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NUCLEAR
Cleanup time in Vieques
Iran says IAEA experts visited heavy water plant at Arak
Israel maintains nuclear smokescreen 18 years after Vanunu blew whistle
Vanunu faces unprecedented restrictions after 18-year sentence
Israel's nuclear whistleblower remains defiant after 18 years behind bars
Israeli Nuke Whistleblower Makes Appeal
N. Korea Says Linking It to Terrorism Is Far-Fetched
Report: N. Korea's Kim in China; Summit Talks Monday
Assessing the risk of nuclear terrorism
Public deserves far more information on nuclear testing
Pantex finishes repairs to contain blast matter
Behind Diplomatic Moves, Military Plan Was Launched
Rove Revels in Democrat Kerry's Lead
Rice Refutes Book on Date That Bush Decided to Go to War
Kerry Accuses Bush of Being Ineffective on War
MILITARY
EU maintains Chinese arms embargo
2 U.S. Officers Shot Dead in Kosovo
3 Die in Shootout Between U.N. Police in Kosovo
New Iron Curtain descending
Spanish Leader Orders All 1,300 Troops in Iraq to Withdraw
Guerrilla ``psychological operation'' has U.S. military worried
US holding 200 Iraqi 'mutineers'
Other Nations May Reassess Iraqi Forces - Rice
Revolts in Iraq Deepen Crisis In Occupation
Bremer Says Iraqis Not Ready to Secure Country; 5 Marines Killed
Flashpoints in Iraq Calm as Violence Breaks Out Elsewhere
Top officers from three communities named to head
Israelis kill Hamas chief in Gaza attack
Diplomat sent to New Zealand to deal with Israeli arrests
U.N. condemns Israeli slaying Hamas chief
Israeli Strike Kills Another Hamas Chief
Sharon Hopes to Show He Isn't Running From a Fight
Hamas Appoints New Leader After Killing
Leader of Hamas Is Killed by Israel
Hamas Vows to Avenge Israel's Killing of Rantissi
How Israel's Mossad captured nuclear whistleblower
How to Improve Domestic Intelligence
Robot Plane Drops Bomb in Successful Test
This Is A War Of Liberation And We Are The Enemy
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
How the Death of Judy's Father Made America More Secretive
High Court to Hear 'Enemy Combatant' Cases
Cases Before Supreme Court Will Test Limits of Presidential Power
Judges on Little - Known Court Paid for Life
Pre-9/11 Files Show Warnings Were More Dire and Persistent
Gorelick Defends Information-Sharing Policies
ENERGY
Experts: U.S. May Be Losing Fuel Cell Race
OTHER
Antidepressant Use in Children Soars Despite Efficacy Doubts
ACTIVISTS
A whistle blower mightier than Israel
Man who revealed Israel's nuclear secret set for release
Can the Rights of People Simply Disappear by Presidential Order?
Anti-war sentiment growing even among military families
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Cleanup time in Vieques
NY Daily News
April 18, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/boroughs/story/184355p-159906c.html
Tomorrow, April 19, will mark five years since David Sanes Rodríguez was killed on Vieques. And during that time, much has changed on that little Puerto Rican island.
Sanes Rodríguez, a 33-year-old civilian security guard, was accidentally killed in 1999 by a U.S. Navy pilot who dropped two 500-pound bombs on the island - but missed his intended target.
However, the young man's death was not in vain: It ignited a firestorm of protest that culminated with the May 1, 2003, Navy pullout from Vieques, which it had mercilessly used for target practice for more than 60 years.
Yet, after six decades of problems, peace and fairness for the almost 10,000 U.S. citizens who inhabit the 55-square-mile island mean much more than just an end to the bombing.
"If they do not eliminate the military toxins accumulated over six decades of bombing, the Navy will continue to kill our people for a long time to come," said Ismael Guadalupe, spokesman for the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques, one of the main groups that opposed the Navy's presence.
And two years after the Navy stopped military exercises, Guadalupe's words ring as true as when he uttered them.
"There hasn't been any cleaning," Guadalupe said Friday from the committee's office in Vieques. "The Puerto Rican government is asleep at the wheel. The Department of Justice has no interest in cleaning the island."
A lot needs to be done. After all, what the Navy left behind was an unfortunate legacy of poisonous chemicals, toxic waste, illness, poverty and God knows how much unexploded ammunition sprinkled on the island's beautiful beaches.
Among Puerto Rico's 78 municipalities, Vieques has the highest cancer mortality rate.
And despite official denials, there is no mystery to this health crisis. In addition to leaving behind unexploded bombs, the Navy, by its own admission, dropped napalm on Vieques and fired uranium-tipped shells there that were never recovered.
"These poisonous remnants remain," said Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-Queens). "And they need to be cleaned up before one can honestly say the Navy has fully vacated the island of Vieques."
Actually, in May of 1999, one month after the death of Sanes Rodríguez and the start of the civil disobedience campaign in the bombing zone, the Navy admitted it had fired depleted uranium projectiles during maneuvers in February of that year.
Yet the people of Vieques have never been tested for uranium contamination.
"The Puerto Rican Health Department has been totally negligent for not examining our people," declared committee member Nilda Medina. "We have no doubt that the very high cancer incidence among our population is related to depleted uranium and other military toxics."
Summing up the current situation in Vieques, Guadalupe sounded proud, frustrated and militant - all at the same time.
"Make no mistake the withdrawal of the Navy was a great triumph of the people," he said. "But the cleaning of the island has not happened. We are still getting sick and dying in our own homes. We have won a battle but not the war."
After 60 years of bombing the island, the Navy should not wait any longer to clean the environmental mess it left behind. Protecting their health is the least Washington should do for the long-suffering people of Vieques.
-------- iran
Iran says IAEA experts visited heavy water plant at Arak
(AFP)
April 18, 2004
http://www.iranmania.com/news/170404b.asp
TEHRAN, April 16 - Inspectors from the UN's nuclear watchdog have visited Iran's heavy water plant at Arak, southwest of Tehran, and a new mission from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will arrive in the country before June, state television said Friday.
"IAEA experts have visited the heavy water installations at Arak ... and a new agency mission will come to Iran before the next meeting of the agency's board of governors next June," said Iran's atomic energy chief, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh.
"We hope that conforming to our discussions with (IAEA chief Mohamed) ElBaradei and the European countries the Iranian nuclear dossier will return to a normal process," he added.
Diplomats in Vienna say that besides the existing heavy water plant, Iran in June plans to build a heavy-water reactor which could produce plutonium for military use.
Iran, for its part, says the reactor will be exclusively for research and the production of radioisotopes for medical and industrial use.
Tehran said last autumn it wanted to build such a plant but actual construction is seen by diplomats as something which can only cause concern internationally, particularly in the United States, which believes Iran wants to give itself nuclear weapons under cover of research for peaceful ends.
The reactor to be built at Arak would not be in violation of safeguards which the IAEA enforces under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Last October, Iran gave the IAEA what it said was a complete declaration of its nuclear activities.
It was later found to have made a number of omissions, including its acquisition of designs for sophisticated P-2 centrifuges that can produce weapons-grade uranium, way above the normal level of enrichment required for atomic reactors.
Earlier in April, during a visit by ElBaradei, Iran promised to intensify its cooperation with the IAEA and rapidly answer outstanding questions in order to resolve doubts on its nuclear programme.
-------- israel
Israel maintains nuclear smokescreen 18 years after Vanunu blew whistle
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Apr 18, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040418041732.1vi0y2ub.html
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9317883%5E1702,00.html
For the past 40 years, Israel has sought to maintain a veil of secrecy over its nuclear capacity even if Mordechai Vanunu's revelations erased any shred of doubt about its possession of an atomic arsenal.
Ever since the 1965 inauguration of the Dimona plant in the southern Negev desert, the one-time workplace of the whistleblower Vanunu, Israel has consistently refused to deny or confirm that it possesses nuclear arms.
But even before Vanunu, who is to be released on Wednesday after 18 years in prison, leaked details of the program to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper in 1986, the official policy of ambiguity had left few people fooled.
Israel currently has two nuclear facilities, the reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert built with French aid and capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium and a smaller research reactor at Nahal Sorek, south of Tel Aviv.
Under an understanding with the United States dating back to 1969, Israel has committed itself to abstain from any comment on its nuclear potential and not to carry out nuclear tests.
In return, the United States does not pressure Israel to adhere to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which would oblige the Jewish state to submit its nuclear facilities to international supervision by the UN's atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The agency's Director General Mohamed ElBaradei recently urged Israel to give up its nuclear arsenal, claiming it spurred a regional arms race.
"I am not happy with the status quo, because I see a lot of frustration in the Middle East due to Israel's sitting on nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons capability, while others in the Middle East are committed to the NPT," he told the Israeli daily Haaretz.
As an extra precaution, the whole program is also covered by military censorship, which the Israeli media regularly bypasses by quoting foreign publications.
According to these "foreign experts", Israel has used its reactor at Dimona to produce around 200 nuclear warheads.
Peter Hounam, the journalist who first broke the Vanunu story for the Sunday Times, criticised Israel's "gall" for still failing to come clean about its capabilities but said it was determined not to upset its allies in Washington.
But its decision to try to gag Vanunu at all costs even after his release was likely to backfire and serve to increase demands for clarity, he added.
"I think that the international reaction to the way he is being treated will add to the impetus for the UN" being given access to the Dimona plant, he told AFP.
"Everything about this stinks of hypocrisy," he added.
No Israeli leader has ever broken the long-standing taboo by unequivocally recognising the existence of a nuclear arsenal, but allusions have become less and less oblique.
The former premier Shimon Peres, considered the father of Israel's nuclear program after reaching agreement with France back in 1956 for the provision of a nuclear reactor and uranium, effectively confirmed its existence in an interview with French television in 2001.
"The suspicion and the fog which surround this project are constructive, for it increases our power of deterrence," said Peres in a documentary on Dimona.
Peres, who was director at Israel's defence ministry in the 1950s, has no sympathy for Vanunu's decision to turn the spotlight on the nuclear issue.
"He betrayed his country and that's it," Peres told reporters recently.
"Nobody gave him permission or authority to do things against his own country."
----
Vanunu faces unprecedented restrictions after 18-year sentence
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Apr 18, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040418040020.96nhp2k9.html
As he exits the gates of Israel's top-security Shikma prison on Wednesday, Mordechai Vanunu will savour the sweet taste of freedom for the first time in 18 years.
But the man who blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear program will still not be at liberty to resume the life of a normal citizen, and will instead be subject to unprecedented restrictions for a prisoner who has served his term.
While some members of the government had been pushing for Vanunu to be confined to house arrest, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided that he will instead be kept under strict supervision.
According to his office, Sharon accepted the advice of Attorney General Menachem Mazuz that Vanunu be "subjected to appropriate supervisory measures, in accordance with the law, in order to prevent him from perpetrating additional security offences."
A senior government source said that security officers handed Vanunu a list of restrictions in his prison cell, signed by the Interior Minister Avraham Poraz.
Vanunu would be prevented from leaving Israel and contacting foreign embassies and foreigners, as well as be required to inform authorities if he wanted to leave his hometown, the source added.
He will not be expressly forbidden from contact with the Israeli media, but they are subject to strict censorship on the nuclear program.
His brother Meir said that Vanunu was appealing against plans to prevent him from possessing a mobile phone or using the Internet.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which has been asked by Vanunu to represent him on his release after he parted company with his long-time lawyer recently, said the restrictions could be challenged in court if Vanunu wishes to pursue the case.
"He has completed his sentence and there is no reason to place restrictions on him just because he might do something else in the future," association spokesman Yoav Loeff told AFP.
"You cannot punish someone further who has finished serving his sentence."
The Israeli cabinet minister Gideon Ezra is convinced that Vanunu, who has remained unrepentant about leaking details of the top-secret Dimona nuclear plant to Britain's Sunday Times, still constitutes a danger to state security.
"I visited him myself in his prison cell, where he told me of his intention to continue to divulge secrets, without expressing the least regret for what he had done," Ezra recently told Israeli deputies.
Ezra had pushed for Vanunu to be subjected to administrative detention -- an archaic procedure which allows the authorities to hold a suspect for renewable periods of six months without charge or trial.
However Peter Hounam, the Sunday Times journalist who broke the Vanunu story back in 1986, said the idea that his contact had more secrets to reveal was "nonsense" and said his treatment continued to be "utterly inhumane".
"I debriefed him in '86 over a five-week period. There is absolutely nothing that he knows about Dimona that we have not recorded," he told AFP.
"Their real concern is that he is a living reminder that Israel is not telling the truth" about its nuclear arsenal.
Menachem Hofnung, an expert in national security law at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, said he was "sure that it (the restriction order) is going to be challenged" after Vanunu's release.
"It is unprecedented for a prisoner who is being released after completing his full jail term (to be subject) to such restrictions," he told AFP.
However he doubted that Vanunu would become a cause celebre as Israeli society was broadly sympathetic to the notion of restrictions on the grounds of national security.
Vanunu has told friends and relatives that he wants to renounce his Israeli citizenship, hoping to emigrate after his release.
But the restrictions mean that a man who is still widely considered by Israelis as a traitor -- an opinion compounded by his conversion to Christianity -- will have no option but to remain in the Jewish state.
----
Israel's nuclear whistleblower remains defiant after 18 years behind bars
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Apr 18, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040418040548.vrcc5jty.html
Prison has not broken him. On the verge of freedom after 18 years of incarceration, Mordechai Vanunu is as convinced as ever that he was right to lift the lid on Israel's nuclear program.
His numerous enemies in Israel as well as his foreign admirers are in agreement on one thing at least: the incredible determination of a man who has spent more than 11 years in solitary confinement.
His ironically titled poem "I am your spy", which was composed in prison, bears eloquent testimony to his belief that he has been invested with a mission to save the region from nuclear catastrophe.
"I have no choice. I am a little guy, a citizen, an ordinary fellow, but I will do my duty. I have heard the voice of my conscience. And there's nowhere to run," wrote Vanunu from his prison in the southern town of Ashkelon.
His time behind bars has certainly left its mark. Now aged 50, he has put on weight and his hair has thinned to a few strands around the temples.
But his aura of defiance still beams from his periodic prison mugshots.
Kidnapped by the secret services and then sentenced in 1986 for "espionage" for having leaked top-secret information on the Dimona nuclear plant in the southern Negev desert to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper, he remains a traitor in the eyes of most Israelis or, at best, dangerously naive.
But for many foreigners and anti-nuclear campaigners, he is a prisoner of conscience whose captivity shames the Jewish state.
In 1987 he was awarded the Prix Right Livelihood, "the alternative Nobel peace prize", and Amnesty International has also demanded his release.
"They have tried to break him in prison. This has not come about but the years of isolation have left their mark," said Gideon Spiro, a militant Israeli pacifist who heads a support committee for Vanunu and has engaged in regular correspondence with the prisoner who has been prevented from having any visits.
"Vanunu is convinced that he has succeeded in drawing the world's attention to the dangers of nuclear arms in Israel and the whole Middle East. But he hoped for more than that -- he dreamt that his revelations would lead to the elimination of weapons of mass destruction."
Vanunu settled in Israel as a boy when his devoutly Jewish family emigrated from Morocco in 1963.
After three years of national service, Mordechai Vanunu signed up to work as a nuclear technician in Dimona.
Often working nightshifts at the plant, he also found time to study philosophy and geography at the nearby university of Beersheva.
"It was there that he began his drift to the left, becoming increasingly active against the (1982) war in Lebanon," said Spiro.
But his revolt against his background led him to cross what Israelis of all political persuasions regard as a red line. He abandoned Judaism and converted to Protestantism.
Vananu now signs his letters with the initials J.C. after his new name John Crossman which he chose in reference to the cross of Christ, said his brother Meir.
"Mordechai wishes today to leave the country and asked five years ago to renounce his Israeli nationality but he has run into a dead end as, according to the law, you must first have another nationality," he told AFP.
Meir said that Mordechai hopes to receive political asylum in Britain or France.
But the Israeli authorities are unlikely to allow him to leave the country after his release on April 21.
Meir said he was worried about the psychological consequences of the long years in prison on his brother who he said "feels constantly hounded".
His release is unlikely to lead to a reunification with his father Shlomo, a former rabbi, who has disowned his oldest son while his mother has also never visited him behind bars.
Vanunu is also a traitor in their eyes -- for having converted to Christianity.
----
Israeli Nuke Whistleblower Makes Appeal
April 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Nuclear-Whistleblower.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- The man who exposed Israel's nuclear weapons program to the world appealed a series of restrictions Israel has said it will impose on him after he is released from prison later this week.
Concerned that Mordechai Vanunu's release after 18 years will refocus unwanted attention on its nuclear capabilities, Israeli security has said it will impose several restrictions on him. He will be prevented from traveling abroad for a year, from contacting foreigners and from discussing his work at the nuclear reactor and the circumstances surrounding his capture.
He also will be required to inform the security services of his whereabouts.
``This is just the continuation of his confinement with different conditions,'' said Vanunu's lawyer, Oded Seller. ``These are the most serious restrictions.''
Vanunu asked the Interior Ministry and Israeli army on Sunday to cancel the restrictions, Seller said. If the request is denied, Vanunu will appeal to the Supreme Court, he said.
Vanunu wants to live abroad, Seller said. In addition, he would like to be in contact with his adoptive parents, who are Americans from Minnesota.
Vanunu, 50, told The Sunday Times of London in 1986 what he learned during his nine years of work as a technician at Israel's nuclear reactor. He was to be released Wednesday.
Vanunu has said he has nothing more to reveal about his work at the reactor. Using the information and pictures Vanunu provided, experts estimated Israel had the sixth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
-------- korea
N. Korea Says Linking It to Terrorism Is Far-Fetched
Sun Apr 18, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4857214
LONDON - North Korea said Sunday that comments by Vice President Dick Cheney linking the one-party Asian state to terrorism were far-fetched.
Cheney said in a speech Friday that North Korea was ruled by a tyrannical government that thrived on terrorism and pointed to the fate of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for threatening the United States.
"It is quite understandable that the U.S. can not sleep in peace, terror-stricken by Al Qaeda, but its unreasonably linking the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) to such (an) organization is an expression of total ignorance and nothing but a far-fetched attempt to justify its hostile policy toward the DPRK," the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted a Foreign Ministry official as saying.....
The North Korean official also repeated an earlier statement that Pyongyang would consider the imposition of economic sanctions as a declaration of war.
Cheney, on a visit to South Korea dominated by a crisis over the North's nuclear ambitions, said last week that Pyongyang could spark an Asian arms race and even supply nuclear know-how and weapons to militant groups unless its nuclear programs are stopped.
The North Korean crisis has simmered since October 2002, when U.S. officials say Pyongyang disclosed it was working on a clandestine program to enrich uranium -- in addition to a plutonium-based program that had been mothballed in 1994.
Cheney came to the region armed with new intelligence from A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist believed to have sold nuclear technology to North Korea as well as to Libya and Iran. He hopes the intelligence will convince China and other key members of six-party talks on North Korea of the urgency of the threat.
U.S. officials say Khan provided third-party confirmation that Pyongyang already has up to three nuclear devices.
North Korea is ruled by Kim Jong-il, who inherited power from his father Kim Il-sung in the first communist dynastic succession. Kim Il-sung, who founded the DPRK in 1948 remains "Eternal President" of the country despite his death in July 1994.
----
Report: N. Korea's Kim in China; Summit Talks Monday
Sun Apr 18, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4857054
SEOUL - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il entered China by train Sunday and will travel to Beijing overnight for talks to include the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons, South Korean state broadcaster KBS news said.
Kim's special train passed into China late Sunday and would arrive in Beijing Monday, the television network quoted sources in the Chinese border city of Dandong as saying.
Kim's four-day visit to Beijing, Pyongyang's old communist ally, would be his first since May 2001, it said, adding he would meet Chinese President Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao in the first summit since the new Chinese leaders took office last year.
Officials in China and South Korea, which closely monitors developments in its northern communist neighbor, could not immediately confirm the KBS report. Diplomats say rumors of a possible Kim visit have circulated for several weeks.
There was no mention of the visit on North Korea's official KCNA news agency.
China has hosted two rounds of talks with the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia to try to get North Korea to give up its atomic bomb-making ambitions.
The six-party talks have made little progress on how North Korea's two nuclear programs would be dismantled and its energy and security concerns addressed.
In the last round in February, the six agreed to meet again before mid-year and to start working-level talks before that to discuss a dispute that flared up in October 2002.
U.S. intelligence experts estimate North Korea produced enough plutonium for several bombs in the early 1990s, before a U.S.-negotiated 1994 freeze of the North's program which Pyongyang repudiated last year.
North Korea has said it had restarted the frozen nuclear reactor in mid-2003 and completed making weapons-grade plutonium from fuel extracted from the plant.
But Pyongyang has gone back on its reported October 2002 admission to the United States that it had a uranium-based program and now denies this.
-------- terrorism
Assessing the risk of nuclear terrorism
Experts differ on likelihood of 'dirty bomb' attack
James Sterngold,
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/18/MNGP9673BG1.DTL
After two wars and more than two years of efforts to plug holes in America's post-Sept. 11 defenses against surprise attacks, no threat is regarded as more alarming, more complex or more filled with vexing uncertainties than nuclear terrorism.
President Bush solemnly declared two months ago that nuclear weapons were "the greatest threat to mankind," and he acknowledged they were becoming easier to acquire. Just last week, the Department of Energy announced it was accelerating a program, in the face of mounting criticism, to take back the roughly 19 tons of highly enriched uranium the United States has supplied over the years to sometimes lightly guarded reactors in countries such as Iran, Pakistan, South Africa and Mexico.
"I will tell you that the threat is real," Paul Longsworth, the Energy Department's deputy administrator for defense and nuclear nonproliferation, said in an interview. "There will be additional steps."
The president, working with several dozen countries, has put in place a program called the Proliferation Security Initiative to intercept shipments of illicit bomb-making materials and to tighten controls on the export of equipment that can be used in the bomb-making process. The Bush administration also has proposed measures to prevent countries that do not already have the technology for creating reactor fuel from acquiring it, even for commercial power reactors open to inspection.
Yet, frustrated by what she says has been the administration's lethargic response to this dire threat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said earlier this month she was co-sponsoring legislation to accelerate the programs for securing the tons of weapons-grade material left in the former Soviet bloc to keep it away from terrorists, and she has exhorted the administration to take a more urgent approach to the problem.
All these measures underscore the reality that -- as nearly every expert agrees -- the threat of nuclear terrorism is in a class by itself in terms of how to measure the real likelihood and its potentially horrific impact and what to do about it.
A key problem is that, while the probability of a successful strike is regarded as extremely low, the subject is shrouded in a fog of uncertainty so dense that many studies of the issue lead to what researchers often admit are debates built on faith as much as science, with little agreement except that a single strike could alter the course of history in a million-degree burst of heat and light.
"Very quickly this argument becomes theological," said Brian Jenkins, a government adviser on terrorism for 30 years and a senior official at the Rand Corp. think tank in Santa Monica. "Like theology, there are nonbelievers. There are also those who see the apocalypse. The truth is, this is an analytical dilemma and there is no answer. It is a statistically remote, high- consequence event."
Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian arms control negotiator who is now a senior researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, has written two long, cautious reports on the possible theft of so-called "suitcase nukes" or weapons-grade material from Russia's bulging arsenals, considered one of the most likely sources for a terrorist bomb.
Still, he admits, the leads he found in his voluminous research often ended up relying on unsubstantiated rumors, guesses, half-truths, reports that merely reflected older reports or deliberate misinformation -- a confusing array of dead ends murkier than the information on most other kinds of weapons terrorists might use.
"In my opinion, the threat is pretty remote," said Sokov, who has presented his research to the Defense Department. "It is extremely difficult to get such a weapon, even a real 'dirty bomb.' At the same time, this is one of those cases where you cannot allow yourself a single failure. You cannot be wrong even once."
Few have been more strident in warning of the consequences and pressing for a stronger U.S. response than Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a senior defense official in the Clinton administration.
In articles and a coming book, "Nuclear Terror: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe," he argues that the Bush administration has not done nearly enough to secure nuclear materials that could be stolen and fashioned into a bomb, particularly in Russia and former Soviet bloc countries.
He has said that if the Bush administration fails to take tougher measures to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists, a strike is likely within this decade. But he also admitted in an interview that any such statement is a stab in the dark, unlike predictions about attacks with conventional weapons.
"There's no scientific method you can apply to measure this," said Allison. "You are talking about an event that is low-probability and infrequent, even unprecedented. It's like being hit by a meteor or something."
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a leading Washington think tank on nuclear weapons issues, said that to some immeasurable degree, the chances of such a strike do appear to be growing, particularly because of revelations about how Pakistan was able to spread weapons technology with the help of businessmen in places like Malaysia and Dubai.
He agreed with Allison that the Bush administration needed to do more, and quickly, to safeguard the hundreds of tons of weapons-grade uranium in Russia. That fuel could be transformed into a nuclear device or an effective dirty bomb, which would disperse a lethal cloud of radioactive dust.
"What's not understood is why we haven't been hit by one already," said Albright of dirty bombs. He added that he placed the probability of terrorists developing a working nuclear-fission bomb -- in which the detonation triggers a nuclear chain reaction releasing an immense burst of energy, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- at "less than 1 percent." Karen Clark is president of AIR Worldwide, a Boston-based firm that is a pioneer in measuring the probability of catastrophic events, using complex mathematical models, for use by insurance companies. Her firm has done an intensive analysis of the prospects of terrorists using a nuclear weapon within the United States. She said that they concluded the likelihood had risen somewhat, but not for all types of attacks.
"The probability has gone up," said Clark. "But the probability has gone up more for smaller kinds of attacks and down for something that requires more coordination and complexity," because intelligence, security, vigilance and defenses have improved since Sept. 11.
That troubles some experts. "We ought to be in a situation where we're much safer now than we were on 9/11," said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear proliferation expert at Harvard's Kennedy School. "And we can't say that."
He calls himself a pessimist, estimating that the likelihood of a terrorist nuclear attack in the range of 5 percent.
Bunn said the Bush administration has not done nearly enough to push forward programs for securing the many tons of highly enriched uranium -- the easiest fuel to transform into a working bomb -- left in the former Soviet Union in facilities that have lax security.
Enough fissile material to make thousands of nuclear devices is stored in often-vulnerable sites in Russia and the former Soviet republics, he said, and American-assisted programs to beef up the safeguards are going far too slowly.
The administration has proposed spending $650 million in the coming fiscal year on efforts to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists, according to Bunn's analysis. But that, he noted, is only an 8 percent increase from 2001, the last Clinton budget and the last year before Sept. 11. That amount equals just 0.2 percent of the entire defense budget, which Bunn says is not nearly enough, given the grave impact of such an attack.
Longsworth, the Energy Department's nonproliferation chief, said the Bush administration recognized it had to speed up these programs, and he acknowledged that "the appetite" for nuclear weapons had grown, along with easier access to nuclear bomb-making technology and uncertainties about the source of potential threats.
"You can't guess where the next non-nation or non-state actor or the next Libya will come from," said Longsworth, but he added that he felt the administration was spending enough and moving fast enough to secure nuclear materials.
Michael May, a former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where U.S. nuclear weapons are designed, and now a professor emeritus at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, said the technological hurdles to a terrorist bomb remain, realistically, quite high.
He discounted the possibility terrorists could make use of a stolen warhead because of all the sophisticated security devices built into them. He also said it would be all but impossible for a non-state terrorist group to develop the capability of making its own weapons-grade uranium, because of the industrial infrastructure required.
The real fear, he said, is that terrorists could steal or buy from corrupt officials weapons-grade uranium, either from Russia or perhaps a country like Pakistan, where many government and military officials are sympathetic to radical Islamists. Getting that material is far more difficult than actually creating a workable weapon, he said.
"Scientists have been pointing to this possibility for years," May said. "What higher priority can there be? It's not a high-likelihood event, but the results are so catastrophic you have to pay attention."
He said that a relatively small, 1 kiloton bomb -- about one-fifteenth the size of the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima -- would kill most of the people within an 800-meter radius, or about a half-mile. Depending on the direction and speed of the winds, the fallout could spread for miles and poison huge numbers of people.
Bunn helped prepare a study at Harvard that estimated a 10-kiloton weapon detonated in Manhattan could kill 500,000 people and cause $1 trillion in immediate economic disruption.
One problem with a nuclear attack is that, unlike other kinds of attacks, there is no way of mitigating the devastation. "Once it happens, there's nothing to do except pick up the wounded and care for them," said May.
That's a key reason Feinstein introduced the legislation seeking to prevent the theft of bomb materials.
"The current approach will take 10 to 20 years to complete, at the current rate of about one facility per year," she said. "This is a time frame out of sync with near-term dangers."
According to Allison, it is now estimated that there are perhaps 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, mostly in the United States and Russia, but there is enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium stored around the globe for 240,000 more warheads.
Also, there is evidence that Pakistani weapons scientists have met with Islamic extremists interested in obtaining bombs, and the U.S. military has found al Qaeda documents in Afghanistan demonstrating the group's interest in learning the technology and obtaining the materials to create the weapons.
"The main certainty is that if we keep the fissile material out of their hands, we stop them from building weapons," said Bunn. "The key is, you have to secure the material at the site before it is stolen. The good news is we know how to do that. The issue is having a sustained political will."
E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Public deserves far more information on nuclear testing
By Bill Evenson
April 18, 2004
Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Apr/04182004/commenta/158068.asp
When the first President Bush halted nuclear weapons testing in 1992, he surely didn't anticipate that the moratorium would later be shrouded in a veil of secrecy. Fortunately, U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett is in position to lift the veil.
The simple scientific fact is that there is no need for the United States to test a nuclear weapon now or in the foreseeable future. Here's why:
The directors of the nation's three nuclear weapons laboratories give the arsenal an annual checkup. Every year since the moratorium has been in place, they have delivered the same diagnosis: no problems. They haven't asked for a nuclear test; they haven't even hinted that tests are needed.
It's not surprising. When the elder Bush halted testing, a multibillion-dollar Stockpile Stewardship Program was developed to maintain the reliability of the 8,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenal. Part of that program focuses on alerting scientists to any problem that might develop in one of the nuclear weapons -- an early warning system. Indeed, scientists now know more about the arsenal than they ever would have under the old testing program.
All of this would be part of the public discussion about testing if it weren't for one thing. The annual report from the lab directors is classified. It's only through leaked information that the public can learn that the arsenal doesn't need testing.
We don't need tests to develop new nuclear weapons. There are more than 1,000 good reasons that back up this point. The United States generated a warehouse of information when it carried out 1,030 nuclear tests over nearly 50 years. Advertisement
Literally many dozens of different nuclear weapons designs have been tested and are capable of being built. In fact, there is already a tested design for every currently proposed "new" weapons concept.
This is not a controversial point. An advisory panel for the federal agency that oversees the nation's nuclear weapons concluded that new nuclear weapons do not need to "involve any radical departures from previously considered or even implemented systems."
Getting that advisory panel information was like pulling teeth. It took a reporter two years and a Freedom of Information Act request to do it.
Testing benefits our nuclear adversaries more than it benefits us. It's a good bet that if the United States broke the moratorium, others would follow. And while at best we would get marginal gains in our weapons program, China could make major threatening upgrades. In particular, China would probably integrate multiple warheads on each missile and develop new warheads for advanced solid-fuel rockets.
Chinese officials have said that they will consider a resumption of testing in response to the U.S. nuclear policies outlined in the Nuclear Posture Review that the Defense Department submitted to Congress in December 2001. We might draw our own conclusions on the matter. Unfortunately, the review is classified.
Clearly, something has to be done to open up the process. We shouldn't have to rely on leaks and Freedom of Information requests.
Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, recently introduced a bill addressing the issue of radiation containment and nuclear testing. It is a nice step on behalf of concerned downwinders, but more has to be done.
Significant decisions should not be made behind closed doors and imposed on us with little warning. Such decisions require public understanding and deliberation. In the case of the Iraq war, the Bush administration engaged the public months ahead of time in an effort to build support. We should expect no less in the case of a nuclear weapons test.
Yet, there is no federal requirement to provide ample public notification of a proposed nuclear test. Worse yet, the entire testing program is veiled in secrecy. This is no way to alleviate public apprehension. In fact, it encourages suspicion.
In a recent hearing in Washington, Bennett pressed a Department of Energy (DOE) official with questions to determine whether a nuclear test is currently in the works. It is not at all reassuring that it took a U.S. senator to get answers that should be publicly available.
Bennett should encourage the Department of Energy to open up the process. At the very least, he should call for public notification of any proposed test with ample time for deliberation.
What's ample? Eighteen months is reasonable -- it takes that long to plan and carry out a nuclear test anyway. If DOE has a strong enough case for testing, then surely they wouldn't worry about a little public discussion.
Bill Evenson is a professor of physics and associate dean of the School of Science and Health at Utah Valley State College.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- texas
Pantex finishes repairs to contain blast matter
Sunday, April 18, 2004
By JIM McBRIDE jim.mcbride@amarillo.com
The Amarillo Globe-News
http://www.amarillonet.com/stories/041804/new_pantex.shtml
For decades, Gravel Gerties have been a pillar of Pantex nuclear safety.
The specially engineered nuclear weapons assembly cells - named after a popular Dick Tracy comic strip character - are designed to contain an accidental high explosive blast and limit dispersal of radioactive materials during such an extremely unlikely scenario.
Several years ago, Pantex safety experts learned radioactive materials could spew from cell openings - pipe openings, door gaps and structural cracks - during a high-explosive blast, raising potential concerns about off-site radioactive contamination.
About six years ago, then-Pantex contractor Mason & Hanger Corp. issued a work order to seal cell openings identified by safety experts. But the work order was never completed, officials said.
Contractor BWXT Pantex, which took over the Pantex contract in 2001, discovered the work order and completed the overdue repairs.
"BWXT Pantex discovered the work order to make these repairs while reviewing outstanding work orders. These repairs have been completed," Joe Papp, BWXT Pantex's system engineering section manager, said in response to Globe-News inquiries.
In September, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board cited renewed concerns about "cell leak path areas" where radioactive materials could vent during an explosive accident.
"The staff was briefed on recent progress and a path forward to reduce the amount of radioactive material which could potentially be released through gaps around doors, pipe penetrations, blast valves and through structural cracks in the event of a high explosive violent reaction in assembly/disassembly cells," according to a recent safety board report.
At the time, Pantex halted all work in all nuclear weapons assembly cells for about two weeks while safety experts reviewed the issue as a "unreviewed safety question."
John Conway, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board chairman, said the issue is not a particularly serious one, but one that has captured the attention of the board and Pantex safety experts.
"I do not consider it a serious one because it's mostly calculations," Conway said. "The seriousness would be of having a detonation. It wouldn't go nuclear, but it would spread plutonium. The worst thing is it would kill somebody in there."
Conway said Pantex was able to continue operating while the work order was pending because its calculations showed that off-site radioactive releases would not have exceeded federal guidelines during an accident.
"That is one of the reasons that, with the work order pending, they were still able to operate," he said. "You don't like to have work orders that were considered priority, then put aside and then nobody complied with it. It went for what it appears to be six years."
Papp said Pantex last year discovered additional "cell pathways" not previously identified in other safety studies.
"While the additional pathways could potentially increase the off-site effects, Pantex remained below the off-site exposure guidelines," Papp said.
Papp said studies that calculate the theoretical effects of a high-explosive blast in an assembly cell are conservative and take the most extreme accident scenarios into account. Such calculations normally estimate the power of such a blast and the amount of plutonium that would be vaporized and forced through cracks or other openings, Conway said.
"The small size of these pathways, the construction of the cells and limits placed on the amount of nuclear material allowed in each cell would limit the amount of material dispersed to levels below the federal guidelines to protect public health and safety," Papp said in a statement. "Since that time, BWXT Pantex has filled the structural cracks, which were minor. We are currently looking into other ways to reduce the pathways through our continuous improvement program."
Conway said federal government guidelines for off-site radiation are 25 REM - Roentgen Equivalent Man - a measure of radioactive exposure and its biological effects on human tissue.
"There's a general rule when you are trying to plan that you never have more than 25 REM at the fence. ... You plan to make sure you don't get anything off-site," he said. "If, in any way conceivable when you do your calculations, that it could exceed 25 REM outside the fence, that's it. You cannot operate."
Papp also said nuclear materials are not normally released through cell pathways during regular operations.
-------- us politics
Behind Diplomatic Moves, Military Plan Was Launched
'We're Going to Have to Go to War,' Bush Said to Rice
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19691-2004Apr17?language=printer
This is the first of five articles adapted from "Plan of Attack," a book by Bob Woodward that is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq. (Simon & Schuster).
Shortly after New Year's Day 2003, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had a private moment with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex.
Bush felt the effort to get United Nations weapons inspections inside Iraq on an aggressive track to make Saddam Hussein crack was not working. "This pressure isn't holding together," Bush told her.
The media reports of smiling Iraqis leading inspectors around, opening up buildings and saying, "See, there's nothing here," infuriated Bush, who then would read intelligence reports showing the Iraqis were moving and concealing things. It wasn't clear what was being moved, but it looked to Bush as if Hussein was about to fool the world again. It looked as if the inspections effort was not sufficiently aggressive, would take months or longer, and was likely doomed to fail.
"I was concerned people would focus on not Saddam, not the danger that he posed, not his deception, but focus on the process and thereby Saddam would be able to kind of skate through once again," Bush recalled in an interview last December.
"I felt stressed," he added. All the holiday parties at the White House had not helped. "My jaw muscle got so tight. And it was not just because I was smiling and shaking so many hands. There was a lot of tension during that last holiday season."
There was another factor at work that was not publicly known. Sensitive intelligence coverage on U.N. inspections chief Hans Blix indicated that he was not reporting everything and not doing all the things he maintained he was doing. Some in Bush's war cabinet believed Blix was a liar.
"How is this happening?" Bush asked Rice. "Saddam is going to get stronger."
Blix had told Rice, "I have never complained about your military pressure. I think it's a good thing." She relayed this to the president.
"How long does he think I can do this?" Bush asked. "A year? I can't. The United States can't stay in this position while Saddam plays games with the inspectors."
"You have to follow through on your threat," Rice said. "If you're going to carry out coercive diplomacy, you have to live with that decision."
"He's getting more confident, not less," Bush said of Hussein. "He can manipulate the international system again. We're not winning.
"Time is not on our side here," Bush told Rice. "Probably going to have to, we're going to have to go to war."
In Rice's mind, this was the moment the president decided the United States would go to war with Iraq. Military planning had been underway for more than a year even as Bush sought a diplomatic solution through the United Nations. He would continue those efforts, at least publicly, for 10 more weeks, but he had reached a point of no return.
The president also informed Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, of his decision over the holidays. Rove had gone to Crawford to brief Bush on the confidential plan for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign. While Laura Bush sat reading a book, Rove gave a PowerPoint presentation on the campaign's strategy, themes and timetable.
Opening his laptop, he displayed for Bush in bold letters on a dark blue background:
PERSONA:
Strong Leader
Bold Action
Big Ideas
Peace in World
More Compassionate America
Cares About People Like Me
Leads a Strong Team
All things being equal, the president asked, when would you like to begin the campaign and active fundraising?
Rove said he wanted the president to start that February or March and begin raising the money, probably $200 million. He had a schedule. In February, March and April 2003, there would be between 12 and 16 fundraisers.
"We got a war coming," the president told Rove flatly, "and you're just going to have to wait." He had decided. "The moment is coming." The president did not give a date, but he left the impression with Rove that it would be January or February or March at the latest.
"Remember the problem with your dad's campaign," Rove replied. "A lot of people said he got started too late."
"I understand," Bush said. "I'll tell you when I'm comfortable with you starting."
Bush Orders a War Plan
Rice was the only member of his war cabinet whom Bush directly asked for a recommendation of whether to go to war.
"What do you think?" he had asked her a few weeks before. "Should we do this?"
"Yes," she said. "Because it isn't American credibility on the line, it is the credibility of everybody that this gangster can yet again beat the international system." As important as credibility was, she said, "Credibility should never drive you to do something you shouldn't do." But this was much bigger, she advised, something that should be done. "To let this threat in this part of the world play volleyball with the international community this way will come back to haunt us someday. That is the reason to do it."
Other than Rice, Bush said he didn't need to ask the principal advisers whether they thought he should go to war. He knew what Vice President Cheney thought, and he decided not to ask Secretary of State Colin L. Powell or Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
"I could tell what they thought," the president recalled. "I didn't need to ask them their opinion about Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could be pretty clear. I think we've got an environment where people feel free to express themselves."
One person not around was Karen Hughes, one of his top advisers and longtime communications director. Hughes, who had resigned the previous summer to return to Texas, probably knew how Bush thought and talked as much as anyone.
"I asked Karen," the president recalled. "She said if you go to war, exhaust all opportunities to achieve [regime change] peacefully. And she was right. She actually captured my own sentiments."
More than a year before -- on Nov. 21, 2001 -- Bush had told Rumsfeld that he wanted to develop a plan for war in Iraq. Since that time the defense secretary had been working closely with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, and other U.S. commanders, as well as Bush and other members of the war cabinet to develop a plan even as Bush pursued diplomacy through the United Nations.
At times, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. thought of Bush as a circus rider with one foot on a "diplomacy" steed and his other on the "war" steed, both reins in his hands, leading down a path to regime change. Each horse had blinders on. It was now clear that diplomacy would not get him to his goal, so Bush had let go of that horse and was standing only on the war steed.
Rumsfeld had been trying to put himself in the president's shoes, attempting to make sure that Bush didn't get so far out in words, body language or mental state that he couldn't get back from a decision to go to war as the United States built up forces around Iraq.
On the other hand, Rumsfeld felt there was a time when the president should not want to walk back, and really could not. That time would be well before Bush had to decide to put Special Operations Forces inside Iraq, the point of no return identified by Franks.
"I can remember trying to give him as early a clue as possible that that was coming down the road," Rumsfeld recalled in an interview.
"There comes a moment as all these things are happening," he added, "when we have to look a neighboring country in the eye, and they have to make a decision that puts them at risk. And at that moment, the president needs to know that."
Back in Washington in early January 2003, Bush took Rumsfeld aside.
"Look, we're going to have to do this, I'm afraid," he said. "I don't see how we're going to get him to a position where he will do something in a manner that's consistent with the U.N. requirements, and we've got to make an assumption that he will not."
It was enough of a decision for Rumsfeld. He asked to bring in some key foreign players.
The president gave his approval but pressed Rumsfeld again. When is my last decision point?
"When your people, Mr. President, look people in the eye and tell them you're going."
One of the key players that had to be notified and brought along was Saudi Arabia. U.S. forces would have to be sent through and from Saudi territory into Iraq. Rescue, communications and refueling support were not going to be enough. Of the five other countries on Iraq's border, only Kuwait and Jordan supported a military operation. The 500 miles of Saudi-Iraqi border were critical.
So on Saturday, Jan. 11, Cheney invited Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, to his West Wing office. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were also there.
Prince Bandar had served during four American presidencies. At age 53, Bandar was almost a fifth estate in Washington, amplifying Saudi influence and wealth. He insisted on dealing directly with presidents and is almost family to Bush's father, former president George H. W. Bush. And he had maintained his special entree to the Oval Office under this President Bush.
Sitting on the edge of the table in Cheney's office, Myers took out a large map labeled TOP SECRET NOFORN. The NOFORN meant NO FOREIGN -- classified material not to be seen by any foreign nation.
Myers explained that the first part of the battle plan would be a massive aerial bombing campaign over several days against Iraq's Republican Guard divisions, the security services and command and control of Hussein's forces. A land attack would follow through Kuwait, plus a northern front through Turkey with the 4th Infantry Division if Turkey approved it. Included was massive use of Special Forces and intelligence paramilitary teams to secure every place in Iraq from which Hussein could launch a missile or airplane against Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Israel.
Special Forces and intelligence operatives would distribute $300 million to local Iraqi tribal leaders, religious leaders and the Iraqi armed forces.
The Saudi-Iraqi border would have to be covered. Special Forces, intelligence teams and other strikes would have to be launched from there. If there were alternatives, Myers said, they would not be asking the Saudis.
Bandar knew that his country could create a cover for the arrival of U.S. forces by closing a civilian airport at Al Jawf in the northern desert, flying Saudi helicopters day and night as a routine border patrol for a week, and then withdrawing. The U.S. Special Forces could set up a base there that might not attract much attention.
Staring intently at the 2-by-3-foot Top Secret map, Bandar, a former fighter pilot, asked a few questions about air operations. Could he have a copy of the large map so he could brief Crown Prince Abdullah? he asked, referring to the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia.
"Above my pay grade," Myers said.
"We'll give you all the information you want," Rumsfeld said. As for the map, he added, "I would rather not give it to you, but you can take notes if you want."
"No, no, it's not important. Just let me look at it," Bandar said. He tried to take it all in -- the large ground thrusts, the location of Special Forces or intelligence teams all designated on the map.
"You can count on this," Rumsfeld said, pointing to the map. "You can take that to the bank. This is going to happen."
"What is the chance of Saddam surviving this?" Bandar asked. He believed Hussein was intent on killing everyone involved at a high level with the 1991 Persian Gulf War, including himself.
Rumsfeld and Myers didn't answer.
"Saddam, this time, will be out, period?" Bandar asked skeptically. "What will happen to him?"
Cheney, who had been quiet as usual, replied, "Prince Bandar, once we start, Saddam is toast."
"I am convinced now that this is something I can take to my Prince Abdullah," Bandar said, "and think I can convince him. But I cannot go and tell him that Myers and Rumsfeld and you told me. I have to carry a message from the president."
"I'll get back to you," the vice president replied. After Bandar had left, Rumsfeld voiced some concern about the vice president's "toast" remark. "Jesus Christ, what was that all about, Dick?"
"I didn't want to leave any doubt in his mind what we're planning to do," Cheney said.
In his car, Bandar scribbled out details from what he had seen on the map. When he got home, he took a large blank map of the region that had been supplied by the CIA and began reconstructing the plan piece by piece.
The next day, Sunday, Rice called Bandar to invite him to meet with the president the following day, Monday, Jan. 13. At the meeting, the president told Bandar that he was receiving advice and reports from some in his administration that in the event of war he would have to contend with a massive Arab and Islamic reaction that would put American interests at risk.
"Mr. President, you're assuming you're attacking Saudi Arabia and trying to capture King Fahd," Bandar said. "This is Saddam Hussein. People are not going to shed tears over Saddam Hussein, but if he's attacked one more time by America and he survives and stays in power after you've finished this, whatever it is, yes, everybody will follow his word. If they say attack the American Embassy, they will go and attack it."
Before the Gulf War in 1991, Bandar recalled for the president, "Go back to look at what was said to your father -- the Arab world will rise from the Atlantic to the Gulf!" Well, that didn't happen then, and it would not happen this time, he said. The problem would be if Hussein survived. The Saudis needed assurance that Hussein was going to be toast.
"You got the briefing from Dick, Rummy and General Myers?" the president asked.
"Yes."
"Any questions for me?"
No, Mr. President.
"That is the message I want you to carry for me to the crown prince," Bush said. "The message you're taking is mine, Bandar."
"That's fine, Mr. President."
Bandar believed it was exactly what Cheney had told Bush to say.
"Anything else for me?"
No, Mr. President.
Bandar Told Ahead of Powell
One of Rice's jobs was, as she called it, "to read the secretaries": Powell and Rumsfeld. Since the president had told Rumsfeld about his decision to go to war, he had better tell Powell, and fast. Powell was close to Prince Bandar, who now was informed of the decision.
"Mr. President," Rice said, "if you're getting to a place that you really think this might happen, you need to call Colin in and talk to him." Powell had the most difficult job, keeping the diplomatic track alive.
So that Monday, Jan. 13, Powell and Bush met in the Oval Office. The president was sitting in his regular chair in front of the fireplace, and the secretary was in the chair reserved for the visiting leader or most senior U.S. official. For once, neither Cheney nor Rice was hovering.
Bush complimented Powell for his hard work on the diplomatic front. "The inspections are not getting us there," the president said, getting down to business. The U.N. inspectors were just sort of stumbling around, and Hussein was showing no intention of real compliance. "I really think I'm going to have to do this." The president said he had made up his mind on war. The United States should go to war.
"You're sure?" Powell asked.
Yes, said Bush.
"You understand the consequences," Powell said in a half question. For nearly six months, he had been hammering on this theme -- that the United States would be taking down a regime, would have to govern Iraq, and the ripple effect in the Middle East and the world could not be predicted. The run-up to war had sucked nearly all the oxygen from every other issue in foreign relations. War would surely get all the air and attention.
Yeah, I do, the president answered.
"You know that you're going to be owning this place?" Powell said, reminding Bush of what he had told him at a dinner the previous August in which Powell had made the case against military action in Iraq. An invasion would mean assuming the hopes, aspirations and all the troubles of Iraq. Powell wasn't sure whether Bush had fully understood the meaning and consequences of total ownership.
But I think I have to do this, the president said.
Right, Powell said.
I just want to let you know that, Bush said, making it clear this was not a discussion, but the president informing one of his Cabinet members of his decision. The fork in the road had been reached and Bush had chosen war.
As the only person in Bush's inner circle who was seriously and actively pressing the diplomatic track, Powell figured the president wanted to make sure he would support the war. It was in some way a gut check, but Powell didn't feel the president was making a loyalty check. No way on God's earth could he walk away at that point. It would have been an unthinkable act of disloyalty to the president, to Powell's own soldier's code, to the United States military, and mostly to the several hundred thousand who would be going to war.
"Are you with me on this?" the president asked him now. "I think I have to do this. I want you with me."
"I'll do the best I can," Powell answered. "Yes, sir, I will support you. I'm with you, Mr. President."
"Time to put your war uniform on," the president said to the retired general.
In all the discussions, meetings, chats and back-and-forth, in Powell's grueling duels with Rumsfeld and Defense, the president had never once asked Powell, Would you do this? What's your overall advice? The bottom line?
Perhaps the president feared the answer. Perhaps Powell feared giving it. It would, after all, have been an opportunity to say he disagreed. But they had not reached that core question, and Powell would not push. He would not intrude on that most private of presidential space -- where a president made decisions of war and peace -- unless he was invited. He had not been invited.
Bush's meeting with Powell lasted 12 minutes. "It was a very cordial conversation," the president recalled. "It wasn't a long conversation," he noted. "There wasn't much debate: It looks like we're headed to war."
The president stated emphatically that though he had asked Powell to be with him and support him in a war, "I didn't need his permission."
Poland Signs On to the War
Before a meeting with Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski the next day, Jan. 14, Bush's frustration again flared in public as he shifted position on the time remaining to Hussein. While eight days earlier he had said publicly that the Iraqi president has "got time," he told reporters that morning, "Time is running out on Saddam Hussein."
Bush knew he had no better friend on the European continent than the popular, second-term Polish president who had agreed to send troops to the war. The Bushes had hosted Kwasniewski and his wife for a rare state dinner the previous July.
"The level of anti-Americanism is extremely high," Kwasniewski said at their private meeting. He had a serious political problem because of his support for Bush.
"Success helps change public opinion," Bush said. "Should we commit troops, we'll feed the people of Iraq." He said it as if that humanitarian gesture might have an impact on public opinion in Poland. He said there was a protocol a country could follow to show the world that it was ridding itself of unconventional weapons -- one that South Africa had followed, visibly and aggressively opening up records and facilities for inspections. Hussein had not.
"In my judgment it's time to move soon, but we won't act precipitously," Bush said, adding, "but time is running out. It's sooner rather than later."
"We will win," the Polish president said, but sounding like Colin Powell, he added plaintively, "but what are the consequences?" After a pause, he continued, "You need wide, broad international support. We are with you, don't worry about it. The risk is the U.N. will collapse. What will replace it?"
These were hard questions that Bush sidestepped, saying only, "We believe that Islam like Christianity can grow in a free and democratic manner."
For Bush, the important things were that Poland would be with him and would supply troops.
Mark Malseed contributed to this report.
--------
Rove Revels in Democrat Kerry's Lead
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19692-2004Apr17.html
This article was adapted from "Plan of Attack," a book by Bob Woodward that is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq. Simon & Schuster. (c) 2004.
By early February 2004, White House political adviser Karl Rove could see that Iraq was turning into a potential negative. The violence on the ground continued. The U.S. military had more than 100,000 troops there and would require that many or more for some time. American soldiers were being killed at too high a rate, and the administration hadn't reached a political settlement. Turning the government over to the Iraqis looked shaky. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, and President Bush's and CIA Director George J. Tenet's public acknowledgments that the intelligence might have been wrong, were potentially big setbacks.
Previously, Rove had claimed he was salivating that the Democrats would nominate former Vermont governor Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential race. But Dean had imploded and Sen. John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, had won 12 of the first 14 Democratic primary contests and appeared to be headed for the nomination. Politics is a game of recovery, adaptability and optimism. So Rove had a new line.
"The good news for us is that Dean is not the nominee," Rove now argued to an associate in his second-floor West Wing office. Dean's unconditional opposition to the Iraq war could have been potent in a face-off with Bush. "One of Dean's strengths, though, was he could say, I'm not part of that crowd down there." But Kerry was very much a part of the Washington crowd, and he had voted in favor of the resolution for war. Rove got out his two-inch-thick, loose-leaf binder titled "Bring It On." It consisted of research into Kerry's 19-year record in the Senate. Most relevant were pages 9 to 20 of the section on Iraq.
The record was that Kerry had been all over the map. Sounding like a method actor who believes his lines, Rove offered some readings from the Kerry record.
"Iraq has developed a chemical weapons capability," Rove quoted Kerry saying in October 1990, according to the Congressional Record. Saddam Hussein has been "working toward" development of weapons of mass destruction or "had all those abilities," Kerry had said in January 1991. (Of course, this turned out to be true, as the U.N. weapons inspectors discovered after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.) In 1998, as a member of the intelligence committee, Kerry said that Hussein was "pursuing a program to build weapons of mass destruction," and in October 2002, he said, "I am prepared to hold Saddam Hussein accountable and destroy his weapons of mass destruction." And, "The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real. . . . He has continued to build those weapons."
Rove's eyebrows were jumping up and down as he read. "My personal favorite," he said, quoting Kerry on March 19, 2003, the day the war started: "I think Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction are a threat, and that's why I voted to hold him accountable and to make certain that we disarm him."
"Oh, yeah!" Rove shouted. And that had been on National Public Radio! He had it all on tape. So here is a member of the Senate intelligence committee saying that Hussein had the stuff. And the Bush campaign argument would be as follows: "You're looking at the same intelligence the president is and arriving at the same conclusion, and if you accuse him of misleading the American people, what were you doing? Are you saying, I was duped?"
Of course, when the aftermath of the war turned sour, Rove noted, Kerry started backing away, arguing that he had voted not for war but only to give the president the power to threaten war. More starkly, Kerry had said on "Meet the Press" in August 2003 that the congressional resolution "we passed did not empower the president to do regime change; we empowered him only with respect to the relevant resolutions of the United Nations."
Well, Rove and the rest of the country knew that the resolution clearly gave the president approval to use the military in Iraq.
Rove was gleeful. "It's on tape!" he said, "and we've done testing on it, and you put out there, literally you take the footage of him saying some of this stuff and then have him in the exchange with Chris Matthews saying I'm antiwar and people say, 'What a hypocrite!' "
Kerry would have, and did have, answers. His main response was that Bush did not press hard enough or long enough with the United Nations, that he did not build a legitimate global coalition, that he did not plan for the aftermath, and was too eager to go to war when Hussein was isolated and weak.
But Rove believed they had Kerry pretty cold on voting to give the president a green light for war and then backing off when he didn't like the aftermath or saw a political opportunity.
Whatever the case, Rove sounded as if he believed they could inoculate the president on the Iraq war in a campaign against Kerry. It remained to be seen, but Rove was certainly going to try.
Mark Malseed contributed to this report.
--------
Rice Refutes Book on Date That Bush Decided to Go to War
April 18, 2004
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/international/middleeast/18CND-TALK.html?hp
Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said today that the president decided in March 2003 to go to war against Saddam Hussein, not in January 2003, as a new book contends.
She said she was with Mr. Bush in Crawford, Tex., in January 2003 when he expressed his frustration with how weapons inspections were proceeding in Iraq. "He said, `Now, I think we probably are going to have to go to war, we're going to have to go to war,' " Ms. Rice recalled today on the CBS News program "Face the Nation." "It was not a decision to go to war. That decision he made in March when he finally decided to do that."
Ms. Rice's recollection corresponds with Mr. Bush's contention made in a televised news conference on March 6, 2003, that he had not yet decided whether to invade Iraq. "I've not made up our mind about military action," he said at the time.
But the new book - "Plan of Attack," by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post - contends that Mr. Bush decided in January to go to war and informed Secretary of State Colin L. Powell after the fact, in a 12-minute conversation that also covered other matters.
Ms. Rice, who appeared on three of the Sunday morning news programs, denied that Mr. Bush had kept Mr. Powell in the dark about the president's thinking on a possible invasion of Iraq.
In his book, Mr. Woodward said that at the request of Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even briefed Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, on the American war plans before telling Mr. Powell. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld used a top-secret war map, supposedly off-limits to foreigners, to describe the administration's plan, the book contends.
"I just can't let this impression stand," Ms. Rice said on CBS. "The secretary of state was privy to all of the conversations with the president, all of the briefings for the president. They were in almost daily contact about what was going on at the United Nations."
She added: "It's just not the proper impression that somehow Prince Bandar was in the know in the way that Secretary Powell was not. It's just not right. Secretary Powell had been privy to all of this. He knew what the war plan was."
Ms. Rice's comments were the most extensive response so far by an administration official to Mr. Woodward's book, which began circulating earlier this week. The book provides the most detailed account to date of the debate and tensions between senior Bush administration officials in the 16-month period of planning and preparation that ended with the attack on Iraq last March.
Ms. Rice also defended the president's private request of Mr. Rumsfeld in November 2001 to devise a war plan against Iraq even though the United States was still heavily engaged in Afghanistan.
"By the end of November, things are starting to wind down in Afghanistan, and I do think the president's mind was beginning to move to what else he would have to do to to deal with the blow, with the threat that had emerged as a result of 9/11," Ms. Rice said on Fox News Sunday. Iraq represented "the most hostile relationship that we had in the Middle East," she said.
"It's not at all surprising that the president wanted to know what his options were before he began a course of diplomatic activity," she said.
Ms. Rice denied an assertion in Mr. Woodward's book that differences between Mr. Powell and Mr. Cheney had poisoned their relationship and that they remained hostile toward each other. The book describes Mr. Powell clashing with Mr. Cheney, whom Mr. Woodward describes as being preoccupied with reports of links between Saddam Hussein and the Qaeda terrorist network. Mr. Powell regarded Mr. Cheney's intense focus on Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda as a "fever," the book says, and he believed that the vice president misread and exaggerated intelligence about the Iraq threat and supposed terrorist ties.
"I can tell you, I've had lunch on a number of occasions with Vice President Cheney and with Colin Powell, and they're more than on speaking terms," Ms. Rice said on Fox News Sunday. "They're very friendly."
--------
Kerry Accuses Bush of Being Ineffective on War
April 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Kerry.html?hp
MIAMI (AP ) -- Democrat John Kerry on Sunday accused President Bush of being ``stunningly ineffective'' at foreign policy and stuck by his argument that the war against terrorism isn't primarily a military struggle.
Kerry, in a wide-ranging interview on NBC's ``Meet the Press,'' also stood by his promise to create 10 million jobs and halve the deficit in his first term if elected, though he conceded that soaring red ink could squeeze some proposals.
The Massachusetts senator and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee pressed his argument that Bush, the Republican incumbent, went about the Iraq war in a way that has left the United States and its troops shouldering too much of the burden. He said he would build an international alliance to share the responsibility for rebuilding Iraq.
``I think this administration has proven, frankly, stunningly ineffective in diplomacy,'' Kerry said, citing Bush's policy change on Israel last week. ``There were Arab leaders that were taken by surprise by this announcement.''
``I will immediately reach out to other nations in a very different way from this administration,'' he said. ``Within weeks of being inaugurated I will return to the U.N. and I will rejoin the community of nations.''
Kerry rejected the suggestion that he's been inconsistent on Iraq because he voted for the congressional resolution that authorized the use of force, and against $87 billion in additional funding for the war. A Bush campaign commercial currently on the air criticizes Kerry's vote against the aid package last year.
Kerry noted that Bush himself had threatened to veto the $87 billion bill if it included money to pay for health care for reservists and required Iraq to pay back some of the money set aside for its reconstruction.
``Think of that. The president threatened to veto that bill, and yet he is now accusing me for voting no,'' he said.
Asked whether he'd vote against another funding bill for U.S. troops in Iraq, Kerry said: ``It depends entirely on what the situation is .... I'm not going to say that.''
The Democrat and Vietnam War veteran said he supports the long-term goal of stability in Iraq, but warned that the public's patience may wear thin.
``If we are stuck for a long period of time in a quagmire where young Americans are dying without any sense of that (stability) being able to be achieved, I think most Americans will decide that's failure,'' Kerry said.
Kerry also defended his argument that the fight against terrorism is more than just a military operation.
``You need the best intelligence, the best law enforcement cooperation in the world,'' he said. ``I will not hesitate to use those forces effectively. I think I could fight a far more effective war on terror.''
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Bush's re-election campaign, said Kerry's appearance ``was filled with inaccuracies, attacks and pessimism toward the future of the country.''
``His assertion that the war on terror is not primarily a military operation shows a starling lack of judgment about the dangers facing the country,'' Schmidt said.
But Kerry campaign officials pointed to a comment by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who said ``we are fighting the war on terrorism on many fronts,'' as evidence the administration takes essentially the same position.
Kerry's interview in Miami came as he opened a three-day campaign swing through Florida, where the disputed 2000 election was decided in favor of Bush, who won by 537 votes. Kerry also was attending a campaign rally at the University of Miami followed by a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Palm Beach.
In a nod to local politics and the influential community of Cuban expatriates, Kerry said he remained opposed to lifting the U.S. embargo against Cuba, though he favors talks with the country and possibly encouraging travel.
Kerry held to his promise of creating 10 million jobs, drawing comparisons with former President Clinton. Kerry said Clinton pledged to create 8 million jobs when he ran in 1992, but ended up creating 11 million.
``We're now a bigger economy with more people. There's no reason we can't create 10 million jobs,'' Kerry said. ``But you can't do it with George Bush's failed policy.''
Despite the heated nature of the presidential race, Kerry agreed with Bush on a few points.
Kerry said he ``completely'' supported Bush's endorsement of a plan by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to hold on to lands seized in the 1967 Middle East War, a change to long-standing U.S. policy that has angered the Palestinians.
Asked about Israel's assassination Saturday of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, leader of the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, Kerry echoed the White House by expressing support for Israel's efforts to be secure.
On other subjects, Kerry said:
--He hoped to meet with Ralph Nader, whom Democrats blame for Al Gore's narrow loss in 2000. Nader is running as an independent this year and party leaders fear he will pull support from Kerry, throwing the election to Bush.
--He will choose a vice presidential candidate between now and the Democratic convention in July.
--His wife, Teresa Heinz, does not have to release her income tax returns. Federal law, he said, requires candidates to release their returns, as he did last week, but that her financial holdings are detailed in ``very, very intrusive'' Senate financial disclosure forms.
On the Net:
Kerry campaign: http://www.johnkerry.com
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
EU maintains Chinese arms embargo
The ban was imposed after the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square
Sunday, 18 April, 2004,
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3637807.stm
The European Union has told Beijing there will be no early lifting of its arms trade embargo on China.
The ban was imposed after the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
France had pushed to end the ban, but most EU states said there must first be clear evidence of an improvement in Beijing's human rights practices.
The Chinese foreign minister called the ban a relic of the Cold War, but added that "all good things take time".
"This is up to all our European friends," Li Zhaoxing said after a meeting with senior EU officials in Ireland.
Conflicts of interest
The debate is driven by a fast-growing EU-China trade relationship.
European arms makers are keen to supply the fast-modernising military of China, which is the EU's second biggest trade partner after the US.
At a summit last December, EU leaders agreed to consider lifting the ban after pressure from France and Germany, which were keen to sell weapons.
France has argued the ban is "anachronistic", given the improved relations between Beijing and the EU - and had wanted the ban lifted by last month.
"I've given to my Chinese colleague this presidency's frank assessment that we don't believe - as things stand - that a decision is likely during our presidency," Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen said at the joint news conference with Mr Li.
The US, Scandinavian nations, the European Parliament and human rights groups have urged the EU to keep the ban in place, citing human rights concerns.
The human rights organisation, Amnesty International, has led the campaign to keep the arms ban, saying pro-democracy advocates in China are not much better off now than in 1989.
Washington also argues that removing the ban will destabilise security in east Asia, where there are tensions between China and Taiwan and between North Korea and South Korea.
-------- balkans
2 U.S. Officers Shot Dead in Kosovo
Members of U.N. Force Killed by Jordanian Policeman at Jail
Associated Press
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20693-2004Apr17.html
KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Serbia and Montenegro, April 17 -- A Jordanian policeman opened fire on a group of international police officers at a U.N. prison in Kosovo on Saturday, killing two Americans before he was shot and killed. Ten Americans and an Austrian were wounded.
The shootout erupted as a group of police officers -- 21 Americans, two Turks and an Austrian -- were leaving the detention center after a day of training. They came under fire from at least one member of a group of Jordanians on guard at the prison, said Neeraj Singh, a U.N. spokesman.
The officers shot back in a battle that lasted about 10 minutes. It was not immediately clear what prompted the Jordanian to shoot, but the Reuters news service quoted a police source as saying the confrontation began with an argument about Iraq. Singh said the police were "investigating the circumstances."
"It is absolutely too early to draw any conclusions with regard to what happened there," the head of the U.N. police, Stefan Feller, said after visiting the site. He called the shootout a "terrible incident."
"As far as we know, there was no communication between the officer who fired and the group of victims," Singh said, adding that four Jordanian officers were being questioned.
The Jordanian government expressed regret for the incident and said it was also investigating it, according to Jordan's official Petra news agency. The government statement identified the officer as Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali.
U.N. and local police officers sealed off the prison yard with yellow tape, took pictures and marked the bullet cartridges with numbers. The body of a policeman, covered with what looked like a dark blue jacket, lay in the yard for hours.
One witness, a 50-year-old woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she heard the shooting, ran to her balcony overlooking the prison yard and saw one officer shooting and another hiding.
Another witness who also gave only his age, 31, said he was at a park when he heard the shooting and later heard American officers yelling, "Drop the gun! Drop the gun!"
Milan Ivanovic, a doctor in the hospital in the Serbian section of Kosovska Mitrovica, said five U.S. officers and an Austrian officer were being treated at his hospital. It was not clear where the other wounded officers were being treated or what their nationalities were.
"Their wounds are predominantly in the chest and abdomen," Ivanovic said. "They were caused by firearms and possibly explosive devices."
Kosovska Mitrovica -- a city about 25 miles northwest of Pristina, Kosovo's capital -- has long been the scene of violence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, including riots that broke out a month ago, killing 19 and injuring 900.
The city is divided between ethnic Albanians on the southern side of the Ibar River and Serbs who live in the northern part of the city.
Kosovo, a province of Serbia, became a U.N. protectorate in 1999, after NATO launched an air war to stop former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from cracking down on ethnic Albanians.
About 3,500 U.N. police officers serve in Kosovo alongside a 6,000-member local force. The U.N. police force is backed by about 20,000 NATO-led troops.
The top U.N. official in Kosovo, Harri Holkeri, seemed stunned at the shooting incident, which came as the mission was still grappling with last month's violence.
"I am deeply shocked and dismayed at the unfortunate death of dedicated professionals who have come such a great distance to help Kosovo on its road to future," he said.
--------
3 Die in Shootout Between U.N. Police in Kosovo
April 18, 2004
By NICHOLAS WOOD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/international/europe/18KOSO.html
LJUBJLANA, Slovenia, April 17 - Two American women working as prison guards with the United Nations in Kosovo were killed Saturday and 10 other Americans and an Austrian working as prison officers were wounded when a Jordanian, also with the United Nations, opened fire on them, officials said. The attacker was shot and killed.
The attack took place in a prison in the city of Mitrovica, in the north of the province. United Nations officials said the motive for the shooting was not immediately clear.
Some of the wounded were in serious condition, hospital officials said.
The American dead and wounded were among a group of 21 United States prison officers who had arrived in Kosovo on April 7, a United Nations police spokesman said, and they had just completed an induction course at the jail, which is usually used as a pretrial detention center for ordinary crimes.
"They were leaving the detention center in three vehicles after a routine training day, when they came under fire," said Neeraj Singh, a spokesman for the United Nations police service in Kosovo.
He said that at least one Jordanian officer began shooting and that the Americans returned fire, killing him.
"There was no communication between the two groups before the shooting started," Mr. Singh said, dismissing suggestions in the local news media that fighting had erupted as the result of an argument.
Joe Napolitano, the commander of a United Nations police station next to the jail, said the Jordanian had shot at the American group for some time before he was killed.
"He just opened fire on them," Mr. Napolitano said in a telephone interview. "It lasted about 10 minutes."
United Nations peacekeepers and police officers have been working in Kosovo since 1999, after NATO's 78-day bombing campaign to stop forces backed by the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, from driving ethnic Albanians from the province. About 3,500 United Nations police officers are now in Kosovo.
Jordan has a company of around 120 antiriot officers in the region. Their duties including guarding the exterior of the prison; they did not serve as guards inside. The United States has had a lead role in prison administration and staffing in the province.
A statement issued by United Nations mission in Kosovo confirmed the deaths. "As a result of the shooting, three international officers died, including two from the United States and one from Jordan," the statement read. "Eleven other international officers received gunshot wounds and are currently undergoing medical treatment."
Dr. Milan Ivanovic, the director of a hospital in northern Mitrovica where seven of the officers were being treated, said four had suffered serious injuries. "One American woman is in a critical condition," Dr. Ivanovic said in a telephone interview, adding that one of the two American dead had survived until after arriving the hospital.
It is not the first time a Jordanian policeman has opened fire on fellow officers. Early last year in Pristina, a Jordanian officer opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle after an argument, killing another officer and then shooting himself.
Residents contacted by telephone in northern Mitrovica, where the prison is based, said the gunfire could be heard across the city.
It was another blow for the ethnically divided city, which is still recovering from a recent wave of ethnic unrest in which 19 people were killed and more than 800 injured.
The violence began in Mitrovica and spread across the region as ethnic Albanian mobs attacked the province's minority Serb community. More than 4,000 people were displaced from their homes as a result, and more than 500 homes destroyed or damaged, according to United Nations figures.
Harri Holkeri, the top official with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, or Unmik, expressed shock over the shooting.
"I am deeply shocked and dismayed at the unfortunate death of dedicated professionals who have come such a great distance to help Kosovo on its road to the future," Mr. Holkeri said in a statement released by the United Nations officials. "I convey my heartfelt condolences to the families of the deceased, to their Unmik police contingents, and their home countries' government. I wish speedy recovery to the injured officers."
-------- europe
New Iron Curtain descending
April 18, 2004
By William J. Kole
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040417-113032-3343r.htm
UZHHOROD, Ukraine - The new Europe is tantalizingly close to Tamila Vasilchenko - so close she can walk through a bleak border post to sell candy on a dusty roadside in neighboring Slovakia.
Yet what soon will be the European Union's most far-flung corner might as well be an ocean away. Ukrainians such as Mrs. Vasilchenko, 59, a retired teacher struggling to survive on a meager pension, can cross over to Slovakia a few times a month, but they can't stay.
They're shut behind a new Iron Curtain - a 2,400-mile economic frontier separating the former Soviet Union from the newly expanded European Union and the stability and prosperity it represents.
"Sometimes I don't pay the electricity or water bills for months because I don't have enough money," Mrs. Vasilchenko said bitterly. "I have to come here to sell something in order to have a better life."
That last resort could disappear on May 1, when Europe crowns its most significant geopolitical shift since World War II by making EU members of eight former communist countries, plus Cyprus and Malta, which were never in the Soviet orbit.
Joining the European Union on May 1 will be Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Current EU member states: Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
Enlargement brings the European Union right to the doorstep of the turbulent Balkans and the former Soviet Union, raising troubling security issues as the bloc rushes to tighten borders against traffickers and terrorists.
The old Iron Curtain was a Cold War border from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean consisting of minefields, attack dogs, tanks, concrete barriers and sharpshooters perched in towers. The new divide is draped with its share of barbed wire, but it's far more high-tech - computers linked to national and Interpol databases help guards decide who comes and goes.
Both borders, however, share the same goal: To keep the Easterners in the East.
Already awash in immigrants and rising xenophobia, the European Union is determined to avert an onslaught of cheap labor as it reaches out, ever eastward, to court new corners of the Continent.
The new frontier also threatens to further isolate Russian minorities already floating in a nationality limbo.
"Nobody takes us into account. We are an empty spot," said Vera Altonina, 63, an ethnic-Russian pensioner selling flowers on the streets of Riga, Latvia's capital, where she lives and works without citizenship.
"During Soviet times, there were no noncitizens and citizens. We were one big country, and nobody cared whether you were Russian or Latvian," she said. "Joining NATO and the EU was not our decision. The government never asked us. Now, we are isolated from Russia completely."
The expansion pushes the European Union into a potentially rough neighborhood: Just over the new borders are Belarus, Croatia, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Ukraine.
Across the Baltics and in Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, border controls are being tightened, not loosened.
EU headquarters in Brussels has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help the newcomer nations buy aircraft, snowmobiles, night-vision goggles, scanners and computers.
During the Cold War, the 61-mile Slovak-Ukraine border was under Moscow's sway and few people had the means or permission to travel.
Today, the border is virtually impenetrable, patrolled by 500 highly trained Slovak guards, meticulously searching Ukrainians and their vehicles and wandering through nearby fields and forests.
Ukraine lies on the ancient Silk Road, which has become a major route for smugglers bringing heroin and illegal immigrants from Central Asia to Europe.
"Before, we were in the East. Now we're about to switch to the other side, and we can't take any chances," said Deputy Col. Miron Vojtasek, Slovakia's second-in-command for the frontier, fidgeting nervously at his desk and sighing heavily as the phone rang every few minutes.
"We're protecting the outer border of Europe." The need for tight security became apparent late in March when Ukraine's Defense Ministry disclosed that several hundred Soviet-built missiles were missing from the nation's arsenals, raising concerns that they might reach terrorists.
In February, border guards stopped a man crossing into Hungary with nearly a pound of uranium. It was not clear whether the uranium was in natural form or had been enriched for weapons use.
Similar vigilance is evident along Poland's long border with Russia. In the Soviet era, crossings were spaced roughly 60 miles apart. Now there are manned checkpoints every 13 miles.
Poland, which began building new stations in 1997, has 16,000 border guards and will hire 5,300 more by 2006, said Jaroslaw Zukowicz, a border-security spokesman.
In October, Poland introduced visas for Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians. Cross-border traffic and small trade initially almost stopped, but the flow of vehicles and "suitcase merchants" hawking cheap cigarettes and other goods has resumed.
In the Baltics, where the border with Russia was mostly an administrative one until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, barbed-wire fences now run through thick forests, police boats patrol borderland rivers and lakes, and modern customs offices dot main highways to Russia and Belarus.
The Kremlin is unhappy that the Baltic states, which it long viewed as its own back yard, have joined the European Union and NATO. Baltic officials have tried to assure Russia that everyone in the region will be more secure.
"The western border of Russia has never been so safe before," declared Antanas Valionis, Lithuania's foreign minister.
Across the ex-communist East, there are doubts about the integrity of poorly paid border guards. Gunars Dabolins, who heads Latvia's border police, dismissed assertions that his department is rife with corrupt guards willing to wave through contraband in exchange for cash.
Even so, "we are establishing a criminal department in the border service because we realize that the pressure from [Russia and Belarus] is going to be big, and there will be attempts made by organized crime to bribe them," Mr. Dabolins said.
There's more to the new Iron Curtain than security issues. The EU expansion cuts off Russia from Kaliningrad, its westernmost enclave, and risks deepening the isolation of the Russian minorities in Latvia and elsewhere.
"When I go to Russia, they tell me I'm not Russian. When I'm in Latvia, they tell me I'm not Latvian," said Slava Vyacheslavs, 63, who left Russia on foot for Latvia at age 4 in 1944, yet hasn't been granted citizenship.
"I get a measly little pension in Latvia, so I've got to stay here. So let it be Europe - maybe that will be better for me," he said.
Russians in Kaliningrad, meanwhile, tend to view neighboring Poland, with its Western clothing, furniture, supplies and style of living, as their "America."
In Uzhhorod, capital of Ukraine's Transcarpathia region, which bills itself as the geographic center of Europe, Ukrainians see Slovakia as a similar Promised Land. It's an impression that's bound to increase after May 1.
Those fortunate enough to obtain multiple-entry visas often cross the border three or four times a day to sell whatever they can.
The gasoline trade is a vivid illustration of the widening wealth gap. Ukrainians tank up their shabby late '70s Lada and Volga sedans at home, drive to Slovakia where gas costs more, and siphon it out with a rubber hose for sale, leaving just enough for the 3-mile-long drive back.
Maria Dupin, 17, who studies English at college and aspires to work as a translator, says friends have left Uzhhorod and not come back. But for now, she said, she's content to wait for Europe to come to her.
When that might happen is anyone's guess. The European Union hasn't even set a vague target date for Ukraine's accession.
"I expect more opportunity in Europe," she said. "Ukraine is not a very good country. Those who left must know it's better to be on the other side."
• AP reporters Andrea Dudikova in Slovakia, Timothy Jacobs in Latvia and Monika Scislowska in Poland contributed to this article.
--------
Spanish Leader Orders All 1,300 Troops in Iraq to Withdraw
April 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/international/europe/18CND-SPAI.html
MADRID, Spain -- Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Sunday he had ordered Spanish troops withdrawn from Iraq as soon as possible.
While Zapatero had run for office on a promise to withdraw Spanish forces from the U.S.-led coalition, the timing of the announcement was unexpected.
In an announcement from the Moncloa Palace, Zapatero said he had ordered the defense minister to "do what is necessary for the Spanish troops stationed in Iraq return home in the shortest time possible."
Zapatero spoke just hours after the new Socialist government was sworn in.
-------- iraq
Guerrilla ``psychological operation'' has U.S. military worried
Sunday April 18, 2004
By JIM KRANE
Associated Press Writer
http://cbsnewyork.com/international/Iraq-CampaignofFear-ai/resources_news_html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) With videos of kidnapped civilians and leaflets threatening violence, one top U.S. military officer said insurgents were operating a brilliant campaign of fear that experts said was meant to drain international workers from Iraq and isolate the U.S. military and its allies.
Guerrilla ``masters of intimidation'' are also successfully countering the U.S. military's own psychological campaign.
One of the most demoralizing weapons in the campaign has been the release and broadcast of four videotapes of hostages, one of whom was filmed during his execution.
Insurgents have also issued a burst of fliers and statements warning Iraqis against cooperating with the U.S.-led occupation. The U.S. military used similar fliers and warnings to intimidate the Iraqi army during the war.
``There are activities here, people here, insurgents and extremists who are masters of intimidation,'' a senior U.S. military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Officials suspect former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party of being behind some of the campaign. Baathist operatives once ruled Iraq under a blanket of fear. Now they are recreating that aura of intimidation, experts say.
``The Baath was and is a secretive party that knows how to operate underground. These guys are good,'' said Robert Baer, a former CIA operative who worked covertly in northern Iraq during a 21-year career in the Middle East.
``The plan is to force all contractors out. Kidnapping, mutilations and executions will work, as they did in Lebanon'' during the civil war in the 1980s, Baer said. ``This will be the template for Iraq.''
The U.S. military is worried that the dangers will force Western media to flee Iraq, and the world will rely more on Arab media outlets like satellite TV channels Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya for coverage.
U.S. officials have long complained that the two satellite channels portray the occupation unfairly. The U.S.-led occupation administration has already created a ``war room'' to counter what it calls incorrect coverage on Al-Jazeera. Coalition press officials scan the network for erroneous reports, and then point out those reports to journalists during daily press briefings.
Last March, the U.S. Army launched its own psychological operation, the largest in U.S. history, carting in portable radio stations and tons of leaflets during the invasion of Iraq. Last summer, the Army had 11 Psychological Operations companies with almost 1,000 Psyop personnel working to sway Iraqis to join rebuilding efforts and see the bright side of the occupation.
The military or other U.S. government branches also control several Iraqi newspapers, television and radio stations, as well as the just-opened Al-Hurra Arabic language satellite TV station.
Iraqi insurgents' campaign promotes the opposite message: Guerrilla fighters are the true heroes; U.S. forces can't control Iraq or protect civilians; and those who support the occupation do so at their peril.
``You see it with these fliers that say 'Stay away from work from the 15th to the 23rd of April,' and 'Stay home from school today,' and 'If you work with the coalition you're a marked man or woman and so is your family,''' the U.S. official said. ``You see it used against the police and the Iraqi security forces.''
Army convoys that rely on civilian drivers have been bottled up, and one soldier has been abducted and another is missing. The kidnapped man, U.S. Army Pfc. Keith Maupin, 20, appeared on Al-Jazeera on Friday in yet another rebel video. Five armed men stood behind the seated soldier, their faces covered by tribal keffiyah scarves.
The psychological campaign has otherwise had little direct effect on the U.S. military.
But the guerrilla efforts could inflict huge damage on the rebuilding of Iraq and its economy, including the $18.4 billion construction campaign funded by U.S. taxpayers, said Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The climate of fear in Iraq along with the simultaneous doubling of insurgent attacks has kept foreigners from traveling, hampering rebuilding efforts and curtailing news coverage. In some areas the U.S. military appears to have lost control of the highways, and Iraqi guerrillas have set up their own roadblocks.
The military announced the closure of two highways into Baghdad on Saturday.
``The reconstruction projects which are so critical to the onward development of this country will be slowed down because contractors will be intimidated to come in,'' said Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt on Friday. ``Every additional security guard and every dollar that's paid for security is one less dollar to put into the infrastructure.''
If the campaign keeps up, it could discourage foreign aid for an emerging Iraqi government while sparking demands by the American public for a troop withdrawal, Cordesman said.
Before the invasion, Cordesman said U.S. military planners predicted the emergence of such a campaign, which led then Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, to call for 200,000-member U.S. occupation force.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called Shinseki's estimate ``wildly off the mark.'' Cordesman said recent boosting of coalition troop levels beyond 150,000 show the wisdom of Shinseki's predictions.
Among Iraqis, the psychological campaign is especially effective. Many distrust government information sources and put more credence in rumors, said Jeremy Binnie, an Iraq analyst with the London-based consultancy Jane's.
``This information culture is perfect for the insurgents,'' Binnie said. ``They can spread anti-coalition disinformation that people will read and often believe.''
----
US holding 200 Iraqi 'mutineers'
April 18, 2004
Reuters
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/17/1082140098949.html
US forces have detained around 200 Iraqi paramilitary soldiers who refused to take part in a US offensive against the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah, their former comrades said on Saturday.
The US military declined to confirm whether the men were being held.
Senior officers play down the significance of such incidents but, asked about reports of mutiny among Iraqi troops, have acknowledged a "command failure" took place during the Fallujah offensive.
Soldiers from the Baghdad-based 36th Security Brigade, part of the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC), said that last week US commanders took them at night to Fallujah, west of the capital, where US forces were massing to crush a growing insurgency.
"They told us to attack the city and we were astonished. How could an Iraqi fight an Iraqi like this? This meant that nothing had changed from the Saddam Hussein days. We refused en masse," said Ali al-Shamari.
Fallujah has been a flashpoint for attacks on US forces since Saddam was toppled last year. The city is inhabited by minority Arab Sunnis, many of whom complain they are worse off under the occupation than under Saddam, a fellow Sunni.
US Marines began a major assault on Fallujah on April 5 after the killing and mutilation of four US private security guards in the city the previous week. Doctors say more than 600 Iraqis have died in fighting in Fallujah since then.
Shamari said the brigade members did not know they were heading to Fallujah until they arrived there.
After the brigade refused to fight, he said, soldiers were stripped of their badges and confined to tents in a US base on the outskirts of Fallujah. Their rations were restricted to one meal per day.
"I escaped, but around 200 of our comrades remain there. We demand their release," Shamari said.
The 36th brigade, according to four of its members, comprises 340 soldiers from the former Iraqi army and the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia that once fought Saddam's forces.
Ali Hussein, a Shi'ite private, said the brigade's mission since its formation had been security tasks such as conducting searches and guarding buildings.
"Suddenly, we were asked to take part in a huge offensive," Hussein said, adding that he felt sympathy for Fallujah residents although they were from the Sunni minority who had dominated the Shi'ites for decades.
Bukhtiar Saleh, a Kurdish soldier, said US heavy-handedness had discouraged him from fighting.
"They were bombing the city with warplanes and using cluster bombs. I could not be a part of this," he said.
Human rights groups and several leading Iraqi politicians have denounced US action in Fallujah, calling it collective punishment of a whole town for the violent actions of a minority.
The US army says it has not targeted civilians. The Sunni insurgency and a separate Shi'ite revolt is testing the resolve of thousands of Iraqi security forces hastily formed after Saddam's government fell last year.
----
Other Nations May Reassess Iraqi Forces - Rice
Sun Apr 18, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4857714
WASHINGTON - The United States expects other nations with forces in Iraq to reassess their position after Spain's decision to pull its troops out, President Bush's national security adviser said on Sunday.
White House spokesman Ken Lisaius also said Washington wanted the Spanish withdrawal to be made in a "coordinated, responsible and orderly manner" but offered no critique of Madrid's decision.
Condoleezza Rice, speaking on ABC's "This Week" before the decision was announced in Madrid, said, "We know that there are others who are going to have to assess how they see the risk."
"We have 34 countries with forces on the ground. I think there are going to be some changes," Rice added.
Spain, along with Britain and Italy, had been one of the strongest supporters of Bush's invasion of Iraq last year to oust President Saddam Hussein.
But Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, a day after being sworn in, said Sunday he ordered the 1,300 troops to be brought home as soon as possible.
The White House had hoped Zapatero, who had made a pull-out a key feature of his election campaign, would reconsider his stand if the United Nations took a bigger role in Iraq.
Lisaius said, "We will work with our coalition partners in Iraq, and the Spanish government, and expect they will implement their decision in a coordinated, responsible and orderly manner."
He added, "As we have said before, each country will have to make its own choices in fighting the war against terror and in securing freedom for the people of Iraq."
The Bush administration has worked to shore up backing among other countries with forces in Iraq, whose resolve has been tested by a wave of kidnappings and violent attacks by insurgents in recent weeks.
"We are grateful to our other coalition partners for their recent expressions of solidarity in carrying out the mission in Iraq," Lisaius said.
----
Revolts in Iraq Deepen Crisis In Occupation
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20690-2004Apr17?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 17 -- In the space of two weeks, a fierce insurgency in Iraq has isolated the U.S.-appointed civilian government and stopped the American-financed reconstruction effort, as contractors hunker down against waves of ambushes and kidnappings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The events have also pressured U.S. forces to vastly expand their area of operations within Iraq, while triggering a partial collapse of the new Iraqi security services designed to gradually replace them.
The crisis, which has stirred support for the insurgents across both Sunni and Shiite communities, has also inflamed tensions between Arabs and Kurds.
U.S. officials said they are reconsidering initial assessments that the uprisings might be contained as essentially military confrontations in Fallujah, where Marines continue their siege of a chronically volatile city, and Najaf, where the militant Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr has taken refuge in the shadow of a shrine.
"The Fallujah problem and the Sadr problem are having a wider impact than we expected," a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy said. In Baghdad and Washington, officials had initially concluded that addressing those problems would not engender much anger among ordinary Iraqis. "Sadr's people and the people of Fallujah were seen as isolated and lacking broad support among Iraqis," the official added.
Instead, the official said, "The effect has been profound."
The violence has brought the U.S.-funded reconstruction of Iraq to a near-halt, according to U.S. officials and private contractors.
Thousands of workers for private contractors have been confined to their quarters in the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad that also houses the headquarters of the U.S. occupation authority. Routine trips outside the compound to repair power plants, water-treatment facilities and other parts of Iraq's crumbling infrastructure have been deemed too dangerous, even with armed escorts.
Compounding the problem is a growing fear that insurgents will seek retribution against Iraqis working for private contractors and the occupation authority. Scores of Iraqis have stopped showing up for their jobs as translators, support staff and maintenance personnel in the Green Zone, even though there is a lack of lucrative employment elsewhere.
The security situation "has dramatically affected reconstruction," said another U.S. official in Baghdad. "How can you rebuild the country when you're confined to quarters, when only small portions of your Iraqi staff are showing up for work on any given day?"
Among the firms that have restricted the movements of their employees are the two of the largest private contractors in Iraq: Bechtel Corp. and Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. The Research Triangle Institute, a North Carolina-based firm that has been helping set up city councils across Iraq, has sent 80 staffers -- about 40 percent of its non-Iraqi workforce -- to Kuwait as a precautionary measure.
Security concerns also have hindered the implementation of a $6 billion, U.S.-funded wave of construction projects intended to help improve security by putting legions of unemployed young men to work.
"We want to offer people opportunities that compete with the financial incentives they get" from insurgent leaders, an American official said. "But it's a Catch-22. We can't start the work that's supposed to help improve security until security improves."
The insurgency also appears to be generating new alliances -- and tensions -- among the major sectarian and ethnic groups in Iraq.
The most visible leader of the resistance is Sadr, a firebrand whose appeal long appeared to be limited to the young, unemployed Shiites who made up his militia, the Mahdi Army. However, in a surprising development, his poster began appearing this month at Sunni mosques that previously showed little interest in his activities.
Such displays of unity have dampened fears of a clash between the Sunni minority and Shiite majority communities. But worries about a different kind of civil war have been generated by reports that Iraq's ethnic Kurds are fighting alongside U.S. Marines and against the insurgency.
Guerrillas coming out of Fallujah have complained bitterly that Kurdish militiamen known as pesh merga are deployed against them. The Kurds are members of the 36th Battalion of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, built from several exile-based militias that supported the U.S.-led campaign against Saddam Hussein. Commanders of another, overwhelmingly Arab Iraqi army battalion refused to fight alongside the Marines.
"Worse than pigs, thieves and tramps," read lines in a poem circulating on fliers in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq where Kurds are accused of pushing Arab families off land claimed by both groups. The fliers condemned the leaders of Iraq's two Kurdish parties. It is not known who produced the fliers, which were also seen in Baghdad.
The Kurdish leaders were condemned in chanting that followed Friday prayers at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad.
"When the fighting is over in Fallujah, I will sell everything I have, even my home," said a resistance fighter who gave his name as Abu Taif Mashhadani. He wept as he recalled his 8-year-old daughter, who he said was killed by a U.S. sniper in Fallujah a week ago. "I will send my brothers north to kill the Kurds, and I will go to America and target the civilians. Only the civilians. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And the one who started it will be the one to be blamed."
The American confrontations with Sadr and in Fallujah also have roiled the political landscape by further isolating members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council from the Iraqi population.
In the first few days after Sadr's militiamen clashed with U.S. forces and the Marines surrounded Fallujah, council members -- usually a publicity-hungry lot -- had little to say in public. Although most of them regard the insurgents and militiamen as just as much of a threat as U.S. officials do, few wanted to risk the fallout from condemning a cleric or advocating tough counterinsurgency measures.
But on Baghdad's streets, many Iraqis said they equated the silence with tacit agreement with U.S. policies. In their sermons, clerics lambasted council members, many of whom the Bush administration had hoped would emerge as Iraq's new leaders. At one mosque in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, where streets run with wet garbage, council member Mowaffak Rubaie, a Shiite physician who was recently named national security adviser, was derided as a traitor and "the minister of sewers."
The crises have helped boost the standing of more radical Shiite and Sunni political leaders. Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, a Shiite tribal chief who led guerrilla attacks on Hussein's army in the 1980s and '90s in the southern marshes, gained stature in many Shiite neighborhoods after he suspended his membership in the council because of a disagreement with U.S. policy. Although U.S. officials selected Muhammadawi to sit on the council last summer, they have soured on him in recent months because of his support for an armed militia in southeastern Iraq.
Mohsen Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, has emerged as the council's most influential Sunni member because of his attempts to broker a peace deal in Fallujah. But Abdul Hamid had also been written off months ago by U.S. officials -- for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist Sunni movement that is banned in several Arab nations.
"The politicians the Americans wanted to become popular have lost out to the guys the Americans didn't want to become popular," said an Iraqi adviser to the occupation authority. "It was exactly the outcome they did not want."
The fighting has clearly widened the chasm between the government appointed by the U.S. administration and Iraqi society. In Baghdad, ambulances and hospitals that report to the Ministry of Health took in the wounded from Fallujah but then spirited them to smaller, private hospitals and homes amid rumors that U.S. soldiers were sweeping through major medical centers arresting the injured.
"We must protect them -- we must," said Riad Mohammed Saleh, a receptionist at a public hospital in the capital's Yarmouk district. "We figure they are regular citizens."
The extent of popular support for the resistance is unclear. But in nationwide surveys taken before the sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, a growing percentage of Iraqis said they saw the U.S. forces as occupiers, not liberators. The standing of the Americans was particularly low in the restive towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.
"Whenever the Americans increase their attacks on these areas, the people there become stronger and more willing to fight," said Sadoun Dulame, director of the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, an independent Iraqi research center. "I think if the Americans break into Najaf there will be a real problem, because they will be affected by the people of Fallujah."
A wider uprising would further test U.S. troops, which were forced in the last week to vastly expand their area of operations by moving south of Baghdad into a zone nominally controlled by a Polish-commanded international division. Several Army units were recalled from Kuwait, where they were preparing to leave for home.
Commanders were surprised by the sophistication and coordination displayed by insurgents massing for attacks on armored columns on highways. On Friday, a coalition aircraft reported coming under fire from an anti-aircraft gun, which was highly unusual.
No less sobering, commanders said, were new reports of children playing roles in guerrilla attacks. In Baghdad Tuesday, a girl about 6 or 7 years old dropped an explosive from a highway overpass onto a convoy. A commander was killed in a similar incident outside Fallujah, when a convoy was ambushed after slowing for a girl leading cattle across a highway.
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
Bremer Says Iraqis Not Ready to Secure Country; 5 Marines Killed
April 18, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/international/middleeast/18CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 18 - The American coalition administrator in Iraq said today that recent fighting in the country showed Iraqi forces would be unable to maintain security alone, stressing that United States-led armies were needed in the country after the handover of sovereignty on June 30.
Also today, the chief spokesman for the American military said five American marines were killed on Saturday in a prolonged gunbattle that started when they came under mortar and small arms fire in Qusaybah, near the Syrian border.
The spokesman, Brig. Gen Mark Kimmit, said Iraqi anti-coalition forces and marines fought for about 14 hours in the battle, unusual for its duration and far from the area where marines have been fighting an offensive in Falluja, the Sunni Muslim town west of Baghdad.
"This is the first time we have lost five marines" in that area, General Kimmitt said by telephone.
Dozens of Iraqis were killed in the fighting, according to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which has a reporter embedded with the Marines.
Political preparations for the handover of sovereignty to Iraqis have been all but overshadowed by the battles that have raged in Falluja, and which have also flared in mostly Shiite towns south of Baghdad this month with fighters loyal to an anti-American cleric, Moktada Sadr.
"Events of the past two weeks show that Iraq still faces security threats and needs outside help to deal with them," the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer III, said in a statement.
"Early this month the foes of democracy overran Iraqi police stations and seized public buildings in several parts of the country," he said. "Iraqi forces were unable to stop them."
Mr. Bremer blamed former members of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard and members of Mr. Sadr's militia for the violence. He added: "But it is clear that Iraqi forces will not be able, on their own, to deal with these threats by June 30 when an Iraqi government assumes sovereignty. Instead, Iraq and troops from many countries, including the United States will be partners in providing the security Iraqis need."
The remarks underscore the dilemma of occupation forces in Iraq more than a year after Saddam Hussein was toppled. Insurgents and Iraqi militia have said that they were fighting in recent weeks to rid their country of occupation forces, but for the American-led coalition, that unrest firms their resolve to remain.
But Spain's new prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, announced that he had ordered his defense minister to "do what is necessary for the Spanish troops stationed in Iraq to return home in the shortest time possible."
The security issue has been a priority in recent weeks for members of the American-installed Iraqi Governing Council, which has tried to mediate through its representatives to halt the fighting in Falluja.
In a further move expected to consolidate the Iraqi forces, the interim Defense Minister, Ali Allawi, named three senior officials today to the Iraqi Armed Forces. The appointments of the Sunni Arab, Kurdish and Shiite generals reflected in general the demographic majority of the country.
The top general was named as Gen. Babekr al-Zibari, a Sunni Kurd from Mosul. He will serve as senior military adviser. Gen. Amer al-Hashimi, a Sunni Arab from Baghdad, would be the chief of staff.
The deputy to that position would be Lt. Gen Daham al-Assal, from Nineveh.
He will be second in command of the Iraqi Armed Forces.
"Iraqis want peace," said Mr. Allawi in a statement. "Iraqis want security. With these generals providing leadership, Iraqis will have both."
The American military also announced today that in Baghdad on Saturday, one soldier was killed and two were injured when their Abrams tank rolled over and in another incident, a soldier died of wounds from a roadside bomb attack on his convoy.
Also on Saturday, three soldiers in the 1st Armored Division were killed in a small-arms ambush near al-Diwaniya, the military said.
In al-Anbar province where the Sunni Muslim town of Falluja is located, a soldier assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed on Saturday as a result of enemy action, the military said.
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Flashpoints in Iraq Calm as Violence Breaks Out Elsewhere
April 18, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Heavy fighting in Iraq over the weekend killed 10 U.S. troops, including five Marines in a day of bloody clashes near the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Sunday.
The deaths brought to 503 the number of American soldiers killed in action in Iraq since the start of the U.S.-led war in March last year to oust Saddam Hussein.
This month's toll of 104 is higher than the number killed in action in the three-week war that toppled Saddam.
Spain, whose forces have battled Shi'ite rebels in parts of southern Iraq this month, said it would bring home its troops as soon as possible, in another blow to the U.S.-led coalition.
The heaviest fighting at the weekend was in Qusayba on the Syrian border, where five Marines and 25 to 30 guerrillas were killed in a day of clashes Saturday, the military said.
``A day-long series of firefights began...when a Marine patrol reported they were under fire by enemy forces wielding machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades,'' the 1st Marine Division said in a statement.
``Marines continued to bring coordinated fire against the enemy force of approximately 120 to 150 fighters throughout the day and into the night. Enemy casualties are estimated to be 25 to 30 dead and an unknown number of wounded.''
HUMAN SHIELDS
The Marines said women and children had surrounded guerrilla mortar positions during the fighting, apparently as human shields. ``It is unknown whether or not they were in those positions on their own free will,'' the statement said.
A Marine offensive in western Iraq this month has sparked the bloodiest fighting since the fall of Saddam, particularly in the Sunni bastion of Falluja, 32 miles west of Baghdad.
U.S.-led forces have found themselves simultaneously battling a Shi'ite uprising in southern Iraq, led by rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Three U.S. soldiers were killed in the southern Shi'ite town of Diwaniya Saturday in a convoy ambush, the military said.
Residents said seven Iraqis were killed and six wounded in the clashes, and angrily pointed to blackened shops and bullet-pocked walls. Burned-out cars and two charred military vehicles littered the streets.
Dutch troops traded fire with Iraqis Saturday near the Shi'ite town of Samawa where they and Japanese forces are based. The Dutch military said one Iraqi had been wounded.
The U.S. military said a U.S. soldier was killed Saturday by a bomb in Baghdad and another was killed in western Iraq.
Spain's new Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said he had given Defense Minister Jose Bono the ``order to do what is necessary for the Spanish troops in Iraq to come home in the shortest time and in the greatest safety possible.''
Zapatero, who was speaking on television, had already pledged before his election to withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops.
IRAQI OUTRAGE
The number of civilians killed in this month's offensive by U.S. forces, and the ferocity of the fighting, has sparked outrage among many Iraqis and led to a spate of kidnappings of foreign civilians from more than a dozen countries.
Iraq's U.S. Governor Paul Bremer said in a speech Shi'ite rebels and Sunni guerrillas who ``want to shoot their way to power'' would be stopped by U.S.-led forces.
But he added: ``They will be dealt with in a manner that reduces the loss of innocent blood to the minimum possible.''
Talks are going on to bolster a shaky truce in Falluja and to prevent violence in Najaf, a holy city to Iraq's Shi'ite majority, where Sadr is holed up and protected by his militia.
Iraqis have warned that if U.S. troops enter Najaf it would spark fury across the country and further inflame violence.
Sadr's spokesman Qays al-Khazali told a news conference the cleric's Mehdi Army militia would halt military operations in and around Najaf during commemorations Monday and Tuesday for the anniversary of the Prophet Mohammad's death.
SADR CAMP DEFIANT
But Khazali also struck a defiant note. ``The Americans are escalating the situation and the Mehdi Army is ready,'' he said.
About 2,500 U.S. troops have been poised on the outskirts of Najaf for several days, with orders to kill or capture Sadr.
U.S. officials demand that the cleric disarm his Mehdi Army and turn himself in to stand trial in an Iraqi court for the murder last year of a moderate Shi'ite cleric in Najaf.
Falluja, a bastion of Sunni guerrillas, enjoyed a second day of calm, but five civilians were killed overnight as they fled U.S. shelling in the nearby town of Karma, witnesses said.
The Americans were demanding Falluja rebels lay down their guns before U.S. Marines lift a siege of the city of 300,000, said mediator Hajem al-Al-Hassani of the Iraqi Islamic Party.
``A solution is expected to take time,'' he said.
U.S. Marines launched a crackdown in Falluja after the killing and public mutilation of four American private security guards ambushed on March 31.
Guerrillas have seized about 50 foreigners this month. Most have been freed, but the captors of four Italians killed one and threatened to kill the rest unless Italian troops leave Iraq.
A U.S. soldier and contractor have also been abducted and paraded in footage shown on Arab satellite networks.
The climate of insecurity has prompted the U.S. military to indefinitely close highways leading north, west and south of Baghdad in a new blow to reconstruction and economic life.
--------
Top officers from three communities named to head new Iraqi armed forces
BAGHDAD (AFP)
Apr 18, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040418160521.2a1d33tj.html
Iraq's interim defence minister Sunday named senior officers from the country's three main communities to front the new post-Saddam armed forces.
The appointments followed criticism of Iraqi forces during fighting between US marines and insurgents in the hotspot town of Fallujah, and coalition troops and Shiite militants in the south.
General Babekr al-Zibari, 57, a Sunni Kurd from Mosul who organised the Kurdish peshmerga fighters and opposed Saddam Hussein for 30 years, has been given the key post of senior military advisor to a new Iraqi leadership.
General Amer al-Hashimi, 58, a Sunni Arab, will be the chief of staff responsible for recruiting and training staff. Lieutenant General Daham al-Assal, 63, a Shiite trained in both the United States and Britain, will be his deputy.
"These generals bring a wealth of experience, wisdom, courage and ability to the Iraqi Armed Forces," interim defence minister Ali Allawi told reporters.
"Iraqis want peace. Iraqis want security. With these generals providing leadership, Iraqis will have both.
"We are now passing through a period of instability. The enemies of democracy in Iraq are carrying out aggressive acts to get Iraq back to the old days."
He insisted the new force would have enough resources to see off the threat, adding 450 new graduates had passed through training last week going towards a planned 35,000-strong military.
The total security force will number 200,000, he said.
The United States disbanded the Iraqi army shortly after the fall of Saddam in April 2003, with some former servicemen joining the insurgents against coalition forces.
However, criticism has continued over the performances of the new Iraqi troops who are expected to take on increasing responsibilities for the security of the country.
In Fallujah, members of the paramilitary civil defense forces were suspected of luring four US contractors into a lethal ambush last month. Police failed to intervene to prevent the mutilation of the victims by an angry crowd, and an Iraqi army unit refused to fight Iraqis in the city.
Elite Iraqi troops deployed alongside US forces besieging Fallujah told reporters Friday they were ready to quit the operation, claiming they were outgunned and unhappy with US tactics.
General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, last week praised some units and said weaknesses were down to poor training and equipment as well as the absence of an Iraqi chain of command.
Coalition officials announced last month the setting up of a new defence ministry, responsible for the army, airforce, an Iraqi coastal defence force, and the civil defence force that was set up in July and trained by the US-led coalition.
Unlike the former regime, where all functions of the dreaded defence ministry were controlled by Saddam, the new defence ministry structure will be layered.
It will include a secretary general who will deputise for the minister in his absence and an inspector general to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse that was rampant under Saddam, the coalition said.
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis kill Hamas chief in Gaza attack
April 18, 2004
By Joshua Mitnick
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040418-010907-1775r.htm
TEL AVIV - Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi died last night shortly after an Israeli air force helicopter fired two missiles into his car in Gaza City.
The assassination of the Palestinian firebrand marks the second time in less than a month that the Islamic militant group lost its chief to Israeli military fire. Two of his bodyguards also were killed in the attack.
"Israel will regret this. Revenge is on the way," Hamas spokesman Ismail Haniyeh said, according to the Web site of the Ha'aretz newspaper. "The death of Rantisi wasn't in vain. Our fate as members of Hamas and Palestinians are to die as martyrs."
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat called it a "brutal assassination" even as Israel's vice prime minister, Ehud Olmert, warned there would be more such attacks.
Just last month, Mr. Rantisi, 56, was named to succeed Hamas co-founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin after he died in an Israeli missile attack outside a Gaza mosque.
An Israeli border police officer was killed and three other Israelis were injured a few hours before the attack on Mr. Rantisi when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated an explosive at the Erez checkpoint on the northern border of the Gaza Strip.
In rare finger-pointing at the United States, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia said the Bush administration was complicit in the assassination because of its support of Israel.
The flare-up comes just days after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited Washington and received President Bush's approval for a unilateral withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip.
Israel has pursued Hamas' top leaders in a campaign of targeted killings meant to deny the militants' claims of victory amid the pullout. Mr. Rantisi had been targeted in a similar attack in June.
The white Subaru carrying Mr. Rantisi, one of the most popular Palestinian leaders, was hit by two missiles while traveling on a central street a block from his house in the Sheik Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City.
The Hamas leader was brought to Shifra Hospital with critical wounds all over his body and head. He died five minutes after arriving, the Associated Press reported.
Two guards, Akram Nassar, 35, and Ahmad Jhura, 32, also were killed, and five pedestrians were wounded.
Enraged Palestinians surrounded the charred car, calling for revenge. Less than an hour after the attack, thousands of Gazans were in the streets to show solidarity with the slain militant leader.
One man stuck his hands into the car, stained them with blood and waved them in the air, the AP reported.
The killing ratchets up pressure for retaliation because Hamas militants so far have failed to take revenge for the killing of Sheik Yassin.
In Washington, the White House declined to criticize Israel for the assassination, saying that Israel "has the right to defend itself from terrorist attacks" and urging restraint in the region.
"The United States is gravely concerned for regional peace and stability," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. "The United States strongly urges Israel to consider carefully the consequences of its actions, and we again urge all parties to exercise maximum restraint at this time."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw condemned Israel's policy of targeted killings as "unlawful, unjustified and counterproductive." In Cairo, Hossam Zaki, spokesman for the Arab League, called the assassination "a criminal act" that puts an end to all peace efforts.
Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, and Mr. Rantisi used uncompromising rhetoric in the group's fight against the Jewish state, making him an oft-quoted figure in the international media.
Palestinians considered Mr. Rantisi, a pediatrician by training, to be the chief of Hamas' political leadership. Israel, however, has long argued there is no distinction among Hamas leaders.
"We will take all measures to defend ourselves and to strike with impunity against terrorist leaders," Sharon adviser Raanan Gissin said in a television interview.
Israeli security sources said Mr. Rantisi was planning a large attack to solidify his position in Hamas, the AP reported. Israeli security forces now will be put on high alert for attacks avenging his death.
Hamas is responsible for most of the 112 suicide bombings that have killed 465 persons on the Israeli side during 31/2 years of violence.
Some politicians on the Israeli right accused Mr. Sharon of ordering the assassination to persuade members of his Likud Party to vote in favor of the Gaza pullout in a referendum next month. The referendum campaign began this weekend amid speculation that Mr. Sharon might be forced to resign if he loses the vote.
The assassination of the newly picked Hamas chief leaves a vacuum in the organization's Gaza-based leadership.
Khaled Mashaal, based in Syria, leads Hamas operations outside the occupied territories. Mr. Haniyeh, a former top aide to Sheik Yassin, and Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas spokesman, are considered candidates to succeed Mr. Rantisi in Gaza. Both are members of Hamas' decision-making political bureau.
Ghazi Hamad, an associate of Mr. Rantisi and editor of a newspaper sympathetic to Hamas, said the militant group faces a "big crisis." He suggested that the identity of the new leader might be kept secret to insulate him from Israeli attacks.
"Hamas will be more and more secretive," he predicted. Mr. Rantisi survived a similar missile strike by three Israeli helicopters June 10, escaping with moderate wounds. Two Palestinian bystanders were killed. In a retaliatory attack the next day, 16 Israelis were killed in a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem.
In recent months, the Hamas leader had gone into hiding, living in a secret apartment, abandoning his mobile phone and limiting meetings. An Israeli official said he could not be hit for many days because he had surrounded himself with children.
Mr. Rantisi was chosen as Hamas' leader in Gaza just a few days after the March 22 assassination of Sheik Yassin. He said he knew he was a marked man, but preferred death at the hands of Israelis rather than death from natural causes.
"We will all die one day," he said. "Nothing will change. If by Apache [helicopter] or by cardiac arrest, I prefer Apache."
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Diplomat sent to New Zealand to deal with Israeli arrests
By Yossi Melman,
18/04/2004
Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and DPA
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/416350.html
Israel's embassy in Australia in recent days dispatched a diplomat to New Zealand to deal with the arrests of two Israelis for allegedly trying to obtain a false New Zealand passport.
Wellington has asked Israel to explain why two of its citizens, reported by a newspaper to be Mossad secret service agents, were trying to procure the forged document, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark confirmed Saturday.
The case has set off alarm bells that Mossad agents may be masquerading as harmless New Zealand travelers abroad, the New Zealand Herald said. Clark refused to comment directly on the case in which the two Israelis appeared in court in Auckland on Friday.
But she issued a statement saying that, "the government takes seriously any action which challenges the integrity of the New Zealand passport system."
"The people involved in this case are Israeli citizens and the matter has been raised directly with the Israeli government," Clark said. "There will be a strong and public response to this matter once the court action has concluded."
Acting ambassador in New Zealand, Orna Sagiv, refused to comment on the arrests, while sources at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem on Saturday morning said they knew nothing of the affair.
The newspaper said Uri Zoshe Kelman, 30, and Eli Kara, 50, denied three joint charges including attempting to obtain a New Zealand passport and participating in an organized crime group to obtain a false passport when they appeared in the Auckland District Court.
It said court papers revealed two other men were involved.
Ze'ev William Barkan, 37, has fled the country, and authorities concede they would not know where to find him, the Herald said. The other man was believed to be in New Zealand, but police said the others refused to identify him.
It said the group had been in and out of the country since last November, with Kara, who says he is a travel agent based in Sydney, Australia, claiming he has visited New Zealand 24 times since October 2000.
Court papers allege they applied for a New Zealand passport using the birth certificate of a New Zealand man suffering from cerebral palsy, who authorities say is innocent of any involvement. The Herald said Kelman and Kara first appeared in court late last month.
When they appeared in court again Friday, defense lawyers agreed they should be committed for trial while not admitting that there was a prima facie case against them.
The two were released on bail subject to curfew conditions and reporting regularly to police. Outside the court, Kara denied being a member of the Israeli secret service, while Kelman refused to comment, the Herald said.
In 1997, Mossad agents were caught using Canadian passports during a failed assassination attempt on an Islamic official in Jordan, and in 2000, a Mossad operative was given a suspended sentence after being accused of espionage and repeated use of false identity documents in Switzerland, the paper said.
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U.N. condemns Israeli slaying Hamas chief
April 18, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040417-102022-9285r.htm
UNITED NATIONS, April 17 -- A U.N. spokesman said Saturday Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Abdelaziz Rantissi.
The newly nominated leader of Islamic resistance movement in the Gaza Strip was killed, with a bodyguard and his son, in an apparent missile strike on his car earlier Saturday.
The spokesman said Annan "reiterates that extra-judicial killings are violations of international law and calls on the government of Israel to immediately end this practice."
Annan was described by the spokesman as "apprehensive that such an action would lead to further deterioration of an already distressing and fragile situation. The only way to halt an escalation in the violence is for Israelis and Palestinians to work towards a viable negotiating process aimed at a just, lasting and comprehensive settlement, based on the Quartet's Road Map."
The spokesman was referring to the peace plan calling for two separate states, Palestinian and Israeli, living side by side in peace. It is sponsored by the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States.
----
Israeli Strike Kills Another Hamas Chief
Gaza Leader, Two Others Slain in a Missile Attack
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 18, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20694-2004Apr17?language=printer
JERUSALEM, April 17 -- The top leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip was assassinated in an Israeli helicopter missile strike on Saturday, hospital officials and witnesses said, setting off large-scale Palestinian demonstrations and calls for revenge.
Abdel Aziz Rantisi, 54, who had recently become the Gaza Strip leader of the militant Islamic group, for years launched vitriolic assaults on Israel and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He could order a demonstration and within hours mobilize tens of thousands of Palestinians into the streets.
His killing came about a month after the Israeli assassination of Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and deepened the anger of Palestinians already frustrated by last week's U.S. endorsement of an Israeli plan to keep several major settlements in the West Bank.
"Israel will regret this -- revenge is coming," Ismail Haniya, a senior political leader of Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, told reporters after Rantisi was pronounced dead at a hospital in Gaza, the Reuters news agency reported. "This blood will not be wasted. . . . The battle will not weaken our determination or break our will."
Rantisi was killed Saturday evening when an Israeli helicopter fired two missiles at a white Subaru sedan in which he was traveling, about a block from his home in the Sheik Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, according to witnesses. The attack demolished the vehicle, killing Rantisi and two of his bodyguards -- Akram Nassar, 35, and another man who had not been identified late Saturday, hospital officials said.
Rantisi, who was critically wounded in the attack, was rushed to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Arabic satellite television stations aired graphic images of doctors frantically working over his body covered with puncture wounds and slash marks.
Thousands of Palestinian protesters converged on the scene of the attack and at Shifa Hospital, screaming vows of revenge. Demonstrators burned tires in the streets; mosques blared verses from the Koran; and militants fired bursts from AK-47 assault rifles across the city.
Israeli officials defended the assassination.
"We are preventing terrorist attacks, and part of the prevention is to go after terrorists like Rantisi," said Gideon Meir, deputy director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "Anyone who will replace him and will continue this business of terrorism against Israel is a legitimate target."
A White House statement said Israel had the right to defend itself but urged it "to consider carefully the consequences of its actions."
The statement appealed for all sides to use restraint, noting that doing so was especially important "at a moment when there is hope that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will bring a new opportunity for progress toward peace."
The killing came three days after a White House meeting in which Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Bush vowed again to wipe out Palestinian terrorism, which they see as a prerequisite to establishing an independent Palestinian state. Palestinian leaders denounced Bush's endorsement of a Sharon plan that would allow Israel to keep several large Jewish settlements in the West Bank and that rejected the right of return for Palestinian refugees to lands that are now part of Israel.
Following the meeting, Khaled Meshal, a top Hamas leader based in Damascus, said in an interview with Reuters news agency that Bush's policy marked the end of "illusions that there can be a U.S.-sponsored political settlement" and proved "that resistance is the only way."
Rantisi, a pediatrician, assumed the leadership of Hamas in Gaza on March 23, a day after Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at Yassin, killing him as he was being pushed home in his wheelchair from morning prayers at a local mosque. Seven other Palestinians died in that attack.
With the killings of Rantisi and Yassin and the assassination last August of another senior Hamas political activist, Ismail Abu Shanab, Israel has removed the most charismatic and senior leaders of Hamas in Gaza. The leadership mantle will now probably be passed to Haniya or Mahmoud Zahar, a senior political figure in the group. Zahar's house was destroyed by Israeli missiles in a failed assassination attempt last year.
In a statement, Hamas said it had chosen a new leader to replace Rantisi but would keep his identity secret.
Palestinian political officials lashed out at Israel, blaming it for ratcheting up violence and diminishing the chances for peace.
"This is just deepening the slide into a lose-lose situation between the Israelis and Palestinians," said Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestinians. "Sharon thinks he can solve problems with incursions and assassinations. This will only add fuel to the fire."
"The Palestinian cabinet considers this terrorist Israeli campaign is a direct result of American encouragement, and the complete bias of the American administration towards the Israeli government," the Associated Press quoted Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia as saying.
Last June, Rantisi and his 19-year-old son, Ahmed, were seriously injured in an Israeli missile strike on their car that killed a bodyguard and two bystanders. Since then, Rantisi had adopted extraordinary security precautions and rarely was seen in public and then only in large crowds.
Rantisi, who spoke fluent English and was quoted frequently in the American press, often insisted that Palestinians would not relinquish their claim to Israel, predicting that all land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean would ultimately fall to Palestinian control and ownership.
Like many other Hamas leaders, Rantisi in recent years moderated his message, even suggesting that Hamas could enter into a long-term cease-fire with Israel. But political analysts who follow Hamas say that such statements simply illustrated Rantisi's pragmatic side and that he never softened his real goal of destroying the state of Israel.
Portly, bearded and bespectacled, Rantisi was particularly popular with Hamas's guerrilla fighters. He was considered the key intermediary in Gaza between the political side of the organization and its military faction, called the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
On the day Rantisi took over as the Gaza leader of Hamas, he told thousands of supporters at the city soccer stadium that his organization would strike Israel wherever possible. "We will chase them everywhere," he told the crowd.
A few hours before the strike against Rantisi, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated explosives near the Erez border crossing from the Gaza Strip into Israel, killing an Israeli border police officer and injuring two other border policemen and one Israeli citizen, according to a statement released by the Israeli Defense Forces.
Special correspondent Islam Abdulkarim in Gaza City and staff writer Peter Slevin in Washington contributed to this report.
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NEWS ANALYSIS
Sharon Hopes to Show He Isn't Running From a Fight
April 18, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/international/middleeast/18ASSE.html?hp
JERUSALEM, April 17 - Israel's spokesmen were under strict instructions Saturday night not even to mention Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's political faction, Likud, in discussing Israel's killing of a leader of the militant group Hamas.
The missile strike in Gaza City against Abdel Aziz Rantisi was ordered on security grounds alone, they said.
The claim was certainly plausible: Israel had tried to kill Mr. Rantisi before, and made no secret of its intention to try again once Israel killed the previous leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, last month, and Mr. Rantisi took over.
Yet the killing will almost certainly have political consequences - ones that illuminate the strategy and effects of Mr. Sharon's plan to withdraw settlers from Gaza without a peace agreement.
"Sharon made up his mind that he's going to pull out of Gaza," said Dr. Shmuel Sandler, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University. "And he's going to do it with a big bang."
The missile strike brought immediate criticism from Arab and European governments.
But those are not the audiences that most concern Mr. Sharon right now. His focus is local. Capitalizing on new diplomatic assurances granted by President Bush, he wants to weaken Hamas in Gaza, while demonstrating to Palestinians and Israelis that he is not running from a fight.
Dore Gold, an adviser to Mr. Sharon, said there was no connection between the missile strike and diplomacy. But Israeli analysts and politicians immediately linked the two. Some fierce right-wing critics of the pullout plan praised Mr. Sharon after the missile strike.
Tzachi Hanegbi, a Likud opponent of the plan, lauded what he called the plan's "security aspect." He told Israel's Channel 2 television, "There is no doubt that the gloves are off, and the determination of the government is no longer questioned."
But he said he still objected to a unilateral withdrawal "as a matter of principle."
The missile strike came on the eve of a critical meeting between Mr. Sharon and Likud leaders who have not yet announced whether they will support the plan, which the Likud is to approve or reject in a party referendum May 2. The most important of the leaders who have not announced a final position is Benjamin Netanyahu, the finance minister and former prime minister.
In itself, the strike was not likely to change any of these minds. Limor Livnat, one of the wavering leaders, told Israel radio, "If you're asking me whether this makes it easier for me to support the disengagement plan, then the answer is no."
Yet among the rank-and-file of the 200,000 Likud members, the killing of Mr. Rantisi was likely to give Mr. Sharon more insulation from the accusation that in withdrawing unilaterally, he is caving in to terrorism. On this question, Likud members are already more disposed to trust Mr. Sharon, one of Israel's most storied generals, than they are officials like Ms. Livnat or even Mr. Netanyahu.
On Wednesday, in a visit to the White House, Mr. Sharon gained sweeping new diplomatic assurances from President Bush in exchange for his withdrawal plan.
Among them was a broadly worded statement that the United States would consider Israel free to strike into Gaza if it feels menaced from there. "Israel will retain its right to defend itself against terrorism, including to take actions against terrorist organizations," Mr. Bush wrote in a letter to Mr. Sharon.
For Mr. Sharon, part of the appeal of his approach, put simply, is that unilateral withdrawal, rather than bilateral, gives Israel more freedom to act. It will not feel restrained from military action by an agreement like the Oslo accords, which gave the governing Palestinian Authority responsibility to fight terrorism. Mr. Sharon says he would have preferred that the Palestinians handle that task. But since they did not, he says, Israel must ensure that it remains free to do so.
Israeli security officials acknowledge that, at least in the short run, strikes like the one on Mr. Rantisi boost the popularity of Hamas among Palestinians and further weaken the governing Palestinian Authority. But they say that, over time, Hamas may begin to crack apart under the pressure.
Hamas has been exploring taking a role in helping govern Gaza once the Israelis leave. Mr. Sharon's advisers argue that another advantage to the unilateral approach is that Israel no longer needs to care about how Palestinians run their own affairs.
Palestinian officials say that Mr. Sharon has worked to radicalize the Palestinians to avoid a peace agreement.
In the first two years of the conflict, when attacked by Hamas bombers, Israel retaliated against institutions of the Palestinian Authority. Israel said it was trying to goad the Palestinian Authority to act against terrorism, but Palestinian officials said the real intent was to destroy any legitimate Palestinian government.
Having undermined Palestinian moderates, they say, Mr. Sharon is now claiming there is no possible peace partner, to avoid negotiations that would cost him more territory than he plans to yield unilaterally.
But for almost a year now, Israel has also been hunting the so-called political leaders of Hamas.
At the same time, Israel's military restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have hampered the ability of Hamas to strike. Mr. Rantisi did not live to see the bloody retaliation he repeatedly vowed for the killing of Sheik Yassin.
Israelis generally expect that retaliation to come eventually. According to polls, most Israelis back the policy of "targeted killing" of militant leaders, even though most also think it provokes more violence in the short term, and does not reduce it in the long term.
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Hamas Appoints New Leader After Killing
April 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html?pagewanted=all&position=
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Hamas secretly appointed a new Gaza Strip chief early Sunday, but refused to reveal his identity following Israel's assassination of two previous Hamas leaders in less than a month.
Israel assassinated Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi in a missile strike on his car on Saturday, part of its declared campaign to wipe out the Islamic militant group's leadership ahead of a planned Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Two of Rantisi's bodyguards were also killed in the attack.
Hundreds of thousands of mourners thronged the streets of Gaza City, chanting ``revenge, revenge'' and throwing flowers at the men's bodies as they were carried through the streets in a funeral procession.
Hamas posted a statement on its Web site pledging ``100 retaliations'' that will shake Israel. It said it had declared a state of emergency in the West Bank and Gaza Strip until revenge was complete.
``Yesterday they said that they killed Rantisi to weaken Hamas. They are dreaming. Every time a martyr falls, Hamas is strengthened,'' Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, told more than 70,000 mourners gathered at the city's largest mosque for the funeral. ``Hamas might have a crisis at hand after losing its leaders, but it will not be defeated.''
Palestinian officials also worried Israel would next target Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whom Israel accuses of fomenting terror. The Israeli Cabinet voted last year to ``remove'' Arafat.
``President Arafat is going to be the next victim,'' Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said.
Palestinians demonstrated Sunday throughout the Gaza Strip and West Bank in anger over Rantisi's killing.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Israeli soldiers shot a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in the head, leaving him in critical condition, during a riot against the killing, hospital officials said. The army said soldiers were putting down a large riot but did not shoot live ammunition.
In Bethlehem, a teenager throwing bottles at soldiers was shot in the stomach and wounded. The army said it believed he had been throwing a firebomb.
During the Gaza funeral procession, about 200 armed Hamas militants lined both sides of the road and saluted the bodies as they approached a large blue and green mourning tent set up outside Rantisi's house. Armed members of rival militant groups fired volley after volley of gunfire in the air.
Green Hamas flags and black mourning flags hung from nearby homes.
The graveyard was jammed with people and onlookers gathered on nearby rooftops as Rantisi was buried just a few graves away from Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas' founder who was killed by Israel on March 22.
The group's Damascus-based leader Khaled Mashaal instructed the group to keep the name of its new Gaza leader secret. Army Radio reported the new leader was Mahmoud Zahar, who had been Rantisi's second in command.
``We are committed to the policy of resistance and we cannot be swayed,'' Zahar told The Associated Press. ``Hamas cannot be defeated. Hamas cannot be broken.''
Israel has targeted Hamas and its leaders in advance of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposed withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip and a few West Bank settlements.
Sharon vowed to continue hunting down Hamas leaders.
``This policy of making an effort on the one hand to advance a political process and on the other hand to hit the terror organizations and their leaders will continue,'' Sharon said at the start of his weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday.
Sharon returned from Washington Friday with strong U.S. backing for his plan, as well as unprecedented U.S. support for Israel to hold on to parts of the West Bank under a final peace deal.
Sharon has called for a May 2 referendum on his plan in his hard-line Likud Party, and polls show the proposal garnering a slim majority of the party's 200,000 voters.
Two key Israeli Cabinet ministers, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Limor Livnat, decided Sunday to back the plan, giving Sharon a Cabinet majority and the support of influential Likud members.
Vice Premier Ehud Olmert denied there was a connection between the referendum and Rantisi's assassination. But the killing underscored Israel's commitment to continue fighting terrorism and hunting down militant leaders even after a pullout, he said.
Israeli Cabinet minister Gideon Ezra said Mashaal -- the overall Hamas leader who Israel tried unsuccessfully to kill in the past -- was also marked for death.
``The fate of Khaled Mashaal is the fate of Rantisi. The minute we have the operational opportunity we will do this,'' Ezra said.
The Bush administration declined to criticize Rantisi's killing, saying instead that Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorist attacks and urging Palestinians to use restraint in responding.
``The United States strongly urges Israel to consider carefully the consequences of its actions,'' White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
Arab officials and Muslim leaders called the assassination ``state terrorism'' that proved Israel was intent on sabotaging peace hopes and suggested American support for such killings, an accusation Israel and the United States denied.
Israeli security forces went on high alert after Rantisi was killed, fearing reprisal bombings. Arafat condemned the killing as a ``brutal assassination.''
Stores and schools were closed in Gaza. In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority instructed schools to devote the first half-hour of lessons to Quran readings in a sign of mourning. Flags were flown at half staff at Arafat's Ramallah headquarters.
In the city of Nablus, crowds hung up effigies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Bush, shot them and then burned them as they chanted ``revenge, revenge.''
Rantisi's car was hit by two missiles Saturday evening about a block from his house in the Sheik Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City.
Israeli officials accused Rantisi of planning a large attack on Israel to solidify his leadership and retaliate for Yassin's killing. Hamas is responsible for most of the 112 suicide bombings that have killed 465 people on the Israeli side during 3 1/2 years of violence.
Also Sunday, the Israeli army killed a Palestinian armed with a rifle who tried to infiltrate a Jewish settlement in Gaza. Hospital officials identified the man as Nael Mohammad Omar, a 22-year-old Islamic Jihad member.
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Leader of Hamas Is Killed by Israel in Missile Attack in Gaza
April 18, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/international/middleeast/18MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, April 17 - An Israeli helicopter strike on Saturday night killed the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a combative figure who assumed the post less than a month ago after a similar Israeli attack that killed the group's founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Palestinians responded with noisy street protests and vows of revenge.
[Hamas appointed a replacement for Dr. Rantisi on Sunday but declined to identify him, the Associated Press reported.]
The Israelis fired at least two missiles that struck Dr. Rantisi's white sedan as it was traveling on a main street in Gaza City, less than five hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up. The bomber killed one Israeli security worker and wounded three others several miles to the north of Gaza City, in an industrial park near the crossing point between the Gaza Strip and Israel.
After several weeks of relative calm, Saturday's violence unleashed fresh tensions. Angry Palestinians swiftly surrounded Dr. Rantisi's mangled car, with many wailing in grief. Two bodyguards in Dr. Rantisi's car were also killed, Palestinian witnesses and hospital officials said.
Protests followed from Arab and European governments, and the White House responded with a more muted call for all sides to show "maximum restraint."
The strike came three days after President Bush approved of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plans to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. In Jerusalem, his government portrayed the strike as motivated strictly by security, but the attack also has political overtones.
At the hospital where Dr. Rantisi died, the crowd was restless. Ismail Haniya, another Hamas leader, said, "All of us will be martyrs." He added: "This is our fate as Hamas and the Palestinian people. This will not end our willingness to continue with the resistance."
In Palestinian cities throughout Gaza and the West Bank, the news sent thousands of Palestinians into the streets, where they waved Palestinian flags, set tires ablaze and fired guns into the air.
Dr. Rantisi, 56, did not have the stature and authority of Sheik Yassin, who in 1987 established Hamas, an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Still, Dr. Rantisi, a pediatrician who was no longer practicing medicine, had become the most prominent Hamas spokesman in recent years. He was known for his fiery statements in which he rejected any compromise with Israel.
Speaking last month at a memorial service for Sheik Yassin, who was killed March 22, Dr. Rantisi said: "The Israelis will not know security. We will fight them until the liberation of Palestine, the whole of Palestine."
Hamas has carried out about half of the more than 100 Palestinian suicide bombings in the past three and a half years of Middle East fighting. The group has always opposed negotiations with Israel, and calls for its destruction.
The Israeli action came just three days after President Bush met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel at the White House and backed Mr. Sharon's proposal to withdraw soldiers and Jewish settlers from Gaza. The president's strong overall support for Mr. Sharon was seen as a significant victory for the Israeli leader.
But Palestinians said that endorsement was a green light for Mr. Sharon to act aggressively.
"The Palestinian cabinet considers this terrorist Israeli campaign a direct result of American encouragement and the complete bias of the American administration toward the Israeli government," Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian prime minister, said Saturday night.
Israel officials said plans to hit at Dr. Rantisi had been in motion for a long time, and the timing was coincidental.
"This is something that needs planning," said Gideon Meir, the deputy director general of Israel's Foreign Ministry. "It's not something you can carry out on short notice. Rantisi is a legitimate target because he is a leader of Hamas, which sends terrorists to kill innocent Israelis."
Israel acted because it had precise intelligence on Dr. Rantisi's movements and no civilians were traveling with him, said one Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing operational details.
Israel has faced widespread international criticism for its killings of Palestinians involved in violence. The United States, Israel's closest ally, has consistently objected. But Mr. Sharon's government has said repeatedly said it will continue the practice. Israel had focused mostly on midlevel operatives, like bomb makers, but in the past year, it has pursued the most senior Hamas leaders in Gaza.
Israel effectively launched the new policy last June with a helicopter missile strike that wounded Dr. Rantisi in his car in Gaza City, but he soon recovered. With Dr. Rantisi's death, Israel has now killed three top Hamas figures in Gaza since last August, and the government said more would face the same fate if the group continued its attacks.
In Washington, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the United States was "gravely concerned for regional peace and stability," but he declined to directly criticize Israel. "As we have repeatedly made clear, Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorist attacks," Mr. McClellan said.
Hamas's overall leader, Khaled Mashaal, who is based in Syria, survived a botched attack by Israeli agents in 1997 in Amman, Jordan. Mr. Mashaal, speaking Saturday to the Arab satellite television network Al Jazeera, said Hamas should not disclose the name of its next leader in Gaza.
Mr. Sharon has been somewhat vague on whether he would be willing to act against the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, who has been confined to his badly damaged compound in Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, for the past two years.
Mr. Sharon has promised Mr. Bush that he would not harm Mr. Arafat. But Mr. Sharon's cabinet decided in principle last year to "remove" Mr. Arafat, saying that he encourages terrorism and refuses to send his security forces against violent Palestinian factions.
Earlier this month, Mr. Sharon suggested that he no longer felt bound by his pledge to Mr. Bush and that Mr. Arafat had "no insurance policy." But several Israeli officials have since said that there are no current plans to act against Mr. Arafat.
Despite Mr. Sharon's proposal to withdraw from Gaza, which appears to be gaining momentum, the coastal territory has been racked by increased violence in recent months.
Israel says it wants to make clear that a withdrawal is not seen as capitulation, and has carried out repeated military raids in Gaza. Palestinian factions have continued the attacks, including almost daily mortar and rocket fire.
Israeli security forces have been on high alert since the killing of Sheik Yassin, who also died in a helicopter missile strike in Gaza City. The sheik, a quadriplegic, was in his wheelchair and was heading home from a mosque. Palestinian factions vowed a wave of attacks in retaliation, and Israel said it had foiled several attempted bombings in recent weeks.
But on Saturday afternoon, a Palestinian attacker detonated his bomb in a special industrial zone where several thousand Palestinians work in factories, most of them owned by Israelis. The factories are at the northern edge of Gaza, near the Erez crossing point, an area that has been the scene of multiple Palestinian attacks in recent months.
The bomber was inside the industrial park and set off the bomb next to Israeli security force members as he was leaving the area around 4 p.m., when many workers head home. Four members of the security forces were wounded, one of them a border policeman who later died, the Israeli military said.
Hamas and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades claimed joint responsibility and identified the bomber as Fadi al-Amoudi, 22.
Before Saturday, the most recent Palestinian suicide attack was on March 14, when two Palestinians from Gaza slipped out of the territory, apparently inside a truck's shipping container, and detonated their bombs after the truck reached the southern Israeli port of Ashdod. The blasts killed 10 Israelis. Eight days later, the Israelis killed Sheik Yassin.
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Hamas Vows to Avenge Israel's Killing of Rantissi
April 18, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast.html
GAZA (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian mourners cried for vengeance on Sunday for Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, slain by Israeli missiles even as the Jewish state plans to quit the group's Gaza stronghold.
In secret, Hamas appointed a new official to replace Rantissi -- the second leader of the militant group to be assassinated by Israel in less than a month. Hamas's spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin was killed in a March 22 missile attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon praised the army for Saturday's air strike on Rantissi, Hamas's firebrand political leader in Gaza, vowing Israel would keep hunting militants.
``We will never allow the murderers of today, or those of tomorrow, to hurt our people. Those who dare to do so will be struck down,'' Sharon said in a speech.
Earlier, Sharon told his cabinet the killing was part of a dual strategy to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war, while striking militants. Key ministers pledged support for the plan after the meeting.
Rantissi's body was carried aloft on a stretcher draped in a green Hamas flag. Mourners kissed his shrapnel-sliced face and others tossed flower petals onto the body. Fists shook at the sky in anger as four Israeli warplanes roared overhead.
``ERUPTION OF NEW VOLCANOES''
``The blood of Yassin and Rantissi will not be wasted. Their blood will force the eruption of new volcanoes,'' one militant shouted. Thousands took up the refrain of revenge, chanting: ``We will sacrifice our souls and blood for Rantissi.''
Rantissi, a 56-year-old Egyptian-trained pediatrician who was outspoken in support of violence against Israel, died when two missiles slammed into his car hours after a suicide bomber killed an Israeli soldier at northern Gaza's Erez crossing.
Rantissi was buried on Sunday in Gaza's Martyrs' Cemetery.
Hamas has so far failed to carry out the kind of massive attack it had promised to avenge Yassin's death.
Faced with an Israeli threat to wipe out all its leaders, Hamas said it had appointed Rantissi's successor but would keep his identity secret. Palestinian sources speculated the new leader was either Mahmoud al-Zahar or Ismail Haniyah.
Rantissi's killing stoked Palestinian anger already high over President Bush's statement last week backing Sharon's pullout plan -- which would also let Israel keep some West Bank land Palestinians want for an eventual state.
PROTESTS ERUPT ACROSS WEST BANK
Protests against Rantissi's assassination erupted across the West Bank in scenes that recalled the start of a Palestinian uprising more than 3-1/2 years ago. Israeli troops used teargas and rubber bullets to drive back stone-throwers.
In an incident that could signal spreading violence, police said patrolmen shot and wounded two Israeli Arabs who fired at them in north Israel. Israeli Arabs, while generally sympathetic to their Palestinian brethren, rarely take part in militancy.
``It is no doubt a crime,'' Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie said about Rantissi's killing. ``Unfortunately the Israelis feel they are supported by the United States administration.''
Qurie wrote to world leaders on Sunday urging them to restart Middle East peace talks, accusing the United States of breaking international law by making ``concessions'' in the name of the Palestinians.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan criticized Rantissi's killing. He was echoed by the European Union and Russia.
The United Nations, the EU, Russia and the United States form a ``Quartet'' of brokers who have charted a ``road map'' to a Middle East peace. But some European officials feel Bush's statement last week sidelined the other group members.
``This is not the path to peace,'' said Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. ``Any departure from the road map will only increase instability in the entire Middle East region.''
The United States denied giving Israel the green light to go after Rantissi but refrained from condemning the assassination.
SHARON TALKS OF TWO-TRACK POLICY
Sharon defended the move, saying: ``The policy is an effort on the one hand to progress on the diplomatic process and on the other to harm the terror organizations and those who lead them.''
Rantissi was widely viewed as particularly hard-line in a group that has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Israel killed Rantissi three days after Sharon won Bush's backing at the White House for his plan to withdraw from Gaza and four small settlements in the West Bank by the end of 2005.
In a U.S. policy shift, Bush said Israel could not be expected to give up all land captured in 1967 and rejected any right of return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel.
Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Channel One television Israel had received ``de facto'' U.S. approval for Israeli annexation of West Bank settlement blocs. He did not specify which blocs or when annexation would occur, and a source in Sharon's office denied there had been such an agreement.
Sharon presented his ``disengagement plan'' to his cabinet on Sunday. But a vote will be delayed until after a referendum on the pullout is held on May 2 among the 200,000 members of the prime minister's right-wing Likud party.
Sharon won over Netanyahu and another previously doubtful cabinet member on Sunday, possibly ensuring Likud support.
--------
How Israel's Mossad captured nuclear whistleblower Vanunu
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Apr 18, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040418035553.1im1ibpc.html
On September 30, 1986, a female Mossad agent lured Mordechai Vanunu to Rome, where the employee at the Israeli nuclear reactor of Dimona was kidnapped before being spirited back to Israel and jailed.
A week later, the Sunday Times published an interview and pictures of the secret reactor given by Vanunu that constituted the first evidence that the Jewish state possessed the nuclear weapon.
On April 21, Vanunu, termed the world's most famous whistleblower, will be thrust back into the spotlight after 18 years spent in the shadows of his Ashkelon prison, several of them in solitary confinement.
In the course of the nine years he worked as a technician at the Negev-based facility before being fired in 1985, Vanunu grew increasingly distressed over his country's nuclear program.
In the heart of the Cold War, he first fled to Nepal, where the Jewish Orthodox-educated then 30-year-old flirted with Buddhism and unsuccessfully attempted to defect to the Soviet bloc.
He then traveled to Australia, where he became a Christian and was baptised under the name John Crossman. He met Peter Hounam, a correspondent for Britain's Sunday Times, who arranged to fly to London with him in September
There, Vanunu produced pictures of the Dimona complex he had secretly taken and revealed what he knew about the program which is now widely accepted as making Israel the world's sixth largest nuclear power, despite obstinate official denial.
Then Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit recently admitted that Vanunu's assassination was considered upon learning about his revelations, but the espionage agency instead engineered a plot to abduct him and whisk him back to Israel.
On September 30, Vanunu was befriended by a young blonde woman, who posed as an American tourist under the name of Cindy.
The undercover Mossad agent Cheryl Hanin Bentov managed to lure Vanunu to Rome for "holidays".
Upon entering a flat in the Italian capital which "Cindy" had said belonged to her journalist sister, the whistleblower was wrestled to the ground and injected with a sedative.
He was freighted back to Israel and sentenced to 18 years in prison for treason after a seven-month trial. On October 5, 1986, the Sunday Times published the earth-shattering interview.
The international community then expressed little condemnation of Israel's abduction on foreign soil and, bar Arab states and a group of non-proliferation activists, few expessed real concern over Israel's unsupervised nuclear program.
In Israel, the kidnapping was seen at the time as one of the spectacular overseas operations that contributed to Mossad legend, but the affair is now equally remembered for the shortcomings of the Israeli establishment prior to his capture.
Vanunu's shift to the extreme left and contacts with a communist Arab student organisation were known to the political subversion branch when he underwent security screening for employment at the country's most secret plant.
Some senior Israeli security officials have recommended keeping Vanunu under administrative detention when his term in prison expires, for fear he had more secrets to betray.
But it was decided not to gag Vanunu by holding him without trial, and most commentators argue that whatever information he may not have revealed to the Sunday Times is now 18 years old and unlikely to have a cataclysmic impact.
-------- spies
How to Improve Domestic Intelligence
April 18, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/weekinreview/18rise.html
WASHINGTON - Before Sept. 11, Al Qaeda terrorists took advantage of yawning gaps between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in order to slip into the United States. Last week, the Sept. 11 commission hearings recounted in painful detail the lapses of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. before the attacks on New York and Washington, and helped pressure President Bush to consider reforming the way the government collects intelligence.
The White House has suddenly embraced an old idea - appointing a national intelligence czar to oversee the government's sprawling intelligence apparatus. Many experts are also calling for dramatic changes in how the nation collects intelligence inside its own borders, and are pointing to Britain's domestic intelligence agency, known as MI-5, as a model.
But do Americans, rattled by terrorist threats, really want an efficient domestic spy service?
The Sept. 11 hearings have certainly raised doubts about whether the F.B.I. is still up to the job.
"You need intelligence collection done domestically, and the bureau has not done it," said John MacGaffin, a former C.I.A. official who also worked as a consultant to the F.B.I. Last year, he and a group of former senior intelligence, law enforcement and Pentagon officials proposed creating a separate counterintelligence and counterterrorism service within the F.B.I. Now he says it should be split off into a new agency, which would allow the F.B.I. to focus on its strength in traditional crime fighting.
But the F.B.I. still opposes establishing a stand-alone agency. And, the creation of a secretive organization with a mandate to spy on Americans would represent a dramatic departure for a country that has long feared any permanent encroachments on civil liberties.
In fact, opposition to a domestic intelligence agency has created an alliance between the F.B.I. and the American Civil Liberties Union, which has warned of the threat from a secret police force. Such a new agency "could easily employ the same kind of dirty tricks the C.I.A. uses overseas here in the United States against American citizens," Anthony D. Romero, the A.C.L.U.'s executive director, said in a press release. "Even during the most frigid days of the cold war, we never saw the need to create a secret police force that would work outside of the constraints of the Constitution."
Such fears are why MI-5 has become a model for so many in Washington. Britain has integrated domestic intelligence collection into a society that prides itself on its protection of civil rights.
The key is that MI-5 has no arrest powers, and leaves that to Britain's police. MI-5, known as the Security Service, is responsible for handling cases involving terrorism, espionage and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, but takes a supporting role to British law enforcement when cases become criminal matters.
But if Britain has created an agency that focuses solely on national security threats within its borders, it still hasn't eliminated the kind of interagency rivalries that have plagued the United States.
In the end, the bureaucratic structure of intelligence will matter less than success at gathering information.
"We are now spending about $40 billion for intelligence," Mr. MacGaffin said. "For your $40 billion, you as a taxpayer should be entitled to having one guy sitting on a rock next to Osama bin Laden somewhere in Afghanistan, and maybe one guy sitting in the middle of a group of extremists here in this country."
-------- us
Robot Plane Drops Bomb in Successful Test
April 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Combat-Drone-Test.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A robotic plane deliberately dropped a bomb near a truck at Edwards Air Force Base on Sunday, marking another step forward for technology the U.S. military hopes will one day replace human pilots on dangerous combat missions.
Under human supervision but without human piloting, a prototype of the Boeing Co.'s X-45 took off from the desert base, opened its bomb bay doors, dropped a 250-pound Small Smart Bomb and then landed.
The inert bomb struck within inches of the truck it was supposed to hit, Boeing said, adding that had the bomb contained explosives, the target would have been destroyed.
``It's absolutely a huge step forward for us. It shows the capability of an unmanned airplane to carry weapons,'' said Rob Horton, Boeing's chief operator for the mission. ``From the video, you see the weapon going down and a huge cloud of dust and the truck shaking around.''
The X-45A was preprogrammed with the target coordinates and used the satellite-based Global Positioning System to adjust its course.
Horton, who was sitting 80 miles from the target, authorized the drone to drop the bomb, which was released from 35,000 feet as the plane flew at 442 mph.
The military sees such aircraft taking part in its most dangerous missions, such as bombing enemy radar and surface-to-air missile batteries, in order to clear the path for human pilots.
The Y-shaped, tailless plane has a 34-foot wingspan and weighs 8,000 pounds empty. It is the first drone designed specifically to carry weapons into combat.
Other robotic planes, including the Predator spy drone currently being used in Afghanistan, have been modified to carry weapons.
Boeing hopes to build hundreds of the X-45 planes, which would cost $10 million to $15 million each.
-------- propaganda wars
This Is A War Of Liberation And We Are The Enemy
Apr 18, 2004
By John Pilger,
New Statesman
http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=1357&list=/home.php&
Four years ago, I traveled the length of Iraq, from the hills where St Matthew is buried in the Kurdish north to the heartland of Mesopotamia, and Baghdad, and the Shia south. I have seldom felt as safe in any country. Once, in the Edwardian colonnade of Baghdad's book market, a young man shouted something at me about the hardship his family had been forced to endure under the embargo imposed by America and Britain. What happened next was typical of Iraqis; a passer-by calmed the man, putting his arm around his shoulder, while another was quickly at my side. "Forgive him," he said reassuringly. "We do not connect the people of the west with the actions of their governments. You are welcome."
At one of the melancholy evening auctions where Iraqis come to sell their most intimate possessions out of urgent need, a woman with two infants watched as their pushchairs went for pennies, and a man who had collected doves since he was 15 came with his last bird and its cage; and yet people said to me: "You are welcome." Such grace and dignity were often expressed by those Iraqi exiles who loathed Saddam Hussein and opposed both the economic siege and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland; thousands of these anti-Saddamites marched against the war in London last year, to the chagrin of the warmongers, who never understood the dichotomy of their principled stand.
Were I to undertake the same journey in Iraq today, I might not return alive. Foreign terrorists have ensured that. With the most lethal weapons that billions of dollars can buy, and the threats of their cowboy generals and the panic-stricken brutality of their foot soldiers, more than 120,000 of these invaders have ripped up the fabric of a nation that survived the years of Saddam Hussein, just as they oversaw the destruction of its artifacts. They have brought to Iraq a daily, murderous violence which surpasses that of a tyrant who never promised a fake democracy.
Amnesty International reports that US-led forces have "shot Iraqis dead during demonstrations, tortured and ill-treated prisoners, arrested people arbitrarily and held them indefinitely, demolished houses in acts of revenge and collective punishment".
In Fallujah, US marines, described as "tremendously precise" by their psychopathic spokesman, slaughtered up to 600 people, according to hospital directors. They did it with aircraft and heavy weapons deployed in urban areas, as revenge for the killing of four American mercenaries. Many of the dead of Fallujah were women and children and the elderly. Only the Arab television networks, notably al-Jazeera, have shown the true scale of this crime, while the Anglo-American media continue to channel and amplify the lies of the White House and Downing Street.
"Writing exclusively for the Observer before a make-or-break summit with President George Bush this week," sang Britain's former premier liberal newspaper on 11 April, "[Tony Blair] gave full backing to American tactics in Iraq . . . saying that the government would not flinch from its 'historic struggle' despite the efforts of 'insurgents and terrorists'."
That this "exclusive" was not presented as parody shows that the propaganda engine that drove the lies of Blair and Bush on weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links for almost two years is still in service. On BBC news bulletins and Newsnight, Blair's "terrorists" are still currency, a term that is never applied to the principal source and cause of the terrorism, the foreign invaders, who have now killed at least 11,000 civilians, according to Amnesty and others. The overall figure, including conscripts, may be as high as 55,000.
That a nationalist uprising has been under way in Iraq for more than a year, uniting at least 15 major groups, most of them opposed to the old regime, has been suppressed in a mendacious lexicon invented in Washington and London and reported incessantly, CNN-style. "Remnants" and "tribalists" and "fundamentalists" dominate, while Iraq is denied the legacy of a history in which much of the modern world is rooted. The "first-anniversary story" about a laughable poll claiming that half of all Iraqis felt better off now under the occupation is a case in point. The BBC and the rest swallowed it whole. For the truth, I recommend the courageous daily reporting of Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad (http://www.wildfirejo.blogspot.com).
Even now, as the uprising spreads, there is only cryptic gesturing at the obvious: that this is a war of national liberation and that the enemy is "us". The pro-invasion Sydney Morning Herald is typical. Having expressed "surprise" at the uniting of Shias and Sunnis, the paper's Baghdad correspondent recently described "how GI bullies are making enemies of their Iraqi friends" and how he and his driver had been threatened by Americans. "I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherfucker!" a soldier told the reporter. That this was merely a glimpse of the terror and humiliation that Iraqis have to suffer every day in their own country was not made clear; yet this newspaper has published image after unctuous image of mournful American soldiers, inviting sympathy for an invader who has "taken out" thousands of innocent men, women and children.
What we do routinely in the imperial west, wrote Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, is propagate "through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen positive images of western values and innocence that are threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence". Thus, western state terrorism is erased, and a tenet of western journalism is to excuse or minimize"our" culpability, however atrocious. Our dead are counted; theirs are not. Our victims are worthy; theirs are not.
This is an old story; there have been many Iraqs, or what Blair calls "historic struggles" waged against "insurgents and terrorists". Take Kenya in the 1950s. The approved version is still cherished in the west - first popularized in the press, then in fiction and movies; and like Iraq, it is a lie. "The task to which we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilize a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state." The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists, was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace. "The special prisons," wrote the imperial historian V G Kiernan, "were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments." None of this was reported. The "demonic terror" was all one way: black against white. The racist message was unmistakable.
It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a Vietnamese one. In fact, there were many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.
The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number, according to a veterans' study, killed themselves on their return home. Dr Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness. When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens of thousands of Iraqis - men, women and children - were contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense and ask, plead, for help with decontamination. The Iraqis didn't use uranium; it was not their weapon. I watched them put their case, describing the deaths and horrific deformities, and I watched them rebuffed. It was pathetic." During last year's invasion, both American and British forces again used uranium-tipped shells, leaving whole areas so "hot" with radiation that only military survey teams in full protective clothing can approach them. No warning or medical help is given to Iraqi civilians; thousands of children play in these zones. The "coalition" has refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to send experts to assess what Rokke describes as "a catastrophe".
When will this catastrophe be properly reported by those meant to keep the record straight? When will the BBC and others investigate the conditions of some 10,000 Iraqis held without charge, many of them tortured, in US concentration camps inside Iraq, and the corralling, with razor wire, of entire Iraqi villages? When will the BBC and others stop referring to "the handover of Iraqi sovereignty" on 30 June, although there will be no such handover? The new regime will be stooges, with each ministry controlled by American officials and with its stooge army and stooge police force run by Americans. A Saddamite law prohibiting trade unions for public sector workers will stay in force. Leading members of Saddam's infamous secret police, the Mukhabarat, will run "state security", directed by the CIA. The US military will have the same "status of forces" agreement that they impose on the host nations of their 750 bases around the world, which in effect leaves them in charge. Iraq will be a US colony, like Haiti. And when will journalists have the professional courage to report the pivotal role that Israel has played in this grand colonial design for the Middle East?
A few weeks ago, Rick Mercier, a young columnist for the Free-lance Star, a small paper in Virginia, did what no other journalist has done this past year. He apologized to his readers for the travesty of the reporting of events leading to the attack on Iraq. "Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage," he wrote. "Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations . . . Maybe we'll do a better job next war."
Well done, Rick Mercier. But listen to the silence of your colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. No one expects Fox or Wapping or the Daily Telegraph to relent. But what about David Astor's beacon of liberalism, the Observer, which stood against the invasion of Egypt in 1956 and its attendant lies? The Observer not only backed last year's unprovoked, illegal assault on Iraq; it helped create the mendacious atmosphere in which Blair could get away with his crime. The reputation of the Observer, and the fact that it published occasional mitigating material, meant that lies and myths gained legitimacy. A front-page story gave credence to the bogus claim that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks in the US. And there were those unnamed western "intelligence sources", all those straw men, all those hints, in David Rose's two-page "investigation" headlined "The Iraqi connection", that left readers with the impression that Saddam Hussein might well have had a lot to do with the attacks of 11 September 2001. "There are occasions in history," wrote Rose, "when the use of force is both right and sensible. This is one of them." Tell that to 11,000 dead civilians, Mr Rose.
It is said that British officers in Iraq now describe the "tactics" of their American comrades as "appalling". No, the very nature of a colonial occupation is appalling, as the families of 13 Iraqis killed by British soldiers, who are taking the British government to court, will agree. If the British military brass understand an inkling of their own colonial past, not least the bloody British retreat from Iraq 83 years ago, they will whisper in the ear of the little Wellington-cum-Palmerston in 10 Downing Street: "Get out now, before we are thrown out."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
How the Death of Judy's Father Made America More Secretive
Sun Apr 18, 2004
By Barry Siegel Times Staff Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=716&e=26&u=/latimests/20040418/ts_latimes/howthedeathofjudysfathermadeamericamoresecretive
In a box delivered by rolling handcart on the morning of Feb. 26, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court received 40 copies of a petition so unusual a clerk decided he couldn't accept it for filing. First, though, he turned through its pages.
In a preliminary statement, he read these words: Three widows stood before this court in 1952. Their husbands had died in the crash of an Air Force plane. The lower courts had awarded them compensation. But the United States was bent on overturning their judgments, and - to accomplish this - it committed a fraud not only upon the widows but upon this Court.
Filed by a prominent Philadelphia law firm, this petition asked for an exceedingly rare writ of error coram nobis - an error committed in proceedings "before us." The petition's true author - at least in spirit - was a middle-aged woman from Bolton, Mass., named Judy Palya Loether. Her father had perished on that doomed Air Force plane when she was 7 weeks old. For most of her life, he'd been a mystery. She felt certain he would have had an effect, would have contributed to shaping a different Judy, perhaps a better Judy. Instead, she'd had a stepfather who seemed to withhold love. She'd raised a family and served her community, but she'd never lost her sense of wonder about her father, her desire to know him. In time, this impulse drew her into the past. What Judy Palya Loether wanted the Supreme Court to do was fix that past - to fix its own 50-year-old error.
The clerk read on: At the heart of the case is a set of reports the Air Force prepared on the accident.... The Air Force refused to produce these reports, even to the district judge.... The United States took the case to this Court ... contending that the reports contained "military secrets" so sensitive not even the district court should see them.... This Court took the government at its word, and reversed. But, it turns out that the Air Force's affidavits were false. The Air Force recently declassified the accident reports. They include nothing approaching a "military secret." ... In telling the Court otherwise, the Air Force lied.... It is for this Court in exercise of its inherent power to remedy fraud, to put things right.
The clerk didn't need to puzzle over which long-ago case the petition addressed. Although U.S. vs. Reynolds wasn't familiar to the public, law students everywhere knew it to be the landmark 1953 ruling that formally established the government's "state secrets" privilege - a privilege that has enabled federal agencies to conceal conduct, withhold documents and block troublesome civil litigation, including suits by whistle-blowers and possible victims of discrimination.
U.S. vs. Reynolds' ramifications reach beyond civil law: By encouraging judicial deference when the government claims national security secrets, it provides a fundamental basis for much of the Bush administration's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including the USA Patriot Act and the handling of terrorist suspects. Although some judges and the Supreme Court may be starting to resist, the "enemy combatants" Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, for many months confined without access to lawyers, have felt the breath of Reynolds. So has the accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui when federal prosecutors defied a court order allowing him access to other accused terrorists. So have hundreds of detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, held for more than two years without charges or judicial review.
By asking the Supreme Court to "remedy fraud," Judy Palya Loether and others in the crash victims' families were taking dead aim at the factual foundation of the state secrets privilege. Long ago, Judy's mother and two other widows had tried to challenge the power of the federal government. Now here came the families once again.
Two days after their petition arrived at the Supreme Court, the clerk's office returned all 40 copies to the Philadelphia law firm. Enclosed with the petitions were the firm's $300 check for the filing fee and a letter explaining that "there are no provisions in the rules of this Court to allow you to file such a document."
For 48 hours, the law firm and the clerk's office debated whether the Supreme Court could, in fact, be asked for a writ of error coram nobis. In the end, the clerk's office advised the firm to resubmit the petition with an attached motion asking the justices, in effect, for leave to file something the clerk thought unacceptable. This time the petition didn't get sent back.
Judy Palya Loether typed e-mail messages and roamed the Internet. She fielded calls from reporters. She heard from her father's aging colleagues. She began to imagine that she might prevail. Here, she sensed, was a powerful way to right a wrong. More important, here was a powerful way to find her father. Judy began to feel like Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz."
"This whole journey of mine," she told those around her, "has changed my life."
Code-Named Project Banshee
As a young girl, Judy Palya Loether thought her father had invented everything. This wasn't so, she later discovered, but to her, Al Palya could fairly be called a Renaissance man. She knew he'd been born on a farm in northern Minnesota. She knew he could play a mean saxophone and once saved a ship at sea with his ham radio. In family scrapbooks, she found evidence that he'd won a Charleston dance contest. She read reports about the summer he played his sax on a ship cruising to the Orient. She looked at travel films he made in half a dozen of the country's national parks. Old letters, photographs, clippings - they told Judy her father was a tournament bridge player, a photographer, a bandleader, a singer, a carpenter. They told her also that he was a genius at making things miniature. That's how he eventually came to earn a living. First as an engineer at Minneapolis-Honeywell, then, beginning in 1945, at RCA in New Jersey.
His role at RCA mesmerized her. There, at the dawn of the Cold War, he had been assigned to secret experimental work that RCA was doing for the military. In early 1946, RCA contracted to develop a guidance system for pilot-less aircraft, code-named Project Banshee. The goal, in an era before intercontinental missiles, was to launch drone planes that could travel long distances and drop bombs on pinpoint targets. Other engineers thought this notion defied the laws of physics. Judy's father insisted it could be done. In 1947, he and his team of engineers began testing the Banshee system on board B-29 Superfortresses, the type of plane used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Poking around, Judy found a letter he wrote that summer to a colleague: All phases at present going smoothly and expect to complete Banshee sometime in October. I had some results on flight tests.... The plane [flies] in the right direction, but the run is by no means a straight line. We have not progressed far enough to determine exactly what the trouble is ...
Other notes showed the deep love shared by Judy's father and mother. They'd met while Al was studying engineering and playing in a popular dance band at the University of Minnesota. He stood 5-feet-9, weighed 150 pounds, had blue eyes and brown hair. She thought he had a wonderful smile. They married in June 1937 and drove to a Canadian honeymoon in his new red convertible. They had a son, then another son.
By May 1948, after four merit raises at RCA, Palya was earning $6,720, the equivalent today of about $100,000. On Aug. 16 of that year, his third child - Judy - was born. In the family archives, she could never find this event mentioned by her father. She found only a photo of her as an infant sitting in her mother's lap; was her father looking at his daughter through the camera? She could not say. She knew only, from a note he scribbled, that six weeks after her birth, on Oct. 1, he flew to Chicago and spent a weekend with his sister Lillian, talking about the care of their widowed mother. Then, on Monday, he flew to Atlanta.
He was headed to Robins Air Force Base, south of Macon, Ga. They had one final Banshee mission in a B-29 scheduled for Oct. 6. Al Palya didn't need to ride in the plane but planned to anyway. As usual, he wanted to boost the morale of the technicians who had to handle the daily grind.
In an Instant, a Pilot Without Power
Later, there would be some confusion at Robins as to why the scheduled 8 a.m. takeoff was postponed. The copilot thought a gasket had to be replaced on their B-29. The flight engineer thought the RCA team hadn't arrived. Whatever the reason, 1 p.m. became the new start time.
Standard procedure called for both crew and civilians to be briefed on emergency measures, but it didn't happen. Like the initial delay, this lapse would be blamed on the troublesome gasket and the late-arriving engineers. It didn't seem to matter to the crew. The Air Force personnel, after all, were well-informed, and among the civilians, Judy's father and Bob Reynolds, a young engineer on his RCA team, were squadron regulars.
Shortly after 1 p.m., 13 men climbed into the B-29's two pressurized cabins. One cabin was fore and the other aft of the plane's giant bomb bays. Judy's father strapped himself into the nose gunner's position in front of the pilots, the prize seat for sightseeing. Today's mission was to test the Banshee guidance system on a five-hour round trip between Georgia and Florida.
The survivors of that mission would never forget what happened.
They fired up the engines. Before taxiing out, the flight engineer reported that the No. 2 engine was running a little hot, not uncommon on a B-29. On a power check, the pilot put No. 2 at full throttle with turbo on for about four seconds. He found no loss of power. In these postwar months, airmen at Robins were used to flying with below-par engines, and weren't likely to scratch a flight because one didn't perform to specs. "It will clear up," the pilot told his crew.
He lowered the flaps to 20 degrees and asked if all the men were ready. At 1:28 p.m., the B-29 - 111,000 pounds, 99 feet long, with four 2,500-horsepower engines on a 141-foot wingspan - rolled down the Robins runway.
They retracted the landing gear and climbed through light cumulus clouds, with power at a standard 2,400 rpm and 43 inches of manifold air pressure. At 4,000 feet, just as the B-29 cleared the clouds, the flight engineer reported that engines No. 1, 2 and 4 were running warm. This was not unusual, especially in the Georgia heat. The pilot boosted air speed and reduced power to 40 inches of manifold air pressure, which meant the nose went down and air flow increased over the engines.
The plane kept climbing. Then, in an instant, at 18,500 feet, the pilot lost power on engine No. 1. Manifold air pressure inside the engine dropped from 40 to 23 inches. Fuel consumption fell. The pilot asked about other readings. All else normal, the flight engineer advised.
Neither the pilot nor copilot was overly alarmed. They put out their cigarettes, though. A moment later, the pilot advised everybody to strap on a parachute. The civilians scrambled to obey. Eugene Mechler, an engineer with the Franklin Institute, an RCA subcontractor, helped his colleague William Brauner fasten his snaps. Mechler, back behind the bomb bay, could not see Judy's father in the plane's nose. He'd later say, "Al had the prize seat for sightseeing, and I had the best seat for escaping."
At 20,000 feet, the pilot leveled off and reduced power on his three good engines, taking them down to 2,100 rpm and 31 inches of manifold air pressure. He asked the flight engineer to try to raise the pressure manually on No. 1. The engineer worked the emergency amplifier system until he had No. 1 at 31 inches. It wouldn't hold, though; an instant later, pressure fell back to 23.
Now they knew they had a problem. The B-29 Superfortress had been the most formidable bombing aircraft of World War II, but from the beginning its engines tended to overheat. What's more, their crankcases were made of magnesium alloy, which is highly flammable. The pilot decided to "feather" No. 1, which meant turning it off after positioning the propeller so it wouldn't keep rotating in the wind. Looking out his window, he accidentally pushed the button for No. 4 instead.
The copilot, noticing immediately, turned No. 4 back on - or at least thought he did; No. 4 would later be found in the feathered position. The pilot, meanwhile, pressed the correct button to shut down No. 1. They felt the slight vibration that comes when an engine is turned off in flight.
It was too late. Even before No. 1 stilled, the flight engineer saw the engine access doors turn light brown. Then a crew member scanning the left side reported smoke.
The pilot ordered the flight engineer to trigger the fire extinguisher on No. 1. That seemed to work - the smoke disappeared. But five seconds later, it came back. This time there was fire too. In an instant, it engulfed the aft half of the engine. Then the entire engine, then the wing area behind the engine. Flames flashed past the left scanner's window. The whole left wing was on fire.
"Engine No. 1 on fire," shouted the left scanner, over and over. "Engine No. 1 on fire."
Judy's father sat alone in the nose. Al Palya's view was forward to an empty sky free of flames.
The pilot started a descent. He ordered the cabin depressurized so his crew could open the escape hatches. The civilians tugged at the parachutes on their backs; the crew scrambled for positions.
"What's wrong with No. 2?" the pilot asked.
Manifold air pressure in No. 2 had dropped to 20 inches. They were in a moderate dive, banking about 20 degrees to the left. The pilot fought the bank, pulling hard to the right, his wheel turned more than 90 degrees.
"Stand by to abandon ship," he said.
Farther back in the plane, the Franklin engineer Eugene Mechler saw sheets of flame shoot past a window. He couldn't believe it. He felt safe inside this huge hull. Planes land with an engine on fire all the time, he kept thinking. This pilot will get us down OK. I'd rather stay with the ship than parachute.
The left scanner popped the rear escape hatch. The pilot opened the bomb bay doors. In that instant, the aircraft went into a violent spin to the left, probably caused by drag from the open doors or the damaged left wing. Centrifugal force pinned the crew. It plastered everyone to the floor in piles, one body atop another, unable to move.
The pressure eased slightly, just enough for some of the men to stir. Up front, the copilot stepped toward the forward nose escape hatch. The plane banked, throwing the flight engineer into the hatch. He stuck there, face up in the well, his parachute on his back. The nose gear had extended, but not enough to allow escape. The copilot, standing over him, stuck a foot down and kicked him through. An instant later, the copilot followed, jumping at 15,000 feet.
Farther to the rear, the left scanner blacked out, woke, slid through the bomb bay escape hatch and pulled his rip cord. Eugene Mechler crawled after him, pausing a moment to grab his parachute release handle. As he jumped, he yanked. My gosh, he thought. I pulled it too soon, the chute will foul on the plane.
It didn't. Mechler slowed as his chute opened. There was the earth, just below him. There too, in the air around him, were the left scanner, the flight engineer and the copilot.
Those four lived. The nine other men did not. The RCA engineer Bob Reynolds and the Franklin engineer William Brauner couldn't escape the centrifugal force that held them in the rear compartment. Judy's father managed to leap from the plane - but he either failed to pull his rip cord or jumped too low.
As they parachuted to the ground, the four survivors heard a puff in the sky and saw falling pieces of metal. It was 2:08 p.m. The B-29 had been airborne for 40 minutes, but would fly no more. Witnesses heard an explosion louder than thunder, more like a bomb. Looking up, they watched the plane disintegrate as it plummeted.
Engine No. 4 came off, then the outer panel of the left wing, then No. 1 and No. 3. All control surfaces, wing flaps and portions of the stabilizers tore loose. The fuselage broke in two at the rear bomb bay. Most of the parts rained down on the Zachry family's 340-acre cattle farm, just off the dirt Gibbs Street extension, two miles south of Waycross, Ga.
"Well, I can tell you," Bernard Zachry would report half a century later, "anyone who lives in Waycross remembers it. Biggest thing that ever happened here."
'I Regret to Inform'
In his barn, Robert Zachry heard the B-29 explode. He told his 4-year-old son, Michael, to run for the house, then jumped on his quarter horse and rode out to open the gate on Gibbs Street. The authorities, he knew, would need to get onto his land.
Michael was sprinting past the pump house when the plane hit the ground. He dived into the grass, jumped up and started running again. His 6-year-old brother, Bernard, should have been on the school playground but instead was across the street playing cowboys and Indians with his buddy Joey and a girl whom they'd tied to a tree.
Bernard saw it all, the plane falling from the sky, the fire and smoke, the parachutes, one engine knocking over their fence, another landing near the schoolyard. He also saw the school principal shouting at him as she came across the road, a heavyset woman trying to climb a fence to get to the wayward children. Bernard's mother reached them first. She scooped him up as the principal grabbed Joey. Bernard never could recall anyone untying the girl.
He remembered the crowd that gathered, though. Waycross had some 30,000 citizens then, and a fair share of them were pushing on the Zachry family's fence. Bernard's mother tried to keep people from knocking it down. He and his brother watched a man climb over the fence, pick up a severed arm and remove a watch.
Soon sirens filled the air. The local police and the state patrol arrived, then the ambulances, the Red Cross, the military, the reporters and photographers. Uniformed officers from Robins Air Force Base began holding everyone back, including the local cops and firemen. From the B-29's tail section, a Robins engineer removed the Banshee project's equipment.
What Bernard and Michael would remember most was the knock on the back door of their home. When they opened it, there stood one of the men - the left scanner. He had a sprained ankle and appeared shaken. Bernard's mother took him in, gave him a cup of coffee. His parachute hadn't opened all the way, he told them. If he hadn't landed in their gator pond, out near the swamp, he might not have made it.
Searchers found the bodies of the nine who hadn't survived in and near the wreckage. Three were civilian engineers from RCA and Franklin - Bob Reynolds, William Brauner and Judy's father. Al Palya lay by himself, an unopened parachute on his back, free of the aircraft in a field of clover.
Three hours later, a pilot friend knocked on Patricia Reynolds' door near Robins Air Force Base. "Pat," he said, "there's been an accident down at Waycross. We don't know who survived."
She was the only widow close enough to get to the crash site. They drove the 90 miles in near silence, Pat lost in thought. Her husband, Bob, hadn't even been scheduled to fly this day; another engineer had asked if he would cover for him. They were still kids on a honeymoon, he 24, she 20. They'd risen near dawn and walked the hills at 5:30, holding hands. That would be her last memory of him.
In Pennsylvania, William Brauner's wife, Phyllis, pregnant with her second daughter, also got word. Will and I, she liked to say, did all our arguing before marriage, then never. They had a 4-year-old daughter, Susan, who would never forget sitting on the stairs that day, watching her mother sobbing and rocking until a doctor rushed in with a black bag to sedate her. Susan also would never forget waving goodbye to her daddy the morning he left them. As he turned to wave back, she thought, I'll never see him again.
In New Jersey, a telegram arrived at the home of Judy and her mother, Elizabeth: I regret to inform that Mr. A. Palya has died due to injuries received in an aircraft accident at Waycross, GA.... The deceased is now at Mincy Funeral Home, 516 Pendleton St., Waycross, GA. Kindly wire collect whether you desire remains to be shipped direct to your home or to a designated funeral home or mortuary, furnishing the name and address of funeral director selected by you to receive remains. Deepest sympathy is extended ...
Betty Palya studied newspaper photos. One featured a solitary body prone on the Waycross farm, covered by a blanket. Her husband had been the only civilian found outside the aircraft; most likely, this was Al. By her side, she had all the letters he wrote as he traveled on business. It's Saturday, only one week - 7 days - till I stand by the railroad tracks waiting for your train.... Honey I can't start telling you how thrilled I am. Honest I can hardly sit still ...
She'd met him when she came to study with his sister, a friend of hers. Their courtship had lasted three years. Then one day he'd said, "Let's get married." She'd tried always to be a good, loving housewife and companion. Now she vowed to be a good and loving single mother to three young children.
She'd still make all their clothes, their draperies, their bedspreads, their slipcovers. She'd still cook big meals each night - a meat, a potato, a vegetable, a salad, a dessert, the colors varied, not all the same. She'd still set the table with a tablecloth, the glasses placed at the tip of the knives. She'd still make fudge every Friday night, spaghetti with meatballs every Saturday night, the sauce simmering in the kitchen all day. Judy would forever remember those meals, those weekend smells, that resolve by her mother to shelter them from their loss.
Mincy Funeral Home's bill to prepare and ship Al Palya's body to New Jersey came to $681.27. On Friday, Oct. 8, his close colleague Walter Frick - who'd originally been scheduled to fly on the doomed B-29 - escorted the body home, overwhelmed with sadness about the infant daughter who would never know her father. Services were held the next Monday in Haddon Heights, N.J. They buried Al Palya later that week in Tabor, Minn., where he'd been born and raised. His widow and three children stood by as they lowered his casket into the earth. That afternoon, Judy Palya was two days short of being 2 months old.
A Plane With a Troubled History
At least to the public, the crash of a B-29 flying over Waycross remained a mystery. One newspaper informed citizens only that the "plane was on a secret mission testing secret electronic equipment.... Guards were sent to recover and protect as much of the confidential equipment as possible." Another report advised that "full details of the plane's mission were not disclosed, but it was believed that it may have been engaged in cosmic ray research."
The copilot, through a military spokesman, did describe how one engine caught fire and another lost power before the plane went into a severe spin. The copilot advised reporters, however, that he "could not discuss" the cause of the explosion or how he and the others escaped.
Then, in late November, seven weeks after the crash, RCA Executive Vice President Frank Folsom mailed a typed, four-page, single-spaced letter to Hoyt Vandenberg, commanding general of the Air Force. Folsom, 54, would a year later become the president of RCA. He knew the military: From 1941 to 1943, he'd been chief procurement officer of the U.S. Navy.
He'd also been Al Palya's and Bob Reynolds' employer, and indirectly, through the Franklin subcontractor, William Brauner's as well. From his letter to Vandenberg, it was clear that Folsom, drawing upon inside sources, knew what had happened to his men in the doomed B-29. Despite his restrained tone, he sounded deeply disturbed.
Although we have not received authoritative information from the Air Force regarding the cause of the accident, it appears from available informal information that one of the engines caught fire, followed shortly by a loss of power in a second engine. At about the same time the plane went into a tight spiral.... The resulting centrifugal force prevented escape.... The civilian engineers had received no preflight briefing in emergency bailout procedures.... This particular airplane had a long history of unsatisfactory performance.... We feel that it is probable that there was some confusion among the pilot, copilot and flight engineer ...
Folsom then laid down a not-overly-subtle threat: Steps will be required to assure that our engineers will be willing to assume the unavoidable risks incident to flight tests in military aircraft.... This accident has firmly impressed upon our engineering staff the danger of flying in military aircraft.
Folsom wanted newer, safer planes. He wanted all safety regulations followed. He wanted first-rate flight crews. He wanted "frank and open disclosure of all facts regarding the maintenance and operation of airplanes." He wanted his own independent inspection of Air Force planes. And, when a crash occurred, he wanted the official accident report.
Folsom's letter clearly rattled the military command, which depended on RCA's technical expertise. Copies moved up and down the Air Force hierarchy, at each stop drawing memos directed at others in the chain of command. Most troubling to the military was what Folsom's letter didn't say, what Folsom didn't know. By then, Air Force officers had in hand the official report of their own accident investigation. It not only confirmed Folsom's charges, it added to them.
The report made clear the doomed B-29 was a problem plane that had spent more time in maintenance than in the air. A crew flying it from Ohio to Florida on June 24, 1947, experienced so many malfunctions during takeoff and initial flight that they turned back after 20 minutes. They landed at Wright Field in Dayton with three engines "on red cross," which meant the plane was grounded for repairs.
Worse, the Air Force had not complied with several maintenance directives for this B-29 - including two critical technical orders that addressed the threat of engine fires. The orders, dated May 1, 1947, called for installation of deflector shields to avoid overheating and eliminate a "definite fire hazard." Because of the technical order "noncompliance," the accident report advised, the aircraft had been on a cautionary "red diagonal" but had been "released for flight by signing of an exceptional release." The report concluded: "The aircraft is not considered to have been safe for flight because of noncompliance with [the] technical orders."
None of this information made it into the reply that the Air Force eventually sent to Frank Folsom. In a letter dated Feb. 17, 1949, some 4 1/2 months after the accident, an assistant vice chief of staff dismissed the RCA executive's concerns.
"There is no question regarding safety procedures," Maj. Gen. William McKee advised. "Constant emphasis is placed on this phase of operations.... The Air Force is most anxious to conserve property and life and under no conditions, except extreme emergency, are aircraft permitted to fly when safety is in question."
McKee assured Folsom that his "personal interest in this matter is deeply appreciated." He assured also that "every possible action will be taken to maintain full mutual confidence" with civilian contractors. However, "due to the purpose and nature of the Accident Report, it is impossible to furnish copies."
Three Widows and an Unlikely Lawyer
At age 20, Pat Reynolds returned to Indianapolis and her mother's home. It was not a time, she would later say, when people readily spoke out against their country. There'd been the Depression, World War II, and then the start of the Cold War. Everyone respected authority. There wasn't a lot of resistance to anything. "What we knew," Pat recalled, "was 'loose lips sink ships.' "
Phyllis Brauner sold the family house in Pennsylvania and moved in with her mother, the two buying a home in Wellesley, Mass. Marriage had derailed her education plans, but now she returned to school, aiming to earn a doctorate in chemistry.
Elizabeth Palya remained in New Jersey, collecting $63.34 a month from Social Security and teaching high school home economics to support three young children. As she ran their household - always doing something - Judy watched and listened, learning how to shop for fabric, how to beat fudge to a glossy sheen, how to cut the taste of acid in spaghetti sauce.
It was an attorney friend of Phyllis Brauner's late husband who first suggested they file a lawsuit against the government. By January 1949, Judy's mother had expressed interest in joining such a claim and sharing a lawyer. In April, they fixed on one: Charles Biddle of Drinker Biddle & Reath in Philadelphia. Judy's mother sent a check for $50, her share of Biddle's retainer.
This was an uncommon case for Biddle. He generally was a lawyer to the rich, a well-ensconced member of the establishment. The Biddles, a legendary family of bankers, diplomats, lawyers, politicians and military men, were one of Philadelphia's first families, there since early in the 19th century, when Nicholas Biddle bought property on the bank of the Delaware River, 13 miles upstream from the city. Nicholas Biddle was the most powerful banker of his time, director of the Second Bank of the United States and a ceaseless combatant with President Andrew Jackson for control of the nation's currency. At the 123-acre family estate, called Andalusia, his guests included John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, the Marquis de Lafayette and Joseph Bonaparte, the former king of Spain.
In Charles Biddle's time, Andalusia still clung to customs and codes from the Victorian era. The family gathered in coat and tie, even in the heat of summer, for a traditional Sunday dinner of roast beef, rice and peas. Charles traveled to Scotland every year to shoot grouse. His family summered in Maine, loading suitcases, ice boxes, nannies, gardeners, butlers and maids onto two private railroad cars. At his law firm in downtown Philadelphia, most knew Charles as Mr. Biddle. His old-fashioned patrician style - easy, self-confident, relaxed - rose from his talents and from his station in life. It masked the mind of a tough litigator. He was a Republican to the core.
None of this, though, was Charles Biddle's chief claim to fame. Above all else, he was known as a World War I flying ace. As a member of the Lafayette Escadrille, he served in both the French Army Air Force and the American Expeditionary Force. He shot down 11 German planes. In April 1918, while attacking German two-seaters at low altitude behind enemy lines, he was hit, wounded and forced down, but managed, under heavy fire, to dodge his way to an advanced British observation post. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart, the French Legion of Honor, the Croix de Guerre with three palms, and the Belgian Ordre de Leopold.
Biddle was 59 when the B-29 case came his way in the spring of 1949. Although it wasn't his custom to represent cash-strapped widows or challenge the government's high seats of power, he couldn't resist. What drew him most was the story of a B-29 going down - and the secrets it held.
On June 21, in federal district court in Philadelphia, he filed the initial complaint, Phyllis Brauner and Elizabeth Palya vs. the United States of America, seeking $300,000 for each widow. He also called Pat Reynolds in Indianapolis. She'd turned down his first invitations to join the lawsuit. At 20, she had no children and wasn't interested in the money. Even more, she wasn't interested in immersing herself in this matter; deep denial felt better. Now Biddle, trying again, told her he respected how she felt, but feared she'd jeopardize the other two women's case if she didn't get involved.
Biddle's words brought to mind images of Bob that Pat would remember always. He'd just glowed from the minute she met him. They went to a movie that first night, then sat outside singing an old camp song - Tell me why the stars do shine - in perfect two-part harmony, her voice a sultry contralto. They married three months later and headed to Florida on a B-17, Pat in the nose, smuggled aboard - her first plane ride. RCA had assigned Bob to the Banshee project.
OK, Pat said finally. Sign me up.
This Biddle did, in a second complaint filed on Sept. 27. A month later, the government answered, denying any negligence, claiming it "was in no manner responsible for the accident."
In January 1950, during the discovery process, Biddle asked government lawyers a critical question: "Have any modifications been prescribed by [the government] for the engines in its B-29 type aircraft to prevent overheating of the engines and/or to reduce the fire hazard in the engines?"
The answer - from U.S. Atty. Gerald Gleeson and Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas Curtin - was as succinct as it was false: "No."
Soon after, Biddle tried to force the government to produce its official accident report and statements of the three surviving crew members. The government lawyers refused. There was no mention yet of "state secrets" or "national security"; the government claimed only that these documents, arising from the military's internal investigation, were a "privileged part of the executive files."
On June 30, after hearing arguments, U.S. District Judge William H. Kirkpatrick delivered his opinion: an unqualified ruling in favor of the three widows. The plaintiffs don't know why the accident happened, he pointed out. If anyone knows, it's the government. So the government should hand over the accident report and the statements.
Kirkpatrick had his eye fixed on just what kind of privilege the government was claiming - and not claiming: "The Government does not here contend that this is a case involving the well recognized common law privilege protecting state secrets.... In effect, the Government claims a new kind of privilege. Its position is that the proceedings should be privileged in order to allow ... free and unhampered self-criticism within the service.... I can find no recognition in the law of the existence of such a privilege."
The government still refused to produce the accident report. At the end of July, the three widows found a letter in their mailboxes. Biddle was writing with uncommon exasperation.
"To my mind it is perfect nonsense after all these years when B-29s have had accidents all over the world to say that a report on what caused this accident is a secret which should not be disclosed. Obviously, we are not interested in any secret devices which may have been on board but which had nothing to do with causing the accident. And in any event, the answer ... is to let the Court look at the report and if there is anything which should not be made public, the Judge can authorize that it be withheld.... The violent objection to producing [the accident report] on the part of the Air Force naturally makes one suspicious that it may contain some conclusions very unfavorable to the Government's case."
The issues crystallized at a rehearing before Kirkpatrick on Aug. 9, 1950, in Washington, D.C. Only now did the government invoke a state secrets privilege. In support of a motion for this rehearing, the Air Force had submitted two sworn affidavits, one signed by Thomas Finletter, the secretary of the Air Force, the other by Reginald Harmon, the Air Force judge advocate general.
The government "further objects to the production of this report," Finletter declared, "for the reason that the aircraft in question, together with the personnel on board, were engaged in a highly secret mission of the Air Force. The airplane likewise carried confidential equipment and any disclosure of its missions or information concerning its operation ... would not be in the public interest."
Harmon added: "Such information and findings of the accident investigation board which have been demanded by the plaintiffs cannot be furnished without seriously hampering national security."
The government's purpose seemed clear to Biddle. The Department of Justice wasn't merely resisting a lawsuit filed by three widows; it was intentionally trying to set a far-reaching precedent. While a state secrets privilege existed in common law, it had never been formally recognized by the Supreme Court. Biddle felt sure that his opponents meant to make this a test case. With the Cold War intensifying, so too was the government's determination to marshal all possible powers.
On the bench, Kirkpatrick held the two affidavits in his hand. He'd been a lieutenant colonel in the Army during World War I, so he understood the needs of the military. He was the chief judge of his district, a Republican appointed by Calvin Coolidge. Something troubled him, though. Are you changing your reason for withholding the accident report? he asked the government lawyers. Does your original reason stand? You're not now contending that this case involves national security and the state secrets privilege?
We do here contend that, replied the government lawyer, Thomas Curtin. He wanted it emphasized: He was now making a claim of state secrets privilege.
"That claim has been made in other cases," Kirkpatrick pointed out, "and it has been usually met by submission of the [documents] to the court to determine whether or not it is data which would imperil the safety of the military position of the United States."
Now their debate drove to the heart of the matter. Curtin: "We do not believe that is good law. We contend that the findings of the head of the department are binding, and the judiciary cannot waive it."
Kirkpatrick: "It is an important question. I suppose, just to state a wholly imaginary and rather fantastic case, suppose you had a collision between a mail truck and a taxicab, and the attorney general came in and said that in his opinion discovery in the case would imperil the whole military position of the United States, and so forth. Would the court have to accept that? Is that where this argument leads?"
Curtin: "I think you could interpret it that way."
Kirkpatrick: "I only want to know where your argument leads."
Curtin: "Under the statute, we contend it is final."
Kirkpatrick: "Your argument would lead to the point that I suggested?"
Curtin: "There is no other interpretation. In other words, I say that the executive is the person who must make that determination, not the judiciary.... In this particular case, the executive having made that determination, I submit, sir, it is binding upon the judiciary. You cannot review it or interpret it. That is what it comes down to."
Kirkpatrick wouldn't let pass that the government, in midstream, had changed its reason for not producing documents. "Of course," he said, "there is another fact, that this particular claim of privilege ... was not made at the time. I carefully read the briefs, and it was not suggested there that there was any claim of [state secrets] privilege."
Two years after the crash, one year after the lawsuit was filed, Curtin now said: "In my [initial] claim, I didn't even know what the trip was, or what was even on the plane, as a matter of fact."
"All right," Kirkpatrick responded. "It is an old controversy."
He'd made up his mind, though. The next month he issued an amended ruling, ordering the government to produce the documents for him to inspect alone in his chambers. When the government refused, Kirkpatrick entered a judgment by default in favor of Judy's mother and the other two widows.
They had won round one.
After a trial to determine the value of their husbands' lives - defined as their lost earnings - Kirkpatrick granted Betty Palya and Phyllis Brauner $80,000 each (the equivalent of $622,075 today) and Pat Reynolds $65,000 (the equivalent of $505,397). Relief, if not celebration, filled their households. The three women looked forward to relative financial security. This despite a letter each received a week later from Charles Biddle. "It may be quite some time before anything is collected," he warned, "for I believe that the Government will in all probability appeal."
The Highest Court in the Land
The government waited five months. Not until April 1951 did it ask the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Kirkpatrick's ruling. Half a year later, on Oct. 19, Biddle and the government attorneys argued their cases before a three-judge appellate panel. On Dec. 11 came the panel's opinion, written by Judge Albert Maris, a highly regarded jurist and law professor appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Ruling in favor of the three widows, Maris offered a resounding affirmation of Kirkpatrick's decision, which he quoted at length. Maris went even further than Kirkpatrick in addressing the critical underlying issues. In words that sound as fresh today as when written, he made plain that he saw clear dangers in what the government sought.
Maris first addressed the government's claim that disclosure of the accident report would hamper open investigations: "We regard the recognition of such a sweeping privilege as contrary to a sound public policy. It is but a small step to assert a privilege against any disclosure of records merely because they might prove embarrassing to government officers. Indeed, it requires no great flight of imagination to realize that ... the privilege against disclosure might gradually be enlarged ... until, as is the case in some nations today, it embraced the whole range of government activities."
Then Maris turned to the government's second basis for a claim of privilege - state secrets. Like Kirkpatrick, he recognized that the government had advanced this argument only belatedly. Also like Kirkpatrick, he found the government's claim deeply troubling. What bothered him most was the assertion that the executive branch had unilateral power, free of judicial review, to decide what could be kept secret.
Maris pointed out that Kirkpatrick hadn't ordered any documents to be disclosed; he'd only directed that they be produced for private examination in his chambers. "The Government was thus adequately protected," Maris wrote. "[But] the Government contends that it is within the sole province of the Secretary of the Air Force to determine whether any privileged material is contained in the documents and that his determination must be accepted by the district court without any independent consideration.... We cannot accede to this proposition.... To hold that the head of an executive department of the Government in a suit to which the United States is a party may conclusively determine the Government's claim of privilege is to abdicate the judicial function."
Maris' conclusion: "The judgments entered in favor of the plaintiffs will be affirmed."
Round two also had gone to the three widows.
Charles Biddle, of course, knew what was coming. Three months later, the solicitor general filed a petition for a writ of certiorari - a request for the Supreme Court to hear the case. On April 8, 1952, the Supreme Court agreed to adjudicate what was now known as United States vs. Reynolds Et Al.
From both sides came thick briefs arguing their positions and defining what was at stake. The government gave no quarter. Neither did Biddle. "The basic question here," he wrote, "is whether those in charge of government departments may refuse to produce documents properly demanded, in a case where the government is a party, simply because the officials think it would be better to keep them secret, and this without the Courts having any power to question."
Biddle concluded: "The Secretary of the Air Force may not assert he alone shall be the judge of whether his own claim is well founded.... This matter reaches to bedrock."
In early September 1952, the clerk of the Supreme Court advised the lawyers for both sides that they should be present on Tuesday, Oct. 21, for oral arguments. On that fall day, at 1:30 p.m., Charles Biddle appeared before the court in striped pants, black tie and black frock coat with tails. Each side was allotted one hour for its argument, with a half-hour recess between the two presentations. The judges, another attorney present later reported to Phyllis Brauner, "were quite interested and shot questions at the lawyers arguing the case and one never really was quite certain on whose side their sympathies lay."
This became clear 4 1/2 months later, on March 9, 1953, when the Supreme Court delivered its opinion in U.S. vs. Reynolds. The government, wrote Chief Justice Fred Vinson for a 6-3 majority, had made a valid claim of privilege against revealing military secrets, a privilege "well established in the law of evidence." The decisions of the District Court and the Court of Appeals - of Judge Kirkpatrick and Judge Maris - were therefore reversed.
By "well established," the Supreme Court meant that the state secrets privilege was rooted in common law. Now, though, the high court formally recognized it, which made it binding on all courts throughout the nation.
The justices also spelled out a procedure for how the privilege should be applied. The privilege must be asserted by the government, they instructed, and it is not to be lightly invoked. There must be a formal claim lodged by the head of a department only after his personal consideration. The court itself must determine "whether the circumstances are appropriate for the claim of privilege," and yet do so "without forcing disclosure of the very thing the privilege is designed to protect."
This last, of course, was the tricky part. To resolve it, Vinson presented a "formula of compromise" that essentially said the government shouldn't have absolute autonomy, but courts shouldn't always insist on seeing the documents. You can't abdicate control over the evidence, Vinson instructed trial judges, but if the government can satisfy you that a reasonable danger to national security exists, you shouldn't insist upon examining the documents, even alone in chambers.
U.S. vs. Reynolds clearly rose from the context of the times. In 1949, the Soviet Union had staged its first atomic bomb test, and in October 1951 had dropped a bomb from its own version of a B-29. In March 1953, the Cold War was intensifying, the Korean War still waging, McCarthyism spreading. Fourteen weeks later, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be executed as spies, the Supreme Court having denied a last-minute stay. Like now, a threat appeared to exist not just overseas but on America's own shores. Chief Justice Vinson acknowledged all this in a conclusion that could have been written today.
"In the instance we cannot escape judicial notice that this is a time of vigorous preparation for national defense. Experience in the past war has made it common knowledge that air power is one of the most potent weapons in our scheme of defense, and that newly developing electronic devices must be kept secret if their full military advantage is to be exploited in the national interests. On the record before the trial court, it appeared that this accident occurred to a military plane which had gone aloft to test electronic equipment. Certainly there was a reasonable danger that the accident investigation report would contain references to the secret electronic equipment which was the primary concern of the mission."
At bottom, Vinson's opinion represented an act of faith. We must believe the government, he held, when it claims this B-29 accident report would reveal state secrets.
The Supreme Court hadn't dismissed the case, only remanded it to district court for retrial. In preparation for that, Biddle decided to depose the three surviving crew members - something he'd resisted earlier, believing the government's offer of them was a diversionary tactic. On April 29, he reported the result to the three widows: "As I anticipated, they made it quite clear that the secret equipment on board the plane had absolutely nothing to do with the accident and had not even been put into operation."
None of that mattered. The government, having established the precedent it sought, had little remaining interest in battling the widows. In late June, government attorneys agreed to settle the case for a total of $170,000 - just $55,000 less than what Kirkpatrick had originally awarded. In exchange for signing "full and final" releases of their claim, Phyllis Brauner received $49,855.55 (the equivalent of $349,926 today), Elizabeth Palya $48,355.55 ($339,398) and Patricia Reynolds $39,288.90 ($275,759). For his legal work, Charles Biddle earned $32,500 ($228,109), a contingency fee of just less than 20%.
Near the end of 1953, Biddle wrote to Phyllis Brauner: "As you know, I hated to settle the case because I thought if we had carried it through to a finish we could have gotten substantially more. However, something might have gone wrong and perhaps it was better to be sure of receiving the amount which you did."
In other words: The widows got their money, and the government got its privilege.
The next round would be up to Judy Palya Loether.
About This Story
This story is drawn from court records and government reports, as well as interviews over eight months with lawyers, law professors and all central characters. They include Judy Palya Loether, Susan Brauner, Cathy Brauner, Patricia Reynolds Herring, Bernard Zachry, Michael Zachry, Robert Zachry, Wilson M. Brown III, Jeff Almeida and Charles Biddle's son, James Biddle. Thoughts and emotions attributed to the characters come directly from them.
Descriptions of the crash site and the Zachry farm derive from a visit to Waycross, Ga., and a tour of the farm. Descriptions of Charles Biddle and his ancestral home are drawn from a visit to Andalusia and a tour of the estate provided by James Biddle, who shared family scrapbooks, histories, tapes and his father's memoir, "The Way of the Eagle."
The context and impact of U.S. vs. Reynolds are based on law review articles, case files, legal textbooks and interviews with attorneys and professors specializing in national security law, including Jonathan Turley, Kate Martin, Mark Zaid and Peter Raven-Hansen.
Passages that narrate the B-29 crash derive from declassified Air Force documents, including the official accident report ("Report of Special Investigation of Aircraft Accident Involving TB-29-100BW No. 45-21866"); supplementary memos and summaries; statements and sworn testimony by crash survivors Herbert W. Moore Jr. (copilot), Earl W. Murrhee (flight engineer), Walter J. Peny (left scanner) and Eugene Mechler (civilian engineer); statements by witnesses near Waycross, maintenance foremen, investigators and the B-29's previous flight crew; the crew roster; maintenance reports; weather reports; and diagrams, maps and photos of the crash site. The narration also derives from historical articles about the B-29; newspaper articles published the week of the crash; Eugene Mechler's letters to Judy Palya Loether; Susan Brauner's memories; and interviews with Zachry family members.
Passages that chronicle the legal case resulting in U.S. vs. Reynolds are based on the original case file, including the complaint, responses, interrogatories and briefs; the transcript of record stored at the U.S. Supreme Court; the transcript of proceedings before Judge William H. Kirkpatrick on Aug. 9, 1950; the sworn affidavits signed by the secretary of the Air Force and the judge advocate general; the transcript of the trial for damages before Kirkpatrick on Nov. 27, 1950; the Court of Appeals decision by Judge Albert Maris in December 1951; the government's petition for a writ of certiorari; the briefs filed to the Supreme Court; the Supreme Court decision by Chief Justice Fred Vinson in March 1953; the petition for a writ of error coram nobis filed by Drinker Biddle & Reath in February 2003; the response of the United States filed by the solicitor general in May 2003; and correspondence between Charles Biddle and the three widows.
Descriptions of Project Banshee are drawn from correspondence between Albert Palya and his colleagues; declassified Air Force documents; and a history of Eglin Air Force Base. The portrayal of RCA executive Frank Folsom is based on declassified Air Force documents and Folsom's original letter to Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg.
Historical newspapers and photos of the principals and of the piece of B-29 wreckage are courtesy of family members; the photo of Chief Justice Fred Vinson is from Associated Press archives; and the photo of attorney Charles Biddle is courtesy of Drinker Biddle & Reath.
Coming Tomorrow
Judy Palya Loether climbs into her mother's attic in search of secrets. What she finds is a key to her own past and the government's way of hiding facts.
On the Web
For additional photographs and documents, go to latimes.com/B29
Researcher Nona Yates contributed to this report.
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High Court to Hear 'Enemy Combatant' Cases
Lawyers for 16 Detainees at Guantanamo Bay Presenting Arguments Tuesday
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20707-2004Apr17?language=printer
To fight terrorism, President Bush has made the broadest assertions of wartime executive power since World War II. Beginning this week, some of those claims will face the Supreme Court's scrutiny for the first time since the president began to announce them in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. On Tuesday, the justices will hear appeals by suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members who are seeking a legal forum in which they can fight their months-long imprisonment at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On April 28, lawyers for two U.S. citizen terrorism suspects who have been held and questioned by the military as "enemy combatants" will make a similar plea.
The cases pose a fresh challenge to the war policies of an administration already on the defensive over its handling of Iraq and its pre-Sept. 11 approach to al Qaeda terrorism. While the president is urging the Supreme Court to interpret its constitutional role narrowly -- to do nothing more than ratify what it says are exclusive constitutional prerogatives of the commander in chief -- advocates for the detainees and their supporters are telling the justices that the court is all that stands between the citizenry and the unchecked power of the executive branch.
"The issue is whether the president will be the sole judge of how the balance will be struck in reconciling the rule of law with the requirements of security," said Michael J. Glennon, who teaches national security law at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. "There is a presumption . . . in cases such as this that neither the president nor the Congress will be the sole judge, that the Supreme Court will have the last word. The court will insist on a high [standard] in finding that presumption rebutted."
The cases arrive, in the middle of an election year, before a court that is heir to a long tradition of judicial deference to presidents in wartime -- but whose current members have shown little reluctance to second-guess or undo the actions of the other two branches of government.
And the impact of the court's rulings -- due about the same time the United States is scheduled to hand over power to an Iraqi government -- may extend well beyond U.S. borders, to allied governments and international public opinion, which often look to the United States as a symbol of freedom and the rule of law, but have been critical of Bush's approach so far.
On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments by lawyers for 16 prisoners at Guantanamo -- 12 Kuwaitis, two Australians and two British citizens -- who were captured in Afghanistan by U.S. forces or their Afghan allies and classified as members of al Qaeda or the Taliban.
The Bush administration has taken the position that all 650 current Guantanamo detainees are unlawful enemy combatants and are, therefore, not prisoners of war entitled to the protections of the Geneva conventions, as they would be if they had been fighting for a regular army. Though the administration has nevertheless pledged to give them humane treatment consistent with the conventions, it says that the detainees are not entitled to a hearing at which they could contest their detention, perhaps by producing evidence that they never actually fought against the United States.
Rather, the administration says, they may be held and interrogated for as long as the executive branch considers it necessary. Two lower federal courts have agreed.
Under World War II-vintage Supreme Court precedent, the administration argues, the detainees may have no access to a civilian court, because they are noncitizen enemies who were captured outside U.S. sovereign territory and are still being held abroad. Under a century-old lease agreement with Cuba, the United States has "jurisdiction and control" over the Guantanamo base, but Cuba retains "ultimate sovereignty." Indeed, Guantanamo was chosen in 2001 as a detention center for battlefield captives from Afghanistan in part because of the Justice Department's legal opinion that it was outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
The administration's brief to the court argues that its actions are sufficiently checked by political and diplomatic forces, such as recent negotiations with Britain that resulted in the release of two of the prisoners named in the Supreme Court case. It also cites the numbers of recently released prisoners and a "multi-step screening process" the U.S. military uses to separate friend from foe.
But the largely skeptical reaction of the American legal community, as well as international public opinion, to the administration's actions at Guantanamo have demonstrated how much both the law and public perceptions of it have changed since World War II -- when both the American public and the Supreme Court initially accepted the mass internment of people of Japanese ancestry, including thousands of U.S. citizens.
"In the '40s, what criminal justice and civil rights looked like was just completely different," said Cass Sunstein, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago.
A chorus of human rights organizations and European governments have condemned what they call the attempted creation of a "legal black hole" in Guantanamo.
A friend-of-the-court brief supporting the detainees filed by human rights activists from Cambodia, El Salvador, the former Yugoslavia and other new democracies notes that "the people of countries around the world look to the United States to uphold the ideals so elegantly reflected in its constitution. When the United States fails to live up to those ideals, the cause of individual rights is diminished not just here but everywhere."
In that sense, the consolidated Guantanamo cases, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334 and al Odah v. United States, No. 03-343, have global political significance.
In legal terms, however, only a relatively narrow claim is at issue. The detainees are not asking to be set free. They are asking the Supreme Court to declare that their cases are not, in fact, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts so that they may ask a federal judge to grant them some form of an opportunity to argue for their freedom.
That could be as minimal as an appearance before a military tribunal.
To the administration's argument that it needs a prison such as Guantanamo because of the unique character of a war against enemies who often fight in civilian disguise, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the British and Australian detainees, argue in their brief that these "are the same conditions that make it essential for the Government to provide some process by which innocent people can secure their release."
Neither political pressure nor the military's screening process is sufficient to protect the detainees' rights, their lawyers argue, because "what the Executive Branch extends by grace, it may withdraw by fiat." The fact that the Bush administration has chosen to release some prisoners lately shows only that it responds to the pressure generated by judicial action, such as the Supreme Court's decision to intervene in the case, which was widely interpreted as a setback for the government, the detainees' lawyers say.
Next week, the court will consider the Bush administration's assertion that the president can declare a U.S. citizen suspected of working with al Qaeda or the Taliban an "enemy combatant" and hold him or her in a military brig, under interrogation and without access to counsel, for as long as is deemed necessary.
Two men, Yasir Esam Hamdi, a U.S.-born Saudi seized as a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan, and Jose Padilla, a Puerto Rican arrested in Chicago as he was allegedly entering the United States from Pakistan to carry out an al Qaeda plot to detonate a radiological bomb, have been jailed for two years and 22 months, respectively.
In support of these actions, the Bush administration characterizes them as lawful war-fighting measures, citing the president's constitutional power as commander in chief and a Sept. 18, 2001, joint congressional resolution that authorized him to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against those he determines to be terrorists.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, upheld the detention of Hamdi, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, based in New York, ruled that the Padilla detention was unlawful. The Bush administration has since given both men limited access to counsel.
Though it affects fewer people, for now, than the Guantanamo cases, legal analysts consider the administration's claims in the Hamdi and Padilla cases to have the broadest potential impact. Essentially, they lead to the creation of a parallel legal system, separate from ordinary criminal justice and controlled almost exclusively by the executive.
"The court has not been terribly receptive to claims of unlimited power by either Congress or the executive, and that's what we're dealing with here," Glennon said.
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Cases Before Supreme Court Will Test Limits of Presidential Power
April 18, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/politics/18SCOT.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, April 17 - Three Supreme Court cases generated by the Bush administration's detention of those it deems "enemy combatants" will be argued over the next 10 days, framing a debate of historic dimension not only about the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike, but also - or perhaps principally - about the boundaries of presidential power.
It was always evident that these cases would invite the justices to re-examine the balance between individual liberty and national security, and perhaps to recalibrate that always delicate balance for the modern age of terrorism. But the full extent to which the arguments turn on competing visions of presidential authority became clear only after the dozens of briefs filed in the three cases began to arrive at the court after the first of the year.
In each of its three main briefs, the administration's lawyers argue for a muscular view of executive authority that leaves no room for "second-guessing" or "micromanaging" by the federal courts.
For example, in its brief arguing that the courts have no jurisdiction even to hear challenges to the open-ended detention of hundreds of men taken from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the administration says judicial review "would place the federal courts in the unprecedented position of micromanaging the executive's handling of captured enemy combatants from a distant combat zone" and of "superintending the executive's conduct of an armed conflict."
That would "raise grave constitutional concerns" under the separation of powers, the brief says.
The Guantánamo case will be argued Tuesday. Appeals in two lawsuits filed on behalf of separate groups of detainees, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334, and Al Odah v. United States, No. 03-343, are consolidated for a single argument.
In its brief appealing a lower court's ruling that President Bush lacked authority to order the military detention of an American citizen, Jose Padilla, the administration argues that the decision to transfer Mr. Padilla from the civilian courts to a military prison was made under the president's inherent authority as commander in chief. "The authority of the commander in chief to engage and defeat the enemy encompasses the capture and detention of enemy combatants wherever found, including within the nation's borders," the brief asserts.
Mr. Padilla was apprehended two years ago at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on suspicion of participating in a plot by Al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive device, but he has never been charged with a crime. This case, Rumsfeld v. Padilla, No. 03-1027, will be argued April 28 along with an appeal by a second citizen detainee, Yaser Esam Hamdi.
Mr. Hamdi, born in Louisiana to Saudi parents, was taken into custody more than two years ago in Afghanistan, where government lawyers say he was fighting with the Taliban. He and Mr. Padilla are being held in the same Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. For two years, neither man was permitted to see a lawyer. The government recently permitted them limited access to their lawyers while maintaining that this was a matter of "discretion" rather than entitlement.
The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled last year that a nine-paragraph description by a Pentagon official of the circumstances of Mr. Hamdi's seizure was sufficient to validate his continued detention. Dismissing Mr. Hamdi's petition for a writ of habeas corpus that sought to challenge his classification as an enemy combatant, the appeals court said that once the government explained itself, there was no further role for the federal courts.
In its brief in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, No. 03-6696, urging the justices to uphold that decision, the administration asserts that the determination of enemy combatant status is "a quintessentially military judgment, representing a core exercise of the commander-in-chief authority" and "entitled to the utmost deference by a court."
These arguments in turn have galvanized a broad swath of the legal community to express alarm about the sweep and implications of the administration's claims of executive authority. Liberal and civil rights organizations are not the only groups to have filed briefs on the detainees' behalf. One of the most pointed is from the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization here that is influential in conservative circles.
The institute's brief in the Hamdi case describes the government's argument that the courts cannot meaningfully review a determination of enemy combatant status as a "shocking assertion" that "strikes at the heart of habeas corpus."
Tracing the habeas corpus procedure to its roots in ancient English law, the brief continues, "The right to habeas corpus is, in essence, a right to judicial protection against lawless incarceration by executive authorities."
Global Rights, an international human rights legal group, maintains in its brief that "enemy combatant" is an "invented classification" that is not recognized in international law. Its use has the effect of "stripping Mr. Hamdi of any recognized status under international law," the brief says, adding that "the government is engaging in the very practice of arbitrary detention that it has condemned worldwide for decades."
In the Guantánamo case, which has received great attention in England because British subjects are among the detainees, 175 members of the British Parliament have filed a brief arguing that "the exercise of executive power without possibility of judicial review jeopardizes the keystone of our existence as nations - namely, the rule of law."
Like a number of other briefs in all three cases, the Parliament members' brief argues that the administration's actions violate both the binding obligations and the norms of international law. "Indefinite executive detention without judicial review is inimical to the United States' commitment to the rule of law and its international obligations," the brief says.
While the international-law arguments will undoubtedly appeal to some justices, they may well alienate others. In cases on subjects ranging from gay rights to the death penalty to the legal liabilities of multinational businesses, the Supreme Court is engaged in a vigorous debate over the extent to which United States courts should take account of foreign legal developments. In some respects, this debate represents the latest front in the legal culture wars that have been raging, sometimes beneath the public radar, since the battle over Robert H. Bork's nomination to the court in 1987.
Mr. Bork and 23 other conservative lawyers and legal scholars, including several recent veterans of the White House counsel's office and the Justice Department, have filed a brief in the Guantánamo case that is likely to draw more than passing attention within the court.
Organized as Citizens for the Common Defence, this group, which includes a number of the current justices' former law clerks, focuses sharply on the international-law arguments in maintaining that the detainees and their lawyers "rely upon and seek to have this court endorse an essentially political position that is adverse to the interests of this nation as asserted by the executive."
Referring to Article II of the Constitution, which defines the office of the president, the brief says that "this case can be viewed as one battle between those who invoke `international norms' and multilateralism to constrain the United States and those who believe that Article II empowers the executive to defend the nation subject only to legal constraints applicable and deemed relevant by U.S. law, including the Constitution and those international legal obligations that U.S. law incorporates."
In the courtroom itself, the arguments may well proceed as rhetorical duels over the relevance and proper interpretation of formerly obscure Supreme Court precedents, dusted off for the first time since they were issued during or soon after World War II. In the Guantánamo case, for example, the administration invokes Johnson v. Eisentrager, a 1950 decision rejecting a right of habeas corpus on behalf of 21 German civilians caught spying for Japan in wartime China.
The lesson, the administration says, is that noncitizens held outside the United States do not have access to federal court. The Guantánamo detainees' lawyers say the precedent does not apply - either because the Guantánamo Bay Navy base is effectively, even if not formally, United States territory or because the Germans, in contrast to the current detainees, had already had lawyers and trials before a military commission and were thus "adjudicated" rather than simply labeled enemy aliens.
One precedent of which the justices need no reminder is Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 Supreme Court decision that upheld, to the country's lasting regret and eventual formal apology, the wartime detention of 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent, most of them citizens.
Fred Korematsu, the plaintiff in that case, is now 84. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. His brief on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees is a catalog of government overreactions to foreign and domestic threats, from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through the McCarthy period of the 1950's.
"Our history merits attention," Mr. Korematsu's brief says. "Only by understanding the errors of the past can we do better in the present."
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Judges on Little - Known Court Paid for Life
April 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Judges-Lifetime-Pay.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Judges on a little-known federal court that decides claims against the government are appointed for 15 years, but collect their full six-figure salaries for a lifetime for a workload that averaged fewer than two trials each in one recent year.
U.S. Court of Federal Claims jurists turn their fixed terms into lifetime jobs by remaining as senior judges. Currently, the federal claims court has 16 active judges and 13 in senior status.
A few of the senior judges handle a full workload. Some handle at least 25 percent of their former caseload. Others have an empty docket. All are paid $158,100 a year, the same as full-time federal judges.
The congressionally approved arrangement for the claims judges -- described as a ``charmed existence'' by one legal expert -- is gaining scrutiny. Two Democratic senators have prepared a bill to abolish the court, with its budget of $14.4 million.
``It's a waste of money,'' Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. Added Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.: ``The taxpayers are spending top dollar for full-time judges that don't even perform part-time work.''
A Court of Federal Claims judge had an average workload of 45 cases from 1997 through 2001 and conducted fewer than two trials each in 2002, according to records compiled by the senators. In contrast, District Court judges averaged 478 cases and completed an average 19 trials a year, according to the latest statistics.
Court of Federal Claims Chief Judge Edward Damich said in an interview that the caseload numbers are meaningless because his judges must resolve ``complex, high stakes litigation'' that usually is settled without a trial.
The claims court has special expertise in disputes between contractors and the government, cases brought by taxpayers seeking refunds and plaintiffs complaining the government illegally seized their property. It has sole jurisdiction in lawsuits filed by unsuccessful bidders seeking government contracts.
Damich said Congress reorganized the court more than 20 years ago with the intention of allowing its judges to serve for life despite their 15-year terms.
``It was because of the fear that if we were to lose salary and benefits completely, that might influence judges in their decisions,'' he said. ``They might be influenced in a pro-government way to get reappointed.''
Damich said that for reasons he could not explain, presidents have rarely reappointed the judges to second 15-year terms.
Citing complex issues over the years, Damich said the court handled 65 cases brought by utilities seeking damages because spent nuclear fuel was not removed from their property.
An additional 300 cases were brought by financial institutions and their shareholders, who blamed a government accounting change for triggering massive savings and loan failures in the 1980s.
The court's docket as of April 8 had 6,264 cases, Damich said. But he acknowledged that all but 1,789 were claims to collect money from a government trust fund, established for victims -- mostly children -- harmed by vaccines.
The vaccine cases are handled by special experts called masters; the judges only get involved when someone appeals a ruling. They should not be counted in the court's caseload, Dorgan and Wyden said, and their caseload statistics leave them out.
The senators said they were especially outraged by the full-salaried senior judges.
``They go from doing next to nothing to doing nothing,'' Dorgan said.
The chief judge won support from David Churchill, a Washington lawyer who is president of the Court of Federal Claims Bar Association.
``The Justice Department is a litigant in each of these cases,'' he said, adding ``it would be greatly preferable'' to give the claims judges lifetime appointments to ensure their independence. He contended it would be highly disruptive to transfer to judges on another court complex cases that last for years.
When the claims judges finish their term and take senior status, the chief judge must decide whether to recall them to service and have them work for their salaries.
If they are recalled, the judges are required to handle 25 percent of an active judge's caseload to qualify for any pay increases.
Damich, who said he negotiates with each senior judge, said four of the 13 do no work while one senior judge handles only court administrative duties. The other senior judges have varying caseloads.
On the net:
U.S. Court of Federal Claims http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/
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Pre-9/11 Files Show Warnings Were More Dire and Persistent
April 18, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JIM DWYER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/politics/18SEPT.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, April 17 - Early this year, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks played four minutes of a call from Betty Ong, a crew member on American Airlines Flight 11. The power of her call could not have been plainer: in a calm voice, Ms. Ong told her supervisors about the hijacking, the weapons the attackers had used, the locations of their seats.
At first, however, Ms. Ong's reports were greeted skeptically by some officials on the ground. "They did not believe her," said Bob Kerrey, a commission member. "They said, `Are you sure?' They asked her to confirm that it wasn't air-rage. Our people on the ground were not prepared for a hijacking."
For most Americans, the disbelief was the same. The attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after three weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.
The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.
While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings - including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country - had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks.
The new information produced by the commission so far has led 6 of its 10 members to say or suggest that the attacks could have been prevented, though there is no consensus on when, how or by whom. The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican, has described failures at every level of government, any of which, if avoided, could have altered the outcome. Mr. Kerrey, a Democrat, said, "My conclusion is that it could have been prevented. That was not my conclusion when I went on the commission."
While the commission was created to diagnose mistakes and to recommend reforms, its examination has powerful political resonance. The panel has reviewed the records of two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Mr. Bush, who is in the midst of a campaign for re-election, said last Sunday that none of the warnings gave any hint of the time, place or date of an assault. "Had I known there was going to be an attack on America I would have moved mountains to stop the attack," he said.
In an intense stretch this month, the commission pried open some of the most closely guarded compartments of government, revealing the flow and details of previously classified information given to two presidents and their senior advisers, and the performance of intelligence and law enforcement officials.
The inquiry has gone beyond the report of a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committee in 2002, which chronicled missteps at the mid-level of bureaucracies. Urged on by a number of families of people killed in the attacks, the Kean commission has used a mix of moral and political leverage to extract presidential communications and testimony. Among the new themes that have fundamentally reshaped the story of the Sept. 11 attacks are:
¶Al Qaeda and its leader, Mr. bin Laden, did not blindside the United States, but were a threat recognized and discussed regularly at the highest levels of government for nearly five years before the attacks, in thousands of reports, often accompanied by urgent warnings from lower-level experts.
¶Presidents Clinton and Bush received regular information about the threat of Al Qaeda and the intention of the bin Laden network to strike inside the United States. Each president made terrorism a stated priority, failed to find a diplomatic solution and viewed military force as a last resort. At the same time, neither grappled with the structural flaws and paralyzing dysfunction that undermined the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., the two agencies on which the nation depended for protection from terrorists. By the end of his second term, Mr. Clinton and the director of the F.B.I., Louis J. Freeh, were barely speaking.
Even when the two agencies cooperated, the results were unimpressive. Mr. Kean said that he viewed the reports on the two agencies as indictments. In late August 2001, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, learned that the F.B.I. had arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after he had enrolled in a flight school. Mr. Tenet was given a memorandum titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But he testified that he took no action and did not tell President Bush about the case.
During the Clinton years, particularly at the National Security Council, the commission has found, there was uncertainty about whether the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden justified military action. Much of the debate was provoked by Richard A. Clarke, who led antiterrorism efforts under both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush and argued for aggressive action.
"Former officials, including an N.S.C. staffer working for Mr. Clarke, told us the threat was seen as one that could cause hundreds of casualties, not thousands," according to one interim commission report. "Such differences affect calculations about whether or how to go to war. Even officials who acknowledge a vital threat intellectually may not be ready to act upon such beliefs at great cost or at high risk."
In the first eight months of the Bush administration, the commission found, the president and his advisers received far more information, much of it dire in tone and detailed in content, than had been generally understood.
The most striking came in the Aug. 6 memorandum presented in an intelligence briefing the White House says Mr. Bush requested. Titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the memorandum was declassified this month under pressure from the commission. After referring to a British tip in 1998 that Islamic fundamentalists wanted to hijack a plane, it went on to warn: "Nevertheless, F.B.I. information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." Mr. Bush has said the briefing did not provide specific details of when and where an attack might take place.
Mr. Kerrey said that Mr. Bush showed "good instincts" by asking for the material, but said the call from Ms. Ong, the flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11 - which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in the day's first attack - showed that the threats and alarms did not get passed down the line.
"I don't see any evidence that our airports were on heightened alert," he said. "A hijacking was not a bolt out of the blue."
The Clinton Response: A Growing Priority, Hamstrung by Process
Throughout President Clinton's eight years in office, law enforcement and intelligence agencies tracked Al Qaeda through a succession of plots in the United States and overseas. The commission found new evidence that counterterrorism became a priority for the Clinton national security team. But the panel said the effort was stymied by bureaucratic miscommunications, diplomatic failures, intelligence lapses and policy miscalculations.
On the intelligence side, the commission discovered confusion about crucial issues. White House aides believed, for example, that President Clinton had authorized actions to kill Mr. bin Laden, but C.I.A. officers thought they were legally permitted to kill him only during an attempt to capture him.
Throughout the 1990's, the panel found, law enforcement and intelligence experts, often in lower-level jobs, repeatedly warned that Mr. bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States. The threat was plainly stated in documents disclosed by the commission. One, in 1998, was titled "Bin Laden Threatening to Attack U.S. Aircraft," and cited the possibility of a strike using antiaircraft missiles. Another 1998 report, referring to Mr. bin Laden as "UBL," said, "UBL Plans for Reprisals Against U.S. Targets, Possibly in U.S." A 1996 review of a plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific uncovered evidence of the Qaeda interest in crashing a hijacked plane into C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.
But the C.I.A.'s efforts to thwart Mr. bin Laden's network through covert action were ineffectual, the commission found. The agency's "Issue Station," which was set up in 1996 to hunt down Mr. bin Laden, had a half-dozen chances to attack the Qaeda chief, but each time agency higher-ups balked. A plan to kill him in February 1999 was called off at the last minute because of concerns that he might be with a prince from the United Arab Emirates, regarded as a useful ally in counterterrorism, the commission reported.
President Clinton tried diplomacy, but that too failed. In 1998, Mr. bin Laden issued a public call for any Muslim to kill any American anywhere in the world. That April, Bill Richardson, the United States representative to the United Nations, went to Afghanistan and asked the Taliban government to surrender Mr. bin Laden to the United States.
Simultaneous Qaeda bombings in August 1998 at American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania galvanized talk of aggressive efforts, but brought no tangible results. President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes against a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in the Sudan. The missiles hit their intended targets, but neither Mr. bin Laden nor any other terrorist leader was killed.
In December 1998, Mr. Tenet announced in a memorandm to his senior staff at the C.I.A. that they would henceforth be at war with Al Qaeda. "I want no resources or people spared," he wrote.
In practice, the commission concluded, Mr. Tenet's declaration of war, which the C.I.A. director has frequently cited in his public testimony since the attacks, had "little overall effect."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country's other principal counterterrorism agency, struggled to repackage the tools of an interstate crime-fighting organization against a highly unconventional foreign-based threat to the United States.
One interim panel report described the F.B.I. as a bureaucracy suffocated by outmoded rules and legal barriers that barred criminal investigators from obtaining intelligence data. Agents worked on an aging computer system that kept them from knowing what other agents in their own offices, much less those around the country, were working on. Some F.B.I. analysts hired to assess terror threats were assigned to jobs entering data and answering telephones.
Throughout the 1990's, the bureau focused on investigations of specific terror attacks to bring criminal cases to court. The most successful were handled by its New York office, whose agents were among the most knowledgeable in the world about Al Qaeda.
By late in the decade, the F.B.I. recognized the need to improve its intelligence collection and analysis, but the report said that Mr. Freeh had difficulty reconciling that with its continuing agenda, including the war on drugs. As a result, the bureau's counterterrorism staff was thin. On Sept. 11, 2001, only about 6 percent of the F.B.I.'s agent work force was assigned to terrorism.
In October 2000, two Qaeda suicide bombers in a small boat packed with explosives attacked the Navy destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. President Clinton did not retaliate, but Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, warned his successor, Condoleezza Rice, that "she would be spending more time on terrorism and Al Qaeda than any other issue."
The Bush Review: Alerts, but Breaks in Chain of Command
Warned of the Qaeda threat during the transition, President Bush's national security team started work in March 2001 on a comprehensive strategy to eradicate the terror network. But the effort seemed to plod ahead almost in isolation from the urgent notices by the C.I.A. Most of the threat warnings, but not all, pointed overseas.
At the end of May, Cofer Black, chief of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, told Ms. Rice that the threat level stood at "7 on a scale of 10, as compared to an 8 during the millennium," the period around January 2000. In response, American embassies were warned to take precautions. The State Department warned Americans traveling overseas. The C.I.A. intensified operations to disrupt terror cells around the world.
Mr. Tenet took his terror warnings directly to Mr. Bush. Ms. Rice said that at least 40 meetings between the C.I.A. director and the president dealt "in one way or other with Al Qaeda or the Al Qaeda threat." Mr. Tenet later said "the system was blinking red," adding that no warning indicated that terrorists would fly hijacked commercial aircraft into buildings in the United States.
On July 5, Ms. Rice and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Clarke to alert top officials of the country's domestic agencies. "Let's make sure they're buttoning down," Ms. Rice said. The F.A.A. issued threat advisories, but neither the agency's top administrator nor Norman Y. Mineta, the secretary of transportation, was aware of the increased threat level, said Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member, at a hearing last week.
On July 27, Mr. Clarke informed Ms. Rice that the threat reporting had dropped. But White House officials said that Mr. Bush continued to ask about any evidence of a domestic attack. In August, C.I.A. officials prepared a briefing about the possibility of Qaeda operations inside the United States, including the use of aircraft in terror attacks.
The briefing paper was presented to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6 at his Texas ranch. The memorandum, declassified on April 10 by the White House at the commission's request, included some ominous information. It said that Qaeda operatives had been in the United States for years, might be planning an attack in the United States and could be focusing on a building in Lower Manhattan as a target.
Mr. Bush said the Aug. 6 report was not specific enough to order new actions. "I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America at a time and place, an attack. Of course I knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where and with what?"
The president noted that the memo said the F.B.I. had 70 investigations under way related to Al Qaeda. In addition, the F.B.I. had sent messages to its field offices urging agents to be vigilant. Thomas J. Pickard, the F.B.I.'s acting director from June to August, said he telephoned top agents to advise them of the threat. But the commission found that most F.B.I. personnel "did not recall a heightened sense of threat from Al Qaeda."
The commission found several previously undisclosed intelligence reports to Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and national security aides dating back to April and May, when the volume of warnings began to increase. Mr. Bush was given briefing papers headlined, "Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations," "Bin Laden Threats Are Real" and "Bin Laden's Plans Advancing."
In August 2001, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. came as close as the government ever did to detecting anyone connected to the Sept. 11 plot. That month investigators finally made progress in the fractured effort to track down two men, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who on Sept. 11 were aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
The C.I.A. had investigated the pair off and on since they had been seen at a Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. But they were not placed on a State Department watch list until Aug. 23, after they already were in the United States. Moreover, the C.I.A. failed to tell the F.B.I.'s primary investigators on the Cole case of a key connection between the two men and a Cole suspect until after Sept. 11. "No one apparently felt they needed to inform higher level of management in either the F.B.I. or C.I.A. about the case," one commission report said.
In mid-August, after the arrest of Mr. Moussaoui in Minneapolis, the commission disclosed, Mr. Tenet and his top deputies were sent a briefing paper labeled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But they took no action on the report.
The commission found several missed opportunities in the Moussaoui investigation that might have detected his connection to a Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that planned the Sept. 11 attacks. "A maximum U.S. effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections to the Hamburg cell," one commission report said. The report added that publicity about Mr. Moussaoui's arrest "might have disrupted the plot. But such an effort would have been a race against time."
It was not until Sept. 10 that Mr. Bush's national security aides approved a three-phase strategy to eliminate Al Qaeda. The plan, which was to unfold over three to five years, envisioned a mission to the Taliban in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based; increased diplomatic pressure; and covert action. Military strikes might be used, but only if all other means failed.
--------
Gorelick Defends Information-Sharing Policies
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20691-2004Apr17.html
Jamie S. Gorelick, the embattled Sept. 11 commission member who served as a deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, fired back at critics who said she erected the "wall" between the FBI and the CIA that kept them from sharing intelligence and possibly from doing more to prevent the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In an opinion piece written for today's Washington Post, Gorelick says that a memo she wrote in March 1995 about information sharing between the two agencies "permits freer coordination between intelligence and criminal investigators than was subsequently permitted" by two other guidelines.
Gorelick's opinion comes five days after Attorney General John D. Ashcroft partly blamed the 2001 attacks on her memo during his testimony before the commission, and four days after Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) called on Gorelick to resign, citing "an inherent conflict of interest."
In the middle of his commission appearance, Ashcroft took the highly unusual step of declassifying Gorelick's memo, saying the wall was "the single greatest structural cause for the September 11th problem."
But Gorelick, like other researchers, traced the statutes limiting intelligence sharing to the administrations of former Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the 1980s. Under those presidents, intelligence sharing was permitted for spying on foreign suspects, but not criminal prosecutions.
Later, former attorney general Janet Reno issued guidelines on how information could be shared. "The point was to preserve the ability of prosecutors to use information collected by intelligence agents," Gorelick wrote.
Larry Thompson, a deputy attorney general under Ashcroft, revised those guidelines in an Aug. 6, 2001, memo. Gorelick argued that Thompson's memo upheld the guidelines in her own, even as Ashcroft said that she was culpable in hampering agencies that could have arrested suspected terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui and Nawaf Alhazmi.
"My memo directed agents on both sides to share information -- and, in particular, directed one agent to work on both the criminal and intelligence investigations -- to ensure the flow of information 'over the wall.' "
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Experts: U.S. May Be Losing Fuel Cell Race
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 18, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Fuel-Cell-Future.html
LATHAM, N.Y. (AP) -- The United States could fall behind in using fuel cells because it already has an extensive infrastructure for other energy sources and spends fewer government dollars on alternatives, industry officials and analysts said.
Countries like China and India, which have rapidly expanding economies but not large-scale electricity distribution networks, could eclipse U.S. efforts to adopt what is called the ``hydrogen economy,'' free of dependence on fossil fuels for electricity and transportation.
``It's a little too early to tell on the U.S.,'' said Roger Saillant, chief executive officer of fuel cell developer Plug Power, based in Latham, outside Albany. ``There is a risk we're becoming a laggard.''
China and India both have ample supplies of coal gas or other fuels to take hydrogen from, making the use of fuel cells easier. Japan, which faces high energy demands and steep oil prices, may also be among the first to embrace the technology, industry observers say.
Fuel cells are battery-like devices that combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity without combustion. Under ideal conditions, they release no harmful emissions.
David Jollie, editor of Fuel Cell Today, a London-based Web site that tracks the industry, agreed that fuel cells will likely take hold first in areas without competing technologies, just as cellular phones have become dominant in many developing countries.
``Anywhere there is not an established grid structure or infrastructure there will be more opportunity to get in there,'' Jollie said. ``They'll look to leap frog the old centralized distribution network.''
David Schoenwald, co-manager of the $46 million New Alternatives Fund, a mutual fund that invests in environmentally friendly energy companies, said he has started to invest more overseas where government support and interest is greater in developing new energy sources.
``We see the rest of the world as having greater interest in clean energy and energy security than the United States,'' Schoenwald said. ``A good part of the world is part of the Kyoto treaty and are interested in protecting the environment. This is going to require a fair amount of government support to reduce costs and help development and the current administration isn't as supportive as we would like.''
The international climate treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, required industrial nations to reduce by 2012 greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming to levels below what they were in 1990. The U.S. did not ratify the treaty.
The United States is spending about $200 million this year on hydrogen research, compared to $260 million in Japan, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Canada is spending $400 million, while the European Union is investing 2 billion euro ($2.43 billion) over the next several years.
David Garman, the Energy Department's assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy, defends the Bush administration's commitment to new energy technologies. He cited the president's plan to spend $1.7 billion on hydrogen research and development over the next five years.
``If you go all the way back to the president's national energy plan, there were 105 recommendations. Fifty-four were for energy efficiency and renewable energy,'' Garman said.
``The way people have portrayed the president and his plan is one-sided,'' he said. ``The plan is very pragmatic. It's going to take some time for renewable energy and things like hydrogen to be competitive.''
Right now, it costs about 10 times as much to operate a hydrogen-powered fuel cell car as it does to run one with an internal combustion engine. And the small amount of hydrogen that is produced today comes from natural gas and other fossil fuels, generated in a process that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In January 2002 the federal government announced the establishment of Freedom CAR, a partnership with U.S. automakers aimed at creating a network of hydrogen filling stations to help accelerate production of fuel cell vehicles.
Every major automaker is working on some type of fuel cell vehicle, but the Energy Department estimates they won't be widespread until 2020.
General Motors has estimated it would cost $11.7 billion to build 6,500 hydrogen fuel stations in 100 U.S. metropolitan areas and 5,200 more on national highways.
``It is a very complicated effort with many facets,'' Garman said. ``But if the motor vehicle industry develops a fuel cell car consumers want to buy, the infrastructure will be there. It's very achievable.''
Herb Nock, senior vice president of marketing and sales for Danbury, Conn.-based FuelCell Energy, said his company, which builds large fuel cells for utilities, is focusing on markets like California and the Northeast, where there is congestion on the power grid and concern about pollution.
``We don't see this product replacing nuclear or coal-fired plants any time in the near future,'' Nock said. ``We're looking at markets where other energy forms just don't make sense.''
On the Net:
Plug Power: http://www.plugpower.com
Department of Energy: http://www.doe.gov
FuelCell Energy Inc.: http://www.fuelcellenergy.com
Fuel Cell Today: http://www.fuelcelltoday.com
-------- health
Antidepressant Use in Children Soars Despite Efficacy Doubts
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20624-2004Apr17?language=printer
The number of depressed American children being treated with antidepressants has soared over the past decade -- a tectonic shift in the practice of psychiatry -- but new scientific reviews of the research that fueled the trend suggest that the drugs' benefits have been dramatically oversold.
The use of antidepressants among children grew three- to tenfold between 1987 and 1996, data from various studies indicate, and a newer survey found a further 50 percent rise in prescriptions between 1998 and 2002. The explosion in antidepressant use occurred even though the vast majority of clinical trials have failed to prove that the medicines help depressed children.
The spike in prescriptions over the past five years has been especially sharp among children younger than 6, even though there is virtually no clinical trial data on these youngest patients.
Paradoxically, drugs that have never shown benefits for depressed children in clinical trials have some of the largest increases in prescription rates. Pediatric prescriptions for Paxil, for example, doubled between 1998 and 2002, even though the medicine failed to show it was any better than dummy pills in three trials. The drug has not been approved for use in children, and last year the Food and Drug Administration and British health authorities warned physicians not to prescribe Paxil for children, citing safety concerns.
Paxil is not alone. Of 15 trials conducted among depressed children, 10 failed to show antidepressants were better than dummy pills. Two were inconclusive, and three showed positive results. The negative results have mostly been withheld from public scrutiny by the pharmaceutical companies that paid for the trials, which say that the data are proprietary.
Although many psychiatrists swear by the drugs in children and adults, leading specialists agree they have limitations.
"These drugs are by and large efficacious, but they are only moderately efficacious," said Steven Hyman, former chief of the National Institute of Mental Health.
"A lot of clinical trials for antidepressants fail," added Hyman, now provost at Harvard University. "Partly that's the difficulty of trials in a waxing and waning disease, but we also need drugs of greater intrinsic efficacy."
Prozac remains the only antidepressant that the FDA has approved for children's depression, after the agency accepted two studies that demonstrated the drug worked better than dummy pills.
But an FDA internal analysis of the trials found Prozac failed on the statistical measure that researchers had originally chosen as their primary benchmark: "The evidence for efficacy based on the pre-specified endpoint is not convincing."
Senior officials at the agency, however, concluded that the improvement on another measure justified approval. For one of the studies, a senior official, Russell Katz, wrote in July 2001 that "one could argue that this post hoc choice of primary outcome is inappropriate," but in the end he and others said that this was the proper benchmark.
Australian researchers writing this month in the British Medical Journal reviewed the published studies of Prozac and other drugs and concluded they were consistently weak. The review charged that researchers doing the studies had selectively dramatized successes and glossed over problems.
Another analysis this month in the journal Psychiatric Services said the drugs had only modest benefits, with "many treated patients continuing to experience symptoms." The report tracked antidepressant prescription increases among children with private health insurance.
"When a patient takes a medicine or a family physician or a pediatrician prescribes medicine, their understanding when they hear this medicine works is they believe, 'My child will recover from depression,' " said Jane Garland, head of the mood and anxiety disorders clinic at the British Columbia Children's Hospital in Vancouver.
"But the data says they are not going to get any better than on a placebo," she said. "They will have some improvement in symptoms, which is a good thing, but it means there is clearly more than medication needed for treatment."
Concerns over the quality of the data have been heightened by a recent warning by British health authorities that urged caution in using the drugs, citing indications that they may cause suicidal behavior.
"The risk-benefit ratio starts to look dodgy," Jon Jureidini, a child psychiatrist at the Women's and Children's Hospital in Adelaide, said in an interview. "But if you look at the published literature, you can be forgiven for not reaching that conclusion."
The American psychiatric establishment firmly supports the drugs -- even those not specifically approved by the FDA for children. Psychiatrists say children's depression is severely undertreated.
Most psychiatrists say that the fears about suicide risk are overreactions. Patients who suddenly stop taking medicine without consulting their doctors could put themselves at risk, Harvard's Hyman and other physicians say. Many doctors are convinced the drugs save lives.
The review in Psychiatric Services said that growing awareness about depression, better diagnosis and incentives by insurance companies in favor of medication rather than talk therapy may have fueled the rise in drug treatment. Although the drugs are also used for anxiety and other conditions, depression accounts for the majority, the review said.
The report also cited doctors' belief that positive data from adult studies can be extrapolated to children. In a 1999 letter to Prozac's manufacturer, however, the FDA expressed "substantial concern about the ability to extrapolate positive antidepressant findings from adult to pediatric patients."
"I'm not anti-drug, but I don't know what to believe," said Wayne Blackmon, a Washington psychiatrist who worries that clinicians have been fed misleading data. "Once you start delving into it, you start going, 'Oh no, no, no -- this is not valid.' "
Across the board in clinical trials of antidepressants, about half of all depressed children improve whether they are on a drug or a placebo (dummy pill). And new evidence suggests that the placebo effect -- the tendency to get better when patients believe a treatment will help -- may be even greater in the real world, because patients deemed susceptible to placebos are screened out of clinical trials.
While supporters and critics of the medicines present the issue in black-and-white terms, the data from clinical trials paint a complicated picture.
In one of the two trials of Prozac used to win FDA approval, for example, the original benchmark was recovery -- how many depressed children recovered on Prozac compared with dummy pills. The difference was not statistically significant.
But Prozac's manufacturer, Eli Lilly & Co., then evaluated how many children improved by 30 percent on a commonly used scale to measure depression. Among children taking Prozac, 58.3 percent had a 30 percent improvement, whereas only 31.9 percent of those on dummy pills improved that much. By this new measure, the difference was statistically significant, and the company claimed success.
The internal FDA statistical analysis, however, found the difference vanished when officials looked at how many children improved by 10 percent. And there was again no difference when they evaluated how many children had a 50 percent improvement: "The largest treatment effects was found when 20 percent or 30 percent cut-off points were chosen," an FDA statistician wrote.
Within the FDA, officials also worried that the group of depressed children who got Prozac included a large number who also suffered from anxiety, raising questions about the validity of the results. FDA officials also said a nurse with access to codes showing who got the drug was involved in evaluating two patients, a potential bias.
In the end, however, senior FDA officials concluded that the drug had succeeded on yet another measure, which they said was the best way to evaluate antidepressants -- the average improvement on the children's depression scale.
FDA officials Thomas Laughren, team leader for psychiatric drug products, and Robert Temple, associate director of medical policy, said in a recent interview that the children with anxiety did not undermine the result. While the study had been conducted as an academic research project, not an industry-sponsored trial, FDA officials said they had confidence in it.
"There is nothing to suggest this was not a rigorously conducted study," Laughren said. Eli Lilly spokeswoman Jennifer Yoder said the company stands behind its drug.
Part of the problem for doctors and parents trying to evaluate the data is that experts starkly disagree on the statistics. Graham Emslie, for example, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who conducted the two positive trials for Prozac, said six antidepressant studies in children showed benefits; the FDA counted three.
Emslie co-chaired a panel of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology that declared in January that the drugs are safe and effective for depressed children.
However, at least one manufacturer, Wyeth, has itself told doctors not to prescribe its drug Effexor for children. Philip Perera, medical director at Glaxo SmithKline, which makes Paxil, said: "Our point of view with respect to pediatrics is that it is still up in the air."
Jureidini's analysis in the British Medical Journal, which examined six published trials for Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Effexor, found that of 42 measures used to evaluate patients in these studies, only 14 showed a statistical advantage for the medicine over placebo.
The psychiatrist, who himself prescribes the medicines to children -- but rarely -- said the moderate benefits of the drugs have been oversold. He blamed pharmaceutical industry marketing and the alliances the industry has made with top psychiatrists: Once prominent doctors said they supported the medicines, general practitioners and the public accepted the conclusion, Jureidini said.
The researcher said that doctors had a subtle -- but powerful -- bias: "There's this kind of view that we all know antidepressants work and if the research doesn't support that, there must be something wrong with the research."
-------- ACTIVISTS
A whistle blower mightier than Israel
Vanunu's only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons.
By RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Sunday, April 18, 2004
ABS-CBN News (Philippines)
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Opinion&OID=49260
Mightier than the government of Israel. One man.
He has been incarcerated for almost 18 years, 12 spent in solitary confinement, yet he remains freer than his tormentors could ever hope to be--the government of Israel, which continues to languish in the prison of its singular cowardice.
His name is Mordechai Vanunu, whistle blower extraordinaire and the world's first independent nuclear inspector. On April 21--the day before Earth Day, a fitting occasion--Vanunu will walk out of Israel's Ashkelon Prison with his conscience intact and his motive no less urgent.
The prisoner of conscience is a family hero, an icon of the global peace movement, a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize and a citizen of the world. If only for the message that Vanunu continues to carry and the example of his sacrifice, the Philippine government should be sending a peacekeeping force not to Iraq but to Israel. To receive Vanunu. To embrace him. To provide palpable support to a man who best embodies what is presumed to be a collective aspiration of the world the abolition of all nuclear weapons.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel's nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he learned of and documented Israel's secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The world learned of Israel's clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu's interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Photographs that revealed nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and "the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually." In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.
Vanunu's only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped and drugged--five days after the Sunday Times published his interview--and shipped to Israel to be sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years' imprisonment
Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East yet today it remains the only country in the Middle East that is not party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel is the world's sixth largest nuclear power yet the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, and Israel's biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, remain closed to international inspection.
Vanunu. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a poem he wrote in prison: "I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp." "What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people faced with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit to it," said the historian Howard Zinn. "Historically, the most terrible things--war, genocide, and slavery--have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."
Vanunu chose disobedience, chose to obey his conscience instead, and was forced to spend the next 18 years of his life behind bars. Was it worth it? For this giant of a man, the answer is an emphatic yes.
"We've succeeded in overcoming this long time of silence. . . You were my voice, my conscience--you kept all these issues of secret nuclear weapons in the center and followed my path, " wrote Vanunu recently to his supporters in the U.S. "We'll not rest until we see a new international agreement to ban, abolish all kinds of nuclear weapons. . . We believe it is possible and we can witness it in our lifetime . . . The end of nuclear weapons is possible."
"The dreams men dream in sleep are mist and shadow, said Barrows Dunham. "The dreams men dream while waking can be come the substance of a world." True.
"I won. I'll be free. The gates and the locks will be opened. They didn't succeed in breaking me," wrote Vanunu, to his brother Meir last February.
Giant, how do we repay you?
We are all caught up in the thousand and one things that life imposes daily, but we will try. For starters, this Wednesday, on April 21, at the Embassy of Israel in Makati City, a small Filipino family will bring a garland of flowers to welcome you.
And all of you who are free--especially this Wednesday--come and join and break bread. Tell Israel that it must get rid of its nuclear weapons and that it must sign the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons treaty. Send your letters and flowers to Israel's embassy at Trafalgar Plaza, H.V. de la Costa Street, Salcedo Village.
Each flower stem will serve to welcome Vanunu and each petal will symbolize the abolition of a nuclear missile.
Dr. Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped nearly 18 years ago in a terrorist act of the Israeli government and he should not have spent even one day behind bars and yet, as if all these were not enough, the Israeli government still intends to enforce barbaric restrictions on the Nobel Peace Prize nominee after his release from prison on April 21. Another display of the moral bankruptcy of a government all too often erroneously called "the only democracy in the Middle East."
Vanunu will be forbidden to leave city limits unless he reports his intentions to the local police force; he will not be allowed to approach any border terminal, including Ben-Gurion International Airport, the country's ports, or borders with the Palestinian Authority; he is forbidden to be in contact with foreigners--whether in face-to-face meetings or by telephone, fax, or e-mail--including foreign citizens residing in Israel; he is not allowed to approach foreign embassies and divulge details to anyone regarding the Dimona plant where he worked or the circumstances of his being kidnapped and transported to Israel; and he will not have passport privileges, and therefore, cannot leave the country.Vanunu has formally asked to renounce his Israeli citizenship as a way to prevent the government from confining him to the country after his release from prison.
Send your messages of concern regarding the inhumane restrictions on Vanunu to H.E. Yehoshua Sagi, ambassador of Israel, at fax number 894-1027 and via e-mail at pressil@info. com.ph.
Comments welcome at xioi@ excite.com
----
Man who revealed Israel's nuclear secret set for release
By Margaret Coker,
Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Sunday, April 18, 2004
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/today/news_04183f71a56e80030020.html
ASHKELON, Israel -- Back in the mid-1980s, when the world was riveted by the terrifying Chernobyl meltdown and fears of nuclear Armageddon, Mordechai Vanunu decided to become a whistle-blower or -- depending on one's point of view -- a traitor.
Vanunu, a former mid-level technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear facility, confirmed to the world in 1986 what until then had been a tightly held secret: The Jewish state possessed nuclear weapons. The revelation rocked world capitals and reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East.
In retaliation, Israel mounted an operation worthy of the best spy fiction. A blond American-born woman working undercover for Israel's intelligence service lured Vanunu from London to Rome, where he was kidnapped and shipped back to Israel. There, in a secret trial, Vanunu was convicted of treason and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Vanunu is due to be released from Israel's Ashkelon prison Wednesday after a harsh term that has included 12 years in solitary confinement. Yet years after the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons has been accepted internationally, the 49-year-old son of an Orthodox rabbi still inspires fear here.
Nervous that Vanunu could lead a campaign to pressure Israel to dismantle its weapons program -- especially now when the world's attention is focused on weapons of mass destruction -- Israeli authorities have told Vanunu that he will not be released from prison unless he agrees to heavy restrictions on his movements, speech and associations.
They also want Vanunu to agree not to leave Israel, although the Christian convert says he wants to live in the United States.
Vanunu has refused so far to comply with the government's terms, telling his family and his lawyer that after spending nearly two decades in jail for something he considers an act of conscience, he won't amend his beliefs now.
"He's a man of principles, and he always acted on his principles," said Nick Eoloff, a retired St. Paul, Minn., resident who along with his wife adopted Vanunu after his own parents disowned him. "He doesn't want to bend these principles now. He should be a free man come Wednesday."
Israeli officials declined to comment publicly on Vanunu's case.
U.S. Embassy officials here said that the Vanunu issue is an internal Israeli affair. Echoing Israel's policy of neither confirming nor denying its membership in the nuclear club, the U.S. government has never publicly pressured Israel to admit to its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, despite firsthand reports and satellite photos suggesting their existence.
Wanted to join air force
Vanunu's history with the state of Israel hasn't always been rocky. Born in Morocco in 1954, his Orthodox Jewish family emigrated to Israel when he was 9. He studied in a religious school in southern Israel, memorized the Torah and as a teenager he wanted to join the legendary Israeli air force, a celebrated symbol of national and Jewish pride.
He didn't pass the stringent military exams, however, so instead he settled on a university path, studying physics and philosophy. He also got involved in political activities as a student, joining the Arab student union and protesting against Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
"His political world view was shaped at the university," said Vanunu's brother Meir, one of only two blood relatives who continue to speak to him.
Before applying to university, Vanunu was hired at the Dimona facility in 1976 after learning about an opening from a newspaper advertisement. During his employment, routine security checks into his leftist activities on campus never amounted to any disciplinary action because Vanunu never disclosed what was actually happening at the plant. (All workers were required to sign a contract forbidding them from ever talking about their work -- the secrecy act that later allowed the state to prosecute Vanunu for treason.)
Before being laid off in 1984 during a round of downsizing, Vanunu spent hours photographing different sectors of the complex, including ones that were hidden from American inspectors in the one tour Israel allowed for outside observers in the 1960s.
He then left the country with a backpack and the undeveloped film to take an extended vacation through Asia. When he reached Australia in 1986, he found an activist group that shared his concern about nuclear proliferation and a religious community in the Anglican Church that held his beliefs. He also found a business agent who knew a good news story when Vanunu told him what was on his film.
The pictures, along with Vanunu's technical knowledge of the plutonium enrichment program, provided enough proof that London's Sunday Times newspaper decided to publish his story, which they called the biggest news scoop since Watergate. The Times also arranged a $100,000 book deal for Vanunu.
The ultimate protection
Israel's nuclear program dates to the 1950s, when the French sold reactors to the young state. The program quickly went from peaceful to military purposes, however, because Israel's overriding belief was that its citizens, many of whom had survived the Nazis, needed the ultimate protection.
"We were a very small country," Professor Uzi Even, who worked at Dimona from 1962 to 1968, told the British Broadcasting Corp. in an interview last year. "The Holocaust was very much in our memory at that time, and we all realized that we have to do something to prevent the same scenario from happening again."
Israel kept the program secret, arguing that this was the best deterrent to surrounding countries like Iraq, Libya and Iran, which in the mid-1980s were vying for the bomb as well as the destruction of the Jewish state.
The Mossad, Israel's spy agency, knew that Vanunu's story was going to be published in London. Charged with silencing him before this could happen, they had a female agent lure him into what was known in Cold War lingo as a "honey trap."
The agent, who called herself Cindy, struck up a relationship with the would-be whistle-blower while he was waiting for the newspaper to verify his story. After spending some time together in London, she lured him to Rome, where Vanunu was drugged, kidnapped and whisked back to Israel on an army boat disguised as a merchant vessel.
The undercover work came too late. The Sunday Times published Vanunu's material on Oct. 5, 1986, while the technician was in the Mossad's custody.
Release could spur scrutiny
Vanunu's story ended Israel's nuclear secrecy, and satellite photos of Dimona taken by America's Space Imaging Corp.'s Ikonos satellite, published on the Federation of American Scientists' Web site in August 2000, removed any doubts of his veracity.
The scientific organization, comparing pictures taken of Dimona by U.S. satellites in 1971 and the more recent images, said that the infrastructure at the site indicated that Israel possessed the know-how to have made nearly 200 bombs, which would make it the world's fifth-largest nuclear power.
Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and therefore is not subject to inspections and the threat of sanctions by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
At Vanunu's annual parole hearing last year, Avigdor Feldman, his former lawyer, argued that his client had no more secrets and should be freed. But the state prosecutor, according to Feldman, argued against early release with a new argument: the empty search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"The prosecutor said that if Vanunu were released, the Americans would probably leave Iraq and go after Israel and Israel's nuclear weapons," Feldman said.
The head of security at the Defense Ministry, the same official who was in charge of Dimona when Vanunu left, reportedly spearheaded a months-long campaign to keep him in administrative detention after the prison sentence ended. This procedure, a punitive measure imposed on thousands of Palestinians suspected of militant activity, gives the state the power to incarcerate individuals without trial.
The Eoloffs, Vanunu's adopted family, say that any continued punishment amounts to a personal vendetta by those in Israel's security establishment who consider Vanunu a double traitor, to his country and to his religion.
"Vanunu committed two crimes in their eyes," Mary Eoloff said. "He sold their secrets and he became a Christian. The worst Jewish prisoners get better treatment than he does. He's often said, 'If I stayed Jewish then I would have had it better.' "
Vanunu's immediate future will likely remain up in the air until Wednesday.
His appeal against the restrictions is scheduled to be heard by Israel's high court this week.
mcoker@coxnews.com
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Can the Rights of People Simply Disappear by Presidential Order?
On April 28th Say NO to Dangerous Presidential Powers to declare any Citizen an "Enemy Combatant"
Sun, 18 Apr 2004
From: Chicago Refuse and Resist rnrchicago@yahoo.com
Planning Meeting:
Thursday, April 22nd, 6:30 p.m. New World Resource Center 1300 N Western Ave., Chicago
On April 28, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the President's asserted right to designate citizens as "enemy combatants," hold them at a U.S. Navy base, and deny them the ability to challenge the lawfulness of their detention. On April 20th the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the President's alleged right to create a "law free zone" at the Guantanamo detention center in Cuba.
Across the country and around the world there is concern and outrage over these cases. We must turn peoples concern to outrage and outrage to action. Only this will force the courts to rule against these sweeping police state powers.
Decisions in these landmark cases are expected in June!
In Chicago:
April 28th 4:30 p.m. Gather in Federal Plaza In Chicago:
April 20th Press Conference Tuesday, 10 a.m, Federal Plaza Contact: Chicago Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, 312-913-0039 Midwest Regional Office of Amnesty International USA, 312-427-2060
The National Lawyers Guild, Chicago Chapter, and the Midwest Regional Office of Amnesty International USA join a broad coalition of national and international groups demonstrating outside the US Supreme Court to protest Guantanamo's "law-free zone."
In Washington DC:
Tuesday April 20 & Wednesday April 28 Demonstrate in front of the U.S. Supreme Court both days: 9:30am-12:30pm, 1st Street SE and Constitution Avenue get more information at www.nlg.org/eccases/
STARTING NOW!
CIRCULATE AND ENDORSE THIS NATIONAL CALL:
Can the Rights of People Simply Disappear by Presidential Order?
What does it mean when the President of the United States can on his own designate a citizen in the U.S. as an "enemy combatant," and order the military to hold that person incommunicado, indefinitely, and without charges? The U.S. Supreme Court is now deciding whether the courts even have the right to question the President's action.
What does it mean when the U.S. military internationally can literally snatch people off the street, designate them as "enemy combatants," and assert that they are beyond the reach of either U.S. or international law? Many are transported to a facility under total U.S. control and funded by Congressional appropriations, where they are held incommunicado, indefinitely, without charges and some are threatened with trials before a military commission that falls short of basic standards of justice.
If the Supreme Court upholds these actions, it will condone the President's claim of virtually unlimited "wartime powers" without a formal declaration of war by the Congress, and with no or extremely limited oversight by the courts or the Congress.
On April 20 the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the President's alleged right to create a "law free zone" at the Guantanamo detention center in Cuba. And on April 28, the Court will hear oral arguments on the President's asserted right to designate citizens as "enemy combatants," hold them at the U.S. Navy base in Charleston, SC, and deny them the ability to challenge the lawfulness of their detention.
We believe that the President cannot be allowed to create a "legal Black Hole" into which people are dropped with no recourse to the courts or to international law. Among us we hold many varied views on how and why this situation has arisen and what is ultimately needed to ensure justice. But we all agree that this dangerous new presidentially-designated category of "enemy combatants" who have no legal rights is unjust, illegal, and immoral, and cannot be allowed to stand.
The silence over this perilous issue must be broken, and public opposition must be manifested. Join us in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on April 20 and April 28 to declare a resounding NO! Legally permitted, non-violent demonstrations will occur on both days from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm with a program of speakers beginning at 11:am.
Our future and the future of hundreds of anonymous detainees now hang in the balance. This is a watershed event in history. What is at stake is just how much the President will be allowed to get away with. Your silence will be taken as assent.
To endorse this call, e-mail eccases@nlg.org.
[national and international organizations]
Amnesty International USA Bill of Rights Defense Committee Blue Triangle Network First Amendment Foundation Guantanamo Human Rights Commission National Committee Against Repressive Legislation (NCARL) National Lawyers Guild Refuse & Resist! Solidarity USA
[regional and local organizations]
Communities United Against Police Brutality (Minneapolis) Greensboro Justice Fund
[individuals]
Elaine Cassel, Civil Liberties Watch Stephen Rohde, civil liberties lawyer
Website: http://www.nlg.org/eccases/
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Anti-war sentiment growing even among military families
Sunday, April 18, 2004
By Jules Crittenden jcrittenden@bostonherald.com
Boston Herald
http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg?articleid=1790
As polls show support for President Bush's Iraq policy dropping, military families are becoming more vocal in questioning the war.
A Newsweek poll last week found 51 percent of Americans now disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq. A Time/CNN poll had the same result, but also found that 53 percent still think Bush was right to take America to war in Iraq, while 41 percent say he was wrong.
Miriam Palacios of Roxbury, cousin of slain G.I. Gabriel Palacios, spoke out at an anti-war protest Friday. She said yesterday she changed her mind about the war in December, after her cousin's home leave. He was killed in January.
``He didn't want to talk about the war,'' she said. ``Once he left, we felt different. It looked like we weren't trying to help the Iraqis. We were trying to control them.''
Meanwhile, the families of New Hampshire reservists said they plan to go to Washington, D.C., to protest another extension, 17 months into their deployment. Catherine Maynard said she supports the war but thinks her son has done his share.
``They are war-weary. They are tired. I don't know how they can send them back. I'm sure if the president knew of the extensions, he'd send them home. I don't think he's getting all the information.''
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