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NUCLEAR
Cheney plans to pitch Westinghouse nukes to Beijing
Scots danger from 'missing' DU fragments
Pakistan's dirty nuclear secret
IRAN'S HEAVY WATER REACTOR
'Disarming Iraq': Lack of Evidence
Unproven missiles stir fears of renewed arms race
Missile defense for jets to be set by this summer
Troubled waters
Bush Gave No Sign of Worry In August 2001
'Against All Enemies' and 'Ghost Wars': Fixing the Blame
U.S. Backs Off Bin Laden Capture Forecast
MILITARY
Taliban Kidnap Afghan Official and Two Bodyguards
Warring Militias in Congo Test U.N. Enforcement Role
Singapore to spend more on developing defence technology: report
Hong Kong Marchers Send Beijing a Message on Democracy
Fallujah: a ghost town where scared residents bury their dead
Nine hostages freed in Iraq, Japanese still held
Negotiator tells Japan hostages safe in Iraq - Kyodo
Unit of new Iraqi army refuses to fight in Fallujah: report
Americans Slaughtering Civilians in Falluja
U.S. Calls for Cease-Fire in Fallujah
Fragile Truce Begins in Falluja, Halting a Week of Violence
U.S. Targeted Fiery Cleric In Risky Move
Iraqi Battalion Refuses to 'Fight Iraqis'
Likud Sets Date for Gaza Referendum
Waking up to body bags
Red-faced US air force after spy plane intrusion
Hawaiian Bomb Test Island Begins to Heal
Aljazeera airs tape of dead 'CIA men'
Forest Service's Fire Pamphlet Criticized
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Airport Screening Upsets Crown Prince
A Warning, but Clear?
Pre-9/11 Secret Briefing Said That Qaeda Was Active in U.S.
Declassified Memo Said Al Qaeda Was in U.S.
Panel Plans to Document the Breadth of Lost Opportunities
Police Armor Prompts Lawsuits
ACTIVISTS
Police, protesters clash over Taiwan vote
Social Investing Still Domini's Passion
Demonstrators Seek Removal Of U.S.-Led Forces From Iraq
Syrians Test Limits Of Political Dissent
Taiwan Riot Police Battle Election Protesters
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- business
Cheney plans to pitch Westinghouse nukes to Beijing
MEGAWATTS: China's energy needs will skyrocket in the coming years and the US vice president wants to make sure that American companies are in on the action
AP, WASHINGTON
Sunday, Apr 11, 2004,
Taipei Times
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/04/11/2003136217
"The opportunity is not just in selling the Chinese a number of reactors, but engaging them for a longer term in a strategic partnership."
Ron Simard, senior director at the Nuclear Energy Institute On a trip to China next week to talk about high-stakes issues like terrorism and North Korea, US Vice President Dick Cheney will have another task -- making a pitch for Westinghouse's US nuclear power technology.
At stake could be billions of US dollars in business in coming years and thousands of US jobs.
The initial installment of four reactors, costing US$1.5 billion apiece, would also help narrow the huge US 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 reactor in the US in three decades and the next one, if it comes, is still years away. So China is being viewed by the US industry as a potential bonanza.
Cheney's three-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai next week is part of a week-long trip to Asia.
He will focus on terrorism and nuclear tensions over North Korea, but he also is expected to talk up US reactor technology, according to industry and government sources.
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, recently told a hearing of the House International Relations Committee.
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. US 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 US-based Westinghouse Electric and a French rival, Areva, which is peddling its next generation of reactors that are built by the company's Framatome subsidiary.
Westinghouse is putting its hopes on its 1,100-megawatt AP1000 reactor, an advanced design that is still awaiting approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before it can be built in the US. Westinghouse, owned by the British nuclear firm BNFL, is the only US-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 US$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 US 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 as a senior director 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 US since the 1970s.
No US 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 of 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
Scots danger from 'missing' DU fragments
Army range lost pieces of killer shells
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
11 April 2004
UK Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/41214
Depleted uranium (DU) is still contaminating the military firing range near Kirkcudbright in the south of Scotland, according to an unpublished Ministry of Defence survey.
Since 1982 over 90 shells have been misfired or have malfunctioned and scattered fragments of DU, which is radioactive and chemically toxic, across the ground. Despite searches, some of the fragments have never been recovered.
Local concern about the risks is going to be highlighted this week, when peace activists take to the streets to hand out cards to members of the public warning that DU could make them ill. The cards are deliberately designed to mimic those handed to troops in Iraq, and revealed by the Sunday Herald in February.
Over the last 22 years over 6500 DU rounds have been fired at the Dundrennan range, near Kirkcudbright. The shells are meant to pass through shoreline target screens and drop more than two miles out to sea.
But the latest official report passed to the Sunday Herald says that 79 have broken up in flight, 10 have hit the ground and four hit the target gantry. The report was written by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) Radiological Protection Services at Alverstoke in Hampshire.
"Higher levels of contamination have sometimes been found at points where malfunctioning DU rounds or fragments landed on the range, but this has been removed when MoD clean-up levels were exceeded," the report states.
Other areas were less contaminated, but fenced off "as a matter of good practice". But, the report adds: "Some projectiles and fragments have not been recovered."
The report reveals the results of the latest and most comprehensive survey of the range, which was carried out between September 2001 and March 2002. "There are some isolated areas of DU contamination close to firing points and target gantries and it is recommended that any discrete fragments of DU should be removed from these areas," the report concludes.
"There are also a small number of areas where it would be advantageous to carry out further intrusive investigations to investigate some apparently anomalous monitoring results."
One of the most polluted areas was around the Raeberry firing point and target, on cliffs overlooking the Solway Firth. But there the radiation readings were confused by the discovery of a luminous radium dial in an abandoned tank. The report recommends that this should be disposed of as radioactive waste and the area resurveyed.
It adds: "Given the known history of malfunctions that have occurred at the site in the distant past, it is very encouraging that this wide-ranging survey has resulted in the discovery of a relatively small number of previously undiscovered DU fragments."
This is not, however, how it is seen by some local residents, who claim that there are many incidences of leukaemia along the Solway coast. "We are not at war, but we live in a theatre of DU testing and this has the potential to cause ill health," said Chloe Bruce from the Galloway Coalition for Justice and Peace.
The coalition is planning to distribute DU health warning cards in Kirkcudbright and Castle Douglas on Friday, prior to a public meeting in the evening.
"The focus of our action on April 16 is to highlight the hypocrisy of the MoD issuing warning cards to our troops, but not to the civilians they supposedly protect," declared Bruce.
The MoD cards say: "You have been deployed to a theatre where depleted uranium (DU) munitions have been used. DU is a weakly radioactive heavy metal which has the potential to cause ill-health. You may have been exposed to dust containing DU during your deployment."
DU is a very hard metal produced as a waste product by the nuclear power industry. It is regarded by British and US armed forces as the best available material for armour-piercing shells, and has been extensively used in battles in Iraq and the Balkans.
The British Army's Challenger 2 tanks fire a 120-millimetre DU round. DU "has a unique battle-winning capability", says the MoD report. "At present no satisfactory alternative material exists to provide the level of penetration needed to defeat the most modern battle tanks."
A spokesman for the MoD insisted on Friday that the risks from DU contamination at the Kirkcudbright range were "minimal, to say the least". The ministry carried out a comprehensive programme of monitoring at the site.
"It shows that levels of depleted uranium present a negligible risk to health," he said. "There is no reliable scientific or medical evidence to link DU with ill-health of either service personnel or the general population."
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan's dirty nuclear secret
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, admitted to selling nuclear secrets.
SANDRO CONTENTA EUROPEAN BUREAU
Apr. 11, 2004.
AP
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1081635608624&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724
VIENNA-When Libya ratted out the biggest global network in nuclear smuggling, among the thousands of black market items it turned over to U.N. inspectors were the blueprints for a nuclear warhead.
Libyan officials handed over the stack of documents in the very same way they had received them - stuffed into two shopping bags from "Good Look" tailors in Islamabad.
The U.N. inspectors were flabbergasted: the designs were for a bomb that could, if "properly" unleashed, devastate a city.
The plans had arrived in Libya more than two years ago through a nuclear proliferation racket that spanned at least nine countries on three continents. The full extent of the racket remains unknown.
To dismantle it, authorities are now feverishly working to track down the middlemen, scientists and companies that comprise the network.
But the most pressing concern is the deadly design itself. How many times were the blueprints and instruction manuals photocopied as they travelled the smuggling route to Tripoli? And to how many other countries - or extremist groups - were they sold? Those questions fuel nightmarish scenarios.
"Stopping nuclear proliferation is a race against time," says a Vienna-based diplomat.
The plot of this real-life thriller unfolds on a global stage where most members of a small nuclear elite consider their weapons vital for national security, yet expect everyone else to feel safe without them.
With disarmament ruled out by the eight or nine countries that have nuclear weapons, getting them has become the goal of a growing number that don't.
The smugglers in this ring also took strategic advantage of U.S. governments turning a blind eye to nuclear proliferation from an ally - Pakistan - and an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that failed to investigate troubling early warning signs.
The racket's mastermind was scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb. It was Khan who put together a smuggling network suspected of operating for at least 15 years. In a televised confession Feb. 4, Khan admitted selling nuclear technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Paris-based expert Bruno Tretrais says: "I would not be surprised if at least one other country was involved, like Syria, Egypt or Algeria."
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei describes Khan's network as a nuclear Wal-Mart, providing one-stop shopping in technology, know-how, and uranium hexafluoride, the gas that is processed to enrich uranium for bomb making.
At times, Khan shipped nuclear technology directly from Pakistan. But often he used middlemen and suppliers from at least a dozen companies in Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Dubai, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Germany and Switzerland. It's unclear how many of the firms actually knew they were involved in the illegal ring because some of the equipment they made could be used for both nuclear and non-nuclear purposes.
Hard evidence about Khan's activities finally began to emerge last year after Iran caved in to international pressure and showed its nuclear facilities and black market equipment to IAEA inspectors.
By late December, as part of a bargain with the U.S. and Britain to end Tripoli's international isolation, Libya directly fingered Khan. And much of the technology Libya turned over was identical to equipment IAEA inspectors had seen in Iran. Libya also named some of Khan's middlemen and suppliers as the source of more than $100 million (U.S.) in nuclear bomb-making technology that had been smuggled into Tripoli since 1998. That technology included designs for an early model nuclear bomb that could be dropped from a plane or launched by missile.
Libya told IAEA inspectors it had received the designs free, as a kind of bonus for being a good customer. But Western diplomats remain skeptical. According to one unconfirmed report, they cost Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi $20 million.
And although an IAEA report in November said it had found no evidence of nuclear weapons being produced in Iran, last week ElBaradei travelled to Tehran to ask officials there whether they had received the same blueprints as Libya.
Iran's ruling Shiite Muslim clerics insist their program is exclusively designed to generate much needed power from the country's nuclear reactors, despite being an oil-rich nation. They blame the U.S.-led trade embargo for forcing them to buy Khan's black market goods, beginning in the late 1980s. They have since mastered the complex "centrifuge" technology used to enrich uranium, but insist they have never pushed it to the 90 per cent level necessary to produce nuclear weapons.
But what has heightened the IAEA's suspicions is a massive uranium enrichment facility the government secretly began building in the desert south of Tehran that is big enough to power several nuclear reactors.
IAEA inspectors want to know why Iran built the facility before building the reactors - especially since Russia had already agreed to provide it with enriched uranium.
"The only logical conclusion is that the uranium will be for another purpose - nuclear weapons," a Western diplomat says.
Unless these vexing questions are resolved, some observers fear the U.S. or Israel may blast the facility sky high in a replay of the bombing of an Iraqi nuclear facility by Israeli warplanes in 1981. In his confession, Khan chalked up his smuggling activities to "errors in judgment" and a desire to divert Western pressure from Pakistan's nuclear program by spreading the problem around, especially to Muslim countries.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf insists Khan acted without the knowledge of top security or government officials. Most experts consider that claim laughable.
Musharraf immediately pardoned the 67-year-old scientist, calling him a hero for his services to the country, and let him keep the fortune he amassed from smuggling. He also prevented Khan from being interviewed by IAEA inspectors or U.S. officials.
U.S. President George W. Bush accepted Musharraf's handling of the matter in return for information about the type of technology smuggled, as well as assurances that Khan would be put out of business, says Gary Samore, who advised Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, on non-proliferation issues.
Bush feared that pressing the matter further would weaken Musharraf domestically and reduce his commitment to hunting down Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda loyalists, believed to be hiding along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.
While Bush was prepared to launch a war against Iraq on a claim that its alleged weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of terrorists, he appears to have taken a more tolerant and patient approach with a ring that makes the possibility of a nuclear nightmare all the more real.
There's no hard evidence yet that Al Qaeda-linked groups shopped at Khan's network. But in 2001, two Pakistani nuclear scientists reportedly met bin Laden twice in Afghanistan.
In October that year, Pakistani authorities detained a group of scientists, including a once senior member of its nuclear program, on suspicion of passing on nuclear secrets to Afghanistan's Taliban government, hosts to bin Laden's Al Qaeda terror network until the Taliban was ousted by U.S. forces.
Later, bin Laden told a Pakistani journalist Al Qaeda actually had nuclear weapons, a claim most experts doubt.
Nuclear weapons are made from either highly enriched uranium, or processed plutonium, both extremely complex procedures requiring precise scientific skills.
Al Qaeda has tried to buy fissile material for a bomb on the black market. It made several failed attempts to buy enriched uranium in the mid-1990s in Africa, Europe and Russia.
"If Al Qaeda were to build nuclear weapons, it would likely build relatively crude, massive nuclear explosives, deliverable by ships, trucks, or private planes," writes David Albright, a former IAEA inspector who is now head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
Al Qaeda's nuclear quest has also refocused attention on the hundreds of tonnes of nuclear bomb material kept in insecure facilities in the former Soviet Union, mainly Russia.
A declassified CIA report two years ago stated that an unknown amount of Russia's fissile material had been stolen over the past decade.
Since 1993, the IAEA has documented 18 cases of trafficking in the kind of enriched uranium or plutonium needed for nuclear bombs. But the quantities involved have not been enough to produce a nuclear weapon.
They could produce a so-called "dirty bomb," a makeshift process in which radioactive materials are attached to conventional explosives and dispersed by the blast. But the bigger the blast, the more the radioactive material disperses, and, surprisingly, the less deadly it becomes.
Whatever the scientific calculation, anxiety over Khan's smuggling ring is high and rising. He initially set up his clandestine operations to serve Pakistan's nuclear ambitions. The country launched its quest for nuclear weapons after 1974, when rival India conducted its first atomic test using plutonium processed from Canada's Candu reactor technology.
Khan was then working in the Netherlands at Urenco, a European nuclear power consortium. He returned to Pakistan before a Dutch court convicted him of stealing company blueprints for centrifuges.
The U.S. was aware Pakistan was illegally bringing in equipment for its nuclear program by at least 1983, according to a recently declassified state department document. But Washington turned a blind eye throughout the decade, deciding it was more important to keep Pakistan as an ally in the battle against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, says Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In 1989, when the Soviets left Afghanistan, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Pakistan. At about the same time, Khan's network began exporting nuclear technology to Iran, partly to finance Pakistan's nuclear drive.
To gain favour and the financial backing of oil-rich Arab countries, Khan stressed the strategic importance of an Islamic state acquiring a nuclear bomb. Saudi Arabia was a key backer, in part by providing oil at cut-rate prices.
Most experts believe Pakistan - which is not a signatory of the U.N.'s non-proliferation treaty - had enough enriched uranium for nuclear weapons sometime between 1989 and 1994.
The IAEA had both the mandate and the power to investigate suspicions about a black market. But the agency had by then settled on a practice that made it an auditing agency verifying only those nuclear sites that countries declared, says Vilmos Cserveny, director of its policy co-ordination office.
In 1995, IAEA inspectors came across Khan's name when dismantling Iraq's nuclear program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They discovered a memo written by a member of Iraq's intelligence service saying Khan had offered to help Iraq build nuclear weapons. The memo was dated Oct. 6, 1990 - when Saddam Hussein's army had occupied Kuwait and a U.S. coalition was building up forces to drive it back.
A related document said the "upfront" cost of assistance in enriching uranium and manufacturing nuclear weapons would be $5 million.
The IAEA inspectors halted their investigation after Pakistan denied making the offer described in the memo and Iraqi officials described it as a hoax.
But throughout the 1990s, Khan also made several trips to North Korea - trips that would have required Pakistani government approval. During those years, Pakistan obtained intermediate-range ballistic missiles from North Korea, likely in exchange for nuclear technology.
Most experts believe North Korea built one or two nuclear weapons by 1994 with Pakistan's help. Last year, North Korea abruptly pulled out of the non-proliferation treaty, which had made it subject to international inspections.
Pakistan tested some of its North Korean missiles in May, 1998, and declared itself a nuclear weapons state.
Interestingly, the biggest blow to Khan's network came last October when a German-owned ship destined for Libya was seized in the Mediterranean. Its containers, which the manifest said were full of "used machine parts", were instead packed with equipment for sophisticated centrifuges. Bush claims the seizure was a result of U.S. and British intelligence. But by then, Gadhafi was negotiating his return to relative respectability with London and Washington, and some diplomats believe he decided to sacrifice the ship's cargo as a goodwill gesture.
Bush is calling on the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution requiring all states to criminalize proliferation and enact strict export controls. But experts say countries are not likely to sit idly by while the U.S. and others continue to develop their nuclear arsenals.
"As long as you keep developing new weapons like U.S. bunker busters or mini nukes, this will always make other countries react," Cserveny says.
-------- iran
IRAN'S HEAVY WATER REACTOR
4/11/04
Voice of America
http://www.voanews.com/Editorials/article.cfm?objectID=8641831B-0C06-4CAB-8CD193D9E5EA74A3
The following is an editorial reflecting the views of the United States Government:
In about two months, Iran is planning to start construction of a heavy-water nuclear reactor in the city of Arak. Heavy-water reactors provide the best means of producing plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Iran has told the International Atomic Energy Agency, the I-A-E-A, that its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes. But the I-A-E-A has been investigating Iran's program since March 2003 and has already confirmed numerous clandestine nuclear activities that Iran undertook for more than eighteen years.
Kenneth Brill is the U.S. representative to the I-A-E-A. He says that Iran's long history of deceit gives plenty of reason to doubt its claims:
"The classic example of why people are concerned about the Iran nuclear program is the Kalaye Electric Company plant which was originally portrayed by the most senior Iranian officials as a simple watch factory or a simple warehouse, and over time its true use and purpose was conveyed to the I-A-E-A. It was a place where centrifuge experiments had been done."
Centrifuges can be used to make nuclear-weapons-grade uranium. And this is just one of many deceptions and broken promises by Iran concerning its nuclear program. Adam Ereli is the deputy spokesman for U.S. State Department:
"On October 21st, Iran told the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom that it would, quote, 'suspend all enrichment -- uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as defined by the I-A-E-A,' end quote. Then they later went on and said, 'Okay, but that doesn't include domestic manufacture and assembly of centrifuges.' Then again, on November 10th, Iran sent a letter to the I-A-E-A saying that it had decided to suspend, quote, 'all [uranium] enrichment-related reprocessing activities in Iran.' Then, again, on February 23rd, it [Iran] said it would suspend assembly and testing of centrifuges. So we've heard this before."
Mr. Ereli said it would be "great" if Iran would live up to its promises to the I-A-E-A. But so far, Iran has not done so. The I-A-E-A board meets again in June. High on the agenda will be the question of whether Iran is meeting its promises to the I-A-E-A and its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If the I-A-E-A finds that Iran is not doing so, its noncompliance could be reported to the United Nations Security Council.
-------- iraq / inspections
'Disarming Iraq': Lack of Evidence
April 11, 2004
By FAREED ZAKARIA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/books/review/11ZAKARIT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
At several points in ''Disarming Iraq,'' Hans Blix admits that he too assumed Saddam Hussein's regime was concealing weapons of mass destruction. But, he explains, ''I needed evidence.'' His frustration with the Bush administration, expressed throughout this book, was that it was both supremely confident that the weapons existed and utterly uninterested in evidence. Indeed, the administration was deeply mistrustful of Blix's search for it. Washington's logic, he writes, appeared similar to that of witch hunting in the Middle Ages. ''The witches exist; you are appointed to deal with these witches; testing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch hunt.''
Blix was puzzled that this certainty about the weapons was combined with absolutely no real information about where they might be. He repeatedly complained to senior American officials that the intelligence was meager or simply bad. The sites they directed him to rarely yielded anything. The evidence Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cited publicly Blix knew to be dubious.
And yet Blix also believed that the witches existed. He suspected that the Iraqis were hiding weapons and weapons programs. He came to this conclusion on the basis of the same logic -- a lack of evidence. In 1991 the United Nations had found vast stockpiles of chemical and biological agents in the country. Iraq claimed to have destroyed them but had never presented a single piece of evidence that it had done so. If they had destroyed them, Blix wondered, why did they not ''try to convince us of this in 2002 and 2003. . . . Had there really been no written orders issued in 1991? . . . Why was the Iraqi side so late in presenting . . . lists of people who they claimed had taken part in the destruction of prohibited items in 1991? Why did they not present these people for interviews in December 2002?'' Thus in his first report to the Security Council, in January 2003, Blix declared, ''Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance -- not even today -- of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world.''
''Disarming Iraq'' can be read as an attempt by an honorable international civil servant to steer between two realities: on the one hand, an American administration that had made up its mind to go to war no matter what; on the other, an Iraqi regime that never cooperated enough to ease the world's suspicions. Blix writes in a straightforward, honest style, with his distinctive, low-key (dare one say Swedish?) personality coming through. He is never outraged, often ''surprised,'' ''puzzled'' or ''troubled.'' His book is a detailed history of the diplomacy surrounding what turned out to be the last United Nations inspections in Iraq. It's an important addition to the historical record, though it contains more about Unmovic than most readers will want to know. (That's United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission.)
Blix provides few interesting character sketches and says little that is surprising about the Bush administration. He speaks admiringly of Colin Powell, feels that he was always treated courteously by Condoleezza Rice and writes less charitably of Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. He recalls a meeting with Cheney at which the vice president tried to intimidate him, threatening to ''discredit inspections in favor of disarmament'' if he did not produce quick results.
More revealing are Blix's difficulties with the Iraqis. Time and again he and his colleague Mohamed ElBaradei tried to explain to the Iraqis that they needed to cooperate for the inspections to confirm what they claimed -- that they had no weapons of mass destruction. After repeated requests to talk to Saddam Hussein, which were turned down, Blix and ElBaradei met with the Iraqi vice president (a powerless Hussein stooge). At that meeting, ElBaradei sternly explained that it was ''incomprehensible'' that Iraq had not taken the steps the United Nations had demanded. There was no response.
Later, in February 2003, as the United States made clear that time was running out, several countries proposed ways of testing Iraqi cooperation. One was that Saddam Hussein give a televised speech promising full cooperation with inspections so that everyone in the country heard it from the top. Another was a timeline for inspections with clear benchmarks. Almost every country got seriously interested in these proposals. But there was no response from Iraq. It was behavior like this that led Blix and many others to assume that the Iraqis were not coming clean because they had something to hide.
Blix is unsparing of the United States in his concluding sections. He points out that virtually every claim made by American policy makers about Iraq's weapons programs -- aluminum tubes, yellowcake, mobile labs -- has proved to be false. The entire assessment of Iraq's weapons program, he argues, lacked any kind of ''critical thinking.'' In addition ''the contempt which both Vice President Cheney and the leadership in the U.S. Department of Defense appear to have held for international inspections deprived them, in effect, of a valuable source of information.'' Everyone recognizes the need for human intelligence in societies like Saddam Hussein's. Well, the inspectors, who met with Iraqi officials, traveled around the country and inspected sites, were human intelligence.
Iraq was a hard case. Not only was it one of the most closed states in the world. It had a history of pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and had used them twice, against the Kurds and the Iranians. From the mid-1970's through the early 90's, Iraq continuously, persistently and ambitiously sought nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. All Western intelligence services underestimated the extent of these efforts. International agencies, chiefly the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Hans Blix, actually gave Iraq a clean bill of health during these decades. As a result, everyone, including Blix, was wary of Iraq's declarations that it had destroyed its old stockpiles and wasn't building new ones.
But something changed around the early 90's inside Iraq. Perhaps the regime became dysfunctional, or the inspections worked, or the bombing and sanctions took their toll or something else. But at that point, Iraq appears to have quietly thrown in the towel. Blix speculates that the Iraqis did not reveal this to the world for several reasons: the Americans seemed dead set against them anyway; national pride; they wanted to scare their neighbors (''like someone who puts up a sign warning BEWARE OF DOG without having a dog''). Whatever it was, the United States -- and most of the world -- missed it.
But if getting Iraq right was tough, getting the diplomacy right was much easier. Reading this book one is struck by how, at the end, the United States had become uninterested in diplomacy, viewing it as an obstacle. It seems clear that with a little effort Washington could have worked through international structures and institutions to achieve its goals in Iraq. Blix and ElBaradei were proving to be tough, honest taskmasters. Every country -- yes, even France -- was coming around to the view that the inspections needed to go on for only another month or two, that benchmarks could have been established, and if the Iraqis failed these tests the Security Council would authorize war. But in a fashion that is almost reminiscent of World War I, the Pentagon's military timetables drove American diplomacy. The weather had become more important than international legitimacy.
Had Washington made more of a commitment to diplomacy, Saddam Hussein would probably still have been deposed. Blix's book provides ample evidence that the Iraqis would most likely not have met the tests required of them. But the war would have been authorized by the Security Council, had greater international support and involved much more burden sharing. Countries like India and Pakistan, with tens of thousands of troops to provide, made it clear that they needed a United Nations mandate to go into Iraq. The Europeans and Japanese (who now pay for at least as much of the reconstruction of Afghanistan as the United States does) would similarly have been more generous in Iraq than they are today.
Most important, the rebuilding of Iraq would be seen not as an American imperial effort but as an international project, much like those in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and even Afghanistan. America is paying a price in credibility for its mishandling of Iraq. But the real price is being paid by the Iraqi people, whose occupation has been far more lonely and troubled than it needed to be.
Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and the author of ''The Future of Freedom.''
-------- missile defense
Unproven missiles stir fears of renewed arms race
By DAVID BALLINGRUD,
St. Petersburg (Florida) Times
April 11, 2004
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/04/11/Perspective/Unproven_missiles_sti.shtml
Twenty-one years and $100-billion ago, President Ronald Reagan described his Star Wars dream of a safe and secure nation.
"What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack?" he asked. What if "we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"
Today, while most of the world's attention is elsewhere, the United States is taking the first step toward Reagan's elusive and costly goal. Construction is underway in California and Alaska of a ground-based missile system intended to detect, track and destroy an enemy missile before it could strike a target in this country. Sometime this summer or fall, the United States will put 10 missile interceptors in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Ten more will follow next year. In addition, major radar improvements are planned in Alaska and the United Kingdom.
But is this a step toward the safer nation envisioned by Reagan? Or is it a step toward a new Cold War, an arms-race-in-space with old nemesis Russia and new participants China and North Korea?
Consider the developments of the last few months:
- The Russians boasted of soon having a new weapon of their own. It is a hypersonic, intercontinental cruise missile, they said in February, capable of maneuvering through any missile defense system.
- Last month the United States announced a successful test of a similar vehicle, the hypersonic X43A, a missilelike aircraft designed to fly to the edges of outer space and then return to Earth. NASA touts the peacetime potential of the X43A, but the U.S. military makes no secret of its interest in an aircraft that might become a bomber too fast to be shot down.
- Just a few days ago, Japan announced it would spend $1-billion this year to start work on a joint project with the United States to build a missile shield to protect that nation. The system would be operational in about three years. The United States is reportedly making the same offer of protection to other nations, among them India.
- In response, China complained that the U.S.-Japan project destabilizes the region, that it is intended to dilute Chinese power and keep it from ever assimilating Taiwan. Meanwhile, China itself has become a major power in space and missile development.
It all has a familiar ring for Victoria Samson, a defense analyst for the independent Center for Defense Information. "The Cold War is far from over," she said. "It may just be entering a new phase."
The Russian posturing about a new hypersonic cruise missile is a reaction to the U.S. plan to deploy the first stages of an antimissile system this summer, she said, and the United States should expect other nations to behave the same way. "This kind of thing makes other countries very nervous and it forces them to step up their own military spending," she said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin put it bluntly. "As other countries increase the number and quality of their arms and military potential," he said recently, "then Russia will also need to ensure it has a new generation of arms and technology."
But critics of the U.S. plan are worried about more than a new arms race, or "missile gap."
They say the antimissile system now being deployed by the United States is costly and unproven - that it has "boondoggle" stenciled all over it. Testing as we go along
Recently, a group of 49 high-ranking, retired military officers asked President Bush to delay deployment of the antimissile system, calling it the "responsible" thing to do. One of those who signed the March 26 letter was Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, former head of the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
Only two of 10 "critical technologies" have been verified workable by adequate testing, they charged. The money saved by delaying deployment should be redirected to protecting "the multitude of facilities containing nuclear weapons and materials, and to protect our ports and borders against terrorists."
Critics of the system have strong doubts about the way it is being tested - or rather, the way it is not being tested.
The military's usual test requirements have been suspended to meet the deployment deadline later this year. In their place is a process called "spiral development," which means testing incrementally as the system is deployed, piece by piece.
"That's a foolish way to go," said Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration and now an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an interview last week.
"That's the kind of thing to do if a threat is imminent. But there's no imminent threat now. It's foolish, even bizarre, and it's likely to run up huge costs. That's why those generals and admirals wrote that letter."
Samson agreed. "The problem is that the system being deployed this year is schedule-driven," she said. "The United States is unwisely whisking its programs through development. This rush to failure is creating a missile defense system which offers no defense and will spend billions of dollars in the process."
The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, an independent nonprofit focusing on national security, argues that use of any untested components puts the program "in danger of getting off the track early and impairing the effort over the long term."
In a report on the issue, the center acknowledges that "hostile rogue states, especially North Korea, will have the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction by ballistic missile on the U.S., perhaps in the next decade. However, even our obsolescent Defense Support Program satellites are capable of pinpointing the location of a ballistic missile launch. Why would any state, rogue or otherwise, employ a ballistic missile or missiles to deliver a weapon of mass destruction on the U.S., and thereby invite a devastating retaliatory strike?
"There is no evidence that leaders of rogue regimes, including Korea and Iran, have suicidal tendencies."
Making matters worse, the testing done on the system thus far has been rigged, the center charges.
"Of the 10 flight tests that have been completed, eight were intercept tests; five of the eight have been declared successful. However, all five have employed the same unrealistic target missile trajectory, known in advance, and flown at low speed and altitude. The simple target missiles have been rigged with transmitters that exaggerate their signatures . . . for midcourse tracking."
In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, director of the Missile Defense Agency, defended the system. Today, missile defense development "takes place in uncharted waters," he said. "We are no longer compelled to pursue a 100 percent solution for every possible attack scenario before we can provide any defense at all."
The president, Kadish said, recognizes that the first system will have limited capability. "He directed that we field what we have, then improve what have fielded."
"Which would we rather have," he asked. "Some capability today, or none as we seek a 100 percent solution?"
Korb discounted Russian claims of having developed a super weapon that would defeat any missile defense system.
"What the U.S. is building would not halt a Russian attack anyway," he said. "They have on the order of 7,000 warheads," far more than could be intercepted. Russians, he said, are particularly sensitive about their missile capability, "because that's all they have left." Countering an unknown threat
The 10 missiles going into the ground in Alaska and California this fall are just the first piece of a much larger system planned for land, sea and space.
The idea is to be able to knock a missile out of the sky as it leaves the ground (boost phase), as it flies to its target (midcourse phase), or as it descends to its target (terminal phase).
Eventually, if built as currently planned, the system will use shipboard missiles, ground-based missiles, satellites and radar to detect a launch, track the missile in flight, then destroy it in one of its three phases. The Pentagon is studying a laser mounted aboard a Boeing 747, too, but development of that weapon has suffered recent setbacks.
The ground-based missile system under construction in Alaska and California is designed to protect against the most dangerous but most remote threat - that posed by a long-range, intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.
To be successful, the ground-launched interceptor must hit the attacking missile in the midcourse, outer space part of its flight. Near misses don't count. The launch must be detected, its course determined, and the interceptor launched. But how do Pentagon officials assure U.S. taxpayers they can hit a bullet with a bullet? How can they cause a 16,000 mph hit on a speck in space, especially one surrounded by decoy specks?
Here's the plan. With a rough idea of the incoming missile's track, the interceptor is launched. Atop the interceptor sits the exoatmospheric kill vehicle. Once in outer space, it disengages from the booster rocket and receives last-minute target information from the ground and from tracking satellites. Finally, it must locate the incoming warheads on its own, distinguish the real from the fake, and then steer itself into the warhead's path. The interceptor carries no explosives; the collision destroys the incoming missile.
A second key part of the system, to be deployed by the end of 2006, is a fleet of 15 destroyers and three cruisers, each equipped with the Aegis antimissile system. The missile used on the warships is not the same as those to be launched from Alaska and California. The ships used a modified version of a proven Navy antiaircraft missile, linked to the high-tech Aegis radar.
Since the Navy missile is built to intercept a missile in boost phase, the Aegis system is considered a "theater" or regional system. According to published reports, the first Aegis vessel will arrive in the Sea of Japan in September.
It is the Aegis system - and the fact that the Pentagon recently announced a $1.78-billion sale of radar equipment to Taiwan - that critics say will immediately disrupt the balance of power in the region.
China, already displeased with Japan's decision to spend a billion dollars on missile defense, said the radar sale to Taiwan sent the "wrong message." Typically, North Korea was more blunt. The Navy deployment in the Sea of Japan was preparation for war, a spokesman said, and part of its "attempt to dominate the Asia-Pacific region."
Howard Baker, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, acknowledged that a shield would rob missile-armed nations of offensive power and could encourage the development of shield-piercing missiles, but he said it would not destabilize Asia.
"Missile defense is a unique military concept," he told reporters recently. "It is inherently incapable of offensive operation. It is purely defensive. And therefore I don't think anybody should be concerned about it."
----
Missile defense for jets to be set by this summer
By Philip Shenon
Sun, Apr. 11, 2004
NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY JOURNAL
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/world/8407352.htm
WASHINGTON - Government contractors who were asked to find a way to protect passenger jets from small shoulder-fired missiles in al-Qaida's arsenal have determined that some planes could be outfitted with anti-missile technology as early as this summer, far sooner than the Bush administration suggested was possible.
The contractors' assessment, revealed in recent statements at industry gatherings and in interviews with executives, is likely to increase pressure on the administration to begin installing anti-missile devices, particularly on larger planes flying to foreign destinations where al-Qaida terror cells pose a clear threat.
The technology has been installed on military planes for years, offering laser-jamming equipment and decoy flares to deflect small missiles that are known to be in al-Qaida's stockpiles.
"Can we do it in 90 to 120 days and protect the aircraft? Absolutely," said Paul Handwerker, a business development executive at BAE Systems, a British military supplier that is leading one of three groups of contractors selected by the Department of Homeland Security in January to develop the technology for passenger jets.
Handwerker said that while he agreed with the reasoning behind the government's timetable, the company's engineers "would find a way to do it much faster" if the request was made.
Jack Pledger, an executive who oversees anti-missile systems for Northrop Grumman, another contractor selected for the program, said that laser-jamming devices installed by Northrop on military planes could be quickly converted to passenger jets.
"We could do it right now," Pledger said.
"If it became necessary to provide this system immediately, we're ready."
Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies have repeatedly warned in recent months that al-Qaida terrorists intend to shoot down American and other Western passenger planes with shoulder-fired missiles, which can be bought on the black market for as little as $5,000 and weigh as little as 35 pounds.
In November 2002, two small Russian-made SA-7 missiles fired by terrorists believed to be loyal to Osama bin Laden's network barely missed an Israeli passenger jet on takeoff from Mombasa, Kenya.
Last year, the threat of a missile attack was considered so serious at Heathrow Airport in London that troops were stationed along flight paths into the airport for several days.
A British arms dealer was arrested in New Jersey last summer on charges that he tried to sell a Russian-made surface-to-air missile to a U.S. undercover agent posing as an al-Qaida operative; the case against him is pending.
A study last November by the Congressional Research Service cited estimates from counterterrorism specialists of more than 5,000 small missiles in the stockpiles of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
Although al-Qaida has never been tied to the downing of a passenger plane in a missile attack, the study noted that there had been at least five missile attacks on large passenger jets around the world since 1983, two of them resulting in destruction of the aircraft and the deaths of all 171 people on board.
Four of the attacks were in Africa, including the one in Mombasa. One attack was in Afghanistan.
The Homeland Security Department announced last year that it was setting aside $100 million for a program to determine whether anti-missile devices could be installed on passenger planes, with prototypes built this year or next.
The department's timetable has been criticized on Capitol Hill, where a group of lawmakers, most of them Democrats, has urged the government to move much faster and to commit billions of dollars to begin equipping planes immediately.
The department says that it is moving as quickly as it can and that it would be irresponsible to try to outfit passenger planes until the reliability, safety and cost-effectiveness of the anti-missile device is demonstrated.
They note that military anti-missile systems cost as much as $3 million per plane, require intensive maintenance and can produce a high rate of false alarms, factors that could be economically disastrous to the nation's already-beleaguered airline industry.
"What we're trying to avoid is taking shortcuts," said John Kubricky, who is directing anti-missile research programs at the Department of Homeland Security.
"I can't think of any way to speed this up and to do it safely and economically."
Kubricky said that anti-missile technology developed for high-performance military jets was not readily applicable to passenger planes, which fly for hundreds of hours without extensive maintenance.
"It's like taking the family car and comparing it to a NASCAR racer," he said.
In January, the department announced that three groups of technology contractors -- one led by BAE Systems; one led by Northrop; and one led by United Airlines, a division of UAL Corp., and Avisys, a small technology company based in Texas -- had each been awarded a $2 million contract to determine how passenger planes might be outfitted with military-style anti-missile devices.
In announcing the awards, the department said it was trying to determine if there was "viable and effective" technology to protect passenger jets.
The recent comments of the contractors have alarmed officials at the Department of Homeland Security, and they have urged the contractors to refrain from such optimistic public pronouncements.
The contractors say that while they can move faster, they are pleased to operate within the government's timeline.
"The Department of Homeland Security is taking a prudent and proper approach to evaluating the technologies," said Pledger at Northrop.
Handwerker of BAE Systems said his company supported the department's goal of creating anti-missile devices for passenger planes that "make everything much more cost-effective, much easier to maintain -- orders of magnitude more reliable than what is normal in a military environment."
-------- terrorism
Troubled waters
April 11, 2004
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/10/1081326976347.html
The bombing of the French oil tanker Limburg in October 2002 led to a tripling of premiums on ships calling at ports in Yemen.
Millions of cargo containers ply the world's shipping lanes. Terrorists could use any one of them to unleash a global nightmare, writes Michael Richardson.
Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister John Anderson is right to be concerned about the security of ships and ports. Seaborne commerce is an industry of vast scale and labyrinthine complexity. It is also lightly regulated, frequently beyond the reach of the law and often secretive, especially in concealing the real owners of ships. Oceans cover 70 per cent of the world's surface and most of this huge area is classified as international waters, or high seas, where ships are free to roam unhindered except in very specific circumstances.
Al-Qaeda has threatened to attack Australia. Some leaders of the Jemaah Islamiah, al-Qaeda's closest ally in South-East Asia, have also warned Australia that its pro-US policies have made it a target. Given the vast scale of the global shipping and cargo container industry, and its vulnerability to acts of terrorism, better security is vital, especially when the risk of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) getting into the hands of international terrorists is rising.
Vessels and the cargo containers they carry can be used in various ways by terrorists to further their aims: to raise money, through legal or illegal trade; to covertly transport operatives, equipment and weapons; or to commandeer ships carrying explosive, inflammable or toxic substances and use them as weapons in much the same way that al-Qaeda used hijacked airliners to strike New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
The terrorist network linked to al-Qaeda appreciates the vital role of sea transport and has exploited it for years. In 1998, an al-Qaeda cargo vessel carried the explosives used to bomb the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 220 people. Al-Qaeda has used cargo containers to ferry agents and probably terrorist-related material around the world. According to court documents, shortly before his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, al-Qaeda's director of global operations, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, offered to invest $US200,000 ($A262,000) in an export firm in exchange for access to containers used to ship garments to Port Newark in New York.
Officials and counter-terrorism experts in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia have warned that the next step up in mega-terrorism may be an attack using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons. A ship or container is regarded as one of the most likely delivery devices. Those who worry about such an attack believe that WMD and terrorism have become interlocking threats - and could, if effective safeguards are not put in place quickly, fuse in an extremely dangerous challenge to global security and stability. The exposure in February 2004 of an extensive and long-running nuclear black market that funnelled weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea from Pakistan has heightened these fears.
Container security is of vital importance in preventing maritime terrorist attacks on Australian territory. The millions of uniform steel containers that carry most of the world's cargo are a security nightmare. There are at least 2.5 million container movements each year in and out of Australia's 60 main ports and this number is expected to increase by 45 per cent over the next six years.
Worldwide, as many as 15 million containers are in circulation, criss-crossing the globe and making more than 230 million journeys each year. Less than 1 per cent of shipped cargo is screened using X-ray and gamma-ray devices to check for explosives, radioactive substances or other dangerous materials.
This relative lack of security checks has raised fears that terrorists may conceal a radiological or nuclear bomb in a container and try to explode it in a key trade centre.
Although there is no clear evidence that any terrorist group has acquired nuclear weapons, there is ample evidence that al-Qaeda has tried. Documents recovered from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime describe al-Qaeda's nuclear ambitions. In the mid-1990s, its agents tried repeatedly to buy bomb-grade uranium in Africa, Europe and Russia. In November 2001, Osama bin Laden claimed that he had a nuclear bomb. US intelligence officials dismissed his assertion but continue to warn that his network is still seeking a nuclear explosive device. However, experts say it would be difficult for terrorists to acquire enough plutonium or highly enriched uranium for a crude nuclear bomb. Moreover, putting the infrastructure in place to build a usable bomb would probably take years.
It would be easier to assemble a radiological device - a "dirty bomb" - that uses conventional explosives to disperse deadly radioactive material. Millions of radioactive sources have been distributed worldwide over the past 50 years. The International Atomic Energy Agency has warned that the radioactive substances needed to build dirty bombs can be found almost anywhere, and that more than 100 countries may have programs that are incapable of preventing, or even detecting, the theft of these materials.
Fortunately, building the most potent radiological bombs is much more difficult for terrorists than assembling explosives to disperse less toxic material. Not only are the very dangerous radioactive substances more difficult to obtain, the successful spreading of highly radioactive particles requires specialised scientific knowledge. But criminals are now trading in components and materials for dirty bombs. This makes it easier for terrorists to acquire powerful radiological sources. Indeed, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US have concluded that a dirty bomb attack "somewhere in the world is overdue".
In January 2003, the BBC said it had seen evidence that al-Qaeda had tried to assemble radioactive material to construct a dirty bomb in Afghanistan before the US-led invasion in October 2001. No dirty bomb was found, but British officials were convinced that al-Qaeda had the expertise to build another one, based on terrorist training manuals detailing the deployment of a radiological weapon to achieve maximum destructive effect.
The detonation of either a nuclear or powerful radiological bomb in a port city would cut the arteries of maritime commerce if the device was believed to have come by sea. It would halt much of the world's trade and severely damage the global economy.
A big seaborne terror attack would send marine insurance rates to prohibitively high levels. After terrorists used a small boat packed with explosives to set the French oil tanker Limburg ablaze off the Yemen coast in October 2002, underwriters tripled premiums on ships calling at ports in Yemen. Many vessels cut Yemen from their schedules, or diverted to ports in neighbouring states.
A CBRN attack on an international port would send ship and cargo premiums skyrocketing. The bigger the attack, the greater the insurance shock would be. There is no insurance for a maritime-related terrorist attack using a nuclear bomb. The recovery costs would be unimaginably huge.
A nuclear bomb could cause hundreds of thousands of casualties. Any serious attack from the sea would be followed by ramped-up security measures that would disrupt world trade. Such measures would include lengthy cargo inspections, or even the closure of ports for an indefinite period while additional checks and safeguards were applied to allay public fears.
One of the first things the US Government did after the September 11 attacks, for example, was to shut down US commercial aviation for four days - a security measure that had severe repercussions on aviation, travel, tourism and business worldwide. US ports were also closed for two days.
As an island-continent highly dependent on seaborne trade, Australia would be hit hard by a terror strike, even if it happened on the other side of the world. A catastrophic terrorist attack from the sea would be particularly damaging because the global economy is built on integrated supply chains that feed components and other materials to industry on a "just enough, just in time" basis.
Disruption of this supply chain would have repercussions around the world, and profoundly affect business confidence.
Yet the global economy will also suffer if well-meaning security measures slow down trade and make it more costly.
Striking the right balance between free trade and security is critically important, and it must be done in 2004 as a wide range of new counter-terrorist measures for ships and ports take effect.
-------- us politics
Bush Gave No Sign of Worry In August 2001
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2676-2004Apr10?language=printer
CRAWFORD, Tex., April 10 -- President Bush was in an expansive mood on Aug. 7, 2001, when he ran into reporters while playing golf at the Ridgewood Country Club in Waco, Tex.
The day before, the president had received an intelligence briefing -- the contents of which were declassified by the White House Saturday night -- warning "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." But Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday.
"No mulligans, except on the first tee," he said to laughter. "That's just to loosen up. You see, most people get to hit practice balls, but as you know, I'm walking out here, I'm fixing to go hit. Tight back, older guy -- I hit the speed limit on July 6th."
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in her testimony Thursday to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, spoke of a government on high alert for terrorism in the summer of 2001. "The president of the United States had us at battle stations during this period of time," she testified. Rice's talk of battle stations is part of the Bush administration's effort to counter an impression that it did not do enough about terrorism before Sept. 11; a Newsweek poll released Saturday found that 60 percent think the Bush administration underestimated terrorism before the attacks.
But if top officials were at battle stations, there was no sign of it on the surface. Bush spent most of August 2001 on his ranch here. His staff said at the time that by far the biggest issue on his agenda was his decision on federal funding of stem cell research, followed by education, immigration and the Social Security "lockbox."
Of course, many of the efforts to thwart an attack would not have been visible on the outside. But some officials on the inside -- notably former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke -- say the administration was not acting with sufficient urgency to the spike in intelligence indicating a threat. And there is nothing in Bush's public actions or words from August 2001 to refute Clarke.
During that month, Bush's top aides were concentrating on the president's political standing: His approval rating had slipped, his relations with Congress were tense, and Democrats had regained control of the Senate. The only time Bush mentioned terrorism publicly that month was in the context of violence in Israel.
In public, Bush often engaged in playful banter. Reporters teased him about his golf game and whether he would take an afternoon nap. Bush teased them about their suffering in the Texas heat. "I know a lot of you wish you were in the East Coast, lounging on the beaches, sucking in the salt air, but when you're from Texas -- and love Texas -- this is where you come home," he said.
A former Bush aide who remains close to the White House said the use of the term "battle stations" by Rice was an overstatement as it is understood in what the White House constantly calls "the post-9/11 world." The former aide, who refused to be identified to avoid angering the president and his staff, said that some members of Bush's senior staff did not know the extent of the information he had been given about the al Qaeda threat, and that even those in his inner circle did not imagine "the scale, the precision, the magnitude" of the strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
"In a pre-9/11 world, it was like, 'Check it out and see what you find and get back to us after Labor Day,' " the former aide said. "It wasn't just the president who was on vacation. It was the whole government. It was the Bureau [FBI] and the Agency [CIA], too. The attention to the threats was above and beyond normal, but it obviously wasn't enough."
Officials close to Bush defended his approach during that summer, saying that of course what was done looks inadequate now, but that no one could have imagined such attacks back then, including the president. These officials said their only frames of reference were the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, which killed more than 160 people, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, which killed six and injured more than 1,000.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush's actions in August were adequate and appropriate. "The intelligence was non-specific and pointed to attacks overseas," McClellan said. "We directed embassies and bases abroad to button up, and directed the domestic agencies to make sure they were buttoning up at home, as well. . . . If we had had any information that could have prevented the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the president would have taken strong and decisive action to stop them."
In retrospect, Bush's schedule for August 2001 seems quaint, the issues relatively small. On the first of the month, Bush announced a tentative agreement on an HMO patients' "Bill of Rights." The next day, he met with lawmakers about education. On Aug. 4, the issue was Medicaid; on Aug. 8, Bush helped to build a Habitat for Humanity home. Aug. 13 found him celebrating agricultural legislation, and the next day put him at a YMCA picnic. The rest of the month brought him to a fundraiser in New Mexico, a Harley-Davidson plant, a Target store, a Little League championship and a steelworkers' picnic.
Security issues did arise, but nothing about domestic terrorism. During the month, Bush announced his support of peace developments in Northern Ireland, spoke of U.S. withdrawal from an arms treaty with Russia, complained about the "menace" of Saddam Hussein shooting at U.S. planes over Iraq, and named Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The possibility of terrorist attacks against the United States never came up.
In an Aug. 29 speech to the American Legion titled by the White House "President Discusses Defense Priorities," Bush spoke about higher pay for soldiers, an increase in military spending, military research and development, and the need to defend against missile attacks. "We are committed to defending America and our allies against ballistic missile attacks, against weapons of mass destruction held by rogue leaders in rogue nations that hate America, hate our values and hate what we stand for," he said.
Bush vowed to the veterans, 13 days before the attacks: "I will not permit any course that leaves America undefended."
Nor did terrorism have any place in a speech Bush gave at the end of August, after he returned to the White House from his Crawford ranch. The White House titled the Aug. 31 speech "President's Priorities for Fall: Education, Economy, Opportunity, Security." But the only one of these topics Bush discussed with more than a mention was education. "One of the things that I hope Congress does is work and act quickly on the education bill and get it to my desk as soon as they get back," he said.
Reporters' questions also reflected the tranquillity. They asked Bush to comment on a Little League player who lied about his age, the slow pace of reaching an immigration deal with Mexico and the federal role in high-speed Internet access.
The most extended treatment of security issues in the month of August 2001 came on the 24th, when Bush announced Myers's appointment as Joint Chiefs chairman. Again, Bush placed emphasis on missile defense. "One of the things you will hear us talk about is the need to develop an effective missile defense system, and we do have money in the budget for that," he said.
In response to a question about whether the United States would increase its role in Middle East peace efforts, Bush directed Yasser Arafat "to urge the terrorists, the Palestinian terrorists, to stop the suicide bombings." Bush did mention Rice at the session -- but only to say that she and White House counselor Karen Hughes had "briefed" him on the Chandra Levy matter after the two aides watched then-Rep. Gary A. Condit's television interview about the missing intern.
In the White House Rose Garden on Aug. 3, before leaving for the ranch, Bush summarized the achievements of his first months in office and set a three-part agenda for September. His first goal was completing work on legislation dealing with "education and the disadvantaged." His second priority was the federal budget. And third, he said, "beginning in September, I'll be proposing creative ways to tackle some of the toughest problems in our society." There was no mention of terrorism or even foreign affairs as a priority.
Nor was there for the rest of the month, except when the subject was Israel. On Aug. 13, while on a golf outing, he spoke with reporters at length about the heightened tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. But much of his public comments were in the category of lighthearted banter. After helping with the Habitat home on Aug. 8, Bush displayed a bloodied finger and cracked: "It must be a slow news day if you're worrying about my finger."
On Aug. 23, Bush took a trip to Crawford Elementary School, where he allowed the children to ask him questions. He spoke of golf, fishing, exercise and presidential perks such as the White House, the limousine and the Secret Service. Bush also volunteered his afternoon schedule: a meeting with Rice, a phone call to the Argentine president, lunch with the first lady, a visit with the family pets, a call to his personnel office and a lesson on trees. "We've got a horticulturist coming out from Texas A&M to help us identify the hardwood trees on our beautiful place," he said.
In summary, Bush told the children: "I've got a lot going on today."
Allen reported from Washington.
--------
'Against All Enemies' and 'Ghost Wars': Fixing the Blame
April 11, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/books/review/0411books-risen.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Discounting the possibility that the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, is secretly a publicist for the Free Press, one must assume that the Bush administration really is angry at its former counterterrorism czar, and isn't simply trying to help him sell more books. But if President Bush and his advisers were hoping that their loud pre-emptive attacks on ''Against All Enemies'' would make this book go away, they were sadly mistaken. Richard A. Clarke knows too much, and ''Against All Enemies'' is too good to be ignored.
The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks captured the headlines in the days after the book's release, but ''Against All Enemies'' offers more. It is a rarity among Washington-insider memoirs -- it's a thumping good read.
The first -- and by far the best -- chapter is a heart-stopping account of the turmoil inside the White House on the morning of Sept. 11, when Washington suddenly came blinking into a bloody new world. I hope Clarke has sold the rights to Hollywood, at least for his opening chapter, because I would pay to see this movie. You can guess who gets to play Jack Ryan in his retelling of that historic morning.
By Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Clarke had become the ultimate White House insider; he was not only a Clinton holdover, he was a holdover from the first Bush administration and had served in the Reagan State Department. He had been working at the National Security Council for about a decade, and in 1998 had been named White House counterterrorism coordinator by President Clinton. He was asked to stay on in the same post by the second Bush administration. But he had quickly become frustrated by the new team's unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin Laden. By the morning of Sept. 11, he was still handling counterterrorism, but was planning to leave for a lower-profile assignment dealing with cybersecurity.
In the first minutes after the attacks, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told Clarke to act as crisis manager in the White House Situation Room, and he seized the moment. In his account, it was he who recommended to Vice President Dick Cheney that President Bush should not come back to the White House from Florida, and he who gave the order triggering the Continuity of Government procedures, the doomsday rules under which cabinet members and Congressional leaders were whisked to undisclosed locations.
With Clarke at the helm of a secure videoconference network linking the White House with other key agencies, in quick succession thousands of commercial aircraft were grounded; the country's land and sea borders were closed; the military went to Defcon 3, its highest alert level in nearly 30 years; and the Russians were notified. ''Damn good thing I did that,'' Clarke quotes Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as telling him. ''Guess who was about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear forces?''
While Clarke and his aides were holding down the fort in the Situation Room and the president was flying around the country on Air Force One, Vice President Cheney, his wife and aides were holed up in a little-known bunker in the East Wing of the White House called the PEOC, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. At one point that morning, Clarke went to the bunker to see Cheney; navigating his way into the vault past grim, shotgun-toting guards, he found that Lynne Cheney had turned down the volume on the television hooked up to the secure videoconference so she could listen to CNN.
The most controversial incident in ''Against All Enemies'' deals with the president's eagerness to link the Sept. 11 attacks to Iraq, and comes on the night of Sept. 12. Clarke writes that he saw Bush wandering alone through the Situation Room. The president then stopped and asked Clarke and a few aides to ''go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.''
Clarke said he was ''taken aback, incredulous.'' He told the president, ''Al Qaeda did this.''
''I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred. . . .'' After the president left, one of Clarke's aides said, ''Wolfowitz got to him.''
Within a few months of the attacks, Clarke's access clearly did begin to dwindle; White House officials played on his lack of firsthand knowledge of Iraq war planning to attack the credibility of his book. But the key allegation in the book -- that the Bush team was obsessed with Iraq even when faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al Qaeda that was attacking the United States -- can't be dismissed by assertions that he was out of the loop. During those early days, Richard Clarke was the loop.
''Ghost Wars,'' Steve Coll's objective -- and terrific -- account of the long and tragic history leading up to Sept. 11, is a welcome antidote to the fevered partisan bickering that accompanied the release of Clarke's book.
Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post, has given us what is certainly the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of Al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of Afghanistan. He has followed up that feat by threading together the complex roles played by diplomats and spies from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States into a coherent story explaining how Afghanistan became such a welcoming haven for Al Qaeda.
In particular, Coll has done a great service by revealing how Saudi Arabia and its intelligence operations aided the rise of Osama bin Laden and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia's alleged involvement in terrorism has been the subject of wild conspiracy theories since Sept. 11; Coll gives us a clear and balanced view of Saudi Arabia's real ties to bin Laden. The links he reveals are serious enough to prompt an important debate about the nature of the Saudi-American partnership in the fight against terrorism. ''Saudi intelligence officials said years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi intelligence agent,'' he writes, referring to Saudi support for foreign Arab fighters against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Still, ''it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence.''
Coll overlaps with Clarke in his detailed recounting of the mush that was the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policy. Unlike Clarke, however, Coll doesn't have an ax to grind, and so offers a more evenhanded view of the internal battles between the White House, the C.I.A. and other agencies at a time when terrorism was not Washington's top priority. As a reporter who struggled to cover many of the twists and turns in counterterrorism policy that Coll describes, I find ''Ghost Wars'' provides fresh details and helps explain the motivations behind many crucial decisions.
As Coll seeks to explain why the Clinton team never mounted a serious effort to go after Al Qaeda, even after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, he finds plenty of blame to go around: ''Clinton's National Security Council aides firmly believed that they were the aggressive ones on the Al Qaeda case, pursuing every possible avenue to get at bin Laden over calcified resistance or incompetence within the C.I.A. and Pentagon bureaucracies. From the other side of the Potomac, Clinton's White House often looked undisciplined, unfocused and uncertain.'' ''Ghost Wars'' also corroborates many of Clarke's assertions that counterterrorism policy was largely ignored by the new Bush administration before Sept. 11. Coll notes, as does Clarke, that the Bush team didn't hold its first cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan until Sept. 4, one week before the twin towers fell.
Coll closes with the Sept. 9, 2001, murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, an Afghan rebel leader who had been cooperating with the C.I.A. in its vain efforts to track bin Laden around Afghanistan. As with so many other warnings before it, the full significance of Massoud's murder was missed until it was too late. Here and elsewhere in ''Ghost Wars,'' Coll's riveting narrative makes the reader want to rip the page and yell at the American counterterrorism officials he describes -- including Clarke -- and tell them to watch out.
James Risen is the author, with Milt Bearden, of ''The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the C.I.A.'s Final Showdown With the K.G.B.'' He covers national security for The Times.
--------
U.S. Backs Off Bin Laden Capture Forecast
April 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Bin-Laden.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The U.S. military pulled back Saturday from an earlier prediction that Osama bin Laden would be captured this year, even while preparing its largest force to date for operations along the Pakistani border where the al-Qaida chief is suspected to be hiding.
Catching bin Laden and other top fugitives remains a priority of the expanding American operation in Afghanistan, a spokesman said, but the growing mission is ``not about just one or two people,'' a spokesman said.
``We remain committed to catching these guys. It's pretty much ... just about everything that we do here,'' Lt. Col. Matthew Beevers said.
But he declined to make any new predictions of when the fugitives might be behind bars.
Beevers insisted the military in Afghanistan was ``still confident'' of capturing its top targets, but added: ``At the end of the day, it's not about just one or two people. It's about ... ensuring that there is stability and security throughout Afghanistan.''
Buoyed by the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the top American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Barno, said in January he was confident bin Laden and Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar would suffer the same fate this year.
At the time, a spokesman even said the military was ``sure'' it would catch the two men and Afghan rebel commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Those remarks, and talk of a spring offensive in Afghanistan by Washington defense officials, triggered speculation bin Laden had been located.
But now the military has followed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's lead in appearing to lower expectations that a top fugitive would be unveiled during an election campaign in both the United States and Afghanistan.
``Close doesn't count,'' Rumsfeld said as he stood alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a February visit to Kabul. ``I suspect that we'll find that it is accomplished at some point in the future, but I wouldn't have any idea when.''
There have been no firm indications of bin Laden's whereabouts since he eluded American and Afghan troops at the battle for the Tora Bora cave complex in eastern Afghanistan in December 2001.
Last month, France's defense minister said French troops had recently helped identify an area in Afghanistan where bin Laden could have hidden, but he provided no specific details.
Barno has vowed to crush insurgents this year in a ``hammer-and-anvil'' approach with Pakistani forces on the other side of the border.
In a sign of Pakistan's new resolve to crack down on militants, thousands of its troops fought bloody battles with al-Qaida suspects in the South Waziristan border region last month.
Shortly after the siege began March 16, President Gen. Perez Musharraf claimed in a television interview that his men had cornered a ``high-value'' al-Qaida target, and several senior Pakistani officials said they believed it to be bin Laden's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahri.
Authorities later backed off those claims, saying instead they had wounded an Uzbek militant with al-Qaida links named Tahir Yuldash. They say they believe Yuldash escaped, possibly through a mile-long tunnel leading out of the battle zone.
Last week, Pakistani forces promised to send thousands of soldiers into a cluster of remote hideouts in a fierce crackdown if tribesmen there do not hand over al-Qaida terrorists by April 20.
The U.S. military insists it will not cross into Pakistan to pursue rebels but has been building up its forces on the Afghan side of the border.
The plan is for the coalition force to reach its largest size yet -- 15,500 soldiers, including 13,500 Americans. Two thousand soldiers have been added to the force in recent months, and the military said another 2,000 Marines are arriving in Afghanistan.
Part of the increase is to provide security for badly needed reconstruction projects in former Taliban strongholds, an approach the military hopes will yield better intelligence.
But Beevers would not say where the new Marines will be deployed or whether they will participate in operations to capture al-Qaida leaders.
``We'll make those deployment decisions and locations based on the threat that we see in front of us,'' he said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Taliban Kidnap Afghan Official and Two Bodyguards
April 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-taliban.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Islamic Taliban fighters captured an Afghan provincial security chief and his two bodyguards in central Afghanistan, a spokesman for the ousted Taliban militia said on Sunday.
The security official, Ahmadullah, and the bodyguards were taken hostage near the town of Tirin Kot in volatile Uruzgan province, a former bastion of the hardline Taliban which U.S.-led forces overthrew in late 2001.
``We have captured Ahmadullah with his two bodyguards. They are still alive,'' the spokesman told Reuters. A provincial official said Ahmadullah was missing.
The Taliban has declared a ``jihad,'' or holy struggle, on foreign and Afghan government troops and aid organizations. Since August last year, more than 600 people have died in violence, much of it blamed on the Taliban.
Up to one third of the country, mainly in the south and east, is effectively off-limits to foreign aid workers due to the security threat, which is of increasing concern as the country heads toward presidential elections in September.
-------- africa
Warring Militias in Congo Test U.N. Enforcement Role
April 11, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/international/africa/11CONG.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BUNIA, Congo - In this scrappy frontier town in eastern Congo, the United Nations faces among the most important tests of its peacekeeping prowess.
Five thousand blue-helmeted United Nations troops, with orders from the Security Council to secure this lawless land run by rival militias, have lately found themselves on the receiving end of the gunmen's wrath.
In recent months, they have come under fire from the militias they had been dispatched to separate and pacify, and they have come under increasing pressure to fire back more aggressively.
Peace remains elusive across this vast mineral-rich region known as Ituri, and United Nations officials here privately acknowledge a crisis of confidence among the people they are here to protect.
The challenge facing this peacekeeping mission has once again raised a vexing question: the next time warlords in a neglected corner of the world wreak havoc on their land, can United Nations peacekeepers be counted on to put an end to it?
The success or failure of this United Nations mission, the most expensive in the world, carries implications far beyond the borders of this Central African nation - not least for Haiti, where United Nations troops are expected to take over from American, Canadian and French forces in the coming months.
The spotlight on Ituri comes as the United Nations is poised to vastly expand its peacekeeping missions worldwide. By the end of this year, countries emerging from war will need up to 70,000 troops - up from 48,000 deployed today, according to United Nations estimates. Africa demands the greatest numbers, with 10,800 stationed in Congo, 15,000 promised for Liberia and 6,000 under way for Ivory Coast. New missions are to open this year in Burundi, Haiti and Sudan.
Where those soldiers will come from, with what training and resources, is among the United Nations' chief challenges, one made worse by the number of Western troops committed to Iraq.
The vast majority of peacekeeping forces today come from poor nations in South Asia, Africa and Latin America whose soldiers are paid more for United Nations duties than for any jobs they might find back home. The largest contingents in Ituri, a mission for which few countries were willing to sacrifice their soldiers, are from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Uruguay.
"Western countries set a very bad example when they refuse to sign up for these peacekeeping missions, implying that developing countries should provide the cannon fodder while the West comes in for high- profile rescue operations," said David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy, a research organization. "United Nations peacekeeping is encountering major ethical and practical challenges."
Here in Bunia for the past five years, an estimated 50,000 people have died as neighboring countries and what were effectively their local proxies, organized along ethnic lines, have fought for its control.
The success of United Nations peacekeeping is plainly evident here, even if limited. Last May, dismembered bodies littered these streets, and grinning, gun-toting child soldiers lorded over the town. Today, it is no longer under the terrifying reign of one ethnic militia. Schools are working. Markets are buzzing. The local court has reopened.
But reports of rape and extortion continue to pour in. Tin roofs are stolen from atop abandoned homes. Suspects facing criminal trials in the newly established court have broken out of jail.
The gunmen still have their guns. A long overdue disarmament program is yet to be started and suggestions to do so, many analysts believe, have turned peacekeepers into targets of orchestrated attacks.
With nearly half of its 10,800 troops nationwide concentrated here in Ituri, the United Nations mission has been plagued with problems, including a dearth of French speakers to communicate with civilians and a failure to stanch the flow of arms from neighboring countries. Civilians have grown skeptical about the peacekeepers' ability to protect them - a skepticism that in turn hampers the peacekeepers' ability to gather intelligence.
"What are they doing here?" cried a man named Julian Odaga Berniwegi, whose two sons were set on fire by gunmen one night in January, a stone's throw from where Uruguayan peacekeepers were parked in an armored personnel carrier.
"One thing I must say, the civilians are not cooperating with us," said a Pakistani soldier, Lt. Majid Jan, on a twilight foot patrol in the Bunia market. At times, he said, he and his fellow soldiers have arrived in a neighborhood where shots were heard just minutes before, only to be told that no one had heard anything.
Of course, Mr. Berniwegi later told a journalist, he is reluctant to confide in the blue helmets. "If I give you information now who will watch my family?" he said. "If I call them, you think they will come? No."
Petronille Vaweka, a member of the region's fledgling transitional government, said, "To win the people's confidence, Monuc has a lot of work to do," using the French acronym for the United Nations mission in Congo.
[A March 25 internal report by the United Nations secretary general on the mission in Congo counted 20 attacks on the mission in Ituri, reflecting what it called "an apparently new trend among militia hard-liners to deliberately target Monuc."]
In mid-January, Pakistani troops came under fire on patrol on the edge of a gold-mining region northwest of here. Later that month, a boat convoy was shot at as it went to investigate human rights abuses on the shores of Lake Albert. In the most damning attack to date, gunmen in February ambushed a United Nations team near Katoto, less than an hour's drive from Bunia, killing an unarmed military observer from Kenya at point-blank range.
A second military observer who narrowly missed being shot said in an interview here that he fled under a hail of rebel bullets. The United Nations soldiers traveling in armored personnel carriers to protect the unarmed civilians were criticized for failing to engage their guerrilla attackers, opting instead to clear out of the area.
Western diplomats in Congo say they worry that the spate of attacks on peacekeepers - and their less than robust response - have sent a message of weakness to guerrilla leaders with no apparent stake in peace.
"Even when they get attacked, you wonder if they're reacting," one Western diplomat said in the capital, Kinshasa.
A second put it more bluntly: "They need to be killing people, and they haven't been."
In a telephone interview, the head of the mission, William Lacy Swing, said troops on the ground had begun to respond with greater force in recent weeks. "We've had that criticism and we've taken it very seriously," Mr. Swing said. "We have reviewed very carefully how we are deployed how robust our posture is."
He pointed to increased patrols on Lake Albert to monitor the flow of arms, the deployment of troops to seven towns outside Bunia and more robust crackdowns on rebel arms caches and training grounds.
The scrutiny of the United Nations mission here is heightened by what came before it. Last May, an anemic force of about 200 Uruguayan peacekeepers stood by helplessly as rival ethnic militias battled for control of Bunia. As news of the massacres poured out, alarm bells went off about the prospects of ethnic cleansing.
Last June, the United Nations persuaded France to send 1,400 soldiers on an emergency three-month mission. The French soldiers scoured the town in their night-vision glasses. Their Mirage fighter jets roared overhead. Their satellite imaging tools - to say nothing of their ability to speak to local residents - helped them put together an intelligence network. An officer with the Bangladeshi battalion that succeeded them last September spoke longingly of those things.
Not least, in July 2003, the Security Council took what by its standards counts as a bold step. It authorized additional troops and gave them the strongest mandate possible. For the sake of enforcing peace, these peacekeepers can shoot to kill.
-------- asia
Singapore to spend more on developing defence technology: report
SINGAPORE (AFP)
Apr 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040411061332.bfpq4fwt.html
Singapore will set aside an extra one percent of its annual 8.62-billion-dollar (5.16 billion US) budget for research into new defence technology to help churn out "third generation" soldiers, the defence minister said in remarks published Sunday.
The additional 86 million dollars, which comes on top of 4-5 percent budgeted for research and development, will go towards exploring weapons, tactics and capabilities the military will need in the event of a war.
Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean said in the Sunday Times that the move to beef up defence technology was necessary given the city-state's limited resources.
"If warfare today were still fought on the basis of swords and shields and bows and arrows, we would be in deep trouble because we don't have as many arms to carry swords and shields as other people," said Teo.
The defence ministry has 3,000 scientists, engineers and technology specialists involved mostly in research and development to invent solutions that will give the Singapore military an edge in battle, Teo said.
Singapore, a small but affluent city-state, has one of Asia's most modern naval, air and land forces.
In addition to the terrorist threat, Singapore considers itself vulnerable to regional instability and spends a vast amount on beefing up its defence and keeping its military and reservists fully trained.
-------- china
Hong Kong Marchers Send Beijing a Message on Democracy
April 11, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/international/asia/11CND-HONG.html?hp
HONG KONG, April 11 - Thousands of demonstrators wearing black armbands marched through downtown streets here this afternoon in a peaceful protest to the Chinese government's decision last Tuesday to limit further moves by this territory toward democracy.
After a large but violent demonstration in Taipei on Saturday over an election dispute there, the rally here was another reminder of the strong democratic sentiments now bubbling around China's periphery.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in Japan now, is to visit Beijing and Shanghai from Tuesday through Thursday. The State Department has been increasingly critical in recent weeks of China's efforts to restrict Hong Kong's democratic development.
Organizers estimated that "more than 15,000" people participated in today's march, while the police declined to provide a figure. The unexpectedly large turnout for an event scheduled just last Tuesday night and held in the middle of the four-day Easter holiday weekend was the latest sign of the growing politicization of a city once known for its preoccupation with material prosperity.
Many in the crowd were middle-aged, and in interviews people said that they were unaccustomed to involvement in public protests. Some had only become politically active last summer, when 500,000 people marched in a successful effort to force the government to withdraw plans for a stringent internal-security law, while a few said that they had never attended a protest before today.
"The central government is trying to put more controls on Hong Kong's people," said May Tam, 53, who said she is a housewife who had never been to a demonstration before but was worried about the future of her three grown children as Beijing clamped down.
Ms. Tam and many others here want to introduce universal suffrage with the next elections for the chief executive in 2007 and for all seats in the Legislative Council in elections to be held in 2008.
A committee of 800 prominent citizens, most with ties to Beijing, currently chooses candidates who are allowed to run for chief executive. Half the members in the 60-seat Legislative Council in the next elections for that body on Sept. 12 will be reserved for various special interests, most of them friendly to Beijing, while the rest will be chosen by the public.
The Standing Committee of the Communist Party-controlled National People's Congress ruled in Beijing early Tuesday that Hong Kong's chief executive would have to obtain its approval before submitting any electoral reform bills to the legislature. The Standing Committee made the ruling by issuing an official interpretation, which has the force of law, of Hong Kong's Basic Law, the miniconstitution that this territory has followed since Britain handed it over to China in 1997.
The ruling angered many here because the Basic Law calls for an eventual move to universal suffrage and lays out a procedure for electoral changes. That procedure appears to call for Beijing's assent only at the end of the political process here, by which time considerable political momentum might have accumulated that may make it hard for Beijing to veto a plan with broad support in Hong Kong.
The Standing Committee also declared on Tuesday that the Legislative Council here - where democracy advocates hope to win a majority for the first time in the elections on Sept. 12 - cannot take up electoral reform bills on its own.
In a statement issued after today's march, the Hong Kong government defended Beijing's interpretation of the Basic Law, saying that "the interpretation has laid down a clear set of legislative procedures, enabling us to proceed to the next stage of work on a solid legal foundation."
Beijing officials have contended that they are trying to protect China's sovereignty and that they can build a more prosperous Hong Kong by imposing stability. But many here contend that Beijing is taking away rights that citizens here have come to expect, like the ability to choose their own leaders someday.
Some protesters seemed discouraged about the likelihood of persuading Beijing to change tack. "They have the power to stop our progress, we can't do anything, but we come anyway," said Sam Lee, a 45-year-old computer engineer who attended with seven family members.
As with every other political demonstration here in the past year, the protest today was peaceful. The crowd assembled on Hong Kong's most fashionable boulevard, where stores like Cartier and Chanel stayed open throughout. The only store that rolled down gray steel shutters over its windows was Van Cleef & Arpels, a jewelry store, but it remained open for visitors approaching it from inside the office building that houses it.
-------- iraq
Fallujah: a ghost town where scared residents bury their dead in their yards
by Deborah Pasmantier,
April 11 (AFP)
http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/480fa8736b88bbc3c12564f6004c8ad5/0b3694b7d1beafc1c1256e73006baf82?OpenDocument
BAGHDAD - The battled-scarred Sunni bastion of Fallujah west of here became a ghost town where frightened residents lived like rats, fearing to venture out, and many were forced to bury their dead in their yards.
Refugees from the city described the days of fear before the ceasefire which was scheduled to come into force Sunday.
With US marines locked in nasty street fighting with wily rebels, residents were trapped indoors, a stadium has been transformed into a graveyard and bodies littering the streets are hastily moved in blankets.
"As soon as the Americans see a group of people in the streets, they shoot at them, people venture out only if their homes risk being bombarded or if they must carry the dead or wounded to the city's clinics," said Abbas Ibrahim, a 30-year-old Fallujah resident who was able to escape the city Friday.
"They put them in blankets and dart through the streets."
"When there are bodies in the streets, neighbors run to get them. The stadium has been turned into a graveyard, as the town cemetery lies outside the city," he added. "I saw people bury their dead in their yards because they feared to venture out."
Families were only able to leave the town from Friday, following the US marines' assault from Monday to flush out rebels responsible for last week's brutal murder of four US contractors.
"Fallujah is a ghost town, a battlefield," said a Red Crescent official, Mohammed Ibrahim Abbas, who was able to reach Fallujah's central district Thursday to deliver medical supplies.
"The streets were deserted, no cars, all the shops were closed, homes and stores bombarded," he added.
Some 2,000 marines taking part in Operation Vigilant Resolve rolled into the town Monday riding on tanks and armored vehicles through the southern industrial zone.
"Late Sunday, there were heavy bombings, the market was hit. When we woke up, we saw roads and two bridges blocked, tanks ringing the town, planes, US snipers," said Haitham Assad, a 20-year-old member of the para-military Iraqi Civil Defense Corps who reached Baghdad Thursday.
Since then fighting was non-stop in the outlying districts and in the industrial zone, but the center was still in rebel hands, according to the witnesses.
"Marines armed with machine-guns are taking up positions behind stores, on rooftops, in streets. The insurgents too," said Qussai Ali Hassen, another Red Crescent official who was caught in the cross-fire.
"The mujahedeen (Islamic fighters), aged 20 to 35 and armed with rocket propelled grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles, are positioned around the US troops. They are trying to stop them from reaching the center. I saw hundreds of mujahedeen, some say thousands," said Abbas Ibrahim.
"When US soldiers are in trouble, they call for air support. There are also bombardments in the center. Several of my friends died in their homes," he added.
Fallujah's general hospital lies outside the town limits, so five small clinics have been turned into makeshift hospitals.
But they can treat only two dozen patients at a time and lack equipment.
Haitham Assad, who was injured in the leg and wrist, spent 48 hours there. "There were plenty of bodies lying on the floor," he said.
"The mujahedeen bring their wounded, who are treated along with civilians in miserable conditions," said Hassen, quoting local doctors.
"Surgeons lack anesthetics and post-surgery medication," said Mohammed Ibrahim Abbas of the Red Crescent.
More than 400 Iraqis have been killed and over 1,000 wounded during the fighting, according to an Iraqi official.
----
Nine hostages freed in Iraq, Japanese still held
By Luke Baker,
11 Apr 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp;:4079b9e6:7eb5671220f7f55e?type=worldNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4798609
BAGHDAD - Nine foreign hostages were freed by Iraqi kidnappers on Sunday, but the fate of three Japanese and an American remained unclear.
Iraq has seen a wave of hostage-taking over the last week as violent confrontations with Sunni and Shi'ite rebels ignited across the country ahead of a June 30 deadline for the U.S.-led administration to hand power to an interim Iraqi government.
In a videotape aired by Arabic television station Al Jazeera on Sunday, a masked man announced the release of eight foreign men described as truck drivers.
"We have released them in response to a call from the Muslim Clerics Association...after we were sure that they will not deal with the occupation forces again," the man said.
Looking frightened, the men -- three from Pakistan, two Turks, an Indian, a Nepali and a Filipino -- read out their names, nationalities and ages on camera while their armed captors, faces masked, stood behind them.
"We had arrested eight truck drivers who supply the forces of the enemy," the masked man said. Coalition Provisional Authority officials in Iraq said they had no immediate information on the hostages release.
BRITON RELEASED
Earlier on Sunday, British contractor Gary Teeley, seized by suspected militants in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya last week, was handed over to U.S.-led forces, officials said.
"He is in the hands of American and Italian forces in Nassiriya as we speak. We'll be making sure that he is flown out of the country and back to Britain as soon as possible," said a senior source in the coalition forces.
In London, a British Foreign Office spokesman said Teeley, a father of five missing since last Monday, was "safe and well".
Al Jazeera reported that local tribes had been involved in negotiating his freedom. Italian Army Lieutenant Colonel Moneduro told Sky News the operation to free Teeley began with an attack on the military headquarters of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army.
"After two other kinds of operations and investigations we put some pressure on these armed groups and also through negotiations we arrived at the release of Mr Gary Teeley," Moneduro said.
"(The news has) still not sunk in at the moment. I am just grinning from ear to ear. I am so happy," Terry Teeley, a cousin of the British contractor, told Sky News television.
An Iraqi group told another Arabic channel on Saturday it would behead 30 foreign hostages it was holding unless U.S. forces ended a blockade of Falluja, a town west of Baghdad.
Japan's government was told on Sunday that three Japanese hostages were safe but were still being held by militants who abducted them last week, Kyodo news agency reported.
Al Jazeera said militants holding the Japanese would begin killing them unless their demands -- including the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Iraq -- were met within 24 hours.
Japan was stunned and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was confronted with the biggest test of his political career when a previously unknown group released a video on Thursday showing the three, blindfolded and with a gun to their heads.
Koizumi had vowed not to give in to the abductors, who had demanded that Japan withdraw its military from Iraq within three days of the video's broadcast. Japan has about 550 ground troops in Iraq involved in reconstruction and humanitarian work.
The hostages are freelance reporter Soichiro Koriyama, 32, aid worker Nahoko Takato, 34, and Noriaki Imai, 18, who wanted to look into the effects of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq.
Kidnappers on Saturday also threatened to execute a U.S. hostage, who identified himself as Thomas Hamill, unless American forces lifted the siege of Falluja, according to another tape aired on Al Jazeera.
Hamill said he worked for a private company which had dealings with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. The group holding him was named as "the Mujahideen Group - Kidnappings".
If U.S. troops did not end its siege of Falluja, a bastion of insurgency, "he will be dealt with worse than those who were killed and burned in Falluja," a voice in the message said.
Iraq has seen an escalation in fighting after the mutilation of four U.S. contractors killed in a Falluja ambush in March.
----
Negotiator tells Japan hostages safe in Iraq - Kyodo
April 11, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp;:4079b9e6:7eb5671220f7f55e?type=worldNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4798457
TOKYO - Japan's government was told on Monday that three Japanese civilians kidnapped in Iraq were safe but were still being held by militants who abducted them last week, Kyodo news agency reported.
Quoting an unnamed Japanese government official, Kyodo said a negotiator whose identity was not disclosed told the government that the three captives were safe.
Kyodo later quoted an unspecified government source as saying the three were being held near Falluja, west of Baghdad, a city that has been the scene of fierce fighting in recent days between guerrilla fighters and U.S. forces.
The agency gave no more details and Japanese government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Late on Sunday, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yasuo Fukuda, had said the hostages were not in Japanese custody despite earlier reports that they were to be freed on Sunday.
Arabic TV station Al Jazeera said on Sunday that the militants holding the three Japanese would begin killing them unless their demands -- including for the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Iraq -- were met within 24 hours.
Japan was stunned and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was confronted with the biggest test of his political career when a previously unknown group released a video on Thursday showing the three, blindfolded and with a gun to their heads.
Koizumi had vowed not to give in to the abductors, who had demanded that Japan withdraw its military from Iraq within three days of the video's broadcast. Japan has about 550 ground troops in Iraq involved in reconstruction and humanitarian work.
The three hostages are freelance reporter Soichiro Koriyama, 32, aid worker Nahoko Takato, 34, and Noriaki Imai, 18, who had planned to look into the effects of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq.
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Unit of new Iraqi army refuses to fight in Fallujah: report
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Apr 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040411075653.hwwl6yt6.html
A battalion of the new Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah earlier this week to support US Marines battling for control of the city, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Citing senior US Army officers in Baghdad, the newspaper said the incident is casting new doubt on US plans to transfer security matters to Iraqi forces.
The 620-man 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Armed Forces refused to fight Monday after members of the unit were shot at in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Baghdad while en route to Fallujah, said The Post, quoting US Army Major General Paul Eaton.
The convoy then turned around and returned to the battalion's base in Taji, north of the Iraqi capital.
The paper quotes Eaton as saying members of the battalion insisted that they "did not sign up to fight Iraqis."
The general, who is overseeing the development of Iraqi security forces, declined to characterize the incident as a mutiny, but rather called it "a command failure," the report said.
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Americans Slaughtering Civilians in Falluja
by Dahr Jamail
April 11, 2004
Baghdad time
http://blog.newstandardnews.net/iraqdispatches/archives/000162.html
I knew there was very little media coverage in Falluja, and the entire city had been sealed and was suffering from collective punishment in the form of no water or electricity for several days now. With only two journalists there that I'd read and heard reports from, I felt pulled to go and witness the atrocities that were surely being committed.
With the help of some friends, we joined a small group of internationals to ride a large bus there carrying a load of humanitarian supplies, and with the hopes of bringing some of the wounded out prior to the next American onslaught, which was due to kick off at any time now.
Even leaving Baghdad now is dangerous. The military has shut down the main highway between here and Jordan. The highway, even while just outside Baghdad, is desolate and littered with destroyed fuel tanker trucks -- their smoldering shells littered the highway. We rolled past a large M-1 Tank that was still burning under an overpass which had just been hit by the resistance. Fuel tanker destroyed by resistance fighters along the highway near Abu Ghraib
At the first U.S. checkpoint the soldiers said they'd been there for 30 hours straight. After being searched, we continued along bumpy dirt roads, winding our way through parts of Abu Ghraib, steadily but slowly making our way towards besieged Falluja. While we were passing one of the small homes in Abu Ghraib, a small child yelled at the bus, "We will be mujahedeen until we die!"
We slowly worked our way back onto the highway. It was strewn with smoking fuel tankers, destroyed military tanks and armored personnel carriers, and a lorry that had been hit that was currently being looted by a nearby village, people running to and from the highway carrying away boxes. It was a scene of pure devastation, with barely any other cars on the road.
Once we turned off the highway, which the U.S. was perilously holding onto, there was no U.S. military presence visible at all as we were in mujahedeen-controlled territory. Our bus wound its way through farm roads, and each time we passed someone they would yell, "God bless you for going to Falluja!" Everyone we passed was flashing us the victory sign, waving, and giving the thumbs-up.
As we neared Falluja, there were groups of children on the sides of the road handing out water and bread to people coming into Falluja. They began literally throwing stacks of flat bread into the bus. The fellowship and community spirit was unbelievable. Everyone was yelling for us, cheering us on, groups speckled along the road.
As we neared Falluja a huge mushroom caused by a large U.S. bomb rose from the city. So much for the cease fire.
The closer we got to the city, the more mujahedeen checkpoints we passed -- at one, men with kefir around their faces holding Kalashnikovs began shooting their guns in the air, showing their eagerness to fight.
The city itself was virtually empty, aside from groups of mujahedeen standing on every other street corner. It was a city at war. We rolled towards the one small clinic where we were to deliver our medical supplies from INTERSOS, an Italian NGO. The small clinic is managed by Mr. Maki Al-Nazzal, who was hired just 4 days ago to do so. He is not a doctor. Ambulances in Falluja are being shot by American snipers.
He hadn't slept much, along with all of the doctors at the small clinic. It started with just three doctors, but since the Americans bombed one of the hospitals, and were currently sniping people as they attempted to enter/exit the main hospital, effectively there were only 2 small clinics treating all of Falluja. The other has been set up in a car garage. Iraqi woman wounded in the neck by an American sniper. Doctors predicted the wound would be fatal.
As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who'd been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in.
One woman and small child had been shot through the neck -- the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning.
The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life.
After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.
One victim of American aggression after another was brought into the clinic, nearly all of them women and children.
This scene continued, off and on, into the night as the sniping continued. As evening approached the nearby mosque loudspeaker announced that the mujehadeen had completely destroyed a U.S. convoy. Gunfire filled the streets, along with jubilant yelling. As the mosque began blaring prayers, the determination and confidence of the area was palpable.
One small boy of 11, his face covered by a kefir and toting around a Kalashnikov that was nearly as big as he was, patrolled areas around the clinic, making sure they were secure. He was confident and very eager for battle. I wondered how the U.S. soldiers would feel about fighting an 11 year-old child? For the next day, on the way out of Falluja, I saw several groups of children fighting as mujahedeen.
After we delivered the aid, three of my friends agreed to ride out on the one functioning ambulance for the clinic to retrieve the wounded. Although the ambulance already had three bullet holes from a U.S. sniper through the front windshield on the driver's side, having westerners on board was the only hope that soldiers would allow them to retrieve more wounded Iraqis. The previous driver was wounded when one of the sniper's shots grazed his head.
Bombs were heard sporadically exploding around the city, along with random gunfire.
It grew dark, so we ended up spending the night with one of the local men who had filmed the atrocities. He showed us footage of a dead baby who he claimed was torn from his mother's chest by Marines. Other horrendous footage of slain Iraqis was shown to us as well.
My entire time in Falluja there was the constant buzzing of military drones. As we walked through the empty streets towards the house where we would sleep, a plane flew over us and dropped several flares. We ran for a nearby wall to hunker down, afraid it was dropping cluster bombs. There had been reports of this, as two of the last victims that arrived at the clinic were reported by the locals to have been hit by cluster bombs -- they were horribly burned and their bodies shredded.
It was a long night-between being sick from drinking unfiltered water and the nagging concern of the full invasion beginning, I didn't sleep. Each time I would begin to slip into sleep, a jet would fly over and I wondered if the full scale bombing would commence. Meanwhile, the drones continued to buzz throughout Falluja.
The next morning we walked back to the clinic, and the mujahedeen in the area were extremely edgy, expecting the invasion anytime. They were taking up positions to fight. One of my friends who'd done another ambulance run to collect two bodies said that a Marine she encountered had told them to leave, because the military was about to use air support to begin 'clearing the city.' One of the bodies they brought to the clinic was that of an old man who was shot by a sniper outside of his home, while his wife and children sat wailing inside.
The family couldn't reach his body, for fear of being sniped by the Americans themselves. His stiff body was carried into the clinic with flies swarming above it.
The already insane situation continued to degrade, and by the time the wounded from the clinic were loaded onto our bus and we prepared to leave, everyone felt the invasion was looming near. American bombs continued to fall not far from us, and sporadic gunfire continued. Jets were circling the outskirts of the city.
We drove out, past loads of mujahedeen at their posts along the streets. In a long line of vehicles loaded with families, we slowly crept out of the embattled city, passing several military vehicles on the outskirts town. When we took a wrong turn at one point and tried to go down a road controlled by a different group of mujeheen, we were promptly surrounded by men cocking their weapons and aiming them at us. The doctors and patients on board explained to them we were coming from Falluja and on a humanitarian aid mission, so they let us go.
The trip back to Baghdad was slow, but relatively uneventful. We passed several more smoking shells of vehicles destroyed by the freedom fighters; more fuel tankers, more military vehicles destroyed.
What I can report from Falluja is that there is no ceasefire, and apparently there never was. Iraqi women and children are being shot by American snipers. Over 600 Iraqis have now been killed by American aggression, and the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards. Ambulances are being shot by the Americans. And now they are preparing to launch a full-scale invasion of the city.
All of which is occurring under the guise of catching the people who killed the four Blackwater Security personnel and hung two of their bodies from a bridge. Young Iraqi boy shot in the neck by a U.S. sniper in Falluja.
Iraq dispatches is a weblog collecting the daily writings of Dahr Jamail, Baghdad correspondent for The NewStandard. He is an Alaskan devoted to covering the untold stories from occupied Iraq.
http://newstandardnews.net
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U.S. Calls for Cease-Fire in Fallujah
Iraqi Delegate Says Truce Is Secured; Insurgents Hold American Captive
By Sewell Chan and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2308-2004Apr10?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 11 -- U.S. commanders took the unusual step Saturday of publicly asking insurgents to honor an across-the-board cease-fire in the besieged city of Fallujah as guerrillas threatened to kill an American hostage unless U.S. forces withdrew from the city.
After lengthy negotiations on Saturday, a group of Sunni Muslim officials from the Iraqi Governing Council believed it had secured a deal with local tribal and religious leaders in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, as well as U.S. commanders for a cease-fire to begin at 10 a.m. local time Sunday. However, it was not clear that the local leaders would be able to get the insurgents to cease hostilities.
"We are trying to get it to happen, to get them to stop firing at coalition forces," said Saif Rahman, an aide to Hachem Hassani, a member of the delegation and a top official of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Iraq's largest Sunni political party. "U.S. commanders had promised to stop firing at 10 a.m., provided they were not being shot at. We feel the people of influence of Fallujah should assume their role as leaders of the community. It's up to them."
Rahman added that if a cease-fire were to hold for 12 hours, then additional negotiations would be held for a permanent cessation of hostilities.
U.S. officials also said Saturday that 47 Iraqis were killed in a battle Friday in the town of Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, in one of the bloodiest confrontations of the insurgency.
A week of violence that has left dozens of soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis dead closed with U.S. commanders facing the specter of prolonged guerrilla warfare in the streets of Fallujah, continued rebellion in a half-dozen other cities and additional kidnappings of troops and foreign civilians.
An airman was killed and two others wounded in a mortar attack Saturday on a U.S. air base in Balad, northwest of Baghdad.
Two U.S. soldiers were missing in action and thought to have been captured during an ambush Friday on an Army fuel-truck convoy. A soldier and an Iraqi driver were killed in the incident, and an American civilian was taken hostage.
In televised footage, the kidnapped man identified himself as Thomas Hamill, 43, from Mississippi. The al-Jazeera satellite network quoted Hamill as saying he was being treated well. His wife, Kellie, contacted at their home in Macon, Miss., confirmed that her husband had been captured. She told the Associated Press that he works for the Houston-based engineering and construction company Kellogg, Brown & Root, a division of Halliburton.
There were no signs of a respite in the violence on Saturday. The head of the Irbil office of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society and his wife were killed in an ambush on their car in the northern city of Mosul, officials of the organization said.
In the Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiya, clashes lasted much of the day and peaked around noon. Residents reported seeing more than 20 tanks and at least two helicopters flying overhead and firing on a group of houses near a police station.
In Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite Muslim slum where a revolt by militiamen erupted April 4, U.S. forces withdrew from streets outside the city hall and police stations. Crowds entered the streets and declared at least a symbolic victory.
About 1,000 soldiers of the Army's 1st Armored Division, based in Baghdad, retook most of the southern town of Kut, securing two municipal buildings, a television station and a bridge, Army officials said. Militiamen loyal to Moqtada Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has called for resistance to the occupation, had seized the town days earlier after Ukrainian troops withdrew.
In the holy city of Karbala, where an estimated 1.5 million Shiite pilgrims gathered for the annual religious festival of Arbaeen, the city hall was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Najaf, the other Iraqi city revered by Shiites, remained under the control of Sadr's militia, along with the nearby town of Kufa. U.S. officials vowed to stay out of both towns until the festival ends Sunday.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi paid a surprise visit to the southern city of Nasiriyah, where Italian troops have battled members of Sadr's Mahdi Army off and on during the week. "We are finding a lot of difficulties in implementing democratic ways and stability in Iraq," Berlusconi said in Kuwait on his way home.
In Baqubah, 47 Iraqis were killed Friday during a daylong battle for control of the police station and the governor's building, according to a U.S. Army combat report.
The battle began when 15 rocket-propelled grenades were fired on the police station at 2 p.m., according to the report. Two Iraqi police officers died in the attack, while two U.S. soldiers suffered minor injuries.
Later that afternoon, more than 40 insurgents, dressed in black uniforms or civilian clothing, tried to ambush U.S. troops with grenades. The soldiers returned fire. The climax of the fighting came at 8:30 p.m., when 100 insurgents armed with guns and grenade launchers confronted U.S. forces at a traffic circle and suffered heavy losses.
Insurgents are believed to have kidnapped at least 14 foreigners in the past week, including three Japanese, an Arab resident of Israel, a Briton, a Canadian and an American. Seven South Korean missionaries were abducted on April 8 but released after a few hours.
Rumors about additional kidnappings were rife Saturday.
On the al-Arabiya satellite television network, a group claiming to be affiliated with Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Palestinian group Hamas killed by the Israeli military last month, claimed to have 30 hostages from various countries. The group provided no proof.
Separately, a group calling itself Saraya al-Mujahedeen said it would release the three Japanese at the request of a Muslim clerics' group. The families of Noriaki Imai, 18, an antiwar activist, Soichiro Koriyama, 32, a freelance photojournalist, and Nahoko Takato, 34, a volunteer aid worker, filmed spots with al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera on Saturday, pleading for their release.
The German government said that two German security officials working for its embassy staff in Baghdad disappeared Wednesday while traveling near Fallujah, but said it was not clear whether they had been kidnapped or killed.
About 2,500 Marines have cordoned off Fallujah and established a foothold in the industrial zone on the eastern edge of the city. On Friday, the American administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, announced a unilateral suspension of offensive operations by the Marines, although sporadic fighting continued throughout the day.
The next morning, military commanders hastily called a news conference to proffer a bilateral cease-fire that was to start at noon.
"If the cease-fire holds, talks regarding the reestablishment of legitimate Iraqi authority in Fallujah will begin," said Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the military's top spokesman in Iraq. He acknowledged that there were no signs that insurgents would agree to stop fighting.
"At this point it's an aspiration," Kimmitt said, adding that the military hoped to get the help of "the Arabic press to get the message to the enemy."
Meanwhile, the Marines sent in a third battalion to reinforce their siege, along with a battalion from the Iraqi Armed Forces, which operate under U.S. command.
The tenacity and tactical sophistication of the insurgents in Fallujah, an overwhelmingly Sunni city, have taken commanders by surprise. Military leaders believe that former military officers from the government of the deposed president, Saddam Hussein, including members of the elite Republican Guard or the Saddam's Fedayeen militia units, are behind the insurgency.
About 60 fighters have been captured in Fallujah in the past few days, including five foreigners holding passports from Egypt, Sudan and Syria, Kimmitt announced.
The cease-fire offer -- and its public nature -- prompted criticism from some American analysts. Retired Army Col. Pat Lang, a former Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he considered the request unwise.
"In the Arab world, it is generally assumed that a supplicant for a truce or cease-fire does so from a position of relative weakness and that the request itself is an admission of the knowledge of that weakness," he said. "We should be concentrating on making them ask for a truce."
Baghdad residents said the U.S. siege of Fallujah has profoundly affected them. For the first time since the war began a year ago, the bloodshed has generated an outpouring of sympathy from Shiite Muslims, who long kept their distance from the insurgency.
As refugees from Fallujah arrived on Friday, fleeing during a brief truce, families in Baghdad gave them shelter. In Sadr City, barricades of scrap metal and rocks still lined the neighborhood's main street, which passes the Sadr headquarters. U.S. forces attacked it before dawn Thursday, but residents said that within hours, Sadr followers had rebuilt it with cement and brick.
Along the streets, crowds celebrated the withdrawal as a victory.
"The people are victorious," shouted Mohammed Jassem, a 31-year-old resident. "God willing, it's the power of God. Daily, we inflicted losses on them."
Crowds gathered, with residents trying to outdo one another. They denounced the U.S.-appointed Governing Council. a body that has come under withering criticism in mosque sermons. Some threatened to unleash suicide bombings if the U.S. military reentered the neighborhood during Arbaeen.
"The pupil left and the teacher came," Adel Kadhim Turfi, a 38-year-old resident, said. "Saddam was the pupil of the Americans."
Correspondents Anthony Shadid in Baghdad and Anthony Faiola in Tokyo and staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
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Fragile Truce Begins in Falluja, Halting a Week of Violence
April 11, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER and KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/international/middleeast/11CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 11 - A fragile cease-fire took effect in the besieged city of Falluja today, halting a week of intense fighting there between insurgents and American-led forces.
United States officials said they had sought the truce at the request of the Iraqi Governing Council, which sent emissaries into the embattled city to negotiate with insurgents.
"I understand the cease-fire for now is holding, and we're hopeful that we'll be able to get some productive talks going," L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official in Iraq, said today during an interview from Baghdad on the "Fox News Sunday" program.
"We're just trying to get a cease-fire in place and we have asked the insurgents to stop attacking the Marines," Mr. Bremer said in a separate interview on ABC's "This Week." "They didn't do that yesterday. We had a number of attacks yesterday, so we proposed a different time for one today."
Hundreds of Iraqis and 40 or more Americans have been killed in the last week in a surge of clashes across Iraq that began in Falluja, where most of the casualties on both sides have occurred.
In western Baghdad today, guerrillas shot down an American Apache attack helicopter, killing its two crew members. A quick-reaction team was mobilized to retrieve the crew members' bodies, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman, told a news briefing.
Hundreds of American reinforcements have moved into place on Falluja's outskirts, joining about 1,300 marines and Iraqi security forces already engaged in the operation.
At least one flare-up in Falluja interrupted the cease-fire today. News agencies reported that a sniper opened fire on an American patrol, wounding two marines. In the ensuing gunbattle, at least one insurgent was killed.
That exchange of gunfire came despite a guerrilla commander in Falluja's Jolan neighborhood telling Al Jazeera satellite television network that his fighters would abide by the truce.
"I have ordered my fighters to adhere to the cease-fire," said the commander, who identified himself by the nom de guerre Abu Muaz. "But I warn everyone, if the enemy breaks the cease-fire, we will respond."
With Falluja exploding and with Shiites restive elsewhere, the United States has found itself caught in the most extensive combat since last May, when President Bush declared the end of major military operations in Iraq.
The sustained rebellion in Falluja began when American troops raided the city, a center of opposition to the American-led occupation, last Monday, five days after four civilian security experts working on contract were killed as they drove through the city and their corpses were mutilated. At the same time, armed followers of a 31-year-old radical Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, launched uprisings in central and southern Iraq.
The Americans suspended offensive operations at Falluja for a while on Friday, and again on Saturday, to let negotiations proceed.
American forces have used attack helicopters, tanks and warplanes against militants firing rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons in the city, which has a population of about 200,000.
In the heated atmosphere, insurgents have begun taking foreign hostages, trying to undercut support for the coalition in their home countries.
The hostages complicate matters for the coalition because the hostage takers can be small, disconnected groups without lines of authority among them. One American held since Friday will be executed today if the United States does not lift its siege of Falluja, his captors said.
The American, identified as Thomas Hamill, was seen on television in the back seat of a car, next to a masked gunman. Mr. Hamill, identified in subsequent news reports as a 43-year-old Mississippi resident and an employee of the Halliburton Corporation, gave his name and said he had been captured in an attack on a convoy. Another gunman said into the camera: "We swear to God, we are not afraid of death. We are going to heaven."
The captors later videotaped Mr. Hamill in front of an Iraqi flag, his eyes darting nervously. He said he had been treated well and that his employer did jobs for the United States forces.
Off camera, one of his captors announced a 12-hour deadline, from 6 p.m. local Iraqi time on Saturday, for American forces to end their siege of Falluja. "Otherwise we will treat him worse than those before him in Falluja," the man said. There was no word on his fate or condition this morning, after that deadline expired.
Mr. Bremer, speaking on Fox, said that the United States would not negotiate over hostages.
Two American soldiers and an unknown number of civilian contractors were also reported missing after their convoy was attacked at midday Friday. German officials said two security workers had disappeared and might have been killed driving from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad.
Three Japanese held hostage since Thursday were to be released today, reports from Tokyo indicated, and the Muslim Clerics Association called for their release. But today Al Jazeera quoted an Iraqi described as an intermediary who said the kidnappers were "giving the Japanese government a 24-hour ultimatum, not open to extension," to withdraw its troops from Iraq; otherwise "they will execute a first hostage."
In Kuwait, an associate of Iraq's leading Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, denounced the kidnapping of the Japanese, Reuters reported. The associate, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Mohri, also denounced what he called the chaos in Iraq caused by the followers of Mr. Sadr. His remarks, from Friday Prayers, were carried in Kuwait's newspapers on Saturday.
"We condemn the acts of sabotage, chaos and takeover of public property by a group that unfortunately is part of one of Iraq's biggest and best-known families," he said.
Another group of armed Iraqi insurgents, their faces masked, claimed on Saturday to be holding 30 foreigners hostage and threatened to kill them unless the United States halted its offensive in Falluja.
In a film that was shown repeatedly on Arabic television, a masked man representing the group said: "We have Japanese, Bulgarian, Israeli, American, Spanish and Korean hostages. Their numbers are 30." He added: "If America doesn't lift its blockade of Falluja, their heads will be cut off."
The videotape did not show any hostages, however, and it was not possible to confirm that such a group was being held. Bulgaria said its soldiers were accounted for.
Shiite militias loyal to Mr. Sadr, the anti-American cleric, have battled coalition troops for control of cities south of Baghdad. Battles have flared in Nasiriya, Kut, Kufa, Najaf and Karbala, as well as in Sadr City, a neighborhood in Baghdad. Shiites and Sunnis united around Falluja as a rallying point against the occupation.
Leaders of Mr. Sadr's militia said on Saturday that they would not attack coalition forces in Karbala, about 65 miles south of Baghdad, during a Shiite pilgrimage to the city this weekend for the festival of Arbaeen.
Mr. Sadr's militias had tried to seize control of government buildings staffed by Iraqi officials and officers. United States officials have vowed to crush the militia forces, which they number in the thousands.
In Sadr City, American tanks that had been posted outside of police stations were not in place on Saturday. A witness said that earlier in the day, American forces tore down posters showing Mr. Sadr, and ran over them in tanks. Militants have said would respond fiercely if the coalition arrests Mr. Sadr, for whom a warrant has been issued in connection with the murder of another cleric in Najaf in April 2003.
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U.S. Targeted Fiery Cleric In Risky Move
As Support for Sadr Surged, Shiites Rallied for Fallujah
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2679-2004Apr10?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 10 -- "Bremer follows in the footsteps of Saddam," screamed the headline in al-Hawza, a tabloid newspaper run by firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr. With incendiary language, the article accused L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, of deliberately starving the Iraqi people.
A month later, on March 28, Bremer ordered the weekly paper shut down. According to U.S. officials, Bremer believed that after months of waiting, the moment was right to pressure Sadr to capitulate to American demands to disband his growing militia, which had attacked American troops in the past.
But instead of relenting, Sadr and his supporters responded with protests, the seizure of government buildings and a spate of violent attacks. He unleashed a major revolt in Shiite-dominated parts of Baghdad and southern Iraq that has become the gravest challenge to the U.S. occupation.
Several American and Iraqi officials now regard Bremer's move to close the newspaper as a profound miscalculation based on poor intelligence and inaccurate assumptions. Foremost among the errors, the officials said, was the lack of a military strategy to deal with Sadr if he chose to fight back, as he did.
"We punched a big black bear in the eye and got him angry as hell but had no immediate plan to disable him, so of course he struck back in a very vicious way," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who has been serving as a senior adviser to the U.S.-led occupation authority in Baghdad. "Sadr basically implemented plans he had all along to launch a revolutionary campaign to seize power. The mistake we made tactically was in not moving swiftly and all at once against every aspect of his operation."
In the aftermath, Iraq has been convulsed by a week of tumult in which more than 50 U.S. and allied troops and hundreds of Iraqis were killed, a host of cities were taken over by Sadr's militias, and many Shiites threw their lot in with rival Sunni Muslims in opposing the U.S. occupation.
Bremer also chose to pursue Sadr at the same time tensions were boiling over in Fallujah, a Sunni-dominated city west of the capital. Two days before the newspaper closure, U.S. Marines had killed 15 Iraqis during a raid there, accelerating a cycle of violence that intensified later that week, when four American security contractors were killed and a mob mutilated at least two of the bodies.
American military commanders had intended to mount an intense but narrowly targeted operation in response to the contractors' deaths. The plan called for Marines to encircle the city and attempt to pick off the few dozen insurgents who they believed were behind repeated attacks on American personnel. But as with the campaign against Sadr, the military plan to quell Fallujah appears to have been based on faulty assumptions. Instead of disgorging the insurgents, many residents rallied to support them by joining the fight against the Marines. People in other cities, including Shiites who used to regard Fallujah's residents as the hillbillies of Iraq, rushed to donate blood and money. Sunnis in Fallujah and elsewhere in central Iraq who had deemed Sadr a troublemaker began to laud him as a hero.
All of a sudden, Bremer had not just a two-front war on his hands, but one in which each side was drawing strength from the other.
"It has been the perfect storm," an official with the occupation authority said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said there is wide agreement among political strategists working for the authority that military action in Fallujah was justified after the savage deaths of the contractors. But there is greater dissension within the authority over the tactics employed against Sadr, the official said.
"Did we have to go after him right now?" the official said. "It should have been delayed. Dealing with both these problems at one time is crazy, if not suicidal."
'Rebellion in Their Hearts'
A year ago, in one of his first interviews after the fall of former president Saddam Hussein's government, Sadr warned the Americans not to alienate his movement. "I advise the Americans to ally with the Shiites, not to oppose them," he said. He then recalled what Shiites view as centuries of oppression and suffering. Added to that, he said, was the national character of Iraq -- a record of rebellion and dissent.
"You can read history," he said. "They will reject any government brought by America, any leader, any state. They have rebellion in their hearts."
Before the war, Sadr's name was little known, even among the Shiite clergy. But in the chaos that followed Hussein's fall, he came to prominence on the strength of his father's legacy, commanding the loyalty of rebellious young clerics who bridled at the reticence and conservatism of the mainstream clergy.
Sadr's rise would have been impossible without the clout of his father, Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, an elderly and revered grand ayatollah from a prominent clerical family. In the 1990s, he built up a mass following through control of clerical schools, a network of social services and a message of resistance -- always metaphorical -- to Hussein's rule. His assassination in 1999 unleashed bloody unrest in a Baghdad slum that would later take his name.
Moqtada Sadr, the son, was a low-ranking cleric. Sadr claims he is 30, though some suggest he is younger. His youth meant that more established ayatollahs, for whom age is a requisite, would never treat him as an equal. His lack of scholarship forced his movement to defer to a more senior cleric in Iran on religious matters. His lack of political history led some of his father's disciples to break away and form movements of their own. More mainstream Shiites dismissed him as an upstart.
Those who remained loyal to Sadr were quick to exploit the chaos of Hussein's fall, rallying the poor and disenfranchised for whom his father claimed to speak. In Sadr City, loyal clerics sent armed guards to hospitals and government buildings to prevent looting. From dozens of mosques, they distributed aid and collected looted goods. They organized Friday prayers at a mosque closed for years by Hussein, drawing tens of thousands and filling four-lane streets for nearly a mile.
Sadr and his deputies were blunt in their criticism of the United States, blaming it for failing to support a Shiite uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and for allowing looting and lawlessness that erupted after Hussein's fall. Soon after the war, suspicions were voiced among Sadr's followers that the U.S. occupation authority would handpick a government that would deprive them of power. After a complex series of negotiations involving other Shiite leaders, Sadr and his allies were left out of the country's new 25-member Governing Council.
Bristling at his exclusion, Sadr intensified his rhetoric over the summer -- denouncing the occupation, then demanding an American withdrawal, then forming a militia that he declared would be unarmed.
In August, a U.S. military helicopter flew low over Sadr City, knocking over a black religious banner from atop a transmission tower. The incident unleashed protests that drew hundreds, some of whom clashed with U.S. forces. In October, in what U.S. officials described as an ambush, Sadr's followers fought a gun battle with U.S. troops. Two U.S. soldiers and two of Sadr's men were killed.
Sadr never played by the rules -- neither those established by the Americans nor the centuries-old traditions adhered to by the mainstream clergy. He insisted that the occupation had no legitimacy, and he was often brazen in his competition with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a bitter rival of his father who is widely recognized as Iraq's supreme Shiite religious authority. Sadr was no less strident in denouncing the Governing Council as an agent of the U.S. administration. In a sermon to tens of thousands last summer, he insisted he and his followers should help run the country.
In his sermons, Sadr relentlessly drew a distinction between the traditional seminary, favored by Sistani, and his own vision of an activist seminary involved in all spheres of life. In more personal terms, he blamed the traditional clergy for failing to back his father in his struggle with Hussein, and some saw his rebelliousness as an attempt to reclaim a mantle of leadership for his family.
Although Sadr's public image faded over the winter, he and followers turned their attention to strengthening the movement's militia, known as the Mahdi Army. The name is a reference to a Shiite messiah-like figure said to have disappeared in the 9th century. It was a choice laden with symbolism and an early hint at the almost mystical devotion among Sadr's followers to the young cleric.
The militia began in August with perhaps 500 followers and was ridiculed at the time for its ragtag quality. Estimates of its strength now run from 3,000 to 10,000. The militia often handled security at religious festivals and Shiite sites in Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad, its members dressed in trademark black. But some residents complained of nefarious activities. Armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortars and ubiquitous AK-47s, the group acted as an enforcement arm of the movement, sending out death threats, intimidating people not adhering to its version of Islamic dress and, at times, seizing public buildings and beating up disobedient policemen.
In March, militia members were blamed for the destruction of a Gypsy village in southern Iraq long known for containing Iraq's equivalent of a red-light district. More than 1,000 residents were driven out, and the village -- with the help of looters -- was razed. In public, the militiamen -- drawn from the Shiite underclass -- displayed a militancy infused with Shiite Islam's narrative of suffering and martyrdom.
"We're impatient," a group of heavily armed militiamen shouted in Nasiriyah in January, drilling in a circle in a dusty courtyard. "We want death tonight."
Putting Pressure on Sadr
Inside the marble-walled Baghdad palace that serves as the occupation authority's headquarters, Sadr's anti-American rhetoric alarmed Bremer and his staff as early as last July, when the cleric issued his first denunciations of the Governing Council.
"There was a conclusion early on that this guy was trouble and needed to be contained," said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition he not be identified by name. "But there was not a clear plan on how to go about it."
Bremer and his top aides hoped that Sadr's popularity would wane and that other, more senior and moderate clerics would draw away his supporters, the official said. But on the chance that would not occur, the occupation authority sought to pressure him with the threat of arrest.
In late July, U.S. officials asked an Iraqi judge to investigate Sadr's role in the killing of Abdel-Majid Khoei, a fellow Shiite cleric who was killed in April 2003 shortly after returning to Iraq from exile in Britain. After a discreet investigation, the judge issued arrest warrants in August for Sadr, his top deputy and 11 other people.
But U.S. officials opted not to execute the warrants right away and kept them secret. "The danger was, if we arrested someone like that, we'd make him into a martyr," said a former official with the occupation authority who was familiar with the effort to deal with Sadr.
Instead, the occupation authority sought to use the warrant as a cudgel to moderate Sadr's statements and actions. The existence of the warrant was conveyed to Sadr through an intermediary with the explicit message that if he did not tone down, he would be detained, the senior official said.
American authorities also tried to persuade Iraq's more senior and moderate clergy to rein in Sadr. But the clergy were unwilling to act, fearing Sadr's street support, and U.S. officials were wary of inciting even small elements of the Shiite majority, whose support many viewed as crucial to the success of the occupation.
"We're watching him and some of the big [ayatollahs] are watching us, and we're both hoping the other does something," another senior official with the occupation authority said in August.
Although Sadr did tone down his public statements for a few weeks, he continued to expand his militia. But after the group was blamed for the deaths of five soldiers in October, Bremer and top military commanders in Iraq concluded they would have to take a different, more forceful approach.
The military began to assemble plans to go after Sadr, an initiative that was blessed by Bremer and the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz also favored taking action against Sadr, a senior military officer at the Pentagon said.
But the overall commander for the Middle East at the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid, was hesitant to move on Sadr out of concern that arresting or killing him would simply elevate his stature, the officer said. Moderate Shiite clerics also advised the occupation authority against an arrest.
"One cleric called Sadr a punk," the officer recalled. "All that caused Centcom to say, 'Hey, now is not the time to bring him in. We can deal with what he's doing.' "
Subsequent discussions about confronting Sadr also resulted in inaction, largely because of concern that doing so would interfere with other, more pressing concerns, such as the drafting of an interim constitution. "The concern was about various factors on the ground," said Daniel Senor, a spokesman for Bremer.
By March, though, Bremer's calculus had changed. With the planned handover of sovereignty less than 100 days away, political officers within the occupation authority called for more aggressive efforts to disband Sadr's militia on the grounds that the continued existence of the Mahdi Army was preventing other Shiite militias from disarming. If the Americans failed to demobilize Iraq's disparate militias before ending the occupation, it likely would impede the country's democratic transition, the political officers had warned.
"He was creating a context in which there were simply not going to be free and fair elections," said Diamond of the Hoover Institution. "We could have bought him off, but the result was not going to be a democracy in Iraq but a creeping slide into some form of a Islamist dictatorship in which various militia armies would be the ones who would determine the outcome of the election. That's because if we didn't disarm his army, we wouldn't be able to disarm any of the other militias. And if you don't demobilize of all the militias, there's no way you can have a democracy."
By late March, Bremer decided to make an initial move against Sadr by going after the newspaper. Al-Hawza, which churns out 10,000 copies a week, had been regularly printing material deemed by U.S. officials as incitements to violence -- a violation of one of Bremer's decrees.
In his letter ordering the newspaper shut, Bremer said the weekly had an "intent to disrupt general security and incite violence."
"Sadr was way over the line," a U.S. official involved in the decision said. "There was no question he was breaking the law."
U.S. military officers ushered al-Hawza's staff into the street March 28 and snapped a padlock on the office gate. "I'm sorry," one officer told al-Hawza's employees, "I'm going to have to close your building."
The Marines' Optimistic Mission
Before members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force arrived in Fallujah last month to replace units of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, they were encouraged to grow mustaches as a gesture of goodwill in a country where most men sport some form of facial hair. They also attended courses on Islamic culture and conversational Arabic.
The Marines hoped their attention to local sensitivities would help to pacify Fallujah, a Sunni-dominated city 35 miles west of Baghdad where resistance to the occupation has been fiercer than anyplace else in Iraq. It is the place where a shoulder-fired missile brought down a Chinook transport helicopter in November, killing 16 soldiers, and where grenade attacks on American convoys are a daily occurrence.
Over the past few months, however, the resistance in Fallujah has changed. Military officials say they believe that the new ringleaders are not former henchmen of Hussein's Baath Party, but hard-line clerics who have capitalized on the city's reputation as one of the most traditional Sunni enclaves in Iraq.
The Marines wanted to change Fallujah with rewards instead of raids. They arrived as a benevolent force for economic development and political liberalization, armed with millions of dollars to contribute to the region's improvement.
Marine officials had few illusions about the difficulty of their task, but they embarked on the Fallujah expedition with an ambitious, gung-ho spirit. In a message to the arriving troops, Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, said they were embarking on a dangerous task that would require patience and wisdom as well as courage and force. He compared the mission to other challenges faced by the Marines in World War II and Vietnam, saying, "We are going back into the brawl. . . . This is our test -- our Guadalcanal, or Chosin Reservoir, our Hue City. . . . You are going to write history."
The Marines were cautioned by local tribal and religious leaders that the best way to avoid violence was to stay away from the city. "People here don't like to see American troops in their streets," said Khamis Hassnawi, Fallujah's senior tribal leader. "If they want to prevent bloodshed, they should stay outside the city and allow Iraqis to handle security inside the city."
But on March 26, two days before the closure of al-Hawza, the Marines entered Fallujah to conduct a raid on suspected insurgents. What began as an early morning search operation spiraled into a day-long firefight with residents in which 15 Iraqis and one Marine were killed.
In the course of a day, all the goodwill the Marines had tried to build evaporated.
'A Huge Mistake'
When Bremer ordered the shutdown of al-Hawza, there was no intention to use force to apprehend Sadr or leaders of his militia, according to occupation authority officials familiar with the decision.
One U.S. official said there was not even a fully developed backup plan for military action in case Sadr opted to react violently. The official noted that when the decision was made, there were very few U.S. troops in Sadr's strongholds south of Baghdad. That area has been under the jurisdiction of multinational military divisions that had failed to move aggressively against the cleric's militia.
The newspaper closure was intended "to send another signal to Sadr, just like telling him about the arrest warrant," the official said. "In hindsight, it was a huge mistake. The best-case scenario was that he would ignore it, like the earlier threat, or that he would capitulate. The worst case was that he would lash back. But we weren't ready for that."
At the time, occupation authority officials figured that Sadr had between 3,000 and 6,000 militiamen, only 2,000 of whom were armed fighters -- a figure that turned out to be a vast underestimate. "We were relying on the most optimistic predictions possible," the official said.
Officials in Washington familiar with the deliberations of both the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff said they knew of no high-level meetings before the closure of Sadr's paper in which either group reviewed military plans girding for a possible violent backlash.
But the officials said that the decision to move against Sadr was fully supported by senior Bush administration officials. And while top officials may not have been familiar with military details, one senior administration official said that Washington had repeatedly advised Bremer and U.S. commanders in Iraq to ensure they were prepared for trouble if they went after Sadr.
"Every time we talked with Baghdad about taking any action against Sadr, we always talked about the need to have proper preparations in place to deal with a violent reaction," the official said.
Senor said the decision to move against Sadr in late March was prompted by "a real trend in the ramping-up of very inciteful, highly provocative rhetoric" from Sadr "that was directed at promoting violence against Americans during a very emotional time."
"We believe we had a responsibility to address it head-on," he said. "We had a concern that if he was left unchecked, Americans could wind up getting killed."
Mobilizing the Militia
For months, Sadr's lieutenants believed their leader's arrest was imminent. The rumors surged at each crisis -- in August, with the protests over the flag in Sadr City; in October, after the gun battles with U.S. troops; and again in April, after the paper's closure.
Mustafa Yaqoubi, one of his top deputies, warned in November against a crackdown. "No one can control people's passions, their reaction and their behavior," said Yaqoubi, wearing the black turban of a descendant of the prophet Muhammad and sitting in Sadr's two-story office in Najaf. "What they would do is unpredictable."
His confidence was inspired in part by knowledge of the popular disgust at arresting clergy. Particularly for religious Shiites, such arrests smacked of Hussein's repression. Over three decades, his Baath Party arrested, executed and expelled thousands of clerics, effectively muzzling the institution. Even critics of Sadr warned against detaining muammimeen, or the turbaned ones.
"The arrest of scholars is a grave mistake," said Abdul Aziz Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and one of Sadr's main rivals.
When Bremer moved against the newspaper, the clerics around Sadr saw it as the first step in a long-anticipated attack. They concluded it was time for a showdown. Without a show of force, they feared, U.S. officials would only be encouraged to take further steps.
"They wanted to hide the Shiite voice by closing the newspaper," said Fuad Tarfi, a spokesman for Sadr in Najaf.
Within hours, the clerics ordered a full mobilization. Protesters flooded the traffic circle in front of the newspaper's offices for a noisy rally, an action they would repeat over the next two days.
Three days after the newspaper was closed, on March 31, the demonstrations escalated. Instead of loitering in front of al-Hawza's offices, hundreds of Sadr supporters marched in a tight military formation to the fortified entrances of the occupation authority.
"We are followers of Sadr!" they shouted. "All the people know us. We will not be humiliated! Why is America against us?"
Many of the young men wore only black, save for green sashes on their brows. Marshals rushed between the units shouting warnings to keep the ranks sharp. Clerics in white turbans swept down the fringes with a proprietary air.
"Just say the word, Moqtada," they screamed, "and we'll resume the 1920 revolution!"
Later, the chants became more ominous. "Today is peaceful," they warned. "Tomorrow will be military."
That same day, in an unrelated incident, four American civilians working for a private security firm were ambushed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades as they drove through Fallujah. Residents mutilated the bodies of at least two of the men, dragged them through the streets, hung them from a bridge and burned them while a crowd cheered.
As soon as word of the incident reached Baghdad, "it was clear we would have to deliver a serious response," a senior U.S. official said. "We were going to have to do something significant to clean up the town."
With Fallujah having become the most immediate crisis, officials with the occupation authority assumed moves against Sadr would be put on hold.
"We didn't want to fight two fires at once," the senior official said.
'Terrorize Your Enemy'
In the days that followed, most communication between Sadr's staff and the occupation authority occurred through public statements. The U.S. administration had few if any interlocutors to call upon, and given their dismissiveness of Sadr for months, officials showed little willingness to negotiate with him.
Instead of de-escalating, the Americans kept increasing the pressure on Sadr. On Saturday, April 3, U.S. forces arrested Yaqoubi, Sadr's top deputy, on charges of involvement in the killing of Khoei, the Shiite cleric.
"We didn't choose the time for the uprising. The occupation forces did. It's clear that by arresting Sheik Yaqoubi and closing the Hawza newspaper, they wanted to provoke the Shiites," Tarfi said. "We didn't want to choose this time for the uprising."
After Yaqoubi's arrest, Sadr followers began boarding buses and trucks for Kufa, a town next to Najaf where Sadr the day before had called for direct attacks on occupation forces.
The protest was scheduled for 5 p.m. on Saturday. Afterward, people kept coming. At 3 a.m. on Sunday, buses were still crossing the bridges over the Euphrates River and depositing young men from Baghdad into the crowded square in front of Sadr's headquarters.
After daybreak on Sunday, hundreds of Sadr loyalists took over the headquarters of the city's traffic police station and a second government building, both surrendered by local police and officials without a fight. The next target was the coalition headquarters, which was protected by private guards and Salvadoran troops.
Alarmed to see the throng moving toward them, the soldiers and guards fired percussive rounds designed to break up the crowd. Some witnesses said the sound rounds were followed by mortars. The defenders also took up firing positions on the roof of the building adjoining the coalition headquarters, a hospital named for Sadr's father.
At one point, a vehicle carrying four Salvadoran soldiers was caught outside the gate. Demonstrators overwhelmed its terrified occupants, seizing and killing one prisoner on the spot by putting a grenade in his mouth and pulling the pin. Two other soldiers, their faces bruised from recent beatings, were later seen being led by armed men into the mosque.
By 1:30 p.m., the loudspeakers of the Kufa mosque announced that the Mahdi Army held Kufa, Najaf, Nasiriyah and Sadr City, Baghdad's teeming Shiite slum. The checkpoint controlling access to the bridge into Kufa and Najaf was staffed by young militiamen. Many Iraqi police officers, paid and trained by the U.S.-led coalition, had joined the assault on its quarters.
At 4:30 p.m., Sadr issued a typewritten statement. He called on his followers to stop the protests, describing them as futile. But he then gave a new order.
"Terrorize your enemy. God will reward you well for what pleases him. It is not possible to remain silent in front of their violations," the statement read.
Within the hour, a U.S. patrol was ambushed in Sadr City. The platoon from Comanche Company was on the street precisely because the 1st Cavalry Division suspected something was amiss. But none of the soldiers saw the rocket-propelled grenades fired from an alley into the platoon's Humvees. At least four soldiers were killed on the scene and four more died in the next few hours.
Survivors radioed for reinforcements. The unit racing from the base camp into the massive slum was met by a hail of fire from rooftops, alleys and upstairs windows. Every road was barricaded with concrete blocks, construction debris and trash.
By nightfall, both sides had reached a point that neither anticipated. "This morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed the line, and they have moved to violence," Bremer said. "This will not be tolerated."
On Monday, more than 1,000 U.S. Marines sealed off Fallujah and set in motion an operation aimed at tracking down people responsible for the slaying of the four Americans. The same day, Bremer called Sadr an outlaw and "pledged to reassert the law and order which the Iraqi people expect."
The two-front war had begun.
--------
Iraqi Battalion Refuses to 'Fight Iraqis'
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2680-2004Apr10?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 10 -- A battalion of the new Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah earlier this week to support U.S. Marines battling for control of the city, senior U.S. Army officers here said, disclosing an incident that is casting new doubt on U.S. plans to transfer security matters to Iraqi forces.
It was the first time U.S. commanders had sought to involve the postwar Iraqi army in major combat operations, and the battalion's refusal came as large parts of Iraqi security forces have stopped carrying out their duties.
The 620-man 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Armed Forces refused to fight Monday after members of the unit were shot at in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Baghdad while en route to Fallujah, a Sunni Muslim stronghold, said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who is overseeing the development of Iraqi security forces. The convoy then turned around and returned to the battalion's post on a former Republican Guard base in Taji, a town north of the capital.
Eaton said members of the battalion insisted during the ensuing discussions: "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis."
He declined to characterize the incident as a mutiny, but rather called it "a command failure."
The refusal of the battalion to perform as U.S. officials had hoped poses a significant problem for the occupation. The cornerstone of the U.S. strategy in Iraq is to draw down its military presence and turn over security functions to Iraqis.
Over the past two weeks, that approach has suffered a severe setback as Iraqi security forces have crumbled in some parts of the country. In recent days perhaps 20 percent to 25 percent of the Iraqi army, civil defense, police and other security forces have quit, changed sides, or otherwise failed to perform their duties, a senior Army officer said Saturday.
"I wouldn't say it is so widespread that it's the majority," the senior officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But it concerns us."
Eaton added: "The lines are blurring for a lot of Iraqis right now, and we're having problems with a lot of security functions right now."
A soldier with the 1st Armored Division, who has recently been engaged in combat in Baghdad, said many of the Iraqi security troops with whom he has worked are no longer reporting for duty. "I think what we are seeing is not some mass quitting and mutiny by ICDC [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps], but rather just plain fear," the soldier said. "And all it takes is one Iraqi to take the lead in leaving, and they all do out of fear."
When the 2nd Battalion graduated from training camp on Jan. 6, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hailed it as a major part of the future of Iraq. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the U.S. commander on the ground in Iraq, attended the ceremony and said: "We are now into the accelerated period of providing Iraqi security forces, and these soldiers look very proud, very dedicated. I have high expectations that in fact they would help us bring security and stability back to the country."
The battlefield refusal of the battalion -- one of just four that exist in the Iraqi army -- began Monday when it was ordered to travel about 60 miles to support the Marines, then locked in battle with fighters in Fallujah. The mission of the Iraqi troops was to help with secondary military tasks such as manning road checkpoints and securing the perimeter, Eaton said.
One of the problems, Eaton said, was that the Iraqi troops were not told they would be given a relatively benign role, and assumed they were being hurled into the middle of a bloody fight, battling on the side of the Americans against Arabs. "The battalion thought it was going to be thrown into a firestorm in Fallujah," he said.
Complicating communications, he said, was that the battalion had 10 new U.S. advisers who rotated into their jobs April 1, just four days before the incident, replacing the advisers who had trained the unit for months.
The battalion, traveling by truck and escorted by troops from the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division, passed through a Shiite area in northwest Baghdad. They were fired on, and six members of the unit were wounded, one seriously, Eaton said. A crowd of Shiites gathered and "surged" at the convoy, he said. "They were stunned that they were taken under fire by their fellow population," he said.
The battalion was then sent back to Taji, where preparations were made to fly it to the Fallujah area. But opposition to the mission stiffened, Eaton said, "so we decided not to involve them in the Fallujah operation."
Accounts differ on whether the other Iraqi battalion based at Taji also indicated that it would decline to go to Fallujah. Eaton said it was not involved, because it was not yet deemed ready to fight.
But the other Army official said that a decision was made not to force the issue with that unit's commanders. "I don't think they pushed them to the brink where they said, 'Hell, no, we won't go,' " the official said.
The two senior officers also differed on what motivated the refusal.
The Iraqi rebuff was based on "pure fear," said the Army official. "They just got cold feet."
But Eaton, who visited the unit the day after the incident, disagreed. He noted that Iraqi troops have "fought very, very bravely" against Iran. He said that, in his view, the problem was caused by poor leadership and complicated by the fact that the unit was trained by U.S. advisers who emphasized that their job would be to defend Iraq against outside forces.
Eaton, who oversees the organization, training and equipping of the Iraqi army, the civil defense force, the police, security guards and border patrol, said the recalcitrant battalion's Iraqi leadership would be "reorganized."
He also said that training would be different for future battalions, and handled almost exclusively by Iraqi officers, a group of which recently finished re-training in Jordan. "They will train their own men," he said.
Eaton, who previously was chief of infantry training for the U.S. Army, said that solutions would be found to the setback.
"Is it disappointing? Obviously," he said. "We're just going to work our way through it."
-------- israel / palestine
Likud Sets Date for Gaza Referendum
April 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel's ruling Likud party will vote April 29 on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's hotly debated plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements, a party spokesman said Sunday.
Seeking the vote is an enormous gamble for Sharon because his hard-line party is divided over the plan and approval is far from assured. Sharon has pledged to honor the outcome and could come under growing pressure to resign if he loses.
Likud spokesman Shmuel Dahan said the date was chosen at a meeting of the party's Central Election Committee. If he wins approval from Likud's 200,000 members, Sharon reportedly will seek Cabinet and parliamentary approval within days.
The decision on the date came a day before Sharon was to leave for Washington, where he will seek President Bush's endorsement of the plan in a meeting Wednesday. A vote of confidence from Bush would give Sharon an important boost.
Several senior Cabinet ministers have said they will not support Sharon without American backing. Media reports said the Cabinet might vote May 2, to be followed a day later by the rest of parliament.
The extent of U.S. support for the plan remained unclear. Sharon sent several senior aides to Washington over the weekend to work out final details on the agenda of the meeting.
The United States has said it supports the idea of a Gaza pullout, but only as part of the internationally backed ``road map'' peace plan.
The road map calls for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, with the final borders to be negotiated between the two sides. The plan, however, has been stalled for months amid Israeli and Palestinian violations.
Sharon said Sunday that his plan would help Israel's security, improve its standing in the international community, improve the economy and lift peace efforts.
``There is no doubt that this plan opens a way in the future for a process of peace,'' Sharon said before meeting with Israel's ceremonial president, Moshe Katsav.
Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they hope to win a U.S. promise that Israel would not have to withdraw fully from the West Bank under a permanent settlement with the Palestinians. Israel also wants assurances that millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants will be barred from returning to Israel.
But a senior Israeli official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Americans are resisting such assurances. Instead, he said, the Americans will say a final settlement has to be reached through negotiations.
Officials are working on letters of understanding to be signed during the meeting, Israeli officials said.
``In the meantime, we are hearing support, understanding and backing for the disengagement plan,'' said Israel's ambassador to the United States, Danny Ayalon.
The Palestinians also demand that a Gaza pullout be part of the road map. They want a much larger withdrawal from the West Bank.
Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian Cabinet minister, said he had been assured that the United States will not take any steps that prejudice a final settlement.
The Gaza pullout, which includes the evacuation of all 21 settlements in the strip, is among a series of unilateral measures Sharon has proposed to separate Israelis and Palestinians in the absence of a peace agreement. Israeli officials say they remain committed to the road map but that there is no credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side.
Early Sunday, about 400 demonstrators from Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip protested peacefully outside Sharon's Negev Desert ranch to protest the withdrawal plan.
In new fighting, Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian in the West Bank town of Akraba, near Nablus, as they arrested two wanted militants, witnesses and hospital officials said. Mohammed Abu Kaber was shot in the head as he looked out the window from a house that troops had surrounded, neighbors said.
The army said Abu Kaber was killed by ``warning shots.'' Soldiers arrested two members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades militia, one of them Abu Kaber's brother, the neighbors said.
-------- us
Waking up to body bags
April 11, 2004
AFP
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/10/1081326980611.html
The taboo against media coverage of US war casualties has broken down, reports Catherine Hours.
Pictures of body bags and US soldiers praying around dead comrades are creeping into American media coverage of Iraq, highlighting the growing unease at events. The mounting death toll and particularly events such as the mutilation of four private security contractors in the city of Fallujah have broken the taboo on showing US victims, media experts say.
Many US dailies showed a picture last week of US marines praying over the body of a member of their unit after he died from his wounds at a first-aid point in Fallujah. The USA Today daily splashed a picture of a wounded marine gripping the hands of comrades as he awaited treatment.
US officials have sought since the Vietnam War to control media use of conflict images. Since the 1991 Gulf War, they have banned photographers from covering the return of military coffins to the US.
"It's really moving towards a more normal situation, to publish pictures of the dead, because after all a war is about killing," Jim Naurekas, of the media analysis organisation Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, said.
"Throughout the war the media were extremely reluctant to publish any images of wounded or dead American soldiers; that's been one of the major taboos of the conflict," Mr Naurekas said.
"There is the idea that to publish pictures of wounded soldiers would diminish support for the war. Particularly at the height of the fighting last year, there was a sense that doing anything that might erode the public backing for the war was unpatriotic. There's a great deal of self-censorship."
Robert Thompson, director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York, said events on the ground in Iraq and political changes in Washington had altered media coverage.
"American journalists and TV channels are probably a little less reluctant now to report some of the stuff in more detail and showing more pictures than they were before, when there was all this national unity," he said.
The killing of the contractors in Fallujah "sort of eroded the taboo". The charred bodies of two of the Americans were mutilated and strung from a bridge. Gruesome pictures were widely shown in the US.
CNN repeatedly showed pictures last week of a soldier, with the lower part of his body covered in blood, being evacuated on a truck and of wounded marines escaping from their tank.
Several newspapers also showed the picture of a marine in the town of Ramadi carrying over his shoulder the body of a dead comrade in a black body bag. Pictures of troops in tears as they learn of the deaths of fellow soldiers and a female medic holding the hand of a wounded marine after an ambush have also been given prominent exposure.
"It could affect people and their perception of the war to see the reality of it," Mr Naurekas said. "It's pretty well understood that images have a much more emotional impact than words do."
Mr Thompson believes the impact will only be serious if the flow of conflict pictures is prolonged. "Any one set of images is not really going to change public opinion significantly," he said. But "a few more weeks like the one we just had, where all these images begin to come together, and that's where the change really occurs".
Mr Thompson cited the large number of "pretty scary images" in the Vietnam War. "But it wasn't until we'd been there for a while and the images just wouldn't stop that public opinion began to change significantly."
----
Red-faced US air force after spy plane intrusion
LONDON (AFP)
Apr 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040410232627.wy4utvx3.html
The US air force was left red-faced last year when a drone flew uninvited into British skies and had to be granted so-called "purple airspace" usually reserved for Britain's royal family, the London-based Observer newspaper said Sunday.
"We had no idea what this thing was, had to hurriedly identify it and then give it 'purple airspace," said a civil servant quoted by the Sunday newspaper.
"It was major embarrassment that has been hushed up," the source added.
Air-traffic controllers were forced to grant the privilege to the Global Hawk -- an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) -- after the drone reportedly went astray during recent trials of the spy plane in Germany.
Germany is one of a number of Western nations keen to buy the plane, first used to spy on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and reported to have eavesdropped on shipping and radar stations during missions from the German Navy's Nordholz base near Hamburg.
The US air force drone flew six sorties over the North Sea during the test flights in Ocotober and November last year, according to the newspaper.
----
Hawaiian Bomb Test Island Begins to Heal
April 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Islands-Return.html
KAHOOLAWE ISLAND, Hawaii (AP) -- When Emmett Aluli first set foot here nearly three decades ago, the barren land was so littered with the remnants of years of military test bombings that he shed tears for an island he considers sacred.
On Friday, the Navy hauled off its last barge full of equipment and debris after an unprecedented 10-year, $460 million cleanup. And though significant amounts of ordnance remain, Aluli and others now see Kahoolawe as a place of hope.
``Environmentally and visually, it was the worst thing we could ever see on an island, on our land,'' said Aluli, a Molokai physician and member of the state-run Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission. ``We've tried our best to get the complete cleanup. We understand the shortfalls. We're just looking at the future.''
The uninhabited patch of red dirt rising from the Pacific is sacred to native Hawaiians who feel the island, untouched by tourists, connects them with the spirits of their ancestors.
For nearly five decades after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the land was ravaged by bombs from U.S. planes and warships. But after years of protests and lawsuits, President George H.W. Bush ordered a halt to the exercises in 1990.
Today, Hawaii's wet winter is evident in the swaths of green across Kahoolawe's typically barren plains and hills. For Davianna McGregor, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Hawaii and a member of the grass-roots Protect Kahoolawe Ohana, it's a sign of hope.
``You feel like the island is finally at rest and can begin healing,'' she said.
Anthropologists say the wind-swept island of Kahoolawe (pronounced ka-HO'oh LA-vay) was first settled and established into small fishing communities around 1000 A.D. Its lack of fresh water always posed a problem, and led to a decline in its inhabitants.
King Kamehameha III made Kahoolawe -- at 45 square miles, the smallest of the Hawaiian archipelago's eight major islands -- a prison colony for about two decades beginning around 1830. Prisoners moved out, goats and sheep moved in, and it didn't take long after ranching began in 1858 for overgrazing to leave the landscape barren.
Then came Pearl Harbor, the declaration of martial law in Hawaii, and the military's takeover of Kahoolawe as a training range. Soldiers got real-life training here that military officials say saved American lives in World War II and beyond.
But the use of the land offended many native Hawaiians, who regularly hold religious ceremonies on the island, chanting and praying that ancestors grant forgiveness for allowing the land to be disrespected. It was returned to local control last November.
The massive cleanup -- on a land area far greater than the high-profile bombing site of Vieques in Puerto Rico -- was limited by funding, technology and time. Still, more than 100,000 ordnance items were collected and destroyed, contributing to a tally of 12.9 million pounds of scrap metal.
Some 22,114 acres of Kahoolawe's surface have been cleared of ordnance -- about 84.5 percent, according to the Navy, which does not count 2,600 acres it deems completely inaccessible. Only 2,650 acres -- 9 or 10 percent, depending who's counting -- has been cleared to four feet below ground, a level where native plants can possibly be grown as a first step in ending erosion.
Work remains to be done on the island, said Stanton Enomoto, the acting executive director of Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission.
``That's always going to be a reminder to us,'' he said. ``There's still an obligation on the part of the United States that they have to finish the job.''
Rear Adm. Barry McCullough, commander of Navy Region Hawaii, said he understood the concerns of some who felt more could have been done, but insisted ``the Navy did what it was chartered to do.''
A similar cleanup will turn the island of Vieques into a wildlife refuge following the Navy's withdrawal from the training base last year. Tensions rose there in 1999 when two errant bombs killed a civilian guard, and a surge of protests followed.
For all the desolation of Kahoolawe, it's also a place of beauty. There are stretches of white sand beaches, high cliffs plunging to sapphire waters, and fields of spindly tamarisk, spurts of ilima flowers and kiawe trees.
It's unlikely the island and its waters will ever -- or at least not soon -- be freed of the reminders of the bombings that scarred the land. But some say the remaining ordnance may actually be a blessing.
``It provides an ironic sense of protection from the kind of commercial development that has happened on the other islands,'' said McGregor. ``It's never going to be safe for hotel development or golf course development or other commercial uses that have ruined very sacred spaces on the other islands.''
All manner of suggestions have surfaced on how the land should be used -- from a homeland for Palestinians to a massive casino in a state that bars all gambling but whose people favor Las Vegas vacations.
For now, though, access will be limited. Small groups will visit for cultural and educational purposes, but widespread use will likely be restricted until the fragile environment is restored. Ultimately, control is to be transferred to a Native Hawaiian sovereign entity.
Aluli said the wrongs done to Kahoolawe are no longer the focus.
``The main thing is the island is at peace again.''
On the Net:
Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission: http://kahoolawe.hawaii.gov/
Navy Region Hawaii: http://www.hawaii.navy.mil/
-------- propaganda wars
Aljazeera airs tape of dead 'CIA men'
Sunday 11 April 2004,
Al jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/64583899-BD41-4851-9C9C-A2BA1FDC9F1C.htm
Aljazeera TV has aired a video tape showing two dead bodies, with the voiceover claiming they were that of CIA men killed in Falluja.
The tape, aired on Sunday, showed marks of gunshots on the bodies and a number of Iraqis surrounding them. It also showed a damaged car, which the narrator claimed belonged to the dead men.
On Saturday, Aljazeera aired a tape showing a US detainee kidnapped by a group called al-Mujahidin during an attack on a US convoy.
The captive, Thomas Hamil, is an American working for a private company supporting the military operation.
The convoy, transporting supplies and fuel, was attacked on the Baghdad-Falluja highway on Friday.
The captive said on the tape that he was the only member of the convoy to escape death. He said he was being treated well.
Aljazeera also aired an audio tape from the kidnappers. "Up to now your prisoner is being dealt with in the tolerant manner specified by Islamic law. Our one request is to break the siege of the city of the mosques (in Falluja) during the 12 hours from six o'clock on Saturday evening," the kidnappers said.
"If not, he will be dealt with worse that those who were killed and burned in Falluja," they added.
Hostages
Hamil works for a company supporting the military operation A number of people of different nationalities have been reportedly kidnapped in Iraq.
Three Japanese, a Palestinian and a Canadian of Syrian origin are all confirmed to having been kidnapped. All of them, except a Japanese freelance photojournalist, are aid workers.
Another seven South Korean pastors were also taken hostage before being released.
Meanwhile, a Briton who went missing in the southern city of Nasiriya six days ago was released on Sunday, reported Aljazeera's correspondent Hamid al-Shutri.
Gary Teeley, 37, was released after tribal leaders in the area negotiated with captors. Teeley, an employee of the International Qatar Company in Baghdad, was handed over to occupation authorities.
Two German security officials who disappeared after coming under attack while travelling from Jordan to Baghdad last week have probably been killed, a German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on Sunday.
The two had been on their way to the German embassy in Baghdad when their convoy was attacked on Wednesday. The incident was not made public until Saturday.
----
Forest Service's Fire Pamphlet Criticized
April 11, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Forest-Photos.html
RENO, Nev. (AP) -- The Forest Service has been accused of misrepresenting forest conditions by using misleading photographs in a brochure that urges more logging to prevent wildfires in the Sierra Nevada.
The pamphlet, created by a public relations firm, explains that fire risks have risen as the Sierra's forests have grown more dense the past century. Six small black-and-white photos spanning 80 years appear beside descriptions of how the ``forests of the past'' had fewer trees and less underbrush, making them less susceptible to fire.
The 1909 photo shows an open, park-like forest with large trees spaced widely apart. More trees and underbrush appear in each successive picture -- 1948, 1958, 1968, 1979 -- and finally a photograph thick with trees in 1989.
``Today's forests, dense with green, may seem beautiful, but in fact are deadly,'' the pamphlet reads. ``Our old-growth forests are choking with brush, tinder-dry debris and dead trees which make the risk of catastrophic fire high.''
However, the 1909 photo does not depict natural conditions -- it was taken just after the forest had been logged.
And the pictured forest is nowhere near the Sierra Nevada. It's in Montana.
``I was looking at the picture and I thought it looked awful familiar,'' said Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project in Cedar Ridge, Calif. ``I started looking around and sure enough, the industry has used it before in Montana. It's from the Bitterroot Valley.''
Then Hanson used a magnifying glass to make another discovery.
``You can see huge slash piles and stumps in the background,'' he said. ``They give the impression this represents natural, pre-settlement conditions, but the picture was taken after logging had occurred and most of the trees had been removed.''
The same shot taken near Como Lake in the Bitterroot National Forest southwest of Hamilton, Mont., appeared in a 1983 Forest Service research report entitled ``Fire and Vegetative Trends in the Northern Rockies: Interpretations from 1871-1982 photographs.''
The caption in that report said the photo shows ``cleanup operations on the Lick Creek timber sale.''
The site also appears in another agency research paper in 1995 depicting an old-growth ponderosa pine stand at Lick Creek in 1909 ``immediately before partial cutting.'' That photo shows a forest three to four times more dense than the post-logging photo.
The agency has used the same photos -- minus the pre-logging shot -- in support of logging in the Pacific Northwest, too.
``I can't believe they are still doing this,'' said Timothy Ingalsbee of the Western Fire Ecology Center in Eugene, Ore. He said the agency used the same sequence of photos in 1998 ``and misrepresented it to make it seem like it came from the forest just above Ashland, Oregon.''
Forest Service officials confirmed the photos in the Sierra brochure are from Montana. They were used because they were typical of pine stands across much of the West, officials said.
``It is difficult to find a good series of repeat photographs of the same place over almost 100 years,'' Forest Service spokesman Matt Mathes said.
``We used this one because it is an accurate record of how stands -- including those in the Sierra Nevada -- become increasingly dense without active management or wildfire,'' he said.
Although the photos in the six-page color brochure have no caption, Hanson said the Sierra Nevada is the only region discussed.
``The clear implication is that this is in the Sierra Nevada. It is very misleading,'' Hanson said.
The Forest Service spent $23,000 to produce and print 15,000 copies of the brochures as part of the ``Forests for a Future'' campaign that brought criticism from some members of Congress because the agency hired a private public relations firm.
Reps. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., and Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., asked for an inspector general's investigation into whether the agency broke any laws by spending $90,000 on the contract with OneWorld Communications Inc. of San Francisco.
The Forest Service defends using outside help and said the photos from Montana were not intended to mislead.
Mathes said the fact the forest was logged before the 1909 picture was taken does not matter. ``The idea here was to show increasing density over time, which visibly did occur,'' he said.
``Our goal here was to ... increase the clarity and understandability of our message,'' he said. ``We needed to be accurate but not necessarily precise to the 99th degree.''
Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said the use of the Montana photos is ``misleading'' and said people ``are smart enough to make up their own minds when presented with accurate facts, but this approach is disingenuous.''
On the Net:
Forest Service ``Forests for Future'': http://forestsfuture.fs.fed.us/
John Muir Project: www.johnmuirproject.org
Swan View Coalition photos: www.swanview.org/ponderosa.html
American Forest Resource Council: http://www.afrc.ws/
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Airport Screening Upsets Crown Prince
April 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/national/11PRIN.html
MIAMI, April 10 - A routine security check at Miami International Airport turned into a diplomatic contretemps this week when the unhappy subjects of the baggage search turned out to be the heir to the Spanish throne and his fiancée.
The heir, Crown Prince Felipe, 36, and his entourage were connecting onto a commercial airliner in Miami after arriving from the Bahamas aboard a chartered jet, The Miami Herald reported on Saturday.
But before boarding an Iberia Airlines flight to Madrid on Thursday, the prince, his fiancée, Letizia Ortiz, and the rest of the party had to pass through a security check.
"The prince and his bodyguard felt they should not be subjected to the screening," said Lauren Stover, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, "but if they do not have an escort from the State Department or the Secret Service, it is required. It's the law."
The couple were taken to an American Airlines lounge, where they were searched by three "top-notch screeners with V.I.P. experience," Ms. Stover said.
Miami-Dade County's mayor, Alex Penelas, later sent the royal family a letter of apology about what he called a "lamentable situation."
-------- investigations
NEWS ANALYSIS
A Warning, but Clear?
April 11, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/politics/11ASSE.html?hp
WASHINGTON, April 10 - In a single 17-sentence document, the intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush in August 2001 spells out the who, hints at the what and points toward the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that followed 36 days later.
Whether its disclosure does lasting damage to Mr. Bush's presidency and re-election prospects may depend on whether the White House succeeds in persuading Americans that, as a whole, its significance adds up to less than a sum of those parts.
In a written rebuttal twice as long as the document itself, the White House sought Saturday night to drive home a single major point: that the briefing "did not warn of the 9/11 attacks." The idea that Al Qaeda wanted to strike in the United States was already evident, senior officials argued. They also said that while the document cited fresh details to make that case, they were insufficient to prompt any action.
Still, after two years in which the White House sought to prevent the disclosure of the document, Mr. Bush's critics are bound to seize on those details as evidence that the president had something to hide. While the White House has insisted the document was mostly vague and historical, critics will certainly seek now to paint it as something historic.
At a time, in the summer of 2001, when Mr. Bush and his advisers have said that the vast bulk of intelligence information pointed to the danger of a terrorist attack abroad, the Aug. 6 briefing can be read as a clear-cut warning that Osama Bin Laden had his sights set on targets within the United States and had already launched operations within America's borders. Based in part on continuing investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, the brief spelled out fresh reason for concern about Qaeda attacks, very possibly using hijacked airplanes and conceivably in New York or Washington.
Depending on which side is arguing the point in this rancorous election year, the "patterns of suspicious activity" cited in the document will be presented either as yet another sign that the pre-Sept. 11 warnings were always too vague to act on, as the White House has argued, or as new evidence that Mr. Bush and his advisers were too slow to sense the danger at hand.
In making their case, White House officials who spoke to reporters in a conference call and issued a three-page "fact sheet" sought repeatedly to minimize the significance of the document.
"None of the information relating to the `patterns of suspicious activity' was later deemed to be related to the 9/11 attacks," the document issued by the White House said. The idea that Mr. bin Laden and his supporters wanted to carry out attacks in the United States, a senior official said, "was already publicly known," while the fresh concerns outlined in the document - about surveillance of federal buildings in New York, and a telephone warning to an American Embassy in the Persian Gulf - "were being pursued aggressively by the appropriate agencies."
Still, a preview of a very different assessment could be heard even last week, as Democratic members of the independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks confronted Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, with pointed questions about the briefing.
Why, Timothy J. Roemer, the former congressman, wanted to know in that session, had not Mr. Bush, vacationing in Texas, responded to the warnings at least by summoning cabinet-level advisers for a meeting on terrorism, something that had not occurred by that point in his administration.
"At a time when our intelligence experts were warning of a possible strike against the United States, it's clear that the administration didn't take the threat seriously enough to marshal the resources that might have possibly thwarted the attack," said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
In deciding to release the portion of the daily briefing document, something no previous White House has ever done, Mr. Bush and his advisers were clearly attuned to the potential political damage that had been caused as its contents began to leak out following Ms. Rice's testimony on Thursday. In taking the step, White House officials seemed determined to head off the protests before accounts in the Sunday morning newspapers and on talk shows inflicted another round of damage.
But in taking the step after 6 p.m. on Saturday, the day before Easter, the White House may also have been seeking to shorten the time that critics might have to offer their own interpretations of the document.
Particularly in recent weeks, after the former counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke accused the White House of having failed to treat terrorism as an urgent priority in the months before Sept. 11, Mr. Bush's advisers have asked that their actions be viewed in their proper context.
In the summer of 2001, they have argued, the wave of warnings about possible attacks was indeed alarming, but it was almost always too vague to prompt any concrete action. While the intelligence was often credible, they contend, it was rarely specific.
With the disclosure of the Aug. 6 document, however, the specific, contemporary nature of what it contained will almost certainly confront the White House with more questions asking "what if?" Of the specific, contemporary information, the most tantalizing may be the May 15 warning to the American Embassy in the United Arab Emirates, "saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."
White House officials said Saturday they had "no information" connecting that call to the Sept. 11 attacks. But they conceded that they could not rule out such a link.
"Nothing pointed to a specific attack in a specific location," a senior White House official said on Saturday night, in trying to minimize the significance of the C.I.A.'s concern about the "patterns of suspicious activity." Whether that lack of specificity should have made it any less arresting as a call to action by Mr. Bush and his aides will be debated in the days ahead, perhaps most importantly by the commission as it prepares to render a judgment about Mr. Bush's performance.
--------
Pre-9/11 Secret Briefing Said That Qaeda Was Active in U.S.
April 11, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/politics/11INTE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, April 10 - The classified briefing about Al Qaeda that President Bush received a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks reported that the terrorist network had maintained an active presence in the United States for years, was suspected of recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York, and could be preparing for domestic hijackings. But the briefing did not point to any specific time or place of attack, and did not warn that planes could be used as missiles.
After releasing the "President's Daily Brief" on Saturday evening, White House officials said that none of the information given to the president at his ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, was later linked to the attacks. But the page-and-a-quarter-long briefing document showed that Mr. Bush was given more specific and contemporary information about terrorist threats than the White House had previously acknowledged. As recently as Thursday, the White House described the brief only as a "historical" account of Al Qaeda activity.
The release of the document is bound to fan the already-fierce debate about whether Mr. Bush and his team acted aggressively enough to confront the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the weeks and months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The president's critics are likely to embrace the specific and unresolved nature of some of the warnings as a further indication that Mr. Bush had ample information about the possibility of a terrorist attack in the United States, and should have exhorted his senior advisers toward additional action, something that he did not do. But the White House and its allies will certainly argue, as they did late Saturday, that the document did not warn of the Sept. 11 attacks and that his administration was already acting with sufficient vigilance. [Text, Page A17.]
The document said that the F.B.I. had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." A portion of that sense was revealed during Thursday's testimony by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. The commission had called for release of the classified briefing document, which was accompanied by an oral presentation to the president on the same date.
The document, prepared by the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence, lays out evidence from American and foreign intelligence agencies and media reports to support what it says had been known since 1997: that Osama Bin Laden "has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S."
Among its citations are statements reportedly made by Mr. Bin Laden in 1998, after American missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan, that he "wanted to retaliate in Washington"; information that Al Qaeda members "have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years" and that "the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks"; and a report from a clandestine source in 1998 that a Bin Laden cell in New York "was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks."
The document said that the C.I.A. had "not been able to corroborate" reporting from 1998 that Mr. Bin Laden wanted to hijack an American airliner to gain the release of Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
At the hearing of the Sept. 11 commission, Ms. Rice, one of the closest aides to Mr. Bush, said the briefing report had been requested by the president after several months of intelligence reports warning of a possible attack, most likely abroad.
The briefing also referred to a telephone warning in May 2001 to the American Embassy in the United Arab Emirates, in which a caller reported that supporters of Osama bin Laden were "in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."
At the time that Mr. Bush was briefed, while on vacation at his home in Crawford, Tex., the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Information were actively pursuing both leads, the officials said. At some point after the briefing, two Yemeni nationals involved in apparent surveillance of Federal Plaza in New York were interviewed by the F.B.I., which determined that the incident was "tourism related," the White House official said.
Nonetheless, at the time Mr. Bush received the briefing from a C.I.A. official in the living room of his ranch, the agency judged that in considering the risk of possible attacks in the United States by Mr. Bin Laden's supporters, "there were suspicious patterns of activity that were worrisome, even though nothing pointed to a specific operation in a specific location," a White House statement issued Saturday night said.
For nearly two years, ever since the White House first acknowledged the existence of the classified briefing item, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S.," the White House had sought to shut the door on its disclosure. The President's Daily Brief, prepared six days a week by the C.I.A., is one of the most highly classified documents produced by the government, and was likened by Vice President Dick Cheney in May 2002 to the "family jewels."
Until late last year, the White House had insisted that not even members of the independent commission could see the documents, and relented only under an agreement in which most commissioners saw only portions of the document.
Repeatedly, top White House officials, while refusing to release the document, have insisted that although it might have addressed Mr. Bin Laden's determination to strike inside the United States, it contained nothing substantially new. In her testimony before the commission last Thursday, Ms. Rice described the document as reporting primarily "historical information based on old reporting." On Saturday night, White House officials sought to reiterate that message, but acknowledged that in the 17-sentence document, the two sentences referring to the surveillance of the federal buildings in New York and the call to the American Embassy in the United Arab Emirates could be considered "closer to the present time."
In a background briefing for reporters and in a fact sheet that it released to accompany the document, White House officials said that none of the information relating to the "patterns of suspicious activity" cited by the C.I.A. had later been determined to be deemed related to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The officials said that it remained unclear, however, whether the May 15 call to the embassy in the United Arab Emirates, which had not previously been disclosed, might have been a credible warning. They said the caller did not say where or when the attacks might occur, but that the call nevertheless prompted a May 17 meeting by a National Security Council group to review the information.
Still, the White House fact sheet said, "We had no information, either before or after 9/11, that connects the caller's information with the 9/11 attacks."
The White House said that the surveillance of Federal Plaza in May 2001, which has previously been publicized, was of concern as late as August 2001 because the site was home to the federal courthouse where Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, had been convicted.
The release of the document was itself historic; no White House has ever made public a copy of a President's Daily Brief, a document that has been produced by the C.I.A. for presidents since the 1960's. The only items deleted from the version of the document that was made public were the names of foreign intelligence services that had provided information used in the report, White House officials said. Dr. Rice and other White House officials have said that the document was prepared at the request of Mr. Bush. In her testimony on Thursday, Dr. Rice told the commission that "I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States," referring to the possibility of domestic strikes by Al Qaeda.
Still, she added, "I don't remember the Al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about."
Asked directly if she had ever informed the president of intelligence suggesting that Qaeda terrorists were already in the United States and planning for attack, Ms. Rice said during her testimony that she couldn't remember.
In a background briefing for reporters and in the fact sheet it issued on Saturday night, the White House sought to minimize the significance of the document. "The P.D.B. article did not warn of the 9/11 attacks," the White House said in the fact sheet it distributed on Saturday night.
"The article advised the President of what was publicly well-known: that Bin Laden had a desire to attack inside the United States."
While the White House would not describe what, if anything, Mr. Bush did with the information in the briefing, senior officials said their reading of it was that nothing beyond the efforts already underway appeared to be justified at the time.
"Since there was no threat reporting, no new action was required," said Sean McCormack, the spokesman for the national security council.
Among other information presented in the August 2001 briefing, Mr. Bush was told that the F.B.I. was "conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers Bin Laden-related," according to the document. Ms. Rice disclosed that information in her testimony as last week, as evidence that the government was on guard against the possibility of terrorist attacks.
The document also said that "Al Qaeda members - including some who are U.S. citizens - have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."
--------
Declassified Memo Said Al Qaeda Was in U.S.
Aug. 6 Report to President Warned of Hijacking
By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2677-2004Apr10?language=printer
CRAWFORD, Tex., April 10 -- President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan.
The information was included in a written Aug. 6, 2001, briefing to Bush that was declassified Saturday night by the White House in response to a request from the independent commission probing the Sept. 11 attacks.
The short article, titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," also included information that the FBI had "70 full field investigations" underway in the United States that were believed related to Osama bin Laden, and that a caller to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 said a group of bin Laden supporters was in the United States planning attacks with explosives.
The document, citing a foreign intelligence service whose identity was redacted, said bin Laden told followers he wanted to "retaliate in Washington" for the United States' 1998 missile attack on his facilities in Afghanistan.
In a conference call Saturday with reporters, administration officials who insisted on anonymity said there was no evidence that either the call to the U.S. Embassy in the UAE or the surveillance of federal buildings in New York by Yemenis was related to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The officials said the photographing of the federal buildings was later judged to be "tourist activity," but they did not say whether that judgment was made before or after the attacks.
The White House originally resisted releasing the article, part of the President's Daily Brief, or PDB, citing the sensitivity of intelligence information. It characterized the document as a historical summary with little current information on which the president could have acted.
In her testimony to the 9/11 commission on Thursday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "this was a historical memo. . . . It was not based on new threat information."
While the two-page document included information dating to 1997, it also contained information that the government suspected al Qaeda was actively preparing for an attack in the United States. While it gave no information about specific targets or dates, the briefing warned that U.S. intelligence believed bin Laden had serious plans to hit the United States.
The PDB said U.S. intelligence could not confirm "some of the more sensational threat reporting," such as information from a foreign intelligence service in 1998 saying bin Laden "wanted to hijack a US aircraft" to gain the release of U.S.-held Muslim extremists. The identity of the foreign service was redacted.
"Nevertheless," it said, "FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
The brief continued: "The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
The CIA author of the document wanted to make clear to the president that, despite the many threats being centered abroad, agency analysts believed there was a real and continuing danger that bin Laden was determined to attack the United States.
As one former administration official who has read the PDB said last week: "The agency doesn't write a headline like that if it doesn't want to get attention." In this case, the former official said, "the CIA did not believe Bush policymakers were taking the threat to the U.S. seriously."
The White House noted Saturday night that the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI issued several warnings between June and September 2001, including specific warnings about the possibility of a hijacking to free al Qaeda members imprisoned in the United States.
The two White House officials who held the teleconference call said that they would not divulge whether Bush asked questions when given the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing, saying the president's response was "confidential." They also declined to say whether the president or others followed up on the warnings or sought more information, other than to say that the government spread to various agencies the warning about the call to the embassy in the UAE.
In a fact sheet released with the PDB, the White House asserted that the document "did not warn of the 9/11 attacks" and noted: "Although the PDB referred to the possibility of hijackings, it did not discuss the possible use of planes as weapons."
The White House also asserted that the PDB "was based largely on background information" and that "there is no information" that the call to the UAE embassy or the surveillance of buildings in New York "was related to the 9/11 attacks."
At the same time, the document indicated that the government knew of widespread al Qaeda activity in the United States. "Al-Qa'ida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks," it noted. ". . . A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks."
In its historical section, the document cites bin Laden's television interviews in 1997 and 1998 in which he said he would "bring the fighting to America," ironically telling his followers he would "follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef."
"After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington," the report said, redacting the name of the foreign intelligence service that supplied the information.
Also in 1998, the PDB said, an Egyptian Islamic Jihad operative told a foreign service, the identity of which was also redacted, "that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike."
The PDB judged that the millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been a bin Laden attempt, noting that convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam said that he was encouraged by bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaida in his plan to attack Los Angeles International Airport and that bin Laden was aware of the operation. Zubaida was planning his own attack, Ressam told the FBI.
The PDB also said bin Laden "prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks," and it noted that the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania began with surveillance by bin Laden associates as early as 1993. The report noted that two of those convicted in the embassy bombings were U.S. citizens.
PDBs have been released in the past, but CIA Director George J. Tenet has tried to put them in a non-releasable category.
The items in the PDB on the surveillance of New York buildings and the call to the UAE were obtained at the last minute by the CIA from the FBI in an effort to get new information, a U.S. government official said. The CIA's intent was to sound sufficient alarm about bin Laden's potential.
The CIA analyst who prepared the article called an FBI analyst dealing with the subject, and that analyst supplied the material about bin Laden's threats of hijackings or other attacks in the United States.
The FBI analyst did not make a survey within the bureau for information but rather reported a new incident that seemed relevant to the request -- the interviewing of Yemeni tourists taking photographs of the Foley Square courthouse in downtown New York where Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and others had just been convicted.
There was other relevant information in the FBI bin Laden unit, including the now well-publicized Phoenix document from an agent in that city, written on July 10, 2001, which raised questions about a bin Laden supporter taking flying lessons and suggested a nationwide survey to see what else was going on.
On the call to the embassy in the UAE in May 2001, the White House officials said they responded within two days to get investigations started. But it was still unresolved on Aug. 6 when the item was provided to the president. On Saturday, officials said that the matter was still not resolved but that they were able to determine it did not relate to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Pincus reported from Washington.
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Panel Plans to Document the Breadth of Lost Opportunities
April 11, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/politics/11PANE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, April 10 - With new evidence made public almost daily to show how the Sept. 11 attacks might have been prevented, the independent commission investigating them says its final report will offer a book-length chronology of the law-enforcement, intelligence and military failures that stopped the government from understanding the threat of Al Qaeda until it was too late.
Many of the missed opportunities are well documented, especially those in the months before the attacks: the Central Intelligence Agency's delay until August 2001 of raising an alert about two of the terrorists, who by then were already in the country; the Federal Bureau of Investigation's failure to follow up on a warning in July from a Phoenix agent that Qaeda terrorists might be training at American flight schools; and the bureau's failure to understand the significance of Zacarias Moussaoui, the flight school student arrested in Minnesota a month later and later linked to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
But members of the bipartisan commission say that the government's missed opportunities date back many years over several presidencies and involve other branches of government, and that they will all need to be explored in the panel's final report, scheduled for release in July.
"This was not something that had to happen," said Thomas H. Kean, the chairman of the commission and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. Mr. Kean has gone further than other panel members in arguing that the attacks were clearly preventable.
"There are many examples," he said in an interview. "People got into this country with improper travel documents. People were placed on watch lists but nobody communicated that to airports. If we had acted earlier to stop Al Qaeda when it was smaller. These problems go way back, and we've got to try to learn lessons."
While its final chronology will stretch across years, the commission's attention has turned to the nine months before the Sept. 11 attacks - a period in which President Bill Clinton handed over power to President Bush and Mr. Bush's new team tried to reorganize the way the government dealt with the threat of terrorism. It was also the period in which most of the suicide hijackers entered the United States and made their final preparations for attack.
The period has come under special scrutiny by the commission as a result of the accusations of Richard A. Clarke, President Bush's former counterterrorism director, who said in a new book and in testimony to the panel that President Bush and his top aides cared little about terrorist threats before Sept. 11.
Had they cared, he asserts, the government might have had a chance to tie together what now seem to have been obvious clues available to the government in late 2000 and early 2001 that Al Qaeda was about to attack in America.
At least some of the clues were presented directly to President Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, when he received an intelligence briefing on Qaeda threats in the United States.
In her long-awaited testimony to the commission on Thursday, Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, acknowledged that the briefing contained a blunt warning that Osama bin Laden intended to attack "inside the United States" and that the F.B.I. had detected a "suspicious pattern" that could suggest plans for a domestic hijacking.
On Friday, government officials provided other details about the contents of the briefing report given to the president, including a warning that Al Qaeda might have a support network in the United States and that terrorists might try to attack with explosives within American borders.
In his earlier testimony, Mr. Clarke said that if the intelligence agency, the bureau and other government agencies had been forced by Ms. Rice and others in the White House to share all of their available information about Qaeda threats in the summer of 2001, "even without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I could have connected those dots."
One of the most important of those dots was sitting in the files of midlevel analysts at the intelligence agency, which has acknowledged that it knew in 2000 about the danger posed by two Qaeda operatives who were later among the Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi; they had attended a terrorist planning meeting in January 2000 in Malaysia.
But the F.B.I., long the institutional nemesis of the C.I.A., was not alerted until August 2001, when the agency asked that the two men be added to a terrorist watch list that would have blocked their entry into the country. It was too late. Although both men were living openly in San Diego - one was listed in the telephone book - the bureau did not find them in time, and it is not clear that anyone at the bureau tried very hard.
Mr. Clarke has said that he was never informed about the presence of the two men in the United States by the bureau or the intelligence agency and that had he known, there was at least a possibility that part of the Sept. 11 attacks could have been foiled.
In light of a flood of intelligence warnings throughout the spring and summer of 2001 that Qaeda terrorists were planning a catastrophic attack against the United States, Mr. Clarke said, "I would like to think that I would have released or at least had the F.B.I. release a press release with their names, with their descriptions, held a press conference, tried to get their names on pictures on the front page of every paper."
"It's very easy, in retrospect, to say that I would have done this or I would have done that," he said. "We'll never know."
At a time when the intelligence agency was not sharing information with the F.B.I., the bureau was finding it impossible to share information within its own ranks.
Robert S. Mueller III, the bureau director, and his senior deputies in Washington said they were not informed until after Sept. 11 that F.B.I. field offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis had reported information to Washington that summer suggesting that Al Qaeda or other terrorists might be developing a plot involving commercial airplanes.
In Phoenix, a field agent reported to Washington in July that he had noted a disturbing trend at flight schools in the area, where young foreigners who might be affiliated with Islamic terrorist groups appeared to be seeking training; he urged a nationwide investigation of flight schools.
In Minneapolis, a flight school alerted the F.B.I. in August that a student, Mr. Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was acting erratically and wanted to learn only how to steer a plane, not how to take off or land.
He was quickly arrested on immigration charges, and local bureau agents urged their superiors in Washington to obtain a warrant to search his belongings, arguing that he appeared to be a Islamic extremist; the warrant was refused. He was later found to have the telephone number in Germany of a ringleader of the terrorist cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ms. Rice has said that she was also not alerted before Sept. 11 to the arrest of Mr. Moussaoui, to warnings from Phoenix or to the presence in the United States of Mr. Alhazmi and Mr. Midhar.
And she suggested that it would have made no difference in the months before the attacks if she or President Bush had moved more aggressively to make sure that clues were being gathered and shared. "I do not believe that it is a good analysis to go back and assume that somehow maybe we could have gotten lucky by, quote, shaking the trees," she said. "Dick Clarke was shaking the trees. The director of central intelligence was shaking the trees, the director of the F.B.I. was shaking the trees.
"I've asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done," she added. "I know that there was no single thing that might have prevented that attack."
-------- police
Police Armor Prompts Lawsuits
Associated Press
Sunday, April 11, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2402-2004Apr10.html
FORT MYERS, Fla. -- A law enforcement coalition has sued the manufacturers of bulletproof vests that many police agencies believe lose effectiveness over time, failing to protect as promised.
The National Association of Police Organizations seeks as much as $310 million and class-action status in lawsuits filed Thursday in Florida and Michigan.
The lawsuits come five months after the Justice Department announced an investigation into the vests, which were sold to as many as 100,000 law enforcement officers.
Named are Jacksonville-based Armor Holdings and Second Chance Body Armor Inc., based in Central Lake, Mich. The suit also names the Japanese manufacturer of the material Zylon, Toyobo America Inc. and Toyobo Co. Ltd.
Zylon was marketed as a lighter-weight alternative to other materials used to make bulletproof vests, but police agencies say they suspect the material degrades and weakens with wear.
One lawsuit blames Second Chance armor in the June 2003 death of an Oceanside, Calif., police officer. Three bullets penetrated his Zylon vest.
"It's a travesty to have men and women, who risk their lives everyday in an effort to make our lives safer, to have been misled and given a false sense of security by depending on a vest that is ineffective," Mike Crow, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
Armor Holdings denied its vests were faulty.
"Our products have helped protect and preserve the lives of law enforcement officers throughout the country," the company said in a statement Thursday.
Representatives from Toyobo America did not return calls for comment, and the offices of Second Chance Body Armor were closed.
Toyobo has acknowledged that Zylon loses 10 percent to 20 percent of its durability within two years of manufacture, but contends the material works well in properly constructed body armor. It has blamed some of the vests' failure on the manufacturers.
The Washington-based National Association of Police Organizations represents almost half of the sworn law enforcement officers in the country, plus 11,000 retired officers.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Police, protesters clash over Taiwan vote
By Baker Li,
April 11, 2004
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040411-011729-7496r.htm
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Thousands of angry Taiwanese demonstrators protesting last month's election results clashed with police yesterday as they tried to storm the barbed-wire barriers protecting President Chen Shui-bian's office.
The violence erupted after more than 100,000 protesters marched in Taipei to demand an independent inquiry into an election-eve assassination attempt on Mr. Chen, which opposition supporters suspect was staged to win sympathy votes.
In the worst clash since the election, some 2,000 protesters used a large scaffold as a battering ram and tried to charge through the iron barriers and barbed wire that protect the president's office.
They threw at least one gasoline bomb, tables, chairs, placards and bottles before water cannons and about 8,000 helmeted police wielding wooden batons and shields forced them back. At least two protesters were sent to a hospital with bloodied foreheads.
"Chen Shui-bian step down. We want the truth. Go democracy," the mob shouted in the third large protest since Mr. Chen narrowly defeated Nationalist leader Lien Chan in the March 20 election.
Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou said 96 persons were injured in the clash, including 55 policemen. Thirteen protesters were arrested, of whom six had criminal records, he said.
Responding to accusations that the police crackdown was overly harsh, Mr. Ma said it was unfortunate but unavoidable.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Lien led a peaceful rally demanding an independent inquiry into the shooting, in which Mr. Chen was lightly wounded. The president has rejected demands for an inquiry, so Nationalists are calling for a referendum on the issue.
"In the last three weeks, Mr. Chen Shui-bian has shied away from, avoided and ignored the people's demands," Mr. Lien told a sea of supporters waving flags and tooting horns in the afternoon.
"This is not a long-term strategy. You cannot forever hide behind the iron barriers and barbed wire," he said to Mr. Chen.
Police estimated about 120,000 people at the rally, double the number at last weekend's event but fewer than the 500,000 who took to the streets on March 27 in Taiwan's largest protest.
The crowd began to break up after Mr. Lien left, when the violence started.
On March 19, Mr. Chen received a gash across the stomach and Vice President Annette Lu was wounded in the knee when an unknown assailant with a homemade handgun fired two bullets at them as they campaigned in the southern city of Tainan.
Mr. Chen won re-election the following day by 30,000 votes out of more than 13 million cast.
"The presidential election is over," Mr. Chen told a meeting of his Democratic Progressive Party.
"The election dispute has entered the legal process, and everyone should have the biggest confidence and patience in the fairness of our judicial system," he said, referring to opposition lawsuits seeking a recount and a new election.
----
Social Investing Still Domini's Passion
By REUTERS
April 11, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-column-profilescheduledweeklycolumnpic.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - With parents who met while working at an orphanage in 1948 post-war Italy, portfolio manager Amy Domini possesses an innate sense of activism.
Known as a grande dame of U.S. social investing, she has written one of the definitive books on the subject and oversees one of the largest U.S. portfolios that screens out tobacco, firearms, nuclear power and other industries.
The Domini Social Equity Fund, with about $1.3 billion under management, mirrors an index of 400 stocks selected for their companies' corporate citizenship, safe and useful products, respect for the environment, and other factors.
She helped develop the index in 1990 and launched the fund one year later.
``We are very satisfied with capitalism,'' she said. ``It has brought us food, clothing, shelter and human comforts, but it also can do that for a small group, to the exclusion of somebody else.''
The fund is weighted toward financials, technology and health care names, while light on energy and utility stocks. Among its largest holdings are Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) and Intel Corp. (INTC.O).
Recently booted from the index, Domini said, were Bank of America Corp. (BAC.N), in part for its involvement in the Wall Street and mutual fund scandals of recent years, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT.N) for its tendency to raise controversy in local communities.
Larger corporations that are considered leaders in their respective businesses are held to ``slightly higher standards,'' Domini said.
And investors need not trade their conscience for performance as the fund's results have not strayed far from the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 (.SPX).
According to fund tracker Lipper Inc., Domini Social Equity is up more than 1.8 percent in 2004, compared with a gain of nearly 1.7 percent for Vanguard's S&P 500 index fund. In the past year, Domini's fund has risen 34.2 percent, while the S&P fund is up 35 percent.
When viewed among its social-investing peers in the three-year time frame, the Domini fund is a top performer.
Lipper found that the average three-year annualized performance of large-cap social funds is a loss of 1.62 percent, vs. Domini's gain of nearly 0.7 percent. Over the period, the S&P index fund added 0.52 percent.
CAMBRIDGE BROKER
Domini, 54, was born in New York City and grew up in Connecticut ``in a sort of classic Eastern liberal environment.'' But when she was starting out in her business career, she ``really did not have any passion for the economic justice area.''
The mother of two college-aged sons, Domini is divorced.
Upon graduation from Boston University 31 years ago, she joined Tucker Anthony, the venerable Boston brokerage.
``A friend said 'What are you going to do after you graduate?''' she recalled. ``We both took typing classes, but neither of us got jobs typing, but we got jobs photocopying at Tucker Anthony.''
Two years later, in 1975, she became a broker in the firm's Cambridge office, the epicenter of academic America, where she first met clients who wanted to avoid investments that conflicted with their values.
``With new brokerage relationships, I would ask if there was something they wanted to avoid,'' Domini said. ``And they always said there was something that they did not want to invest in. This convinced me it was real.''
This culminated in her book, ``Ethical Investing,'' published in the mid-1980s, just ahead of the ``greed is good'' Wall Street boom.
She still resides in Cambridge, and splits her time between Boston and New York City, where the fund is based.
In the 1990s, with the fund and index up and running, Domini joined with Peter Kinder and Steven Lydenberg to form a social-investing research company to advance the investment style among institutional investors and the public alike.
Together, the three put out ``The Social Investment Almanac'' with 51 contributing authors in 1992, followed by ``Investing for Good'' a year later.
She said the almanac was very important ``in giving comfort to a board that had to make investment decisions,'' while the follow-up title was geared toward the general public.
Once the fund became large enough to support its own infrastructure in 1997, it split from the research shop.
Now known as KLD, the research operation services ``everybody in the industry,'' Domini said, while the fund retains her name.
----
Demonstrators Seek Removal Of U.S.-Led Forces From Iraq
Protesters Oppose Marines Entering City of Fallujah
By Bill Broadway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2371-2004Apr10.html
About 200 people gathered in Lafayette Square near the White House yesterday to protest the war in Iraq and demand the withdrawal of U.S.-led occupation forces. Then they took to the streets of Northwest Washington chanting: "No justice! No peace! U.S. out of the Middle East!"
The demonstration and march were peaceful. But the rhetoric was strident, recalling the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s on a much smaller scale.
"The Bush administration is a murderous regime, trying to strip the rights of the Iraqi people," shouted Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, member of the steering committee for International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which organized the rally in Washington and protests in 50 other U.S. cities. Organizers estimated overall participation at "tens of thousands."
"We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Iraq and in other countries," Verheyden-Hilliard told a crowd of people of varied ages and ethnic backgrounds. "We tell them that we [the American people] are not their enemy, and we will work to bring this war to an end."
Organizers said they called for the emergency protest Tuesday night after U.S.-led occupation forces surrounded the city of Fallujah and 2,500 U.S. Marines entered the city in search of insurgents who had killed and mutilated four U.S. contract workers last week. Medical officials in Fallujah have said that at least 450 Iraqis have been killed there since Tuesday.
Other speakers -- from Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada, the Free Palestine Alliance and Mexico Solidarity Network -- demanded the impeachment of President Bush for crimes against humanity and accused the United States of hiring unscrupulous mercenaries to guard Iraq's oil fields. They lashed out at corporations being paid billions of dollars to do work in Iraq and accused the United States of wanting to control Iraqi oil.
"What they're saying is correct," said T.J. Myers, 28, a bystander who said he recently returned from a year's military service in Baghdad and left the Army after a seven-year enlistment.
"It's all about money," said Myers, who lives in Fort Benning, Ga., and was in Washington on vacation. "It's my first time in D.C., and I have never seen so many homeless people in my life and right near the White House. How can we send [billions] to another country when we have so many people in trouble here?"
Many in the crowd cheered the speakers and held bright green signs that said: "U.S. Out of Iraq. Self-determination. Not Colonial Occupation."
Some observers applauded softly while others stood quietly by their bicycles or listened from park benches.
District resident Don Harward, who identified himself as a retired educator who opposes the war, said he came to the protest to see what ideas the organizers might offer about ending the military quagmire in Iraq.
"I'm not impressed with what I've been hearing from the administrative leadership, and I'm not impressed with the idealistic rhetoric of rallies like this," Harward said. "I'd like to hear solutions. But I don't hear solutions."
The demonstration was interrupted briefly by Rahim Al Shumary, who identified himself as an Iraqi American and a Shiite. He began yelling from the sidelines that most Iraqis welcome the presence of the U.S.-led occupation forces and that the militants who are attacking the coalition forces come from Syria and other countries.
"America did a good job for the Iraqi people. Saddam, he did worse," Shumary said as he was pushed away from the protest area by two policemen and was swarmed by reporters from international news organizations.
Some observers along the two-hour parade route, north to Adams Morgan and back to Lafayette Square, cheered the protesters. Others watched quietly but approved the message and supported the protesters' right to demonstrate.
"It's time [to] get our boys out of that country," said Melvin McClain, 45, outside Central Union Mission on 14th Street.
"I'm happy to see the protest," said John Gallietta, 44, a communications engineer and 10-year Army veteran visiting from Sacramento. Part of being a democracy is having the freedom to express your views, he said.
--------
Syrians Test Limits Of Political Dissent
Assad's Government Talks of Reform
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2604-2004Apr10?language=printer
DAMASCUS, Syria -- "I smell the odor of corruption."
That was the opening line in a recent story in the official Syrian newspaper al-Thawra that detailed the handling of a health crisis over contaminated water in the far northeastern town of al-Hassaka.
In other times, in other countries, such an exposé of local malfeasance would hardly raise a storm. But the harsh and open critique was so unusual in authoritarian Syria that it set off a tumultuous chain of events. A central government representative tried to get Yunis Khalef, the reporter who wrote the story, fired. Police visited his house after midnight. He fled to Damascus. Another newspaper rushed to defend the journalist, who was fired from al-Thawra, then reinstated.
The incident was one sign that Syrians are openly challenging the tight restrictions that have ruled public life. While the government seems conflicted over how to respond, President Bashar Assad's Baath Party, which has a monopoly on power here, is starting to talk about reforming itself.
Political dissent is still dangerous in Syria, and speaking out is far from routine. Last month, a human rights group reported that a military court had sentenced 14 democracy activists to jail terms of up to one year. The activists were charged with belonging to an "underground organization," said Aktham Naisse, who heads the Committees for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights in Syria.
Naisse told the Associated Press that the men had been detained last August just before a meeting to discuss political reforms. "The sentences are evidence that the Syrian authorities do not respect human rights," he said.
"At best, there is confusion," said Waddah Abd Rabbo, editor of the Economy newspaper, one of a pair of independent news outlets permitted by the government. "The problem is that there is no program that lets Syrians know what the country is going to be, what kind of economic or political system we are really going to have. No one can plan. So people are testing and others are trying to restrain change." The Economy took up the al-Hassaka case and defended the al-Thawra journalist.
"There is no conviction that we even need political reform," said Nabil Sukkar, a private consultant and former World Bank official.
Several protests have been staged recently. A group of demonstrators held a sit-in at the People's Assembly in early March to demand freedom for political prisoners and to promote a petition aimed at ending emergency laws that effectively obstruct dissent. Police stepped in and arrested several participants, including three journalists and a U.S. Embassy official who were observing the protest. They were all released after a few hours.
Despite the arrests, activists said they considered their ability to hold the demonstration in the first place something of a landmark victory.
"As activists, we were able to send a clear message to the Syrian street and to international public opinion that we are serious about our demands," Naisse said. "Sooner or later our hopes and aspirations will be fulfilled."
Shortly after the protest in Damascus, a riot broke out at a soccer match in the northern city of Al Qamishli, pitting Syrian Arabs against ethnic Kurds. The riot offered new opportunities for dissent. The Syrian Arabs chanted "Long live Saddam Hussein," and the Kurds responded by shouting praise for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, Syria's arch-enemy, and waving both Kurdish and American flags. Kurdish rioters then burned several Syrian government buildings.
Clashes between Kurds and Syrian security forces then spread to other cities, including Damascus, and became an outlet for pent-up Kurdish demands for equal rights. About 1 million Kurds hold Syrian citizenship and another 300,000 are refugees, most of them from Turkey. In all, about 24 people died in the unrest, according to reports from human rights groups and foreign media.
Syrian officials asserted that provocateurs from Kurdish regions of northern Iraq incited the riots. Al-Thawra spoke darkly of "foreign pressures" -- code for the United States -- designed to destabilize Syria.
A heavy police presence in Kurdish neighborhoods and pleas by Kurdish groups eventually calmed the situation. The complaints, however, continued. "Kurdish aspirations are ignored," said Salah Barwari, an official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an Iraqi party that has administered part of northern Iraq under U.S. protection since the early 1990s, and now is represented on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. The group has maintained an office for many years in Syria. Barwari said that Syrian Kurds want citizenship for refugees, equal job opportunities and recognition of Kurds as a distinct nationality.
Barwari acknowledged that the Kurdish drive for autonomy in Iraq has had an emotional impact on Syrian Kurds. "The situation in Iraqi Kurdistan has given Syrian Kurds the strength to demand the same," he said.
The Syrian government has dabbled with political and economic reform since the death in 2000 of President Hafez Assad, who ruled Syria for three decades. He was succeeded by Bashar Assad, his son, who raised expectations that the generational change in Syria's leadership would translate into political and economic change.
But the government has responded inconsistently to calls for reform. Long-announced moves to liberalize the economy have unfolded slowly. Assad has permitted operations by a pair of foreign-owned banks, and has eliminated a secretive economic court that tried corruption cases but was widely regarded as a means of maintaining control over the economy. Internet access is allowed, although some Web sites, such as Yahoo and the Hotmail e-mail service, are blocked.
"Just for economic change, we need open debate, we need accountability. And we don't have it," said Sukkar, the private consultant.
The government is now trumpeting reform within the 1.5 million-member Baath Party, which dominates government, state-owned factories and other institutions in this country of about 18 million.
Baathists are quick to insist that they share only the name of Iraq's Baath party, although they have the same roots. Fayez Sayegh , a senior Baath official and former director of state radio and television, said the first step in the party's reform is the formation of committees to redefine Baathist ideology, whose "eternal missions" are summed up in the party motto: Unity, Freedom and Socialism. Unity refers to pan-Arab political union, something that Sayegh says is now only a hazy prospect.
As for socialism, Sayegh said the government would shed the remnants of Soviet-style control of the economy, opening it to foreign investment.
On the issue of freedoms, he did not address the emergency laws that effectively curb civil rights in Syria and are rationalized by the official state of war between Israel and Syria. Nonetheless, Sayegh said, Syria has to change in order to fit in to the "present world order." His prescription: a rejuvenation of the Baath party.
The party is not scheduled to announce any change in its position on freedoms until 2005, when the Baathists hold their next congress.
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Taiwan Riot Police Battle Election Protesters
April 11, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/international/asia/11TAIW.html
HONG KONG, April 11 -- Thousands of demonstrators wearing black armbands marched through downtown streets here on Sunday afternoon to protest peacefully the Chinese government's decision last Tuesday to limit further moves by this territory toward democracy.
Following a large but violent demonstration in Taipei on Saturday over an election dispute there, the rally here was another reminder of the strong democratic sentiments now bubbling around China's periphery.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in Japan now, is scheduled to visit Beijing and Shanghai from Tuesday through Thursday. The State Department has been increasingly critical in recent weeks of China's efforts to restrict Hong Kong's democratic development.
Organizers estimated that "more than 15,000" people participated in today's march, while the police declined to provide a figure. The unexpectedly large turnout for an event only scheduled last Tuesday night and held in the middle of a four-day Easter holiday weekend was the latest sign of the growing politicization of a city once known for its preoccupation with material prosperity.
Many in the crowd were middle-aged, and said in interviews that they were unaccustomed to involvement in public protests. Some had only become politically active last summer, when 500,000 people marched in a successful effort to force the government to withdraw plans for a stringent internal-security law, while a few said that they had never attended a protest before Sunday.
"The central government is trying to put more controls on Hong Kong's people," said May Tam, 53, who said she was a housewife who had never been to a demonstration before, but was worried about the future of her three grown children as Beijing clamps down.
Ms. Tam and many others here want to introduce universal suffrage with the next elections for the chief executive in 2007 and for all seats in the Legislative Council in elections to be held in 2008.
A committee of 800 prominent citizens, most with ties to Beijing, currently chooses candidates who are allowed to run for chief executive. Half the members in the 60-seat Legislative Council in the next elections for that body on Sept. 12 will be reserved for various special interests, most of them friendly to Beijing, while the rest will be selected by the public.
The Standing Committee of the Communist Party-controlled National People's Congress ruled in Beijing last Tuesday morning that Hong Kong's chief executive would have to obtain its approval before submitting any electoral reform bills to the legislature. The Standing Committee made the ruling by issuing an official interpretation, which has the force of law, of Hong Kong's Basic Law, the mini-constitution that this territory has followed since Britain handed it over to China in 1997.
The ruling angered many here because the Basic Law calls for an eventual move to universal suffrage and lays out a procedure for electoral changes. That procedure appears to call for Beijing's assent only at the end of the political process here, by which time considerable political momentum might have accumulated that might make it hard for Beijing to veto a plan with broad support in Hong Kong.
The Standing Committee also declared last Tuesday that the Legislative Council here where democracy advocates hope to win a majority for the first time in the elections on Sept. 12 cannot take up electoral reform bills on its own.
In a statement issued after Sunday's march, the Hong Kong government defended Beijing's interpretation of the Basic Law, saying that, "The interpretation has laid down a clear set of legislative procedures, enabling us to proceed to the next stage of work on a solid legal foundation."
Beijing officials have contended that they are trying to protect China's sovereignty and can build a more prosperous Hong Kong by imposing stability. But many here contend that Beijing is taking away rights that citizens here have come to expect, like the ability to choose their own leaders someday.
Some protesters seemed discouraged about the likelihood of persuading Beijing to change tack. "They have to power to stop our progress, we can't do anything, but we come anyway," said Sam Lee, a 45-year-old computer engineer who came with seven family members.
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