"I would not describe this as a cease-fire," The Associated Press quoted the colonel as saying. "We are still aggressively defending our positions. However we have ceased offensive operations for now."
However, the coalition's deputy director of operations, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, told CNN that a unilateral cease-fire by American troops was in force, a position he maintained at a news briefing in Baghdad later today. But he added, "If fired upon, they will fire back."
Another American officer said that he had applied for, and received, permission to return to the offensive after repeated insurgent attacks, Agence France-Presse reported.
"We went into pause but the enemy kept attacking us on the western side of the city," Maj. Pete Farnum told a correspondent with the French agency who is accompanying United States troops around Falluja.
At the same time, a live report from Falluja by Al Jazeera television monitored in Baghdad showed an American helicopter firing on a part of Falluja called Hay Jolan.
The Arab station also showed Iraqi medics and residents in the city gathering up the dead bodies and wounded from the five days of fighting and quoted the medics as saying that until now there had been no chance to collect the victims.
A doctor at one of the city's hospitals, Rasi al-Esawi, said that 141 bodies had been collected at his medical center since the fighting started, with 30 collected just today.
The live coverage on Al Jazeera showed convoys of Iraqi cars coming into Falluja. The station, monitored in Baghdad, also reported shelling from American tanks, but the reports could not be verified.
The delegation from Falluja was reported by news agencies to be meeting with Marine commanders at their base outside the city. The exact purpose of the talks was not announced.
In other violence today, insurgents attacked an American oil convoy west of Baghdad, killing nine people, according to witnesses and a Reuters photographer at the scene. The convoy had been accompanied by military vehicles, but the nationalities of those killed was not immediately clear.
Earlier today, American-led troops retook the eastern town of Kut, two days after Ukrainian forces withdrew following clashes with Shiite militiamen loyal to Mr. Sadr.
Mr. Sadr's followers launched an uprising this week, battling American-led forces in Shiite areas across Iraq. One Ukrainian soldier was killed this week in Kut.
Shiite militiamen still control the center of the holy city of Najaf, where Mr. Sadr, who is the subject of an arrest warrant, is thought to be holed up.
In Karbala, 15 Iraqis were killed in overnight clashes between Shiite fighters and Polish and Bulgarian troops, and 6 Iranian pilgrims were shot dead near a Polish checkpoint between Babel and Kerbala, the Iraqi police said.
In political developments, Mr. Bremer named two members of the Governing Council to major posts: Samir Sumaidy, a Sunni independent, becomes interior minister, replacing Nouri Badran, a Shiite, who resigned on Thursday; and Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite independent, takes on the newly created role of national security adviser.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
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ALLIANCES
Signs That Shiites and Sunnis Are Joining to Battle Americans
April 9, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/middleeast/09SHIA.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 8 - When the United States invaded Iraq a year ago, one of its chief concerns was preventing a civil war between Shiite Muslims, who make up a majority in the country, and Sunni Muslims, who held all the power under Saddam Hussein.
Now the fear is that the growing uprising against the occupation is forging a new and previously unheard of level of cooperation between the two groups - and the common cause is killing Americans.
"We have orders from our leader to fight as one and to help the Sunnis," said Nimaa Fakir, a 27-year-old teacher and foot soldier in the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia. "We want to increase the fighting, increase the killing and drive the Americans out. To do this, we must combine forces."
This new Shiite-Sunni partnership was flourishing in Baghdad on Thursday. Convoys of pickup trucks with signature black Shiite flags flapping from their bumpers hauled sacks of grain, flour, sugar and rice into Sunni mosques.
The food donations were coming from Shiite families, in many cases from people with little to spare. And they were headed to the besieged residents of Falluja, a city that has now become the icon of the resistance, especially after the bombing on Wednesday of a mosque compound there.
"Sunni, Shia, that doesn't matter anymore," said Sabah Saddam, a 32-year-old government clerk who took the day off to drive one of the supply trucks. "These were artificial distinctions. The people in Falluja are starving. They are Iraqis and they need our help."
But it is not just relief aid that is flowing into the city.
According to several militia members, many Shiite fighters are streaming into Falluja to help Sunni insurgents repel a punishing assault by United States marines. Groups of young men with guns are taking buses from Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad to the outskirts of Falluja, and then slipping past checkpoints to join the action. "It's not easy to get in, but we have our ways," said Ahmed Jumar, a 25-year-old professional soccer player who also belongs to a Shiite militia. "Our different battles have turned into one fight, the fight against the Americans."
American leaders had been concerned that the rival sectarian groups would not find a common cause. Now, it seems, they have found a common enemy. "The danger is we believe there is a linkage that may be occurring at the very lowest levels between the Sunni and the Shia," Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the occupation forces, said on Thursday. "We have to work very hard to ensure that it remains at the tactical level."
He also said the call for unity is "clearly an attempt to take advantage of the situation."
Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, an assistant commander of the First Armored Division, said military intelligence indicated that there might be some loose coordination between the renegade Shia movement of Moktada al-Sadr and a Sunni extremist group called Mohammed's Army in the western portions of Baghdad.
He said troops from the First Armored and the First Cavalry Divisions were conducting reconnaissance and offensive operations against fighters from both groups, who have converged on the road to Falluja.
The city, 35 miles west of Baghdad, has become the rallying cry of the resistance. It is in its fifth day of siege. Marines are trying to root out insurgents after four American security guards were ambushed there last week and their bodies were mutilated by a mob. American troops have been fighting house to house and mosque to mosque against a determined group of guerrillas. According to people inside Falluja, the situation is grim and getting grimmer.
"It's a disaster," said Sheik Ghazi Al Abid, a wealthy tribal leader, who was reached by telephone. "There's no food, no water, no electricity."
The sheik said it was so dangerous that bodies have been left on the streets because people are terrified to venture outside to collect them.
"Anybody who moves will get shot," the sheik said. "We need all the help we can get." He also said more than 300 people had been killed, hundreds more had been wounded, and medical supplies and blood were running low." There are so many injured civilians," the sheik said, "they don't know where to go."
In Baghdad, blood banks were packed. Imams at both Sunni and Shiite mosques put out a message that Falluja residents needed blood fast. On Thursday, a group of Shiite men formed a line at one Baghdad blood bank that wended out the door. The men were ready to get pricked with a needle for their Sunni brothers. "We share a cause now," said Mohammed Majid, a taxi driver. "Why not share our bodies?"
Pentagon officials said Thursday that they had no definitive figures on the size or scale of the Sunni or Shiite militias. That is largely because the militia movement seems too fluid, and it is splintered among several factions. "It's a mob mentality," said one intelligence official. "They are recruiting among a lot of unhappy people."
Shiite extremist groups have a long tradition of hiding their true strength, in large part because their history has been marked by persecution by Sunni elites in many Muslim countries. In southern Lebanon in the 1980's, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency was never able to get solid estimates of the number of Shiite fighters involved in Hezbollah or the Islamic resistance that eventually forced the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, former United States intelligence officials said Thursday.
Those former officials pointed out that the practice of Taqiyya - dissembling about one's religion, especially in times of danger - is particular to Shiism. That secretive tradition has made Shiite groups extremely difficult for intelligence officers to penetrate, the former C.I.A. officers said.
Until last week, the Shiite groups had mostly sat out the resistance. Many Sunni fighters were loyal to Mr. Hussein. That alienated Shiites, who had been ruthlessly persecuted by the former Iraqi leader.
All that changed this week when Mr. Sadr activated his militia at the same time Falluja faced its biggest battle. Now, the two sides have joined. There were even reports on Thursday of armed men from Falluja escaping to Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad. Mr. Hussein is no longer mentioned. Fighting the infidels is.
James Risen contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
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Iraq Council Demands Immediate Cease - Fire
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Governing-Council.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In a split between U.S.-picked Iraqi leaders and American administrators, the Governing Council demanded an immediate cease-fire across the country Friday and a halt to military operations that punish civilians.
A Shiite member of the council also met with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is battling U.S.-led forces in the south, and announced he was suspending his membership in the Iraqi Governing Council until the ``bleeding in all Iraq'' ends.
Another member, Ghazi al-Yawer, threatened to quit the council over the Marines' bloody siege of the city of Fallujah, aimed at uprooting Sunni insurgents.
U.S. forces have been fighting a two-front battle this week -- against Sunni militants in Fallujah and al-Sadr's militia in the south -- that has killed more than 460 Iraqis and 45 Americans.
Friday's halt in the Fallujah assault was requested by the council to allow for talks on reducing the violence, U.S. coalition spokesman Dan Senor said.
But a top commander, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt insisted the talks ``are not negotiations.''
Al-Yawer, a Sunni member of the council, and the representative of another Sunni member met Friday with city leaders in talks at a Marine base outside Fallujah, council member Mahmoud Othman told The Associated Press.
Al-Yawer said that while he has not taken any formal steps, ``I will quit (the council) if the problem is not solved peacefully, because God will not bless a position of power that does not benefit its people.''
``If negotiations fail because of the stubbornness of the American side or the failure to adhere to a cease-fire, I will quit 100 percent,'' he told Al-Jazeera TV.
The council's request for negotiations pointed to the eagerness of the Iraqi leaders to distance themselves from the assault, which has angered many Iraqis and become for some a symbol of resistance against the Americans.
In a statement issued early Saturday, the council demanded ``an immediate cease fire'' and political solutions for the ``situations around the country, particularly in Fallujah.''
It also called for an end to the ``military solution'' and ``collective punishment that falls on innocent civilians'' -- a reference to the Fallujah siege.
It denounced terrorism and noted that ``no one is above the law'' -- a reference to activitied by both Sunni and Shiite insurgents
Shiite council member Abdul-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi met Friday with al-Sadr, the cleric U.S. commanders have vowed to capture.
``I will not go back to the council until we enter a constructive discussion about Iraq ... to achieve what the Iraqi people really want and to stop the bleeding in all Iraq,'' he told reporters outside al-Sadr's office in Najaf.
``I call on everybody to use the voice of wisdom and avoid violence,'' he said.
One of the strongest pro-U.S. voices on the council, Adnan Pachachi, denounced the U.S. siege, launched after Sunni insurgents killed four U.S. contract workers and a mob dragged their burned and mutilated bodies through the streets and hung two of them from a bridge.
``These (U.S.) operations were a mass punishment for the people of Fallujah,'' Pachachi told Al-Arabiya TV. ``It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal.''
Added al-Yawer: ``We all agree that those who did that (killed the four Americans) were criminals who deserve to be arrested. But the result was the mass punishment of a city. ... And that we refuse.''
Asked about the council members' criticism, Senor said U.S.. forces have ``a responsibility to address a situation that is hostile.''
He said the coalition cannot ``just turn our heads and look the other way'' when Americans are killed in Fallujah.
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DISPATCHES
Why Falluja Remains a Crossroads for Collision
April 9, 2004
By MICHAEL GORDON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/middleeast/09FALL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON - When American forces invaded Iraq last year, Baghdad was the prize. The generals dubbed it "the center of gravity," and the calculation was that its seizure would mean not only the demise of Saddam Hussein and his ilk but the end of the war.
It was a goal that the Bush administration believed was all but fulfilled when Saddam's statute was pulled down in Baghdad's Firdos Square a year ago this Friday. All that seemed to be left was some mopping up.
A year later, it is clear that the victory was never complete. The killing of four American contractors in Falluja last week and the mutilation of their bodies at the hands of a riotous mob indicate that many there have neither accepted their defeat nor the United States' plans for a new, more pro-Western Iraq.
With Shiites in open armed rebellion and the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr challenging the coalition, Falluja is not the only testing ground for whether the Americans are capable of reasserting control. Millions of Iraqis will be watching to see who prevails.
The Bush administration's project in Iraq would have been difficult under the best of circumstances.
But a deficit of American forces, the slow pace of early nation-building efforts by an American-led coalition that lacked a United Nations mandate and the constant rotation of U.S. forces have made the job harder - and made it easier for the insurgency in towns like Falluja to endure and even grow.
I went to Falluja in June with the 2nd Brigade of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, the same soldiers that conducted the April 5, 2003 "Thunder Run" - an armed dash through a still unconquered Baghdad - and fought their way into the center of the Iraqi capital two days later.
It seemed clear back in June that there were several reasons for the troubles in Falluja, a city of a quarter million that is located some 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, west of Baghdad. Falluja was not on the invasion path of American forces on their way to Baghdad and thus did not witness the full display of American might.
The population is heavily Sunni and more wary, if not outright hostile, to an American presence than other regions dominated by Shiites and Kurds, who were brutally repressed by Saddam. Falluja is also a convenient way station for Syrian and other foreign fighters looking to take on the American-led coalition.
Since Falluja is located on the major highway that goes from Baghdad to Jordan it is also a city virtually impossible for Westerners to avoid. In Falluja, worlds collide. But the United States' handling of the occupation has contributed to the problem there, too. In a culture that prizes personal relations, there has been too great a turnover in American units there and too great a difference in their size, methods and resources.
After the fall of Baghdad, it took a while for Falluja to draw much attention. When it did, it was for the wrong reasons. The 82nd Airborne Division was the first unit to dispatch troops there. They set up a base of operations in the city and soon found themselves confronted by demonstrators. Shots were fired at the troops. The soldiers fired back, and Falluja's residents say that 17 citizens were killed and more than 70 wounded - figures the 82nd disputes.
That April 28 episode set a bad tone for the units that were to follow. A 1,200-strong squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was given responsibility for Falluja after the 82nd left and took casualties.
So the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division was then handed the mission. The 4,000-strong unit pulled out of Baghdad and headed west with its M-1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and set up camp just outside Falluja and near the nearby town of Habbaniya.
The brigade's officers concluded that the problem in Falluja was not just the conglomeration of former Baathists who had profited under Saddam, religious extremists and foreign fighters - to use the terminology of briefers in Baghdad in describing their adversary.
The officers saw that those groups were also exploiting the town's poor or disaffected, including those whose relatives had been killed or wounded in the confrontations with the Americans. For $500, there were young men ready to take a shot at an American.
The brigade put on some early displays of force, enforcing a curfew with Bradley fighting vehicles and M-1 tanks. But the brigade also sought to build ties with local officials and build good will with the population.
The plan was to carry out selective raids that minimized the risk of hurting innocents while maximizing economic assistance and empowering local officials - much the same strategy that Major General David Petraeus employed assiduously and successfully in Mosul, further to the Iraqi north. The brigade paid blood money for every dead or injured civilian and spent almost $2 million on improvements to the city.
By early August, the situation was more stable. Soon, however, the 2nd Brigade left to return to the United States. The Falluja mission was handed back to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and after that to the 82nd Airborne, which sought to train the nascent Iraqi security force to control the city.
This month, the Marines returned to Iraq to take responsibility for Falluja and western Iraq. The Marines came to Iraq vowing to use a "Velvet Glove" strategy of building ties with locals.
But the killing of the American contractors and the inability of the new Iraqi security forces to establish order changed that. Sensing that a moment of truth had arrived, the Bush administration took off the velvet glove and ordered the Marines to take control.
The outcome of the new battle for Falluja will send a signal as to whether insurgents or the coalition will shape the future of Iraq. Overoptimistic assumptions within the Bush administration about the number of forces required to stabilize Iraq and the ever-changing array of forces that have tried to deal with the city have made the situation in Falluja and western Iraq more difficult than it need have been.
As a press release from the Marines noted this week, "Establishing a persistent presence in areas where U.S. forces have not consistently operated over the last 12 months has been costly."
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The Phantom Sovereign
By Jonathan Schell,
The Nation and TomDispatch.com
April 9, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18374
The Iraqi struggle for independence from American rule has begun in earnest. US forces there now face a double insurrection - one part Sunni Muslim, the other Shiite Muslim - that threatens at the same time to turn into a civil war. Only the Kurdish north is quiet. With these events, US policy for Iraq has taken leave of reality as thoroughly as America's claims regarding weapons of mass destruction did before the war. The policy was declared on November 21, when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced that on June 30 of this year the "occupation of Iraq will end," and Iraq will then enjoy "sovereignty."
Since then, news commentators and officials have repeatedly told the public that on that date the United States "will hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people" (in the words of Dan Senor, a senior adviser to the CPA), who will then enjoy what is commonly called an "interim constitution." Every word of these short phrases is based on assumptions radically at odds with the facts.
1. "Sovereignty." According to Webster's, sovereignty is "supreme power, especially over a body politic." But it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to argue that the United States and its allies wield "supreme power" in Iraq. True, US forces can go where they like, but do they rule? Do the Iraqi people obey them? When the American authorities order something to happen, does it? On the contrary, none of the US plans for running the country announced by the Bush Administration has so far even been enacted, much less succeeded. Even now, GOP Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said that he has "no idea" what the plans for the June 30 transition are.
Iraqi political figures, by contrast, have been making a lot happen. According to the always invaluable (and now winner of a Pulitzer prize) Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, the most popular of the Shiite leaders, the comparatively moderate Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, launched a petition against the US-sponsored "constitution." The petition quickly gathered tens of thousands of signatures. This peaceful opposition to American rule, however, was quickly superseded, at least for the time being, by the Shiite insurrection, led by the extreme Islamist Muqtada al-Sadr.
The Iraqi blogger Zayed, until now pro-occupation, offers the following portrait of life in Baghdad the day after the insurrection:
"No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Mahdi [Sadr's militia] are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners. Doors are locked, and AK-47's are being loaded and put close by in case they are needed. The phone keeps ringing frantically."
There is no "sovereign," American or other, in this Iraq; there is anarchy. The less "sovereignty" the United States possesses, it appears, the more quickly it wants to surrender it.
2. "Hand over." How can the United States "hand over" power that it has never possessed? In any case, sovereignty is not a physical object, like a desk, that can be moved from one office to another. It is a relationship among people - one of command and obedience. Even if the United States did have sovereignty in Iraq, as it obviously does not, it would not be able to pass it on to someone else. Either the United States would remain the real sovereign behind the scenes or the new group would have to build up sovereign power for itself. Admittedly, the United States does possess something in Iraq - unopposable military force. But this is one thing, needless to say, that the United States decidedly will not hand over on June 30 or any other day. (Other things it is not planning to hand over are control of the central bank and the news media.) Will the Governing Council, which many Iraqis call "the Governed Council," command American troops or, for that matter, even their own Iraqi troops? Not likely. Meanwhile, the misnamed "administrator" of the misnamed "coalition" will be replaced by a misnamed "ambassador," presiding over what is to be the largest US "embassy" in the world.
3. "The Iraqi people." The Iraqi people will have no involvement, whether as givers or takers of power, on June 30. Those to whom the United States plans to hand over something or other (it will certainly not be power) are a small group of Iraqi officials, most of whom are to be US appointees. No one knows yet exactly who they will be or how they are to be chosen, Bremer's previous plan of selecting them by means of managed "caucuses" having been scuttled in the face of opposition from Ayatollah Sistani.
4. "Interim Constitution." A series of temporary regulations promulgated, before any election has been held, in the name of a conquering power and its local appointees is wholly misdescribed as a constitution. A constitution is the fundamental, enduring law of a country. In a democracy, it proceeds from the will of the people. Nothing of this kind will be instituted in Iraq on June 30.
5. "June 30, 2004." Among political observers, it is widely and believably said that this date is geared not to any events in Iraq but to the 2004 US presidential election. The Bush Administration wants to bolster the President's campaign by creating an impression of progress in Iraq, and is staffing the CPA's office of strategic communications with GOP operatives including Rich Galen, former press spokesman for Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle.
Keeping all these things in mind, we should revise the commonly used phrases. Instead of saying, "On June 30, the Coalition will hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people," we should say, "On June 30, the re-election campaign of George W. Bush will hand over the appearance of responsibility for the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq to certain of its local appointees."
And the Iraqi people? They are busy, violently and otherwise, struggling for their own future. One of the organizers of the Sistani petition, Saad Taher, commented to Shadid, "America has a term: the rebuilding of Iraq. We are rebuilding ourselves. We want to create a new Iraqi personality. That's our task. That's not the Americans' task." For better or worse, these words are already on their way to becoming true.
Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.
-------- nato
Putin Doubts Expanded NATO Meets New Threats
April 9, 2004
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/europe/09RUSS.html
MOSCOW, April 8 - President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday that he hoped the expansion of NATO might have a positive effect on international relations but that the expansion is not effective against terrorist threats.
"Life shows that simply expanding will not enable us to effectively counter the main threats that we are facing today," he told Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the NATO secretary general, at a Kremlin meeting.
"This expansion did not help prevent the terrorist acts in Madrid, let's say, or help resolve the problems of Afghanistan," he added.
Mr. de Joop Scheffer's visit to Moscow comes nearly two weeks after NATO formally welcomed seven new members in Eastern Europe, including three former Soviet republics in the Baltics.
"Russia's position toward the enlargement of NATO is well known and has not changed," Mr. Putin said in a television appearance with Mr. de Joop Scheffer.
Russia has expressed concern over the deployment of NATO troops close to its borders, particularly over plans to have four F-16 fighter jets make regular flights near Russia's border from a base in Lithuania.
Russia said it might increase its military presence bordering three Baltic nations - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - if NATO stations permanent military bases on their soil.
Despite Moscow's opposition to the expansion of NATO, Mr. Putin said he hoped it would lead to "the strengthening of trust in Europe and the entire world."
He added that "each country has the right to choose the form of security it considers most effective."
Mr. de Joop Scheffer said he understood "the Russian psychology, when a Russian citizen sees NATO enlarge and wonders, and asks what that is all about."
He told Mr. Putin that Russia should work with the alliance in confronting today's global threats.
"The problems facing us are simply too big - terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq - to think that we can go it alone, that Russia or NATO can go it alone," he said.
Before meeting the president, Mr. de Joop Scheffer signed an agreement with the Russian defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, to improve communications by setting up a Russian liaison office at NATO's military headquarters in Mons, Belgium.
During a radio interview the NATO chief called the deployments normal and nonthreatening.
"Russian planes patrol Russian airspace, NATO planes patrol NATO airspace," he said. "It's perfectly normal."
-------- russia / chechnya
The Battle for Chechen Oil
By Timur Aliev
GROZNY, Chechnya, (ENS)
April 9, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-09-04.asp
Pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov plans to found a new oil company that would give the devastated republic a greater share of its oil riches, while making him more financially and politically independent from his Russian backers.
Currently, money from sales of Chechen oil have gone to Russian giant Rosneft and its local subsidiary Grozneftegaz. According to Kadyrov, Chechnya sees few benefits.
"In fact, Grozneftegaz is failing to play even a small role in reconstruction of the republic. Today 70 percent of taxes from oil sales stay in Moscow," Kadyrov said at a government session in Grozny last week. He complained that neither Rosneft nor Grozneftegaz have been putting any of this money back into Chechnya's badly damaged oil infrastructure or toward social needs.
Chechnya has only small reserves of oil, but it is of high quality. Grozny was also the site of one of the largest refineries in the Soviet Union, though much has been destroyed during Russia's two campaigns to crush independence forces in the last 10 years.
Oil extraction in Chechnya dates back a century, with production growing in the 1960s to a record of 21 million tonnes in 1971. After rapid decline through the 1980s, production stabilized at four to five million tonnes by the 1990s, just as the independence movement led by Jokhar Dudayev gathered pace.
Despite huge damage to infrastructure and the rerouting of an important pipeline from the Caspian around Chechnya, oil remains lucrative - both on a large scale and for local residents running illegal, homemade refineries.
But the battle for control has also become the focus of a political feud between Kadyrov and his opponents in Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as Akhmad Kadyrov, Russia's chief administrator in Chechnya, listens during a meeting in North Ossetia, July 2000. (Photo courtesy Tickets of Russia) Some factions, in the Kremlin in particular, want Kadyrov to shoulder increasing responsibility for running Chechnya and combating the guerrilla forces.
Others, such as the Russian finance and defense ministries are highly distrustful of Kadyrov, a former rebel commander who changed sides and became president last year in elections that independent observers denounced as fixed.
Kadyrov has ordered the general director of Grozneftegaz, Baudin Khamidov, to develop plans to establish a separate holding company that would be independent of Rosneft.
"Chechnya will benefit from this special status. We are a destroyed republic," Zaindi Durdiev, one of the authors of the plan and a former Chechen oil minister, said in a telephone interview. "The money that Grozneftegaz earns is currently collected by the Russian energy ministry, then it goes to the finance ministry, and only then back to us."
At the same time, Durdiev is sceptical that the Chechen oil firm will actually be created. "It is unlikely to happen, as people at governmental level in Russia oppose it," he said.
Creating a new oil company might become possible once an accord on Chechnya's powers is ratified. The draft of the agreement proposed by Kadyrov envisages equal participation by Russian authorities and the local Chechen government in exploiting the republic's oil resources. Under the proposed accord, production and export quotas would also be agreed with the Chechen authorities.
Rosneft says it does not object. "If the state considers it necessary to create another oil company there, let it do it," spokesman Dmitrii Panteleev said in a telephone interview.
He rejected accusations that Rosneft had failed to provide funding for social spending or the reconstruction of the oil industry. Panteleev said the company invested more than 3.5 billion roubles in Chechnya last year. More than 550 million roubles for economic and social assistance were transferred to the energy ministry, he said.
"Our activity in Chechnya is fully regulated by the state ... and it is not commercial in nature. The government commissioned us to create Grozneftegaz to operate there and reinvest part of the funds to maintain or increase oil production," he said.
Grozneftegaz says it spent some 125.5 million roubles last year in the social sphere and a further 38.3 million roubles in charity, as well as considerable investments in gas, water and electricity infrastructure.
Rashid Yunusov from the Chechen finance ministry believes Kadyrov is also at the heart of a complex legal dispute between Rosneft and Grozneftegaz with another company, Chechenneftekhimprom.
Oil well in Chechnya (Photo credit unknown) In 2002, state owned Chechen oil and gas businesses were meant to be transferred to Grozneftegaz. Instead, the assets were transferred to a newly created firm, Chechenneftekhimprom.
Then early this year, creditors of Chechenneftekhimprom, led by a company called Kreking, moved to secure payment. "They seized the property which Grozneftegaz was renting and some auctions were even held to transfer this effectively state owned property into private hands," said Panteleev.
Kreking, said Yunusov, is backed by the Chechen president. "The most important thing for Kadyrov is to manage to create a Chechen oil company before privatisation starts in Chechnya," he said. Rosneft refused to comment on Kreking's aims.
Vladimir Pribylovsky, an analyst from the Panorama think tank, said the heart of the dispute is political. "This is not an economic issue for the Kremlin. It is a question of whether the Kremlin should butter Kadyrov up with the oil, or whether he'll do without it."
The outcome could depend on which of the Kremlin clans gets an upper hand.
Two deputy assistants to President Vladimir Putin - Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin - "dislike Kadyrov for ideological state related reasons," said Pribylovsky. Both men are associated with the "siloviki", a group of political figures with military or KGB backgrounds.
Protecting Kadyrov, on the other hand, are members of the Yeltsin era grouping known as the "family." Their pragmatic viewpoint, Pribylovski said, is that paying off Kadyrov with oil is an acceptable price for his loyalty to Russia and willingness to repress the rebels.
{Published in cooperation with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Timur Aliev is IWPR's coordinator in Chechnya.}
-------- space
Dark Matter
By Chris Floyd
Friday, Apr. 9, 2004. Page 116
Moscow Times
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/04/09/120.html
This summer, the human race will pass a sinister milestone. It will come quietly, creeping like a thief in the night -- a starless night, the sky blanked by a minatory shadow.
For while the world's attention will be turned this July toward the bloody carnage erupting in Iraq after the illusory turnover of "sovereignty" by the still-entrenched occupation force, and riveted by the flood of sewage pouring from the White House as the presidential campaign reaches critical mass, the United States will break a long-held taboo and launch the first weapon into the global commons of outer space.
It's a small step, a test satellite called the "Near Field Infrared Experiment," set for launch -- by a Minotaur missile, no less -- this summer from a NASA base in Virginia. NFIRE is part of the Bush Regime's multibillion-dollar, crony-feeding boondoggle known as "missile defense." The satellite's primary mission is to gather data on the exhaust fumes of rockets in space, information that will then be used to help future space weapons differentiate more clearly between a target and its trailing plume.
But NFIRE is itself weaponized, carrying a projectile-packed "kill vehicle" that can destroy passing missiles -- or the satellites of the United States' military and commercial rivals, as ABC News reported last week. This marks the first time in history that any nation has put a weapon in space, despite America's still-official policy against such a practice. And as Pentagon officials made clear in an eye-opening presentation to Congress in February, NFIRE's test is just the first spark of a conflagration that will soon set the heavens ablaze with American weaponry capable of striking -- and destroying -- any spot on earth. As one top Pentagon official -- opposed to this lunatic proliferation, thus remaining anonymous -- said: "We're crossing the Rubicon into space weaponization."
The ABC report -- largely ignored, except by the Irish Examiner and some specialist web sites -- was strangely incomplete, however. It noted only that there is a $68 million appropriation for NFIRE buried in the 2005 military budget -- leaving the implication that the project is still on the drawing board.
But in fact, NFIRE is already operational. It began in August 2002 and has moved steadily toward its long-established Summer 2004 launch date, according to NASA and press releases from the private contractors involved. The Pentagon's own published specs for the mission state clearly: "The Generation 2 kill vehicle will be integrated into the near-field experiment payload" when the spacecraft launches in summer 2004. The Minotaur missile that will haul the weapon into orbit was ordered by the Pentagon in January 2003, Orbital Sciences Corporation reports. Doubtless there will more NFIREs burning in 2005 as well, but the weaponization of space is not some distant prospect: That dark future is now.
And the boys in Space Command are just getting warmed up. They wowed the salivating Bushist faithful in Congress with highly detailed plans for a whizbang space arsenal led by the "Rods From God" -- bundles of tungsten rods fired from orbiting platforms, hurtling toward earth at 3,700 meters per second, accurate within a range of 8 meters and able to destroy even the most hardened targets, the Center for Defense Information reports. They could be launched at only a few minutes' notice at any target on the planet.
"God's Rods" will be accompanied by orbiting lasers, "hunter-killer" satellites, and space bombers that needn't bother with silly-billy legal worries about "overflight rights" from other countries, but can descend out of the ether to swoop down on any uppity nation that displeases the world-Caesar in Washington.
This belligerent Buck-Rogering, long a gleam in many a militarist's eye, gained relentless momentum with the arrival of Don Rumsfeld as Pentagon war chief. In the late 1990s, while helping Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz plot their "Project for the New American Century" -- wholesale militarization of U.S. policy, aggressive war (including the invasion of Iraq even if Saddam Hussein was no longer there), "global dominance" of "vital energy resources," etc. -- Rumsfeld also headed a "blue-ribbon panel" of the usual Establishment worthies looking into "the role of space in national security." Their conclusion? You guessed it: Rummy said America must garrison the heavens to prevent a -- wait for it -- "space Pearl Harbor."
Oddly enough, over at PNAC, at about the same time, Rummy and Cheney were speaking openly about the possibility of a "new Pearl Harbor" that would "catalyze the American people" into supporting their plans, which were published in September 2000. Space weaponization -- via "missile defense" -- was an essential part of the scheme. Once in office, they shoveled billions to their favored defense cartels and fast-tracked space-weapon programs. Indeed, National Security Advisor Condi Rice intended to crown these early efforts with a major speech enshrining the Bush Regime's "top priority" for national security: "missile defense."
Unfortunately, the speech -- scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001 -- had to be canceled due to the "new Pearl Harbor" that struck that day, the Washington Post reported last week. But the plan and its long-standing priorities -- invasion of Iraq, military control of Central Asia, space weaponization -- continued without missing a beat, though clothed now in the expedient rhetoric of a "global war on terror."
Of course, with each passing day, Bush's PNAC centerpiece -- the rape of Iraq -- is actually breeding more terror, more hatred for America, more risk for the people he rules with such ignorant, blood-flecked insouciance. But this doesn't matter; what matters is the plan, the dominance. And so space too must be conquered, at any cost, until the whole world is under cosmic military occupation -- a global Fallujah, seething with chaos and fury.
Annotations
Reining in our Weaponry
San Francisco Chronicle,
March 15, 2004
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/04/09/sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/15/EDGLU4UDP71.DTL
Shooting Stars
ABC News,
March 30, 2004
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/SciTech/US/space_weapons_040330.html
U.S. Takes First Steps to Weaponize Space
Spacedaily.com,
March 30, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/bmdo-04k.html
US Creeping Toward Weapons in Space
Irish Examiner,
March 31, 2004
http://breaking.examiner.ie/2004/03/31/story140741.html
NFIRE Mission Description [page 3]
U.S. Department of Defense,
February 2003,
http://www.dtic.mil/descriptivesum/Y2004/MDA/0603886C.pdf
U.S. Military Launch Manifest
Small World Communications,
March 22, 2004
http://www.sworld.com.au/steven/space/usmil-man.txt
Rods From God: Possible Space Weapons of the Future
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
July 28, 2003
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03209/206344.stm
21st Century Gunboat Diplomacy
The Nation Institute,
March 30, 2004
http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1344
Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't Terrorism
Washington Post,
April 1, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42287-2004Apr1?language=printer
Rebuilding America's Defenses
Project for the New American Century,
September 2000
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
Rumsfeld Commision Warns Against 'Space Pearl Harbor
Agence France Presse,
Jan. 11, 2001
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/bmdo-01b.html
U.S. Military Moves to Control Space
EnviroVideo,
Feb. 24, 2001
http://www.envirovideo.com/karltechglobe.html
Orbital Wins $60 Million in New Small Launch Vehicles Order
Orbital Sciences Corporation,
Jan. 23, 2003
http://www.orbital.com/Template.php?Section=News&NavMenuID=32&template=PressReleaseDisplay.php&PressReleaseID=392
Star Wars: Protecting Globalization From Above
CorpWatch,
Jan. 18, 2002
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=1333
Ballistic Missile Defense Interceptors
U.S. Missile Defense Agency,
Jan. 30, 2004
http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/pdf/kinetic.pdf
SAIC Wins NFIRE Contract
U.S. Department of Defense,
Jan. 21, 2003
http://east.defenselink.mil/contracts/2003/c01212003_ct028-03.html
Near Field InfraRed Experiment
NASA,
August 2002
http://www.wff.nasa.gov/code840/public/proj_nfire.ppt
The Minotaur Missile
Gunter's Space Page,
Jan. 16, 2004
http://www.skyrocket.de/space/index_frame.htm?http://www.skyrocket.de/space/doc_lau_det/minotaur.htm
USN Selected for NFIRE Mission
Universal Space Network, Inc.,
December 18, 2003
http://www.universalspacenetwork.com/usnnews/5.htm
MDA Plans to Launch Sattelite to Assist in Missile Defense Tests
Space News,
December 9, 2002
http://dev.space.com/spacenews/archive02/mdaarch_120902.html
Spectrum Astro Forming Industry
Team for Targets and Countermeasures Bid
http://216.109.117.135/search/cache?p=%22Near+Field+Infrared+Experiment%22+%22kill+vehicle%22&n=20&fl=0&u=www.satellite2003.com/press/01072003b.htm&w=%22near+field+infrared+experiment%22+%22kill+vehicle%22&d=F5CB00AEF9&c=483&yc=49519&icp=1
-------- spies
DOCUMENTS
A Little Light Is Shed on Intelligence Digests
April 9, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/politics/09BBOX.html
WASHINGTON, April 8 - In Washington-speak, it is the P.D.B. - or President's Daily Brief. An intelligence digest prepared six mornings a week, by the Central Intelligence Agency, it is one of the most highly classified documents prepared by the government, its distribution limited under President Bush to fewer than a dozen senior administration officials.
Compiled in a loose-leaf notebook, and consisting of about a dozen items a day, the P.D.B. in some ways serves as a kind of newspaper, with reports on current developments around the world and on broader trends. On Aug. 6, 2001, the digest presented to Mr. Bush in Crawford, Tex., included a memorandum titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S." Until Thursday, when it was publicly disclosed by Condoleezza Rice in her testimony before the special commission looking in the Sept. 11 attacks, even that title was classified.
As part of their continuing inquires into the Sept. 11 attacks and prewar intelligence about Iraq, both the Sept. 11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee have battled with the White House to gain access to the daily briefs. The White House has resisted, arguing that the documents are protected by the doctrine of executive privilege. So far, the White House has relented only to the commission, and only by allowing members of the panel to review a limited number of digests.
Whether Mr. Bush is in Washington or traveling - or, as he was on Aug. 6, at his vacation home in Crawford - the daily briefs are presented to him each Monday through Saturday by a C.I.A. official.
Asked on Thursday who had written the headline on the Aug. 6 report, a C.I.A. official declined to identify that person. A small unit of intelligence analysts within the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence prepares the daily brief, with input from other intelligence agencies.
-------- us
Governors ask Army to reconsider dumping byproducts of deadly nerve agent into Delaware River
Friday, April 09, 2004
By Randall Chase,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-04-09/s_22644.asp
DOVER, Delaware - Wastewater from the destruction of a Cold War-era nerve agent should not be treated in New Jersey, nor should its chemical byproducts be dumped into the Delaware River, the governors of New Jersey and Delaware said Thursday.
The Army plans to destroy VX nerve agent at the Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana, then ship the waste to DuPont's Secure Environmental Treatment facility in Deepwater, New Jersey, for final treatment and disposal.
Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner and New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey said it's "in the best interests of the citizens and natural resources of the states of Delaware and New Jersey" that the entire process happen in Indiana. The comments were contained in a letter to acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee.
Jeff Lindblad, a spokesman for the Army Chemical Materials Agency, said military officials would review the letter and respond to the issues raised by state officials.
The Army plans to neutralize the VX at Newport by mixing it with hot water and sodium hydroxide. The resulting chemical would be hydrolysate, which the Army and DuPont have compared to liquid drain cleaner.
The Army originally planned to ship the treated waste to Dayton, Ohio, for final disposal, but dropped that plan in the face of legal opposition.
A single drop of liquid VX can cause paralysis and death within minutes. The VX was scheduled to be destroyed by April 2007, but Congress accelerated the process after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Earlier Thursday, DuPont announced it would not accept an Army contract for the project until the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completes a formal review. That review was requested last month by the congressional delegations of Delaware and New Jersey.
----
War Funding Is Adequate For Year, Pentagon Says
Hill Aides to Push Administration on Costs
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62597-2004Apr8.html
The Pentagon said yesterday that troops in Iraq will have enough money to get through the year, despite the unanticipated resumption of heavy combat and a possible increase in force strength.
But skeptical congressional aides from both parties promised to press the administration on war costs in light of the changing battlefield. Simply maintaining current troop levels beyond June could add nearly $4 billion in unfunded costs through the end of the year, said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution.
"They have not come to us or said a word, but obviously this compounds their problems," James W. Dyer, Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, said of the rising violence in Iraq. "All these numbers have to be re-looked."
Bush administration officials have insisted that the $87 billion war spending measure Congress passed last year will be sufficient to cover military and rebuilding costs in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. President Bush's $421 billion defense budget for 2005 included no money for military operations, but White House budget Director Joshua B. Bolten has said the administration will seek as much as $50 billion early next year in a supplemental request.
Dyer said that is not likely to be sufficient, given a new military offensive in Afghanistan, unanticipated peacekeeping costs in Haiti and the mayhem in Iraq. And some lawmakers have been publicly skeptical that the military can wait until after the election for a cash infusion. Rep. Ike Skelton (Mo.), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said deployed Marines lack 5,400 M4 carbine rifles they had sought. The Army is $2 billion short of force protection funds it needs, including $900 million that Army officers requested to add armor to Humvees and other vehicles, he said.
"There's $12 billion worth of unfunded requirements," Skelton said, "and somewhere along the line, that has to be filled."
Defense Department plans had anticipated U.S. troop levels dropping to 115,000 by June, from the approximately 135,000 in Iraq now. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld raised the possibility Wednesday that some troops scheduled to return in the next few weeks may have to remain. Members of Congress have said forces need to be bolstered. An additional 25,000 troops could cost about $667 million a month, O'Hanlon said.
"If they are going to increase troop strength, or not draw down from where they are, they may well need more money," said Steven M. Kosiak, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Pentagon officials reiterated their assessment of war costs yesterday.
The Defense Department "still believes it can wait until 2005 for the next supplemental," Marine Lt. Col. Rose-Ann L. Lynch, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. "Actual combat and the associated expenditure of munitions are not the major cost drivers in a contingency. Increased wear and tear on equipment will be dealt with in future budget requests.
"It is still too soon to judge the cost impact of the recent events," she continued, "however, there is enough flexibility in the available supplemental funding to accommodate short-term changes in operating tempo," or combat intensity.
-------- propaganda wars
Marshal Orders Tapes Of Scalia Talk Erased
Reporters Told Justice Bars Recording
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62514-2004Apr8.html
A federal marshal guarding Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ordered two reporters to erase audio recordings they were making of Scalia's speech to a group of high school students in Mississippi on Wednesday, prompting protests from local journalists who said they were victims of official interference with the press.
As Scalia was addressing an afternoon assembly at the Presbyterian Christian High School in Hattiesburg, Deputy U.S. Marshal Melanie Rube confronted the journalists and told them they must erase their recordings because they violated the justice's policy against audio- or videotaping of his public appearances.
After Associated Press reporter Denise Grones balked, the marshal took her digital recorder and erased its contents -- after Grones explained how the machine worked. The marshal also asked Hattiesburg American reporter Antoinette Konz to hand over a cassette tape and returned it, erased, after the event.
"The deputy's actions were based on Justice Scalia's long-standing policy prohibiting such recordings of his remarks," David Turner, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said. But, he added: "Justice Scalia did not instruct the deputy to take that action."
Editors at both the Hattiesburg American and the Jackson bureau of the AP said their reporters had not been told ahead of time that they could not record at the high school.
"I find it very curious where a Supreme Court justice spends a significant amount of time talking about the Constitution, he seems to omit the part about freedom of the press," said Jon Broadbooks, executive editor of the American. "What authority does the marshal service have to try to confiscate reporters' tape recorders?"
Supreme Court spokesman Ed Turner said that Scalia was unavailable for comment. "The justice generally prefers not to have audio or video recordings of his remarks," Turner said.
Like the recent debate over Scalia's refusal to recuse himself after a duck-hunting trip with Vice President Cheney while Cheney is a named party in a pending case at the court, the incident in Mississippi drew attention to the nearly complete autonomy each justice enjoys in deciding matters that bear on how he or she is perceived by the public. While some justices welcome television coverage of their speeches, others shun it.
But confrontations between the media and justices' security details, which are far smaller than those that surround the president and some Cabinet officials, are rare. Members of the court are guarded by Supreme Court police while in Washington, and by U.S. marshals when they travel outside the capital.
Deputy Marshal Rube is based at the Marshals Services' Hattiesburg sub-office, Turner said. She had been instructed to enforce Scalia's policy during preparations for his visit, Turner added.
The incident at the high school followed a clash between Scalia and the media earlier in the day at William Carey College, a Baptist institution where Louis Griffin, with whom Scalia regularly hunts turkeys, is a trustee.
College officials announced before Scalia's speech to a large assembly that it could not be recorded. But they invited the local media, including television reporters, to talk with Scalia at a reception afterwards.
When Scalia saw cameras at the reception, however, he informed the college's president, Larry W. Kennedy, that he did not give interviews, and Kennedy asked the journalists to leave, Kennedy said in a telephone interview.
Both of the reporters whose recordings were erased in the afternoon were at the morning event when Scalia's ban was announced.
But, said Ron Harrist, news editor of the AP's Jackson bureau, the afternoon speech "was a separate event at the high school. There was no announcement not to do it. We feel like it [the order to erase] was unjustified. Our reporter was strictly using a recorder to make sure she got what he had to say correct."
--------
Legal Experts Express Concern About Erasure of Scalia Tapes
April 9, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/national/09SCAL.html
A federal marshal who required two reporters to erase audiotapes of a speech by Justice Antonin Scalia at a Mississippi high school on Wednesday may have violated the law, legal experts said yesterday.
Justice Scalia does not typically allow audio or video recorders at his speeches, though he often allows print reporters to attend and take notes. Imposing such conditions ahead of time for speeches in private settings generally creates no legal problems, the legal experts said. But seizing or destroying a reporter's notes or tapes afterward in the absence of an announced ban may violate a federal law and the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches, they said.
The reporters involved in the incident at Presbyterian Christian High School in Hattiesburg had been invited. They openly taped Justice Scalia's speech and were confronted by a deputy marshal, Melanie Rube, during a question-and-answer session afterward.
The journalists and the United States Marshals Service, which provides security for Supreme Court justices when they travel, offered differing accounts of precisely what happened next.
Antoinette Konz, who covered the speech for The Hattiesburg American, adamantly denied having been told of a taping ban. Her tape would confirm her account, Ms. Konz said, had she not been forced to erase it.
Ms. Rube, the deputy who confronted the reporters, declined to comment.
Nehemiah Flowers, the United States marshal in Jackson, Miss., said the reporters had been advised of the ban "intermittently, individually."
"It is my understanding that Deputy Rube did not touch anyone and asked politely if they would erase the tape," Mr. Flowers added.
He denied that such a request was coercive or unlawful. "We do have that authority," he said. "This is a justice of the Supreme Court, and as far as we're concerned, we're following the court's orders."
In a statement released by the Marshals Service in Washington, a spokeswoman said Ms. Rube's actions "were based on the justice's standing policy prohibiting such recordings of his remarks."
"That policy," the statement continued, "was most recently enunciated immediately prior to the first speaking venue attended by Scalia that morning." The speech at the high school was in a different place and later in the day.
Legal experts said the deputy's actions were legally questionable.
"The seizure and destruction of a reporter's tape recordings is remarkable, and I think it would be difficult to find any law that would justify it," said Luther T. Munford, a First Amendment expert at Phelps Dunbar, a law firm in Jackson.
A Supreme Court spokesman declined to comment beyond noting that Justice Scalia prefers not to have audio or video recordings made of his speeches and conveys that requirement to his hosts.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press protested the seizure yesterday in a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft. The letter noted that the deputy's action appeared to violate a 1980 federal law prohibiting most seizures of journalists' resource materials.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Going the Extra Mile
L.A.'s Airport Safety Plan Puts Pickups, Drops Far From Curb
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62790-2004Apr8?language=printer
LOS ANGELES -- Troubled by violence and terrorist threats, Los Angeles International Airport has announced a $9 billion plan to transform itself into what the city's mayor contends would be the nation's highest-security airport.
Under the plan, casino-style security cameras would search crowds for suspicious behavior. Passengers would pass through two screening checkpoints equipped with the latest explosive-detection technologies.
Most controversial for this vehicle-obsessed city, travelers would no longer be allowed curbside pickup and drop-off at the terminal. Instead, they would be let off a mile from the airport, where they would go through security screening and then hop aboard a "people mover" train to their gates.
"We wanted to come up with a design that, no matter what the threat level is, whether orange or red . . . whatever level happens, our airport doesn't have to change," said Mayor James K. Hahn, who described the plan as a national model for airport security. "We will have, effectively, the first 'code red' airport in the nation."
With hopes of starting construction early next year, the airport first needs key approvals this fall from the city council, which has been skeptical of the plan, and from the Federal Aviation Administration.
If approved, the proposal could influence a new wave of security designs at other airports around the country, said Jim Riley, director of the public safety and justice program at Rand Corp.
"There really is a lot riding on this," said Riley, who raised reservations about the proposal in a report conducted for a local lawmaker opposed to the overhaul. "It becomes the standard bearer and if one airport is done this way you may see others. Because of its size and complexity, this project is going to send a lot of signals about what our next steps in terms of security ought to be."
City and airport officials say Los Angeles International, with its arched, iconic central restaurant, is the nation's top terrorist target among airports because of its economic importance in connecting Asia to the West Coast. In 1999, federal officials intercepted Algerian-born Ahmed Ressam as he was crossing the Washington state border in a vehicle packed with explosives. Ressam, a terrorist with ties to al Qaeda, planned to blow up an explosives-laden suitcase inside a Los Angeles airport terminal.
In 2002, a man walked into the Bradley International Terminal and fatally shot two people at the El Al Airlines ticket counter before he was killed by an armed airline guard.
City officials have long worried that the airport's design left the terminals vulnerable to a truck bombing.
Since the terrorist attacks, the airport has been high on the security watch list, particularly during the latest Christmas and New Year's holidays when several incoming flights were canceled. It, along with seven other major airports, remained on elevated alert until the end of March after the national threat level was lowered in early January.
While there is wide agreement that security at Los Angeles International needs improvement, the mayor's plan has sparked intense debate over the kind of security that would best serve the flying public. Airline lobbyists oppose the plan. Security consultants can't agree whether it significantly improves security or not. City council members and local congressional representatives say the proposal focuses too much on a bombing threat to the detriment of other security enhancements.
One of the most controversial pieces is the proposed construction of a building a mile from the airport where passengers would be picked up and dropped off. Opponents argue that the outlying building, called Manchester Square, would inconvenience travelers and expose the airport to unforeseen threats.
"I'm sorry, I just don't buy the fact that the mayor's plan is this huge advancement in security," said James C. May, chief executive of the airline's primary lobbying group in Washington, the Air Transport Association. May is working to stop the project.
Almost all of the 80 airlines that use the airport strongly oppose the plan because they say it poses additional hassles for passengers and limits growth. The airlines also fear the proposal will set a precedent for passing on more construction and security costs to them. The carriers would pay for most of the project through increased landing fees and leases for terminal gates.
May said he supports some aspects -- such as non-security improvements that would move two runways and group in one area rental car facilities that are currently scattered around the airport. But the $9 billion price, he says, is too high. "Our plan scales in at about $2 billion to $3 billion," he said.
The mayor and airport officials contend that Manchester Square would eliminate the airport's biggest vulnerability -- its road configuration. The airport's eight terminals are arranged in a horseshoe shape along a one-way road that's just 45 feet from the ticket counters. At some locations, airplanes are parked and loaded with passengers less than 50 feet from the curb. The air traffic control tower also sits inside the U-shaped road, making it a vulnerable target, according to airport officials.
Officials worry that an Oklahoma City-style bombing could do major damage, not only killing dozens of passengers and visitors, but also impairing the region's air traffic control and the local economy.
The Transportation Security Administration and the federal government "say the number one threat in the U.S. is car bombs, and it has been that way since '92," when the government issued mandates to airports to protect against bombs, said security consultant John E. Hensley of Science Applications International Corp. "If a 16-ton or 18-ton rig comes down, you're not going to stop it. By the time you react, once it's in motion, there's nothing you could do to stop it."
Rep. Jane Harman, a Democrat from Los Angeles and ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, is skeptical that the mayor's project would fully protect the airport. "The most likely terrorist attacks would come in ways that [the mayor's plan] does not address," Harman said, citing findings from security consultant Rand Corp., which conducted an analysis of the mayor's proposal at her request.
Rand concluded in its report that terrorists would be more interested in attacking airplanes, either on the ground or in the air, than in blowing up an airport terminal. The consultants' analysis includes statistical calculations of how many people would be killed by a bomb, depending on whether it explodes at a terminal curb, at a security checkpoint or on an aircraft. The conclusion: death and destruction -- and overall impact -- would be far greater in an attack aboard an airplane than at the airport.
Riley, the Rand director, said he doesn't discount the threat of a truck bomb at Los Angeles International. But he said the airport should also think about other threats to its passengers, such as shoulder-fired missiles, explosives-laden cargo and hijackings with weapons.
Riley said the airport can protect itself against a truck bomb using fairly inexpensive measures such as concrete barriers. Reducing that risk does not call for construction of a separate building for drop-off and pickup a mile from the terminals, he said. "You need flexible security measures that you can adapt to what is going to be a change in terrorist tactics over time," Riley said.
Airlines have mobilized a local and Washington-based lobbying group to voice opposition to the mayor's plan, urging city council members to push for the elimination of Manchester Square, the most unpopular feature. United Airlines, which would keep its terminals while some others would get knocked down, supports the plan.
The Los Angeles plan is a "radical departure from the traditional concept that's used at every other airport of dropping passengers off at the terminal," said Kelley Brown, executive director of the Los Angeles Airlines Airport Affairs Committee, which represents 80 airlines. It's "just too extreme," Brown said.
Hahn contends that the concept of the remote drop-off area is actually not that different from the situation at Dulles International and Denver International airports, where there is a considerable distance between planes and cars. The rail line connecting the passenger screening facility and the terminal will add only five to eight minutes to total travel time, aides say.
Unlike at every other airport in the nation, Los Angeles proposes to allow family members, friends and other "meeters and greeters," as airports call them, to see their loved ones off again. The airport would require all visitors to undergo a security check along with passengers at Manchester Square.
The initial screening will be conducted by airport security personnel -- not TSA screeners -- at the airport's expense. The airport is vague on details but says that new technology will help smooth the screening process, making the experience feel less intense than it is at TSA checkpoints. No passengers or visitors will have to take off their shoes, but they will be checked for weapons in a walk-through metal detector and their luggage will be scanned for explosives.
Caught in the middle of the security debate is the TSA, which has been asked by the mayor and his opponents to weigh in on the project. While the TSA has no formal role in the revamping, it could lend its authority in assessing the security elements of the plan. TSA Acting Administrator David M. Stone, a former security director at Los Angeles International, supports the plan and is involved in planning discussions, according to Hahn and airport officials. But in a written statement Stone did not say whether he supported or opposed the redesign.
The airport authority, a part of the city, would sell public bonds to fund some of the project. In addition to the airline fees and gates leases, revenue would come from rent paid by restaurants, shops and possibly a movie theater in a giant central terminal built in a space now occupied by parking garages.
The airport spends $100,000 a day in police costs for every day it is on "code orange" alert status. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the airport has spent more than $10 million on security.
Hahn hopes the plan will turn what is now a terrorist target into a destination point even for those without a plane to catch. He recalls days when he was younger and jet travel was booming. "People used to go to LAX just to hang out just because it's a cool place," Hahn said. "It's a fun place to go to if you can make it safe."
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
-------- investigations
Rice Defends Pre-9/11 Anti-Terrorism Efforts
U.S. 'Was Not on War Footing,' She Says
By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62740-2004Apr8?language=printer
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice staunchly defended President Bush's efforts to combat terrorism in a long-awaited appearance yesterday before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, conceding that the government "was not on war footing" but arguing there was no "silver bullet" or specific intelligence that could have prevented the deadly hijackings.
Rice -- whose testimony under oath attracted media coverage from around the world and drew hundreds of onlookers to an overflowing Senate hearing room -- offered a carefully prepared and largely familiar defense of Bush anti-terrorism efforts and chose to focus many of her remarks on the reaction to an unprecedented wave of threat information that flooded the government in the summer of 2001.
"The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them," Rice said near the start of her 20-minute opening statement. "For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient. . . . Tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11th, this country simply was not on war footing."
Rice's testimony, which had been blocked for months by White House lawyers, came in the wake of politically damaging allegations by former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke, who alleged in testimony and a book last month that the Bush administration had neglected the threat from al Qaeda before the attacks. Rice largely avoided the kind of direct attacks on Clarke's credibility that she had led White House officials in making in television appearances, but she criticized him for not complaining to her about perceived shortcomings and quarreled with some details of his account.
In addition, a new controversy flared yesterday about a classified presidential briefing delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001. The briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S.," has long been characterized by Rice and other Bush officials as a historical summary of suspected al Qaeda plots.
But several Democratic commissioners said in yesterday's hearing that the briefing also includes significant details about suspected al Qaeda sleeper cells and their plans to carry out domestic hijackings. The commission has demanded that the briefing be made public, a step that White House officials said yesterday was likely. "We hope to be able to make it available," communications director Dan Bartlett said.
After Rice's appearance, the 10-member bipartisan panel immediately went into closed session for an interview lasting more than three hours with former president Bill Clinton, officials said. "The Commission found the former President forthcoming and responsive to its questions," the panel said in a statement. The panel, slated to deliver a final report by July 26, is also to interview former vice president Al Gore as well as Bush and Vice President Cheney.
During her testimony, Rice declined to offer the kind of public apology that Clarke delivered during his testimony in front of the same panel on March 24. As scores of survivors of Sept. 11 victims looked on, many carrying pictures of their relatives, Rice said, "We owe it to those that we lost, and to their loved ones and to our country to learn all that we can about that tragic day and the events that led to it."
Rice also repeated her earlier contention that a set of proposals for combating al Qaeda prepared by Clarke on Jan. 25, 2001, did not constitute a plan for action, calling it "a series of ideas." She also defended the administration's pace in crafting an overall strategy to combat al Qaeda -- which was similar to Clarke's proposals and was not approved until Sept. 4, 2001 -- and said the administration wanted to pursue a more aggressive strategy than the Clinton administration.
Rice's generally measured tone toward Clarke yesterday stood in stark contrast to many of the statements made by her and other administration officials in recent weeks. Clarke, who watched her testimony on television, said in an interview that Rice "was trying to de-personalize" their differences and indicated that he would seek to do the same.
The Sept. 11 panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was again divided sharply along partisan lines during Rice's appearance, despite attempts by Chairman Thomas H. Kean and the group's vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, to soften the political edges.
In contrast with Clarke's appearance two weeks earlier, most of the panel's GOP members treaded softly on Rice, leaving the tougher, and at times confrontational, questioning to the Democrats. Perhaps the tersest exchange came between Rice and former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who angrily told Rice at one point: "Please don't filibuster me. It's not fair." On several occasions, Kerrey also mistakenly referred to Rice as "Dr. Clarke," finally prompting a loud response from the witness.
"I don't think I look like Dick Clarke," Rice said to laughter from the audience.
Kerrey also lambasted Rice for avoiding "the M-word," for "mistakes," and said many of her explanations sounded "like something from a seminar."
Rice repeatedly referred to "systemic" and "structural" problems that kept the FBI, the CIA and other agencies from sharing terrorist-related information before the attacks. Rice also indicated that Bush would welcome "new ideas and fresh thinking" about reorganizing the U.S. intelligence community, presumably including a proposal favored by many commissioners to create a separate domestic intelligence agency outside the FBI.
"In hindsight," Rice said in her opening statement, "if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States -- something made very difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies."
The August 2001 presidential briefing document, called the President's Daily Brief (PDB), has been the focus of debate and controversy since The Washington Post first described some of its details in May 2002.
Rice confirmed the briefing's title and said it included information that the FBI had 70 active field investigations at the time into suspected al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. But she said the document contained "no new threat information" and "did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States."
Several Democrats on the panel, led by former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, disagreed and said the briefing indicated that "preparations were being made consistent with hijackings within the United States." That description is supported by a joint House-Senate intelligence committee report, released in July 2003, that says the PDB includes "FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks; as well as information acquired in May 2001 that indicated a group of bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."
Ben-Veniste also noted the contradictory accounts from the administration about whether the president specifically asked for the PDB.
In a letter to the commission on March 26, CIA Director George J. Tenet described the PDB as "a piece laying out what we knew about Osama bin Laden's interest in striking inside the United States." He wrote that although there was "no formal tasking," the president had asked questions throughout the spring and summer of 2001 about whether intelligence about al Qaeda planning a large attack pointed toward threats inside the United States.
Commissioners from both sides of the political aisle quizzed Rice about the administration's failure to respond to the October 2000 bombing the USS Cole in Yemen, which the CIA and the FBI had determined by early 2001 had been carried out by al Qaeda operatives. Rice and other administration officials have said they were focused on crafting an overall al Qaeda strategy that was not, as Rice quoted Bush, "swatting flies."
But Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor, asked: "What if in March of 2001, under your administration, al Qaeda had blown up another U.S. destroyer? What would you have done?" Rice responded: "I don't know what we would have done."
Another focus of debate was a meeting on July 5 between Rice, Clarke and White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. focused on possible threats to the homeland. Rice said Clarke "was asked to make sure that domestic agencies were aware of the heightened threat period and were taking appropriate steps to respond."
But Democratic commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general, said a broad swath of aviation, transportation and law enforcement officials knew little or nothing about the elevated threat levels that summer. She said commission investigators have not found anyone within the FBI, including then-acting director Thomas J. Pickard, who recalls any special orders. Rice suggested that any blame would lie with the FBI or with Clarke, who was in charge of "crisis management."
Staff writer Dana Milbank in Crawford, Tex., and researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
--------
Zeroing In on One Classified Document
By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62481-2004Apr8?language=printer
When the Washington investigative machinery gets rolling, it takes a major event to stop it. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice's defense of the Bush anti-terrorism effort at yesterday's hearing before the 9/11 commission was not enough.
But while the hotly anticipated hearing -- a sometimes testy affair played out live before television cameras in a room packed as tight as a rush-hour Red Line train -- did not end the scouring of the Bush administration, it helped to narrow the focus to this: What did President Bush and his senior advisers know in the summer of 2001 about a flurry of terrorist threats picked up by intelligence services, and what did they do about it?
That piece of the puzzle remained in dispute in part because of questions about a key classified document that detailed terror threats to Bush about a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Commissioners called on the White House to make the document public, which seems certain to keep the investigation in the headlines.
In his blockbuster testimony two weeks ago, former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke leveled two basic charges. The first has receded: that the Bush administration ignored his plans for disrupting the al Qaeda terror network in early 2001, plans that included possible military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Rice and the commissioners spent little time on that indictment because Clarke himself undercut it when he said it would not have prevented the attacks.
Instead, they sparred over Clarke's second charge, that top officials, including Bush and Rice, were listless in the face of the summertime "threat spike." Rice insisted that she and the president did all they reasonably could to address "frustratingly vague" threats despite being hobbled by long-standing legal and bureaucratic barriers.
That did not satisfy all the commissioners.
Jamie S. Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, listed some of the panel's earlier witnesses who said they were never alerted to the possible danger.
Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta "had no idea of the threat," she said. "The administrator of the FAA, responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. . . . You indicate in your statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat."
This, Gorelick suggested, was a failure of leadership at the highest reaches. "You get a greater degree of intensity when it comes from the top," she said.
Rice kept her cool and answered in part by steering blame to previous administrations. U.S. intelligence services simply knew too little about al Qaeda's plans, she lamented. And the inability of the FBI and CIA to work together on terrorism had been a chronic problem, left unfixed for years.
"We were there 233 days" before the attacks, she said.
At another point, Rice said the specter of terrorist hijackings should have led the government to order airlines to fortify cockpits "a long time ago."
With the election heating up, the nearly three-hour session rang with political overtones. The toughest questions for Rice came from Democrats on the panel, including contentious exchanges with former senator Bob Kerrey (Neb.) and Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste. One section of the room erupted into applause for Rice several times, only to be answered a bit later by applause for her interrogators from another quarter of the room.
"We're in the political echo chamber now," said Republican Mit Spears, a veteran of the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Rice "did a credible enough job to take away the bigger issues," he asserted, but "I don't think that her testimony will still the debate. The Democrats have enough residual fodder to kick this dog for a while longer."
Among Democrats, many felt that Rice's testimony pushed the trail of blame directly to Bush. "Just one month before terrorists claimed the lives of 3,000 Americans at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was on a 30-day vacation in Crawford, Texas," said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. "He was informed by his national security team that al Qaeda operatives in the United States had the ability to hijack passenger airplanes."
Cummings was referring to one of the hot spots of Rice's testimony: She tangled with commission Democrats over the nature of a highly classified briefing Bush received on Aug. 6, 2001. Ben-Veniste characterized the briefing as a dire warning of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's desire to strike the United States. He underscored his point in one of the day's most dramatic -- and tense -- exchanges.
"And I ask you whether you recall the title of that" briefing, Ben-Veniste said.
"I believe the title was 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' " Rice answered.
Ben-Veniste tried to stop her at that, but Rice kept talking over his objections, insisting that there was nothing new and nothing solid in the "PDB," or President's Daily Brief. "It did not warn of attacks inside the United States," Rice insisted. "It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States."
After some more sparring, Ben-Veniste challenged Rice to have the briefing made public. "If you are willing to declassify that document, then others can make up their minds about it," he said.
It was a dare that left some Washington Republicans nervous. They had watched as the White House resisted calls from survivors of Sept. 11 victims and from the commission for Rice's testimony -- only to give in after suffering political damage. Now they wondered whether the administration would once again dig in its heels in a losing cause.
But the administration is moving to release the disputed briefing, White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "We hope to be able to make it available."
The briefing tantalizes many Democrats because it cuts directly to Bush's own understanding of the al Qaeda threat before the attacks. Judging from news accounts at the time, terrorism was hardly a cloud on the national radar. Reporters covering Bush worried over the heat, the length of the president's vacation, the controversy over stem cell research, and the differences between Crawford and Kennebunkport.
Bush took questions the following day. "I'm working a lot of issues -- national security matters," he told them. But the one he discussed in detail was not terrorism. Iraqi gunners in the "no-fly" zone had once again tried to shoot down U.S. jets.
"Saddam Hussein is a menace," Bush told reporters after a round of golf. "He's still a menace, and we need to keep him in check, and will. He's been a menace forever, and . . . he needs to open his country up for inspection so we can see whether or not he's developing weapons of mass destruction."
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NEWS ANALYSIS
In Testimony to 9/11 Panel, Rice Sticks to the Script
April 9, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/politics/09ASSE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, April 8 - When Condoleezza Rice took the national stage on Thursday morning, her task was to defend President Bush against the accusation that he was inattentive to terrorism before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and to defuse a debate that threatens his re-election campaign. She mounted the defense vigorously, but in the hours after she returned to the White House, it was evident that she had not defused the arguments.
At every turn in her three hours of often-contentious testimony, she stuck to the White House script: Everything that could have been done to prevent the attacks had been done. She did not acknowledge failings, apart from the institutional tensions that have long plagued the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a culture that made it impossible for a succession of administrations to see the threat unfolding in front of them.
She also did not concede that the newly arrived Bush administration was part of that problem, or that it, too, underestimated what it confronted or was distracted by other issues like tax cuts, China and missile defense. Moreover, her tone - as controlled as her delivery at one of her Stanford seminars - left many panel members wondering if she was defending a position that several of them have publicly said is indefensible.
For viewers who have not been following the details of the argument, there was the lingering question of whether anyone in the Bush White House is capable of admitting error - a step many of Ms. Rice's current and former colleagues said would help calm the political waters.
"If Dr. Rice wanted to change some minds, she needed to come out and admit that the administration - like so many of its predecessors - had made mistakes in addressing international terrorism," said Ken Pollack, a former analyst at the national security council and C.I.A. and now a scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. "Simply denying that this administration has underestimated the threat is unlikely to convince Americans who see the manifest failures of the United States government to address a systemic problem."
As expected, Ms. Rice was polite, brisk and precise, if a bit apprehensive-sounding at the start. But by the end of the three hours, her tone was so emphatic and unemotional that she may have created as many new debates about the administration's reaction as she settled old ones.
"This isn't over," one senior administration official said after watching her. "But we may have turned a corner."
Yet on Thursday evening, the White House was still trying to substantiate Ms. Rice's argument earlier in the day that an Aug. 6 intelligence briefing prepared for Mr. Bush about the deadly mix of Qaeda terrorists and airplanes contained nothing about "time, place, how or where" that the president could have acted upon. It was a sign of the political pressure on the White House, however, that at Mr. Bush's orders lawyers were finally racing to declassify the document, which they have kept out of view for more than two years.
Ms. Rice's strongest moments came when she made the case that a month and a half after settling into her office, she started developing a comprehensive - if long-range - strategy to upend Al Qaeda. She argued that the man who has been her harshest critic, Richard A. Clarke, had not left her with a plan, but rather a series of steps to lash out at Al Qaeda. She said that "we might have gone off-course" if the administration had pursued the group without trying to line up Pakistan and other key players.
Hiding the anger at Mr. Clarke that she has vented to friends, she praised him highly in public, and then said she had turned over responsibility for designing the administration's strategy to him. "He was to put that strategy together," she said, essentially putting the failures back in his lap.
But on the other major subject of the hearings - her response to the threats in the summer of 2001 - she was far less persuasive.
In one tangle after another with members of the commission, she did not put to rest questions about why the administration had not taken stronger action after learning of evidence that not only was Al Qaeda intent on striking the United States, but also that airplanes could somehow figure in the attack. She argued, for example, that the F.B.I. was conducting "70 full-field investigations" of Qaeda cells in the United States. Counterterrorism officials said on Thursday that the number overstated the intensity of their search, opening up a new line of inquiry even as Ms. Rice closed off others.
And then there was Ms. Rice's statement on Thursday morning: "There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it."
Yet the declassified version of the joint Congressional inquiry into the warnings that preceded the attacks determined that in May 2001, "the intelligence community obtained a report that bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States by way of Canada to carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives. This report mentioned without specifics an attack within the United States." That information was "included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August," it concludes.
That is just one example of how many disparities remain between the administration's account of what it knew in 2001 and what its critics said it should have pieced together. Ms. Rice kept arguing there was no "silver bullet." Several commission members, led by Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat best known for his role as a Watergate prosecutor, suggested that there were plenty of bullet fragments, and that the administration failed to put them together.
Addressing Ms. Rice with a tone of impatience that she rarely hears in the quiet halls of the West Wing, he demanded that she reveal to the world the title of that Aug. 6 briefing.
"I believe the title was `Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' " she said, immediately trying to explain that it was a historical document, not one containing an explicit warning. "I would like to finish my point here," she said as Mr. Ben-Veniste interrupted.
Mr. Ben-Veniste shot back, "I didn't know that there was a point."
The subtext of such angry exchanges was that Ms. Rice, while seeking to defuse criticism, was in no mood to move to a middle ground. There is too much at stake - starting with the president's reputation as the world's No. 1 warrior against terror, before and after Sept. 11.
But in the end, Ms. Rice's most effective argument may have been her acknowledgment that the country did not have the political will to organize against terrorism until blood was shed on American soil.
"The restructuring of the F.B.I. was not going to be done in the 233 days in which we were in office," she said. Nor, she said, was the country about to make its aircraft cockpits more secure, or threaten to invade Afghanistan, or conduct any other kind of preemptive military strike in the name of counterterrorism.
It was that way before World War I, she argued with the air of the academic she once was. It was that way before Pearl Harbor.
"And tragically," she told the commission, "for all the language of war spoken before Sept. 11, this country simply was not on a war footing."
--------
White House Works to Declassify Al Qaeda Threat Memo
April 9, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-security-bush.html
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - Under pressure from the 9/11 commission, the White House on Friday worked to declassify an intelligence memo that was used to inform President Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, that Osama bin Laden wanted to launch attacks inside the United States.
Democratic members of the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks demanded on Thursday that the president's daily intelligence briefing for that day be released to help them with their probe.
White House officials in Washington worked with government agencies involved in the production of the page-and-a-half memorandum to ensure its release would not compromise sources and methods of intelligence gathering.
Officials said the memo was not expected to be released on Friday and appeared more likely to come out as early as Saturday.
Bush was spending the week at his ranch near Crawford, Texas, and was being joined by members of his family for Easter weekend. His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was also expected in Crawford for Easter.
The memo's title -- ``Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States'' -- was revealed on Thursday in public testimony by Rice, and was a subject of close questioning.
The memo, called the President's Daily Brief and referred to as a ``PDB,'' was dated Aug. 6, 2001, and was given to Bush while he was vacationing in Crawford.
Democratic commissioners demanded to know why the document was not seen as a warning of the attacks little more than a month later when al Qaeda hijackers crashed two airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon and seized another that appeared headed toward Washington but crashed in Pennsylvania.
UNCORROBORATED REPORTING
Rice said the memo referred to uncorroborated reporting from 1998 that a terrorist might try to hijack a U.S. aircraft and blackmail the government into releasing terrorists who participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
``This briefing item was not prompted by any specific threat information, and it did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles,'' Rice said.
Commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator, said it appeared the classified memo hinted at a possible hijacking.
``This is what the August 6 memo said to the president -- that the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity, and I'd say it's consistent with preparations for hijacking,'' Kerrey said.
Bush is running for re-election based in part on his response to Sept. 11 and the White House said Kerrey was being selective about what information in the document he was putting out.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett told ABC's ``Good Morning America'' the CIA document ``cited many things that happened back in the 1990s, instances in 1998, 1997, in 1993. This was not specific threat information about a specific hijacking plan in the United States of America.''
``Trust me, I know this president. If he had information that there was going to be attacks in Washington or New York, he would have moved heaven and Earth to make sure it didn't happen,'' Bartlett said.
Democrats were not convinced that Bush responded as he should have to the document.
``While Dr. Rice repeatedly cited the lack of detailed or specific threats, there are no indications that the administration reacted to this briefing with the vigilance it clearly merited,'' West Virginia Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller said on Thursday.
-------- terrorism
Kidnap: the new weapon of terror
DAMIEN HENDERSON,
April 09 2004
UK Herald
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/13748-print.shtml
IT was the day a new and potentially lethal tactic came to Iraq, already the scene of devastating carnage.
Militants seized a number nationals from countries supporting the American-led coalition, demanding the immediate withdrawal of coalition troops and support personnel as the price for their safe return. Two Arabs from Jerusalem were also held.
It is the first time such kidnappings have taken place and the tactic threatens to exert fresh pressure on governments facing public unrest and criticism from opposition parties over their involvement in Iraq.
The groups of Japanese, Koreans and Arabs were apparently kidnapped in separate incidents yesterday. A British contractor, Gary Teeley, 37, missing since Monday after working at a US air base, was also believed to have been seized by militants.
Seven South Koreans, taken while doing missionary work, were later freed unharmed when their captors realised the nature of their work. But the three Japanese as well as two Israeli Arabs and the Briton were reported still to be hostages last night.
The seven South Korean Christian missionaries were stopped at a checkpoint on a road from Jordan to Baghdad, the South Korean foreign ministry said. They were held for about nine hours and reported to have been released in good condition.
An eighth member of the group, a woman named Kim Sang-mee, escaped when the vehicle she was in drove off before she could get out, the ministry said. The driver was Iraqi.
"We became subject to those people's inspection, and they detained our ministers," Ms Kim told South Korea's MBC news by phone from Iraq. "I was last to get out. And as I was about to get out, the driver drove away and I managed to escape."
South Korea's National Security Council called a meeting for this morning to review the situation and the escalating violence in Iraq as it makes final preparations to deploy troops there.
The foreign ministry later advised that people should refrain from entering Iraq and that all non-essential South Koreans staying there should "quickly evacuate".
South Korea plans to deploy 3600 troops to Iraq, but the deteriorating situation has been exploited by the opposition party ahead of next Thursday's elections.
The Millennium Democratic Party, South Korea's second largest opposition party, urged the government to "reconsider its troops dispatch" and 350 civic groups said they would campaign against candidates who have publicly supported the deployment.
Political pressure was stronger in Japan yesterday after a video was shown which had been seen on Iranian television yesterday. It showed, Iraqis from the previously unknown Saraya al Mujahideen (Mujahideen Brigades) putting knives to the throats of three Japanese hostages.
A statement released with the video said: "We tell you that three of your children have fallen prisoner in our hands and we give you two options - withdraw your forces from our country and go home or we will burn them alive and feed them to the fighters."
It added: "You have three days from the date of this tape's airing." A version of the tape, shown later on the American-funded Arabic channel al Hurra, showed the abductors shouting "Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest)" while a woman hostage screamed and covered her face.
The hostages then screamed "No Koizumi!" - denouncing Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese prime minister. At least one of the women on the video had a press card.
Japanese media later claimed that other members of the group were involved in relief work and field work on depleted uranium weapons.
The abductions came as Japan confined its 530 ground troops in the city of Samawah to their barracks over worries of the rapidly escalating violence involving Shi'ite militias. Mortars were fired near the base on Wednesday, but there were no injuries.
The government was quick to show its commitment to the Iraqi mission. Yasuo Fukuda, the chief cabinet secretary, called the abductions "unforgivable" but said they did not justify a Japanese withdrawal.
Japan's role in Iraq - the first time Japanese soldiers have been deployed in a combat zone since the Second World War - has been made specially sensitive by allegations that it breaches the country's pacifist constitution. Although they are not allowed to enter into combat, the government has claimed that soldiers can return fire when under attack. Yoriko Kawaguchi, the foreign minister, repeated a government warning for civilians to stay out of the country.
Japanese networks did not show the harshest portions of the kidnappers' video, including a scene in which the gunmen made the captives lie on the floor, pointing swords and knives at their chests and throats.
"I'm shocked, it's so cruel," Michiko Kaneko, 29, said in Tokyo. "I think it would be good if there is room for negotiation to keep the troops. If it's not possible, they should pull out, because the lives of the abductees are the most important."
But Katsuhiro Takahashi, 58, argued that Japan should remain in Samawah, even at the cost of the three hostages' lives.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Reliant Indicted for Manufacturing California Energy Crisis
SAN FRANCISCO, California, (ENS)
April 9, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-09-03.asp
The California energy crisis of 2000 and 2001 was manufactured for financial gain by at least one giant out of state energy company, according to an indictment handed down by a federal grant jury in San Francisco. Houston energy company Reliant Energy Services, Inc., and four of its officers were charged Thursday in connection with a federal criminal investigation of the manipulation of the California energy markets.
The grand jury returned a six-count indictment against Reliant Energy Services, Inc., a subsidiary of the company now known as Reliant Resources, Inc., and four of its officers - Jackie Thomas, a former vice president of Reliant's Power Trading Division; Reggie Howard, a former director of Reliant's West Power Trading Division; Lisa Flowers, a term trader for Reliant's West Power Trading Division; and Kevin Frankeny, Reliant's manager of western operations. All of the defendants are residents of Texas.
The indictment alleges that in June 2000, Reliant Energy Services and its officers and employees intentionally drove up the price of electricity in the state by shutting off its power generation to create the false appearance of a shortage. According to the indictment, the plan worked, and Reliant Energy Services allegedly reaped millions in illegal profits.
The defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and commodities manipulation and wire fraud, as well as manipulation and attempted manipulation of the price of a commodity in interstate commerce.
These charges are the first to be brought against a corporation for engaging in fraudulent and manipulative trading practices during the California energy crisis.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said, "The vast majority of American companies are businesses of integrity. The vast majority of corporate executives are honest, hardworking people. But when a company conducts itself in the manner Reliant Energy Services is alleged to have acted here, it will face severe consequences."
But Reliant says the company did nothing wrong and it intends to fight these charges. "We believe the actions that are the subject of the indictment were not in violation of laws, tariffs or regulations in effect at the time," said Reliant Resources General Counsel Mike Jines.
Mike Jines is senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of Reliant Resources, Inc. (Photo courtesy Reliant Resources) "During the week in question, electricity was plentiful in California, there was no supply shortage, no ISO declared emergency and no blackouts, and prices were relatively low," said Jines. "There is absolutely no basis to contend that this conduct contributed to the energy shortage that occurred in California later that year."
The scene was set when deregulation of the electricity industry forced California utilities to divest their generating plants between 1997 and 1999, and during this period Reliant acquired five California power plants.
The indictment alleges that in June 2000, defendant Flowers held a long trading position in the so-called "term" market for future delivery of electricity at the Palo Verde, Arizona trading hub.
On the morning of Monday, June 19, 2000, prices in the relevant California electricity markets fell dramatically. Based on Flowers' trades and market prices, Reliant's West Power Trading Division faced an unprecedented multi-million dollar financial loss, the indictment states.
To reverse Reliant Energy Service's losing financial position, the indictment alleges that the defendants devised an illegal scheme to drive up the price of electricity in California by shutting off the majority of the company's power generation plants, intentionally creating the appearance of an electricity shortage, and disseminating false and misleading information to the market that wrongly attributed the shut-downs to environmental limitations and maintenance problems.
According to the indictment, Reliant Energy Services's manipulation worked, and prices for electricity rose throughout the remainder of the week for all market participants in the California spot and term markets.
The indictment alleges that as a result of the defendants' fraud and manipulation, the California Power Exchange day-ahead market and the Independent System Operator (ISO) "real time" market published artificially inflated spot prices for electricity which were accessed by market participants throughout California.
These electricity markets then charged all market participants artificially high prices for day-ahead, real-time and emergency electricity and energy services purchased during the period of the manipulation, the indictment states.
Among the victims of the allegedly manipulated, artificially inflated prices for electricity was Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in San Francisco, which acquired electricity for its retail customers through these markets.
The indictment alleges that once the defendants achieved the artificial inflation of prices, Reliant Energy Services proceeded to turn certain of the company's plants back on in order to sell its power to California's grid manager, the ISO, for as much as $750 per megawatt hour - the federally imposed price cap at the time.
According to the indictment, the defendants also proceeded to sell the company's previously losing financial position in the term market, which had become profitable because of Reliant's manipulative scheme.
"Reliant was among a group of large energy companies that robbed California blind during deregulation, so this should be only the beginning of the indictments," said Douglas Heller, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.
Heller points out that Reliant charged the state of California as much as $1,900 per megawatt hour for electricity, about 6,300 percent more than the historic norm of $30 per mgh.
The foundation's own analysis shows energy company manipulation of the California energy market allowed the firms to overcharge California consumers by more than $20 billion between 2000 and 2001 and to excessively price long term energy contracts with the state by an estimated $22 billion dollars.
If convicted each defendant could go to prison for five years and be fined millions of dollars. But these penalties do not satisfy Heller, who wants to see electricity consumers get their money back.
Criminal charges alone are insufficient," Heller said. "The energy industry treated California's deregulation experiment like a license to steal and until the state's taxpayers and consumers recoup tens of billions of dollars from these thieves, even convictions will be a hollow victory."
Kevin Ryan is U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California and a member of the President's Corporate Fraud Task Force. He said, "A market controlled by fraud is not a free market. By shutting off power plants to boost the cost of electricity, Reliant's conduct is alleged to have left millions of consumers vulnerable to the higher costs and potential blackouts at the beginning of one of the worst energy crises in history."
Faced with evidence of widespread fraud within the company, Reliant chose to be uncooperative during the federal investigation, said Ryan. As a result, the grand jury and the Justice Department send an important message today to corporate America and consumers - even a Top Five energy company can and will face criminal prosecution if it engages in far reaching criminal conduct and fails to take immediate steps to disclose and clean up its act."
Speaking for Reliant, attorney Jines called that accusation "inaccurate and unfair."
Jines said the company voluntarily disclosed the conduct, agreed to a settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), assisted in making evidence available to the Corporate Fraud Task Force and Department of Justice, and made a series of presentations to the Department of Justice concerning the facts and the law.
"What Reliant did not do was agree that the conduct constitutes a criminal offense," Jines said.
In October 2003, Reliant agreed to a settlement to resolve pending cases stemming from a FERC staff investigation of "potentially" manipulative behavior that could total $50 million, FERC's largest ever.
But Heller wants the consumers of that electricity to get the overcharges back. "Now that they have indicted an energy company for a massive fraud against California, it is time for the federal government to stop protecting the power industry and force the companies to refund all the stolen money," said Heller.
FERC is also responsible for regulating power sold in the wholesale energy market, and the foundation said FERC should set prices at which electricity can be sold and bar the company from selling electricity at unregulated prices.
The group said that the FERC should immediately suspend all unregulated energy sales and return wholesale power pricing to a regulated process until the full extent of criminal behavior in the California market is determined.
FBI Director Robert Mueller, also a member of the Corporate Fraud Task Force, said the indictments demonstrate the FBI's dedication to investigating corporate greed at all levels, as "corporate fraud impacts not only individual victims but the entire economy as well."
----
Power Firm Charged in Calif. Energy Crisis
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62822-2004Apr8?language=printer
A federal grand jury in San Francisco yesterday charged Reliant Energy Services Inc. and four current or former employees with conspiracy, fraud and manipulating the price of electricity during California's power crisis nearly four years ago.
Government officials said the Houston-based subsidiary of Reliant Resources Inc. is the first corporation to face criminal charges related to widespread power interruptions and steep price increases in the western energy market in 2000 and 2001.
According to the indictment, a small group of Reliant Energy officials plotted to hide a multimillion-dollar trading loss in June 2000 by shutting off four of the company's five California power plants, causing energy prices to rise, and then bringing some of the plants back online to take advantage of the higher hourly power rates. The two-day scheme resulted in millions of dollars in profit for the company and caused California electricity buyers to overpay for power by as much as $32 million, the charges said.
"When the market is manipulated, trust is abused, and the corrupt profit at the expense of the law-abiding," Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said at a news conference in Washington.
Reliant officials denied the charges.
The parent company paid $13.8 million last year to settle a related federal regulatory investigation without admitting wrongdoing.
Prosecutors cited Reliant Energy's failure to promptly disclose the California incident as a rationale for the rare step of slapping the company with criminal charges.
"Faced with evidence of widespread fraud within the company, Reliant chose to be uncooperative during the federal investigation," Kevin V. Ryan, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said in a written statement. "Even a Top Five energy company can and will face criminal prosecution if it engages in far-reaching criminal conduct and fails to take immediate steps to disclose and clean up its act."
Reliant Resources, which generates electricity and trades power and natural gas, serves 1.8 million customers in Texas and big commercial clients in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. It reported $11 billion in revenue last year.
Yesterday's criminal charges are the latest developments in a 17-month multi-agency investigation into what caused the meltdown in the western energy sector. Two former Enron Corp. officials have pleaded guilty in connection with manipulative trading strategies.
Reliant Resources lawyers denied that the company had broken the law or impeded the government investigation.
General Counsel Michael L. Jines said the company had come forward with information about the practices in question and helped the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission with their related investigations.
Transcripts released as part of the FERC settlement showed an unidentified Reliant Energy worker saying, "Trying to shorten the supply, uh? That way the price on demand goes up . . . That's cool." Conversations among traders are routinely taped to ensure the accuracy of electricity orders.
"There is absolutely no basis to contend this conduct contributed to the energy shortage that occurred in California later that year," Jines said yesterday in a written statement. "We intend to contest the charges vigorously."
Reliant Energy faces fines of several million dollars and up to five years' probation if it is convicted of all six charges in the indictment.
"Post-Enron, there's clearly a new priority within the Department of Justice to pursue white-collar offenses in general and large corporations in particular," said Barry Boss, a Washington defense lawyer.
In one Enron-related case in 2002, prosecutors indicted Arthur Andersen LLP, the energy company's outside accounting firm, on obstruction-of-justice charges after it disclosed that its auditors shredded documents related to an Enron audit. Andersen, which employed 28,000 people in the United States, ultimately collapsed as clients and its employees fled to rival firms.
Government officials since have stressed that they will consider the cooperation that companies provide before bringing criminal charges.
The Reliant charges were announced on the same day the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to change its guidelines for punishing corporations by giving companies credit at sentencing if their top executives support compliance programs and foster a culture that urges employees to report misdeeds.
Also charged yesterday were Jackie R. Thomas, who supervised the subsidiary's nationwide electricity trading business; V. Reginald Howard II, director of its West Power Trading unit; Lisa L. Flowers, who bought and sold electricity in California; and J. Kevin Frankeny, manager of western operations.
Prosecutors said the current and former Reliant Energy workers would appear in court this morning in San Francisco before Magistrate Judge James Larson. Defense lawyers for the four declined to comment or did not return calls. Each of the six charges against the defendants carries a prison sentence of up to five years and tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
Last October, Reliant Resources agreed to pay $15 million to settle a second FERC case related to California trading manipulations. Future cash penalties could reach $35 million.
The parent company has suffered over the past few years from a slump in stock prices across the energy sector, in which many companies have incurred large debt. Reliant has trimmed its payroll and sought other ways to cut costs, according to securities filings.
Reliant Resources warned last month in a regulatory filing that it expected the federal indictments.
The company said yesterday that the federal charges would not have a "material impact" on its operations or its licenses since Reliant Energy Services deals mainly with wholesale rather than retail customers.
--------
Reliant Goes to Court Over Energy Crisis
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Energy-Crisis-Indictment.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- For the first time, a criminal case has been lodged against a company accused of manipulating power prices during California's energy crisis.
A Reliant Resources Inc. power-trading unit and four of its top-level workers were indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on accusations that they illegally manipulated prices by shutting down the power plants during a two-day period.
Reliant Energy Services Inc., its former vice president, a director, manager and trader are accused of illegally increasing electricity costs while creating a ``false and misleading appearance of an electricity supply shortage.''
The four officials face charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and commodities manipulation. Jackie Thomas, 49, a former vice president of Reliant's power trading division; Reggie Howard, 37, a former director of the west power trading division; Lisa Flowers, 37, a term trader; and Kevin Frankeny, 42, manager of western operations, all were scheduled to surrender in San Francisco on Friday and appear before Magistrate Judge James Larson.
Calls to their attorneys were not immediately returned.
Mike Jines, Reliant's general counsel, said the charges were unfounded and that the company did not commit any wrongdoing.
``We intend to contest these charges vigorously,'' he said.
The company is accused of shutting down four of its five generating stations, withholding power from the market and purchasing electricity instead of producing it to meet quotas.
The indictments, unsealed Thursday, said the company disseminated false and misleading rumors to brokers about the maintenance status of power plants and the availability of power for three summer months in 2000 at the time of rolling blackouts in California.
Artificially high spot-market power prices were the result of ``defendants' conspiracy, scheme to defraud and manipulation,'' the indictment said.
Last month, Houston-based Reliant announced to shareholders that it expected an indictment against the subsidiary. The subsidiary is responsible for buying fuel for and marketing power produced by its electric generation facilities.
The criminal investigation targets the same actions over a two-day period that led to a settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in January 2003, according to Reliant. In that deal, Reliant neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing and agreed to return $13.8 million it made by shutting down power plants over two days in June 2000.
The price of electricity rose through the remainder of the week after that action, according to the indictment. Artificially inflated spot prices were then posted for market participants throughout California, including Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in San Francisco.
Once those prices were inflated, the indictment says Reliant Energy Services then sold power at the higher prices, costing electricity purchasers $32 million in overpayments.
``The vast majority of corporate executives are honest, hardworking people,'' Attorney General John Ashcroft said in Washington. ``But when a company conducts itself in the manner Reliant Energy Services is alleged to have acted here, it will face severe consequences.''
Several other energy companies have paid fines stemming from the energy crisis. Three former Enron Corp. traders have been charged with wire fraud related to price manipulation in California. Two of them have pleaded guilty and a third awaits trial in October.
The government said the company could have to pay millions in criminal fines, if convicted. A Justice Department official said the government sought charges against the company because of its lack of cooperation in the probe, which Jines disputed as ``inaccurate and unfair.''
The four individual defendants could face at least five years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines if convicted.
The case is United States v. Reliant Energy Services, 04-0125.
Reliant shares lost 23 cents Thursday to close at $8.46 on the New York Stock Exchange.
-------- environment
Hong Kong-bound Chinese water heavily polluted, says Greenpeace
Friday, April 09, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-04-09/s_22646.asp
HONG KONG - Greenpeace said Thursday that Chinese drinking water bound for Hong Kong contains a large amount of harmful chemicals, but the Hong Kong government insisted the water was safe.
The environmental group said samples from a duct that delivers water to Hong Kong from the neighboring Chinese province of Guangdong contained ammonia and mercury far exceeding mainland limits.
The Hong Kong government questioned Greenpeace's findings, saying data supplied by Guangdong officials showed the water from the Dongjiang River met Chinese quality standards.
Greenpeace alleged the duct, which was designed to bypass polluted waters nearby, had failed to prevent toxic chemicals from entering during high tide. But Hong Kong water official Suen Kwok-keung rejected that claim.
He said the water Hong Kong receives meets local and Chinese requirements and that the territory's water quality has improved since the 70-kilometer (43-mile) duct began operating in June.
----
Indian River Lagoon Restoration Wins Florida Approval
TALLAHASSEE, Florida, (ENS)
April 9, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-09-09.asp#anchor4
Florida Department of Environment Secretary Colleen Castille has signed off on a $1 billion joint plan by the state and federal government to restore water flows to the Indian River Lagoon.
When complete, the project will restore more than 53,000 acres of wetlands, reduce pollution and provide water storage to return a natural flow of fresh water to the St. Lucie and Indian River estuaries.
"Approval of this plan to protect the Indian River Lagoon is the next step in the restoration of America's Everglades," said Governor Jeb Bush. "This is further evidence of Florida's continued commitment to restore the River of Grass on time and under budget."
The Indian River Lagoon is recognized as an estuary of national significance and is a Florida Aquatic Preserve and an Outstanding Florida Water. Part of the $8 billion, 30 year plan to save America's Everglades, the project now requires federal approval by the U.S. Congress.
Once complete, the restoration project will return historic flows of cleaner water across 90,000 acres of natural land spanning Martin, St. Lucie and Okeechobee counties.
The plan includes construction and operation of 12,000 acres of inland reservoirs and 9,000 acres of pollution-filtering treatment marsh. To restore habitat within the estuaries, the plan also recommends removing more than 5 million cubic yards of muck from the waterways.
Together with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, South Florida water managers plan to build miles of pumps, levees and canals to capture and redirect water.
The reservoirs and treatment marshes, which will provide 170,000 acre-feet of water storage, offer an alternative to discharging excess water into the St. Lucie River that can harm habitat and degrade water quality.
"The South Florida Water Management District has completed a thorough scientific evaluation and delivered a comprehensive restoration plan," said Castille. "Delivering water at the right time to the right places will restore habitat, improve water quality in the St. Lucie River and provide flood protection to residents across three counties."
"The Indian River Lagoon South Restoration Project is moving forward because of a dedicated partnership between federal, state and county governments," said South Florida Water Management District Executive Director Henry Dean, "and because of the invaluable contributions from the local community."
Florida's share of Everglades restoration is ahead of schedule and under budget. Since 2000, Governor Bush has committed more than $2.5 billion through the end of the decade to clean up and restore the River of Grass.
----
Reliant Indicted for Manufacturing California Energy Crisis
SAN FRANCISCO, California, (ENS)
April 9, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-09-03.asp
The California energy crisis of 2000 and 2001 was manufactured for financial gain by at least one giant out of state energy company, according to an indictment handed down by a federal grant jury in San Francisco. Houston energy company Reliant Energy Services, Inc., and four of its officers were charged Thursday in connection with a federal criminal investigation of the manipulation of the California energy markets.
The grand jury returned a six-count indictment against Reliant Energy Services, Inc., a subsidiary of the company now known as Reliant Resources, Inc., and four of its officers - Jackie Thomas, a former vice president of Reliant's Power Trading Division; Reggie Howard, a former director of Reliant's West Power Trading Division; Lisa Flowers, a term trader for Reliant's West Power Trading Division; and Kevin Frankeny, Reliant's manager of western operations. All of the defendants are residents of Texas.
The indictment alleges that in June 2000, Reliant Energy Services and its officers and employees intentionally drove up the price of electricity in the state by shutting off its power generation to create the false appearance of a shortage. According to the indictment, the plan worked, and Reliant Energy Services allegedly reaped millions in illegal profits.
The defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and commodities manipulation and wire fraud, as well as manipulation and attempted manipulation of the price of a commodity in interstate commerce.
These charges are the first to be brought against a corporation for engaging in fraudulent and manipulative trading practices during the California energy crisis.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said, "The vast majority of American companies are businesses of integrity. The vast majority of corporate executives are honest, hardworking people. But when a company conducts itself in the manner Reliant Energy Services is alleged to have acted here, it will face severe consequences."
But Reliant says the company did nothing wrong and it intends to fight these charges. "We believe the actions that are the subject of the indictment were not in violation of laws, tariffs or regulations in effect at the time," said Reliant Resources General Counsel Mike Jines.
"During the week in question, electricity was plentiful in California, there was no supply shortage, no ISO declared emergency and no blackouts, and prices were relatively low," said Jines. "There is absolutely no basis to contend that this conduct contributed to the energy shortage that occurred in California later that year."
The scene was set when deregulation of the electricity industry forced California utilities to divest their generating plants between 1997 and 1999, and during this period Reliant acquired five California power plants.
The indictment alleges that in June 2000, defendant Flowers held a long trading position in the so-called "term" market for future delivery of electricity at the Palo Verde, Arizona trading hub.
On the morning of Monday, June 19, 2000, prices in the relevant California electricity markets fell dramatically. Based on Flowers' trades and market prices, Reliant's West Power Trading Division faced an unprecedented multi-million dollar financial loss, the indictment states.
To reverse Reliant Energy Service's losing financial position, the indictment alleges that the defendants devised an illegal scheme to drive up the price of electricity in California by shutting off the majority of the company's power generation plants, intentionally creating the appearance of an electricity shortage, and disseminating false and misleading information to the market that wrongly attributed the shut-downs to environmental limitations and maintenance problems.
According to the indictment, Reliant Energy Services's manipulation worked, and prices for electricity rose throughout the remainder of the week for all market participants in the California spot and term markets.
The indictment alleges that as a result of the defendants' fraud and manipulation, the California Power Exchange day-ahead market and the Independent System Operator (ISO) "real time" market published artificially inflated spot prices for electricity which were accessed by market participants throughout California.
These electricity markets then charged all market participants artificially high prices for day-ahead, real-time and emergency electricity and energy services purchased during the period of the manipulation, the indictment states.
Among the victims of the allegedly manipulated, artificially inflated prices for electricity was Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in San Francisco, which acquired electricity for its retail customers through these markets.
The indictment alleges that once the defendants achieved the artificial inflation of prices, Reliant Energy Services proceeded to turn certain of the company's plants back on in order to sell its power to California's grid manager, the ISO, for as much as $750 per megawatt hour - the federally imposed price cap at the time.
According to the indictment, the defendants also proceeded to sell the company's previously losing financial position in the term market, which had become profitable because of Reliant's manipulative scheme.
"Reliant was among a group of large energy companies that robbed California blind during deregulation, so this should be only the beginning of the indictments," said Douglas Heller, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.
Heller points out that Reliant charged the state of California as much as $1,900 per megawatt hour for electricity, about 6,300 percent more than the historic norm of $30 per mgh.
The foundation's own analysis shows energy company manipulation of the California energy market allowed the firms to overcharge California consumers by more than $20 billion between 2000 and 2001 and to excessively price long term energy contracts with the state by an estimated $22 billion dollars.
If convicted each defendant could go to prison for five years and be fined millions of dollars. But these penalties do not satisfy Heller, who wants to see electricity consumers get their money back.
Criminal charges alone are insufficient," Heller said. "The energy industry treated California's deregulation experiment like a license to steal and until the state's taxpayers and consumers recoup tens of billions of dollars from these thieves, even convictions will be a hollow victory."
Kevin Ryan is U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California and a member of the President's Corporate Fraud Task Force. He said, "A market controlled by fraud is not a free market. By shutting off power plants to boost the cost of electricity, Reliant's conduct is alleged to have left millions of consumers vulnerable to the higher costs and potential blackouts at the beginning of one of the worst energy crises in history."
Faced with evidence of widespread fraud within the company, Reliant chose to be uncooperative during the federal investigation, said Ryan. As a result, the grand jury and the Justice Department send an important message today to corporate America and consumers - even a Top Five energy company can and will face criminal prosecution if it engages in far reaching criminal conduct and fails to take immediate steps to disclose and clean up its act."
Speaking for Reliant, attorney Jines called that accusation "inaccurate and unfair."
Jines said the company voluntarily disclosed the conduct, agreed to a settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), assisted in making evidence available to the Corporate Fraud Task Force and Department of Justice, and made a series of presentations to the Department of Justice concerning the facts and the law.
"What Reliant did not do was agree that the conduct constitutes a criminal offense," Jines said.
In October 2003, Reliant agreed to a settlement to resolve pending cases stemming from a FERC staff investigation of "potentially" manipulative behavior that could total $50 million, FERC's largest ever. But Heller wants the consumers of that electricity to get the overcharges back. "Now that they have indicted an energy company for a massive fraud against California, it is time for the federal government to stop protecting the power industry and force the companies to refund all the stolen money," said Heller.
FERC is also responsible for regulating power sold in the wholesale energy market, and the foundation said FERC should set prices at which electricity can be sold and bar the company from selling electricity at unregulated prices.
The group said that the FERC should immediately suspend all unregulated energy sales and return wholesale power pricing to a regulated process until the full extent of criminal behavior in the California market is determined.
FBI Director Robert Mueller, also a member of the Corporate Fraud Task Force, said the indictments demonstrate the FBI's dedication to investigating corporate greed at all levels, as "corporate fraud impacts not only individual victims but the entire economy as well."
----
Does the Great White North deserve its green reputation?
Friday, April 09, 2004
By John Holt,
E/The Environmental Magazine
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-04-09/s_12990.asp
The widely held notion that Canada is taking excellent care of its wild, pristine lands - far better than the gluttonous citizens in the United States - is nothing more than a misperception approaching myth. Americans, or Yanks as they are often called up north, are frequently verbally assailed by Canadians with the misplaced and perhaps naïve notion that all U.S. citizens are swine when it comes to caring for and preserving quality country.
Canadians, in contrast, are valiant, conscientious souls who have no blood on their hands. This stance is at best spurious and possibly created to hide the fact that the western provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon are being plundered at an astonishing rate.
While I was having a couple of drinks in a bar called The Pit in Dawson City, Yukon, last summer, a Canadian came up to me and asked where I was from. When I told him he said, "You damn Yanks don't give a damn about your own land. You log it and stripmine it all to hell. Then you come up here to enjoy our country." Over the years I've heard many comments along those lines.
True, there are individuals in Canada who have devoted their lives to preserving the land and there are, as most of us know all too well, greedy people tearing apart the last remaining shreds of unspoiled country in the United States. But fair is fair, and the bottom line is that Canadians should take stock of their own environmental situation before gleefully casting aspersions America's way.
Forty years of being an inveterate road bum, traveling back roads on a skinny budget, fishing malarial bogs, inadvertently canoeing class V whitewater, hiking nonexistent trails bound for nowhere, and unavoidably staying on top of environmental issues in Canada has provided me an ongoing opportunity to see disturbing change in a land of incredible splendor and abundance - one peopled with some truly remarkable, generous, and creative individuals. But in the last five years, these destructive shifts in direction have been seismic, both metaphorically and literally.
Land Under Siege
The notion that Canada is the great white sustainable north is not wholly without merit. On the Environmental Sustainability Index, developed by Columbia and Yale Universities, Canada is ranked fourth and the United States 45th. Canada allows industrial hemp production, while the United States prohibits it, and is also a signatory to the U.S.-shunned Kyoto Treaty on global warming.
But when it comes to allowing extractive industries to run rampant, Canada may be king. From Fort Nelson in northern British Columbia to Rocky Mountain House in central Alberta to the vast Tintina Trench region in the southern Yukon and over east to Yellowknife on Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, the landscape is under siege. The extraction industries are running the show, tearing, blasting, sucking, and cutting every diamond, gold nugget, drop of oil, chunk of coal, and stick of timber they can access. If it's of value, these industries intend to have it.
What's going down in western Canada puts the devastation being visited on states like Montana, Wyoming, and West Virginia look mild by comparison. What are obviously horrendous clearcuts or devastating open-pit coalmines in the U.S. West are everyday situations in Canada too. Both countries are mining their natural resources at an alarming rate.
Canadian provincial campgrounds are filled to the brim with late-model pickups tricked out with all the options and pulling expensive fifth wheelers and pricey speedboats, ATVs, and jet skis. The Cypress Hills section along the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, the setting for Wallace Stegner's book Wolf Willow, are now so overrun as to resemble a scene from National Lampoon's Vacation. Housing developments in cities such as Calgary and Edmonton stretch for miles with thousands of quarter-million-dollar homes.
All of this comes not only from the jobs provided by these corporations but also from royalties paid by the industry based on the amount of a given mineral extracted from a province. In Alberta, this figure exceeds $6 billion annually just for coal. The money is flowing in direct proportion to the abundance of the oil coming from countless wells hammered into the Canadian countryside. The old phrase "a chicken in every pot" has been updated in the northland to "an oil pumpjack in every yard."
Killing a Good Town
A good example - and there are many - is Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. This used to be a rather sedate town of a few thousand sometimes-impoverished souls who enjoyed life on the bluffs above the North Fork of the Saskatchewan River. The residents could take part in all of the outdoor activities one would expect in an area that rests in the foothills along the east slope of the Canadian Rockies, surrounded by dense, mature pine forest with countless rivers and streams pouring out onto the prairie. Lakes of the purest water abound, as do grizzlies, moose, eagles, deer, wolves, various species of trout, grayling, and mountain lions. For years, timber generated decent incomes for many, as did motels, restaurants, and service stations that supplied occasional tourists with basic needs. Most everyone knew everybody else and crime rates were low.
The town, originally founded 150 years ago because of the fur trade and the natural highway provided by the Saskatchewan River, is now a riot of oil rigs, logging trucks, related workers, and the destructiveness that comes from too much money deposited in a local economy way too quickly. Residents are now moving towards surliness, depression, and anger caused by these rapid changes to their lifestyle.
A recent trip up that way this spring revealed streets, even residential side streets, overrun with trucks of all sizes running helter-skelter to the oil-and-gas biz shuffle. Gas stations are constantly busy filling the tanks of industry vehicles.
Beleaguered locals put on game but grim faces in the wake of this onslaught. A woman at a local bakery said, "I don't even remember what my town used to be. None of us knows anyone the way we used to. This place is frantic, like Calgary."
Rocky Mountain House has more than tripled in population, and that doesn't include the countless oil and gas roustabouts, drilling maintenance crews, surveyors, and the like.
What is happening to longtime residents of Rocky Mountain House and countless other towns scattered about the forests, mountains, and prairies of western Canada is to be expected wherever extractive industry moves in and shoves locals out of the way.
What was once home is now a corporate compound replete with out-of-control drinking, drugs, prostitution, and the ubiquitous grifters plying a variety of hustles and cons - the ever-present tagalongs to this avaricious carnival. The townspeople don't know what's happening to them or their land. All that most of them see is the quick money fix that blinds them to the negative and long-term changes to this way of life.
"In terms of world greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. is responsible for 25 percent and Canada 2 percent," said Jim Fulton of the Vancouver, Canada-based David Suzuki Foundation. "But Canadians are the largest per capita users in the world. We use more energy on a daily basis than the entire continent of Africa.
"The impact from gas and oil exploration, especially in the boreal forest of Alberta, is catastrophic," said Fulton. "Exploratory roads are laid out in a grid pattern that runs for hundreds of miles east-and-west and north-and-south. The combined impact of seismic exploration, then bringing in heavy equipment and constructing storage facilities, is enormous.
Then these roads are used by people on ATVs. This affects wildlife including migratory birds, bears, and wolves. The terror experienced by caribou, deer, and moose from ATVs cannot be overstated. If these animals are forced to flee even short distances, they frequently overheat or lose pregnancies. Often they die. In some areas moose populations have vanished, leaving indigenous populations without sustenance.
"The oil reserves in our tar sands are the largest in the world, larger than those of Saudi Arabia," said Fulton. "And the North American oil and automotive industries are doing anything but encouraging fuel-efficient vehicles and conservation. Members of the oil industry are criminals of the first order."
The continual boom-and-bust cycle of the West is at play in Canada. Ten, maybe 20 years of feast, then complete collapse and all of the new homes and expensive toys go back to the banks while the oil, coal, and timber companies are long gone, searching for the next valley to plunder. It's an old, ugly story that's been played out in Butte, Montana; Deadwood, South Dakota; and in ghost towns with names like Garnet, Pony, and Como. Now the routine is playing in Canada.
Millions of acres of land in these western provinces are being surveyed, mapped, and then exploited by these extractive industries. And production figures in oil and gas, coal, and other minerals along with timber are climbing rapidly and, in many cases, equal or exceed production totals in the United States. Forest trunk roads that used to wind serenely through dense pine woods and alongside unspoiled rivers in the Rocky Mountain foothills are now bustling, muddy or dusty corridors conveying a steady stream of enormous trucks hauling huge machinery.
Incoming!
A couple years ago, a friend and I were traveling north from Rocky Mountain House on Forest trunk 743. We were working on a book about the northern high plains called Coyote Nowhere. The late-June weather was warm but rainy and the dirt roads were now a muddy and treacherous quagmire.
Even if there had been no other traffic the drive would have been a sporting proposition. We'd been warned by a forest employee the night before in a campground along the Pembina River to watch out for the steady stream of oil and coal rigs moving up and down these roads.
"They don't stop or even move over for anyone. People are killed all of the time. Trucks, cars, campers: all of them sometimes crushed flat like empty beer cans. That's an extremely dangerous drive you're about to undertake." He wished us luck and then headed off down the road to check on another campsite.
At the time I considered his warning a bit extreme, but I was to find out differently. The next morning as we drove north, a steady stream of enormous rigs roared past us, the tires on these machines taller than our GMC Suburban. The noise of the engines was deafening as they belched thick black clouds of diesel exhaust. While climbing a sticky hill, a semi pulling drilling equipment moved well over to our side of the road, just missing us by inches and drenching the Suburban's windshield in a thick wash of slop. We barely made it to the top of the rise, driving blind, and barely managed to skid over into a slight turnoff.
Getting out to collect ourselves and settle frayed nerves, I looked around. On both sides vast open-pit coal mines stretched deep into the ancient pine forest. Tall metal stacks that rose above the trees were crowned by flickering flames of natural gas being burned off at several pumping stations. Oil company signs said "No Trespassing" at the entrance to every side road. In the pits, large machinery was scooping up and hauling away coal. Dynamite blasting roared in the distance. Far in the west the lofty crest of the Rockies flickered snow white between swirling openings in the cloud cover.
Fifteen years ago when I traveled this road on my way to the then-remote mountain town of Grand Cache (now overrun with the same madness as in Rocky Mountain House), I felt like I was in the middle of a primeval forest, that a grizzly or moose could appear from the edge of the trees at any moment. Now the atmosphere was more like a scene of some vast industrial park.
The rivers were running muddy along the road, and the only wildlife I saw was an occasional raven gliding high above what remained of the forest. This vision of desecration continued for 60 miles before we turned off onto another road, but that one soon led past a mammoth coal mine where mountains on the eastern edge of Jasper Park in the Gregg River drainage were being carved down to nothing. The air was filled with the noise of heavy machinery and was choking with waves of black dust swirling in miniature tornados as the wind whipped down from the remaining mountains. More than 800 miles north from my home, I felt like I was in Detroit.
A Fragile Balance
Half of Canada is covered by temperate forest (like that found in the Northwestern United States), temperate rainforest or boreal forest (similar to that found in Siberia). The boreal forest is a 600-mile-wide band of timberland stretching from approximately 300 miles north of the U.S. border to the treeline in the Arctic and spanning the breadth of the country.
Approximately 300 million acres of the country's forest are managed for timber production. This is an area more than one-and-a-half times the size of several Midwestern states. Two-thirds of Canada's estimated 300,000 wildlife species live in the forest. The temperate and boreal forests along with the arctic tundra of these four provinces are extremely fragile. I spoke with a biologist at the Tombstone Campground Interpretive Center located on the Yukon's Dempster Highway. She pointed out that as few as 20 people walking the same line to a distant peak and back again would disturb the vegetation and soils of this boreal environment to the extent that it would take several decades to return to its natural state.
Less than two dozen people treading lightly, not thousands of pieces of machinery the size of houses, thousands more workers, and thousands of tons of explosives, all ripping and digging away at some of the last wilderness left on the planet.
These figures give an idea of the magnitude of these extractive processes in Canada: The total timber harvest in the country is near 8 billion board feet per year, up from 2.9 billion in 1950. (In the United States this figure is around 4 billion board feet per year, down from 6 billion in the 1980s.)
Canada's forests cover an area nearly three times the size of Europe. This represents 10 percent of the world's forest cover, but only 5.5 percent of this is under some form of legal protection or constraint related to logging. This is some of the most productive forest in terms of biomass in the world. Grizzly bears, cougars, owls, woodland caribou, and elk live there. Approximately 10.8 million acres of logged forestlands in Canada (an area more than twice the size of Wales) remain denuded. If present trends continue, all of Canada's suitable forest will be harvested within 30 to 35 years.
"Alberta is a very, very wealthy province compared to Montana, but that comes with its own baggage," said Alberta guitarist Amos Garrett, who is also a devoted conservationist. "The provincial government is making millions in oil taxes and that just comes in the mail. Maybe there's $10 million to $15 million coming in from sportsmen. That's paltry. So there are deaf ears in Edmonton [the provincial capital]. I don't think we have the programs that you do down there in the States. You do much more for the trout and upland birds than we do."
In British Columbia, ancient forests are vanishing at the rate of one acre every 70 seconds, or 418,000 acres per year. In the time it takes to watch a 30-minute sitcom on television, 26 acres of forest have been leveled. In the past decade an area eight times the size of Connecticut has been clearcut. Companies do not have to bid competitively to log public forests. Fees are typically set at one-fourth to one-third market value.
The majority of logging in British Columbia is in old-growth forest, and the Canadian government estimates that the province is overcutting its woods by 20 percent. Clearcutting makes up 80 percent of all logging.
In B.C., it is legal to log smaller salmon streams down to the banks, destroying aquatic life and leaving no protections against fine sediment and high temperatures that are lethal to salmon eggs and fry. There is no endangered species legislation to protect wildlife from logging, despite the fact that the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada now lists 387 species of plants and animals at risk of extinction (8 percent of these species are shared with the United States). This is an increase of 20 percent since 1992.
Big on Fossil Fuels
Coal production figures for Canada are similar. Alberta mines 27 million tons annually; British Columbia, 40 million tons. The Canadian oil and gas industry invested more than $20 billion in exploration and development in 2000, making it the single-largest capital investor in the nation. Oil production is not expected to peak for 10 years. B.C. government officials have asked leaders in Ottawa to lift a decades-old ban on offshore drilling along Canada's Pacific Coast. Geologists estimate that there could be up to 10 billion barrels of oil and 1.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the area.
"We risk enormous damage to British Columbia's environmental heritage, all for a short-term dollar," said David Hocking, communications director for the David Suzuki Foundation.
Much of the United States from one coast to the other has been devastated by coal mining. Canada's western provinces are experiencing a similar fate, and the pace of the industries is accelerating. Within perhaps as little as two decades the ecosystem damage inflicted upon the Yukon, British Columbia, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories will make what happened in the United States pale in comparison. At the present rate, most natural resources will be exhausted in Canada within 40 years.
Even if Canada was exploiting its natural resources at only one-half the rate of the United States - which it isn't - everything would be gone within a century.
Some of the reasons why the mineral extraction industries have engendered the ire of both U.S. and Canadian citizens are exemplified by comments from the Canadian Minister of Energy and Mines, Richard Neufeld, during his opening address for the 44th Canadian Conference on Coal two years ago in British Columbia.
"We have eliminated corporate capital tax, reduced corporate income tax by 3 percent to 13.5 percent," said Neufeld. "Over 90 percent of our coal is exported, mainly to steel-making countries. The philosophy behind our actions is simple: increase certainty. Streamline regulatory requirements and make B.C. a better place to do business. We've changed the Coal Act to accomplish this for coal exploration and mining. As a result, coal exploration and development can proceed with fewer encumbrances.
"We will make dramatic cuts to prescriptive regulations under the Health, Safety, and Reclamation Code to give companies more flexibility to focus on results, not process. We have amended the Mines Act, and we are developing related regulations to allow most exploration activities to take place without the need for permits," said Neufeld.
This "philosophy" sounds remarkably similar to that espoused by the current administration in Washington, D.C.
During a recent trip to the Yukon, I pulled over at a wayside that offered a spectacular view of the Klondike River valley and the seemingly endless sweep of mountains rolling north towards the Arctic Circle. The ragged, surreal peaks of the Tombstone Range ghosted in the distance.
Looking to my left I noticed a large display sign touting a gold mine that was hidden behind a near range of mountains. Pictures and words graphically showed the huge scope of the operation and extolled the mine as providing jobs and money for Yukon residents. Certainly, this is true, but what will the real cost to Canadians and all of us be when all is said, blasted, and done in the not-so-distant future?
John Holt is the author of Coyote Nowhere: In Search of America's Last Frontier (St. Martin's Press). His latest book is a novel called Hunted (Lyons Press) about strip mining in southeastern Montana.
-------- health
New Drug Law's Cost Impact Debated
Some Question Whether Insurance Companies Will Get Lower Prices
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62515-2004Apr8?language=printer
As lawmakers squabble over just how much the new Medicare prescription drug package will cost, a team of government auditors in Philadelphia knows one thing: If history is any guide, it won't be a good deal for seniors or taxpayers.
Year after year, for more than a decade, bureaucrats have been spitting out reports detailing "excessive overpayments" by Medicare for the limited number of drugs that the program covered, and laid out how the government could have cut those costs in half by using its purchasing power to negotiate lower prices, the way the Department of Veterans Affairs does.
Historically, Medicare covered only medicines, such as cancer chemotherapy, given in a hospital or administered directly by a physician. Last fall, Congress added a broad prescription drug benefit that covers outpatient medication, a major change that dramatically raised the financial stakes.
Under the earlier, limited drug program, the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services began sounding the alarm in 1998, identifying what it called $1 billion in overpayment that year for 34 drugs. For three medications, Medicare paid 16 times more than the VA, the analysts wrote.
A year later, taxpayers were paying even more. "Medicare and its beneficiaries would save $1.6 billion a year if 24 drugs were reimbursed at amounts available to the VA," wrote the IG team based in Philadelphia. Last year, for example, Medicare's cost for the asthma treatment albuterol was 47 cents a milligram, while the VA was paying 5 cents a milligram.
Because the federal government and beneficiaries share Medicare costs, taxpayers and senior citizens were hit by the higher prices. By the time two congressional panels decided to investigate in 2001, the price gap was nearly $2 billion -- $380 million of that in higher co-payments by elderly patients. When Deputy Inspector General George F. Grob was called to testify, he could barely conceal his frustration.
"So every day, every month, every period that we don't solve the problem, the problem gets bigger, and the Medicare expenditures rise," Grob told the lawmakers in his written testimony.
Now, the whopping figures tallied by his team have become a critical piece of ammunition in the debate over the new Medicare benefit intended to help America's seniors afford life-saving medicines.
There remains sharp disagreement over how the new drug coverage should be run and whether it is better to have the government use its clout to bargain over prices or turn the negotiating over to private companies.
The new law, which goes into full effect in 2006, will provide optional coverage for the vast majority of medications generally purchased at a pharmacy. Participants will be able to choose which insurance package they wish to buy, with subsidies provided to low-income seniors, and the Bush administration predicts that private companies administering the benefit will negotiate discounted prices as they compete to sign up the elderly.
Over the years that Medicare provided only a limited drug benefit, the inspector general's office was not the only place to remark on the gap between what the VA and Medicare paid for drugs. Another is the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, where Comptroller General David M. Walker's staff documented excessively high drug costs and has long recommended that Medicare and other government programs follow the VA model, leveraging its purchasing power for lower prices.
During the debate over the new Medicare drug benefit, however, lawmakers, led by the Bush White House, added a provision that rejected the tack advocated by Grob, Walker and the dozens of auditors who have tracked the rise of Medicare spending. Rather than adopt the VA model, the new law explicitly prohibits the government from negotiating with drugmakers.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) calls the prohibition "a living, breathing testimonial to the political influence of the pharmaceutical companies" by preventing "Medicare from doing exactly what the VA has been doing: saving hundreds of millions of dollars."
If the government did use its bargaining power on behalf of all 41 million Medicare recipients, "it would drive down prices for Medicare first and eventually across the board," predicted Rep. Tom Allen (D-Maine).
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and others have filed legislation to eliminate the ban on using the government's negotiating power, an approach endorsed by presumed Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and the seniors group AARP.
"The single most irresponsible provision in the Medicare bill is the prohibition that prevents Medicare from negotiating lower-priced prescription drugs," Kennedy said in a statement. "The Bush administration pretends to protect senior citizens, but it's bilking them instead, by allowing pharmaceutical firms to charge such exorbitant prices."
Leslie Norwalk, acting deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), agreed that the federal government "does not have a very good track record" on Medicare drug prices. But the solution, she argued, is not a greater government role.
By letting the private sector -- insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers who administer drug benefits for insurers -- run the program, Medicare should benefit from seasoned private sector negotiators, she said.
The Congressional Budget Office agreed in its analysis that the private plans administering the new Medicare benefits "will have strong incentives to negotiate price discounts."
When the new law is implemented in 2006, "I am confident that beneficiaries will get prices similar to those we see in the commercial market," Norwalk said. "The same companies that are negotiating on behalf of senators, congressmen and Cabinet secretaries will also be negotiating on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries."
But that, Allen said, is the problem. If Medicare intends to give seniors health benefits similar to what federal employees receive -- as Norwalk suggested -- taxpayers would need to pour even larger subsidies into the program. And if Medicare follows the route of the private sector, get ready for double-digit premium increases, he warned.
"We are moving Medicare toward a private insurance program," he said. "But it's not clear whether we are moving toward the federal employees' model or the kind of insurance small businesses are struggling with today."
Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, director of the University of Minnesota's Pharmaceutical Research in Management and Economics Institute, cautioned that in the past, pharmacy benefit companies have been "more strongly aligned with the drug companies than their clients," and there is little reason to expect that will change with Medicare.
Administration officials and many conservative thinkers argue that if Medicare negotiated directly with drug manufacturers, it would amount to a government monopoly and a system of price controls. Citing the energy crisis of the 1970s, James Pinkerton, a fellow at the New America Foundation, predicts the approach would lead to drug shortages and sharp cutbacks in pharmaceutical research.
The other side counters that Medicare recipients, expected to consume $1.6 trillion worth of medication over the next decade, would be a major player but not a monopoly in a marketplace estimated at $4.6 trillion.
"Medicare would have a major impact" on the market, Walker said. "That doesn't mean it's wrong."
Prescriptions bought by the VA for its 4 million beneficiaries cost at least 24 percent less than the average retail price, said Steve Thomas, director of the program. For many drugs, however, the VA negotiated price is on average 40 percent less that what most consumers pay, Thomas said.
The VA program has proven so popular it was extended to active-duty military and the U.S. Public Health Service, but efforts to open it up further met with "institutional resistance within the VA," Walker said. "They negotiate such a good deal," he said, that if others attempted to take advantage of it, drug companies might end up charging the VA more.
Asked if it would be possible for Medicare to adopt the VA model, Thomas said he could not comment. "I was told not to," he said.
But Walker said policymakers "need to do things in the collective best interest. That's how you get a better deal for taxpayers."
Still, the VA and Medicare do differ in significant aspects. Historically, Medicare has provided retirees with broad options, such as the ability to choose their own doctors or purchase any medicine prescribed for a particular ailment.
The VA, on the other hand, "is a government-run, government-operated system" that limits patient choices, Mark B. McClellan, the new CMS chief, said in a congressional hearing. Doctors and hospitals are told which medications are covered by the VA, based on a formulary or preferred drug list.
"It's one set of drugs that are on formulary and others that aren't covered, and that's what leads to some of their strong negotiating power," he said.
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Past Season's Flu Worst in 4 Years
Reuters
Friday, April 9, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62502-2004Apr8.html
ATLANTA, April 8 -- This season's influenza epidemic in the United States was the severest in four years, largely because of the predominance of a more virulent strain, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.
U.S. flu cases appeared earlier than usual last October, peaked in November and December, and declined rapidly in the first two months of this year, according to an article in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
But based on preliminary data from labs, doctors and city and state health officials, "it was comparable to several seasons in the 1990s in which similar influenza virus strains circulated," the CDC said.
The Atlanta-based agency said it had received reports of 142 flu-related deaths in U.S. residents younger than 18 as of March 27.
The CDC had not previously tracked these deaths, so it could not say whether they had increased.
Exact figures for flu fatalities among adults are unavailable because doctors are not required to report them.
Influenza, which is marked by respiratory inflammation, fever, muscle pain and intestinal-tract irritation, kills about 36,000 people and hospitalizes 114,000 in the United States every year.
The flu, which typically circulates in the nation from October through March, hit hard late last year before many Americans had been vaccinated. A subsequent rush for shots led to a temporary vaccine shortage in some areas.
Drugmakers produced 83 million doses of vaccine for the 2003-04 flu season, fewer than in the previous year, when a large number went unused and were thrown away.
Efforts to combat the flu were further complicated by the fact that the vaccine was not very good at protecting people against the A (H3N2) flu strain, which was most common this season.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Peace trekkers set off for British nuclear arms facility
LONDON (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409140855.rv8106ni.html
Some 300 peace activists set off from central London on Friday on an Easter weekend trek to a British nuclear arms facility to denounce the ongoing development of the world's most lethal weapons.
The 90-kilometer (52-mile) march on the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, Berkshire, west of London, was organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), one of Britain's oldest anti-war groups.
It alleges that the Aldermaston facility -- which the peace trekkers intend to surround upon their arrival Monday -- is expanding to develop new nuclear weapons to replace Britain's ageing Trident submarine-based missiles.
The march set off from Trafalgar Square in London where, according to police estimates, around 1,000 people gathered for a CND rally to warn of the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.
"Fifty-nine years ago Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by the most terrifying weapons ever devised, and tens of thousands were killed," said veteran politician Tony Benn, referring to the 1945 bombings of the two Japanese cities at the end of World War II.
"That was a warning to the human race that we ignore at our peril," he told the smaller-than-expected crowd.
CND vice president Bruce Kent said the group wanted to "wake up a sleeping population" to the dangers that nuclear weapons still pose, a decade after the demise of the Cold War.
He said a UN conference in New York in May to review the Non-Proliferation Treaty would be a critical event in international efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.
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Protest of IMF Planned This Month
By Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63013-2004Apr8.html
Groups opposed to the policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank announced plans yesterday for a series of protests in downtown Washington to coincide with the two institutions' spring meetings this month.
Activists with the D.C.-based Mobilization for Global Justice, which helped organize the raucous anti-globalization protests in April 2000 that led to mass arrests and disrupted parts of downtown, are planning rallies and teach-ins April 21 through 25.
The main event is a march on April 24 that will begin and end at Franklin Square and include stops at the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the IMF and World Bank. A "small-scale" action involving civil disobedience is being planned for April 23, although the details are still being worked out, organizers said.
Protesters said the two institutions, which are marking their 60th anniversary this year, promote policies that cause poverty and inequality, harm the environment and lead to the privatization of basic services such as water provision.
"We're expecting a large, boisterous, vigorous demonstration," said Mobilization organizer David Levy, as he stood at a lectern at the National Press Club in front of oversize puppets of President Bush and IMF and World Bank leaders.
Levy and other organizers said it was too early to say how large the turnout would be.
Damian Milverton, a spokesman for the World Bank, said the protesters have raised some important issues over the years, but he disputed their characterization of the bank's work. "We're very proud of our overall record at the bank, and the 10,000 people who work here are doing so because they're trying to make a very positive difference in the lives of the poor around the world, not to come in and make things worse," he said.
The Bush administration's war on terrorism has preoccupied many of the activists who had taken up the cause of anti-globalization, dampening the energy and mass appeal of the movement. The last anti-IMF and World Bank demonstration in Washington, held in April 2003 while public attention was centered on the war in Iraq, was smaller and less disruptive than previous protests.
This year, unlike the demonstrations in 2000, there are no calls to "shut down" the meetings by blocking delegates from entering or leaving the sessions. Instead, activists said the April 24 march will be followed by a carnival-style event at Franklin Square that will feature games and music. They are working with federal and local authorities to get permits for the march, which they said is not expected to be disruptive.
The focus of many of the activities will be near 18th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, the home of the IMF and World Bank. In addition to the march, an "Unhappy Birthday Party," a vigil and an anti-globalization conference will be held during the five-day period.
The protests will fall on the same weekend as the March for Women's Lives. The April 25 abortion rights march on the Mall is being coordinated by seven national women's and civil rights groups, and organizers said they are expecting hundreds of thousands of supporters to take part.
The IMF and World Bank protests and the women's rights march are being planned separately by two different coalitions, although they have cooperated on some of the logistics. Anti-globalization protesters said that they are having a contingent at the women's march as well as joining a feeder march but are not holding a separate IMF demonstration that day.
D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said police do not know how many demonstrators will participate in the weekend protests. Police officials have not asked for help from agencies outside the District but might change their minds before the demonstrations, he said.
He also said there would be some changes in police procedures as a result of the controversy over the arrests of hundreds of people in a downtown park the day before the opening of the IMF and World Bank's September 2002 meetings. Police were criticized by D.C. Council members and a federal judge for making the arrests without proper warning.
Ramsey said that the head of internal affairs no longer will serve as a field commander and that police officials will stress that demonstrators must be given warnings before they can be arrested for failure to obey.
"It's not really different, just making sure people follow the handbook," Ramsey said.
Staff writer David A. Fahrenthold contributed to this report.
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More Than 1,000 Protesters Held in Nepal
April 9, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nepal-Protest.html
KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) -- Police detained more than a thousand protesters for defying a ban on public rallies Friday, as an estimated 25,000 demonstrators flooded the streets of the Nepalese capital to demand that the king restore democracy.
Police rounded up the demonstrators and drove them away in trucks and buses for violating a ban the government imposed Thursday in hopes of heading off protests against the king who dismissed an elected government two years ago and replaced it with one loyal to the monarchy.
Since then, thousands of Nepalese have rallied across the country to demand elections and the restoration of Parliament. Some of the protests have turned violent, but no incidents were reported on Friday.
Hundreds of police armed with batons, tear gas and guns with rubber bullets lined the street leading to the royal palace, after Nepalese officials said they received intelligence reports rebels planned to infiltrate the rallies and cause chaos.
The demonstrations are being organized by the country's five largest political parties, including the Nepali Congress and the United Marxist Leninist Communist Party of Nepal.
They accused the government of using the rebel threat as an excuse for halting a series of rallies over the past week that have attracted tens of thousands of protesters. Thursday's announcement banned gatherings of more than five people in Katmandu and the suburb of Patan, and said violators would be arrested.
``We are going to defy the ban and continue with our peaceful protest until we get our demand,'' Ram Chandra Poudel, a member of the Nepali Congress party, said Friday. ``The rebel thing is just an excuse.''
The protesters are demanding that King Gyanendra restore the country's elected government.
The king dissolved Parliament and fired Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba in October 2002, accusing him of incompetence and failing to control a Maoist insurgency. The king then assumed executive powers and replaced the government with pro-monarchy politicians.
He promised last month to hold parliamentary elections within the next year, but the protesters have not let up.
The rebels, who claim to be inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, have been fighting since 1996 for a communist state. More than 9,000 people have been killed in the rebellion.
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20,000 Armenian Protesters Demand President Quit
By REUTERS
April 9, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4794810
YEREVAN (Reuters) - About 20,000 demonstrators massed in the capital of ex-Soviet Armenia on Friday to demand the resignation of President Robert Kocharyan and vowed to press their protests through next week.
In the largest public gathering since mass protests denouncing alleged irregularities in Kocharyan's re-election last year, demonstrators answering the call of two opposition parties poured into Freedom Square.
``Today, the fate of Armenia is being decided,'' Stepan Demirchyan, head of the opposition Justice Party, told supporters chanting ``Kocharyan out!''
Protest leaders had failed to seek official permission to hold the rally, but police took no action. New protests were planned every evening next week to pursue opposition demands.
Kocharyan's leadership in the Caucasus country remains beset by a failure to resolve a protracted dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh -- a territory populated by ethnic Armenians but assigned to mainly Muslim Azerbaijan in Soviet times.
Participants in Friday's rally said they wanted to secure changes to a law on referendums to hold a nationwide confidence vote on Kocharyan's administration.
The Constitutional Court proposed such a vote immediately after Kocharyan's re-election, but authorities took no action. ``This would be a good chance to ensure the president's departure in a civilized fashion,'' Demirchyan told the crowd.
Parties backing the president have said a referendum would be unconstitutional, but have offered talks with the opposition.
Opposition parties, which hold 25 of 131 seats in parliament after elections in May 2003, suspended their activity in the assembly in February after failing to persuade authorities to stage a referendum. But they returned last month to press their campaign for Kocharyan's resignation.
Observers said the parliamentary election last year was less fraudulent than the poll two months earlier that kept Kocharyan in power, but was still not up to international standards.
The parliamentary poll was the first since eight senior officials, including Armenia's prime minister, were killed in a 1999 shooting spree in the National Assembly.
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