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NUCLEAR
Rwanda's lesson: 'Never again'
Suppliers Readying for Asia Nuclear Power
Cheney to Promote Nuke Reactors to China
We Were Ignored, Ailing Soldiers Say
GIs: Dust made us ill
Army promises testing for depleted uranium
War on Iraq is a Nuclear War
Iran seeks European trio's backing over its nuclear stance
Hostage crisis dominates Cheney's Japan trip
Relatives appeal for Japanese hostages
THE HOSTAGE CRISIS: `All I can do is trust in fate'
Protests and tears as Iraqi kidnappers test Japan's resolve
Families rejoice at hostage release reports
Syria has details of Dimona nuclear reactor, former spy says
U.S. URGED TO SHUT DOWN ALGERIA, EGYPT NUKES
Ukrainian Nuclear Reactors Shut Down
Olivi, Co-Pilot in Nagasaki Bombing, Dies
In Reversal, U.S. Proposes to Remove Atom Waste
Cheney to urge staying course
Bush's Low Profile Questioned as Violence Flares in Iraq
Politics Can Get in the Way of Keeping Papers Secret
MILITARY
The Parallels of Wars Past
Afghan Troops Move Into City That Governor Was Forced to Flee
Afghans Say Renegade Withdraws from Northern City
Pakistani paramilitary haul illegal weapons in Karachi
Uzbekistan Says Arabs Trained Suspects
Air Force Defends Boeing Tanker-Lease Plan
Pentagon Says Changes Are Needed in Boeing Jet Deal
Pentagon Seeks to Use Foreign Airlines
Minister offers to quit over U.S. diplomat's exit
Iraq's enemy within
US offers Fallujah ceasefire, but marine killed as fighting goes on
UK struggles to be heard in Iraq
'Expect Snipers on All Minarets'
Talking Points Memo: an insider's memo from iraq
U.S. Troops Battle to Retake Cities
Seething City Filled With Dread
Sharon to Get U.S. Nod to Keep W.Bank Land - Report
In Mideast, Anger and Solidarity
NATO leaders tries to sooth Russian fears
Spy agency launches recruiting campaign
Judge Seeks More Info in China Spy Case
U.S. Relies on U.N. to Solve Problems of Power Transfer
Security Firms Coming Under Fire in Iraq
BBC's world audience sees U.S. as danger
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Afghan Route to Prosperity: Grow Poppies
American Airlines Revealed Passenger Data
Briefing on Al Qaeda Included Specifics
Al-Qaeda threat included in Bush memo, sources say
Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says
Families: Victims went to work, help
ENERGY
Florida High School First to Install Fuel Cell Power
Dead energy package finds new life as tax amendments
OTHER
Scientists find secrets of cell death
FDA Issues Caution About Lead In Some Candy From Mexico
ACTIVISTS
Lion, cops await nuke protesters
Demonstrators Skirmish With Police in Taiwan
Venezuela Abused Protesters, Human Rights Groups Charge
Kathy Kelly's Prison Address
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- africa
Rwanda's lesson: 'Never again'
April 10, 2004
By Clarence Page
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/cpage.htm
The two men were neighbors and good buddies. They often got together, told jokes and shared that great international adhesive of male bonding: beer.
That was before a mob insisted one friend club the other to death. It happened in Rwanda 10 years ago, a time and place where tribalism ran horribly amok. The victim had done nothing wrong except belong to the wrong ethnic group. As reported by Los Angeles Times correspondent Robyn Dixon, the confessed killer now rationalizes the death as the mob's fault: "Those people are to blame," he says. "Not me."
There are millions of sad stories in Rwanda. His is one of them. "Those people" are his people. Hutus turned on Rwanda's Tutsi minority on the night of April 6, 1994, after a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi was shot down. Bands of Hutu thugs, working mostly with machetes and astonishingly relentless enthusiasm, killed almost a million men, women and children and turned another 2 million into refugees, all for the crime of being Tutsis.
The horrible enormity of those numbers numbs the mind. A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, said Josef Stalin, who knew more than a little about how to stun the world into shocked disbelief through the sheer enormity of his mass killings.
Memories of Rwandan horror pain an idealistic world, a modern civilization that embraced the slogan "Never Again." Since the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed a half-century ago, one American president after another has pledged never to let such a mass murders of civilians occur again.
Yet, they do. Cambodia's killing fields in the 1970s, Saddam Hussein's attacks in northern Iraq in the 1980s, Bosnia's "ethnic cleansing" by Serbs in the '90s and Rwanda's horrors all proceeded without American action.
In Cambodia, Iraq and Rwanda, the U.S. did not even rush to offer stern words or impose sanctions. In Rwanda, the Clinton administration not only refused to authorize deployment of a multinational U.N. force, but actually fussed with other nations over who would pay for U.S. transport vehicles.
Yet, as Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in a speech he delivered at the Genocide Memorial site in Rwanda last December: "The lesson of each genocide is the same. The killing really takes off only after the murderers see that the world, and especially the United States, is not going to care or react."
Indeed, the slaughter in Rwanda of 10 U.N. peacekeepers from Belgium on the second day of the genocide resulted in the U.N. Security Council's decision to pull out the peacekeeping force, despite the U.N. commander's impassioned request for reinforcements. When no response came after 100,000 were killed in two weeks, the slaughter picked up its pace. It took Tutsi rebels, not the mighty U.N., to end the massacre by overthrowing the Hutu leaders.
President Clinton expressed deep regret later. "I feel terrible," he said at one appearance, "because I think we could have sent 5,000 or 10,000 troops and saved a couple hundred thousand lives. I think we could have saved about half of them."
So, why didn't we? Administration officials blame several factors, including the "Somalia Syndrome." Congress and the administration were reluctant to send American troops into more humanitarian missions after the disastrous retreat from Mogadishu in late 1993.
Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the U.N. commander whose call for reinforcements went unheeded, was more blunt in an appearance in Rwanda's capital Kigali this week: "The international community didn't give one damn for Rwandans because Rwanda was a country of no strategic importance."
Right. Had there been oil or something else of "strategic importance" under Rwanda, the world might have responded with a greater urgency. Yet, the American people are not coldhearted. A CBS/ New York Times poll in 1995, for example, found two-thirds of the Americans polled thought "stopping the killing" was reason enough to deploy troops to Bosnia, while only 29 percent agreed with Mr. Clinton that deployment was necessary to maintain a stable Europe and preserve American leadership. Americans want to do the right thing. But they need leadership to help them do it.
Leaders tend to be reluctant to make the humanitarian "Never Again" argument for national action, even when it is perfectly justified. President Bush's White House, for example, fell back on the humanitarian motive for invading Iraq ("The Iraqi people are better off with Saddam is out of power") only after our searchers failed to find Saddam's fabled weapons of mass destruction.
As much as American presidents say "Never Again" with heartfelt passion, the reality too often has been, "Yes, Again," when U.S. moral courage somehow gets lost in day-after-day of polite conversations between diplomats followed by no action. It is not surprising that the United States is reluctant to send troops into faraway adventures. But if we forget the lessons of Rwanda, we will be doomed to repeat them.
Clarence Page is a nationally syndicated columnist.
-------- asia
Suppliers Readying for Asia Nuclear Power
April 10, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-utilities-asia-nuclear.html
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - From India to China, energy-deficient Asia is spending billions of dollars to build nuclear power plants, sparking fierce competition among global equipment makers for the bonanza.
The blossoming of nuclear power in Asia, where 18 of the world's 31 units under construction are located, is dubbed by some as a renaissance of the sector and has become a massive magnet for European, Canadian and Russian suppliers. The lure is so strong that the United States may relax this year its curbs on the sensitive technology transfer to select Asian nations as China has other sources of nuclear expertise.
``Nuclear power will certainly continue to increase as a share of the region's capacity and that's mainly driven by activities in China and India,'' said Charles Chang, Asia power and gas analyst at rating agency Fitch.
Nuclear fuel makes up 1.4-3.7 percent of the power output in Asia's two most populous nations, below the 35-40 percent for Japan and South Korea and 78 percent for France.
Few projects have broken ground in the West in the past few years as environmental, health and security concerns have persisted since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. A growing number of aging nuclear plants in Europe are reaching their expiry dates and it has not been decided if they would be replaced.
To clinch the lucrative contracts in Asia, nuclear equipment suppliers have focused on their safety records as well as competitive investment and production costs, analysts said.
Suppliers also have to convince their own governments to let them export such sensitive technologies. The governments must also build good ties to win such deals, industry experts said.
The suppliers include Framatome ANP, a venture between France's Areva and Germany's Siemens, Electricite de France, and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, an unlisted global nuclear equipment maker, and Russia.
Framatome said on its Web site it ``is ready to take part in the new development phase of the Chinese nuclear program'' and ``is ready to issue the most suitable proposal to allow the Chinese industry to become more and more self-sufficient.''
POWER CHINA
Washington bars firms such as Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Co, a unit of state-owned British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, and General Electric, from building reactors in China.
But industry sources said Washington was expected to ease its control on China in September.
``U.S. firms are not allowed to provide a whole set of equipment to China, let alone signing contracts and providing loans to build the plants for us. But this September the restriction is expected to be lifted,'' said Liu Changxin, deputy secretary general with the Chinese Nuclear Society in Beijing.
China is about to build four 1,000-megawatt (one million kilowatt) plants costing $6 billion as part of its drive to quadruple nuclear capacity to 32,000 MW between 2005 and 2020.
Beijing plans to tender the projects in 2005, said the World Nuclear Association (WNA).
Westinghouse would bid to supply its latest reactors, known as AP 1000s. The projected cost for the AP 1000, scheduled to get design approval in September, will be $1,000-$1,200 per kilowatt.
Framatome would also make a bid, said the WNA, which represents nuclear companies and organizations.
Gilbert Vaughn, a Westinghouse spokesman, said the use of ``a series of AP 1000s in China'' could support as many as 5,000 skilled U.S. jobs over the course of construction.
``These jobs would help to load Westinghouse design-and-manufacturing facilities as well as those of U.S.-based suppliers, including major architectural, design and construction organizations,'' Vaughn said in an email to Reuters.
U.S. firms are now allowed to provide engineering services for China, which uses reactors from France, Canada and Russia. Russia's equipment is cheaper and Moscow has political clout over its neighbor due to China's demand for its arms, Liu said.
SELF-SUFFICIENCY
Most of the world's 440 nuclear plants, which supply 16 percent of global electricity, are in Japan, Europe and North America. The cost of building a nuclear plant is high but its fuel is cheaper than other alternative fuels.
China and India are trying to emulate Japan and South Korea, which built their first nuclear power plants decades ago with U.S. or European technology, but are now capable of making their own reactors and even exporting them, analysts said.
Japan's Mitsubishi Corp, Toshiba Corp and Hitachi Ltd supplies nuclear power parts to China.
India, which began construction on six plants in 2002 and aimed to have 20,000 MW of nuclear capacity by 2020, mainly uses equipment and technology from Canada and Russia.
Russia is supplying India's first large nuclear power plant via a Moscow-funded $3 billion contract, the WNA said.
In India and China, nuclear equipment makers are usually required to bid with proposals to fund the projects. The funds are normally via loans from the bidding firm's governments.
Although China and India are tapping the domestic bond market, the projects will remain largely out of reach of private capital, analysts said.
``They will never get project finance. It is too political,'' said Vijay Sethu, Asia power banker at ANZ Investment Bank.
-------- china
Cheney to Promote Nuke Reactors to China
April 10, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China-Reactors.html http://www.washtimes.com/business/20040409-101956-1151r.htm http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/nation/8401314.htm
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
We Were Ignored, Ailing Soldiers Say
Six who fell ill after returning from duty in Iraq blame uranium poisoning.
April 10, 2004
From Associated Press
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-soldiers10apr10,1,3364517.story?coll=la-headlines-nation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3960228,00.html
NEW YORK - Six soldiers who have fallen ill since their return from Iraq said Friday that the Army ignored their complaints about uranium poisoning from U.S. weapons fired during combat.
They also said they were denied testing for the radioactive substance.
"We were all healthy when we left home. Now, I suffer from headaches, fatigue, dizziness, blood in the urine, unexplained rashes," said Sgt. Jerry Ojeda, 28, who was stationed south of Baghdad with other National Guard members of the 442nd Military Police Company.
He said symptoms also included shortness of breath, migraines and nausea.
Sgt. Herbert Reed, 50, said that when a dozen soldiers asked for treatment last fall, they were initially turned away.
Three of them persisted and were tested in December, said Reed, who has yet to receive his results.
The soldiers held a news conference at Ojeda's home, joined by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who said he would work to get the victims extended health benefits after they are discharged.
Five of the men said they also were recently tested independently by Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a former Army doctor and nuclear medicine expert, who found traces of depleted uranium in their bloodstreams, with four registering high levels.
After their return from Iraq, "the Army was unfortunately not cooperative when they asked for testing," Schumer said.
In Washington, D.C., an Army spokeswoman, Cynthia Smith, said the military would test any soldier who expressed concerns about uranium exposure.
The men said that Army officials are now testing urine samples they supplied. Results are expected in about three weeks.
Since the start of the Iraq war, U.S. forces reportedly have fired at least 120 tons of shells packed with depleted uranium.
Depleted uranium, which is left over from the process of enriching uranium for use as nuclear fuel, is an extremely dense material that the U.S. and British militaries use for tank armor and armor-piercing weapons. It is far less radioactive than natural uranium.
Veterans began reporting health problems as a result of depleted uranium shells in 1991, after the first Gulf War.
Some experts believe the depleted uranium used in warfare is practically harmless, whereas others blame it for cancers and other illnesses.
----
GIs: Dust made us ill
BY WIL CRUZ STAFF WRITER
April 10, 2004
Newsday
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/health/ny-nysold103749694apr10,0,5342878.story?coll=ny-health-headlines
David Rodriguez's symptoms started with muscular back pain last summer. By the end of his seven-month stint in Iraq in August, the Army specialist had dizziness, diarrhea and blurred vision.
On Friday, Rodriguez, one of nine soldiers to become sick from the National Guard's 442nd Military Police Company based in Rockland County, said the symptoms persist.
"Right now," said Rodriguez, 31, a firefighter at Engine Co. 6 in Manhattan, "I have a headache, chest pains. I've had them for about three months straight."
Rodriguez joined five soldiers from his unit and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to draw attention to medical problems experienced by those who may have been exposed to depleted uranium in Iraq and to ask the Army to improve its testing and treatment policies.
The United States uses depleted uranium in weapons and tank armor. It is dense, and when shells containing it strike a target, radioactive dust is formed.
"According to the doctor, we inhaled it," Sgt. Agustin Matos said. "It was in the air."
Soldiers from the company, who include New York firefighters, police officers and corrections officers, said they began having symptoms while they were stationed in Samawah last summer.
Nine of the soldiers, after growing frustrated with the Army's testing process and treatment, were later examined by an independent uranium expert. Some of the soldiers said they asked the Army to test them and were refused.
The independent expert's tests showed four of the soldiers had high levels of depleted uranium in their systems. The others also remain sick, said the soldiers at the news conference in Fresh Meadows.
The story was first reported in the Daily News, and the Army this week began testing all of the soldiers in the unit.
Army spokeswoman Cynthia Smith told The Associated Press on Friday that the military would do "the right thing," and test any soldier concerned about uranium exposure.
----
Army promises testing for depleted uranium
Saturday, April 10, 2004
AP
http://www.whnt19.com/Global/story.asp?S=1775839
New York -- The Army now says it will test soldiers returning from Iraq who fear they might have been contaminated by depleted uranium. The action follows the health complaints of soldiers in the 442nd Military Police Company.
Six members of the company fell ill after returning to New York from Iraq. They had unexplained rashes, headaches and blood in the urine, among other symptoms.
Five tested positive for depleted uranium. The tests were administered by a private physician when the Army refused to test.
The military uses depleted uranium, which is far less radioactive than natural uranium, in armor-piercing weapons.
----
War on Iraq is a Nuclear War
And the fallout is coming this way, says independent scientist Leuren Moret
by Stephanie Hiller,
April 10, 2004
Awakened Woman
http://www.awakenedwoman.com/moret_nuclear.htm
In May, 2003, the United States dumped 2,200 tons of depleted uranium on Iraq, according to reliable sources, and it's logical to assume that more depleted uranium is being employed in the current attacks on Faluja that began April 8 to put down Iraqi resistance to the American presence there.
According to independent geoscientist Leuren Moret, the war on Iraq - like the war on Afghanistan - is a nuclear war. "Depleted uranium is a nuclear weapon and it is a weapon of mass destruction under the U. S. government's definition of weapons of mass destruction," Moret says.
The Pentagon has repeatedly denied that DU is harmful, despite the symptoms of half the returning veterans from the first Persian Gulf Wars who are now disabled. But researchers have shown that the Pentagon has been fully aware of the consequences of what is called "low level radiation" since 1942, when depleted uranium was first suggested for development as a military weapon under the Manhattan Project.
On Sunday, April 6, the New York Daily News reported that nine soldiers who returned from Iraq last summer had symptoms typical of DU poisoning. The News arranged for them to be tested by Asaf Duracovic, a former colonel in the Army Reserves who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and one of the world's foremost experts on the medical effects of radioactive weaponry. Depleted uranium was found in the urine of four of the men - Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and Cpl. Anthony Yonnone - the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict
Recently completed laboratory analyses show two members of Uranium Medical Research Centre's (UMRC) field investigation team are contaminated with Depleted Uranium (DU). The two field staff, one from Canada and the other, Beirut, toured Iraq for thirteen days in October 2003; five months after the cessation of Operation Iraqi Freedom's aerial bombing and ground force campaign. Using mass spectrometry, UMRC's partner laboratory in Germany measured DU in both team members' urine samples. (Please see http://www.umrc.net/UMRC_bulletin_07_Feb_2004.asp)
If short-term visitors and soldiers have been so affected, what of the people, living near bomb sites, breathing the air every day, drinking the water? What of the children who play in these sites and collect pieces of exploded materiel to sell so their families can eat?
Using figures developed by Japanese physicist, Professor Yagasaki from the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, and explained in his presentation at the World Conference on Depleted Uranium Weapons held in Hamburg last October, the radioactivity of 2,200 tons (or 440,000 pounds) of depleted uranium together with some 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan, is the atomicity equivalent to 400,00 Nagasaki bombs.
Depleted uranium is cheap and plentiful. When uranium is processed for fission bombs or fuel rods for use in power plants, only U-235, about half a percent of the total, is used. Most of what's left over is U-238, so-called "depleted" uranium. The US has over a million tons of the stuff, and storage is becoming a serious problem.
Though less radioactive than U-235, DU is still highly radioactive &endash; and chemically toxic as well. "There is no allowable level of risk," says Moret. Nearly twice as dense as lead, DU is used in tanks and airplanes, as well as bullets, handguns, cannons, all the way up to large bombs weighing more than 5,000 pounds.
It's not dangerous until it blows up.
Depleted uranium is pyrophoric. Relatively innocuous as a metal alloy used in planes, tanks, missiles, bullets and rounds, when depleted uranium burns, it releases a radioactive gas. Larger particles may settle to the ground, but winds blowing across the desert may carry the fine particles to locations in a 1000-mile radius from the explosion. As a result, areas as far west as Egypt and as far east as India are likely to be contaminated. "The U.S. has staged a nuclear war in the Middle East, from Iraq and Central Asia, to the northern half of India. Half of Egypt, Israel, the Saudi Arabian peninsula, Turkey, Iran, the Russian oil-rich states, the Caspian oil region, and northern are now, or will be, all contaminated."
Depleted uranium - U-238 - has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. It's effects will be with us forever. It is in the soil, in the groundwater, in food, but the worst of all &endash; it is in the air. When inhaled, it enters directly into the bloodstream. One uranium particle behaves in the body like a tiny nuclear bomb, sending out alpha and beta particles and gamma rays to adjacent cells. These are permanently damaging to the cells and chromosomes and lead to a host of deadly diseases, including cancer and leukemia. They also cause mutations of the genetic material that will show up in subsequent generations as terrible birth deformities, weakened health, and infertility.
Moret says the fallout from these foreign wars is headed our way. Spread by powerful desert winds, the fallout will be carried certainly as far as Britain (where dust storms from the Middle East commonly leave residual dust) and then across the Atlantic Ocean. It will also travel across Asia and the Pacific Ocean and be slowly and silently deposited across the North American continent.
American citizens have already been exposed to radiation from a variety of sources including malfunctioning nuclear power plants, the disasters at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, aboveground bomb tests conducted from 1957 to 1963, and the enormous existing pile of depleted uranium, about 1 million tons, poorly stored in the United States. Radiation has caused the geometric rise of cancers in the US - 1 in 3 Americans compared to 1 in 20 before the second World War. It is also responsible for the rise in autism, learning disabilities, chronic immune deficiency disorders (chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr and so forth), higher rates of infant mortality and the general weakening of the public's health.
Leuren Moret was formerly employed at the Lawrence Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, and the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab. Since walking out on her job to become a whistleblower at Livermore, she has devoted her time to the study of the effects of nuclear radiation. She has worked with scientists like Dr. Ernest Sternglass, Marian Fulk, Dr. Asaf Durakovic of the Uranium Medical Research Center, Dr. Doug Rokke of Traprock Peace Center and many others. Her testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held December 13-14, 2003, in Tokyo was largely responsible for the unanimous verdict on depleted uranium, and that the President Bush and the United States is guilty of war crimes against that country.
Leuren Moret will be interviewed by Janie Rezner on her show, Women's Voices, this Monday, April 12, at 7 pm Pacific Daylight Savings time. You can listen to the interview via the internet. Visit www.kzyx.org
MORE INFORMATION
http://www.mindfully.org
http://www.traprockpeace.org
http://www.umrc.net
http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers.htm
The European Committee on Radiation Risk, within the European Parliament, has just published an excellent report on low-level radiation at <http://www.euradcom.org>
-------- iran
Iran seeks European trio's backing over its nuclear stance
TEHRAN (AFP)
Apr 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040410125433.z44ztak4.html
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi discussed Iran's nuclear case with the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany, seeking their support ahead of a June meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors, Iranian dailies reported Saturday.
"Iranian public opinion expects that Iran's peaceful nuclear case be settled by June and the IAEA and the European Union fulfill their commitments towards Iran," Kharazi said in a phone conversation with his German counterpart Joschka Fischer.
In his talk to his French counterpart Michel Barnier, Kharazi said the visit by IAEA director general Mohamed Elbaradai to Tehran earlier this week "provided the appropriate opportunity to draw a timetable for normalizing Iran's nuclear case before the next meeting of the IAEA board of governors."
Kharazi told British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw: "A timetable has been prepared to discuss and settle the nuclear issue between Tehran and the IAEA and the two sides have agreed on it."
Last October, Iran gave the IAEA what it said was a complete declaration of its nuclear activities.
It was later found to have made a number of omissions, including its acquisition of designs for sophisticated P-2 centrifuges that can produce weapons-grade uranium, way above the normal level of enrichment required for atomic reactors.
The three European countries in October struck a deal with Iran for it to cooperate with the IAEA. The United States however claims Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons and is seeking a tougher stance with Tehran.
In March, the IAEA board of governors passed a resolution that condemned Iran for failing to report crucial technologies, such as the advanced P-2 centrifuge designs.
ElBaradei returned to Vienna last Wednesday from Tehran, where he had hammered out an agreement for Iran to adhere to a timetable to answer the agency's questions about its nuclear activities.
-------- japan
Hostage crisis dominates Cheney's Japan trip
Cheney is likely to urge Japan to stay on in Iraq
Saturday 10 April 2004,
Al jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/898A6F03-11EB-471D-A4F8-E3B8A555F19B.htm
US Vice President Dick Cheney has arrived in Tokyo for talks with Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi likely to be dominated by the kidnapping of three Japanese civilians in Iraq.
Cheney is expected on Saturday to reassure Japan, a key US ally in Asia, that it should keep its forces in Iraq despite the kidnappers' threats to murder the hostages unless Japan withdraws its 550 grounds troops. The troops are there to purify water and help in reconstructing schools.
He is also likely to discuss the North Korean nuclear issue and Tokyo's ban on US beef in his first official visit to Japan, which was postponed from a year ago due to the Iraq war.
Cheney's arrival comes just over 24 hours before the expiry of the deadline set by the hostage takers, a group calling themselves the Saraya al-Mujahidiin, for Japan to pull out of Iraq.
Protests continue
The group has warned it will execute aid workers Noriaki Imai, Nahoko Takato and freelance photojournalist Soichiro Koriyama unless its demands are met by 9:00pm Japan time on Sunday (12:00 GMT).
Koizumi, facing his toughest political test, has vowed not to pull the troops out of the southern Iraqi city of Samawa despite appeals from the hostages' families, but some analysts say mishandling the crisis could bring down his government.
This is the second day of protests in Japan
The US welcomed Japan's decision to keep its troops in Iraq despite the threats. The US State Department said Washington was working with Tokyo to locate the Japanese hostages.
Before Cheney's visit about 1000 protesters rallied near Koizumi's office urging Japan to pull its troops out of Iraq to save the lives of the three hostages.
Japan was stunned on Thursday after Aljazeera television aired a chilling videotape of the hostages at the feet of heavily armed men.
The three are Imai,18, who had planned to look into the effects of depleted uranium weapons; female aid worker Takato, 34; and Koriyama, 32.
Emergency office
Meanwhile, Japan opened an emergency office at its diplomatic mission in Jordan to coordinate rescue efforts for the hostages, said a Japanese Embassy official on Saturday.
A government task force led by Senior Vice Foreign Minister Ichiro Aisawa, Koizumi's special envoy, arrived early on Saturday in the Jordanian capital Amman, said the embassy's deputy chief of mission Jun Yoshida.
Aisawa was scheduled to meet acting Jordanian Foreign Minister Amjad Majali.
The task force will try to locate the three hostages and assemble the facts of the kidnapping, the Kyodo news agency reported.
Details of the kidnapping remain sketchy and it is unclear where or when they were captured.
Tokyo's controversial troop deployment to Iraq is its first mission since World War Two. Critics said dispatching troops to Iraq violates Japan's pacifist constitution, which bans the use of force to resolve international disputes.
Many Japanese also said they feared the troops could come under attack and suffer casualties, something Japan's military has not experienced since 1945.
----
Relatives appeal for Japanese hostages
Imai, 18, wanted to document the effects of depleted uranium
Saturday 10 April 2004,
Al jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F4DBDBF6-B2E6-4DFA-9F23-66FC66DD8FC4.htm
The relatives of three Japanese hostages being held in Iraq have issued an emotional plea to the kidnappers to ensure the safe release of their loved ones.
With the clock ticking as the deadline approaches before kidnappers threatened to burn alive Noriaki Imai, 18; Soichiro Koriyama, 32; Nahoko Tokato, 34, their families spoke to Aljazeera television on Saturday.
Kidnappers are demanding Japan withdraws its 550 ground troops from Iraq. Tokyo vowed not to bow to the call.
"When my son went to Iraq, he made his best effort to show the suffering of the Iraqi people and volunteered to help needy children in hospitals," said Imai's mother, Naoko.
Imai graduated from high school last month. He is a member of the Campaign to Abolish Depleted Uranium and travelled to Iraq on 1 April to study the effects of depleted uranium on Iraqi children. He was planning to write a book documenting the stories of victims of depleted uranium.
"I believe the Iraqi people will help us. My son has been busy with observing the Iraqis' suffering since the Gulf war. He even intended to publish a book on this issue," his mother told Aljazeera's Tokyo correspondent Fadi Salameh.
"Noriaki has opposed war on Iraq. He has suffered a lot as he believes Iraqis need humanitarian help. Please free him as soon as possible."
Children's activist
Takato, 34, is also an aid worker and peace activist. She travelled to Iraq in April 2003, after US and British tanks entered Baghdad.
This was Takato's third trip to Iraq
"Nahoko went to Iraq a year ago in order to help the Iraqi children in hospitals and schools. She liked to play with Iraqi children to emotionally support them. She used to email us talking about the suffering of the Iraqis. She even wanted to contact the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to tell him about what really happens in Iraq," her sister Aiako Inoue told Aljazeera.
Koriyama is a former soldier turned freelance photojournalist. Last May, Koriyami provided the Weekly Asahi magazine, published by the mass-circulation Asahi Shimbun, with pictures of Baghdad after the city fell.
"He has opposed war on Iraq and done his best to help families of harmed Iraqis, particularly children. He has tried to show their suffering to the whole world," said his mother, Kimiko.
"I call on all Iraqis to help the three Japanese hostages who have gone to Iraq only to help Iraqi children. Please save them."
Government appeal
Meanwhile, Japan issued a videotaped demand on Saturday for the release of the hostages.
"To the members of Saraya al-Mujahidin, who have taken three Japanese hostage," Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi said in the footage, which was to be distributed to TV broadcasters around the world on Saturday, including an Arabic version.
"The people of Japan and I strongly demand an immediate and safe release of the three hostages."
----
THE HOSTAGE CRISIS: `All I can do is trust in fate'
The Asahi Shimbun
IHT/Asahi
April 10, 2004
http://www.asahi.com/english/nation/TKY200404100109.html
Despite misgivings, the 3 hostages were there to help.
An anti-war activist, a volunteer worker and a freelance photographer, each of the three Japanese taken hostage in Iraq was there to assist the Iraqi people, their family members and colleagues said.
Eighteen-year-old Noriaki Imai is part of a citizens movement to abolish depleted uranium weapons. Nahoko Takato, 34, is a veteran volunteer who has worked with street children and orphans in developing countries. And Soichiro Koriyama, 32, is a freelance photographer who has photographed suffering people, including AIDS victims, in developing countries.
According to family members, Imai wanted to see firsthand the situation in a war-torn country to help him create picture books promoting peace.
He left his home in Sapporo on April 1, and was scheduled to return to Japan on April 17.
Imai graduated only last month from a high school in Ebetsu, Hokkaido. As a second-year student, he visited an orphanage in Vietnam, where he met children suffering the aftereffects of defoliants sprayed by the United States during the war. The experience left a strong impression on him and sparked his anti-war fervor.
Last fall, when the possibility of dispatching the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq became a big political issue, Imai decided to publish a newsletter on depleted uranium. Starting on Nov. 22, he faxed a daily newsletter to media organizations.
On April 2, two days before he was to leave Japan, Imai met Upper House lawmaker Atsuo Nakamura, and asked him to form a parliamentary league for the prohibition of depleted uranium weapons.
Before entering Iraq, Imai sent on Wednesday an e-mail message from Amman to a member of his citizens group, No!! Depleted Uranium (DU) Sapporo Project.
The message read: ``I have some worries because the situation (in Iraq) is becoming more serious than I anticipated. All I can do is trust in fate.''
In concluding the message, Imai wrote: ``I want to pray for good luck for myself, Ms. Takato and a freelance photographer who is with us.'' He signed off as ``Imai, who is becoming a little bit anxious.''
Takato, whose hometown is Chitose in Hokkaido, has been working with orphans, street children and others in developing countries, including India, since 2000. Since Baghdad fell to U.S. forces a year ago Friday, she spent two three-month stints in Iraq.
Unaffiliated with any nongovernmental organization, she cared for orphans and others, performing such everyday tasks as delivering medicine and other necessities.
She returned to Japan in February after the second stay.
On April 1, she left Japan for Iraq again. The day before her departure, she talked to Akemi Hosoi, 53, who worked with Takato as a volunteer in Baghdad last summer rebuilding a women's school.
Hosoi quoted Takato as saying: ``Since the SDF came to Iraq, anti-Japan feeling has been growing (in the country). It has become difficult to do voluntary work there.''
Hosoi also recalled that Takato related a marked change in attitude among the Iraqi people.
``When I tried to shake hands, some people slapped my hand away,'' Takato was reported to have said. ``That had never happened before.''
A former SDF member who specialized in bomb disposal, Koriyama left the SDF several years ago, eventually becoming a professional photographer.
He recently chronicled AIDS patients and HIV carriers in Thailand.
One of the magazine editors who knew Koriyama said: ``After leaving the SDF, he worked as a truck driver among other things. But he didn't want to spend the rest of his life doing that kind of thing, so he decided to become a photographer.''
Koriyama went to Baghdad last April, immediately after the huge statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled, and took photographs of the nascent reconstruction effort.
To finance that trip, he worked at construction sites for two months, earning about 600,000 yen. With that cash, he bought a digital camera and a personal computer.
----
Protests and tears as Iraqi kidnappers test Japan's resolve
By David McNeill in Tokyo
10 April 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=510182
It is hard to imagine three more blameless victims. Noriaki Imai, a fresh-faced 18-year-old peace campaigner and budding journalist who went to Iraq to study the effects of depleted uranium shells and had written an article criticising Japan's involvement. Nahoko Takato, a volunteer, who has spent much of her 34 years helping the poor children of Asia, and Soichiro Koriyama, 32, who left the armed forces in 1996 to work as a journalist for the liberal press.
They are the three Japanese hostages who are threatened with death unless their country pulls its non-combat forces out of Iraq by tomorrow.
Yesterday Japan was consumed by anguish and tearful protests as the country came to terms with the consequences of its riskiest military foray abroad since the Second World War.
Thousands of people massed across from the prime minister's residence to hold a candlelight vigil for the three hostages. Hundreds of protesters, including Buddhist monks with signs that read "No War" gathered outside the Diet calling for the soldiers to be pulled out. Some protesters claimed sending the troops to a war zone violated Japan's unique constitution prohibiting the use of international force to resolve disputes.
The Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, who yesterday ruled out withdrawal, had the look of a man who had gambled big and lost, a once seemingly invincible leader with rock-star-like popularity who is facing the biggest crisis of his political career.
Mr Koizumi gambled that he could keep public opinion onside after sending Japanese soldiers to Iraq, despite enormous misgivings in this still strongly pacifist country. In the tortured debates leading up to Japan's first dispatch of troops to a combat zone since the Second World War, his government tried to quell this opposition by saying the Self Defence Forces (SDF) would be in a "safe" part of Iraq, and the Iraqi people would understand the 500 troops would be on a humanitarian mission.
Both of Mr Koizumi's arguments now lie in the dust of Samawah in southern Iraq, where the 500 untested Japan-ese soldiers nervously patrol their base camp after an apparent mortar attack on Thursday. And any remaining hope that Japan's reluctant role as a US ally would somehow spare it from the carnage unfolding in Iraq were destroyed by the harrowing sight of ordinary Japanese citizens with knives and swords at their throats.
Their captors, a group called the Mujahedin Brigades, have threatened to burn the hostages alive tomorrow unless the soldiers withdraw from Iraq.
The three hostages represent what most Japanese consider their most valuable contributions to the world since 1945: neutrality and compassion for others. Their predicament has stunned a country that has grown used to thinking of itself as being aloof from the messy world beyond its borders.
Pictures of the hostages ran all day yesterday on Japanese TV, with their distraught families pleading with the government to meet the captors' demands. Mr Imai's mother tearfully pleaded with the government to "immediately" pull the soldiers out. Ms Takato's father said: "I'm just praying for her return and that the government will solve this thing."
The secretary general of the main opposition, the Democratic Party, Katsuya Okada, which opposed sending troops to Iraq, was scathing. "The Prime Minister is to blame for this situation."
Newspaper editorials have carried more mixed messages: the right-leaning Yomiuri said that Japan should "stand firm against the cowardly threats", but unfortunately for the Prime Minister, much of Japan disagrees.Aside from those who want a complete withdrawal, many others believe the troops should wait in Kuwait or another country for the situation to ease.
The government seems set for collision with this public sentiment. Mr Koizumi said he would "not give in to these despicable threats", adding that the government's priority was to get the hostages freed. His chief spokesman, Yasuo Fukuda, bristled at the constant questions from reporters about a possible troop withdrawal. "Do you think it is okay to be swayed by terrorism and swallow their demands?" he said. "It is not that simple. We are there to help the Iraqi people."
The Prime Minister formed an emergency committee to deal with the crisis and sent a senior foreign ministry official to Jordan to try to rescue the hostages, but all of the activity served to emphasise how powerless his government is.
The stakes for Mr Koizumi will be upped today by a badly timed visit by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who will put pressure on him to stand firm for the sake of the 50-year-old US-Japan alliance. The Prime Minister will try to comply, while keeping a wary eye on the drama playing out on Japan's televisions. His political future may hinge on what happens in Iraq.
South Korea stood by plans to send 3,600 new troops, which will make it the biggest coalition partner in Iraq after the US and Britain, but banned its citizens travelling there after seven missionaries became the second group of South Koreans to be held this week. Thailand also had no intention of pulling its troops out, but would reconsider if more violence hampered its humanitarian work, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said.
----
Families rejoice at hostage release reports
Sat 10 April, 2004
By George Nishiyama
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=491804§ion=news
TOKYO - An Iraqi group holding three Japanese hostages say it will free them within 24 hours, a move which surprised Tokyo officials working to secure their release ahead of a deadline to kill them on Sunday.
"They will release them within 24 hours in response to a call from the Muslim Clerics Association," Arabic television station Al Jazeera said on Saturday, referring to a body of Iraqi religious scholars.
Abdel Satar Abdel Jabar, a senior official in the Muslim Clerics Association in Iraq, told Reuters his group had issued a call that all abducted foreigners not linked to the U.S.-led occupation forces should be freed.
"We believe that the kidnapping of foreign civilians not connected to the occupation forces is forbidden," he said.
Japanese officials said they had heard the Al Jazeera report, but said it was premature to comment as they were trying to confirm it themselves.
Japan was stunned on Thursday when an unknown group released a video showing the hostages, blindfolded and with a gun to their heads. The kidnappers threatened to burn the hostages alive by Sunday if Japanese troops did not pull out of Iraq.
The three hostages are Noriaki Imai, an 18-year-old who graduated from high school last month and had planned to look into the effects of depleted uranium weapons; female aid worker Nahoko Takato, 34; and freelance reporter Soichiro Koriyama, 32.
Families of the hostages rejoiced at the news of their possible release, hugging each other and some shedding tears of joy, a member of a group supporting the families said.
"But there is still 24 hours to go, so we must remain calm and think of what we can do," Naoya Ohira told reporters.
A MESSAGE IN ARABIC
The Al Jazeera report came after Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi appeared in a video message addressed to the captors demanding the release of three Japanese civilians.
"The three Japanese hostages are private individuals, and friends of Iraq...The people of Japan and I strongly demand for an immediate and safe release of the three hostages," she said.
Kawaguchi's video, including an Arabic version, was distributed to TV broadcasters around the world, with less than 24 hours to go before the deadline set by the kidnappers to kill the hostages.
The precise deadline was not clear, but a Japanese ruling coalition official put it at around 1 p.m. British time on Sunday.
On Saturday, a group calling itself the "Brigades of the Hero Martyr Sheikh Ahmed Yassin" said they were holding 30 foreign hostages and threatened to decapitate them unless U.S. forces lifted their blockade of the Iraqi town of Falluja.
"We have Japanese, Bulgarian, Israeli, American, Spanish and Korean hostages," a masked gunman said in an footage aired by Arab TV station, Al Arabiya. The footage showed no hostages.
A Japanese foreign ministry official said the ministry was checking the report and could not comment whether any Japanese, apart from the three hostages, had gone missing in Iraq.
KOIZUMI'S TOUGHEST TEST
Some 1,000 protesters demanding troops come home gathered near Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's office hours before U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney arrived to start an Asian tour.
Koizumi, facing his toughest test, has vowed not to pull out the troops, but some analysts say mishandling the crisis could bring down his government.
Relatives of the hostages said they were worried by the apparent lack of progress and shortage of information.
The public was sharply divided over the decision to deploy some 1,000 troops to Iraq and nearby countries in Japan's riskiest military operation since World War Two.
Critics say the deployment violates Japan's pacifist constitution and resent what they see as U.S. pressure to make the decision. Supporters say it is time for Japan to take a bolder role in global security.
-------- mideast
Syria has details of Dimona nuclear reactor, former spy says
By Yossi Melman,
Haaretz Correspondent
10/04/2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/414028.html
Syria reportedly has information about the nuclear reactor in Dimona and pictures taken inside the facility, according to a former Syrian intelligence officer.
Captain Yusef Abed al-Jalil, who served 10 years in an Israeli jail, made his claim in an exclusive interview with Haaretz. The interview will be published in full in Sunday's edition of the paper.
Jalil said the Syrians received the information from Soviet intelligence sources and from agents among Israel's Arab population.
The interview was made possible following the lifting by the Supreme Court of a 10-year publication ban on the affair, and at the request of advocate Mibi Mozar on behalf of Haaretz.
Of Jalil's time in Israeli prison, four-and-a-half years were served after the Nazareth District Court found him guilty, in a plea-bargain arrangement, of spying against Israel. After that, the Israeli authorities kept him in various jails on different pretexts. He left Israel in December 2003 as part of the prisoner swap with Hezbollah.
Jalil, who is of Kurdish origin, served in the Syrian general intelligence in a number of positions, including as an operator of agents in Iraq and Turkey. In 1994, he defected from the army after his commanders gave orders to detain him, and he fled to Israel.
He reached the border on the Golan Heights near Kuneitra and made contact with an Israel Defense Forces patrol, which picked him up. Jalil requested that he be sent to a European country and given asylum after serving his term.
Jalil was interrogated by Military Intelligence for several months and gave them information, but Israel then decided to indict him on espionage charges.
The suspicion was that he had been deliberately sent by Syrian intelligence and that he had not told his interrogators the whole truth.
He said he was given a lawyer from the public prosecution who arranged the plea-bargain against his wish since he did not understand Hebrew or the Israeli court system.
After four-and-a-half years, the Israeli authorities wanted to return Jalil to Syria but this was prevented by the Committee Against Torture, which appealed to the High Court. It ruled against exiling him to Damascus, where he would face a death sentence, and Jalil remained in jail for five more years.
As part of the prisoner swap, Jalil was due to fly to Beirut. Again the committee, and other human rights activists, intervened and Jalil was taken off the plane at Cologne. He has since remained in a refugee camp in Germany.
"I came to you not as an enemy," he said in the interview, "but of my own free will and with good intentions, but you have destroyed my life."
----
U.S. URGED TO SHUT DOWN ALGERIA, EGYPT NUKES
Sat, 10 Apr 2004
[MENL]
http://menewsline.com/stories/2004/april/04_11_2.html
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has been pressed to launch a diplomatic campaign to scale down the nuclear programs of Egypt and Algeria.
The effort has been proposed as Algeria completed its first open presidential elections and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak prepares for a summit in the United States next week. The issue of the nuclear programs of the two North African states was said to have been recently discussed in the State Department and White House as part of a U.S. review of its relations with Algiers and Cairo.
The first public appeal for such a U.S. effort came during a congressional hearing last week. A leading nonproliferation analyst warned of the growing nuclear capability of Algeria and Egypt and the prospect that the latter might assemble nuclear weapons.
"Build on the successful precedent of Libya's nuclear renunciation by getting its neighbors, starting with Algeria, to shut down their largest nuclear facilities," Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said.
-------- ukraine
Ukrainian Nuclear Reactors Shut Down
April 10, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Ukraine-Nuclear.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Two Ukrainian nuclear reactors were shut down Saturday for regular maintenance and energy conservation during the Easter holidays, officials said.
The No. 1 reactor at the Rivne nuclear power plant was pulled off the power grid in the early hours Saturday for regular maintenance, the state nuclear power company Energoatom said. The reactor is expected to be switched on Friday.
The generator of the No. 4 reactor at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest, was switched off the power grid until Thursday to save energy during the religious holiday. Many enterprises will not be operating because of Easter, Energoatom said.
The No. 1 reactor at the Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant is still undergoing a major overhaul, which is expected be completed in late May.
Ukraine was the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in April 1986, with an explosion and fire at a reactor at the Chernobyl atomic plant. It was closed in 2000.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Olivi, Co-Pilot in Nagasaki Bombing, Dies
Associated Press
Sat, Apr. 10, 2004
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/8403339.htm
CHICAGO - Fred Olivi, who copiloted the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, has died. He was 82.
Olivi, a native of Chicago, died Thursday at a rehabilitation center in a Chicago suburb, officials at Panozzo Bros. funeral home said Saturday. He suffered a stroke in August.
The crew of the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, on Aug. 9, 1945, the crew of the B-29 bomber nicknamed Bockscar dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered six days later, ending World War II.
"While thousands died, I feel sure the bomb had to be dropped because if the Americans had been forced to invade Japan, it would have been a bloodbath," Olivi told the Chicago Sun-Times in a 1995 interview.
Olivi was one of many veterans angered by an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution for the 50th anniversary of the bombings.
"It's slanted more in sympathy to the Japanese than it is to us," he said in a 1994 interview.
Olivi enlisted with the Army Air Forces immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "He always wanted to fly," said his older brother, Emil Olivi. "The Air Corps gave him a chance, and he took it."
After the war, Olivi served in the Air Force Reserve, flying with a troop transport squadron based at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport until 1971. He ended his service as a lieutenant colonel.
Olivi also worked full-time as a manager of bridge operations and maintenance for the city of Chicago until he retired in 1988.
In the mid-1960s, Olivi married Carole McVey, whom he met in high school. She died in 1998.
Until his stroke, Olivi traveled around the country touring air shows, giving speeches, visiting museums and selling his self-published book, "Decision at Nagasaki."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
In Reversal, U.S. Proposes to Remove Atom Waste
April 10, 2004
By BRUCE LAMBERT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/nyregion/10brookhaven.html
When the federal government suggested that the easiest way to take care of tons of radioactive material at a long-closed Long Island nuclear reactor was to just leave it there and let it decay over time - the next 87,000 years - critics blanched.
So now, the Department of Energy, which owns the reactor and the research facility where it is situated, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, is drafting a recommendation to remove and dispose of the material, a project that could take about four years and cost $97 million.
"We think it's the right thing to do," said Frank J. Crescenzo, deputy site manager for the Department of Energy.
Once the proposal is issued, the public will be invited to comment, and then a decision will be made, he said.
And the critics, who include environmentalists, elected officials and civic groups, are cheering.
"It came as somewhat of a surprise, and everybody was very pleased," said Thomas Talbot, who heard the announcement Thursday night at a meeting of the laboratory's Citizens Advisory Committee.
He represents the Longwood Alliance, a group of residents and businesses.
Richard Amper, executive director of the Pine Barrens Society, an environmental group, said, "Time they got it right."
But he cautioned that the cleanup "is not a done deal" until approved and financed by Congress. Even then, the work will take four or five years, he said, "but 5 years looks good next to 87,000."
A chorus of elected officials also praised the plan. "Local families will not have to wait 87,000 years wondering about the safety of their drinking water," said United States Representative Timothy Bishop, who represents parts of Suffolk County.
Joining in support were three fellow Democrats: Senators Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive.
The reactor, the nation's first graphite research reactor, operated throughout the 1950's and 1960's until it was eclipsed by newer reactors, closing in 1969.
It had operating problems and leaked radioactive material into the soil and groundwater on the southeastern part of the sprawling 5,300-acre laboratory campus.
The laboratory has already excavated contaminated soil around the building and shipped out contaminated fuel, cooling fans and a leaking underground sump.
Remaining inside is a radioactive cube, 25 feet on each side, made up of 75 layers of graphite blocks, each 4 inches high and 4 inches wide, of varying lengths.
To shield against the radiation, that cube was covered by a huge box, 55 feet by 37 feet and 33 feet high, with a 6-inch inner layer of steel, a 51-inch layer of high-density concrete and an outer 3-inch steel plate. Eventually, the shield absorbed some radioactivity.
A risk assessment concluded last year that one option was to simply leave the graphite and shield in place, maintain the building to prevent air and water contamination, and let the radioactivity gradually dissipate.
Mr. Crescenzo said, "You could essentially leave it there indefinitely, and it would pose no danger to humans or anything else."
But Mr. Talbot said: "That's absolutely bizarre, totally irresponsible to even consider that. We would have created a nuclear waste facility on Long Island."
In the next stage of review, federal officials went beyond the risk assessment to consider factors like cost and public acceptability.
Under the expected cleanup plan, the graphite and shield would be dismantled and shipped out of state to a regulated disposal site.
Former fuel canals and additional contaminated soil would also be removed. The building would remain for reuse.
Another cleanup project at the laboratory is also proceeding. Mr. Crescenzo said that work would soon begin on excavating, disposing of and replacing a layer of silt from the bed of the Peconic River on the laboratory grounds that is contaminated with mercury, PCB's and cesium 137. A second stage will do a similar cleanup on stretches of the river beyond the laboratory property.
-------- us politics
Cheney to urge staying course
By Bill Gertz
April 10, 2004
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040409-115049-2442r.htm
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday the United States must stay the course in Iraq and fight to bring liberty to the Iraqi people.
"Our will is being tested in Iraq as we've seen in the heavy fighting in Iraq this week," Mr. Cheney said in a speech to several hundred members of the Air Force in a hangar at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska.
"Yet, as Americans we understand what is at stake," he said. "It is absolutely essential in both Afghanistan and Iraq that we finish the task at hand. That means helping the people of both nations to establish representative governments and the forces necessary to guarantee their security - so they can enjoy the blessings of liberty and their countries never again become sanctuaries for terrorists."
Mr. Cheney said U.S. security and those of American friends in the region "is directly dependent on our success," in Iraq.
He made the remarks at the first stop on a seven-day trip to Asia, where he will visit leaders in Japan, China and South Korea.
Mr. Cheney is urging two Asian allies with troops in Iraq - Japan and South Korea - to stand fast and not bow to pressure from kidnappers. Shi'ite militants were holding three Japanese civilians, threatening to kill them if Japan does not withdraw its troops from Iraq. Eight Koreans also were taken but then released.
Japan's government has said it will not withdraw its forces of about 530 ground troops in the southern Iraqi city of Samawah, part of a total planned deployment of 1,100 soldiers.
Alaska remains a vital strategic base for the United States in dealing with "the grave threat" of international terrorism, Mr. Cheney said. Troops from the base have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and others have been sent to guard the Alaska oil pipeline against potential attack, he said.
Alaska also will be the first base for the U.S. national missile-defense system, which will include interceptor missiles and radar at Fort Greeley.
The air wing at the base, where troops are called "arctic warriors," also provides a "top cover" for aircraft threats to the United States and Canada, Mr. Cheney said.
Mr. Cheney thanked the troops for "keeping the terrorist enemy on the run around the world."
The vice president, who is traveling with his wife, Lynne, also spoke at a Republican fund-raiser for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican, after meeting with the troops.
Mr. Cheney said during a speech at the fund-raiser that the war on terrorism requires "an aggressive strategy - not merely to prosecute a series of crimes, but to fight and win a global campaign against the terror network."
He also criticized presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who he said would take a different course in the war on terrorism, focusing more on law enforcement and intelligence gathering instead of the military-oriented approach being pursued by the Bush administration.
On the economy, Mr. Cheney said President Bush has taken "strong confident steps" to spur economic growth. He noted that tax relief measures had led to "significant tax relief for millions of American families and businesses."
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
----
Bush's Low Profile Questioned as Violence Flares in Iraq
By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A355-2004Apr9?language=printer
Explosive violence in Iraq and persistent questions about the administration's handling of terrorist threats before Sept. 11, 2001, have plunged President Bush into one of the most difficult moments of his presidency, as he seeks to maintain public confidence in his leadership while facing what experts say are mostly unattractive options to put U.S. policy on track.
In the face of these challenges, Bush has yielded the stage, remaining largely out of sight at his Texas ranch as others in his administration explain his policies. Bush's silence in the face of mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq and concerns about the administration's timetable for transferring power to the Iraqis has brought criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.
"If it were I in charge over there, I would have him out early next week to explain this whole thing," said a Republican strategist close to the Bush team who demanded anonymity as a condition of speaking freely about the administration. "He should restate what we're doing over there. He needs to provide a bigger picture to give voters more confidence that we know where we're going."
"It is not helping them for the president to be out of the picture," said Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, national security adviser in the Clinton administration. "If they think the American people are not troubled with what they see every day, starting with [the killing of four U.S. contract workers in] Fallujah, and then dead Marines and then the hostages -- if they think that is not roiling the waters, they're sadly mistaken. . . . We have too much at stake in Iraq to lose the American people."
Bush's advisers expect political damage to the president, at least in the short term, given what has happened in Iraq in the past 10 days. "I think the American people know the president is resolved in this matter to complete our work," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said yesterday. "We have nothing to suggest that they don't support him on the war on terror. . . . I think you can expect polls to drop during this very difficult period."
But if administration officials anticipate an erosion in Bush's support, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the president's challenger, may have a difficult time converting that into support for his candidacy. Kerry has criticized Bush repeatedly this week for failing to cede more authority to the United Nations and to develop broader international support, but his own past positions on Iraq make his maneuvering room limited, according to strategists.
Administration officials said Bush will discuss Iraq in his radio address today and will reemerge Sunday, when he goes to nearby Fort Hood to meet with the families of soldiers in Iraq. He will be out in public again on Monday when he appears at a news conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
But as Bush prepares to speak out, the stakes for him are considerably higher than they were only a few weeks ago, despite three hours of testimony by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before the independent commission investigating the 2001 attacks and assurances by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military commanders that they are dealing with the uprisings in Iraq.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Bush is "absolutely" losing the public at a quickening pace. He said people are flooding him with pleas "to get us out of there."
"It's a disquieting feeling people have. They think the president does not have a plan, and he doesn't. . . . We are on the verge of losing control of Iraq."
Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) said events in Iraq suggest that Bush and other administration officials should anticipate a new line of questioning of the assessment, at the time of the invasion, that U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators and face only slight resistance. This assumption "clearly is in doubt" considering recent events, he said. The questions have come most forcefully from Democrats but are shared by Republicans. "In both parties, members are concerned," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) "There's not abject panic, but there's deep concern, and there should be."
Measured through the first snapshots, the verdict for the administration is mixed. Rice's testimony drew positive initial reviews about the administration's handling of terrorist threats before the attacks, based on a poll for Time magazine and CNN and on another for CBS News.
But both polls showed erosion in support for Bush's Iraq policy. Only a third of those surveyed by CBS said the war has been worth the cost, down from 4 in 10 a week earlier. Just 50 percent said going to war was the right decision, the lowest figure since the initial combat ended a year ago, with 46 percent saying the United States should have stayed out. The Time-CNN poll found 44 percent saying they approve of Bush's handling of Iraq, compared with 51 percent in late March.
Bush has made his leadership in the war on terrorism the central message of his reelection campaign, but, between now and the two political conventions this summer, he must navigate through what appears to be a far more treacherous period in Iraq, with threats of continuing resistance and a June 30 handoff of power that remains problematic. He also will have to deal with the fallout over the report of the Sept. 11 commission, which is due in late July.
Administration officials argue that the public has digested Bush's long-standing message that the war on terrorism will go on for years and has accepted that stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq will take a long time. The public, they say, is prepared to see that commitment through to the end. The risk for Bush is that he and other administration officials have not been explicit enough in saying that the rebuilding of Iraq may come at the cost of continued U.S. casualties long after the end of the invasion, and not just of taxpayer dollars.
"We've been very careful about trying to predict too far into the future," Bartlett said. "Despite the violence of the last 10 days, the Iraqi people are better off and their future is brighter than their past. That doesn't mean we don't have an obligation to educate the public about how difficult the task is going forward."
What administration officials must avoid, according to members of both parties, is that a continuation of chaos and resistance in Iraq leads to a reassessment of the direction of U.S. policy in Iraq by the public -- as happened during the Vietnam War. If that happens, it could undermine overall confidence in the president on the issue of terrorism.
"The president is running as the war president, and I would assume that that resonates well and that they have tested those messages," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart. "But in the end, what the country really wants is a lot of peace and quiet. We're as far away from peace and quiet as possible."
Kerry spoke out several times this week to criticize Bush, but in some ways he has boxed himself in with his previous votes and speeches on Iraq. In October 2002, Kerry voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the war, and later he voted for the first installment of money to carry out the military operation. He has consistently assumed a hawkish position on Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and he concurred with Bush that failure would weaken U.S. standing around the world.
As a result, Kerry is not in a position, nor is he inclined, to advocate a withdrawal of or significant reduction in U.S. troops, which some Democrats, including Sen. Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), are urging. Indeed, Kerry has suggested that more troops may be needed -- a more hawkish position than many Democrats are comfortable with -- and he campaigned on a platform of expanding the U.S. military overall by 40,000 troops in the short term to protect the military from spreading itself too thin with the simultaneous operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the same time, Kerry would open himself to criticism by pushing for more U.S. troops and more force because he voted against the recent $87 billion bill that included money for Iraq. Kerry, during the Oct. 17, 2003, Senate debate on the $87 billion package, echoed his earlier support for the mission in Iraq but raised the concerns that are materializing today. "Overeager to rush to war, the administration failed to plan adequately or effectively for peace," he said on the Senate floor. "This administration's brazen go-it-alone policy has placed our soldiers at unnecessary risk and our hopes for success in jeopardy."
Because he initially signaled support for the $87 billion, before voting against it, Kerry left some people confused about his position. He also voted for an alternative bill that would have provided the $87 billion if it was paid for by raising taxes on richer Americans. And a week before the vote, he told CBS: "I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to -- to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running."
One theme of Kerry's Iraq policy, stretching from the early prewar Senate debates to today's presidential campaign, is a call for bringing U.S. allies and international organizations into a multilateral operation to stabilize Iraq. No nations are rushing to provide more troops, and several are rethinking their relatively small deployments. Kerry's prescription is essentially twofold: Scrap the date-certain transfer of power and internationalize the effort.
Bush's political advisers have been quick to challenge Kerry to outline his plan for Iraq. One said that even if there are problems in Iraq, Bush will have the upper hand politically. "How do they frame this issue so that if the question is Iraq, the answer is Kerry?" asked one of Bush's top political advisers, who said he could not speak for the record on this subject.
But, for Bush, the more timely question is how he can assure the public that the actions he took in the past and the path he has chosen for the future will bring the success he has promised.
Staff writer Helen Dewar contributed to this report.
--------
Politics Can Get in the Way of Keeping Papers Secret
April 10, 2004
By ROBERT PEAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/politics/10SECR.html
WASHINGTON, April 9 - If President Bush decides to release a secret document describing omens of a catastrophic terrorist attack in 2001, it would be the latest example of how political imperatives sometimes force officials to set aside the government's normal procedures for classifying and declassifying national security information.
Federal rules establish detailed procedures for releasing such information. But those rules can be suspended when officials want to disclose information to serve an overriding purpose.
The White House did that last year, when it made the case for war in Iraq, and the administration has done it again in recent weeks, to buttress its defense of President Bush's record in combating terrorism.
On Friday, administration officials said they expected soon to declassify and release an intelligence document titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."
The document, a report to the president dated Aug. 6, 2001, had been requested by the independent commission studying the terrorist attacks that occurred five weeks later.
Members of the commission seemed to reveal classified information almost spontaneously at their meeting on Thursday.
"We're in the mood to declassify stuff," said one commission member, former Senator Bob Kerrey.
Steven Garfinkel, an expert on the handling of classified documents, said, "Political expediency or policy expediency is obviously going to trump a bureaucratic procedure" on some occasions.
Mr. Garfinkel, who was head of the government's Information Security Oversight Office from 1980 to 2002, said the president had authority to make such decisions.
"The classification system is rooted in executive authority and based on an executive order," Mr. Garfinkel said. "The president is at the top of the pyramid."
Some intelligence officials have argued against releasing the document, known as the President's Daily Brief, on the ground that such disclosure would set a bad precedent.
But Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, said, "The President's Daily Brief could be released publicly simply by blacking out" words that would reveal the sources of intelligence information or the methods used to collect it.
Mr. Blanton said that 10 President's Daily Briefs from the Nixon White House were in the public domain, having been officially declassified by the government.
At the commission hearing on Thursday, Mr. Kerrey quoted from a memorandum sent to the new administration within days after President Bush took office in January 2001. The memo, he said, included a "strategy for the elimination of the jihadist threat of Al Qaeda."
Then, "in the spirit of further declassification," Mr. Kerrey read from the Aug. 6 document, which told Mr. Bush that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking."
Mr. Kerrey does not have the authority to declassify information, but no one has suggested that he violated any rules. The panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said it was "important that the American people get a chance to see" the Aug. 6 document.
In 2002, when he was the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer said the daily report for the president was "the most highly sensitized classified document in the government."
But Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said, "There's been a political calculation at work in the handling" of the Aug. 6 report, and he asserted, "It underscores the arbitrary character of much of the classification system."
"The White House originally claimed that the document could not be disclosed to Congress or the 9/11 commission," Mr. Aftergood said on Friday. "Then it said the document could be disclosed, but only to three of the 10 commissioners. Then it conceded it could be disclosed to the full commission. Now, I expect, the administration will admit, under pressure, that the document can be declassified."
In general, officials who make the initial decision to classify information also have the power to declassify it, but the work of declassifying data is often delegated to lower-level officials.
The last annual report from the information security office said that 4,000 people had classification authority and that 44 million pages of "historically valuable records" were declassified in 2002.
Mr. Aftergood said the President's Daily Brief could be declassified by Mr. Bush, by the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, or by any official to whom they might delegate the necessary authority.
A commission member, Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the panel could not "reveal the title" of the Aug. 6 intelligence report until Thursday, when it was disclosed by Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, in her testimony.
But Mr. Fleischer had mentioned the title two years ago. The president, he said, had received a daily intelligence report with the heading, "Bin Laden determined to strike the United States." Mr. Fleischer disclosed that fact to show that Mr. Bush had been keenly aware of the threat posed by Al Qaeda.
Selective disclosure of classified information is nothing new. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Adlai E. Stevenson unveiled spy-plane photographs at the United Nations, just as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell offered evidence last year to support his contention that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was trying to acquire nuclear weapons.
To support its case against Iraq, the Bush administration also disclosed parts of a top secret intelligence report on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
For several months, administration officials said they could not even consider disclosing a secret document like the President's Daily Brief.
-------- MILITARY
NEWS ANALYSIS
The Parallels of Wars Past
April 10, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/international/middleeast/10LEBA.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, April 9 - Americans struggling to make sense, or maybe political hay, out of the violence convulsing Iraq turn almost reflexively to the searing experience of the Vietnam War.
Israel is haunted by another parallel: its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which for Israelis of a certain generation was their Vietnam. It, too, was envisioned as a bold mission to combat terrorism and reshape part of this region to be stable and friendly to the West.
"In Lebanon, we tried to figure out what was similar to what went on in Vietnam," said Avraham Burg, a member of the Israeli Parliament who went to Lebanon as an officer in the paratroopers and returned to lead a movement against that war. "You have a circle here: it's Vietnam, Lebanon and Baghdad."
The uncertain combat zones of Vietnam and Lebanon posed nightmarish challenges to soldiers. Those challenges may seem familiar to marines in Iraq as they try to sift enemies from civilians, without alienating most Iraqis.
"People look at the map and they say, `This is a desert, this isn't a jungle,' " said Augustus Richard Norton, a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University. "The point is there are functional equivalents to jungles. In this case, they're cities. They're just as impenetrable to us as the jungles were 40 years ago."
Dr. Norton, an expert on the Middle East, fought in Vietnam and later served as a United Nations peacekeeper in southern Lebanon.
At a grander level, a level of global strategy and even myth-making, Iraq has echoes of Vietnam, which was presented by the White House as a test of American resolve against a rising international menace, Communism.
But in terms of specific, stated objectives for the application of military force, Iraq looks more like Lebanon.
In Vietnam the Americans had a clear if shaky client, the South Vietnamese government, and an enemy, North Vietnam, with a strong political structure.
In Lebanon the Israelis, like the Americans in Iraq, plunged into a vacuum - or more precisely into a maelstrom of political and religious rivalries.
"The problem of how to rule a society that is divided, a country that does not exist as a state with a central authority with legitimacy - this is a problem Israel faced in the 1980's in Lebanon, and the United States now faces in Iraq," said Menachem Klein, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv.
When they invaded, the Israelis were showered with rice by Shiites who lived in fear of Palestinian militants. Within a year, they were being bled by the Shiites, whom they failed to enlist as allies. "In the Middle East - as in many places around the world - the enemy of my enemy can be my enemy as well," Mr. Burg said.
Noting that tens of thousands of Americans died in Vietnam, Dr. Norton said, "The Vietnam parallel is a bit of a stretch, in terms of scale. But I do think the Lebanon one is striking."
It may be the Americans in Iraq need now to learn lessons from the Israeli experience in Lebanon that veterans like Mr. Burg feel the Israelis should have learned from the American experience in Vietnam. But the differences among the three conflicts may prove more significant than the similarities.
For example, some experts argued that in Lebanon, pragmatic Shiites never had the backing of a clerical authority on the order of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq. Mr. Sistani, who sees in the American pledge of democracy a chance for Iraq's Shiite majority to gain effective control, has appealed for calm.
"The mainstream clerical clout is really with Sistani," said Martin Kramer, an authority on Islam and Arab politics. "That's a tremendous advantage the United States has in dealing with the Shia."
In Lebanon before the Israelis came, as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the Shiites were an economic underclass deprived of political power, despite their growing numbers.
In the 1970's, a Shiite movement called Amal began working within the Lebanese political system. It was led by a reform-minded cleric named Moussa al-Sadr, a distant relative of Moktada al-Sadr, who is now leading an insurrection against the Americans in Iraq.
By the late 1970's, Amal, which means "hope" in Arabic, was trying to protect Shiites in southern Lebanon - not against Israel, but against Palestinian militants who had established bases there.
Dr. Norton argued that it was not a lack of mainstream Shiite clerics but rather Israel's failure to cultivate the Shiites that led to their radicalization. Israel had little feel for the divisions within Lebanese society. It allied itself with elite Christians, fanning the Shiite sense of deprivation.
The Israelis achieved a central goal, driving the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon, from where it was waging attacks on Israel. But Israel's ambitious regional plan - to turn Lebanon into an ally - collapsed with the assassination of its choice as Lebanese president, Bashir Gemayel, a Christian.
Israeli troops hunkered down in southern Lebanon, where a new, militant Shiite movement, Hezbollah - "the party of God" - began picking them off.
Backed by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah militants, camouflaged among noncombatants, pounded away at the wedge between the local Arab population and the occupying Israeli Army. Israel responded to Hezbollah attacks with checkpoints, searches, and raids into mosques that drove civilians into the arms of Hezbollah.
Dr. Norton argued that a "tipping point" came more than a year after the invasion, on October 16, 1983. That day, an Israeli military convoy provoked a riot in Nabatiya when it tried to drive, honking, through tens of thousands of Shiite worshipers gathered to celebrate their most important holiday, Ashura.
"It was a moment when people could no longer sit on the fence," Dr. Norton said. "And that is what I sense has happened in Iraq. Now I think you have passed the point where many of those centrists or moderates who were sitting on the fence could afford to do so."
The problem for Israel became how to get out of Lebanon, much as the United States faced the problem of extricating itself from Vietnam.
The continuing Hezbollah fire claimed, on average, fewer than 31 soldiers' lives annually. But Israel could not vanquish the group, and as political pressure grew at home it finally left southern Lebanon after 18 years. Its retreat from Lebanon in May 2000 might have contributed to the Palestinian uprising by persuading Palestinians that Israel would respond only to force, analysts say.
Dr. Klein argued that the United States should leave Iraq "as soon as possible," even at risk of criticism as failing to achieve all its goals. "It is better to face this argument than to have higher losses in the future," he said.
But Dr. Eran Lerman, the head of the American Jewish Committee's office here and a retired colonel in Israeli military intelligence, said that any suggestion of an American departure would be a disaster for the mission.
"Conveying the image of permanence is tremendously important in the short run," he said. "For an Iraqi to provide the U.S. government with information, and then to find he has been left to a cruel fate at the hands of a new Iraqi power structure, is precisely the sort of thing that destroys the intelligence gathering and operational cycle."
Mr. Burg, the former Israeli paratrooper, noted that next week President Bush is to meet with the man who commanded the Israeli operation in Lebanon, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then the minister of defense.
"In '82, it was Sharon who didn't learn from the American experience in Vietnam and was doomed to repeat it," said Mr. Burg, a leader of the left-leaning Labor Party and a critic of Mr. Sharon's. "Here is George W. Bush, who didn't learn from Sharon's experience in '82."
Each man, he said, may now hope for a political boost from the other.
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Troops Move Into City That Governor Was Forced to Flee
April 10, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/international/asia/10afgh.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 9 - The central government seemed to be regaining control of a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan on Friday, as hundreds of Afghan National Army troops began moving into the city 24 hours after the governor was forced to flee, government officials said.
The soldiers, part of a, newly trained army of 9,000 that is loyal to the government of President Hamid Karzai, met no opposition. The city, Maimana, the capital of Faryab Province, was calm, said the presidential spokesman, Jawed Ludin.
"They secured the airport and then went out into the city," Mr. Ludin told The Associated Press. "Our reports are that the people received them quite warmly."
A British military observation team in Maimana reported that order had been restored after the arrival of the army, which is known as A.N.A. "The A.N.A. are now patrolling in the town and are currently assisting the local police," a statement from the British military press office in Kabul said. British military planes flew the Afghan soldiers and their American trainers to the city, and more soldiers arrived by road.
Despite the official pronouncements, however, it still was not clear whether the power struggle was over or if militiamen loyal to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum had left the city, as the president had requested.
The incident began Thursday when a crowd of General Dostum's supporters, mostly unarmed, attacked the office of the provincial governor, forcing him to flee under the protection of British troops. One person was reported killed and 10 wounded in the violence, according to the United Nations office in northern Afghanistan.
Another rally by supporters of General Dostum on Friday afternoon passed uneventfully, said a spokesman for the Afghan National Army, Gen. Zaher Azimi. The governor, Enayatullah Enayat, was under central government protection and would "maybe" return to his office Saturday, the general said.
The situation in the rest of the province remained uncertain. Militias loyal to General Dostum have taken control of most of the province and are pursuing a local commander, Hashem Habibi, who recently broke with General Dostum, residents said. British troops reported small-arms and artillery fire in Mr. Habibi's home district.
A government delegation was meeting Friday with General Dostum in his hometown of Shibarghan, east of Maimana. In a telephone conversation with Mr. Karzai on Thursday, General Dostum denied that his troops had moved into Faryab Province or that he had been trying to challenge the government's authority, the presidential spokesman, Mr. Ludin, told Reuters.
Yet in his first comments on the clashes in an interview with Reuters, General Dostum complained that he had not been consulted on the deployment of the army troops. He demanded that Mr. Karzai dismiss his interior and defense ministers or face the collapse of his government, and he railed against passes by American jets over his home Thursday night. "My kids were frightened, but let me say that I am not the type of man to be afraid," he said.
--------
Afghans Say Renegade Withdraws from Northern City
April 10, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-dostum.html
KABUL (Reuters) - Forces of a renegade adviser to President Hamid Karzai have withdrawn from the center of a provincial capital they had overrun, leaving it in the hands of the Afghan national army, the Defense Ministry said on Saturday.
General Abdul Rashid Dostum forces invaded the northern province of Faryab from neighboring provinces on Wednesday and took over the provincial capital Maimana the following day in a fresh challenge to Karzai's U.S.-backed government.
``The Afghan National Army has secured the city and they are moving forward to secure the area around Maimana,'' Defense Ministry spokesman General Zahir Azimy told a news briefing.
``Dostum's forces have left Maimana city and they are about to leave the suburbs as well.''
The government sent hundreds of troops to Maimana to restore order on Thursday and hundreds of officers from the new national police force are also to be deployed.
Azimy said it was possible there might be further clashes in parts of the province, but added: ``In a few days, God willing, it will be completely secure.''
The ministry announcement came a day after talks between a delegation led by Deputy Defense Minister General Mohibullah and Dostum in his stronghold of Shiberghan to the east of Faryab.
A Maimana resident said Dostum's forces had withdrawn to the base about 10 km (six miles) southwest of the city of Mohammad Hashim Habibi, the pro-Karzai commander who fled their advance.
He said about 10 backers of the governor who fled with Habibi were hurt in stone-throwing clashes with Dostum supporters but the latter, who numbered a few hundred, dispersed after Mohibullah promised to tell Karzai their complaints.
Speaking to Reuters on Friday, Dostum complained he had not been consulted about the deployment of national troops and urged Karzai to sack his defense and interior ministers or risk seeing his government fail.
He also complained that planes from the U.S.-led force in Afghanistan flew low over his house on Thursday night, but said he would not be intimidated.
WORRY FOR KARZAI AND US BACKERS
It was the second time in less than a month Karzai has sent troops from the still infant national army to deal with unrest involving provincial militias like Dostum's targeted for disarmament, underscoring the problems he and his foreign backers face ensuring security for September elections.
The unrest is bound to cause worries in Washington about the stability of Afghanistan as U.S. troops pursue Taliban and al Qaeda fighters and is an unwelcome headache in President Bush's election year even as U.S. forces struggle in Iraq.
Aircraft from the U.S.-led military force helped fly the national soldiers to Maimana.
U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Matt Beevers said the situation there now appeared calm after ``civil unrest'' by ``bands of hooligans bent on doing bad things.''
Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek veteran of Afghanistan's long years of civil war known for frequent changes of allegiance, has remained an ``adviser'' to Karzai even though he is a federalist who opposes the president's vision of a centralized state.
-------- arms
Pakistani paramilitary haul illegal weapons in Karachi
KARACHI (AFP)
Apr 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040410131827.0ppsmfy1.html
Pakistani paramilitary rangers Saturday seized a cache of lethal arms meant for terrorist attacks in the violence prone southern port city, officials said
They found seven rockets, one medium-range mortar gun, 18 shells, one rocket launcher and 24 PJ-7 rockets from the basement of a building under construction on the outskirts of the city.
The building was empty and no arrest was made immediately, Ranager's Colonel Zafar Iqbal Awan told reporters.
"The arms were meant for terrorist attacks in Karachi and the discovery has saved the city from a major catastrophe," Awan said.
The Russian-made arms were most probably brought into the city by extremist groups which are target of a current crackdown by security agencies, he said.
-------- asia
Uzbekistan Says Arabs Trained Suspects
Associated Press
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A250-2004Apr9.html
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, April 9 -- Some of the suspects allegedly involved in a wave of suicide bombings and attacks on police in Uzbekistan last week received military training from Arab instructors who also taught al Qaeda fighters, the country's top prosecutor said Friday.
Prosecutor General Rashid Kadyrov, who also said the suspects were linked to two Uzbek extremist groups, did not offer any evidence or take questions from reporters at a news briefing. The Uzbek government, under fire from human rights groups for oppressive policies and crackdowns on Muslims who worship outside state-affiliated mosques, has been keen to defend its policies, portraying itself as the latest victim of global terrorism.
At least 47 people, including 33 alleged terrorists and 10 police officers, died during four days of violence, the first unrest here since Uzbekistan became a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism and allowed hundreds of American troops to use a southern military base.
Kadyrov said 45 people were under arrest and nine were under investigation in connection with the attacks. He said 403 others were detained and later released.
The prosecutor said investigators found computer files at the home of an alleged terrorist with documents on training in "Pakistan and other states." He asserted the militants had underground contacts in four countries, which he did not identify.
-------- business
Air Force Defends Boeing Tanker-Lease Plan
Service Disputes Report by Defense Inspector General
By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A663-2004Apr9.html
The Air Force yesterday defended its controversial agreement to lease refueling aircraft from Boeing Co. and disputed the findings of a report from the Defense Department inspector general that criticized the deal.
"The Air Force factually disagrees with nearly all of the findings and recommendations," the service said in its official response to the report, an edited summary of which was made public yesterday on the inspector general's Web site. "The Air Force fully endorses the program and looks forward to contract signature and eventual delivery of aircraft."
Boeing also responded yesterday, arguing that it had worked with the Air Force to deliver a "streamlined commercial acquisition" instead of the "more traditional government procurement methods" the inspector general recommended, James F. Albaugh, president and chief executive of Boeing's defense business, said in a news release.
The report, which was presented last week to members of the Senate, said the Air Force used "an inappropriate procurement strategy" that failed to follow "best business practices" in agreeing to the $23.5 billion program. While Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz concluded that there was no reason to abandon the program, he called for changes to the contract agreement. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has put the program on hold pending several investigations. He will use Schmitz's report and the Air Force's response in deciding the project's future.
In its response, the Air Force said Schmitz distorted its actions. Under orders from Congress to create a lease program -- the largest lease ever undertaken by the U.S. government -- the Air Force said it complied with law and sought oversight from the White House Office of Management and Budget as well as the Defense Department.
The inspector general overstated the risk of the program, the Air Force said, because Boeing has already developed the commercial version of the plane, the 767, and put its own money into studying its conversion for use as a tanker. The Air Force also stood by its plan to award Boeing a "fixed-price" contract that would let the contractor keep the difference if the planes cost less to build than estimated.
The inspector general argued that the government should use a more traditional approach, covering Boeing's costs and then awarding profits as incentives for good work. But the Air Force argued that the traditional method would expose the government to cost overruns.
In response to a finding that the Air Force had improperly waived its right to audit the program, the Air Force countered that Boeing's operations would be subject to generally accepted accounting principles and that a government audit was not required under the type of contract involved.
The Air Force also said the inspector general was incorrect in asserting that the plane would not be subjected to adequate testing, adding that the service will "continue to work within the Department of Defense to resolve test and evaluation issues using the normal . . . process."
Critics in Congress have charged that the deal to lease 20 refueling tankers and buy another 80 amounts to a corporate bailout for Boeing.
The Defense Science Board and the National Defense University are conducting separate inquiries into the plane's capabilities. In addition, a criminal grand jury in Northern Virginia is looking into the actions of former Air Force official Darleen M. Druyun, who worked on the tanker lease deal and then was hired by Boeing while negotiations were still taking place. Boeing later fired Druyun as well as its chief financial officer for improper hiring procedures.
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Pentagon Says Changes Are Needed in Boeing Jet Deal
April 10, 2004
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/national/10TANK.html
WASHINGTON, April 9 - In a report severely criticizing how the Air Force negotiated with Boeing to obtain up to 100 large jets for use as in-flight refueling tankers, the Pentagon's inspector general said on Friday that the military should not go forward with the $20 billion deal unless major changes were made to procurement practices.
The report found that Air Force officials had failed to do enough homework before concluding that they were paying a fair price for the tankers. The inspector general, Joseph E. Schmitz, also said Air Force officials had improperly waived the government's right to audit the program and failed to follow other acquisition and testing practices.
Pentagon officials requested the report in December after Boeing fired two executives upon uncovering "compelling evidence" of ethical violations related to the negotiations.
The way the Air Force handled the deal "places the department at a high risk for paying excessive prices and profits," the report found. It added that the fact that other military contracting laws had been ignored meant the Boeing tankers "may not be operationally effective, suitable and survivable."
The deal should go forward only after those major issues are resolved, the inspector general found, concluding that there was no "compelling reason" to cancel the deal. The report laid out several options for Pentagon officials, including proceeding with the deal after implementing corrective measures or undertaking a new search for alternatives for military tankers.
The Air Force took strong issue with Mr. Schmitz's conclusions and said it "non-concurs emphatically" with nearly all his recommendations.
"The program's acquisition strategy was dictated by Congress and approved by the office of the secretary of defense," the Air Force stated in a response included in the report. The deal with Boeing, it said, "delivers tankers to the warfighter with a fixed price, guaranteed availability and unprecedented price protections for the government," and complies with "all applicable statutes and regulations."
Boeing officials could not be reached for comment on Friday evening. A Pentagon spokesman said Friday night that the report was "useful and important" and said that other studies of the contract were being conducted.
The deal was very controversial -and equally important to Boeing - even before the ethical controversy erupted. For Boeing, the deal is a way to keep its 767 production line humming. And the Air Force says the war on terrorism and the "heightened steady state of homeland defense," coupled with the age of the nation's existing fleet of in-flight tankers, made completing the deal an urgent necessity.
But critics, both conservative and liberal, blasted it as an extravagant sweetheart deal. They said the administration's plan to lease the jets, instead of buying them, was unusual and would lead to a "profligate waste of taxpayer dollars."
By early November, the military had worked out a compromise with lawmakers and Boeing that called for the Air Force to lease 20 jets and buy up to 80 more, cutting $4 billion off the cost of leasing, instead of purchasing, the planes.
But by late November, the controversy over the behind-the-scenes negotiations had exploded after it was revealed that Boeing's chief financial officer, Michael M. Sears, had spoken to a Pentagon official involved in the negotiations, Darleen Druyun, about a job for her at the company. The Air Force has also been investigating whether Ms. Druyun improperly disclosed information to Boeing about a competing bid for the tankers.
She joined Boeing after she left the Air Force, but both she and Mr. Sears were fired last year.
The controversy also contributed to the ouster of Boeing's chief executive, Philip M. Condit.
Eric Miller, the senior defense investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, said the inspector general's report "showed that the specifications for the tankers were tailored to match the contractor's product, and not the Air Force's needs."
"The investigation also showed that the tanker lease deal is laced with provisions that will remove critical transparency in contracting and other taxpayer protections," Mr. Miller said.
--------
Pentagon Seeks to Use Foreign Airlines
April 10, 2004
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/business/10fly.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The Pentagon is asking Congress for the authority to award contracts to foreign airlines to move troops and equipment, a business that has always been limited to - and been lucrative for - American-based carriers.
The proposal, in the Defense Department's budget request for fiscal year 2005, could have its greatest impact on the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a group of 24 passenger and cargo carriers that sign contracts with the Pentagon each year. These airlines were instrumental in transporting military personnel and equipment to the Middle East last year before and during the Iraq war.
In all, American passenger and cargo carriers were paid $1.2 billion to fly nearly 500,000 troops to and from the war zone during the formal Iraq conflict. The cargo companies carried more than 161,000 tons of equipment, according to a Pentagon report last fall.
But they may not have a lock on the Pentagon's business for long. In its 2005 appropriations request, submitted last month, the Pentagon asked Congress to repeal a law that bars foreign-owned airlines from bidding on its contracts.
Specifically, the Defense Department is seeking to repeal Section 2710 of the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2003. That section requires that contracts be awarded to air carriers with American ownership of 50 percent or more. That is the level that is required for airlines to be certified as domestic carriers by the Transportation Department.
In an analysis that accompanied its appropriations bill, the Defense Department said the limit, "while laudable in intent," presents significant difficulties in practice. Before awarding contracts, the analysis said, Defense Department officials must determine whether 50 percent of an air carrier's operating revenue came from American or foreign-based interests.
"To determine an air carrier's controlling interest is questionable since detailed data regarding source of operating revenues is usually not available. Such information is not readily available or transparent, so contracting officers are forced to assume the risk of unknowingly violating the law," the analysis said.
The analysis did not mention the reserve fleet, but industry officials said the request, if approved by Congress, could lead to competition from foreign carriers.
Word of the request was first disclosed yesterday in an Internet newsletter, Inside the Air Force. A spokesman for the Air Force's Transportation Command, based at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, confirmed the request.
Participants in the reserve fleet sign up for government contracts to transport troops around the world in peacetime. In return, they agree to turn over their planes on short notice, for 30 days at a time, to move soldiers and gear during emergency wartime mobilizations.
Two such mobilizations have been declared since President Harry S. Truman authorized the program in 1951. The first occurred in 1991, during the Persian Gulf war, and the second in 2003 when war began in Iraq.
Last year's mobilization proved a lifeline for participating airlines, which had been battered by a drop in traffic because of fears over the outbreak of war, a weakened economy and the SARS virus. The $1.2 billion paid to the airlines during the mobilization, which lasted from February to June, was part of an overall budget of $2.4 billion in 2003 for the reserve fleet. The same amount has been allocated for 2004.
The biggest passenger carriers participating in the reserve fleet last year were ATA Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Continental Airlines, and the charter airline World Airways, according to the Pentagon. The biggest cargo carriers taking part were Atlas, Evergreen, Polar, Gemini and World, which handled cargo as well as passengers.
Officials at the Air Transport Association, which represents domestic airlines, did not return calls seeking comment.
By allowing foreign carriers to bid against domestic rivals for contracts, the Pentagon could benefit in two ways, said Robert W. Mann Jr., an industry consultant based in Port Washington, N.Y.
Competition could bring down the price that the military pays to transport troops, he said. American carriers transport soldiers and equipment from bases in the United States, like Dover, Del., to military installations overseas. The planes do not fly to conflict zones.
The Pentagon pays a flat 8.5 cents a seat mile for a round-trip flight. The cost of a typical flight between Dover Air Force Base and Kuwait City was $379,965, according to the Pentagon report last year. That was for a 13,546-mile, round-trip flight using a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with 330 seats.
But Mr. Mann said foreign airlines, especially charter companies, have been known to seek as little as 5 cents a seat mile for equivalent trips. The Pentagon "may feel they can get better pricing from other suppliers," he said. It was not clear which foreign airlines would participate. But industry experts noted that competition in Europe between low-fare carriers and major airlines has led to excess capacity there. Meanwhile, a decline in flights to the Middle East because of the Iraq conflict could cause carriers based there to become interested in bidding for Pentagon contracts.
The Pentagon already has the ability to grant contracts to foreign airlines case by case if no American carrier is willing to assume the risk of a flight. In the past, the Pentagon has chartered flights by Volga Dnepr Airlines of Russia and Ukrainian Cargo Airways.
Mr. Mann said foreign airlines could provide the Pentagon with a wider supply of planes. This winter, the Pentagon encountered some reluctance by American companies to bid on individual trips that were needed to begin the rotation of troops to and from Iraq, the largest such movement since World War II.
The rotation requests came as airlines were adding flights to their schedule in anticipation of stronger spring and summer traffic, which can yield more in revenue than what the Pentagon pays.
In addition, reserve flight planes must carry double crews, because the aircraft touch down to deposit troops and equipment and take off quickly afterwards once they are repaired and refueled, not allowing enough rest time for one crew.
There was speculation in aviation circles that the Pentagon might have to resort to another emergency mobilization. But after contacting each participant in the reserve fleet, Air Force officials were able to find enough volunteers to transport troops and equipment during the rotation period.
But that was before comments this week by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the Pentagon might send more troops to Iraq. The participation of foreign airlines in the reserve fleet could provide the military with more leeway, should that be necessary, Mr. Mann said.
-------- china
Minister offers to quit over U.S. diplomat's exit
From combined dispatches
April 10, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040409-101952-8341r.htm
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwanese Foreign Minister Eugene Chien offered to step down yesterday over the resignation of Washington's top diplomat for Taiwan affairs, seen as a good friend of the politically isolated island.
Therese Shaheen, the director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), quit Wednesday amid speculation she was too pro-Taiwan at a time when the United States has tried to maintain a delicate balance in its ties with Taipei and Beijing.
Critics said the Foreign Ministry had abused Mrs. Shaheen's support in order to further domestic political goals, leading to her departure and the loss of an unusually vocal advocate for an island constantly struggling against China's diplomatic stranglehold.
"There were indeed oversights and inadequate supervision in our department's handling of ... Shaheen's resignation," Mr. Chien told reporters, but did not elaborate. "I offered to resign because I absolutely will not shirk responsibility."
Mr. Chien submitted his resignation to President Chen Shui-bian and Prime Minister Yu Shyi-kun.
China views the island as a renegade province that must return to the fold, by force if necessary. Beijing uses its political and economic clout to isolate Taipei internationally, and only 26 countries have diplomatic ties with the island.
The United States switched recognition to Beijing in 1979 but remains the island's main arms supplier, selling it advanced weapons to counter a military buildup in China.
The AIT oversees U.S. interests in Taiwan in the absence of formal diplomatic ties. People familiar with Mrs. Shaheen's departure said she had repeated clashes with the White House.
Bush administration officials told The Washington Times - which first reported on Mrs. Shaheen's impending exit on Wednesday - that she was pressured out because she was a strong defender of Taiwan and clashed with pro-China AIT official Douglas Paal, the U.S. representative in Taipei.
Before the Taiwan presidential election last month, Mrs. Shaheen was perceived to be undercutting U.S. efforts to encourage Mr. Chen to moderate his pro-independence rhetoric so as not to precipitate a crisis with Beijing, they said.
And after Mr. Chen narrowly won the March 20 election, which is being challenged by his opponent, some U.S. officials believe Mrs. Shaheen had jumped the gun by issuing a congratulatory message to Mr. Chen before the White House was ready to do so.
Her message was swiftly announced by the Foreign Ministry, a move seen to lend credibility to Mr. Chen, whose razor-thin victory has sparked huge protests and is being challenged in court.
The State Department has declined comment on reports Beijing had pressured Washington for her removal, saying Mrs. Shaheen had resigned for personal reasons.
Mr. Chien is the third Cabinet minister who has offered to quit since the election, though the impact would be muted as the Cabinet will be reshuffled before the next administration begins on May 20.
"The U.S. and Taiwan have a very unique relationship, and the head of AIT and the head of the Taiwan office in the United States serve as white gloves for bilateral relations," Philip Yang, a political analyst at National Taiwan University, told Reuters news agency.
"You shouldn't use this as a tool for domestic political consumption, and I believe this is something that the U.S. has complained to Taiwan about."
-------- iraq
Iraq's enemy within
The US-appointed governing council cannot deliver democracy
Haifa Zangana
Saturday April 10, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1189273,00.html
In Iraq we say: "Choose the companion first, then the road." We believe it very important to know who one is travelling with. On June 30 the US-led occupation forces will hand power to an Iraqi government. Iraqis would like to begin our journey towards a much-needed stability and democracy. But at the moment our "companions" are the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and their appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). We have not chosen them.
The governing council is as responsible as the US-led occupation forces for Iraq's rapid slide into chaos and bloodshed. They stood aside last Sunday when the Sadr City demonstration against the closure of a newspaper was machine-gunned from helicopters - 32 people were killed and hundreds injured. They stood aside when rockets were fired into the Shulla neighbourhood further north in Baghdad, with more casualties. They have been watching in silence while Iraqis have been killed in Basra, Nassiriya, Kirkuk, Amara, Baquba, Kut, Kerbala and Najaf.
It was left to journalists and organisations like Amnesty International and Occupation Watch to document and condemn hundreds of occupation excesses and outright atrocities, starting from the shooting of 17 civilians at a demonstration in Falluja in April last year.
While the IGC denounced the savage mutilation last week of four American mercenaries in Falluja, they failed to issue an equal condemnation of the US marines' besieging of the town, sending tank columns into neighbourhoods, guns blazing, and attacking a mosque with F-16 planes, killing 40 people. The odd IGC member who could not hide from journalists does no more than murmur about the need for "restraint on both sides" or mouth well-worn phrases about foreign hands trying to delay the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi people. What sovereignty?
The 25-member IGC was appointed on the basis of their ethnic and sectarian backgrounds. The council had some power, but Paul Bremer, the US administrator of Iraq, retained a veto on its decisions. The IGC appointed the Iraqi interim government based on a similar ethnic and sectarian quota. But American officials run all the ministries.
The IGC, the CPA and the occupying forces are in agreement: the Iraqis are not yet ready for elections. The climate is ripe for civil war, they say. So we are faced with the likelihood that the existing IGC members and their chosen ministers will be at the core of the next government, which will be run "informally" by American officials.
The CPA and IGC's early promises were colourful: they would build a new democratic Iraq, they said, guaranteeing human rights and freedom. But a year on, the picture they painted is fading. Car bombs, shootings and kidnapping have become part of daily life. Only 50% of the population have fresh water, compared with 60% before "liberation". Electricity is intermittent. Drugs are sold openly in the streets. Ten thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed since the start of the conflict. But it is not for the security crisis alone that the majority of Iraqis hold IGC members in utter disdain.
Corruption is widespread. To get a job, one needs a tazkia (letter of recommendation) from one of the IGC parties. Allocation of subcontracts only follows a payment of 5%-10% of the value of the contract to the American contractors. Nepotism starts at the very top (eight ministers are close relatives of the IGC members).
Although most of the IGC members were once victims of Saddam's regime, they now turn a blind eye to the violations of human rights by occupation troops. One of the first things the CPA did was to issue a memorandum to remove the jurisdiction of Iraqi courts over any coalition personnel in both civil and criminal matters. According to a recent Amnesty International report: "Coalition forces appear in many cases to be using the climate of violence to justify violating the very human rights standards they are supposed to be upholding. They have shot Iraqis dead during demos, tortured and ill-treated prisoners, arrested people arbitrarily and held them indefinitely, demolished houses in acts of revenge and collective punishment."
The CPA also ignores the violent activities of the four militias in Iraq, which have taken the law into their own hands: the peshmergas of the two Kurdish parties; the Badr brigade of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq; Ahmed Chalabi's troops; and the ex-Ba'athist Mukhabarats under Iyad Alawi's national accord. These militias are run by members of the IGC and no one can touch them. No high-ranking official of Saddam's regime has yet been prosecuted either, despite the wish of most Iraqis that they be bought to justice.
For all the talk of democracy, opposition in any form to the IGC and the occupation is not acceptable. I saw women queuing for hours at the gates of Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad begging for news of their loved ones, many of whom are political prisoners. It brought back bad memories. In the 1970s, under the Ba'ath regime, my mother had to wait in the same place desperate to hear if I was held inside.
In Baghdad, on January 12, I met Abdullatif Ali al-Mayah, professor of politics and director of Baghdad's Centre for Human Rights. He was concerned about women's and young people's rights. A believer in human dignity and justice, he spoke with anger about the plight of Iraqi people under occupation. We arranged to work together. On January 18, on al-Jazeera television, he denounced IGC corruption and demanded elections as soon as possible. Twelve hours later, he was killed. Al-Mayah, a former prisoner of Saddam's regime, was no Saddamist or Bin Ladenist. The CPA and IGC met his murder with silence - as they did the murder of at least 17 other Iraqi academics. With this silence, the oppressed becomes oppressor.
The IGC has allied itself with the occupation administration. Its role is to shield occupation forces, not its own people. The gulf between it and the majority of Iraqis has widened. Away from the vulnerable majority, they stand well-protected by bodyguards driving special cars and carrying free mobile phones courtesy of the US.
The interim constitution was written behind closed doors. Iraqis were not consulted, but Paul Bremer and Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador, were. As the countdown to the supposed end of the occupation begins, Bremer has already announced measures and laws that will in effect thwart a new government from overturning his decisions of the past year
The CPA is in favour of rapid privatisation. At the end of April, 15 ministers will be in London to attend an event described in its colourful brochure as: "An excellent opportunity to do business in Iraq without having to consider the current security risks of visiting the country." Shell, Chevron Texaco, Exxon and Mobil are sponsoring the event, among others.
The UN still has a role to play in Iraq. It has to be clearly defined: to work with Iraqis to rebuild their country, restore democracy and regain their dignity, not to legitimise US-led occupation. Also, in the rush to mortgage Iraq, Iraqi people should not be bound by contracts and long-term agreements signed on their behalf, nor should they be liable for odious debt incurred by Saddam's regime. Why should they repay loans from a long list of foreign governments, all of whom surely lent the money in the full knowledge that it would be used to arm and support their persecutor?
ˇ Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi-born novelist and artist. She is a former political prisoner of the Ba'ath regime
haifa_zangana@yahoo.co.uk
----
US offers Fallujah ceasefire, but marine killed as fighting goes on
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP)
Apr 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040410184743.7udh67jj.html
US forces offered Saturday a ceasefire and unprecedented mediation talks to end a drive against Iraqi insurgents here, but a marine was killed and the bloodstained town still echoed with the sounds of battle.
Even as members of Iraq's interim Governing Council ventured into the city, military commanders on the ground said they did not expect any truce to last and were bolstered by the addition of a third US Marine battalion and a fourth consisting of members of the paramilitary Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
"What's next for us as far as I am concerned is offensive operations," said Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne, commander of the First Battalion-Fifth Marines. "So I'm ready to attack when they give me the green light."
A 35-strong Iraqi delegation, led by US-installed interim Governing Council members, entered Fallujah and held meetings to mediate an end to the bloodshed. Byrne warned it was unrealistic to expect battle-hardened insurgents to surrender.
"The fact they've been wearing belt bombs, the virulent nature with which they've been fighting, the chances of the Iraqi Governing Council and city fathers getting Joe Jihadi to surrender are pretty slim," Byrne said.
Despite the efforts to broker a peaceful solution for Fallujah, a bastion of the Iraqi resistance, marines and insurgents battled on.
Sporadic machine-gun fire and explosions echoed through the Sunni Muslim town west of Baghdad hours after the start of the ceasefire at noon, an AFP correspondent reported.
Black smoke billowed from the town and sirens wailed as AC-130 gunships and warplanes roared above on the sixth day of the battle in which more than 400 Iraqis have been killed and 1,000 wounded.
Insurgents lobbed mortar rounds at US positions Saturday night and large explosions rocked buildings.
"Since the suspension was called, the marines have sustained one marine killed and one wounded in Fallujah," the Marine Corps said in a statement, although it gave no further details and insisted they were respecting the unilateral ceasefire ordered by coalition commanders.
The marines also said they had pursued a group of up to 16 insurgents to a cave and dropped two large bombs on them, although there was no confirmation of any casualties.
Amid the pile-up of bodies in Fallujah's morgues, Byrne insisted that the Iraqis who had been killed were insurgents and not civilians. He defended the marines' tactics as precise and meant to steer clear of civilians.
Early Saturday, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the US-led coalition's deputy director of operations, announced it was "prepared to implement a ceasefire with enemy elements in Fallujah commencing at noon".
"If the ceasefire holds, talks regarding the establishment of legitimate Iraqi authority will begin," he said. "These steps were taken with the expectation that enemy elements will also honor the ceasefire."
The US army retains the "right of self-defence" but was "seeking a bilateral ceasefire across the battlefield" to allow mediation efforts, Kimmitt told a Baghdad news conference.
In Fallujah, Master Sergeant Martin Payotelis, with an M-16 slung over his shoulder, expressed scepticism about prospects for a halt in hostilities, stressing that any deal would likely favour the insurgents.
"I don't think a ceasefire is possible. There are too many of the foreigners who have come here to fight," he said as the marines geared for the possibility of house-to-house fighting.
"It's going to get nasty," Payotelis said.
The marines also charged that their foes had failed to respect their humanitarian gestures and targeted relief convoys allowed to enter the town.
During this suspension period, coalition forces retain the inherent right to self-defense, and will remain fully prepared to resume offensive operations," the marine statement said.
The US offer of a ceasefire came after its hand-picked 25-member interim Governing Council issued a statement Saturday denouncing the Fallujah operation as "collective punishment of innocent civilians" as well as the insurgents.
----
UK struggles to be heard in Iraq
By Paul Reynolds,
Saturday, 10 April, 2004
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3616793.stm
As Tony Blair prepares to fly to Washington for his meeting with President Bush shortly, questions have arisen as to whether Britain has an adequate say in the decisions being taken in Iraq.
The former foreign secretary Lord Hurd said that Britain was "involved in the consequences and I think we should be involved in the taking of those decisions".
He referred in particular to the decisions to attack Falluja and to act against the Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr.
He recommended sending a senior British envoy to Baghdad to put Britain's case and suggested the recently retired Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson.
US soldiers bombarded a mosque in Falluja killing at least 40
Implicit in what Lord Hurd said was a belief that Britain would somehow act as restraining influence on the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) which is under the control of the US Administrator Paul Bremer.
British representation in the CPA was somewhat weakened with the departure of Sir Jeremy Greenstock at the end of March.
He was a former British UN ambassador and had a great deal of diplomatic clout having impressed the Americans with his handling of negotiations over UN resolutions on Iraq.
But he kept to his contract under which he stayed for six months and did not extend it until the 30 June handover.
Instead he gave way to his deputy David Richmond, who, although a respected and experienced Iraq hand and an Arabic speaker, does not quite carry the same political weight.
Decision making
The other senior British official in Iraq is Patrick Nixon, who is the representative in Basra.
He, too, is a veteran Arabist who came out of early retirement to take on the job until June.
He is an independent and sceptically-minded diplomat and it is hard to see him approving actions which would lead to serious confrontations. But how much influence he has with Mr Bremer is not known.
The New York Times quoted British officials in London recently as saying that Sir Jeremy had complained to London that Mr Bremer had controlled decision-making "with minimal input from Iraqis and other voices, including Sir Jeremy's".
The officials were quoted as saying that "while they are sympathetic with the daunting management task that Americans have undertaken, they also believe that the Coalition Provisional Authority under Mr. Bremer has become too 'politicized', meaning that events are orchestrated and information controlled with the American political agenda uppermost in mind".
The British unease might be more about tactical than strategic decisions
Publicly however, British ministers are not criticising the decisions in Iraq.
Both the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon were supportive in BBC interviews, though Mr Straw did stress the need for a political as well as military strategy.
There is a political strategy which should see formal sovereignty handed over to an interim Iraqi government on 30 June.
There are doubts however as to whether this government will have much power since the US military will stay on under a four star American general.
The British government appears fully signed up to this political process and Sir Jeremy himself has been praising it over recent weeks in briefings for the media in London.
The British unease therefore might be more about tactical than strategic decisions.
A problem arises however when a tactical decision has a major impact on the wider picture as has happened over the last few days.
----
'Expect Snipers on All Minarets'
Patrolling Fallujah by Foot, Marines Who Sought Friendships Now Face Elusive Enemies
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A113-2004Apr9?language=printer
FALLUJAH, Iraq, April 9 -- Just a hundred yards beyond the factory walls that surround the Marine base camp, the streets feel as remote and forbidding as the moon -- a hostile moon where every piece of scrap metal could hide a bomb, every abandoned factory window could conceal a sniper.
It is high noon, and a handful of U.S. Marines are setting out on a foot patrol as the call to prayer begins emanating from mosques across the city. Some of the Marines on this particular patrol are from a civil affairs unit. They have read books about Iraq and taken courses on Islamic culture. Under normal circumstances, they would be chatting with residents through an interpreter, asking about their problems, trying to make friends.
Instead, today they are stalking enemy territory with M-16s at the ready, thrusting their rifles into windows and doors, crouching behind sand piles and rusted factory equipment, communicating with hand signals, turning sharply at an unseen dog's bark.
And every time they spot another human being, they must instantly decide whether to treat the person as a potential threat or an innocent bystander. That means judging whether a glance is hostile or merely frightened, whether a bundle is more likely to contain food or ammunition.
"Be advised: A group of 20 people carrying white flags are moving behind two trucks," comes a radio message from another patrol a few blocks away. "Eyes on, keep alert," responds another voice.
As they creep through the half-deserted, debris-filled industrial zone that the Marines theoretically have controlled since surrounding the city of 300,000 on Monday, the riflemen are moving across tricky terrain in more than one sense.
Until last week, they were instructed to avoid attacking sensitive Muslim sites. Now, after several days of fierce firefights with insurgents hiding in mosques, they are under orders to treat each one as a possible guerrilla redoubt.
"Expect snipers on all minarets. They will do it to draw fire and cause collateral damage in the hour of prayer," instructs Maj. Lawrence Kaifesh, a civil affairs officer who spent his first few months in Iraq sipping tea with Muslim clerics and tribal sheiks.
But the troops are also under strict orders not to shoot unless shot at first and unless they can take precise aim at their targets. The tension between these imperatives -- to hunt down and attack anti-American insurgents without hurting or alienating the civilian populace -- is palpable in every encounter.
"The situation out there is totally different than anything we prepared for," says Kaifesh, with grim understatement. One of his men guffaws. "We call this aggressive civil affairs," he jokes.
In a shed beneath a giant cement plant, the patrol comes upon seven bedraggled men and a small boy. The men plead, hold out indecipherable ID cards and mime that they are tired and afraid of loud booms.
A young Marine puts on a tough face. "Do you have gun?" A tall man in a red kerchief shakes his head. "Do they have gun?" The man is confused.
"Yes. No. No," he struggles.
After the Marine lowers his rifle and walks away, the men explain to a journalist in Farsi that they are Kurdish factory workers from northern Iraq who have been stuck in Fallujah since Sunday. "We want to go home, we have no food, please help us," says Mohammed Hussain Ahmed, 43.
A few hundred yards away, the patrol enters a yard strung with laundry. A woman in a billowing blue robe keeps asking whether the troops speak Arabic. But none do, and their regular interpreters are busy back at the Marine base, interrogating detainees.
Next, the troops come upon a concrete-block house with a few stunted palms in front. Women and children file obediently outside, followed by an old man. The Marines check the house briefly for anything unusual, such as excessive stockpiles of equipment or clothing. Then they say thank you and move on.
"God, I hope I'm reading people right," says Chief Warrant Officer David Bednarcik. "You look at faces, see how people react when you ask to search them. Even without words you can walk into a room and sense if people like you or not."
Before heading out on the patrol, Bednarcik instructed his men to watch out for people carrying large white bags, because several civilians had been caught this week lugging sacks full of weapons and ammunition. But he also cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
"They might be bad guys, or they might just be going to work. We don't want some trigger-happy Joe Marine to shoot an innocent person and turn another Iraqi family against us," he says.
As the patrol picks its way through piles of factory debris, it passes beneath a smokestack that was hit by a rocket the day before. Dead dogs lie sprawled in the dirt; others growl and skulk in fear. Gunfire crackles close by, and a pile of rocks suddenly becomes precious cover.
Around a corner, two male figures suddenly come into view, bent over something by a wall. The patrol has covered several square blocks in just over an hour, and the Marines are almost back at their base, but they cannot drop their guard yet.
"I think these guys may just be laying bricks," Kaifesh says into his radio, squinting at the busy pair of men.
"Remember, they shoot RPGs at us," comes the sotto voce retort from Bednarcik, referring to rocket-propelled grenades, "and they know the terrain better than we do."
----
Talking Points Memo: an insider's memo from iraq
From: "carol wolman" <cwolman@mcn.org>
----- Original Message -----
From: rainbow7
Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2004 7:54 PM
Altho i do not always agree with Josh Marshall, i do generally trust him. He is a respected journalist, reporter. He writes weekly columns in "The Hill" and articles in "The Atlantic Monthly"...
Posted on his blog site today is a 'personal' communique [[not found in the media]] from his friend "...who [has] spent a career in US military intelligence specializing in counter-terrorism is now in Iraq working as a contractor providing security for companies and NGOs. Love, Serena
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_04_04.php#002835 http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/002835.php
---
(April 10, 2004 -- 03:38 PM EDT)
I mentioned a few days ago that a friend of mine who spent a career in US military intelligence specializing in counter-terrorism is now in Iraq working as a contractor providing security for companies and NGOs.
I received this update from him this morning ...
The fighting two nights ago was loud and widespread throughout the northern and northwestern parts of Baghdad ... areas such as Yarmouk, Sadr City had almost continuous gunfights and rocket attacks. When we heard US forces using the main gun on M-1 tanks at 1 AM we knew it was serious insurgency at hand. The night is no longer the refuge and domain of the Americans. I have to tell you although the wide open areas of Iraq give a false sense of security. Even though much of this is unseen to most people the situation has gone from bad to really bad to unbelievably bad! Westerners are getting hit everywhere. Security companies escorting CPA, themselves and other Westerners are now on the menu for all the armed resistance groups. There was a report of a massive ambush by one security firm that tried to drive in from Amman. Reports have 25-40 gunmen opening up on them. They lost all of their vehicles and had to be given a mercy lift by a passing Iraqi minivan. Several other firms lost western security personnel killed this week in drive-by ambushes and even a seige by the Sadr Militia. Several NGOs, security firms and military bases were literally under siege for days in Kut, Nasiriyah and Baghdad. The boldness and sophistication of the attacks is staggering and it is clear that every one of the resistance fighters and Islamic militiamen have taken heart at the ease of inflicting damage on the Westerners. The abductions of the Japanese hostages is a sign that we have entered a new phase of bad as abduction requires a permissive environment for the hostage taker.
I refer to this entire mess as the second Intifada of Iraq. The first Intifida was last August in Fallujah when US soldiers killed 15-17 Iraqis and Fallujah fell into revolt. Vehicles are being hit where they are easiest to find and the security firms who are here to protect the Westerners are taking casualties because the US Army and Marines are literally stretched thin throughout the country and quite over their own capacity to stop the violence. The resistance's combat operational center of mass is and will continue moving from known mass resistance organizations (such as uniformed Badr Brigade) to small leaderless or autonomous teams or supporters who are now deciding to do what they please to the first target available. Those targets are easy ... Westerners. Any and all. This burst of energy won't last long though ...
I suspect we will have a cool down period in the next few days or within a week but it will be simply to "re-arm and re-fuel for re-strike and re-venge." A true sustained explosion of violence has yet to be coordinated by the myriad of resistance teams but as the independent or semi-centralized resistance groups form, choose leadership and communicate at the internet cafes, you can be pretty sure the second wave of violence is going to come and it will be equally, if not more, dramatic. This time it won't be men in black uniforms, they have learned that lesson in Najaf ... They will shift to urban terrorism and un-uniformed attacks. God forbid if Sadr is killed or captured ... then we have an entire second front that won't give up until we leave.
General Kimmet is wrong if he thinks that he will destroy the Badr brigade or Sadr Army as a military organization because there isn't really one ... he will disperse them into small, highly armed teams of friends and ... voila! Al Qaeda-Iraq or Hezbollah-Iraq will be borne in numbers we will not be able to control. Since the ICDC [the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] seem to have run off and joined the opposition in Nasiriyah it may reflect the true loyalties of the new Iraqi army and Police. No one is going to cross their family, tribe or religious community for the Americans.
The correct answer is to back off, leave Sadr alone and start to throw lots of money into jobs projects and utilities for the south before this summer's electricity and gas shortages ... will that work? Probably not. But we have just antagonized the core of the Shiite resistance and putting them to work is better than letting them fight us 24/7. General Sanchez is right about one thing ... this is not Vietnam ... Oh no, its not that easy. I refer you to Israel humiliating defeat in Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah's armed resistance for a reference to our potential future.
More soon. -- Josh Marshall
This document is available online at http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_04_04.php#002835
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U.S. Troops Battle to Retake Cities
Clerics Call For Uprising; Iraqi Council Dissent Grows
By Karl Vick and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A428-2004Apr9?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 9 -- U.S. troops battled to retake cities from insurgents in southern and western Iraq on Friday as clerics in Baghdad's mosques urged a general uprising against the occupation one year to the day after American tanks entered the heart of the city.
Six foreign civilians, including four Americans, were reported kidnapped. All were seized on the dangerous road leading west from Baghdad toward Fallujah, where 2,500 U.S. Marines have been battling insurgents since Monday. The Marines ceased military operations for several hours Friday to allow women and children to leave the besieged city and Iraqi negotiators to enter.
Medical officials in Fallujah said the number of Iraqis killed there since Tuesday had reached 450, with 1,000 wounded, news services reported. The reports could not be independently verified.
The accounts of civilian casualties and the spectacle of U.S. military operations one year after the fall of former president Saddam Hussein reverberated across Iraq's political landscape. One member of the country's Governing Council suspended his membership on the U.S.-appointed panel, two others threatened to do the same, and a longtime U.S. ally resigned a senior advisory position.
In a Friday meeting with Iraq's civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer, that one council official described as "very tense," council members criticized Bremer for not involving them in discussions about U.S. military operations and for failing to pursue less violent ways to control Fallujah and confront Moqtada Sadr, a junior Shiite Muslim cleric whose militia has been fighting coalition forces in Baghdad and in cities across southern Iraq.
In a sermon delivered by one of his deputies at the Imam Ali Shrine in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Sadr said: "I direct my speech to my enemy Bush and I tell him that, if your excuse was that you are fighting Saddam, then this thing is past and now you are fighting the entire Iraqi people."
Sadr has taken refuge in Najaf, and his militia, called the Mahdi Army, maintained control over the city Friday while U.S. forces have remained outside. In Kut, another southern city held by insurgents since Ukrainian troops retreated earlier in the week, about 1,000 U.S. troops fought Friday to reassert coalition control.
Fighting between insurgents and coalition forces was also reported in the northern cities of Mosul, Baqubah and Muqdadiya, as well as Karbala, the holy city where Shiite pilgrims have been gathering for a religious observance this weekend.
In Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, fighting continued between Italian forces based on the south side of the city and Sadr's militiamen on the north side, across the Euphrates River. Explosions rang out across the city shortly after midnight as an Italian army brigade moved across the river. By Friday evening resistance was "minor and manageable," said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition deputy for operations.
In Baghdad, explosions echoed across the city during the night after a day marked by several mortar strikes around the center of the capital. Shiites and Sunnis prayed together outside each other's shrines, and worshipers continued to donate tons of food for residents of Fallujah.
U.S. officials continued to assert that the situation across Iraq was more manageable than media coverage made it appear. But British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called the situation "the most serious one we have faced."
"The lid of the pressure cooker has come off," Straw told the BBC in an interview in London.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in an interview with ABC News, said: "It's been a difficult week, no doubt. But I think as we end the week, the cities are increasingly coming back under coalition control where we had lost control earlier in the week."
Powell acknowledged that resistance "over the last few days is stronger than anything we had seen previously, and I must say it was more than I had expected to see at this time. But nevertheless, I think our commanders have got a handle on it, they understand it, and they're going to be able to deal with it."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued an order effectively halting the planned withdrawal of about 25,000 U.S. troops from Iraq until U.S. commanders determine exactly how many extra forces they need to counter the surge in violence, defense officials said.
The order gives U.S. commanders five days to identify which units are not needed to deal with the rise in attacks. Those troops will be allowed to leave, the order says, adding that the departure of the rest will be postponed. Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region, said Thursday that he was looking for ways to increase his combat power by two brigades, or about 10,000 troops.
Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the Army's 1st Armored Division, has advised all his forces -- which arrived in May and were expecting to leave this month -- to be prepared to stay for at least another three months, according to Army officials.
With the occupation authority scheduled to transfer sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government in less than three months, U.S. forces had gradually been withdrawing to bases outside urban areas and handing over security responsibilities to an array of Iraqi security forces. But the violence since Sunday, when the Mahdi Army fought a pitched battle against U.S. forces in Baghdad, suggests that the already troubled process is shakier than ever.
Delays and questions about the training and equipping of Iraqi police and other security forces now appear secondary to basic questions of loyalty.
At Friday prayers in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum in Baghdad that spawned the Mahdi Army, scores of uniformed Iraqi police officers wore paper badges with photos of Sadr, his father and his uncle, respected ayatollahs slain by Hussein's government. When Sadr's deputies abruptly decided that the mosque to be used for weekly prayers was exposed to possible attack, the police helped ferry thousands of worshipers to another mosque.
Iraqi police fought beside Mahdi Army near Najaf earlier in the week, and were cooperating with the militia in Najaf and Kut. Several checkpoints along a main highway through southern Iraq were deserted Friday, with pictures of Sadr plastered on an empty pillbox.
In addition, U.S. officials were investigating whether members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps lured four American security contractors into an ambush in Fallujah that ended in mutilation, a possibility reported Friday by The New York Times. The Civil Defense Corps, which trains with U.S. troops, had been regarded by many occupation officials as more reliable than the Iraqi police.
And in an incident that underscored the danger that a broad-based popular insurrection might pose to the occupation, military officials said they had discovered a roadside bomb buried inside the Green Zone, the tightly protected Baghdad compound where the U.S.-led occupation authority is based.
The bomb was found at 12:30 p.m. Thursday in front of the Baghdad convention center, planted in an area where only government and military vehicles are allowed. It was safely detonated by ordnance experts while the top U.S. field commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, gave a news conference inside, according to a senior military official.
Two American soldiers were killed in action in Iraq Friday. A roadside bomb and small arms fire killed a soldier with the 1st Cavalry Division at Camp Cooke, an Army base north of Baghdad, at 8:30 a.m. In the afternoon, a convoy of Army fuel trucks was attacked on a highway near Abu Ghraib, a western suburb of Baghdad. One soldier with the 13th Corps Support Command and an Iraqi driver were killed and 11 people injured.
Since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, 647 U.S. service personnel have lost their lives in Iraq, 456 as a result of hostile action.
Occupation authority spokesman Daniel Senor offered few details about the kidnapping of 14 foreign civilians -- seven of whom were still being held late Friday -- and would only say that U.S. officials were monitoring the situation closely.
The most recent kidnappings occurred on the divided highway just outside Baghdad, where the ambushed Army fuel convoy billowed black smoke much of the afternoon. Reuters news agency journalists reported being led by insurgents to two men they identified as Italians. One was wounded in the arm.
Reports of kidnapped Americans could not be confirmed, said Army spokeswoman Col. Jill E. Morgenthaler. But an Australian journalist said that while he was filming the convoy fire, a gray four-door sedan pulled up and three Iraqis, armed with assault rifles, beckoned him to talk with a passenger in the back seat.
"There was clearly a white guy sitting there. He had a hood over his face that had been pulled up, he had blond hair and a mustache, blood on his bluejeans, and a dark jacket on," said Peter Cave, who is foreign affairs editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., based in Sydney. "He said, 'Our convoy was ambushed and that's all I'm going to tell you.' "
Cave said the man identified himself by name and spoke with a southern accent.
Unidentified insurgents continued to hold three Japanese civilians whom they have threatened to burn alive unless Japan withdraws its troops from Iraq.
The family of Fadi Ihsan Fadel, a 33-year-old Canadian aid worker who was kidnapped Wednesday, appealed for his release. "We pray that Fadi's captors will realize that this brave and gentle man has no other agenda than to help the children of Iraq," the family said in a statement from Montreal.
Friction between the Governing Council and Bremer, who appointed its 25 members, broke into the open with the resignation of Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, a renowned Shiite resistance fighter during Hussein's rule.
"They're dealing with the situation in the wrong way," Muhammadawi said in an interview. "They shouldn't be trying to solve these problems with military force."
Two other council members -- Ghazi Yawar, a Sunni tribal sheik, and Salama Khufaji, a Shiite dentist -- threatened in television interviews Friday to suspend their membership. Ayad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, an exile party that has been supported by the CIA, resigned as president of the council's influential security committee, a day after his top deputy, Nouri Badran, was forced out as interior minister.
Bremer named council member Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumaidy, a Sunni Muslim businessman, to replace Badran and council member Mowaffak Rubaie, a Shiite physician, as the new national security adviser.
Correspondents Anthony Shadid in Nasiriyah, Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Baghdad and DeNeen L. Brown in Toronto, staff writers Bradley Graham and Robin Wright in Washington and special correspondents Naseer Nouri, Hoda Ahmed Lazim and Khalid Saffar in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
Seething City Filled With Dread
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A427-2004Apr9?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 9 -- The family of Firas Ismail stood anxiously around the corner from Firdaus Square, a site made historic by the televised images of Saddam Hussein's bronze statue crashing to the ground a year ago Friday. Almost in unison, family members flailed their arms as Firas approached. Then they shouted in desperation. "Get back!" they yelled. "Get back!"
Firas was trying to cross a street along the square to come home. But on this day, the anniversary of Hussein's fall, no one was allowed close. New rolls of razor-sharp wire, glinting in the sun, encircled the tattered park -- a precaution against attacks at nearby hotels or to prevent potentially embarrassing protests. Tanks stood vigilant with names like "Beastly Boy" and "Bloodlust" scrawled across their barrels. U.S. soldiers had orders to shoot anyone with a weapon, and they fired in the air to warn Firas.
"It's like we're in a military base," said his 62-year-old father. "Look here," the father grumbled, pointing down the street to towering concrete barriers. "Look there," he said, gesturing down another street where knots of edgy soldiers stood guard. A friend, Raad Fouad, looked on. "We live in a city of ghosts," he said. He paused, then repeated the phrase. "A city of ghosts."
The toppling of Hussein's statue was a rare, indelible moment, the lasting image of the American entry into one of the Arab world's great capitals. It was a war tidily won, with the government disappearing in just hours. On the anniversary, in a city still at war, the scene was no less stark. Along a deserted street, toward an abandoned square, residents of this weary city bemoaned the promises broken, describing anger at their fate and dread over what lies ahead. Firdaus Square was again at center stage Friday -- in a city returned to the precipice.
"The people were oppressed for 35 years and now this?" asked the father. "It's gone from worse to even worse."
A year ago, Saadoun Street was a tableau -- in images at least -- like liberated Paris. Crowds, curious and jubilant, poured into the street to watch a line of tanks and armor parade toward Hussein's statue in Firdaus Square.
"We're bringing freedom for everyone," an Iraqi exile shouted from a microphone. "We're making a free Iraq."
"We were so happy with the fall of Saddam," Ismail recalled Friday, standing with his neighbors in the sun-drenched street and offering a guest a cigarette and glass of cold water. "We were all happy but we hoped it wouldn't become an occupation."
Even then, there were hints of ambivalence. Some threw candy, cigarettes and flowers at the soldiers, who were atop vehicles flying the U.S. flag. Others asked the Americans to take down the flag -- their request inaudible over the roar of tank engines. Some snapped up packets of food thrown by soldiers. Others looked away in disgust, their pride wounded.
Fouad, a burly man with a walrus mustache who has lived in the neighborhood for 34 years, reflected on that day. He had stayed indoors then, the memories of war still fresh. The threat of more war still keeps him inside.
"You come home from work, you open the door and you lock it," he said. "It's like we're in a prison now."
Fouad, a Christian, stood with Ismail, a Shiite Muslim.
"Anything can happen now," Fouad said.
"We've seen everything," Ismail added, "and this is the worst moment."
As they spoke, a Humvee drove down the street, its microphone blaring a message: "If we see anyone carrying a weapon, we'll fire on him. Please stay away from this area. Thank you."
The message was repeated throughout the day, at one point intersecting with the soft strains of Koranic recitation. At other times, the speakers switched to sounds more alien in Baghdad -- "Heart of Glass" by Blondie and "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash. An occasional burst of gunfire broke the square's silence. In late afternoon, the thunder of a mortar round rolled over the street.
"This pressure," Fouad said. "What does this pressure give birth to? It creates hatred. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow."
Pulling down Hussein's statue was no easy task. Hundreds had swarmed inside the colonnaded park, where columns bore the initials "S.H." on their cupolas. They tried to bring down the statue with a rope, rocks and a sledgehammer. They never could. Finally, a Marine tank recovery vehicle plowed through the circle, crushing steps and a flower bed. A chain was tethered around the statue's neck, then to the vehicle. An effort that began in early afternoon ended at dusk, and the head was carted down the street.
Iraqis have often remarked that they wish they could have overthrown Hussein themselves. The thought comes up in conversations about Hussein's legacy -- relentless repression, mass killings and, as a final insult, that he brought an occupation.
"They got rid of Saddam for us. None of us could have done it," Ismail said. "But they should have provided us with something better. Instead we got something worse." Fouad nodded. It was a question of respect, he said.
"The example is in front of you," he said. "Someone enters the street and they shoot him. Is that respect?"
There was often a debate in the weeks after Hussein's fall -- was it an occupation or liberation? Few debate that anymore. The sermons across Iraq on Friday were fierce, the messages bleak. In the southern town of Kufa, a statement by Moqtada Sadr, the young cleric whose militia has unleashed an uprising this week across southern Iraq, called on U.S. forces to withdraw and said they faced a revolution. At the Um Maarik Mosque in Baghdad, a leading Sunni cleric echoed the protests now heard in conversations across the country.
"Where is the democracy we were promised, the prosperous state that we were going to have?" he said to thousands of worshipers. "We have occupation, unemployment, bloodshed, hunger and so on."
Across town, in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, a poster was hung up on walls. "Long live the resistance," it said. It praised the Shiites for fighting troops in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City and Sunnis battling the U.S. military in Fallujah. "There is no Sunni or Shiite, only Islamic unity," it read. "Long live the Iraq of the mujaheddin," a religiously resonant word for blessed fighters.
In recent days, many Iraqis have noted the irony that the first, tentative signs of unity in a country deeply riven by sect and ethnicity have come in the face of the U.S. military forces that ended Hussein's apparatus of repression.
"By any means, we have to get rid of them," said Ahmed Mohammed, a 21-year-old Sunni Muslim sitting along Saadoun Street, swaths of the thoroughfare lined with concrete barriers, its curbs crushed by tank treads. "They lied, they lied to Iraqis. They have done nothing. We didn't take a step forward. We've taken a step backward."
Along the street were the tokens of Iraq's freedom. A Shiite banner hung near the gas station. Drifting from a speaker inside were the chants of mourning to mark a Shiite holiday. Advertisements for once-banned satellite phones lined the streets. In the square itself, Hussein's initials had been erased from the cupolas, and a green Shiite flag fluttered overhead from an unfinished modernist statue. Soldiers found a ladder Friday and took down a picture of Sadr, their new foe, pasted to its side.
Mohammed, though, was bleak. His brother, Amer, was killed three weeks ago in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad. Mohammed, sitting idly, had no work. And in the days ahead, he said, there would be "war in the streets."
"They came to overthrow Saddam," said Samir Abed Wahid, standing nearby. "Why are they fighting his victims?"
Wahid, a 32-year-old notary public, is the son of a Sunni father and a Shiite mother. He said he was frustrated by the bloodshed in Fallujah; he was angry at the crackdown on Sadr. He was outraged at perceived injustice, but helpless to do anything about it.
"We have no choice," he said. "We're too weak. We have to listen. No, we have to obey. We're too weak to only listen."
No matter, he said.
"We have to fight the United States. Now this war is not against Saddam. It's against the religion of the people. I'm ready to fight with my family -- in Karbala, in Fallujah. I don't care anymore."
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon to Get U.S. Nod to Keep W.Bank Land - Report
April 10, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-sharon-usa.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will receive, in exchange for a planned Gaza pullout, a written U.S. assurance Israel will not have to quit all of the West Bank in any future peace deal, an Israeli newspaper said on Sunday.
The Haaretz daily said the pledge would be contained in a letter that President Bush will hand Sharon at their White House meeting on Wednesday.
Political analysts say the more benefits the United States offers Sharon in the meetings in Washington, the easier it will be for him to obtain backing at home for his declared plan to withdraw from Gaza and four of some 120 West Bank settlements.
The Palestinians want all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, for the state they hope to establish under a U.S.-backed peace ``road map.''
But, the newspaper said, Bush's letter will declare that Israel will not be asked in the future to withdraw to the pre-1967 boundary known as the ``green line.''
Determination of borders in any final-status accord with the Palestinians will take into consideration ``demographic realities'' on the ground, Haaretz quoted from the letter in an indirect reference to Jewish settlements on occupied land.
There was no immediate official Israeli comment on the report, which was carried by the newspaper's Web Site before the morning newspaper hit the stands.
The report was likely to stoke Palestinian fears the Gaza pullout plan is an Israeli ruse to annex West Bank settlement blocs. Haaretz said Israeli officials believe the letter constituted U.S. acquiescence to such a future move.
According to the newspaper, Bush's letter will effectively challenge any right of return by Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel, saying they can be absorbed in a future Palestinian state.
The prime minister plans to submit his ``disengagement plan'' this month to a binding vote by the 200,000 members of his right-wing Likud party, which like Sharon has long supported settlement building.
In his own letter to Bush, Sharon will reiterate Israel's commitment to the road map peace plan and the president's vision of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Haaretz said.
Palestinians have said Sharon's unilateral steps contradict the road map's vision of mutual moves toward peace and a negotiated settlement leading to the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.
Sharon has said that more than three years of violence has shown that Israel has no real Palestinian peace partner.
-------- mideast
In Mideast, Anger and Solidarity
Arabs Praise Iraqi Insurgents, Condemn U.S. Occupation
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A324-2004Apr9.html
AMMAN, Jordan, April 9 -- The U.S. military campaign across Iraq this week infuriated Arabs in the region and brought strident calls for Muslim solidarity against the American-led occupation.
Throughout the week, Arabic-language television networks have repeatedly aired images of U.S. tanks rumbling through Fallujah, a mosque damaged by a U.S. bomb and the corpses of Iraqis killed in the heaviest fighting in almost a year.
Arab commentators have compared the U.S. offensive to Israel's tactics against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, reinforcing long-standing Arab fears that the United States has no intention of leaving the region.
Leading Arab newspapers and clerics have praised Iraqi insurgents and the emerging anti-U.S. alliance among Sunni and Shiite Muslims as a turning point in the fight against the occupation.
One Egyptian opposition newspaper, Al-Ahali, declared on its front page that Fallujah -- a city west of Baghdad that has been at the center of resistance to the occupation -- has secured a vaunted place in Islamic history for its stand against U.S. troops.
"How will the Americans explain to the world the joint Shiite-Sunni intifada?" journalist Abdel Hady Abu Taleb wrote in Egypt's state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper. "Ever since the fall of Baghdad a year ago, the Americans have been making one excuse after another to explain the escalation of the resistance."
In small demonstrations Friday in several capitals, protesters called for their governments to denounce the U.S. military tactics, which Arab leaders have so far declined to do.
"This comes on top of a broad unhappiness with Arab governments from Morocco to Iraq," said Kamel Abu Jaber, a former Jordanian foreign minister. "It seems like these governments are living in one reality and the people in another."
In Sunni-majority countries such as Jordan, many have watched with trepidation as Iraq's Shiite majority has garnered new political power under the U.S. occupation. But many Sunnis appear now to be setting aside fears of a Shiite resurgence, at least for the moment, to express support for a widening anti-occupation resistance.
In the Jordanian capital, Muslim clerics underscored Sunni-Shiite solidarity during Friday prayers on the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.
"After a year of the occupation of Iraq where are we? Where are the Arab rulers?" Ibrahim Zaid, a Sunni cleric, told several hundred people who gathered here in a parking lot in support of the Iraqi uprising.
"Now there is Fallujah, living alone. There are heroes calling and no one hears them, no one sees them," Zaid told the crowd.
"We feel anger and grief," said Khaldoun Bourno, 30, a Sunni who is general secretary of the Agronomist and Engineers Association in Jordan. "But this anger will not appear on the surface. Instead it will make many martyrs and lead to more and more demonstrations."
In Beirut, several Islamic parties demonstrated Friday against the violence in Iraq. But they drew little notice outside the Palestinian refugee camps and southern Beirut neighborhoods where Islamic organizations hold sway.
Writing on the front page of Beirut's An-Nahar newspaper, columnist Sahar Baasiri said U.S. military operations in Iraq "humiliate" Arabs, fueling resentment that helps explain the mutilation in Fallujah last week of four U.S. government contractors, which Baasiri condemned.
"It is not enough for the White House to blame the terrorists and remnants of the Saddam regime for the violence in Fallujah," she wrote.
The frustrations have not been confined to the poor or ardently anti-American segments of the Arab population. Middle-class professionals, some of them already opposed to U.S. policy in the region because of its support for Israel, are also expressing solidarity with the Iraqi insurgents.
"What's so sad is that Arabs are so used to these American actions that nothing seems to shock us anymore" said Lamia Mansour, 34, a marketing consultant in Cairo. "You can't answer back with logic because there is no logic to what the U.S. is doing and you can't fight back because who can fight the tyranny of the Americans?"
Special correspondents Nevine Bayoumi in Cairo and Maha Alazar in Beirut contributed to this report.
-------- nato
NATO leaders tries to sooth Russian fears
April 10, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040410-045246-4276r.htm
MOSCOW, April 10 -- NATO's secretary-general on his first trip to Moscow sought to dispel Russian anxiety over the alliance's eastward expansion.
"Russia needs NATO, NATO needs Russia," Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said, the Moscow Times reported Saturday.
Later in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Sheffer said, "The problems facing us are simply too big -- terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq -- to think that we can go it alone."
Russian officials weren't easily convinced, given their concerts over Belgian F-16s patrolling Russia's Baltic borders since NATO welcomed new members Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania to the alliance on March 29.
"This expansion could not prevent the terrorist acts in Madrid, for example, or help develop the situation in Afghanistan," Putin said.
Putin said it was necessary to increase the level of trust between NATO and Russia before the expansion could strengthen international security.
-------- spies
Spy agency launches recruiting campaign
4/10/2004
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-10-spy-hiring_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - The highly secretive National Security Agency is looking to hire 7,500 workers over the next five years in the spy agency's largest recruiting campaign since the 1980s.
A release posted on the agency's Web site said NSA plans to hire 1,500 workers by September, and another 1,500 in each of the next four years. Those with specialties in foreign languages, especially Arabic and Chinese, were encouraged to apply. (Related Web site: NSA)
NSA said it was boosting its staff "to meet the increasing needs of the ever-changing intelligence community."
The agency, an element of the Defense Department based at Fort Meade in Maryland, conducts electronic wiretapping and signals gathering for foreign intelligence purposes.
NSA and other intelligence agencies came under scrutiny after the Sept. 11 terror attacks for apparent failures and missteps that critics say might have prevented officials from unraveling the hijacking plot.
A joint congressional inquiry report released last summer faulted the intelligence agencies for being unprepared to handle the challenge it faced in translating the volumes of foreign language counterterror intelligence it collected.
Law enforcement officials have said that among the millions of intercepts the NSA gathered on Sept. 10, 2001, were two Arabic-language messages that warned of a major event the next day. The Arabic messages were not translated until Sept. 12.
--------
Judge Seeks More Info in China Spy Case
April 10, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Spy-Case.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Prosecutors must more strongly back up their indictment of a woman accused of being a double agent for China by providing details about documents seized from her home, a federal judge ruled.
The indictment against Katrina Leung is so vague that Leung has been unable to prepare an adequate defense, U.S. District Judge Florence-Maria Cooper wrote in a ruling made public Friday.
Leung, 49, is a naturalized U.S. citizen accused of taking classified documents from the briefcase of her former lover and FBI handler, James J. Smith. She is not accused of relaying the papers to Chinese officials. She faces up to 14 years in prison if convicted of illegally copying and possessing national security papers.
Defense attorneys acknowledge that Leung was a double-agent, but say she was loyal to the United States, not China.
Leung was recruited to work for the FBI 20 years ago and gathered intelligence during her frequent business trips to China. But prosecutors allege she started working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security sometime around 1990.
In response to a defense request, Cooper gave prosecutors until April 29 to answer 19 questions about three documents seized in a December 2002 search of Leung's home.
One of the documents is a list of agents assigned to investigate Peter Lee, a scientist at defense contractor TRW Inc. who pleaded guilty in 1997 to passing classified secrets to Chinese scientists.
Cooper ordered prosecutors to explain how the documents are connected to national security, how Leung knew their significance and how she intended to use them to harm the United States.
Smith, 60, is accused of gross negligence for allegedly allowing Leung access to classified materials and with mail fraud for filing false reports to FBI headquarters about her reliability. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted.
-------- un
SOVEREIGNTY
U.S. Relies on U.N. to Solve Problems of Power Transfer
April 10, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/politics/10DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, April 9 - The State Department on Friday dismissed as "highly speculative" the idea that increased fighting in Iraq might force a delay in a planned transfer of power to Iraqis by June 30.
But in light of the anti-American insurrection, senior Bush administration officials said the United States was relying increasingly on the United Nations to put an international stamp on efforts to resolve differences among Iraqis on the makeup of an interim government.
"In view of the violence, I think the wisdom of that approach has been validated," a senior State Department official said of an effort that is counting heavily on a United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to win agreement from Iraqis on a transfer plan.
Despite the mounting difficulties in Iraq, President Bush and his top aides have insisted all week that they remain more committed than ever to the June 30 deadline, which the administration set last fall. Senior administration officials say the rebellion has only strengthened their conviction that to cede political power to Iraqis on schedule is the right thing to do.
"We are focusing on confronting those distinct and, I would suggest, isolated elements that seek to derail the political process through the use of violence to advance their parochial interests," the State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, said Friday. "We're confronting that, and we want to return the process and give the process back to the Iraqi people, those Iraqi people who favor dialogue over force. And we think that we'll be successful there."
Mr. Brahimi will be "the pivotal agent" in trying to rescue the imperiled effort to forge a transitional government acceptable to Iraq's main political groups, a senior Bush administration official said this week. By contrast, the official described an American envoy, Robert Blackwill, a deputy national security adviser now coordinating Iraq policy for the administration, as "a political matchmaker" in the process.
Mr. Brahimi has been in Baghdad since Sunday, on his second mission this year to assess the political situation and advise the Iraqis on how to proceed with the June 30 transition.
He met with many groups this week despite the surge of violence, according to Stephane Dujarric, a United Nations spokesman. It is not known when he will end his mission and report back to headquarters.
In an interview, Munir Akram, Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations, said he believed that Mr. Brahimi was exploring three options - turning over sovereignty on June 30 to the existing 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, giving power to an expanded council that would add members to become more broadly representative than the present one, or calling a meeting of tribal leaders like the loya jirga gathering in Kabul last year when Mr. Brahimi was the United Nations' envoy to Afghanistan.
"I think the third option is eroding because of the time factor, and the second option, the expanded council, is the most likely," he said.
Mr. Akram said the Security Council was united in the belief that the June 30 date for transition of power ought to be met. "Everyone's agreed on June 30 - we have the sense that this is a good thing, as much for the Iraqis as for the U.S.," he said.
In public remarks in recent days, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top officials have argued that the violence in Iraq was being fueled in part by the approaching deadline. They have portrayed the attacks by Shiite and Sunni radicals as intended to sidetrack a process intended to put power in the hands of more moderate Iraqis.
While acknowledging that winning agreement on a schedule for a new transfer plan remains a challenging task, administration officials said this week that they saw it as an increasingly important goal.
"It is our sense that the key to stability in Iraqi is empowering Iraqis politically and economically, and the transfer of sovereignty is the symbol of that," a senior State Department official said. Administration officials said they were still holding out hope that Mr. Brahimi might forge a consensus on some plan within the next month.
Mr. Brahimi's method, as described by both United Nations and American officials, is to push Iraqis toward consensus without seeming to impose his will on them. A poker-faced former foreign minister of Algeria, Mr. Brahimi, 70, is known for keeping any sign of his own preferences to himself and building trust among feuding Muslim factions.
The United Nations is wary of appearing to be doing the work of the allied occupiers, and Mr. Brahimi guards his independence closely, particularly because it is well known that the White House urged Secretary General Kofi Annan to give him this assignment.
Iraq dominated conversation at a lunch at the State Department on Thursday between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Senators Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, and Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, who have suggested in recent days that it might now be a mistake to proceed with the transfer as scheduled, officials said. The senators are the chairman and senior Democrat of the Foreign Relations Committee.
"If there's an expectation that Brahimi is a miracle worker, that's a huge expectation," a spokesman for Mr. Lugar, Andy Fisher, said after the meeting.
Douglas Jehl reported from Washington for this article and Warren Hoge from the United Nations.
-------- us
Security Firms Coming Under Fire in Iraq
April 10, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Private-Security.html
MOYOCK, N.C. (AP) -- A dark sport utility vehicle threads down a narrow street as the sound of gunfire zings from buildings on the left. The vehicle stalls, and its occupants slide out, firing blanks at their attackers as they scramble for an alley.
The paramilitary exercise provides training for the real warfare of Iraq -- but this is no military boot camp.
At Blackwater USA's paramilitary training camp, private security guards prepare to work in Iraq, where they serve as commando teams, give strategic advice, even operate a military's supply lines -- all for a price.
The scene from the training camp was eerily echoed weeks later, when three former Army Rangers and a former Navy SEAL employed by Blackwater USA's security consulting subsidiary were killed in Fallujah.
The men were providing security for food deliveries on March 31 when their vehicle was hit by rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire. Their charred, mutilated bodies were dragged through the streets.
A company official said Friday that the men may have been lured into an ambush by Iraqi civil defense workers.
Armed protection teams like the Blackwater group, which was working under a contract with the Coalition Provisional Authority, are the tip of an industry with annual revenues of $100 billion worldwide, said Peter W. Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of ``Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.''
On Saturday, television footage showed insurgents holding prisoner an American civilian, Thomas Hamill, who works for a division of Halliburton, according to his wife. Hamill wore what appeared to be a light flak jacket of the sort worn by private security guards.
Experts say even the grisly news photos of the Fallujah attack are unlikely to deter people eager to collect some of the estimated $1 billion being spent on private security in Iraq.
The U.S. occupation is ``a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for them to make big bucks,'' said Daniel Biran, a former Israeli special forces soldier who is associate managing director for security practice at Boston's Citigate Global Intelligence.
The pay for private workers in dangerous places like Iraq is generous. Experienced people can make $1,000 a day, according to Singer. The first $120,000 earned by Americans working in Iraq is tax-free, Murray said.
And if things get too hairy, private workers -- unlike soldiers -- can quit.
In comparison, a Green Beret master sergeant with 20 years of service and getting various allowances may earn $67,000 annually, said Ken McGraw, a spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla.
Jeff Murray, founder of Murray & Associates in Fayetteville, recently spent two months in Iraq scouting security needs for a British company.
``I would go back, yes,'' said Murray, a 51-year-old former Army captain. ``And I'm actively seeking other clients to represent.''
About 15,000 civilians are working for private defense contractors in Iraq, feeding the approximately 135,000 U.S. troops, fueling vehicles and training Iraqi police. An exact figure for the ones who provide armed security is not known.
Blackwater, founded in 1998 by a trio of former Navy SEALs, is considered a top company in the private defense field. It has roughly 450 armed specialists in Iraq, most former U.S. special operations troops and police SWAT team members. Its workers guard people such as Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq.
Blackwater USA's headquarters is on 6,000 acres at the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in northeastern North Carolina. The complex has firing ranges and even its own dirt landing strip where pilots can practice reaching and leaving trouble spots. Kennels hold dogs in training for security work.
About 50,000 people have been given firearms or small-group tactics training here, after their backgrounds are thoroughly checked.
Trainees come from around the world. A Chilean team worked out on one recent day. They were preceded at the training site by a Greek anti-terrorism squad and a presidential protection detail from Colombia.
Blackwater is privately held, and declined to disclose its revenues. But its government contracts include training thousands of sailors each year.
Privatization advocates say outsourcing security makes financial sense for the government given that it takes 18 months and costs about $250,000 to train an entry-level Green Beret, while an outsourced security operative can be hired when needed.
Singer, however, says the ranks of corporate warriors are swelling because they are politically more palatable than increasing military force strength, he said.
``What's really driving this in Iraq is trying to displace the political costs,'' he said.
Associated Press Writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh contributed to this story.
On the Net:
Blackwater USA: http://blackwatersecurity.com
-------- propaganda wars
BBC's world audience sees U.S. as danger
April 10, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040410-055001-5150r.htm
LONDON, April 10 -- A BBC poll of its worldwide audience showed globalization and the United States pose the most serious risks in the world, even more than terrorism.
Second ranked on the list was corruption. Conflicts -- including wars and terrorism -- came in third, the BBC reported.
Hunger was fourth ranked and climate change fifth.
BBC World asked 1,500 viewers of its news and international channel to name the biggest problems in the world and 52 percent named the United States and globalization.
"We were a little surprised that global superpowers and corruption were ranked top," BBC World's head of research and planning Jeremy Nye said Friday. "We will track whether they are gaining from topical interest or are of greater long-term significance."
Those respondents from Europe, Asia, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia chose the U.S. and large corporations as their biggest worry by a proportion of 52.3 percent.
But respondents only from Europe and the Middle East ranked wars and terrorism as their top concerns.
Illiteracy was ranked sixth overall with 38 percent of the respondents followed by nuclear proliferation.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
Afghan Route to Prosperity: Grow Poppies
April 10, 2004
By AMY WALDMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/international/asia/10OPIU.html?pagewanted=all&position=
SHORABAK, Afghanistan - Rahmatullah trudged toward his village with his donkey, as men across Afghanistan have done for centuries. But in this century, men in Jeeps and on motorbikes were passing him by.
So this year Rahmatullah, a 37-year-old father of three, speaking in front of the village mosque and its mullah, said he would join his neighbors in growing poppies to harvest Afghanistan's most lucrative cash crop, opium.
His hierarchy of dreams is all sketched out. First he will pay off some $1,200 in debt. Then he will build a house to replace the one room he shares with his family, then buy cows for plowing.
"Then, if I get richer, I'll buy a car," he finished, eyes agleam.
Across Afghanistan, opium cultivation is surging, defying all efforts of the Afghan government and international officials to stop it. Officials are predicting that land under poppy cultivation will rise by 30 percent or more this year, possibly yielding a record crop. Last year the country produced almost 4,000 tons - three-fourths of the world's opium - in 28 of its 32 provinces. The trade generated $1 billion for farmers and $1.3 billion for traffickers, according to the United Nations, more than half of Afghanistan's national income.
The expansion of the trade presents a gathering threat to the new democratic government and a severe challenge to the American and international forces here. But American officials, reluctant to open a new front in the campaign against terror or engage in an antidrug war here, are conflicted about how aggressively to combat it.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, said in a recent interview that with Afghanistan's elections approaching - they are now scheduled for September - "the politics of it may require not to go too harsh" with eradication.
But as opium production underpins ever more of Afghanistan's economic life, from new business growth to home construction, officials also fear that the economic and political risks of uprooting it will only increase. To the chagrin of Afghan and international officials, the narcotics industry has far outpaced the legal reconstruction of Afghanistan, with a capitalist intensity they would otherwise applaud.
It has lured private capital for investment and created a free-market system. With Thuraya satellite phones, farmers in distant Kandahar, a rival source of poppy in the south, know almost in real time about changing weather conditions here in this northeastern province, Badakshan, and adjust prices accordingly.
Landowners and traffickers offer credit to farmers willing to grow poppy. Trafficking has linked Afghanistan to the global economy. It even brought the first real industry here, a heroin processing laboratory that villagers estimated had operated for six months to a year before it was destroyed by Afghan and British forces in January. One local referred to it as "the company."
Afghanistan's opium production peaked under the Taliban, who partly financed their movement from the profits. But in July 2000 the Taliban banned opium cultivation, to the distress of many farmers, and the price soared.
Many experts say the ban was simply meant to drive the price up, amounting to an effective cornering of the market for the Taliban and others who had amassed stockpiles.
British and Afghan officials are now counting on mullahs to spread the word that it is haram, or forbidden, under Islam to cultivate opiates. But interviews in many villages found that such preachings were ignored. Other mullahs were growing it themselves.
For many Afghans, poppy has allowed for piety. A United Nations report on Afghanistan's opium economy noted that 85 percent of opium traders surveyed had performed the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is incumbent on every Muslim but too costly for most Afghans.
The growth in opium production is among the gravest threats facing the administration of President Hamid Karzai. It has corrupted the government from bottom to top, including governors and cabinet officials, according to senior Afghan and American officials.
American and Afghan officials say opium is financing warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, local militias, the Taliban and possibly Al Qaeda.
Even as some American officials remain wary of fighting the spread of opium too aggressively, others have criticized the British, who have taken the lead against the drug trade here, for being too soft and slow on eradicating poppy crops. A British plan in 2002 to compensate farmers for eradication is widely seen to have acted as a "perverse incentive" to grow, as one official put it.
Citing the link between narcotics and terrorism, United Nations and British officials, meanwhile, are urging the American-led military alliance to take on laboratories and traffickers. The Americans, who will put $73 million toward antidrug operations in Afghanistan this year, say such an approach will simply send the laboratories over the border to places like Pakistan's tribal areas, while doing nothing to stop the surge in new cultivation.
But an American official also pointed out that many of those in the drug trade "are the guys who helped us liberate this place in 2001" from the Taliban and on whom the American military continues to rely in its hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
"The military just does not want to go down that road," he said.
Ideally, officials say, eradication efforts would focus on wealthy landowners growing poppy, not poor farmers. But many struggling farmers have become sharecroppers on the vast fields of the rich and would share the punishment, just as they share the profit.
The American forces have so far limited their intervention against traffickers and laboratories to encounters as they come across them in the course of other military action.
But Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of the American-led forces, said in March that his troops were finding growing connections between extremism and drugs, which could augur a more assertive approach to the drug trade.
Afghan commando units, with British support, have recently raided as many as 30 laboratories in Nangarhar Province, often meeting well-armed resistance. An American A-10 attack plane shelled "the company" - the processing laboratory near here - when the British and Afghan commandos raided that site.
As the effort to treat the laboratories as targets increases, officials expect violence to rise. American officials say raids on laboratories have already provoked conflict among drug traffickers convinced that their competitors informed on them.
Recent fighting in the Argo district prompted the removal of the governor and police chief after officials in Kabul, the capital, concluded that the two men were working for rival traffickers.
The opium trade is transforming life in Argo, a remote district in Badakshan where a cover of green poppies climbs up steep, desolate hills. The street that runs through the bazaar is mud, but the $200 television sets in the stalls glitter.
In the last four years, said Abdul Rahman, 18, poppy provided his family with a motorbike, a television, an electric generator, a VCR and a CD player - and a new house to hold it all. Last year his family accumulated $4,000 in poppy profits.
Badakshan, here in the north, lays bare narcotics' distorting economic effects. Poppy cultivation has driven up dowry prices and raised the cost of labor so much that wheat was not harvested last year.
So many people are building new homes and businesses with their poppy profits that Atiqullah, 23, a mason, said his daily rate had doubled.
Criminal calculation is partly driving the spread of the drug trade. Residents of Pashtun-inhabited regions long known for poppy growing have turned into outlaw Johnny Appleseeds, crossing the country with loans, expertise and seedpods to generate more opium for heroin laboratories, American and United Nations officials and Afghan farmers say.
But a calculus of human longing is also at work. With the price of opium stubbornly stuck at more than $135 a pound, no legal crop can compete.
"We see in Daryan" - a district thick with poppy - "other people getting rich," said Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans uses one name. "Their life is better. We want to make our life better too."
Today, growing poppies is less about survival - as it was during a drought in this country - than about upward mobility. It is about a new consumer class and an even larger class of aspirants to it.
"Those who had a donkey have a motorbike," said Ahmed Shah, a young farmer in Badakshan. "Those who had a motorbike have a car. Those who have one wife want a second one."
In Dari, the local language, there is a saying: if your donkey lags behind, cut his ear off. It reflects, Afghans say, the central role of envy in their culture - and in cultivation.
The Shomali Plain, just north of Kabul, is full of first-time growers, many of them mujahedeen soldiers. A young commander, Mayel, denied that he was growing poppy, then whispered in earshot of a translator that he was too ashamed to admit that he was.
"We see the people in the south and east getting rich," he told a confidant with righteous logic. "Why shouldn't we cultivate too?"
-------- homeland security
American Airlines Revealed Passenger Data
Contractor Gave Information Gathered for TSA to Private Security Companies, Carrier Discloses
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page D12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A720-2004Apr9.html
American Airlines revealed yesterday that it authorized the release of 1.2 million records containing private passenger data to the government and that the information wound up in the hands of four companies competing for a federal security contract.
The disclosure, which was the third time a U.S. airline admitted sharing private customer information, prompted the Department of Homeland Security to launch an investigation into possible government privacy violations.
Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the department's chief privacy officer, said she would look into whether government employees at the Transportation Security Administration violated internal procedures or the federal Privacy Act.
American's acknowledgment comes after JetBlue Airways and Northwest Airlines admitted sharing private records of names, travel itineraries, telephone numbers and credit card numbers to assist the government with separate aviation security projects. JetBlue and Northwest face several class action lawsuits from passengers who claim the airlines did not properly disclose how their personal information was being used.
American spokesman John Hotard said the airline discovered the data breach only recently after conducting an internal review into its data sharing practices. The review was prompted by JetBlue's and Northwest's acknowledgement of their own data sharing incidents.
American did not say yesterday whether it may have violated any laws or its own policies in the transaction, which occurred in June 2002, but it said that it would not share information again.
"We felt for our passengers and crew it was the right thing to do at that time" because the data request came shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Hotard said. He said the company's policy on how it uses the information it collects from passengers is more restrictive now than it was at the time of the incident. "We wouldn't do it today unless ordered to do so by the government," he said.
The TSA requested that American provide the agency with passenger records for a security project, and American authorized Airline Automation Inc. to comply. But instead the contractor gave the records to four companies competing to win a security contract with the agency: HNC Software, Infoglide Software, Ascent Technology and Lockheed Martin. David Coburn, a lawyer for Airline Automation, said the company turned over the passenger records to the companies as the TSA required, and that the companies signed non-disclosure agreements.
The TSA said in a written statement that it "is in the process of gathering all of the relevant information regarding this situation."
It's unclear what legal action or other fallout American could face, but several privacy advocates said they would not be surprised if the airline is confronted by lawsuits similar to those filed against JetBlue and Northwest.
JetBlue, which apologized to customers after acknowledging in September 2003 that it shared 5 million records with an Army contractor, faces a Federal Trade Commission complaint for unfair and deceptive trade practices. Several TSA employees were required to undergo training on privacy laws by Homeland Security's O'Connor Kelly after her office conducted a review of that incident in February.
Yesterday, O'Connor Kelly said she was not aware of American's data until yesterday. "We have heard allegations that there were other allegations out there but we didn't receive any specific evidence" about American, she said.
Northwest, which maintains that it did not violate its own privacy policy, or any laws, faces a complaint lodged with the U.S. Department of Transportation by a privacy organization.
-------- investigations
Briefing on Al Qaeda Included Specifics
White House Says Declassification of Pre-9/11 Document Will Be Delayed
By Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 10, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A387-2004Apr9?language=printer
The classified briefing delivered to President Bush five weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks featured information about ongoing al Qaeda activities within the United States, including signs of a terror support network, indications of hijacking preparations and plans for domestic attacks using explosives, according to sources who have seen the document and a review of official accounts and media reports over the past two years.
The information on current threats in the briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," stands in contrast to repeated assertions by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials as recently as this week that the document is primarily historical and includes no warning or threat information.
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which has demanded that the 11/2-page document be declassified, referred to it in a March 24 report as "an article for the president's daily intelligence brief on whether or how terrorists might attack the United States."
White House officials, after indicating Thursday that the briefing document could be declassified within a day, announced yesterday that they were delaying any release until at least next week.
"We are actively working on declassification and are not quite ready to put it out," said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council. He attributed the delay to "unprecedented activity" needed to prepare for public release the article from the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief (PDB), the daily report of significant new intelligence and analysis provided the chief executive and his most senior national security advisers.
Also yesterday, the panel met for a three-hour interview with former vice president Al Gore. The session followed a similar meeting Thursday with former president Bill Clinton, who defended his decision not to retaliate after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen because the FBI and the CIA had not formally linked the attack to al Qaeda at that time.
The commission said in a statement that Gore "was candid and forthcoming." The panel is arranging a joint private meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. None of the meetings are under oath and all are likely to remain secret, officials said.
Because the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB in dispute has not been released publicly, it is impossible to be precise about its contents or the context in which it was delivered. Yet much of the information in the document has become public over the last two years through testimony, official accounts and news reports.
Newspaper articles in May 2002 noted the briefing document's alarming title and reported that the PDB mentioned al Qaeda members living in the United States and others traveling in and out of the country. A July 2003 report from a House-Senate inquiry into intelligence failures said the PDB found that al Qaeda "apparently maintained a support structure" inside the United States.
The same report also said the PDB mentioned "FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attack," and included intelligence acquired in May 2001 that "indicated a group of bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."
Rice added in testimony on Thursday that the document says the FBI had 70 ongoing field investigations related to suspected al Qaeda cells or operatives. During the same hearing, Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste said the PDB reported "that al Qaeda members have resided or traveled to the United States for years and maintained a support system in the U.S."
Since details about the briefing first surfaced in May 2002, Rice and other administration officials have repeatedly sought to play down its importance and to suggest that it contained little information about current threats or, at first, to even acknowledge that it was focused on domestic attacks.
During a White House briefing with reporters on May 16, 2002, Rice referred to the briefing as "an analytic report" that "did not have warning information in it of the kind that said they are talking about an attack against so forth or so on." She added that it was about Osama bin Laden's "methods of operation" that "talked about what he had done historically, in 1997, in 1998."
Rice and other officials did not disclose at that time that the briefing included information about ongoing FBI field investigations, possible preparations for hijackings or other contemporary material.
Even the briefing's heading is a matter of minor disagreement. Then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters on May 17, 2002, that the briefing was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the United States," while Rice testified Thursday that it was "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Numerous sources said in 2002 and this week that the correct title is "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
Rice emphasized in her testimony Thursday that the PDB included "a long section on what bin Laden had wanted to do -- speculative, much of it -- in '97, '98, that he had in fact liked the results of the 1993 [World Trade Center] bombing."
"The president was told this is historic information," Rice said.
But Democratic commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said in an interview yesterday that Rice ignores the importance of more current information that was also included in the August 2001 document.
"She is right in a sense that it does not contain a warning per se," said Gorelick, one of only three commissioners who have seen the CIA-prepared PDB as part of a special deal with the White House. "She is also wrong in that it is not just an analytical piece. . . . It is a summary of what the agency knew that gave them reason to believe bin Laden wanted to attack the United States."
Another commissioner, Republican John F. Lehman, a former Navy secretary, is one of seven commissioners who have seen only a summary of the PDB. He said the current information within it is not particularly specific.
"On the FBI's part of it, it says don't worry about it, we've got 70 field investigations going," Lehman said. "That's the tone of it. . . . I found it to be net favorable to the president, which is why I can't understand why they were so restrictive in the first place to letting us have access to it."
The Sept. 11 commission, which has been at the center of a political storm over the last two weeks, is gearing up for another round of explosive hearings here Tuesday and Wednesday. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and their predecessors, Janet Reno and Louis J. Freeh, are expected to defend their anti-terrorism efforts when they testify.
Former FBI acting director Thomas J. Pickard, who will also testify, has told the commission in private that Ashcroft had little interest in terrorism in the summer of 2001, numerous sources have said. Thomas H. Kean, the panel's Republican chairman, said in an interview yesterday that "the hearing will focus very closely on the failures by the FBI and many others" prior to the attacks.
--------
Al-Qaeda threat included in Bush memo, sources say
4/10/2004
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-09-alqaeda-memo_x.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaeda was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo.
The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 - a month before the Sept. 11 attacks - said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated Press.
The same month as that briefing of Bush, U.S. intelligence officials received two uncorroborated reports suggesting terrorists might use airplanes, including one that suggested al-Qaeda operatives were considering flying a plane into a U.S. embassy, current and former government officials said.
Those August 2001 reports - among thousands of varied and uncorroborated threats received by the government each month - weren't deemed credible enough to tell the president or his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the officials said. Neither involved the eventual Sept. 11 plot.
The sources who read the presidential memo would only speak on condition of anonymity because the White House has not yet declassified the highly sensitive document, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States."
That declassification process is expected to be completed soon, allowing the Bush administration to make the document public in a historic disclosure of secret presidential intelligence briefing materials.
The sources said the presidential memo included a series of bullet items that brought Bush through a history of mostly uncorroborated intelligence that cited al-Qaeda's interest in hijacking planes to win the release of Islamic extremists who had been arrested in 1998 and 1999 as well as the travelings of suspected al-Qaeda operatives, include some U.S. citizens, in and out of the United States. It suggested al-Qaeda might have a support system in place on U.S. soil, the sources said.
The document also included FBI analytical judgments that some al-Qaeda activities were consistent with preparation for airline hijackings or other types of attacks, some members of the commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks said earlier this week.
The second-to-last bullet told the president that there were numerous - at least 70 - terror-related investigations under way by the FBI in 2001 involving matters or people on U.S. soil, the sources said.
And the final bullet told the president of a recent intelligence report indicating al-Qaeda operatives were trying to get inside the United States to carry out an attack with explosives, the sources said. There was no specifics about the timing or target, the sources said.
The sources said the briefing memo did not provide the exact date of that intelligence but made clear it was in the 2001 time frame, and that FBI and other agencies were investigating it. The information had been provided to intelligence and law enforcement agencies well before Bush's briefing, the sources said.
They said final bullet in the presidential memo was based on an intelligence report received in May 2001 that indicated bin Laden operatives were trying to cross from Canada into the United States for an attack.
A joint congressional inquiry report into the Sept. 11 failures first divulged the existence of the May 2001 threat report last year but did not reveal it was included in Bush's briefing. The congressional inquiry described the intelligence this way:
"In May 2001, the Intelligence Community obtained information that supporters of Osama bin Laden were reportedly planning to infiltrate the United States via Canada in order to carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives."
In her testimony Thursday to the Sept. 11 commission, Rice described Bush's Aug. 6 daily briefing as including mostly "historical information" and said most threat information in the summer of 2001 involved overseas targets.
Rice also testified that she did not recall seeing any warnings before Sept. 11 that a plane might be used a terrorist weapon, though it was possible others in the White House did.
Current and former government officials familiar with terrorism intelligence told the AP that in the same month Bush received his briefing, U.S. intelligence received two uncorroborated reports - among hundreds - suggesting terrorist might use planes but that neither reached the president or Rice.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said one report in August 2001 said there was uncorroborated information that two bin Laden operatives had met in October 2000 to discuss a plot to attack the U.S. Embassy in Nairaobi using an airplane.
That report stated the operative would either bomb the embassy using the airplane or drive the airplane into it, according to information provided congressional investigators and cited in their report released last year.
Separately, the CIA sent a warning to the Federal Aviation Administration in August 2001 asking the agency to advise commercial airliners that six Pakistanis in Latin America, not connected to al-Qaeda, were considering a hijacking, bombing or sabotage of an airliner. That warning did not have specifics on a time or location but said it could involve Britain, Canada, Mexico, Malaysia, Cuba, among others, according to information made public by the congressional inquiry.
Rice stated emphatically on Thursday she did not see any such reports about al-Qaeda using a plane as a weapon until after Sept. 11, suggesting the intelligence may have reached someone lower in the White House.
"To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us," she said. "I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst."
--------
Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says
April 10, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/politics/10PANE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, April 9 - President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday.
The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford.
The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders. Members of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks have asked the White House to make the Aug. 6 briefing memorandum public. The A.P. account of it was attributed to "several people who have seen the memo." The White House has said that nothing in it pointed specifically to the kind of attacks that actually took place a month later.
The Congressional report last year, citing efforts by Al Qaeda operatives beginning in 1997 to attack American soil, said that operatives appeared to have a support structure in the United States and that intelligence officials had "uncorroborated information" that Mr. bin Laden "wanted to hijack airplanes" to gain the release of imprisoned extremists. It also said that intelligence officials received information in May 2001, three months earlier, that indicated "a group of bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."
Also on Friday, the White House offered evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation received instructions more than two months before the Sept. 11 attacks to increase its scrutiny of terrorist suspects inside the United States. But it is unclear what action, if any, the bureau took in response.
The disclosure appeared to signal an effort by the White House to distance itself from the F.B.I. in the debate over whether the Bush administration did enough in the summer of 2001 to deter a possible terrorist attack in the United States in the face of increased warnings.
A classified memorandum, sent around July 4, 2001, to Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, from the counterterrorism group run by Richard A. Clarke, described a series of steps it said the White House had taken to put the nation on heightened terrorist alert. Among the steps, the memorandum said, "all 56 F.B.I. field offices were also tasked in late June to go to increased surveillance and contact with informants related to known or suspected terrorists in the United States."
Parts of the White House memorandum were provided to The New York Times on Friday by a White House official seeking to bolster the public account provided a day before by Ms. Rice, who portrayed an administration aggressively working to deter a domestic terror attack.
But law enforcement officials said Friday that they believed that Ms. Rice's testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks - including her account of scores of F.B.I. investigations under way that summer into suspected Qaeda cells operating in the United States - overstated the scope, thrust and intensity of activities by the F.B.I. within American borders.
Agents at that time were focused mainly on the threat of overseas attacks, law enforcement officials said. The F.B.I. was investigating numerous cases that involved international terrorism and may have had tangential connections to Al Qaeda, but one official said that despite Ms. Rice's account, the investigations were focused more overseas and "were not sleeper cell investigations."
The finger-pointing will probably increase next week when numerous current and former senior law enforcement officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, testify before the Sept. 11 commission. In an unusual pre-emptive strike, Mr. Ashcroft's chief spokesman on Friday accused some Democrats on the commission of having "political axes to grind" in attacking the attorney general, who oversees the F.B.I., and unfairly blaming him for law enforcement failures.
A similar accusation against the commission was also leveled by Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican with ties to the White House, in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday.
"Sadly, the commission's public hearings have allowed those with political axes to grind, like Richard Clarke, to play shamelessly to the partisan gallery of liberal special interests seeking to bring down the president," Mr. McConnell said.
The charges and countercharges underscored the political challenge that the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has become for President Bush as he mounts his re-election bid. The White House sought this week to defuse the situation by allowing Ms. Rice to testify before the Sept. 11 commission after months of resistance. But her appearance served to raise new questions about the administration's efforts to deter an attack.
The White House on Friday put off a decision on declassifying the document at the center of the debate - the Aug. 6 briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." But the administration appeared ready to release at least portions of the document publicly in the coming days.
The memo from Mr. Clarke's group in July 2001 about F.B.I. activities adds another piece of evidence to the document trail, but it is unlikely to resolve the questions over whether the administration did enough to deter an attack.
White House officials, who spent several weeks attacking Mr. Clarke's credibility, said Friday that they believed the memo from his counterterrorism group was an accurate reflection of steps the White House took to deter an attack. But they questioned whether the F.B.I. executed the instructions to intensify its scrutiny of terrorist suspects and contacts in the United States.
In April 2001, the F.B.I. did send out a classified memo to its field offices directing agents to "check with their sources on any information they had relative to terrorism," said a senior law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. But with the level of threat warnings increasing markedly over the next several months, there is no indication that any directive went out in the late June period that was described in the memo from Mr. Clarke's office.
That summer saw a string of alerts by the F.B.I. and other government agencies about the heightened possibility of a terrorist attack, but most counterterrorism officials believed an attack would come in Saudi Arabia, Israel or elsewhere. Many also were worried about a July 4 attack and were relieved when that date passed uneventfully.
For months, the F.B.I. had been consumed by internal problems of its own, including the arrest of an agent, Robert P. Hanssen, on espionage charges, the disappearance of documents in the Oklahoma City bombing case and the fallout over the Wen Ho Lee spy case. Moreover, the bureau was going through a transition in leadership, with its longtime director, Louis J. Freeh, retiring in June 2001. He was replaced by an acting director, Thomas J. Pickard, until the current director, Robert S. Mueller III, took over in September, just days before the deadly hijackings. All three men will testify at next week's commission hearings and are expected to face sharp questioning about whether the F.B.I. did enough to prevent an attack in the weeks and months before Sept. 11.
At this week's appearance by Ms. Rice, several commissioners sharply questioned whether the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had done enough to act on intelligence warnings about an attack.
"We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 commission," said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the panel. "We have gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody - nobody at the F.B.I. who knows anything about a tasking of field offices" to identify the domestic threat.
The apparent miscommunication will probably be a central focus of the commission's hearing next week. Scrutiny is expected to focus in part on communication breakdowns between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that allowed two of the 19 hijackers to live openly in San Diego despite intelligence about their terrorist ties.
Another Democratic panel member, Jamie S. Gorelick, said at Thursday's hearing that Mr. Ashcroft was briefed in the summer of 2001 about terrorist threats "but there is no evidence of any activity by him."
Such criticism led Mark Corallo, Mr. Ashcroft's chief spokesman at the Justice Department, to say Friday that "some people on the commission are seeking to score political points" by unfairly attacking Mr. Ashcroft's actions before Sept. 11.
"Some have political axes to grind" against Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Corallo said in an interview, naming Ms. Gorelick, who was the deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration; Mr. Roemer, a former congressman from Indiana, and Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor.
While insisting that he was not speaking personally for Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Corallo said he was offended by Ms. Gorelick's remarks in particular. Offering a detailed preview of Mr. Ashcroft's testimony next week, he said the attorney general was briefed repeatedly by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. on threats posed by Al Qaeda and was told that the threats were directed at targets overseas. "He was not briefed that there was any threat to the United States," Mr. Corallo said. "He kept asking if there was any action he needed to take, and he was constantly told no, you're doing everything you need to do."
Several commission officials denied in interviews that there was any attempt to treat Mr. Ashcroft unfairly. Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for panel, said that Mr. Ashcroft would be warmly received.
Ms. Gorelick said she was surprised by Mr. Corallo's comments and puzzled by assertions that the attorney general had no knowledge of a domestic terrorist threat in 2001.
"This appears to be a debate within the administration," she said. "On the one hand, you have Dr. Rice saying that the domestic threat was being handled by the Justice Department and F.B.I., and on the other hand, you have the Justice Department saying that there did not appear to be a domestic threat to address. And that is a difference in view that we have to continue to explore."
The commission also heard testimony Friday morning behind closed doors from former Vice President Al Gore.
Former President Bill Clinton appeared before the panel in closed session on Thursday, but a Democratic commission member took issue Friday with Mr. Clinton's assertion that that there was not enough intelligence linking Al Qaeda to the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole to justify a military attack on the terrorist organization.
"I think he did have enough proof to take action," Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska, said on ABC's `Good Morning America.'
Philip Shenon, Adam Nagourney and James Risen contributed reporting for this article.
-------- terrorism
Families: Victims went to work, help
BY STEVE WICK STAFF WRITER
April 10, 2004
Newsday
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wohost103749697apr10,0,7135530.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines
When Nabil Razouk left Jerusalem for Iraq two months ago, he hoped to find high-paying work translating documents for aid or reconstruction companies.
Now his family is praying they will see him again.
Razouk, 30, a Palestinian Christian with an Israeli passport, is believed to be one of at least five foreigners kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents in the past three days. Three are Japanese citizens, whom insurgents have threatened to burn to death if their government does not withdraw its troops from Iraq.
There were reports early Friday that two Americans and four Italians had been kidnapped. Secretary of State Colin Powell told CNN that he could not confirm the reports but, later in the day, Pentagon sources said two U.S. soldiers were unaccounted for.
In the East Jerusalem suburb of A-Ram, Razouk's uncle said the potential for high wages sent Razouk to Iraq.
"He thought that if he worked for a couple of years in a risky place . . . he could build a better future for himself," said Anton Razouk. "My calculation would have been different and I hope and pray that when he is released he will come back and live in his home town."
There was confusion Friday that perhaps a second Israeli-Arab, identified as Ahmed Yassin Tikati, had been kidnapped. But late in the day that man was identified as Fadi Ihsan Fadel, 33, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen working in Iraq for the New York-based relief group International Rescue Committee.
Fadel's Quebec-based family identified him when they saw him on television. It was unclear why he used a different name. "It's been very hard, very much a nightmare," his brother, Ghayas Fadel, told Canadian television. "We haven't slept, we haven't been eating, we jump every time the phone rings and we're watching the news very closely ... "
Fadel's family said he, too, was drawn to Iraq by high wages and a desire to help people. "He is a man of endless compassion for people in need, especially children," Ghayas Fadel said in a statement released on the International Rescue Committee's Web site.
Thousands massed near Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's official residence in Tokyo Friday and held a candlelight vigil for the kidnapped Japanese citizens: Noriaki Imai, 18, who was in Iraq to study the effects of depleted uranium; Nohoko Takato, 34, an aid worker, and Soichiro Koriyama, 32, a freelance photojournalist.
"Time is running out," said Ayako Inoue, Takato's younger sister. "My uneasiness and anxiety grows as the time passes." Ruling party officials reiterated that Japanese soldiers would remain in Iraq.
In Iraq, an aide to radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr denied that the movement's militia was behind the kidnapping of the Japanese and said the group condemns such acts.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Florida High School First to Install Fuel Cell Power
NORTH PORT, Florida, (ENS)
April 10, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-09-09.asp#anchor8
The nation's first joint hydrogen fuel cell and hydrogen curriculum project was dedicated Wednesday at North Port High School. The dedication marks the culmination of a cooperative effort between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
"Just like the students of North Port High School, hydrogen is the future," said Assistant Secretary of Energy David Garman at the dedication ceremony. Seeing cutting-edge technology up close is good for students and teachers, but having the chance to work with it hands-on is exciting."
"Hydrogen will be powering the cars they'll drive in years to come and, in time, the houses they own," he said.
The school's hydrogen fuel cell, installed through a partnership between the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida Power and Light and Sarasota County, gives students the opportunity to see the technology in operation.
DOE designed the hydrogen energy curriculum to provide a hands-on educational experience for students interested in energy science. North Port High School's is one of 10 pilot schools implementing the DOE's curriculum starting in September.
The fuel cell at North Port provides five kilowatts of power to the school, enough for a classroom.
The school will make use of the heat and water generated by the fuel cell as byproducts. Waste heat will be used to heat water in the school's kitchen, while water created by the fuel cell's recombining of hydrogen and oxygen may be used for landscaping.
"Fuel cells are revolutionizing the way we power our nation, offering cleaner, more-efficient alternatives to fossil fuels," Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Colleen Castille said. "Investing in next generation technology is promoting energy security and protecting Florida's air."
-------- energy
Dead energy package finds new life as tax amendments
April 10, 2004
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040409-111016-5096r.htm
The Senate has all but killed the contentious energy package that has loomed in the chamber for nearly a year, but portions of the bill are steadily creeping into other must-pass legislation packages.
The $13 billion in tax provisions that account for nearly all of the costs of the energy bill have been tacked on to a foreign imports tax repeal bill headed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican.
The energy tax provisions give companies credits and incentives for renewable electricity production such as wind, and environmental improvements for cleaner coal and other fossil fuel production, among other provisions.
"This is a satisfying win for Senator [Jeff] Bingaman, who for months has made the case that the best way to achieve results on energy legislation is to break the stalled energy bill into smaller, more manageable pieces," said a senate Democratic staffer.
Mr. Bingaman, New Mexico Democrat and ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, suggested several weeks ago that cannibalizing the energy bill was the only way to pass the necessary portions of the legislation.
The defunct energy bill was scaled down to $14 billion in a last-ditch effort to get support from both sides of the aisle. The original House bill cost $28 billion and included a provision to protect makers of the fuel additive methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) from lawsuits.
At issue are provisions to strengthen the electric grid, construct a natural gas pipeline from Alaska to Chicago, and the MTBE protections, all of which have caused a Democratic backlash. Not to mention that Democrats still feel spurned from being shut out of last year's conference negotiations with House sponsors by Senate Republicans.
Since then, the bill has been lingering in limbo.
House Republicans, who said they would not to pass the bill without the MTBE provision, accused Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle "of being insincere" in his support for the bill. It has been a month since the South Dakota Democrat publicly said he had secured enough votes from his colleagues to bring the bill to the floor.
"I keep waiting for that time when the majority will bring this before the Senate for an up or down vote," Mr. Daschle said this week.
Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, New Mexico Republican, said Democrats are holding the bill hostage for frivolous reasons.
"Unusual reasons like you didn't give us an energy bill when we had the Senate two years ago or you didn't let our staff work on the bill while it was in conference," Mr. Domenici said.
Nonetheless, Mr. Grassley and Mr. Bingaman feel the energy portions in the foreign imports tax repeal bill will have better luck, even though the foreign tax bill hasn't fared so well in the Senate so far.
This week the foreign tax bill made its second trip to the Senate floor as Democrats have refused to pass the bill without an amendment to protect overtime pay for government workers. The gridlock has cost businesses and the country collectively some $4 billion, Mr. Grassley said.
The World Trade Organization ruled last May that the foreign trade tax provisions of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code constituted a prohibited export subsidy. Therefore, the Senate is being pushed to pass the tax bill.
On March 1, the European Union began imposing retaliatory trade sanctions on a number of U.S. products as a result of the WTO decision.
-------- health
Scientists find secrets of cell death
April 10, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040410-064328-7283r.htm
LONDON, April 10 -- Medical researchers in England say they have a new insight into the biological processes of cell death, which could lead to a new treatment for cancer.
The Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit team at Leicester University hopes their work will eventually lead to a new treatment for a range of diseases by manipulating the complex interactions that lead to a cell's death, but which often go wrong in diseases.
The research is published in the journal Molecular Cell, the BBC reported.
Cells in the human body continually die off to be replaced by new cells. Most cells kill themselves by a programmed death reaction, known as apoptosis.
Failure of the normal apoptosis process can play a part in diseases such a cancer, certain neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and auto-immune diseases such as lupus.
The Leicester researchers hope that uncovering details of apoptosis will enable scientists to find ways to manipulate it for treating disease.
One hope would be to amplify the apoptosis process to stop cancer, which often thrives because of a failure of cells to die off at the end of their natural life.
----
FDA Issues Caution About Lead In Some Candy From Mexico
Associated Press
Saturday, April 10, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A664-2004Apr9.html
Children should not eat certain candy imported from Mexico because it may be contaminated with small amounts of lead, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday.
At issue is candy that contains significant amounts of chili powder, including lollipops coated with chili, and powdery mixtures of salt, lemon flavoring and chili seasoning.
The chili powder can become contaminated with lead during manufacturing, the FDA said.
The FDA also cautioned against tamarind, a popular Mexican candy item sometimes mixed with chili. It also can become contaminated if it is sold in poorly made glazed ceramic vessels that can leach lead.
Fruit and lollipops dipped or mixed with chilies are popular in Mexico, and a market has been growing for them north of the border, particularly in high-immigration areas. None of the candy contains lead amounts that exceed federal limits of 0.5 parts per million, said Michael Kashtock, an FDA plant safety adviser. But the chili-containing candy has more lead than sugar-based candy does -- and candy lead limits are soon to be lowered, as part of the FDA's effort to gradually reduce the amount of lead in foods, especially those popular with children.
Even mildly elevated levels of lead can harm children's developing brains.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Lion, cops await nuke protesters
240 show for annual rally at Lawrence Livermore Lab
By Dave Myhra,
OAKLAND TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Saturday, April 10, 2004
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1865~2075566,00.html
LIVERMORE -- A mountain lion joined about 240 protesters and dozens of sheriff's deputies at the annual Good Friday protest against nuclear weapons at Lawrence Livermore lab.
In the early morning hours, about 50 people stepped up to be peacefully arrested at the West Gate by deputies and lab police officers dressed in riot gear -- all to the cheers and songs of the rest of the crowd.
The Alameda County Sheriff's Department and the lab's Facility Protective Force Division had their hands full. Officers not only had to keep the protest peaceful and make arrests, but also had to keep the protesters from stumbling upon a mountain lion sleeping behind a sign at the West Gate.
At about 6:45 a.m., protesters began to gather, then, after a religious service, marched along Vasco Road from Patterson Pass Road to the West Gate entrance, where they encountered police and the sleeping lion.
The activists carried signs and banners that read, "We are all Downwinders," and other slogans. Some carried signs in memory of Catholic priest Rev. Bill O'Donnell, a well-known peace activist from Berkeley who died last year.
Before reaching the entrance, officers attempted to stop the train of people because of the cat.
This threw an element of confusion into the march as protesters first thought police were trying to stop them altogether.
Once the situation was understood, the group kept its distance from the lion, save for a few individuals trying to get a peek.
The mountain lion, a frequent visitor to lab grounds, crouched behind the sign, somewhat trapped between the protesters and the lab fence.
Earlier that morning, protesters began their annual ritual with a ceremony, honoring O'Donnell and fellow anti-nuclear activist Earl Johnson, who also recently passed away.
The ceremony also included updates on lab activities.
Event Organizer Caroyln Scarr talked about the lab's efforts to double its plutonium supply and vaporize plutonium for experiments.
"This is where the weapons of mass destruction are designed," Scarr said. "We are the biggest owners of weapons of mass destruction."
Speakers also updated the crowd on the lab's efforts to get its environmental document approved.
Participants agreed they all were there for one reason -- to stop the lab from building any more nuclear weapons and to promote peace.
"It shows that we aren't going to be complicit while the government builds nuclear weapons right here in our community," said Tara Darabji, outreach director for Tri-Valley Community Against a Radioactive Environment.
"When I see instruments built to kill, I'm praying that these instruments be changed into instruments of life," said the Rev. Bernardino Andrade, pastor of St. Anthony's Church in Oakley.
The laboratory is also looking for a peaceful world, but in a different way.
"What we really have (protesters and the lab) is a conflict of tactics not goals," lab spokesman David Schwoegler said. "We believe the best way to achieve peace is the way that's worked for six decades, a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent."
The day ended after protesters stepped forward in a large group, kneeled, were surrounded by police, then arrested. Deputies moved arrestees to waiting vans, then took them to a holding facility where they were cited and released. After the last person was taken away to shouts of "thank you" from the crowd, protesters dispersed.
The lab recognizes the protesters right to peacefully protest, and during the event "we have a common objective, mutual safety for both sides, and we were successful," Schwoegler said.
--------
Demonstrators Skirmish With Police in Taiwan
April 10, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
Riot police fought with demonstrators and used water cannon mounted on armored cars as a large rally turned unexpectedly violent here on Saturday night here in front of the presidential palace.
A crowd estimated by organizers at 300,000 and by police at 100,000 had assembled peacefully on Saturday afternoon to call for a parliamentary investigation into a shooting incident that injured President Chen Shui-bian on the eve of elections here last month, and may have helped him win reelection. Most of the crowd dispersed at sunset, but a couple thousand remained and began skirmishing with an even larger number of riot police just after sunset.
A group of senior lawmakers from the opposition Nationalist Party and the affiliated People First Party walked to the front of the crowd to appeal for them to disperse, passing a middle-aged man who clutched a white handkerchief to his forehead as blood poured from his scalp. The lawmakers were able to calm the crowd for an hour, but few people left and fights with riot police then resumed.
The violence could hurt the political prospects of the opposition in legislative elections next December and in the next presidential elections in 2008. The opposition had portrayed itself until now as the party of stability, and had warned that President Chen's sometimes confrontational approach to relations with mainland China risked war.
Mayor Ma Ying-jeou of Taipei, the Nationalists' most likely presidential candidate in the next race after the defeat this year of Lien Chan, the Nationalists' chairman, said in a telephone interview on Saturday morning, before the demonstration, that it was important for the protest to remain peaceful so as to retain the support of the bulk of the Taiwanese people.
But many of the protesters who lingered after sunset were clearly looking for a confrontation. Some wore motorcycle helmets to protect them in a confrontation with police, and a few carried steel pipes and other clubs. Many wore surgical masks found in many homes since the SARS outbreak last year to make it hard for the police to identify them. Despite clear skies, many wore yellow ponchos of clear plastic to protect them from the water cannon.
"We prepared in advance," said a beefy, tattooed man in a yellow poncho who wore a black mask with the Chinese characters for the word "honesty". He refused to give his name.
Su Chi, the senior spokesman for the Nationalists, said that it was not clear that the violent protesters were members of his party or the People First Party. He guessed that no more than a third of the demonstrators who came in the afternoon were members of either party, and said that it was not clear how many party members had stayed after sunset.
On March 20, President Chen won a second four-year term by fewer than 30,000 votes out of 13 million cast, defeating Lien Chan of the Nationalist Party and his running mate, James Soong of the People First Party. The president had been grazed across the abdomen the day before by a bullet while standing in an open Jeep in a motorcade through his hometown, Tainan.
At the government's invitation, Henry Lee, a former Taipei police captain, is looking into the case. Mr. Lee emigrated to the United States in the 1960's and testified as forensic expert for the defense in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
At a televised press conference on Saturday afternoon in Tainan, Mr. Lee said that at least one bullet had come from outside the Jeep in which the president was standing during a motorcade at the time of the shooting.
The Nationalists have suggested that presidential aides inside the Jeep might have staged the shooting. But Mr. Lee said that glass had sprayed into the vehicle, showing that a bullet had traveled through the windshield.
Premier Yu Shyi-kun accepted on Saturday the resignation of Taiwan's minister of foreign affairs, Eugene Chien, the latest in a string of resignations since the election. Mr. Chien had submitted his resignation on Friday, saying that it was partly to take responsibility for his ministry's handling of congratulations from an American official, Therese Shaheen, that was released here hours before the White House had decided to acknowledge President Chen as the victor.
The interior minister has already stepped down to take responsibility for the shooting, as has Taiwan's chief police commissioner. The defense minister submitted his resignation two days after the election, citing a longtime eye problem, but has agreed to stay on until a successor can be found.
The Nationalist Party has also sued to obtain a court-supervised recount of the election. President Chen publicly agreed to a recount two weeks ago, but his lawyers have demanded that the Nationalist Party pay for the recount, in keeping with a Taiwanese practice that people bringing lawsuits must pay the court costs.
The cost of a recount has been estimated at US$16 million, a large sum in Taiwan, which has one-twelfth the population of the United States and less than half the per capita income.
--------
Venezuela Abused Protesters, Human Rights Groups Charge
April 10, 2004
By JUAN FORERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/international/americas/10VENE.html
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, April 9 - Once seen as deferential to civil liberties despite his increasing hold on power, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is now coming under sharp criticism from human rights groups that say that torture and excessive force were used to tame recent anti-Chávez protests.
In the latest report, released on Friday in a six-page letter to Mr. Chávez, Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, accused National Guard troops of using tear gas and electric batons to torture protesters after their arrests.
The letter comes after Venezuela's government lashed out at the Inter-American Human Rights Commission for issuing a voluminous report on what it calls the worsening human rights situation in Venezuela. The commission is an arm of the Organization of American States.
Last week, Jorge Valero, the Venezuelan ambassador to the organization, accused the commission of distorting facts and accused the Bush administration of financing human rights groups as part of a plan to weaken Mr. Chávez. The American representative to the organization, John F. Maisto, fired back in a rare, heated exchange in the organization's headquarters in Washington, accusing Venezuela of undermining the commission.
Mr. Chávez, who is facing opposition efforts to mount a referendum to remove him from office, has denied that his government violated the rights of demonstrators during a week of protests that began on Feb. 27. He has claimed that some of the protesters were armed and violent.
Testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch "suggest a disturbing pattern of conduct that clearly violates international law enforcement standards," José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division for the organization, wrote to Mr. Chávez. Human Rights Watch said the testimonies and documentation that the organization collected were consistent with reports gathered by Venezuelan human rights groups.
Human Rights Watch said 13 people were killed in the protests. It was unclear how many died at the hands of the National Guard and how many were killed by armed protesters. About 400 were arrested.
Human Rights Watch said at least two dozen demonstrators taken into custody were beaten, threatened or tortured by National Guard troops, who tossed tear gas bombs into the police trucks in which they were being held.
"They made us inhale tear gas after closing the canvas sides of the truck and putting on their gas masks," Carlos Eduardo Izcaray, a cellist in the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra who was detained, told Human Rights Watch.
Some of Human Rights Watch's claims are supported by the investigations of two government agencies whose directors are close to Mr. Chávez. The government's human rights ombudsman, Germán Mundarain, reported 7 cases of torture and 17 cases of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. On Wednesday, the attorney general's office said it was investigating allegations of torture against 19 people.
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Kathy Kelly's Prison Address
Sat Apr 10, 2004
Antiwar.com Blog
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P718
Kathy Kelly, a leader of Voices in the Wilderness, is now serving time in prison in Illinois for her activities to oppose the war in Iraq.
She would appreciate hearing from supporters and friends, including giving her the latest antiwar news. She has no Internet access, so printouts of Antiwar.com stories and front pages would no doubt be appreciated.
Kathy Kelly #04971-045 FPC Pekin PO Box 5000 Pekin, IL 61555-5000
You may also write to her co-defendant, Rev. Jerry Zawada: Jerome Zawada, OFM #04995-045 FPC Oxford, P.O. Box 1085 Oxford, WI, 53952
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