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NUCLEAR
Aglow Somewhere
16 Puerto Rican soldiers tested for uranium
Iran: 'Complete Story' Given Inspectors
Tehran resolved "all ambiguities" with IAEA inspectors: official
Sharon Hints at Israel Nuclear Deterrent
Israel 'may have 300 nuclear warheads'
The Release of Mordechai Vanunu and US Role in Israel's Nuclear Arsenal
Japanese greet freed hostages not as heroes but as reckless fools
North Korea Vows It Won't Transfer Nukes
China's U.N. Envoy: N. Korea Opening Up
N. Korea Says to Push Ahead with Nuclear Programs
Missile defense called unproven So far, testing is unrealistic, GAO finds
Missile Defense Agency Faulted On Testing and Accountability
Hearings set on plutonium storage plan
Groups pan using reactors for clean hydrogen fuel
The Real Lessons of 9/11
Kerry's Antiwar Past Is a Delicate Issue in His Campaign
MILITARY
Rights Group Says Sudan's Government Aided Militias' Raids
Halliburton, in Iraq for the Long Haul, Recruits Employees Eager for Work
U.S., U.N. Seek New Leaders For Iraq
U.S. Official Acknowledges Mistakes in Iraq
U.S. Issues Blunt Warning to Besieged Falluja Rebels
Radical Cleric Is Unwanted by His Neighbors
Fallujah Residents Report US Forces
Sharon Says Pledge to Spare Arafat Is Lifted
Sharon Says His Pledge Not to Harm Arafat No Longer Holds
Zur: Israel has infiltrated Hamas leadership
U.N. Distances Itself From an Envoy's Rebuke of Israel and the U.S.
U.S. Soldiers Re-Enlist in Strong Numbers
General Says He May Ask for More Troops
Soldier Can Leave Iraq to See Dying Mother
Photos released in error
A 'Bone Woman' Chronicles the World's Massacres
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Moussaoui Lawyers Heartened By Appeal Court's Reasoning
A Drug War With a Deadline
Va. Seeks New Role Against Illegals
Translator's Lawyers Cite Contradictions
ACTIVISTS
Kucinich lays out plan to extract troops from Iraq
'Street theater' protests lending policies
Slouching toward Bethlehem
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Aglow Somewhere
4/24/04
Vermont Valley News
http://www.vnews.com/04242004/1719100.htm
Those two missing nuclear fuel-rod pieces from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant? The ones that are lethally radioactive and would be the prized possessions of terrorists wishing to fulfill this country's worst nightmares?
Not to worry, say officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency responsible for keeping Americans safe from the obvious hazards of using radioactive material to produce energy.
The fact that the pieces are missing "does not pose a threat to public health and safety as it is highly unlikely that the material is in the public domain. Given the extensive array of radiation detectors at the site, it is very probable that the potentially missing fuel fragments are in a location designed to deal with radioactive waste."
A more concise statement might read: We don't have a clue, but we are keeping our fingers crossed. A phrase such as "highly unlikely" offers some measure of reassurance when talking about the potential for, say, a jet crash, but it provides no comfort when talking about something as potentially catastrophic as a missing chunk of highly radioactive material.
For the last 25 years, it has been assumed that the two pieces -- one about the size of a pencil and the other 17 inches long -- were sitting in a container at the bottom of the pool where the Yankee reactor stores spent fuel rods. The pieces had once been part of a 12-foot-long rod that was pulled from the reactor core when the fuel rod was discovered to be leaking. It's not that regulators had completely forgotten about the pieces. Four years ago, after it was discovered that nuclear fuel was missing from a Connecticut plant, the NRC conducted a survey at all nuclear power plants to account for spent fuel. The Yankee inspection apparently included a visual confirmation of the existence of the container where the fuel-rod pieces were supposedly stored. Nobody bothered to look inside, though.
Until Tuesday, when an NRC inspector decided to take a peek via a remote camera.
The missing fuel from the Connecticut plant was never found. NRC officials say they hope to discover Vermont Yankee's missing fuel-rod pieces in some other place in the storage pool but concede that they may never turn up, either. They may have been accidentally shipped to a low-level radioactive storage site, officials say, or perhaps were shipped out for testing.
As any number of elected officials have pointed out in recent days, it is downright stunning to realize that the NRC and plant officials have lost track of the plant's inventory of radioactive fuel. If regulators don't strictly account for a plant's radioactive material, they can't meet their most fundamental responsibility of safeguarding the public's safety. Critics of nuclear power have often been ridiculed as hysterics, but even they have never dared to suggest that the NRC would be this negligent.
The discovery comes at a time when federal regulators have been resisting the state's request that an independent assessment of plant safety be conducted before Vermont Yankee receives permission to boost power production by 20 percent. That independent evaluation seems all the more imperative now that the NRC has demonstrated that it can't be trusted. And it would need to be done even if Entergy, the plant's current owner, were to drop its plan to increase power production. Thanks to the NRC's abysmal performance, it's foolish to assume anything about the plant's safety.
-------- depleted uranium
16 Puerto Rican soldiers tested for uranium
Saturday, April 24th, 2004
(AP)
http://www.puertoricowow.com/html/general-detail.asp?amaspHidden_listActive=true&amaspField_newshd=16%20Puerto%20Rican%20soldiers%20tested%20for%20uranium%20&amaspHidden_newshd_dataType=string
SAN JUAN- At least 16 soldiers from local units of the United States Armed Forces, who have recently returned from tours of duty in Iraq, have attended the Veterans Hospital to request they be tested for depleted uranium exposure.
It was confirmed by Veterans Hospital spokeswoman, Annie Moraza, who stated that the request for testing was made after it was revealed that four soldiers who participated in the war had tested positive for high levels of contamination from depleted uranium.
A New York newspaper reported that four members of the New York National Guard, three of whom were Puerto Rican, tested positive for contamination from depleted uranium.
Reports state that over a 1,000 soldiers have requested testing from Walter Reed medical center in Washington as a result of the New York cases.
Depleted uranium is a heavy metal used to reinforce projectiles and is believed to cause kidney problems.
Veterans groups also claim that exposure to the hazardous material causes cancer, although medical studies dispute that by itself it causes cancer.
-------- iran
Iran: 'Complete Story' Given Inspectors
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
April 24, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran said Saturday it has offered the "complete story" to the U.N. nuclear watchdog about traces of weapons-grade uranium and documents pertaining to advanced centrifuges that could be used to produce atomic bombs.
Mohammad Saeedi, a top Iranian nuclear official, told The Associated Press the information was submitted to five prominent International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors who visited Iran during a two-week visit.
The inspectors, who arrived in Iran April 12, left Tehran Friday, he said. "We offered them the complete story about traces of highly enriched uranium, mainly all movements of contaminated equipment inside Iran," said Saeedi, director of the International Affairs Department at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
Another team of IAEA inspectors arrived Saturday for "routine inspections," Saeedi said, giving no further details. IAEA officials were not immediately available for comment Saturday.
Uranium enriched to low levels can be used in power plants, while highly enriched uranium can be used in bombs. IAEA experts last year found traces of highly enriched uranium at two Iranian sites on equipment Iran says was contaminated before it was purchased on the international nuclear black market.
Inspectors have also discovered an advanced P-2 centrifuge program that Iran had not reported to the U.N. agency.
Saeedi said Iran explained to the IAEA inspectors that it had conducted research on the centrifuges but not produced them.
"I think they were convinced with our explanations. We explained how far we had progressed in our research," he said.
Saeedi said Iran has not yet decided whether to produce P-2 centrifuges - equipment that could be used to enrich uranium for use in a weapon - but has produced P-1 centrifuges for low-grade enrichment.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year under strong international pressure but continued with its centrifuge program. It eventually said this month that it had stopped building centrifuges.
The United States and other nations accuse Iran of having a covert nuclear weapons program and are pushing the United Nations to impose sanctions.
IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei hopes to present an assessment of Iran's nuclear activities to the IAEA board of governors in June.
----
Tehran resolved "all ambiguities" with IAEA inspectors: official
TEHRAN (AFP)
Apr 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040424091348.hde8orgg.html
An official in the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization said Saturday that Tehran had answered all the questions of the United Nations atomic watchdog and had resolved "all ambiguities".
"All ambiguities relating to the Iranian nuclear activities were cleared up and the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) inspectors obtained answers to their questions", the deputy head of the Iranian organization was quoted as saying by the semi-official Mehr news agency.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei will give a report on Iran's nuclear activities to the next IAEA's board of governors meeting in June, based on the inspectors' findings to be submitted by the end of May.
It is not the first time that Iran has announced that it has answered all questions about its nuclear programme, which the United States in particular suspects is a cover for developing atomic weapons.
At its last session in March, the IAEA alleged that Iran had left certain significant aspects of its activities in the shade, in spite of its commitments made at the end of 2003.
Tehran bridled at the last IAEA resolution and even said that it would not allow the inspectors to continue their work in Iran, but finally yielded.
Saeedi added that during their two week stay which was completed a few days ago, the IAEA's inspectors "discussed with the Iranian experts the two principal subjects of controversy."
These were the manufacture of sophisticated centrifuges to enrich uranium and the "contamination" of equipment with uranium which had a higher level of enrichment than required for civilian purposes.
He added that the inspectors went on a "certain number" of sites and were convinced that Iran had suspended the production and the assembly of the centrifuge parts, under the terms of an agreement on April 9.
The IAEA's experts went to the heavy water factory in Arak, south-west of Tehran, another subject of concern of the international community.
Saeedi said that two or three teams of inspectors were expected in the coming weeks.
-------- israel
Sharon Hints at Israel Nuclear Deterrent
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 24, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Nuclear.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came close to ending four decades of secrecy about the country's nuclear-arms capability, saying the United States recognizes that Israel needs a credible deterrent to Iran and other hostile countries.
Sharon spoke Friday in an interview with Israel's Channel One TV, just two days after whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu ended an 18-year jail term for disclosing details of Israel's nuclear secrets.
``They understand that Israel's existence is still in danger,'' Sharon said, referring to the United States.
``Iran represents an existential threat, one of the existential threats or maybe the main existential threat,'' he said. ``But the recognition of Israel's right -- and of the importance of Israel's ability -- to defend itself, by itself, these things are clearly understood.''
Since acquiring a nuclear reactor from France in the 1960s, Israel has maintained a policy of ``ambiguity,'' refusing to confirm or deny that it has nuclear weapons. But based on information Vanunu gave in a 1986 newspaper interview, experts concluded that Israel has sixth-largest arsenal in the world.
Israel's military censors insist that any reference by Israel-based journalists to the question of Israel's nuclear capacity be attributed to foreign press reports. Sharon used the same formula in his Friday interview.
``If you read the foreign press you will see that they talk about a whole complex of defensive tools, which Israel needs in its hands,'' he said.
``Almost an admission,'' the TV anchor commented at the end of the taped interview.
----
Israel 'may have 300 nuclear warheads'
Experts say the Jewish state continues to make nuclear weapons despite a lack of debate on the issue
APRIL 24, 2004
AP
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,4386,247242,00.html
VIENNA - Israel continues to produce atomic weapons and may already have as many as 300 warheads, experts said as Israel on Wednesday released a man imprisoned for 18 years for leaking nuclear secrets.
Mr Friedrich Steinhaeusler, a former employee of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who specialised in nuclear trafficking, said he believes Israel continues to produce nuclear weapons. Advertisement
Mr Steinhaeusler is now a professor of physics at the University of Salzburg.
He said the best estimate of Israel's weapon cache was 150, but added that the figure had not been verified.
With air-, sea- and land-based launching systems, Israel has the Middle East 'under control', he said.
Israel neither denies nor confirms that it has nuclear weapons.
At the end of last year, Israel had enough nuclear material to make 100 to 200 weapons, said Mr David Albright, a former Iraq nuclear inspector who runs the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
Even the low-end estimate 'is huge' for a country in such a volatile region, Mr Albright said.
'Israel tends to view any restrictions on its nuclear weapons production very negatively,' he said.
Noting the uncertainty about Israel's weapon cache, Mr Avner Cohen, an expert on Israel and nuclear weapons at the Centre for International and Security Studies in Maryland, said: 'There are all kind of estimates, from the upper teens on the lower side to over 300 on the higher side.'
Mr John Simpson, director of the Mountbatten Centre of International Studies at Britain's University of Southampton, estimated the number of weapons Israel holds at no more than 200.
Mr Simpson said his estimate was based on the presumed output of plutonium by a reactor in Dimona, and on the number of tunnels in cliffs from which the weapons could be deployed.
The lack of debate within Israel about the country's nuclear weapons has created uncertainty about what the purpose of the arsenal is, Mr Simpson added.
'It is not clear that these issues have been thought through,' he said.
The release of Mr Mordechai Vanunu on Wednesday, jailed since 1986 for leaking details and pictures of Israel's alleged nuclear weapons programme, could be the focus point for a debate, said Mr Uzi Even, a former employee of Israel's nuclear research centre in Dimona and now a professor at the University of Tel Aviv.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky declined to comment on Israel, saying his agency has no jurisdiction there.
The Vienna agency has said it has no power to look into Israel's nuclear programme because Israel is not party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
IAEA director-general Mohamed El-Baradei has repeatedly called for talks to establish a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.
----
The Release of Mordechai Vanunu and US Role in Israel's Nuclear Arsenal
by Stephen Zunes,
April 24, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=2378
The recent release on April 22 of Mordechai Vanunu from an Israeli prison provides an opportunity to challenge the US policy of supporting Israel's development of nuclear weapons while threatening war against other Middle Eastern states for simply having the potential for developing such weaponry.
Vanunu, a nuclear technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear plant, passed along photographs he had taken inside the plant to the Sunday Times of London in 1986. His evidence demonstrated that Israel had developed up to two hundred nuclear weapons of a highly advanced design, making it the world's sixth-largest nuclear power. For his efforts, agents from the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, kidnapped him from Rome and brought him to Israel1 to stand before a secret tribunal that convicted him on charges of espionage and treason and sentenced him to eighteen years in prison under solitary confinement.
Though labeled a spy and a traitor, he was in fact simply a whistle-blower who became "a martyr to the causes of press freedom and nuclear de-escalation."2 He never received any money for this act of conscience, which he took upon recognizing that Israel's nuclear program went well beyond its need for a deterrent and was likely offensive in nature. A former strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation observed that Vanunu's revelations about Israel's nuclear program demonstrated that: "Its scale and nature was clearly designed for threatening and if necessary launching first-use of nuclear weapons against conventional forces."3 Prior to Vanunu's revelations, many suspected that Israel's nuclear program was limited to tactical nuclear artillery and naval shells.
Israel is one of just four countries - the others being Pakistan, India, and Cuba - that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. UN Security Council resolution 1172 urges all countries to become parties of the treaty.4
It is noteworthy that Israel finds whistle-blowing more threatening than actual spying. None of the half dozen spies convicted in Israel for nuclear espionage served as much time in prison as has Vanunu.5
Vanunu, who has been referred to by Daniel Ellsberg as "he preeminent hero of the nuclear era,"6 has been awarded the Sean McBride Peace prize, the Right Livelihood Award, and an honorary doctorate from a Norwegian university. He has also been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The European parliament, former President Jimmy Carter, the Jewish Peace Fellowship, the Federation of American Scientists, and many other prominent individuals and organizations have long called for Vanunu's release. By contrast, with few notable exceptions - such as the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota - there has been virtually no support in Congress. The four administrations in office during Vanunu's confinement have been even less supportive. For example, in response to an inquiry by Tom Campbell, the former Republican Congressman from California, Clinton 's assistant secretary of State Barbara Larkin claimed that Vanunu had had a fair trial and was doing well in prison.7
This lack of U.S. support for Vanunu is just one part of the long-standing US acquiescence of Israel's nuclear program.
Israel has long stated that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, which is a rather disingenuous commitment given that US planes and warships have been bringing nuclear weapons into the region since the 1950s. Israel is generally believed to have become a nuclear power by 1969. The newly elected President Richard Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger privately endorsed Israel's program that year. They quickly ended the regular US inspections of Israel's Dimona nuclear center. This was of little consequence, however, since these "inspections" were pro forma and not taken seriously. (President Lyndon Johnson demonstrated his lack of concern over the prospects of Israel becoming a nuclear power by rejecting calls that one of the early major weapons sales to Israel be conditioned on Israel'signing the NPT.) The Nixon administration went to great lengths to keep nuclear issues out of any talks on the Middle East. Information on Israeli nuclear capabilities was routinely suppressed. The United States even supplied Israel with krytrons (nuclear triggers) and supercomputers that were bound for the Israeli nuclear program.8
Under the Carter administration, which took the threat of nuclear proliferation somewhat more seriously than other administrations, the issue of Israel's development of nuclear weaponry was not raised publicly. When satellite footage of an aborted nuclear test in South Africa 's Kalahari Desert gave evidence of a large-scale presence of Israeli personnel at the test site, the Carter administration kept it quiet.9 Two years later, when a US satellite detected a successful joint Israeli-South African atomic bomb test in the Indian Ocean, the Carter administration rushed to squelch initial media reports. According to Joseph Nye, then-Deputy Under Secretary of State, the Carter administration considered the Israel's nuclear weapons program a low priority.10
Top officials in the Reagan administration made a conscious effort to keep information on Israel's nuclear capability from State Department officials and others who might have concerns over nuclear proliferation issues.11 The senior Bush administration sold at least 1,500 nuclear "dual-use" items to Israel, according to a report by the General Accounting Office, despite requirements under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that the existing nuclear powers like the United States not help another country's nuclear weapons program "in any way."12
The Israeli media reported that President Clinton wrote rightist Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in 1998 pledging that the United States would continue to protect Israel's nuclear program from international pressure. According to Haaretz, "he United States will preserve Israel's strategic deterrence capabilities and ensure that Middle East arms control initiatives will not damage it in the future. The Clinton letter provides written - if secret - backup to the long-standing agreement between Jerusalem and Washington over the preservation of Israel's nuclear capabilities if Israel maintains its policy of 'ambiguity' and does not announce publicly that it has the bomb."13
Meanwhile, Congress has for many years made it clear to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other responsible parties that it did not want to have anything revealed in an open hearing related to Israel's nuclear capability. A major reason is that there are a number of laws that severely restrict US military and technical assistance to countries that develop nuclear weapons. Israel is the largest recipient of US arms exports, which are highly profitable for the politically influential arms industry.
Outside of Washington, top Israeli nuclear scientists have had open access to American institutions and many leading American nuclear scientists had extended visits with their counterparts in Israel, in what has been called "informational promiscuity" in the seepage of nuclear intelligence.14
In addition, given the enormous costs of any nuclear program of such magnitude, it would have been very difficult for Israel to develop such a large and advanced arsenal without the tens of billions of dollars in unrestricted American financial support. More than simply employing a double standard of threatening perceived enemies for developing nuclear weapons while tolerating development of such weapons by its allies, the United States has, in effect, subsidized nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
In order to justify the US invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush, Senator John Kerry, and others argued that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons program in violation of UN Security Council resolution 687. (In reality, the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency had determined in 1998 that Iraq's nuclear program had been completely dismantled and IAEA inspections in the months immediately prior to the US invasion and exhaustive searches by US forces subsequently have confirmed that assessment.) What both Republican and Democratic leaders have failed to observe, however, is that Israel remains in violation of UN Security Council resolution 487, which calls on Israel to place its facilities at Dimona under IAEA trusteeship. Despite bipartisan efforts in Congress to seek repeal of that resolution, it is still legally binding. Bush and Kerry, however, believe that UN Security Council resolutions, like nuclear nonproliferation, do not apply to US allies.
Within Israel, however, there was much debate among Israeli elites regarding the wisdom of developing nuclear weapons. Some Israeli leaders - ranging from former Labor Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Yigal Allon to former Likud Defense Minister Raful Eitan - argued that a nuclear Israel would increase the possibility of Arab states developing weapons of mass destruction and launching a first strike against Israel.15 Give the country's small size, Israel might not have a credible second-strike capability. There is also the fact that most of Israel's potential nuclear targets are close enough so that a shift in wind could potentially send a radioactive cloud over Israel.
Furthermore, while one could make a case for an Israeli nuclear deterrent up through the mid-1970s, Israel's qualitative advantage in conventional forces relative to any combination of Arab states developed subsequently - resulting in large part from a prodigious amount of taxpayer-funded arms transfers from the United States - would appear to weaken the case for a nuclear weapons development. Furthermore, Israel has an extensive biological and chemical weapons program that far surpasses those of any potential hostile power and - combined with vastly superior delivery systems - would constitute a more-than-adequate deterrent.
Vanunu was forced to remain in solitary confinement until 1998, when ongoing pressure from human rights groups forced the Israelis to end his segregation, though he was still not allowed to talk with fellow prisoners. Amnesty International, for example, observed that the prolonged isolation of Vanunu constituted cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and violated international human rights law.16 The eleven and a half years in solitary confinement has reportedly taken a psychological toll, raising concerns that he may not be a credible voice in the cause of nuclear nonproliferation upon his release.
It appears, however, that Israel's U.S.-backed rightist government may not give him a chance. On March 9, Israeli Attorney General Mordechai Mazuz said that Vanunu's release from prison "will create a significant danger to state security" and that there will likely be major restrictions placed upon his movements and what he can say without the risk of returning to prison.17 Though the Moroccan-born Vanunu had decided to leave Israel prior to his 1986 kidnapping, he had converted to Christianity during an extended stay in Australia the previous year, and has stated that he would like to emigrate to the United States, the Israeli government will reportedly bar him from leaving the country.18
Like Israel, the United States has acknowledged its willingness to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear adversaries. And, like in Israel, there is an obsession with secrecy that allows the government to get away with dangerous and destabilizing nuclear policies that risk a nuclear catastrophe. It is not surprising, then, that the United States has failed to challenge the Israeli government's policy toward this courageous nuclear whistle-blower.
As Ellsberg has observed, "he cult and culture of secrecy in every nuclear weapons state has endangered and continues to threaten the survival of humanity. Vanunu's challenge to that wrongful and dangerous secrecy must be joined worldwide." 19
End Notes
1. The woman who lured Vanunu was an American working for the Mossad.
2. The Sunday Times, December 27, 1992.
3. Daniel Ellsberg, "Mordechai Vanunu's Meaning for the Nuclear Age," April 2004.
4. UN Security Council Resolution 1172 (1998), article 13.
5. P. R. Kumaraswarmy, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 1999.
6. Ellsberg, op. cit.
7. http://www.nonviolence.org/vanunu/archive/f99howstatedept.html.
8. Seymour Hersch, The Sampson Option, New York: Random House, 1991, p. 209-214.
9. Ibid., p. 268.
10. Cited in Ibid., p. 283.
11. Ibid., p. 291
12. Jane Hunter, "A Nuclear Affair," Middle East International, 24 June 1994, pp. 12-13.
13. Aluf Benn, "A President's Promise: Israel Can Keep its Nukes," Ha'aretz, May 14, 2000.
14. Helena Cobban, " Israel's Nuclear Game: The U.S. Stake," World Policy Journal, Summer 1988, pp. 427-428.
15. David Twersky, "Is Silence Golden? Vanunu and Nuclear Israel," Tikkun, (Vol 3, No. 1).
16. Amnesty International, October 1991.
17. Gideon Alon, "AG Mazuz: Vanunu significant danger to state security." Ha'aretz, March 9, 2004.
18. Yossi Melman, "Security sources: Vanunu applied for passport,"Ha'aretz, March 10, 2004.
19. Ellsberg, op. cit.
-------- japan
Japanese greet freed hostages not as heroes but as reckless fools
By Norimitsu Onishi,
New York Times / San Jose Mercury News
Sat, Apr. 24, 2004
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/8510163.htm?1c
TOKYO - The young Japanese civilians taken hostage in Iraq returned home this week, not to the warmth of a yellow-ribbon embrace but to a disapproving nation's cold stare.
The first three hostages, including a woman who helped street children on the streets of Baghdad, first appeared on television two weeks ago as their knife-brandishing kidnappers threatened to slit their throats. A few days after their release, they landed here Sunday, in the eye of a peculiarly Japanese storm.
``You got what you deserve!'' read one handwritten sign at the airport where they landed. ``You are Japan's shame,'' another wrote on the Web site of one of the former hostages. They had ``caused trouble'' for everybody. The government, not to be outdone, announced that it would bill the former hostages $6,000 for air fare.
Beneath the surface of Japan's ultra-sophisticated cities lie the hierarchical ties that have governed this island nation for centuries and that, at moments of crises, invariably reassert themselves. The former hostages' transgression was to ignore a government advisory against traveling to Iraq. But their sin, in a vertical society that likes to think of itself as classless, was to defy what people call here okami, or, literally, ``what is higher.''
Gone into hiding
Treated like criminals, the three former hostages have gone into hiding, effectively becoming prisoners inside their own homes. The kidnapped woman, Nahoko Takato, was last seen arriving at her parents' house, looking defeated and dazed from taking tranquilizers, flanked by relatives who helped her walk and bow deeply before reporters, as a final apology to the nation.
Dr. Satoru Saito, a psychiatrist who has examined the three former hostages twice since their return, said the stress they were enduring now was ``much heavier'' than what they endured during their captivity in Iraq. Asked to name their three most stressful moments, the former hostages told him, in ascending order: the moment when they were kidnapped on their way to Baghdad, the knife-wielding incident, and the moment they watched a television show the morning after their return here and realized Japan's anger with them.
``Let's say the knife incident, which lasted about 10 minutes, ranks 10 on a stress level,'' Saito said in an interview at his clinic Thursday. ``After they came back to Japan and saw the morning news show, their stress level ranked 12.''
`Selfish' actions
To the angry Japanese, the first three hostages -- Takato, 34, who started her own non-profit organization to help Iraqi street children; Soichiro Koriyama, 32, a freelance photographer; and Noriaki Imai, 18, a freelance writer also interested in the issue of depleted-uranium munitions -- had acted selfishly. Two others kidnapped and released in a separate incident -- Junpei Yasuda, 30, a freelance journalist, and Nobutaka Watanabe, 36, a member of an anti-war group -- were equally guilty.
But the freed hostages did get official praise from one government, the United States.
``Well, everybody should understand the risk they are taking by going into dangerous areas,'' said Secretary of State Colin Powell. ``But if nobody was willing to take a risk, then we would never move forward. We would never move our world forward.
``And so I'm pleased that these Japanese citizens were willing to put themselves at risk for a greater good, for a better purpose. And the Japanese people should be very proud that they have citizens like this willing to do that.''
In contrast, Yasuo Fukuda, chief Cabinet secretary, offered this: ``They may have gone on their own, but they must consider how many people they caused trouble to because of their action.''
Families harassed
The criticism began almost immediately after the first three were kidnapped two weeks ago. The environment minister, Yuriko Koike, accused them of being ``reckless.''
After the hostages' families asked that the government yield to the kidnappers' demand and withdraw its 550 soldiers from southern Iraq, they began receiving hate mail and harassing faxes and e-mail messages. The Japanese, like the villagers in Shirley Jackson's ``The Lottery,'' had to throw stones.
Even as the kidnappers were still threatening to burn alive the three hostages, Yukio Takeuchi, a top official in the Foreign Ministry, said of the three, ``When it comes to a matter of safety and life, I would like them to be aware of the basic principle of personal responsibility.''
The Foreign Ministry, held both in awe and resentment by the average Japanese, was the okami defied in this case. While Foreign Ministry officials are Japan's super-elite, the average Japanese tends to regard them as arrogant and unhelpful, recalling how they failed to deliver in time the declaration of war against the United States in 1941 so that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was seen as sneaky.
Defying the okami are young Japanese people like the freed hostages, freelancers and members of non-profit organizations, who are traditionally held in low esteem in a country where the bigger one's company, the bigger one's social rank. They also represent something more: They belong to a generation in which many have rejected traditional Japanese life. Many have gravitated instead to places like the East Village in Manhattan, looking for something undefined.
Role of watchdog
Others have gone to Iraq looking to report the true story, since Japan's big media outlets have generally avoided dangerous places. (Indeed, almost all the big media outlets departed from Iraq in the past week on a government-chartered plane, leaving Japan's most important military mission since the end of World War II essentially ignored by the news media.)
Yasuda -- who was in the second group of hostages and also described the stress of his return far greater than what he felt during his captivity in Iraq -- quit his position as a staff reporter at a regional newspaper to report as a freelancer in Iraq.
``We have to check ourselves what the Japanese government is doing in Iraq,'' Yasuda said during an interview Thursday night. ``This is the responsibility on the part of Japanese citizens, but it seems as if people are leaving everything up to the government.''
The okami reacted with fury at such defiance. Some politicians proposed a law barring Japanese from traveling to dangerous countries; even more of them said the hostages should pay the costs incurred by the government in securing their release.
``This is an idea that should be considered,'' the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's biggest daily newspaper, said in an editorial. ``Such an act might deter other reckless, self-righteous volunteers.''
When two freed hostages mentioned wanting to stay or return to Iraq to continue their work, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi angrily urged them ``to have some sense.''
``Many government officials made efforts to rescue them, without even eating and sleeping, and they are still saying that sort of thing?'' he said.
The Japanese government is now trumpeting ``personal responsibility'' for those going to dangerous areas -- essentially saying that travelers should not expect any help from the government to secure their safety or get out of trouble.
Again, no Japanese politician dared to speak out against this idea.
Indeed, Koizumi's handling of the hostage crisis translated into positive evaluations in public-opinion polls, and the issue diverted attention from Iraq's worsening security situation and the fact that Japan's troops, according to this country's war-renouncing constitution, are supposed to be in a non-combat zone.
-------- korea
North Korea Vows It Won't Transfer Nukes
Sat Apr 24, 2004
By AUDRA ANG,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040424/ap_on_re_as/nkorea_us
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4016901,00.html
BEIJING - North Korean officials angrily denied U.S. accusations that they might sell nuclear weapons to terrorists and offered to freeze a plutonium-based nuclear program in exchange for aid, an American researcher who visited the North said Saturday.
However, the officials wouldn't confirm whether Pyongyang has a second, uranium-based weapons program, a key sticking point in talks with the United States and other governments, said Selig S. Harrison of the Center for International Policy in Washington.
The comments, similar to previous North Korean offers, did not appear to represent any new concession that might revive progress in the six-nation talks aimed at persuading the North to eliminate its nuclear program.
North Korean leaders criticized U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites)'s suggestion during a visit to China this month that the North might sell weapons to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al-Qaida network or other terror groups, Harrison said.
Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun said North Koreans "denounce al-Qaida," said Harrison, who returned from Pyongyang on Saturday and was en route to Washington.
"We are opposed to all types of terrorism and will never transfer our nuclear material to anyone else," he quoted Paek as saying. "Our nuclear program is solely for our own self-defense."
Harrison also met this week with Kim Yong Nam, the country's No. 2 leader; Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan and Lt. Gen. Ri Chan Bok, chief military liaison officer at the Demilitarized Zone on the border with South Korea (news - web sites).
According to Harrison, Kim Yong Nam said North Korea (news - web sites) trades in missiles, but would never allow a transfer of nuclear material to al-Qaida or anyone else.
Harrison, a specialist in North Korean affairs, has visited the North six times since the 1980s.
----
China's U.N. Envoy: N. Korea Opening Up
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 24, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NKorea-China.html?pagewanted=print&position=
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- China's U.N. ambassador sees signs that North Korea is moving toward opening up to the outside world and showing flexibility in the standoff over its nuclear programs.
Wang Guangya said this week's visit to China by North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il -- his last visit three years ago -- the country's economic reforms, and its ``unusual'' request for international assistance following Thursday's deadly train explosion ``all head in that direction.''
``But sometimes because they have different feelings about their environment, they retreat,'' he said.
``Then they move forward again. I hope the country will move in the right direction,'' he said in an interview on Friday.
Wang urged the international community ``to be forthcoming, be positive in responding to their request'' for help for the victims of the train blast.
During Kim's recent visit to Beijing, he said, China agreed to provide more economic assistance.
``As far as specific programs, both sides have to agree to work it out,'' Wang said. ``We agreed to continue and also to increase our economic assistance.''
North Korea is trying to reform its economy ``because without changes in their economy they will remain in bad shape, so they realize this,'' he said.
Wang said one of the main topics during Kim's visit, which included talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao, was North Korea's nuclear program and the six-party talks aimed at ending the standoff.
North Korea said Thursday it would be ``patient and flexible'' at the talks, adding that Kim agreed with the Chinese president to ``push ahead'' with a peaceful resolution.
The statements, carried by the North's official KCNA news agency and central television network, were likely to be encouraging to the United States and other countries, who want China to use its leverage as North Korea's leading supplier of food and energy aid to get the country to disarm.
Washington wants Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear facilities, but North Korea has said it doesn't trust the United States not to invade and wants a security guarantee.
``We tried to convince them that this is the best way to find a solution for this issue,'' Wang said of the six-party talks which involve the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia.
``I think that they are being convinced, and they agreed that they will continue. And they also pronounced that their final objective is to be a nuclear-free country. They don't like to have nuclear weapons,'' he said.
The last round of talks ended in February and participants pledged to meet again before July.
--------
N. Korea Says to Push Ahead with Nuclear Programs
By REUTERS
April 24, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-usa.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - Top North Korean officials have vowed to push ahead with their nuclear programs as long as the atomic standoff festers, saying time is not on President Bush's side, an influential U.S. expert said on Saturday after meetings in Pyongyang.
The officials also promised never to let nuclear weapons fall into the hands of al Qaeda or other militants, said Selig Harrison, of the Center for International Policy in Washington.
Harrison, making his seventh trip to Pyongyang, told reporters on arrival in Beijing after days of meetings that the officials were not expecting a resolution before U.S. presidential elections in November.
But they also had no deadline to test nuclear weapons or missiles if six-country talks on their programs dragged on.
Pyongyang laid out an offer for an initial freeze of its plutonium program, continuing to dismiss Bush's demand for a complete, irreversible and verifiable dismantling (CVID) up front and deny they ever admitted to a covert uranium program.
``If Bush insists on his present policy of CVID first, we wouldn't be interested in having a deal with the United States,'' Harrison quoted Kim Yong-nam, who heads the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly and is the North's number two leader, as saying.
``My feeling is Bush is delaying the resolution of the nuclear issue due to the presidential election,'' Kim said.
``He (Bush) may be trying to gain time, but time is not on his side,'' he said.
``We are going to use this time 100 percent effectively to strengthen our nuclear deterrent, both quantitatively and qualitatively.''
The comments from Pyongyang's reclusive inner circle were made as the North's ruler Kim Jong-il traveled to meet Chinese leaders, just a week after Vice President Dick Cheney was in Beijing.
SENSE OF URGENCY
The comments come during a growing sense of urgency for progress after Beijing hosted two inconclusive rounds of talks. Cheney told China ``time is not our side'' to resolve the crisis and South Korean media reported Beijing, in turn, urged Kim to soften his stance.
However, Kim Yong-nam said the North had no deadline on the talks, according to Harrison.
Foreign Ministry officials told him they expected a third round of six-party talks comprising the two Koreas, China, Russia, the United States and Japan before the end of June, as scheduled, and working group meetings in late May.
But there was no agreed agenda for the working group, Harrison was told. At a recent meeting in New York, the North's diplomats tried to introduce their initial freeze proposal while U.S. special envoy Joseph Detrani insisted solely on CVID.
Harrison quoted Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun saying of the talks: ``Frankly speaking, I am not that optimistic.''
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea disclosed it was working on a secret program to enrich uranium for weapons. North denies the program, a major stumbling block in talks.
Officials repeated to Harrison a message they say the United States distorted -- that they had no obligation to clarify the uranium question to their enemies. ``Informally, they say their policy is not to confirm or deny,'' Harrison said.
In response to allegations by Cheney that North Korea could proliferate nuclear technology, Kim said there was a clear distinction between missiles and nuclear material.
``There can be trade in missiles, but in regard to nuclear material, our policy, past, present and future, is that we would never allow such a transfer to al Qaeda or anyone else.''
Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan, the North's envoy to the talks, detailed a freeze proposal under which the North would grant inspections to determine how much weapons-grade plutonium it had reprocessed and would pledge not to test nuclear material or transfer it to other parties, Harrison said.
In exchange, the United States would allow the North to receive energy aid and electricity from South Korea, Russia and China, lift economic sanctions that have been in place since the 1950-53 Korean War and remove the North from its list of countries sponsoring terrorism, he said.
Harrison said officials were very careful not to take sides in the U.S. elections but noted: ``Their position is that they don't expect anything from the Bush administration.''
-------- missile defense
Missile defense called unproven So far, testing is unrealistic, GAO finds
Washington Post
Saturday, April 24, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/24/MNGD66AGVP1.DTL
Washington -- A congressional audit of the Bush administration's efforts to build a nationwide defense against ballistic missile attack warned Friday that the system, due to be fielded later this year, will be "largely unproven" because of a lack of realistic testing.
The report, by the General Accounting Office, said the eight flight intercepts attempted so far have been largely "repetitive and scripted," and that critical parts of the system have yet to be flight-tested together.
Some elements that were to be part of the initial deployment phase have been deferred because of developmental glitches and production delays, the report noted. Nevertheless, the cost in 2004 and 2005 for developing and fielding the initial system -- which is to include 20 missile interceptors along with several ground- and sea-based radars -- rose by $1.12 billion to $7.36 billion over the past year, the report disclosed.
The report's title -- "Actions Are Needed to Enhance Testing and Accountability" -- summed up the GAO's concerns.
A number of the report's findings echo earlier reviews by the GAO and others, but the study represents the most extensive assessment so far by the agency, an investigative branch of Congress. It comes as the Pentagon is preparing to start lowering the first interceptor missiles into newly built silos in Alaska and California and declare the system operational during the summer or autumn.
Construction of the system has been a high priority for the Bush administration, which is pursuing a series of anti-missile technologies with the aim of erecting a network of defenses to target warheads in various stages of flight. Funding for these projects has absorbed more research and development dollars than any other military program -- more, in fact, than the Army's entire R&D budget. The administration's request for fiscal 2005 tops $10 billion.
--------
Missile Defense Agency Faulted On Testing and Accountability
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37828-2004Apr23.html
A congressional audit of the Bush administration's efforts to build a nationwide defense against ballistic missile attack warned yesterday that the system, due to be fielded later this year, will be "largely unproven" because of a lack of realistic testing.
The report, by the General Accounting Office, said that the eight flight intercepts attempted so far have been largely "repetitive and scripted," and that critical parts of the system have yet to be flight-tested together.
Some elements that were to be part of the initial deployment phase have been deferred because of developmental glitches and production delays, the report noted. Nevertheless, the cost in 2004 and 2005 for developing and fielding the initial system -- which is to include 20 missile interceptors and several ground- and sea-based radars -- rose by $1.12 billion, to $7.36 billion, over the past year, the report disclosed.
Some of the report's sharpest criticisms were reserved for how the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has accounted for its activities. The report faulted the agency for frequently shifting goals and providing incomplete information about costs and performance to Congress.
The report's title -- "Actions Are Needed to Enhance Testing and Accountability" -- summed up GAO concerns.
A number of the report's findings echo earlier reviews by the GAO and others, but the study represents the most extensive assessment so far by the agency, an investigative branch of Congress. It comes as the Pentagon is preparing to start lowering the first interceptor missiles into newly built silos in Alaska and California and declare the system operational during the summer or autumn.
Construction of the system has been a high priority for the Bush administration, which is pursuing a series of anti-missile technologies with the aim of erecting a network of defenses to target warheads in various stages of flight. Funding for these projects has absorbed more research and development dollars than any other military program -- more, in fact, than the Army's entire R&D budget. The administration's request for fiscal 2005 tops $10 billion.
President Bush has argued that defenses against long-range missiles are necessary to protect the United States against what U.S. officials say is a growing threat of attack by North Korea and other hostile states. But congressional Democrats have challenged the urgency the administration has attached to the program, as well as its high cost and likely effectiveness.
"The GAO report confirms much of what we've been saying all along, and it does so in a very credible, very thorough and very objective way," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a leading congressional critic and a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Unable to stop the missile defense drive, which has strong Republican support, Democrats wrote into law two years ago a requirement that the Pentagon establish cost, performance and other goals for the program. The law also directed the GAO to conduct comprehensive annual assessments of the program, which has become more secretive under Bush. Yesterday's report marked the first such assessment.
It noted the unusual freedom the administration has granted the program, exempting the Missile Defense Agency from many traditional oversight requirements. Such flexibility, the report said, does not "diminish the importance of ensuring accountability over the substantial investments in missile defense."
Among the gaps in program information provided by the Missile Defense Agency, the report cited cost estimates. The agency has projected that $53 billion more will be needed for missile defense between 2004 and 2009 but has not specified likely additional costs for operations, maintenance and other "lifecycle" expenses, the report said.
The GAO also questioned the significance of some of the program's "performance goals," particularly the "probability of engagement success" -- a classified estimate of how the system can be expected to perform against certain types of warheads. The estimate, at least as quoted to Congress, lacks details about the key assumptions it is based on -- factors such as the nature of the warhead or the number of anticipated decoys, the report said.
"Without these implicit assumptions being explained, the operational capability of the fielded system is difficult to fully understand," the report said.
The report recommended that the Missile Defense Agency establish specific "baseline" estimates for program costs, schedule and performance, and be required each year to explain deviations from them.
It also recommended that "operationally realistic testing and evaluation" be conducted under the Pentagon's chief weapons evaluator to increase confidence that the system will perform as intended. Testing so far has been controlled by the Missile Defense Agency and has involved surrogates or prototypes for elements still being built.
In comments attached to the report, the Pentagon agreed to set baselines but rejected the idea of moving to operational testing, saying there is no legal obligation to do so until the system matures further. Even after deploying initial elements this year, Pentagon officials plan to treat the system largely as a developmental program, moving gradually to more realistic tests.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Hearings set on plutonium storage plan
By Sophia Kazmi
Sat, Apr. 24, 2004
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/8510352.htm
Public hearings about Lawrence Livermore Lab's plan to double its plutonium storage capacity and increase 10-fold the amount of tritium -- a radioactive form of water -- kept at the lab are set to begin next week.
The first hearing will be in Livermore on Tuesday and the second will be held in Tracy on Wednesday. The last of the hearings will be Friday in Washington, D.C..
The public can comment on the lab's site-wide environmental impact statement, a document updated once each decade that gives the public a glimpse of the lab's future plans.
If the Department of Energy gets its way, the maximum amount of plutonium stored at the lab at a given time could grow to 3,300 pounds over the next 10 years -- from the longtime 1,540-pound standard. It would triple the amount scientists can work with at one time, from 44 pounds to 132 pounds.
Much of the increase will likely go to restarting the plutonium atomic vapor laser isotope separation program, in which plutonium is vaporized and then sorted by different weights with a laser. Originally developed in the 1980s, the program was shut down after reviews determined it wasn't practical.
Marylia Kelley, executive director of the Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, said her group encourages its members and the public to attend the hearings and learn about the proposals, she said.
"It's like, oh my God, they're going to do a bunch of new stuff," Kelley said.
Those who can't attend the hearings have until May 27 to send their comments to the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration. Reach Sophia Kazmi at 925-847-2122 or skazmi@cctimes.com.
-------- idaho
Groups pan using reactors for clean hydrogen fuel
By DAN GALLAGHER
Associated Press writer
Saturday, April 24, 2004
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2004/04/24/news/regional/08610bcd1b4e6f9887256e7f006554c9.txt
BOISE, Idaho (AP) -- The plan seems sensible enough for a country thirsty for energy and fuel alternatives: A shiny new nuclear reactor at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory would kick off research into creating hydrogen gas for the Bush administration's new fuel-cell transportation initiative.
It also would further secure INEEL's status as the nation's top nuclear research site while boosting the payroll of what is already eastern Idaho's largest employer.
Yet watchdog groups warn pollution-free hydrogen fuel should be made with power from renewables like wind or the sun, not in a nuclear reactor with a radioactive waste problem that remains unresolved nearly six decades after nuclear technology was born.
Snake River Alliance Executive Director Jeremy Maxand called the Bush proposal "alchemy at best. We've got to get serious about energy. What we want to see is a comprehensive energy policy that includes renewables."
In 2003, the president announced his hydrogen program in which fuel-cell cars would eventually fill auto showrooms, reduce the nation's need for oil and cut greenhouse emissions.
Hydrogen goes in. Energy to power the car and water vapor come out. It also could fuel industry and heat or cool homes.
The high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor envisioned for Idaho would create both hydrogen and electricity. The $1.1 billion project died in last year's energy bill, but it's part of the current legislation that is backed by Idaho lawmakers.
U.S. Sen. Michael Crapo said Americans have become so reliant on oil that the nation is overly dependent on other countries for supplies.
"Like a stock portfolio, we have to broaden our energy portfolio," Crapo said. "If we made the decision today, it still will be several decades before we have successfully ended our dependence."
Most hydrogen today is made by reacting natural gas with high-temperature steam. The nation needs plenty of hydrogen already to make products such as fertilizer and to refine crude oil, said Steve Herring, an engineer with the Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at the INEEL.
"It's important to remember that we use 12 million tons of hydrogen a year," he said. "It's light, fluffy stuff, so that's a lot of hydrogen."
There currently are 103 reactors operating in the nation today. Providing enough hydrogen to meet all the fuel-cell transportation needs would mean tripling that number, he said.
The administration's FreedomCar program is working parallel to the hydrogen initiative. INEEL scientists are studying and developing some vehicles to run on the gas, and hybrids use combinations of gas and electricity.
The nation not only could use hydrogen for cars but for more electricity, too.
Nuclear energy currently provides about 20 percent of American demand for power and 16 percent worldwide. Department of Energy officials say the reason for the renewed interest in nuclear power is it generates electricity more inexpensively than plants fired by coal, natural gas or oil.
And running the "information highway" of electronic communication that the United States is increasingly relying on to manage its business requires significant amounts of power, said Mike Tracy, spokesman for U.S. Sen. Larry Craig.
Herring also counters Maxand's concern about radioactive waste, claiming the new process would go a long way toward reducing the amount of spent fuel left around the country.
"We wouldn't have zero waste," he said, but "we would reduce a lot of the waste."
Still, opponents reject the Energy Department's claim that nuclear reactors are safe for the environment.
Maxand points to the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor core meltdown in Pennsylvania and the troubled Davis Besse power plant in Ohio, which was shut down several times after boric acid nearly ate through the steel reactor cell.
But there are problems closer to home, critics say.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, Maxand said, plutonium-contaminated waste was buried in unlined pits at the INEEL, while billions of gallons of hazardous and radioactive waste were pumped into the ground above the Snake River aquifer, the source of drinking water for much of southern Idaho.
For the $87 billion recently appropriated to support continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Maxand said, more than 190,000 wind turbines could have been built in the United States, supplying 25 percent of the nation's electrical needs.
In suggesting the production of hydrogen from reactors and coal-fired or oil-fired power plants, the administration is propping up those polluting industries, said Michele Boyd, legislative representative of Public Citizen, the public interest group founded by Ralph Nader.
"It's a huge boondoggle," Boyd said. "Talking about a new $1.1 billion reactor, that's an obscene amount of money."
Boyd said Public Citizen is part of the Green Hydrogen Coalition of groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, which support "green hydrogen" production from wind turbines and solar panels, instead of "black hydrogen" from reactors or fossil fuels.
"What we're trying to do is develop reactor and hydrogen technologies that will mesh with renewables and other sources," Herring said. "It took 100 years to develop the internal combustion engine. We're not going to supplant fossil fuels in 10 years."
-------- us politics
The Real Lessons of 9/11
by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul
April 24, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=2372
We are constantly admonished to remember the lessons of 9/11. Of course the real issue is not remembering, but rather knowing what the pertinent lesson of that sad day is.
The 9/11 Commission soon will release its report after months of fanfare by those whose reputations are at stake. The many hours and dollars spent on the investigation may well reveal little we don't already know, while ignoring the most important lessons that should be learned from this egregious attack on our homeland. Common sense already tells us the tens of billions of dollars spent by government agencies, whose job it is to provide security and intelligence for our country, failed.
A full-fledged investigation into the bureaucracy may help us in the future, but one should never pretend that government bureaucracies can be made efficient. It is the very nature of bureaucracies to be inefficient. Spending an inordinate amount of time finger pointing will distract from the real lessons of 9/11. Which agency, which department, or which individual receives the most blame should not be the main purpose of the investigation.
Despite our serious failure to prevent the attacks, it's disturbing to see how politicized the whole investigation has become. Which political party receives the greatest blame is a high stakes election-year event, and distracts from the real lessons ignored by both sides.
Everyone on the Commission assumes that 9/11 resulted from a lack of government action. No one in Washington has raised the question of whether our shortcomings, brought to light by 9/11, could have been a result of too much government. Possibly in the final report we will discuss this, but to date no one has questioned the assumption that we need more government and, of course - though elusive - a more efficient one.
The failure to understand the nature of the enemy who attacked us on 9/11, along with a pre-determined decision to initiate a pre-emptive war against Iraq, prompted our government to deceive the people into believing that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the attacks on New York and Washington. The majority of the American people still contend the war against Iraq was justified because of the events of 9/11. These misinterpretations have led to many U.S. military deaths and casualties, prompting a growing number of Americans to question the wisdom of our presence and purpose in a strange foreign land 6,000 miles from our shores.
The neo-conservative defenders of our policy in Iraq speak of the benefits that we have brought to the Iraqi people: removal of a violent dictator, liberation, democracy, and prosperity. If all this were true, the resistance against our occupation would not be growing. We ought to admit we have not been welcomed as liberators as was promised by the proponents of the war.
Though we hear much about the so-called "benefits" we have delivered to the Iraqi people and the Middle East, we hear little talk of the cost to the American people: lives lost, soldiers maimed for life, uncounted thousands sent home with diseased bodies and minds, billions of dollars consumed, and a major cloud placed over U.S. markets and the economy. Sharp political divisions, reminiscent of the 1960s, are arising at home.
Failing to understand why 9/11 happened and looking for a bureaucratic screw-up to explain the whole thing - while using the event to start an unprovoked war unrelated to 9/11 - have dramatically compounded the problems all Americans and the world face. Evidence has shown that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the guerilla attacks on New York and Washington, and since no weapons of mass destruction were found, other reasons are given for invading Iraq. The real reasons are either denied or ignored: oil, neo-conservative empire building, and our support for Israel over the Palestinians.
The proponents of the Iraqi war do not hesitate to impugn the character of those who point out the shortcomings of current policy, calling them unpatriotic and appeasers of terrorism. It is said that they are responsible for the growing armed resistance, and for the killing of American soldiers. It's conveniently ignored that if the opponents of the current policy had prevailed, not one single American would have died nor would tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have suffered the same fate.
Al Qaeda and many new militant groups would not be enjoying a rapid growth in their ranks. By denying that our sanctions and bombs brought havoc to Iraq, it's easy to play the patriot card and find a scapegoat to blame. We are never at fault and never responsible for bad outcomes of what many believe is, albeit well-intentioned, interference in the affairs of others 6,000 miles from our shores.
Pursuing our policy has boiled down to "testing our resolve." It is said by many - even some who did not support the war - that now we have no choice but to "stay the course." They argue that it's a noble gesture to be courageous and continue no matter how difficult. But that should not be the issue. It is not a question of resolve, but rather a question of wise policy. If the policy is flawed and the world and our people are less safe for it, unshakable resolve is the opposite of what we need. Staying the course only makes sense when the difficult tasks are designed to protect our country and to thwart those who pose a direct threat to us. Wilsonian idealism of self-sacrifice to "make the world safe for democracy" should never be an excuse to wage preemptive war - especially since it almost never produces the desired results. There are always too many unintended consequences.
In our effort to change the political structure of Iraq, we continue alliances with dictators and even develop new ones with countries that are anything but democracies. We have a close alliance with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, many other Arab dictatorships, and a new one with Kadafi of Libya. This should raise questions about the credibility of our commitment to promoting democracy in Iraq - which even our own government wouldn't tolerate. Show me one neo-con that would accept a national election that put the radical Shiites in charge. As Secretary Rumsfeld said, it's not going to happen. These same people are condemning the recent democratic decisions made in Spain. We should remember that since World War II, in 35 U.S. attempts to promote democracy around the world none have succeeded.
Promoters of war too often fail to contemplate the unintended consequences of an aggressive foreign policy. So far, the anti-war forces have not been surprised with the chaos that has now become Iraq, or Iran's participation - but even they cannot know all the long-term shortcomings of such a policy.
In an eagerness to march on Baghdad, the neo-cons gloated - and I heard them - of the "shock and awe" that was about to hit the Iraqi people. It turns out that the real shock and awe is that we're further from peace in Iraq than we were a year ago - and Secretary Rumsfeld admits his own surprise.
The only policy now offered is to escalate the war and avenge the deaths of American soldiers - if they kill 10 of our troops, we'll kill 100 of theirs. Up until now, announcing the number of Iraqi deaths has been avoided purposely, but the new policy announces our success by the number of Iraqis killed. But the more we kill, the greater the incitement of the radical Islamic militants. The harder we try to impose our will on them, the greater the resistance becomes.
Amazingly, our occupation has done what was at one time thought to be impossible - it has united the Sunnis and Shiites against our presence. Although this is probably temporary, it is real and has deepened our problems in securing Iraq. The results are an escalation of the conflict and the requirement for more troops. This acceleration of the killing is called "pacification" - a bit of 1984 newspeak.
The removal of Saddam Hussein has created a stark irony. The willingness and intensity of the Iraqi people to fight for their homeland has increased many times over. Under Saddam Hussein, essentially no resistance occurred. Instead of jubilation and parades for the liberators, we face much greater and unified efforts to throw out all foreigners than when Saddam Hussein was in charge.
It's not whether the Commission investigation of the causes of 9/11 is unwarranted; since the Commissioners are looking in the wrong places for answers, it's whether much will be achieved.
I'm sure we will hear that the bureaucracy failed, whether it was the FBI, the CIA, the NSC, or all of them for failure to communicate with each other. This will not answer the question of why we were attacked and why our defenses were so poor. Even though 40 billion dollars are spent on intelligence gathering each year, the process failed us. It's likely to be said that what we need is more money and more efficiency. Yet, that approach fails to recognize that depending on government agencies to be efficient is a risky assumption.
We should support efforts to make the intelligence agencies more effective, but one thing is certain: more money won't help. Of the 40 billion dollars spent annually for intelligence, too much is spent on nation building and activities unrelated to justified surveillance.
There are two other lessons that must be learned if we hope to benefit by studying and trying to explain the disaster that hit us on 9/11. If we fail to learn them, we cannot be made safer and the opposite is more likely to occur.
The first point is to understand who assumes most of the responsibility for the security of our homes and businesses in a free society. It's not the police. There are too few of them, and it's not their job to stand guard outside our houses or places of business. More crime occurs in the inner city, where there are not only more police, but more restrictions on property owners' rights to bear and use weapons if invaded by hoodlums. In safer rural areas, where every home has a gun and someone in it who is willing to use it is, there is no false dependency on the police protecting them, but full reliance on the owner's responsibility to deal with any property violators. This understanding works rather well - at least better than in the inner cities where the understanding is totally different.
How does this apply to the 9/11 tragedies? The airline owners accepted the rules of the inner city rather than those of rural America. They all assumed that the government was in charge of airline security - and unfortunately, by law, it was. Not only were the airlines complacent about security, but the FAA dictated all the rules relating to potential hijacking. Chemical plants or armored truck companies that carry money make the opposite assumption, and private guns do a reasonably good job in providing security. Evidently we think more of our money and chemical plants than we do our passengers on airplanes.
The complacency of the airlines is one thing, but the intrusiveness of the FAA is another. Two specific regulations proved to be disastrous for dealing with the thugs who, without even a single gun, took over four airliners and created the havoc of 9/11. Both the prohibition against guns in cockpits and precise instructions that crews not resist hijackers contributed immensely to the horrors of 9/11.
Instead of immediately legalizing a natural right of personal self-defense guaranteed by an explicit Second Amendment freedom, we still do not have armed pilots in the sky. Instead of more responsibility being given to the airlines, the government has taken over the entire process. This has been encouraged by the airline owners, who seek subsidies and insurance protection. Of course, the nonsense of never resisting has been forever vetoed by all passengers.
Unfortunately, the biggest failure of our government will be ignored. I'm sure the Commission will not connect our foreign policy of interventionism - practiced by both major parties for over a hundred years - as an important reason 9/11 occurred. Instead, the claims will stand that the motivation behind 9/11 was our freedom, prosperity, and way of life. If this error persists, all the tinkering and money to improve the intelligence agencies will bear little fruit.
Over the years the entire psychology of national defense has been completely twisted. Very little attention had been directed toward protecting our national borders and providing homeland security.
Our attention, all too often, was and still is directed outward toward distant lands. Now a significant number of our troops are engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq. We've kept troops in Korea for over 50 years, and thousands of troops remain in Europe and in over 130 other countries. This twisted philosophy of ignoring national borders while pursuing an empire created a situation where Seoul, Korea, was better protected than Washington, DC, on 9/11. These priorities must change, but I'm certain the 9/11 Commission will not address this issue.
This misdirected policy has prompted the current protracted war in Iraq, which has gone on for 13 years with no end in sight. The al Qaeda attacks should not be used to justify more intervention; instead they should be seen as a guerilla attacks against us for what the Arabs and Muslim world see as our invasion and interference in their homelands. This cycle of escalation is rapidly spreading the confrontation worldwide between the Christian West and the Muslim East. With each escalation, the world becomes more dangerous. It is especially made worse when we retaliate against Muslims and Arabs who had nothing to do with 9/11 - as we have in Iraq - further confirming the suspicions of the Muslim masses that our goals are more about oil and occupation than they are about punishing those responsible for 9/11.
Those who claim that Iraq is another Vietnam are wrong. They can't be the same. There are too many differences in time, place, and circumstance. But that doesn't mean the Iraqi conflict cannot last longer, spread throughout the region and throughout the world - making it potentially much worse than what we suffered in Vietnam. In the first 6 years we were in Vietnam, we lost less than 500 troops. Over 700 have been killed in Iraq in just over a year.
Our failure to pursue al Qaeda and bin Laden in Pakistan and Afghanistan - and diverting resources to Iraq - have seriously compromised our ability to maintain a favorable world opinion of support and cooperation in this effort.
Instead, we have chaos in Iraq while the Islamists are being financed by a booming drug business from U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.
Continuing to deny that the attacks against us are related to our overall policy of foreign meddling through many years and many administrations, makes a victory over our enemies nearly impossible. Not understanding the true nature and motivation of those who have and will commit deadly attacks against us prevents a sensible policy from being pursued. Guerilla warriors, who are willing to risk and sacrifice everything as part of a war they see as defensive, are a far cry, philosophically, from a band of renegades who out of unprovoked hate seek to destroy us and kill themselves in the process. How we fight back depends on understanding these differences.
Of course, changing our foreign policy to one of no pre-emptive war, no nation building, no entangling alliances, no interference in the internal affairs of other nations, and trade and friendship with all who seek it, is no easy task.
The real obstacle, though, is to understand the motives behind our current policy of perpetual meddling in the affairs of others for more than a hundred years.
Understanding why both political parties agree on the principle of continuous foreign intervention is crucial. Those reasons are multiple and varied. They range from the persistent Wilsonian idealism of making the world safe for democracy to the belief that we must protect "our" oil.
Also contributing to this bi-partisan, foreign policy view is the notion that promoting world government is worthwhile. This involves support for the United Nations, NATO, control of the world's resources through the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, NAFTA, FTAA, and the Law of the Sea Treaty - all of which gain the support of those sympathetic to the poor and socialism, while too often the benefits accrue to the well-connected international corporations and bankers sympathetic to economic fascism.
Sadly, in the process the people are forgotten, especially those who pay the taxes, those whose lives are sacrificed in no-win undeclared wars, and the unemployed and poor as the economic consequences of financing our foreign entanglements evolve.
Regardless of one's enthusiasm or lack thereof for the war and the general policy of maintaining American troops in more than 130 countries, one cold fact soon must be recognized by all of us in Congress. The American people cannot afford it, and when the market finally recognizes the over commitment we've made, the results will not be pleasing to anyone.
A "guns and butter" policy was flawed in the 60s, and gave us interest rates of 21% in the 70s with high inflation rates. The current "guns and butter" policy is even more intense, and our economic infrastructure is more fragile than it was back then. These facts dictate our inability to continue this policy both internationally and domestically. It is true, an unshakable resolve to stay the course in Iraq, or any other hot spot, can be pursued for years. But when a country is adding to its future indebtedness by over 700 billion dollars per year it can only be done with great economic harm to all our citizens.
Huge deficits, financed by borrowing and Federal Reserve monetization, are an unsustainable policy and always lead to higher price inflation, higher interest rates, a continued erosion of the dollar's value, and a faltering economy. Economic law dictates that the standard of living then must go down for all Americans - except for the privileged few who have an inside track on government largess - if this policy of profligate spending continues. Ultimately, the American people, especially the younger generation, will have to decide whether to languish with current policy or reject the notion that perpetual warfare and continued growth in entitlements should be pursued indefinitely.
Conclusion
I'm sure the Commission will not deal with the flaw in the foreign policy endorsed by both parties for these many decades. I hope the Commission tells us why members of the bin Laden family were permitted, immediately after 9/11, to leave the United States without interrogation, when no other commercial or private flights were allowed. That event should have been thoroughly studied and explained to the American people. We actually had a lot more reason to invade Saudi Arabia than we did Iraq in connection with 9/11, but that country, obviously no friend of democracy, remains an unchallenged ally of the United States with few questions asked.
I'm afraid the Commission will answer only a few questions while raising many new ones. Overall though, the Commission has been beneficial and provides some reassurance to those who believe we operate in a much too closed society. Fortunately, any administration, under the current system, still must respond to reasonable inquiries.
--------
Kerry's Antiwar Past Is a Delicate Issue in His Campaign
April 24, 2004
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/politics/campaign/24VET.html?pagewanted=all&position=
When questions were raised last month about whether a 27-year-old John Kerry had attended a Kansas City meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War where the assassination of senators was discussed, the Kerry presidential campaign went into action.
It accepted the resignation of a campaign volunteer in Florida, Scott Camil, the member of the antiwar group who raised the idea in November 1971 of killing politicians who backed the war. The campaign pressed other veterans who were in Kansas City, Mo., 33 years ago to re-examine their hazy memories while assuring them that Mr. Kerry was sure he had not been there.
John Musgrave, a disabled ex-marine from Baldwin City, Kan., who told The Kansas City Star that Mr. Kerry was at the meeting, said he got a call from John Hurley, the Kerry campaign's veterans coordinator.
"He said, `I'd like you to refresh your memory,' " Mr. Musgrave, 55, recounted in an interview, confirming an account he had given to The New York Sun. "He said it twice. `And call that reporter back and say you were mistaken about John Kerry being there.' "
Such little-noticed moments in Mr. Kerry's past - including his decision at age 26 to meet the Vietcong emissaries to the Paris peace talks - are coming under new scrutiny now, as Mr. Kerry finally makes the presidential run that his comrades in arms, and in the antiwar movement, half-mockingly predicted decades ago.
In an interview about his antiwar activities, Mr. Kerry said that he knew nothing of attempts by his campaign to tinker with the past and that he disapproved. "People's memories are people's memories," he said, adding that he had no memory of the Kansas City meeting.
Mr. Hurley says he was merely asking Mr. Musgrave to be accurate, "because his memory was contrary to everything I was hearing."
Yet while Mr. Kerry is heavily accentuating his five months in combat in Vietnam, he rarely emphasizes his two years working against the war - though he first catapulted to fame 33 years ago this week when he electrified millions of viewers in asking the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "How do you ask a man to be last man to die for a mistake?"
And when Mr. Kerry appeared on "Meet the Press" last weekend, he disavowed his own remarks on the same program in April 1971, when he said he and thousands of other soldiers had committed "atrocities."
From its inception, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a curiosity and an influential force in the Vietnam protest movement because of the novelty, and political potency, of antiwar demonstrators in uniform.
In the year and a half that Mr. Kerry belonged to the group, it was loosely structured and had its share of revolutionaries and provocateurs - including many secretly working for law enforcement - who pushed the writings of Chairman Mao and talked of tossing grenades, though they seldom did worse than toss bags of chicken droppings at the Pentagon.
The clean-shaven, shorter-haired, neatly dressed Mr. Kerry, dozens of veterans recalled in interviews, had little patience for any of that. He was almost always the most conservative man in the room.
"He was working in the system, and he wanted to stay in the system," said Al Hubbard, now 68 and ailing, who was one of the group's leaders and said it was the first time he had spoken to a reporter in more than 30 years. "He had his own personal agenda. I think he was just kind of doing dress rehearsals for public office."
To this day, Vietnam Veterans Against the War remains controversial to some veterans who viewed its dissent as harmful to the troops overseas. The cultural and generational divide, after all, did seem to cross right through the veterans' group. Among the many polarizing images of the period was a photograph of long-haired ex-soldiers simulating the Iwo Jima memorial, but with a flag held upside-down to signal distress; the picture graced the cover of a book that had Mr. Kerry as a co-author.
Fledgling War Critic
Mr. Kerry started his antiwar activities in the spring of 1969, when he was just back from Vietnam and working as an admiral's aide in Brooklyn. The death of another close friend in the war that April, he recalled in an interview, "sort of galvanized my feelings that I can't wait around - I've got to get out there and do something."
That fall, his sister Peggy, a volunteer for the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, offered that Mr. Kerry, an amateur pilot, fly Adam Walinsky, a former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy, to a series of antiwar rallies. On Oct. 15, the off-duty lieutenant shuttled Mr. Walinsky across New York state and pumped him for information.
The Navy man had one thing on his mind: politics. "He asked a lot of questions about Robert Kennedy, about the '68 campaign, what it had been about," Mr. Walinsky said. "The questions really were: `How does politics work? How do you get something done? How do you mobilize people?' "
A few months later, Mr. Kerry, freshly out of the service, ran in an antiwar caucus in Concord, Mass., that was convened to pick a primary challenger to a hawkish incumbent congressman. Liberals had already coalesced around the Rev. Robert F. Drinan, a war critic, but Mr. Kerry fared surprisingly well before bowing out and becoming chairman of the successful Drinan campaign. The run drew attention to Mr. Kerry and in May he was invited to speak against the war on "The Dick Cavett Show."
Two weeks later, he married Julia Thorne, and on a trip to Europe with his new bride, Mr. Kerry, the 26-year-old ex-lieutenant took a taxicab from Paris to a suburban villa. The son of a diplomat, Mr. Kerry had managed to arrange a private meeting with North Vietnamese and Vietcong emissaries to the peace talks.
He says he does not remember who else was in the room except for Nguyen Thi Binh, the Vietcong spokeswoman in Paris, who was then bedeviling the Nixon administration by issuing peace proposals it considered little more than propaganda.
"It's not a big deal," he says now. "People were dropping in. It was a regular sort of deal." Senator Eugene J. McCarthy had visited Paris months earlier, and other officials often sat in with the Vietnamese and held news conferences afterward.
Mr. Kerry said he considered it a fact-finding mission. The talks had been stalemated for months. Still on the table was a year-old Vietcong initiative that included an offer to release American prisoners of war when American forces pulled out.
Mr. Kerry recalled "testing what I thought the lay of the land was" in the meeting. "Not that you take their word for their word, but because you sort of put the pieces of the puzzle together."
Asked why the Vietnamese would meet with a 26-year-old, Mr. Kerry suggested it was because he had been on television as a veteran opposed to the war. He acknowledged that they might have been trying to use him to shape American public opinion.
"I knew that, and I was trying to be careful about what was real and what wasn't real," he said. "I wanted to really probe. I wanted to look them in the eyes, and say, `Well, what happens if this happens? And what does this mean?' "
Mr. Kerry came home, and before a Senate hearing 10 months later he criticized President Nixon for not accepting Mrs. Binh's assurances that the Vietnamese would release American prisoners of war if U.S. troops simply left.
Group Finds A Leader
It was sometime in the summer of 1970 that Mr. Kerry was contacted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. A member had seen him on television, and the group needed a speaker for a Labor Day rally.
The rally capped an 86-mile march from Morristown, N.J., to Valley Forge, Pa., two Revolutionary War sites, by a ragtag army of latter-day veterans. Mr. Kerry spoke after Jane Fonda and others, and he sounded a theme he would continue to refine, according to Douglas Brinkley's "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" (William Morrow, 2004): "We are here to say that it is not patriotism to ask Americans to die for a mistake."
He was a hit, by most accounts, although some say Mr. Kerry was bested by a handful of amputees from a nearby Army hospital who clambered aboard a pickup and brought the audience to tears.
Mr. Kerry, for his part, came away with a mixed impression: "I thought there was an authenticity and a level of pain and hurt and anger that was powerful, palpable, that really was very moving," but that their message was not yet ready to take to a wider audience, he says. "Some people would have had a hard time relating."
First Lt. William L. Calley Jr. was on trial in late 1970, and members of V.V.A.W. wanted to get out the word that, as Mr. Kerry would soon argue, the whole nation was really to blame for the My Lai massacre and was "scapegoating one man." Hoping to prove that American policy had given rise to widespread war crimes, the group arranged a gathering in Detroit where veterans could testify about what they had seen and done.
There had been similar sessions before, and some participants had turned out to be frauds. This time, veterans were required to bring their discharge papers.
Mr. Kerry heard men tell of torture, gang rape and the killing and mutilation of women and children. "It was jarring," Mr. Kerry says. "We'd all heard the stories - just scuttlebutt. But not firsthand."
The weekend was a bust, however, in what the veterans felt mattered most: publicity. "We just thought it was going to be an enormous event and turn everything upside down," says Bill Crandell, an ex-Army officer.
In a group discussion afterward, Mr. Kerry asserted himself for the first time. "John Kerry got up and said, `I have a suggestion that we take all of this that we want to convey in a march on Washington,' " said Jan Barry, who founded the veterans' group. "And on his feet, he convinced this group of angry people to put their anger into a creative direction."
The news media and Congress would not be able to ignore a demonstration in the capital, Mr. Kerry argued. He worked nonstop to promote the April 1971 demonstration, called Dewey Canyon III after military operations in Laos. He spent much of his time raising money, giving a kind of stump speech at house parties and meeting with wealthy donors.
"He would have one foot in the V.V.A.W. office, and the other in Wall Street," says George Butler, a longtime friend of Mr. Kerry who is now working on a feature-length film about him.
Show of Force
Dewey Canyon III, 33 years ago, was a whirlwind for Mr. Kerry and his fellow angry veterans, beginning when he and Mr. Hubbard, an Air Force veteran and V.V.A.W. leader, appeared on "Meet the Press." Protesters remember Mr. Kerry that week debating how they should return their medals, arguing unsuccessfully that they should not violate a Supreme Court order that they not sleep on the Mall and intervening to prevent veterans from being arrested when they did a can-can on the Supreme Court steps.
To many veterans, the emotional high point was on Friday, April 23, 1971, when they threw away their hard-won medals. Mr. Kerry would later be harshly criticized for discarding only his ribbons but keeping his medals, while actually throwing away the medals of two other men.
To many others, the high point was Mr. Kerry's testimony. "It legitimized us in the eyes of people who saw us as a bunch of dope-smoking hippies," Lenny Rotman of Boston said. "They didn't see John that way. Even my mother was saying, `If you stick with John Kerry, there'll be opportunities for you.' "
Mr. Kerry's fame was instant. Morley Safer profiled him on "60 Minutes." The publisher of a book about the veterans by Mr. Butler and David Thorne, another friend and veteran, suddenly insisted that Mr. Kerry be listed as an author. Offers came in for his own television program and for a record album.
The antiwar movement's new star was also coming under attack from the Nixon administration. The White House helped arrange for a pro-war Navy veteran to challenge Mr. Kerry to a debate. And F.B.I. files recently brought to light by Gerald Nicosia, an author who has chronicled the Vietnam veterans' movement, showed that the bureau closely monitored Mr. Kerry.
Fissures Among Protesters
Mr. Kerry was facing down another challenge, meanwhile, from within V.V.A.W.
Meeting in St. Louis in June 1971, the veterans debated what to do next. Some pushed in vain for a bigger march on Washington modeled after the 1932 Bonus Army. The increasingly militant Mr. Hubbard, several recall, proposed a new target, racism. He wanted to organize a convoy of supplies to Cairo, Ill., where armed whites were terrorizing black residents, who were at times retaliating with gunshots. Mr. Kerry said no. It would do nothing to advance the veterans' goal of ending the war, he said. And he refused to support anyone engaged in violence. "He just wanted to stay narrowly focused on Vietnam, and not let any fringe groups participate in things with us," said Mr. Hubbard.
Mr. Kerry's fame, wealth and rank were all making him a lightning rod. Several men accused him of hogging the limelight. "There was a great deal of resentment about that," said Michael McCusker of Portland, Ore. "I felt some of it. Suddenly, he's the one speaking for us, and we didn't choose him necessarily."
Mr. Kerry fended off the challenge and continued to raise money for the group - as much as 40 percent of its income, by one estimate - while also earning thousands of dollars on the lecture circuit. But he says he had emotionally checked out of V.V.A.W. after St. Louis and until recently said he had left the organization at that point.
But several news organizations, including The Kansas City Star and The New York Sun, have recently reported that Mr. Kerry also attended the meeting of the group in Kansas City, Mo., in late 1971 where killing opponents of the war was discussed.
Mr. Kerry says he still has no memory of being there but does not dispute the F.B.I. files. They describe the November meeting as tempestuous, with a showdown between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hubbard, who it turned out had lied about his rank, claiming to have been an Air Force captain when he had been a sergeant. His actual service in Vietnam was also called into serious question.
Participants said the meeting was also where Mr. Camil, an ex-marine from Florida, proposed killing American politicians who continued to support the war.
Terry DuBose, a Texan, says Mr. Camil and a few other men approached him to participate. "They wanted me to shoot John Tower," he says. "They had a list of six or eight senators who had continuously voted for the war."
Mr. DuBose says he just walked away. But Mr. Musgrave said Mr. Camil brought the idea up for a vote on the meeting's fourth day, a Monday. "It went over like a lead balloon," he says.
Messrs. Musgrave, DuBose, Camil and others who recall the discussion all say they do not recall Mr. Kerry's being present at the vote. Mr. Musgrave says he believes Mr. Kerry, having tendered his resignation, had left a day before. But Mr. Musgrave also says informal discussions of Mr. Camil's deadly idea had gone on all weekend, and "I don't think that there was anybody there that didn't hear about it."
Mr. Hubbard, hobbling from ancient back injuries around his home in a New Mexico trailer park, says his memory "draws a lot of blanks" and cannot even recall a spat with Mr. Kerry. And while the F.B.I. documents included minutes of the meeting prepared by Mike Oliver, a veteran from San Francisco, Mr. Oliver now insists they are a fabrication and swears he was never there.
"After 30 years, we're using F.B.I. files as if they're the Bible," he says. "That's weird, man, let me tell you."
Still, the campaign has tried to contain damage. One veteran, Randy Barnes, said he had questioned his own recollection after speaking to the campaign. And Mr. Musgrave, the ex-marine who told reporters that Mr. Kerry had been at the Kansas City meeting, said he remains livid about being questioned even though Mr. Hurley of the Kerry campaign later apologized to him and said he had not been trying to browbeat his fellow veteran. "I felt like Mr. Kerry, who I've admired all these years, was trying to make me look like I was lying," he said. "And I don't take kindly to that."
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Rights Group Says Sudan's Government Aided Militias' Raids
April 24, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/international/africa/24SUDA.html
DAKAR, Senegal, April 23 - Human Rights Watch on Friday issued a stinging report accusing the Arab-led Sudanese government of joining Arab militias in attacks on black Africans in the Darfur region of western Sudan, clearing villages, destroying their food supplies and executing men deemed enemies. It came on a day that the United Nations' top human rights body passed a resolution on human rights abuses in Darfur that the United States rejected as too soft on Sudan.
In an unusually strong report, based on interviews with Sudanese refugees across the border in Chad, a four-member team of investigators described the raids by the Arab militias, or "janjaweed," as "a reign of terror." The report, released to the news media earlier this week, documents rapes and killings of civilians, forced displacement of black Africans from their villages and aerial bombings by Sudanese military planes.
"Attacks carried out by the armed forces of Sudan and the janjaweed reflect a disturbing pattern of disregard for basic principles of human rights and humanitarian law," the report read. It went on to say that the human rights violations reported in Darfur "may constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity."
In some places, government planes bombed villages ahead of the militias' attacks and circled overhead afterward to see if the area had been cleared, according to Human Rights Watch. Elsewhere, the military and the militias set up a joint presence, "often in the local police station," before beginning an attack on a village, the group said in a statement accompanying the report.
One of the researchers, Julie Flint, who spent 25 days inside Darfur, said in a telephone interview from London on Friday that in a roughly 40-square-mile area she saw 11 of 13 villages burned, with the other two deserted. Homes and food storage areas were burned, she said. All that was left were bits of peanuts and shards of glass - remnants of tea glasses.
One villager, she said, brought her a list of 62 mosques that had been burned. She said she collected reports of massacres during prayer time at mosques. In two sweeps in March, she reported, Sudanese soldiers detained 136 African men whom the militias massacred hours later. "They are no longer working alone," Ms. Flint said of the militias.
According to United Nations estimates, the attacks have displaced 900,000 people inside Darfur and roughly another 100,000 refugees who have fled across the frontier, to Chad. Low-level clashes over land between Arabs, who are herders, and black Africans, who are farmers, broke out in a full-scale war in February 2003, when a rebel movement emerged.
Meanwhile, aid workers, so far restricted in their movements inside Darfur, are scrambling to ferry food, tarpaulins and other relief supplies to displaced peasants camped out across the vast, largely arid territory. Seasonal rains are likely to come in less than two months, making roads impassable. The government in Khartoum said earlier this week that it would allow a United Nations humanitarian assessment team to travel through the area.
Meanwhile, in Geneva, the United Nations' top human rights body stopped short of condemning the Khartoum government for "ethnic cleansing," choosing instead milder language to express its concern about "the scale of reported human rights abuses and the humanitarian situation in Darfur," and appointing a monitor to investigate the charges.
Fifty members of the United Nations Human Rights Commission backed the resolution, drafted by European Union countries. Washington rejected it, calling for stronger language, and there were two abstentions. The African Union also said Friday that it would dispatch cease-fire monitors to Darfur, and peace talks between the Sudanese government and two guerrilla groups resumed in Chad.
After the vote in Geneva, Richard S. Williamson, head of the United States delegation, called for an emergency session to review their decision after United Nations investigators return from a trip to Darfur. The team is in Sudan now.
Sudan's allies on the United Nations commission this week lashed out at United Nations officials, calling for an investigation into the leaks. Sudan has consistently denied responsibility for the actions of the janjaweed.
The United Nations, which has so far received pledges of $30 million, is calling on donor countries to provide another $130 million in emergency aid. United Nations officials have lately stepped up their criticism of the government in Darfur, as have those within the Bush administration.
In a report prepared for the United Nations commission meeting in Geneva, the Bush administration lashed out at Khartoum for barring aid groups and human rights investigators from the hardest-hit areas of Darfur. "The government of Sudan is denying assistance from reaching its own people," the report declared. "It is time that the international community stand united and denounce the violence and ethnic cleansing taking place in Sudan."
-------- business
Halliburton, in Iraq for the Long Haul, Recruits Employees Eager for Work
April 24, 2004
By SIMON ROMERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/business/worldbusiness/24halliburton.html?pagewanted=all&position=
HOUSTON, April 23 - Is Iraq the right destination for a 48-year-old with eight grandchildren? Cynthia Johnson, the grandmother in question, laughed at the query as she tried on an airtight yellow jumpsuit that might protect her from a chemical weapons attack.
Ms. Johnson and hundreds of others hired by the Halliburton Company packed into what used to be a J. C. Penney store at the Greenspoint Mall here this week to prepare to go to Iraq. She said her job there, serving food to American troops, was more promising than her previous occupation, cooking on an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
"The money's better and there's the feeling I'm doing something useful," said Ms. Johnson, a native of Deridder, La. "My daughters and grandchildren worry for me, but a job like this doesn't come up every day."
Other contractors, including General Electric and Siemens, have suspended their work in Iraq after an escalation of violence in the last month that singles out civilians. Halliburton, meanwhile, the most prominent company there with government contracts valued at $8 billion, appears to be gritting its teeth in anticipation of a long slog ahead.
Its frenzied efforts to prepare a new round of American workers to go to Iraq and the increasingly grim assessment of the risks there stand in contrast with the view that the contracts initially awarded to Halliburton last year, some without competitive bidding, would be a boon for the company.
Still, David J. Lesar, the company's chief executive, said Halliburton had no intention of slowing down in Iraq or leaving. "We're absolutely not going to pull out of there," Mr. Lesar said in an interview.
To be sure, Halliburton is the company Vice President Dick Cheney once ran, lifting it to prominence from its once obscure status as a concern known mostly for oilfield services. The company fought hard to secure the contracts that were once viewed as plum rewards but now have evolved into headaches and at times, a public relations nightmare. An early exit would seem untenable especially in light of the controversy surrounding Mr. Cheney's ties to the company, questions over how the company won some contracts and its overbilling for some services in Iraq.
None of this seems to slow the hundreds of people who stream into Houston each week from around the United States to vie for blue-collar jobs in Iraq. Most are lured by tax-free salaries of about $80,000 and sometimes more for overtime and unusually hazardous duty.
Many of those going through the two-week screening process were hesitant to give their names until passing background checks and absorbing the description of the risks associated with working in Iraq, which include graphic photos of wounded employees returning home. Some had not notified their bosses in other jobs or even their spouses that they might go to Iraq, fearful of doing so until absolutely sure of going.
"I guess I'm lucky not to have those issues since I'm unmarried, unemployed and ready for some steady work," said Michael Curry, 40, of Houston. Mr. Curry said he lost his job maintaining aircraft systems after air travel plummeted following the terrorist attacks in September 2001, so he was eager to be offered a position repairing air-conditioning units in Iraq by Halliburton. "This'll be my first time overseas, but I just want a job."
A grim acknowledgement that opportunities could outweigh risks pervades Halliburton's executive suite as well these days. Mr. Lesar's description of the mood at the company's spartan headquarters here is "solemn and serious." He should know, after returning last week from Kuwait to calm nerves among the company's truck drivers after three drivers were killed and one kidnapped in an ambush of their fuel convoy in nearby Iraq.
Since the start of the war, Halliburton has lost 33 employees and contractors in attacks or accidents in that country, more than the military casualties of any coalition member except the United States and Britain. Scrutinized by critics claiming it is profiteering from war, Halliburton has reluctantly admitted to overcharging the Pentagon for services like food preparation and gasoline delivery for American troops.
Adding to the pressure on the company, investors are groaning about measly profit margins the company has reported generated by its contracts in Iraq. With other contractors suspending their Iraqi operations in recent days, some are questioning why Halliburton does not limit its exposure to Iraq or at least consider selling the subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, handling its work there.
"From a business mix standpoint, the Iraq work has little or no fit with the rest of the organization," said Gary Russell, an analyst in Denver with Stifel Nicolaus, a brokerage firm, who looks favorably on the company's other operations. Mr. Russell noted the "razor thin" profit margins of the Iraq contracts, which range from a base level of 1 percent to 2 percent and slightly higher depending on the company's performance; margins climb to 10 percent for other jobs like building liquefied natural gas terminals.
Could Halliburton be ruing the day it entered Iraq? Not quite, as senior executives prepare to discuss the company's financial results with investors next Wednesday. Part of the appeal of the Iraq contracts lies in serving a loyal customer, the United States government, that pays its bills on time. "I think our shareholders understand why we're in this business," Mr. Lesar said, citing the company's work for American military operations around the world since World War II.
Still, Mr. Lesar, who has run Halliburton since his predecessor, Mr. Cheney, stepped down to campaign for vice president in 2000, did not rule out selling or spinning off Kellogg Brown & Root. But he pointed out the unit was currently in bankruptcy protection as part of an effort to resolve asbestos claims, a process that could take months to conclude before a decision can be made. "Besides, we still have a mission to do," Mr. Lesar said.
In the meantime, markets are rewarding Halliburton as it advances in other areas like oilfield services and the resolution of asbestos lawsuits and a costly contract dispute with Brazil's national oil company. Halliburton's stock has climbed nearly 50 percent in the last year, closing at $30.85 on Friday, fueled largely by optimism about its non-Iraq operations, which account for nearly 60 percent of the company's sales.
"Halliburton's benefited by the perception that investors don't think the sky is falling anymore," said James H. Stone, an analyst at UBS in New York. "But their work in Iraq has clearly been a retardant."
As Mr. Lesar and other executives seek a balance between operations in Iraq and other activities, the company proceeded to prepare truck drivers, electricians, plumbers, cooks and others, to join about 24,000 other employees and contractors Halliburton has in Iraq, an operation that has swelled to account for a quarter of its overall work force. No one gave any indication that hiring would slow down anytime soon.
Halliburton's training center remained the most frenzied area of the Greenspoint Mall this week, easily outranking in popularity the retailers and recruiting offices for the armed forces located down nearby shiny corridors. "I found out about this opportunity while on the road in South Carolina," said a Halliburton recruit from Marion, Ohio, who offered only his first name, Roe, and was hired as a truck driver.
"I'm just telling my sons I'm going there to help the Army," he said.
-------- iraq
U.S., U.N. Seek New Leaders For Iraq
Chalabi and Others Coalition Relied on May Be Left Out
By Robin Wright and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37921-2004Apr23.html
The United States and the top U.N. envoy to Iraq have decided to exclude the majority of the Iraqi politicians the U.S.-led coalition has relied on over the past year when they select an Iraqi government to assume power on June 30, U.S. and U.N. officials said yesterday.
The latest shift in policy comes as the U.S.-led coalition has to resolve some contentious and long-standing issues before the transfer takes place. Earlier this week, the coalition moved to allow former Baath Party members and military officers to return to government jobs.
At the top of the list of those likely to be jettisoned is Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite politician who for years was a favorite of the Pentagon and the office of Vice President Cheney, and who was once expected to assume a powerful role after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials acknowledged.
Chalabi has increasingly alienated the Bush administration, including President Bush, in recent months, U.S. officials said. He generated anger in Washington yesterday when he said a new U.S. plan to allow some former officials of Hussein's ruling Baath Party and military to return to office is the equivalent of returning Nazis to power in Germany after World War II.
Chalabi has headed the committee in charge of removing former Baathist officials. In a nationwide address yesterday designed to promote national reconciliation, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said complaints that the program is "unevenly and unjustly" administered are "legitimate" and that the overall program has been "poorly implemented."
That criticism may curtail Chalabi's influence over the removal of former officials -- and his power over the employment and income prospects of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Washington is also seriously considering cutting off the $340,000 monthly stipend to Chalabi's party, the Iraqi National Congress, according to a senior administration official familiar with the discussions. This would be a major change, because the INC has received millions of dollars in U.S. aid over the past decade as the primary vehicle for supporting the Iraqi opposition.
Chalabi is part of a wider problem, however. Polls indicate that most of the 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council have little public support nine months after they were appointed. The lack of popular backing is the main reason the United States and United Nations are seeking a new body to govern Iraq before national elections are held in January 2005, U.S. and U.N. officials said.
U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who is in charge of picking the new government in consultation with the U.S.-led coalition, made clear yesterday that the council should disband. "They have said twice, not once, in official documents they signed, that our term will end on the 30th of June," he said in an interview on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" to be aired Sunday.
"All opinion polls, and a lot are taken in Iraq, say that people want something different" than expansion of the council because they fear council members "will clone themselves. And why do you want to have that?" Brahimi asked.
U.S. and U.N. officials generally fear that the continued involvement of too many council members will contaminate efforts to create a credible Iraqi government, they said.
Under a new U.N. proposal, Brahimi is expected to return to Baghdad around May 1 to finish discussions and then select Iraqis for 29 positions -- a prime minister to head the government, a ceremonial president and two vice presidents, plus 25 cabinet officers, U.S. officials said.
In his most specific language to date, Brahimi told ABC that these positions should be filled by "mainly technocrats" who are "widely representative" of Iraq's diverse ethnic and religious communities.
Rather than excluding Chalabi or any other Governing Council member by name from the new government, he said that "people who have political parties and are leaders of their parties should get ready to win the election . . . and stay out of the interim government."
Some council members might be retained, but more likely in cabinet posts rather than in the top four jobs, U.S. officials said. Others could be tapped to participate in a national consultative assembly, which Brahimi has proposed should advise the provisional government.
All council members will then be free to test their political appeal in the January elections to see how they would fare without U.S. support, U.S. officials added. With only nine weeks left until the handover, the United Nations, the coalition and Iraqis are scrambling to come up with lists of candidates for the top jobs, which Brahimi will compare when he returns to Iraq, U.S. officials said.
But the political battles are not yet over, U.S. and U.N. officials warned. Chalabi, who went into exile in 1958, is still pressing for the council to be retained in some form; he also has been a leading critic of Brahimi, a Sunni Muslim and former Algerian foreign minister, and his proposals for Iraq.
Acknowledging that Chalabi has challenged him as biased against the Shiites, Brahimi said any such suggestion is "silly." Without referring to Chalabi, he said those who are "sniping" against him on the religious issue "have agendas that have nothing to do with the fact that I am a Sunni."
But he said opponents of his new plan for Iraq's transition "may very well succeed in derailing what we are trying to do. But I think if they succeed, it will not be very good for Iraq or for the international community."
-------
U.S. Official Acknowledges Mistakes in Iraq
Bremer Asks Former Army Officers to Help Create Force;
Shiite Cleric Issues Threat
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37925-2004Apr23?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 23 -- The U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, acknowledged Friday that mistakes had been made in the occupation of the country and invited former Iraqi army officers who served under ousted president Saddam Hussein to help establish a new national force.
Bremer's statements came the same day a rebellious Shiite cleric, Moqtada Sadr, threatened to launch suicide bombings if U.S. forces entered the holy city of Najaf, where he has taken refuge. "We will all be time bombs in the face of the enemy," Sadr told followers at Friday prayers.
Bremer said Iraq's newly named minister of defense would meet with "vetted senior officers from the former regime next week to discuss how best to build the new Iraqi military establishment." Bremer also conceded that a policy barring teachers who were members of the former ruling Baath Party from returning to work had been poorly administered.
He also appealed for Iraqis to rally around the American-led effort to establish security in the country one year into its occupation.
A coalition spokesman said Bremer was not abandoning a sweeping "de-Baathification" edict designed to purge Iraq of the oppressive political apparatus installed by Hussein.
But Bremer's statements, broadcast twice Friday and scheduled to be aired again in coming days, signaled a more inclusive approach by the occupation authority, which has been rattled by insurgent attacks across much of Iraq this month and disappointed by the performance of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces who were asked to help contain the violence. U.S. officials have said 40 percent of Iraqi police walked off the job when Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, seized control of Najaf and the adjacent town of Kufa on April 4.
"We recognize that we cannot provide real security unless Iraqis stand shoulder to shoulder with us," Bremer said.
In Basra, where five car bombs killed 74 people Wednesday, police arrested two men in a truck carrying three tons of TNT and three others in a house containing more than a ton of explosives, the Associated Press reported. Twenty more tons of explosives were discovered at a second house.
The news agency cited a police official as saying that the five men confessed to preparing eight car bombs and were working with a Syrian affiliated with al Qaeda who travels frequently to Kuwait.
Also Friday, one U.S. military fatality was reported. A soldier with the 1st Armored Division was killed by an improvised explosive device near Samarra, 62 miles north of Baghdad. His death brought to at least 510 the number of Americans killed in combat in Iraq, including more than 100 this month, since the March 2003 invasion.
[Early Saturday, the U.S. military said a Marine assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died Thursday of wounds incurred in combat on April 14 in Anbar province, which includes the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, the Reuters news agency reported.]
According to Pentagon figures released Friday, almost 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded since April 1, more than triple the monthly average. Of the 595 wounded in action in the two weeks since the last report, 257 returned to duty after treatment.
Fighting has ebbed in the past week, but militia fighters ambushed a coalition patrol Friday in Karbala, killing a Bulgarian soldier before burning and looting a 2 1/2-ton military truck. Mahdi Army fighters roam freely in the city, considered the second-holiest in Shiite Islam after Najaf, where a force of 2,000 U.S. soldiers and armor waits on the outskirts.
U.S. commanders have said they will "kill or capture" Sadr if given the opportunity. But Bremer assured Iraqis that the coalition preferred to work with more senior Shiite leaders to disarm Sadr's militia there. "We in the coalition recognize the holy nature of these cities," Bremer said.
Sadr broached the possibility of suicide bombings during his regular Friday sermon in Kufa.
"Some of the mujaheddin brothers have told me they want to carry out martyrdom attacks, but I am postponing this," he told an audience of thousands. "When we are forced to do so, and when our city and holy sites are attacked, we will all be time bombs in the face of the enemy."
"My goal is to liberate Iraq," Sadr said, calling on Arab nations to support the insurgency. He equated the plight of Iraqis to that of Palestinians and vowed to avenge Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi this month "by act, not speech."
In prayers at another major mosque in Baghdad, a Sunni cleric warned U.S. commanders not to launch another attack on Fallujah.
"We warn you against another massacre in Fallujah," said Ahmed Abdul-Ghafoor Samaraie. "If there will be more bloodletting and more people killed in Fallujah, one hundred Fallujahs will stand against you."
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the joint task force in Iraq , said residents of the city continued to defy the terms of a peace agreement, including failing to turn in heavy weapons and offering up instead only a few rusty old guns.
Echoing field commanders who have warned of a renewed U.S. offensive "within days," Kimmitt also brushed aside distinctions between Fallujah residents who might favor peace and the foreign fighters and other zealots who Bremer said were "holding the city hostage from within."
"Our soldiers and our Marines have the inherent right of self-defense," Kimmitt said. "Whether that is somebody who is trying to defend their city, which seems to be somewhat of a ludicrous concept, or somebody who's just out to kill an American, both of those will find the full force of the United States Marine Corps and the coalition brought down on them."
In his speech, Bremer reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to turning over sovereign control of Iraq on June 30 to a caretaker government to be appointed by a U. N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi.
On Friday, a U.N. spokesman distanced the institution from Brahimi's remarks in a French radio interview Thursday, in which the former Algerian foreign minister said U.S. support for Israel was making his job in Iraq harder.
"The problems are linked, there is no doubt about it," Brahimi said. "The big poison in the region is the Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians."
Special correspondents Saad Sarhan in Kufa and Nasir Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.
-------
MILITARY
U.S. Issues Blunt Warning to Besieged Falluja Rebels
April 24, 2004
By IAN FISHER and STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/search/abstract?res=F50D1FF8395E0C778EDDAD0894DC404482
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 23 - The American authorities increased the pressure on besieged insurgents in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Falluja on Friday with a series of blunt warnings that if they did not lay down their arms, United States soldiers would attack within days.
A senior Bush administration official in Washington said that although a decision had not been made to attack pending a final round of negotiations, "there isn't much time left." He said the administration felt a sense of urgency because the insurgents had turned over only outdated weapons and because Falluja faced an imminent human crisis, with residents in dire need of food and medicine.
"Our patience is not eternal," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for the American-led military command in Baghdad.
The American warnings came as L. Paul Bremer III, chief of the American occupation authority, delivered a stark television address on Friday in which he declared that "Iraq faces a choice" and that the American plan to bring stability and democracy here might not succeed unless ordinary Iraqis come quickly to its defense.
"If you do not defend your beloved country, it will not be saved," he said.
Mr. Bremer's 20-minute speech marked his first substantial comments to Iraqis since the worst violence of the yearlong occupation erupted late last month, with the deaths of some 100 American troops, attacks on supply convoys, kidnappings and killings of foreigners and the announced withdrawal of 2,000 troops from three allied countries.
As American officials spoke of a looming confrontation in Falluja, Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy enlisted by President Bush to help put together a plan for an Iraqi government, warned that any military action would be counterproductive. "When you surround a city, you bomb the city, when people cannot go to hospital, what name do you have for that?" Mr. Brahimi said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos in Paris for the ABC News program "This Week," to be broadcast Sunday. "And you, if you have enemies there, this is exactly what they want you to do, to alienate more people so that more people support them rather than you."
He added, "I very much hope - I don't know all what is happening now - but in this situation, there is no military solution."
An attack on Falluja, predominantly Sunni Muslim, risks inflaming Shiites as well. Earlier American attacks on the city aroused widespread anger across Iraq, and drove many Shiites to offer food and other support to the insurgents there.
Vice President Dick Cheney, while he did not mention Falluja in a political appearance in Kansas City, Mo., listed terror attacks in Karbala, Najaf, and Baghdad, as well as other cities of the world, in a broader warning of American resolve in the global campaign against terrorists.
"Such an enemy cannot be deterred, cannot be contained, cannot be appeased, or negotiated with," he said. "It can only be destroyed. And that is the business at hand."
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, suggested in an interview on Friday that he was likely to ask for another extension in the current troop levels in Iraq, now at 135,000, and might even ask for more troops beyond that.
Taken together, the comments on Friday marked a change in the recent upbeat tone of American officials as the Bush administration has begun to lay its plans for a transition to Iraqi self-rule on June 30. Mr. Bremer, in particular, abandoned the celebratory tone with which he marked the anniversary a month ago of the American invasion, offering instead a sober list of specific programs aimed at reclaiming public opinion that seems to have veered sharply against the Americans as security has deteriorated.
He said he would approve an immediate injection of $500 million to build local facilities like roads and schools, projects that employ Iraqis. In addition, he said he would authorize $10 million for a study on how best to memorialize the hundreds of thousands of victims of Saddam Hussein.
At the same time, he reached out to officials of the old government and offered a faster way to rebuild the Iraqi Army, disbanded by Mr. Bremer a year ago, by saying the Americans would begin reinstating many of the "honorable men" who served as senior officers in Mr. Hussein's army. He also pledged to hire thousands of teachers and university professors who were low-level Baath Party members and had gone through a vetting process.
But he began with a warning of what was at stake as Iraq approached the June 30 transfer of some sovereignty, and an admission that American military power alone might not be enough.
He and other officials predict that violence will only intensify as that date nears.
"You could take the path that leads to a new Iraq, a peaceful, democratic Iraq," he said. "Or you could take the path which leads to the dark Iraq of the past where violence and fear rule, where power comes from a gun, and where only the powerful and ruthless are secure."
"These anti-democratic forces will not disappear by themselves, but working together we can defeat them," he added, referring to insurgents. "We in the coalition will do our part to restore security. But you must do your part too."
The Falluja conflict seemed to be reaching a crisis despite the efforts of civic leaders in the city who earlier this week agreed with American officials to work to persuade the insurgents, who include a number of foreign fighters, to turn in their weapons in exchange for a peaceful end to the standoff.
Meanwhile, a second standoff with Shiites showed no signs of easing. In his Friday sermon, the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who led a broad anti-American uprising this month, threatened to stage suicide attacks if occupation forces invaded Najaf or Karbala, two cities south of Baghdad held holy by Shiites.
"We will be human time bombs which would explode in their faces," Mr. Sadr said at the grand mosque in Kufa, which like the adjacent city of Najaf is encircled by 2,500 American soldiers.
Inside Karbala, a Bulgarian soldier was shot and killed after an attack on a military convoy on Friday by militiamen loyal to Mr. Sadr.
The confrontations in Najaf and Falluja pose a crucial test for the occupation forces here, and American forces are moving with what appears to be extreme caution between two difficult choices: Attacks on insurgents in either city, especially if they result in many dead and wounded, risk deepening anger and violence against the American occupation. At the same time, not acting risks emboldening insurgents likely to question American resolve.
Mr. Bremer also told Iraqis that even after the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, American-led forces would remain in the country. His pledge on the extent of sovereignty to be turned over seemed fuller than those of several officials in Washington, who have said in recent days that any new government would be limited in its abilities to pass laws or overrule American decisions.
But he devoted much of his speech to shifts in two of his most contentious decisions: to disband the Iraqi Army and to ban former Baathists from new government jobs.
While praised by many Iraqis for excluding members of an oppressive government, critics have asserted that the decisions deprived the country of experienced soldiers, bureaucrats and technicians necessary for a functioning government. The decision to disband the army has come under particular criticism given the pressing need for forces to contain the insurgency and what even United States officials say is poor performance by some of the new recruits.
Dan Senor, Mr. Bremer's spokesman, rejected suggestions that the decision was a change in the policy, saying rather that it was a "technical correction in the implementation of procedures" already in place to allow blameless party members to return to work.
Amid a spate of kidnappings of foreigners here, most of whom have since been released, Nabil George Yaqub Razzouk, 30, an Israeli Arab who worked for an American aid organization, was set free unharmed on Thursday after being seized April 8.
Ian Fisher reported from Baghdad for this article and Steven R. Weisman from Washington.
--------
NAJAF
Radical Cleric Is Unwanted by His Neighbors
April 24, 2004
By ABDUL RAZZAQ AL-SAEIDY and EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/international/middleeast/24NAJA.html
NAJAF, Iraq, April 23 - The black-turbaned imam sounded ready for martyrdom.
Standing in the courtyard of the golden-domed Shrine of Ali on Friday, staring at 2,500 worshipers seated on rugs, the imam, Sadr al-Din al-Kubanchi, hurled words as sharp as scimitars at the army that had invaded this holy city.
But the soldiers he denounced were not Americans but members of the ragtag Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army. Dozens of them, bristling with Kalashnikovs and grenade belts, surrounded the shrine even as Mr. Kubanchi spoke.
They and their young spiritual leader, Moktada al-Sadr, had brought their war with the Americans to Najaf nearly three weeks ago, when they retreated here after a short-lived revolt against the occupation forces. More than 2,500 American soldiers have encircled the city in an attempt to flush out Mr. Sadr - and the residents here are caught in the middle.
"It's not brave to take refuge in the house or the mosque or the markets and use women and children as human shields," Mr. Kubanchi said of the Mahdi Army. "They are people who are trying to cheat you, and they are people from the regime of Saddam Hussein, former intelligence officers. They want to drag you into battle to be destroyed. If that happens, the soldiers will attack Najaf, and our enemies will happily see our blood flow."
The standoff in Najaf has turned into a showdown between the clerics of the city and Mr. Sadr, as the religious and tribal leaders here try to nudge their unwanted neighbor out of town.
They are men of the book rather than of the bullet, so they are seeking to pry Mr. Sadr loose through their powers of rhetoric.
They know that the hopes of a majority of Shiites of overcoming the long-running domination of Sunni Muslims rest with the success of the Americans' efforts to establish a largely democratic Iraq. They know, as well, that by advocating armed rebellion, Mr. Sadr's forces play into the hands of the violent Iraqi insurgents who seek to drive the United States out and reassert Sunni dominance.
Gingerly, since Mr. Sadr now runs the city, they have handed out flyers and given speeches urging the Mahdi Army to take its fight elsewhere. They have done so while their mosques and homes are surrounded by undisciplined militiamen.
On Friday, more than 100 members of the Mahdi Army stood around or roamed in small groups throughout downtown Najaf. Some wore the black shirts and black pants usually associated with the Mahdi Army, but many carried out their patrols in T-shirts, track suits, tennis shoes and leather sandals.
A few traffic policemen in light blue uniforms stood at the town's major intersections. They carried no weapons.
Members of Mr. Sadr's militia cruised around the streets in pickup trucks once used by the police. The trucks, their bodies originally blue and white, had been repainted entirely white. Men shouldering rocket-propelled grenade launchers sat in the back. One pickup truck carrying a half dozen men with AK-47's pulled up near the Shrine of Ali. The militiamen hopped out onto the street and dragged an unarmed man from the truck. They marched him into a two-story building that serves as the makeshift courthouse where Mr. Sadr's clerics dispense Shariah, or Islamic law.
Mr. Sadr spent most of Friday afternoon at his mosque in the town of Kufa, just five miles north along a dusty road. No policemen walked the streets there, and members of the Mahdi Army stood at checkpoints along the main avenue and loitered around public buildings, including the library, the police station and the courthouse.
Even as Mr. Kubanchi began his tirade in Najaf against the Mahdi Army, Mr. Sadr walked into a mosque full of worshipers pumping their fists in the air.
"We will be human time bombs which will explode in their faces," Mr. Sadr said. "They have humiliated us, so how will we react? We believe we can humiliate them."
Mr. Sadr delivered his sermon wrapped in the kind of white cloth usually draped over a Muslim's body before burial.
Abdul Razzaq al-Saeidy reported from Najaf and Kufa for this article and Edward Wong from Baghdad.
--------
Fallujah Residents Report US Forces Engaged in Collective Punishment
April 24, 2004
by Dahr Jamail
The New Standard
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jamail.php?articleid=2382
Three families of refugees from the besieged city of Fallujah who are seeking refuge in the Al-Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad, described the conditions in the embattled city of Fallujah as "a horrible disaster." A man called Khaled Abu Mujahed, speaking from Fallujah on behalf of the Islamic Party, stated that while some relief supplies are getting inside the city, a great number of families remain trapped in their homes, and the stench of dead bodies has become overpowering.
Refugees streamed out of Fallujah when fighting began after United States Marines placed the city under siege, cut off power supplies and began an invasion of the city. Resistance forces referred to by locals as mujahideen fought back, killing scores of US troops. Americans killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians, plus an unknown number of Iraqi fighters.
Crowded inside an empty house in the Al-Adhamiya district of Baghdad, Abu Muher, patriarch of one family that left Fallujah last Saturday, told of a harrowing journey out of his home city. "We were nearly bombed by the Americans when we tried to leave on Friday," he said. "Bombs fell in front and behind us, so we had to turn back. Saturday we were lucky to escape."
Estimates of total refugees vary, but most reports suggest at least 60,000 Fallujans - or about a quarter of the city's population - have fled Fallujah for Baghdad and other cities.
Abu Muher said US warplanes were bombing the city heavily last Saturday prior to his departure, and that Marine snipers continued to take their toll, shot after shot, on residents of the besieged city. "There were so many snipers, anyone leaving their house was killed," he recalled.
Abu Muher, along with two other men from Fallujah who arrived in Baghdad last weekend, said American warplanes had dropped cluster bombs on a road behind their houses in Fallujah. One of the men was too afraid to permit his name to be used in this article. "My neighbors saw the bomblets," he said, "and I heard the horrible sound that only the cluster bombs make when they are dropped on us. My home was hit by their shrapnel. I was too afraid to leave my home to look for myself because of the snipers."
Abdul Aziz, the 15 year-old son of Abu Muher, stated, "I saw two of my neighbors shot by US snipers when I went outside one time. I also saw some of the small cluster bombs on the ground that were dropped by the warplanes of the Americans. Most times, we were too afraid even to look out of our windows."
Another refugee, speaking on condition of anonymity, angrily asked, "This is the way the Americans are freeing Iraq? America's freedom is killing Iraqis. Fallujah is becoming another Palestine. How long will we have to live like this?"
The three men stated that the city remains without electricity, and although they had running water, they used a generator most of the time.
Abu Muher's neighbor, a man named Abdel Salam, said medical relief was being delayed or prevented from reaching the people of Fallujah. "Sunday when we left the city, we saw an ambulance from the United Arab Emirates turned around from the main checkpoint by the Americans. Why are they not allowing ambulances into Fallujah?"
According to official US military statements, ambulances are being escorted into Fallujah on a regular basis. Reached for comment earlier this week, Christy Clemmons of the Coalition Provisional Authority press center for Iraq's Ministry of Health insisted emergency vehicles were reaching the city. "We are working with the Ministry of Health and have so far permitted 46 ambulances to Fallujah," she said. "The US military are escorting the ambulances since in the past they have been commandeered by insurgents and used to attack US soldiers."
Iraq Red Crescent Secretary General Faris Hamed told The NewStandard on Monday that no Red Crescent ambulances had been allowed into Fallujah since April 13, during the peak of fighting in the city. Hamed has been unreachable for an updated report.
A resident of Al-Adhamiya willingly cleared his home for these refugees and is housing them, free of charge. He donated food to them as well.
Speaking by phone today from inside Fallujah, Islamic Party spokesman Abu Mujahed, who is assisting in the distribution of aid as well as negotiations with the US military, said there is still a large number of civilians in Fallujah who cannot get out of the besieged city.
"So many people are lacking water, electricity and medical services," he said. "Most of the time nobody can get in or out of Fallujah."
Mujahed stated that yesterday the US military broke the supposed ceasefire by staging an incursion into the Julan neighborhood as well as the Industrial sector of Fallujah. He added, "This is a disaster! Only a few people can get to the main hospital because the Americans are controlling it. Snipers are firing into Julan and killing so many civilians."
US military reports said the assault on Julan was in response to attacks by insurgents. Battalian commander Lt. Colonel Brennan Byrne told the Associated Press he considered the insurgent activity to be a "major breach" of the agreement the US military says it brokered with resistance forces. The AP further reported that 20 Iraqis and no Americans were killed in the overnight skirmishes.
Mujahed said that supplies from throughout Iraq were being sent to Fallujah. He said they had even received aid shipments from the followers of the rebellious Shi'ite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, and he felt the situation was uniting all Iraqis.
"Women are bringing their gold from Baquba, a man in a wheelchair from Kirkuk brought his wheelchair, then used crutches to leave after he donated it, and supplies are coming from Mosul, Adhamiya, Tikrit, Nasariyah, Baquba, everywhere in Iraq you can think of," Mujahed said.
The party official also reported that while 50 families were allowed to return to Fallujah Tuesday, only seven were permitted Wednesday. Many refugees report having found nowhere suitable to go outside their hometown.
The lockdown war ordered despite reports from Fallujah residents that many of the mujahideen have turned their weapons over to Iraqi Police as a condition of the ceasefire edict. Lt. Col. Byrne told the AP most of the weapons turned over in accordance with US demands were unusable and did not comply with the Marines' insistence on acquiring all of Fallujah's heavy weaponry.
In retaliation for the fighters' noncompliance, Byrne said the Marines would not permit any of the hundreds of Iraqis lined up at a nearby checkpoint to return to their homes, at least for the time being.
"We have at least 700 dead from the fighting," Mujahed reported from inside Fallujah. "So many of them are children and women. The stench from the dead bodies in parts of the city is unbearable."
He said US aircraft had bombed five houses in Julan the previous night, and the mujahideen have now taken positions and are waiting for the Marines to return for the full scale invasion the US has threatened.
Coalition spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said that US Marines continue "aggressive patrols and offensive operations," in the Fallujah area, "as well as providing humanitarian assistance to the citizens of Fallujah." Iraqis interviewed for this story said they had only witnessed the former aspect of the dual role.
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon Says Pledge to Spare Arafat Is Lifted
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36669-2004Apr23.html
JERUSALEM, April 23 -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday that he was no longer bound by a promise to the United States to avoid harming the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. The White House objected, saying Sharon should continue to honor the pledge.
In an interview on Israeli television Friday night, Sharon said he told President Bush in a meeting at the White House last week that he felt relieved of a vow he made to Bush about three years ago not to kill or injure Arafat, the elected president of the Palestinian Authority.
"I freed myself from this obligation not to physically harm Arafat," Sharon said in an excerpt of during an interview that he gave to Israel's Channel Two. The station said the full interview would air Tuesday, Israel's Independence Day. Hours after Sharon's statement was broadcast here, the White House responded by saying that during last week's meeting Bush had reiterated his opposition to any move by Israel to target Arafat.
"We have made it entirely clear to the Israeli government that we would oppose any such action," National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said. "The president was pretty clear."
Administration officials said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice called Dov Weissglas, Sharon's chief of staff, to raise concerns about Sharon's comments. "We consider a pledge a pledge," said a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The quick response reflected the Bush administration's concern that Sharon's statement would further inflame anti-American passions in the region. There has been a strong Arab backlash against Bush's endorsement of Sharon's plan to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip but keep several large settlements in the West Bank.
Sharon's statement follows Israel's assassination of the top two leaders of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in the Gaza Strip. On March 22, the group's spiritual leader and founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was killed in an Israeli missile strike as he was being pushed home in a wheelchair from a mosque. Six days ago, Yassin's replacement in Gaza, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was also killed in an Israeli missile attack.
"This proves the point that Sharon intends to destroy the peace process and the Palestinian Authority and kill President Arafat, and the alternative will be more chaos and more anarchy and more bloodshed," said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel.
Arafat, 74, has been confined to his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah since March 2002, out of fear that if he appeared in public, Israeli soldiers might arrest and deport him.
At that time, Bush sought and received assurances from Sharon that he would not allow Arafat to be harmed, despite numerous demands from some Israeli politicians that he be killed or exiled somewhere outside Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for sealing the Oslo peace accords, which envisioned a land-for-peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. Several years later, each side accused the other of reneging on key aspects of the accords, sparking the renewed fighting that broke out in September 2000 and has continued since. About 950 Israelis and 2,750 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict.
Israel has accused Arafat of embracing terrorism as a bargaining tool instead of engaging in political negotiations. Sharon has rejected Arafat as a negotiating partner, a position endorsed by Bush, who has refused to allow American officials to meet with Arafat, insisting that the Palestinians embrace a new set of leaders "not compromised by terror."
Also Friday, Palestinian security sources reported that three men who had been arrested in connection with the killing of three U.S. security guards in the Gaza Strip last October escaped Wednesday from the Saraya Prison in central Gaza City. Palestinian militants said they freed the men after storming the prison with guns and grenades. The three escapees, members of a radical group called the Popular Resistance Committees, were supposed to have been released more than five weeks ago, after a judge ruled there was insufficient evidence against them. Prison officials had refused to free the suspects, however, until receiving a written order from Arafat, which never came.
"The court said clearly the men were to be released, and we have just released them," a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, Abu Abir, told the Reuters news agency. "We did not break the law; it was an implementation of the law."
Meanwhile, four men were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank -- three in the city of Qalqiliya and one in Taluza, a village about three miles northeast of Nablus. An Israeli army spokeswoman said that the three men killed in Qalqiliya were members of the radical al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and that they were shot at about 4 a.m. while trying to run away from undercover Israeli soldiers who had gone to arrest them. The militants were not armed, she said.
In Taluza, Israeli soldiers opened fire on three armed men who they were trying to arrest, killing a member of Hamas, the spokeswoman said. She declined to identify the victim. Friends identified him as Yasser Abu Laymoun, 32, a professor at Arab American University of Jenin. They denied that he was a member of Hamas.
Staff writers Glenn Kessler and Dana Milbank in Washington contributed to this report.
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Sharon Says His Pledge Not to Harm Arafat No Longer Holds
April 24, 2004
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/international/middleeast/24MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, April 23 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday that he no longer considered himself bound by his pledge not to harm Yasir Arafat, his most explicit statement yet that he might take action against the Palestinian leader.
Mr. Sharon acceded three years ago to President Bush's request not to physically harm Mr. Arafat. But in an interview on Israel's Channel 2 television on Friday night, Mr. Sharon said he told Mr. Bush during their White House meeting last week that "this commitment of mine no longer exists."
When asked if that meant physically harming Mr. Arafat, Mr. Sharon replied, "I do not think this matter can be made any clearer." The Israeli leader did not say how Mr. Bush responded.
The contention that Israel was free of any commitment not to kill Mr. Arafat was rejected by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Friday.
"The president made it clear that he would oppose any such attempts against Mr. Arafat, and the president firmly believes that he has a commitment from Prime Minister Sharon that no such attempt will be made," Mr. Powell said on the ABC News program "Nightline."
Nabil Aburdeineh, an aide to Mr. Arafat, criticized Mr. Sharon for "dangerous statements that may lead the whole region to great risks."
In the past year, Mr. Sharon has gradually backed away from his pledge to Mr. Bush.
In September, shortly after two Palestinian suicide bombings, his security cabinet agreed in principle to "remove" Mr. Arafat, saying he encouraged terrorism.
Earlier this month, Mr. Sharon further indicated that he might act, saying in interviews that Mr. Arafat had "no insurance policy."
The recent targeted killings of the Hamas founder and leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and his successor, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, showed Mr. Sharon's willingness to go after the leaders of Palestinian factions involved in violence against Israel. But several Israeli officials have said recently that there are no imminent plans to act against Mr. Arafat. In the past, Israeli security officials have said they believe that keeping Arafat in his current situation - confined to his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah - is the best thing for Israel. If Mr. Arafat were exiled, he would be able to plead his case throughout the world. If he were harmed, Israel would face strong international condemnation.
In New York on Friday, the diplomatic "quartet" of sponsors of the Middle East peace proposal known as the road map said they would meet May 4 at the United Nations to explore ways to resuscitate the stalled plan. The quartet consists of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union.
In separate developments on Friday, Israeli forces in the West Bank killed four Palestinians they described as wanted men in two operations, capping a violent week in which about 25 Palestinians were killed. The Palestinians said one of the men killed was a university lecturer with no ties to militant groups.
Israeli military officials said that about 11:30 a.m., forces opened fire on three armed men from the Hamas faction in a field in the village of Taluza, north of Nablus. One man was killed while the other two escaped, they said. Palestinians identified the slain man as Yaser Ahmed Abu-Laymoun, 33, a lecturer in the faculty of administrative and financial sciences at the Arab American University in Jenin.
Dr. Waleed Deeb, president of the university, said Yaser Ahmed Abu-Laymoun, who earned his master's degree at Philadelphia University in Pennsylvania, had taught courses on hospital administration for the past two years. Dr. Deeb said Mr. Abu-Laymoun was not politically active.
"If he's really wanted, he would not be able to cross checkpoints on a daily basis to come to the university," Dr. Deeb said. "He has no ties to anybody except family and work."
Earlier on Friday, Israeli military officials said, undercover forces entered the West Bank town of Qalqilya to arrest four wanted operatives of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, another militant group. The Palestinians tried to flee, the Israelis said, and did not heed repeated warnings to stop. The forces then opened fire. Palestinian witnesses, however, said no warning calls were issued.
Three men were killed, and a fourth, identified by Israel as Ataf Sharif, the local commander of the militant group, was wounded but escaped, Israeli military officials said.
In a separate development, members of a Palestinian faction entered a Palestinian Authority security building in the Gaza Strip and freed three men who had been arrested in connection with the killing in October of three American security workers.
Earlier this year, a Palestinian court ordered that the three men, along with a fourth, be set free because of a lack of evidence. But a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant group to which some of the men belong, said Friday that Mr. Arafat had not permitted their release. Supporters of the men said they had freed them on Wednesday night.
-------- spies
Zur: Israel has infiltrated Hamas leadership
Apr. 24, 2004
By JPOST.COM STAFF
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1082793078162
Border Police head Cmdr. David Zur, said Saturday that "Israel has people in the leadership of the Hamas."
Zur was responding to a question posed to him regarding Israel's success in finding and killing top terrorist leaders, Ynet reported.
Zur was speaking at a cultural event in Beer Sheba.
"We are excelling in everything connected to human intelligence. We're investing in agents. Israel has excelled beyond belief in this field," Zur said.
-------- un
U.N. Distances Itself From an Envoy's Rebuke of Israel and the U.S.
April 24, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/international/middleeast/24NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, April 23 - United Nations officials moved Friday to disassociate the organization from damning remarks about Israel and United States policy in the Middle East made by its special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi.
The action was prompted by a radio interview in Paris earlier this week in which Mr. Brahimi said Israel's repressive policy and Washington's support of it were poisoning the Middle East and aggravating the situation in Iraq.
According to Agence France-Presse, Mr. Brahimi said on France Inter radio: "The problems are connected. There is no doubt that the great poison in the region is this Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians, as well as the perception of the body of the population in the region and beyond of the injustice of this policy and the equally unjust support of the United States for this policy."
Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said Mr. Brahimi was speaking as a private individual, not as a United Nations official.
"I think as a preliminary reaction," Mr. Eckhard added, "I could say that, as you know, he is a former foreign minister of Algeria, and therefore he brings to the table strongly held and strongly expressed views about the Middle East peace process."
Asked if Mr. Annan agreed with Mr. Brahimi's reference to Israel representing poison, Mr. Eckhard said: "The secretary general has been expressing his own view in statements over the last several years. They do not contain the word `poison.' "
Arye Mekel, Israel's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said he questioned the explanation that Mr. Brahimi was speaking just for himself.
"Such statements put into question the objectivity of the U.N.," he said.
Mr. Mekel said Israel had not yet decided on its official reaction to Mr. Brahimi's comments.
Mr. Brahimi is due at the United Nations on Tuesday to brief the Security Council on his 11 days of consultations in Iraq and his suggestions for a caretaker government to follow the June 30 transfer of power from the American-led coalition.
The United States supported Mr. Brahimi for this task, and President Bush mentioned him by name at a White House news conference last week as the man "figuring out the nature of the entity we'll be handing sovereignty over" to.
-------- us
U.S. Soldiers Re-Enlist in Strong Numbers
(AP)
Apr 24, 2004
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040424/D8255UT80.html
A U.S Army soldier checks the id's of Iraqis driving into the embattled Baghdad suburb of Abu... Full Image
FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. (AP) - Despite the shrapnel wounds Staff Sgt. William Pinkley suffered during his tour in Iraq, the 26-year-old is joining other soldiers who are re-enlisting at rates that exceed the retention goals set by the Pentagon.
As of March 31 - halfway through the Army's fiscal year - 28,406 soldiers had signed on for another tour of duty, topping the six-month goal of 28,377. The Army's goal is to re-enlist 56,100 soldiers by the end of September.
Pinkley re-enlisted for three more years, citing the camaraderie and the challenge of a new assignment.
"To come out and work with you guys every day, it's a good feeling," Pinkley, 26, told his 101st Airborne Division buddies during the ceremony earlier this month. His wife, Kimberly, watched with a smile, their toddler in her arms.
"It's a very positive retention picture at this point," said Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, an Army public affairs officer. The Army had nearly a half-million active-duty soldiers.
However, Childress cautioned that factors such as an improved economy and the Pentagon's decision to keep about 20,000 troops in Iraq for longer than a year to help quell the violence could change the picture.
The Marines, which along with the Army have borne the brunt of combat in Iraq, said they have already fulfilled 90 percent of their retention goal for the fiscal year for getting Marines to re-up after their initial commitment. The Air Force and the Navy said they, too, are exceeding goals for getting airmen and sailors to re-enlist.
Some contend a poor job market and re-enlistment bonuses worth thousands of dollars are keeping soldiers in the Army. Col. Joseph Anderson, commander of the 101st's 2nd Brigade, said it is more about camaraderie, patriotism and duty.
"They've had a personally rewarding and professionally developing experience," Anderson said. "I think they've formed some bonds that are going to last a lifetime. It tends to make them want to stay."
The only Army division to not meet its goal in the six-month period was the 82nd Airborne Division, whose members have been sent to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq since the Sept. 11 attacks. The division wanted to re-enlist 1,221 soldiers, but got only 1,136.
At Fort Campbell, soldiers from the 101st spent seven months in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. The entire division of about 20,000 soldiers was sent to Iraq last year for major combat, and the last planeload returned home in March. A grueling year in Iraq claimed the lives of 61 Fort Campbell soldiers, and hundreds more were wounded.
In the six-month period ending March 31, the 101st topped its goal of re-enlisting 1,591. It got 1,737 to sign up for another tour of duty.
Fort Campbell leaders said their numbers debunk the theory that yearlong combat-zone assignments - not typically used since Vietnam - and the casualties in Iraq would discourage soldiers from re-enlisting.
Shelley MacDermid, co-director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University, said it is too early to know what effect the war in Iraq will have long-term on recruitment and retention.
"If the war were to end tomorrow, the impact on re-enlistments likely would be very different than three years from now," MacDermid said.
Some soldiers, of course, are getting out, for themselves or for their families. ("There's a saying in the Army - 'You enlist a soldier, but you re-enlist a family' - and that's true," said Command Sgt. Maj. James Plemons, who oversees retention for the 101st.)
Staff Sgt. Bobby Miller, 31, has spent more than 10 years in the Army said he is getting out when his term ends in less than a year. The 101st soldier has served in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and said he has barely seen his wife and two children in the past few years.
"It's not that we don't want to deploy; I'd like a little more stabilization," Miller said.
Pinkley was riding in a Humvee the day after Thanksgiving when it was rocked by a bomb. He suffered internal injuries and is still healing from the shrapnel wounds. He said he and his wife discussed for more than a year whether he should re-enlist.
In the end, despite his pain and his wife's fear for his life, they decided it was best for both of them, she said. His next position will be as a drill sergeant at Fort Benning, Ga.
"I'm excited about it," his wife said. "It's something he wanted to do. We told him we'd be supportive of him whatever he wanted." As for the possibility of her husband being sent off to a combat zone again, she said: "We would definitely do it again if we had to."
On the Net:
Fort Campbell: http://www.campbell.army.mil
Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University: http://www.mfri.purdue.edu
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THE U.S. COMMANDER
General Says He May Ask for More Troops
April 24, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/international/middleeast/24GENE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
CAMP AS SAYLIYAH, Qatar, April 23 - The top United States commander in the Middle East suggested in an interview on Friday that he was likely to ask for another extension in the current troop levels in Iraq, now at 135,000, and might even ask for more troops beyond that.
The commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said the security situation was liable to worsen as June 30 approached, and with it the return of self-rule to Iraq. He cited the likelihood of new insurgent attacks against American troops and doubts about the current reliability of Iraqi security forces. The next four months are critical, he said.
The Pentagon has already extended by 90 days the tours of 20,000 soldiers; they were to return to their home bases after a year in Iraq. The Pentagon has offered to find new troops to take their place, to keep the deployment at 135,000, if the military deems it necessary. General Abizaid gave the clearest indication yet that he would ask for those troops.
"If the situation stays about like it is, I will certainly ask that those forces be replaced," he said in an interview here at the regional headquarters of the United States Central Command in this Persian Gulf state. "We're going to make sure we have the right forces in place to do the job that needs to be done."
Moreover, if other nations withdraw their troops, as Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic have said they will, and if the training of most Iraqi security forces is not completed until as late as December, General Abizaid said it was possible that he would request an increase beyond the 135,000 troops.
"If the security situation worsens and we think it's appropriate to bring in more troops, or if countries decide to withdraw their troops, we'll see this thing through," he said. "We'll adjust to a combination of U.S. force levels, Iraqi readiness and steadiness, and coalition forces."
The general's assessment, coupled with the recent disclosure of the Pentagon's contingency plans for the summer, fall and beyond, appear to make even more remote the Bush administration's goal as recently as a month ago to reduce the forces in Iraq before the November election.
Barring a resolution of the standoffs in Falluja and Najaf, an accelerated training of capable Iraqi security forces and an influx of new international troops, possibly after passage of a new United Nations resolution, all signs now seem to point to keeping American troop levels in Iraq at least at current levels through the late fall.
One leading option to replace the 20,000 troops now on extended tours in Iraq would include sending a second Army Stryker brigade and at least one, and possibly two, Marine expeditionary units, senior military officials said.
General Abizaid said he would have to decide within about a month to ask for replacements so as to identify the right mix of new troops.
In a rare criticism of the American civilian administration in Iraq, he expressed hope that the State Department would change the 90-day rotation policy for many government civilians working in Iraq when it set up the new United States Embassy in Baghdad after June 30. Military officials have complained that the high civilian turnover has hurt the continuity of reconstruction efforts.
"Ninety days in Iraq for a senior official is not long enough," he said. "We keep our soldiers there for a year for a reason. We need to have long-term people that are going to deal with a long-term problem."
General Abizaid, who works from Qatar or his permanent headquarters in Tampa, Fla., but travels regularly to Iraq, said the next four months would be critical to the success of a new Iraq. He said Islamic militants, Baath Party loyalists and other insurgents would make an all-out effort to split the international alliance and foment a civil war.
"The period between now and the first of August is the period that will mold the future of Iraq," he said in the 30-minute interview. "That's because that's where the political friction will come, and the political friction will result in military friction. It will be a period where there will be desperation on the part of the people who want to derail this process to make it fail."
But he said it was essential not only that American policy makers and elected officials stand firm, but also that Iraqis seize the opportunity to discard Saddam Hussein's mantle and stand up to the insurgents' intimidation to fight for their country.
"Its like a wind tunnel, when you're moving towards the point where there's the most turbulence as it narrows down," the general said. "You got to get through that. As you move towards that, the velocity increases, the turbulence increases, and the violence increases. So it's just absolutely essential to stay true to the notion Iraqis are going to be in charge, and we need to have the courage to let them be in charge. It is their country."
He acknowledged that the latest violence exposed serious shortcomings in the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces, the main source of relief for American troops. Many Iraqi units abandoned their posts under fire or defected to the insurgency.
"Iraqi security forces aren't ready," he said flatly, adding that it would be at least September and possibly December before they would be ready.
But he said he was encouraged by the commitment of Iraq's new ministers of defense and interior to improve recruiting and to ensure that Iraqi soldiers and the police were paid promptly and equitably.
He also said Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, had arrived in Baghdad to help Iraqi security forces build loyalty to the new Iraqi governing institutions.
In a stern message to all Iraqis, he added, "It's very important that Iraqis understand that after the 30th of June, they're going to have take authority and responsibility for the vast majority of events taking place within the country."
He said he remained upbeat that a political solution acceptable to most Iraqis would emerge by June 30. "There's probably more clarity than you think, but in typically Arab politics, there is incredible churning going on beneath the placid waters," he said.
"None of the armed opposition that we see out there offer any hope for the future," he said. "They just offer this very, very bleak prospect of either civil war or repression."
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Soldier Can Leave Iraq to See Dying Mother
April 24, 2004
By STEPHEN KINZER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/national/24LEAV.html
CHICAGO, April 23 - A soldier serving in Iraq whose mother has been found to have terminal cancer will be allowed to return home to Wisconsin, an Army spokesman said Friday.
"He's been given permission, and it's all set," the spokesman, Dov Schwartz, said. Mr. Schwartz added that he expected the soldier to fly home within a week.
The soldier, Pvt. Joseph Wagner, 19, asked for leave this month and was turned down. This week, the family filed a second request, and it was approved.
Private Wagner's mother, Patrice Confer, 44, said Friday that she had had no official word about her son's return.
"We haven't heard a thing, nothing," Ms. Confer said. "Everyone's calling to say, `He's coming home, he's coming home,' and I have to tell them I have no notice of that yet. The Army is putting it out there. But as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing real yet."
A spokeswoman for the Army, Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, said a convoy was being organized to take Private Wagner out of Tikrit, where he has been stationed since arriving in Iraq this year. Colonel Hart said the Army had denied Private Wagner's first request for leave because "it was not conclusive."
"It did not mention the prognosis or the terminal nature of the mother's illness," Colonel Hart said. "Now it's been made more clear. I talked to his command yesterday, and he was preparing to leave."
The case had attracted attention from the news media and from Wisconsin politicians. One of them, Senator Herb Kohl, a Democrat, issued a statement saying that Private Wagner would be allowed to remain in Wisconsin "for a few weeks."
"I appreciate this quick response from the Army, which has worked to find a way to accommodate this family," it said.
-------- propaganda wars
Photos released in error
April 24, 2004
By Caroline Overington
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/23/1082616327044.html
A US Air Force photograph of coffins being unloaded at a base that doubles as a soldiers' mortuary in Delaware. Picture:Reuters/US Air Force
The US Air Force released 361 photographs of the flag-draped coffins of American soldiers to an internet website yesterday, angering the Pentagon.
The photographs - which Department of Defence photographers took at an air force base that doubles as a soldiers' mortuary in Dover, Delaware - were apparently released in error to a website called The Memory Hole.
Media organisations across the US, which are banned from taking similar photographs - quickly picked up the photographs.
Several US newspapers were planning to use the images - mostly of coffins containing the remains of soldiers killed in Iraq - on their front pages.
The pictures were released just one day after a civilian contractor, Tami Silicio, 50, was sacked from her job loading cargo for the US military in Kuwait, for taking a photograph of flag-draped coffins that she saw in the back of a plane.
The photograph was first published in the Seattle Times last Sunday, then in The Age yesterday. The Fairfax newspaper group, which publishes The Age, paid Ms Silicio for the right to use the image.
The new batch of hundreds of photographs was released to Russ Kick, who operates The Memory Hole website, after he requested them under freedom-of-information legislation. Lieutenant-Colonel Jennifer Cassidy of the US Air Force said the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware first denied the request, but it was approved on appeal to the Air Force Air Mobility Command.
She said the Pentagon had since decided the release of the photographs violated its own rules and that no further copies would be made public.
The Pentagon's ban on photographing soldiers' coffins at US military bases dates to the first Gulf War in 1991. The US Government, concerned that the ban was often ignored, reissued it shortly before the start of the war in Iraq. It is now strictly enforced.
The Pentagon says the ban is to protect families of the dead from unnecessary trauma.
White House press spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday that President Bush believed "we should honour and show respect for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice defending our freedoms".
However, some media outlets have criticised the ban, saying it prevents people from seeing the costs of war. NBC Nightly News executive producer Steve Capus told The New York Times that the photographs released to The Memory Hole were "not in the least gory" and that he found the Government's arguments against their use unpersuasive.
"As a journalist, I simply disagree with their position," he said. The Pentagon ban does not extend to photographs of soldiers' coffins, only those arriving at military bases.
Dozens of photographs of soldiers' coffins and funerals have been published in US newspapers this year, including on The New York Times front page. This week, there have been dozens more.
A Deputy Under-Secretary of Defence, John Molino, said yesterday the Department of Defence was not involved in the decision to sack Ms Silicio.
Seattle Times photographic editor Barry Fitzsimmons said yesterday he was happy his newspaper had published Ms Silicio's photograph, "but it broke my heart when I found out she lost her job".
-------- war crimes
THE SATURDAY PROFILE
A 'Bone Woman' Chronicles the World's Massacres
April 24, 2004
By JANE PERLEZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/international/asia/24FPRO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MELBOURNE, Australia - Clea Koff was present at the big events of the 1990's: Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo. Just out of graduate school, she was not a fledgling diplomat, nor a journalist. She was wearing overalls, protective gloves and boots.
Her job was to dig out the aftermath: the decayed bodies, the skeletons and bones, hoping to make sense of the senseless.
Most of the time, she was able to keep her composure, even under the most gruesome of circumstances, facing the recent dead.
She would concentrate, she said, on the notion that she was helping provide critical evidence for the international trials where the authorities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia have been charged with crimes against humanity and genocide. That is what it meant to be a forensic anthropologist.
"We play a role in establishing what happened in the past," she said of the profession she has practiced at the intersection of history and justice.
In Bosnia, she dug up bodies that had their hands tied behind their backs, were blindfolded and then shot multiple times. That evidence was presented in The Hague at the trial of the former leader of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic. "There is lawful killing in armed conflict but not that," she said. "A pathologist was asked at the trial of Milosevic if it was possible for those people to have been killed in combat. He replied: `I think not.' "
Ms. Koff has chronicled her experiences unearthing mass graves in a book, "Bone Woman," published by Random House this month to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda that left 800,000 dead. It is a highly personal account written in an engaging I-was-there style.
She helps the reader understand the complexities of skeleton structure, the exacting nature of having to bag and tabulate body parts. She gives a sense of the survivors and the guilt and grief they live with.
It helps that Ms. Koff, now 31, is an accomplished writer who gave up a major in English at Stanford University for archaeology, and then forensic anthropology. "As we drove into Kigali town, I could not believe I was there," she writes of the Rwandan capital. "You know it is Africa: the air is fresh and then sweet - strongly sweet."
Ms. Koff speaks of her work with an irrepressible enthusiasm, and the kind of conviction that she believes she was born to do the job. "The bodies exhibit clues to people's behavior as they approached death," she said over lunch in this Australian city where she took time off to write the book. "They are not telling us about their political beliefs. They're telling us about themselves."
What she found on the bodies often raised unanswerable questions. "In some cases people brought deeds to their houses," she said. "People had baptismal cards. Some people had on two sets of clothes. What were they thinking? One man in Vukovar who had been taken from the hospital, had put his chest X-rays in his bathrobe. What did he expect?"
She was 23 when she got a call, in 1996, asking her to join a team of 16 experts who would work for the United Nations on the massacre sites in Rwanda.
She knew Africa from her heritage: her mother is Tanzanian, her father American. She had traveled the continent as a child accompanying her parents on their safaris making documentary films. But her experience until that time - an internship at a medical examiner's office in Arizona - was hardly preparation for the scale of Rwanda's carnage.
After the United Nations missions, she decided to write a book in order to show Western readers that people in faraway places "don't do these things just because they can't control their primordial instincts."
"Something like Rwanda, because it didn't happen with weapons of mass destruction but with machetes, doesn't mean it happened without a policy," she said.
The massacres were not driven solely by an ethnic hatred of one group, the majority Hutu, against the minority Tutsi, she said. "If people had refused to kill because it didn't sound right, if there were not the material bribes - I feel there were enough people to allow a genocide not to take place."
Many Rwandans joined in the mass killings because they were exploited, she said. At the same time, she said, "There were definitely people who killed wantonly."
Born in Britain, Ms. Koff spent her primary school years in London, and then moved to the United States - Washington and then Los Angeles. She seems more American than English, though at times she slips into a British accent. In the last 18 months, she has split her time between Melbourne and Los Angeles, and plans to return to the United States full time, she said.
Her real education came during her childhood traveling. Her father, David Koff, and her mother, Musindo Mwinyipembe, believed that taking their two children to the gritty reaches of Africa was the best preparation for life.
Her memories of Somalia include playing on the beach at Mogadishu with Somali children. At the same time, she came across expatriates who lived in Mogadishu behind high walls studded with cut glass to keep out local people.
She reports in her book that she sometimes felt the United Nations forensic missions were similarly isolated from the communities they were working within.
Ms. Koff seems to inherit much of her drive from her father, whose work focused on the poor. In 1980, Mr. Koff fought the Boston public television station, WGBH, when executives there were unhappy with "Blacks Britannica," a documentary they had commissioned him to make on race in Britain.
After WGBH made cuts that altered the film's militant message, Mr. Koff went to court, seeking an order barring the station from broadcasting the edited version.
He lost. But the episode left an indelible impression on his daughter, who was left in Britain at school while her parents fought the case in America. "I was 6 or 7 years old," she recalled. "We didn't understand the ins and outs, but understood something was going on."
Her next mission? A change. Ms. Koff plans to start a private agency in the United States that will help families with missing family members. She plans to act as a go-between for the families with the coroner's offices and the F.B.I.
"There are 5,000 long-term unidentified adult bodies in California," she said. "Three thousand to 3,500 adults go missing in suspicious circumstances in California every year. It is often very difficult for the families to get cooperation from the police and medical examiners."
The new work will keep her involved with her first love: bones. "I have an innate excitement about bones," she said. "They speak to me." She quotes her mentor, Clyde Snow, a pioneer in the field of forensic anthropology. "He said, `Bones don't lie.' I like that."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Moussaoui Lawyers Heartened By Appeal Court's Reasoning
Defense May Seek Deposition of Additional Overseas Detainees
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38267-2004Apr23.html
Attorneys for Zacarias Moussaoui, emboldened by an appeals court ruling that a judge has the power to order the deposition of al Qaeda witnesses overseas, said yesterday they may try to gain access to more detainees.
The development came a day after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit issued a ruling clearing the way for Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to be tried in a criminal court.
The three-judge panel ruled that the government could seek the death penalty for Moussaoui for his alleged role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, reversing a trial judge who had barred prosecutors from seeking to have him executed and from presenting Sept. 11-related evidence at his trial.
The 2 to 1 decision by the Richmond-based court, effectively a victory for the government, also said Moussaoui could not interview three key al Qaeda detainees, as he had sought, but could gain access to statements they have made.
But the appeals court raised a potentially troublesome issue for prosecutors by agreeing that U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema has the power to order depositions of overseas witnesses. Prosecutors had argued that they were beyond the court's purview. Defense attorneys say the witnesses will help clear Moussaoui.
"These are not the only witnesses the government is holding abroad that we are interested in, and now we've got a ruling that puts our constitutional foot in the door,'' said federal public defender Frank W. Dunham Jr., one of Moussaoui's attorneys. "We're going to take the lid off what really happened on September 11.''
The witness access issue, which pits Moussaoui's constitutional right to introduce evidence on his behalf against the government's right to wage war on terrorism, has already stalled the case for more than a year. Requests for access to additional witnesses could further delay Moussaoui's trial.
The appeals court became involved after Brinkema ordered the government to allow Moussaoui and his attorneys to depose three leading al Qaeda detainees. The government refused to produce them, and Brinkema punished prosecutors by disallowing the death penalty and any Sept. 11 testimony. The government appealed.
In its ruling Thursday, the appeals court ordered the federal judge in Alexandria to craft alternate versions of statements made by the detainees. Such written "substitutions," which could be presented to the jury in place of live testimony, summarize what the detainees have said in interrogations.
Brinkema earlier rejected substitutions submitted by the government, and some legal observers expressed fears yesterday that the hotly contested process could break down again, triggering yet another appeal to the 4th Circuit. The appellate judge who disagreed with Thursday's ruling, Roger Gregory, raised that possibility in his dissent.
"The chances that this could blow up again are not small,'' said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and an expert on classified information. "The defense will ask for everything, the government will yield nothing and the judge will be in the middle. I think this is probably the judicial equivalent of crossing your fingers.''
Other legal experts said the ruling could make future terrorism prosecutions more difficult and lead to more cases being brought before military tribunals. Federal officials had said they would move the Moussaoui case out of the criminal courts if they lost the appeal.
"This certainly will discourage the government from going [to] civilian criminal courts on these guys in the future,'' said Andrew McBride, a former federal prosecutor in Alexandria. "If you go military, there's no possibility of a live deposition.''
Still, both sides seemed relatively satisfied with the decision. U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said the ruling "upheld the government's core position,'' and federal law enforcement officials said they were unlikely to appeal to the full slate of 4th Circuit judges or to the Supreme Court. Government lawyers were still studying the ruling and its implications for the war on terror.
Dunham said defense attorneys have not decided whether to appeal, but he said: "There's a lot in this decision that we like, and to ask for reconsideration, we risk losing some of the good stuff we got.''
Moussaoui, a French citizen, was charged in December 2001 with conspiring with al Qaeda in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Lawyers on both sides of the case expressed confidence yesterday that the process outlined by the 4th Circuit to craft new substitutions could work, though they said it would clearly take months. The court described what it called an "interactive" process, saying the defense should first identify what parts of the witness statements it might want to admit at trial, the government could then object and Brinkema would make the final decision.
The revised substitutions must mirror the detainees' statements as closely as possible, and the jury at Moussaoui's trial must be instructed that the statements are considered reliable.
The judges made it clear they expect Brinkema to work out a compromise, expressing confidence in her "competence to stop any attempt by either side to offer a distorted version of the statements.''
-------- drug war
A Drug War With a Deadline
Fed-Up Residents in NW Exact Pledge From Police
By Clarence Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38055-2004Apr23?language=printer
James Castle was applying cream to his razor-burned face when three vice officers appeared behind him. The 26-year-old barber saw them approaching in the mirror. They asked him to step outside onto Georgia Avenue, out into the mid-March drizzle, where they patted him down for weapons and checked his University of the District of Columbia ID card before telling him he could go back to work.
Puzzling over this later, the young barber figured it might have had something to do with the bag of cheap jewelry he had been showing to friends outside the barbershop. The police must have thought it was drugs.
"If you go out that door, you're a suspect," warned another barber, Calvin Lanier. But Lanier wasn't offended by the pat-down of his colleague. "The police were just doing their job," he said.
The Shepherd Park Barber Shop has the misfortune to be located at the epicenter of drug activity in the Shepherd Park and Takoma neighborhoods of Northwest Washington, a pleasant area just south of Silver Spring where a long-standing open-air drug market got out of hand last year. Robbers, abandoning any hint of caution, kicked in front doors. One bold burglar rolled away stolen items in a Supercan trash bin. A resident was hit on the head and roughed up by six men when he unwittingly walked up on a drug deal. Then, on Nov. 23, a drug addict was fatally shot as he sat in a car on Juniper Street NW, half a block east of Georgia Avenue.
The homicide did it. Angry neighbors demanded action from the police. And the police responded. At a Dec. 4 community meeting, Chief Charles H. Ramsey made an unusual pledge: The drug market would be eliminated within four months.
His time has run out.
A Call to Arms
The slaying that precipitated this series of events was particularly dramatic.
Joseph Brian Rabic, 38, was a longtime addict who, in tough times, turned to a high-risk scam. Every day for at least a week in mid-November, he had been approaching dealers at drug markets in Montgomery County and the District, asking for drugs, police said. Then he would pull out a bogus gold badge and claim to be a police officer. He would "confiscate" the drugs and send the dealer on his way, telling him, "I'm going to give you a break."
In the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 23, an unusually warm Sunday morning, the ploy backfired.
After Rabic got the drugs about 2 a.m., the dealer got out of Rabic's girlfriend's bronze Mazda Protege and fired four times, said the girlfriend, Kelly Felix, who was in the passenger seat.
"I said to him, 'Have you been shot? Are you all right?' '' Felix recalled this month. "He said his legs were going numb."
Rabic accelerated, trying to make a getaway, but the Mazda crashed a few blocks away. He died about an hour later, after being taken to Washington Hospital Center.
The slaying put long-frustrated residents over the top. Within hours, D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4) posted a crime alert on the community's electronic message board. By early that afternoon, residents were firing off postings that rang with outrage:
"We have a very serious problem. The community knows there is drug dealing on upper Georgia Avenue. The police know there is drug dealing on upper Georgia Avenue. Crack addicts as far north as Gaithersburg, Maryland know there is drug dealing on upper Georgia Avenue. . . . I hope we can schedule a meeting as soon as possible."
"We need to start by requiring [the police department] and the District officials to do their job and we come in and stand with them."
"How many murders and stabbings will it take to spur all of us to a program of effective action? . . . What's driving this? What's sustaining this? Why is it our neighborhood?"
Eleven days later, on the night of Dec. 4, about 200 people packed a community meeting to hear from Chief Ramsey, City Administrator Robert C. Bobb and the 4th Police District command staff.
A plan was born, a promise made. "I think you've got to do the what by when," Ramsey said later, explaining why he set a deadline. "It's a challenge, and it's throwing down a challenge to my own folks."
The Plan
The task fell to Capt. Andy Solberg, a practicing Buddhist and a professor's son from Urbana, Ill., who has patrolled some of the District's toughest streets. Having majored in religion at Haverford College outside Philadelphia, he taught English for two years at the District's Cardozo Senior High School before deciding to go into law enforcement.
The D.C. police department delayed his dream, saying the long, lanky teacher was three inches over its 6-foot-5 limit. But by 1987, the rules had changed and Solberg put on a uniform and hit the streets.
He's still there, 16 years later. In his police locker, he keeps a copy of Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," which examines the nature of things that make up a life well lived: character, friendship, knowledge. He used to read it during roll calls in the 7th District, across the Anacostia River.
Solberg's drug market closure plan emphasized police visibility and arrests. In a city that has dozens of open-air drug markets, the Juniper Street market -- which stretches across several blocks along perhaps half a dozen streets on both sides of Georgia Avenue -- isn't particularly high-volume. But it is uncommonly tenacious, quietly thriving for more than 20 years, offering heroin, crack and marijuana in a leafy area where the streets are named for flowers and trees: Butternut, Dahlia, Hemlock. To the west of Georgia Avenue is Shepherd Park, where the houses get bigger by the block, quickly graduating from gracious to grand. On the avenue's eastern side is Takoma, where the nearby homes are more function, less form, mostly duplexes and low-rise apartments.
Officers would now walk the beat from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. Roadblocks would be set up along Georgia Avenue three times a week. Vice officers would watch for dealers and prostitutes. On-duty officers would accentuate their presence in the neighborhood by doing paperwork in their cruisers, with emergency lights flashing.
Over the months, city officials and residents met four times to debate and refine the plan and to monitor progress. Out in the community, residents and police identified problem spots: poor lighting in alleys, a hole in a fence that could serve as an escape route, a phone booth where suspected dealers congregated. Neighbors recruited about 100 block captains, a critical link between residents and police officials. Members of the Orange Hat Patrol walked the neighborhood every Friday night.
On Patrol
One Saturday night in January, Solberg, 48, drove his police cruiser on patrol along the Georgia Avenue corridor. He stopped in an alley and checked the doors of a garage where drug dealers sometimes stashed their goods. Nothing there. The car then rolled on to nearby alleys and the local bus stop, the shadowy places where hand-to-hand deals create a drug market.
Normally, police said, maybe six dealers would hang around the streets and alleys, selling crack cocaine in $10 and $20 rocks and bags of marijuana to maybe 40 or 50 customers over a couple of hours. About 10 addicts often circled the area, twitching and chain-smoking cigarettes until they scored drugs, as many as five or six times a day. Other buyers were less conspicuous, driving in with out-of-state license plates and looking to party.
Solberg's eyes scanned for anything out of the ordinary. He flashed his light into a silver luxury sedan, surprising a young couple parked outside their house. An hour passed quietly.
But on this chilly evening, Solberg had drawn "nighthawk'' duty, putting him in charge of the entire police department.
About midnight, two calls squawked almost simultaneously over the police radio: a shooting and a serious car crash with shots fired.
Solberg flipped on his police lights and siren, speeding south on 13th Street NW and then the wrong way down a one-way street. Less than five minutes later, he was listening to the reports of a half-dozen officers at the scene of the first shooting on 10th Street NW.
A man lay with his blood pooled on the tile floor of a stairwell inside an apartment building, his body face down on the ground. Shell casings were scattered throughout the stairwell. Emergency medical workers made the call: DOA, at least one shot to the back of the head.
Solberg arrived on South Dakota Avenue NE about 30 minutes later, as firefighters pulled a corpse from a light-blue wreck. Steam rose from the engine block. Emergency workers had cut open the car to retrieve the body that now, covered by a white sheet, lay in the grass. Tire marks in the grass indicated that a second car had driven up to the crash site. Witnesses told police that a man walked up to the car to finish the job with bullets.
On this night, the anti-drug effort on Juniper Street would have to wait.
Plans Gone Awry
There were other snarls, too. The first officer on the beat for the Juniper Street patrol went on sick leave in early February after being bitten by a dog while on duty. Soon after he returned about a month later, his wife gave birth and again he was on leave. He was replaced by a rotation of officers who couldn't establish the same degree of familiarity with people in the neighborhood.
The scheduled thrice-weekly roadblocks along Georgia Avenue never materialized as planned; only about two were held each month. Specialized officers from outside the 4th District, such as canine units, the narcotics strike force and officers who were to be shifted from desk jobs to trouble spots, made scant appearances; they had too many other problem areas to attend to.
"Did we do everything we promised we were going to do? No," Solberg said.
On the night of March 3, nearly three-quarters of the way to Ramsey's deadline, residents and police packed into the Shepherd Park Library's second-floor conference room for a progress report.
Andrew Holloway stood and spoke slowly, noting that in his 20 years in the neighborhood, he often had been the first to criticize police. Holloway, who lives one block from the center of the drug sales, said he had noticed a change in recent months.
"Things have improved there," he said. "I'm able to sleep now. It's better."
The crowd applauded.
Then Charles Mitchell rose to tell a different tale. Every Friday night, he said, he walks south on Georgia Avenue to get dinner at the Pizza Hut.
"I get propositioned twice," he said. Once by dealers on his way to dinner, then by prostitutes on the way home.
"My observation is that 'operation shutdown' is not working," he said. "It's here, it's there; it's not working, bottom line."
Displacement
One afternoon in late March, Officer Shauntelle Anderson clutched her shoulder police radio and side arm as she padded stealthily through the fluorescent-lit basement hallways of two high-rise apartment buildings that face each other across the 800 block of Juniper Street. With the crackdown on the open-air market, she knew, some dealers had moved indoors to deal in the laundry rooms.
These buildings, along with a couple of homes in the area, would be the next test of success for the Juniper Street police plan.
The two privately owned buildings, accessible only with keys, were once a haven for dealers. Now the buildings' managers have supplied Anderson and her fellow officers with keys of their own. But even within the confines of these basements, it is far from easy to catch a dealer.
"I can't just shake him down and lock him up," Anderson said. She'd need probable cause to make an arrest. Or she'd have to be lucky enough to walk up on a deal in progress.
Hilton Burton, commander of the 4th District and a former head of the narcotics division, said police also have seen dealers move to an apartment complex a few blocks south on Georgia Avenue, and to Seventh and Eighth streets NW.
"Displacement is actually a sign that you're being successful," Ramsey said. He added that eliminating drug markets is like cancer surgery. The tumor can be cut out, but residents and city officials need to administer follow-up therapy.
"There's got to be some treatment to make sure you got it all," he said. "And you've got to get regular checkups."
The Bottom Line
Is the drug market gone? The judgment from police: Yes, or nearly so. For now.
"As far as that being an active open-air drug market, we've effectively eliminated that," Ramsey said early this month.
But it's a deeply qualified victory. For one thing, police know that meeting a deadline is little more than an accounting feat. "April 15 is not a drop-dead date for this area," Burton said. "April 15 is just a marker."
For another, while the dealers may be gone, their customers keep showing up. And police know that where there is demand, there will soon be a supply -- if not exactly in the same spot, then nearby.
There have been improvements, though. While residents still fear crime, police believe they have solved one of the worst cases: Days after Rabic's slaying, officers charged David M. Tillman, 24, who lived in the neighborhood, with second-degree murder. No trial date has been set.
The police foot beat, which residents love, will become a basic part of operations in the neighborhood, Burton said. Business owners and city workers are keeping the streets and alleys cleaner and better illuminated.
"It was pitch-black when we first went back there," Solberg said, pointing to an alley just west of Georgia Avenue. "You can read a book back there now."
The results so far: The number of crimes reported within a half-mile radius of the drug market from Dec. 14 to April 13 declined 33 percent from the preceding four-month period, according to police. Burglaries declined from 15 to 6, a 60 percent drop. Calls to police for drug-related offenses declined from 57 to 27, a 53 percent decline. Twenty-three people were arrested on drug offenses.
Moving On
On April 15, residents faced city officials at a meeting that marked the end of Ramsey's four-month plan. Once again, police heard a barrage of complaints -- not about drug sales, but about a rash of kick-in burglaries in the previous week.
That was a sign of success, of sorts. Residents had moved on, cautiously, to issues other than the drug market. And now they were asking police for updates every three months on the Juniper market and for written plans and deadlines for combating another drug market less than a mile away.
Leaving the meeting, Vera Carley said life had improved around her home on Ninth Street. Her neighbors are "almost afraid to talk about it," out of fear that they will jinx the advances, she said. "They're just holding their breath for summer."
Steve Miller, who lives in Shepherd Park, no longer witnesses hand-to-hand drug deals as he walks down Georgia Avenue. Burglaries are still too frequent, but not as numerous as in the past. Now, when he arrives home, he has less fear that a stranger may be lurking in his two-story Colonial.
"I'll give you warning, we're getting accustomed to this," Miller told police and city officials. "We're quickly getting used to having no drugs being dealt on Georgia Avenue. . . . We're not going back."
Staff writer David A. Fahrenthold contributed to this report.
-------- immigration / refugees
Va. Seeks New Role Against Illegals
Police to Enforce Immigration Law
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38082-2004Apr23?language=printer
The federal government will soon grant a group of Virginia State Police officers the power to enforce immigration law, making the state the third in the country to adopt the practice since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, local officials said.
The tentative agreement between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Virginia State Police, permissible under a 1996 law, is part of a movement across the country to grant local law enforcement officials more authority to detain illegal immigrants.
Proponents say the expanded powers will give police more tools to combat terrorism, gang violence and other crimes. But immigrant advocates counter that the practice could lead to ethnic profiling. And some police officials, including D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey, are openly opposed to the idea and say it could discourage immigrants from reporting crimes.
The debate illustrates the complexity of improving security in a country that is home to an estimated 8 million or more illegal immigrants. Three of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks were part of that underground population, but so are millions of workers and families in communities across America. Homeland Security, which enforces immigration laws, acknowledges that it does not have enough agents to track down all those undocumented immigrants.
Virginia officials decided to seek extra immigration powers for some state police officers after participating in local and federal task forces on terrorism and gang violence.
"We had this recurring discussion about our inability at some times to deal with illegal immigrants when we were involved in other types of investigations," said Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia's state police. While the police had worked with federal immigration authorities over the years, he said, "their resources are limited as well. So you don't always have them available to you."
Until recently, local and state police could not make arrests on civil immigration violations, although they could detain immigrants for criminal offenses and sometimes helped federal immigration authorities with transportation or security.
But a provision of a 1996 law allows federal authorities to "deputize" local or state police to enforce immigration law. Flaherty said he and other officials discovered that two other states -- Florida and Alabama -- had sent dozens of state police officers to be trained in immigration enforcement under the federal program since the Sept. 11 attacks. Virginia then contacted Homeland Security to do the same.
Michael J. Garcia, who oversees immigration enforcement for Homeland Security, said federal authorities were not urging state police to receive the training but were happy to provide it if asked. So far, he said, the program has worked well.
"If you look at our resources, we are limited. It's been, I think, helpful to have additional people out there who are skilled in it and who can do the enforcement" of immigration law, he said. "Obviously, we watch to see that's being done appropriately."
Under the agreement being negotiated, about 50 Virginia state police officers would be able to enforce federal immigration law in addition to their other responsibilities, Flaherty said. The officers would be stationed throughout the state, with one attached to each of the 24 drug task forces in Virginia, he said. They would be under the supervision of federal authorities when carrying out immigration enforcement.
Flaherty said the officers, who may begin training as early as next month, would use their immigration authority only in special cases. "We're not going to plan any sweeps of illegal immigrants and whatnot. We just want this tool to use in other cases," he said.
In addition to participating in the Homeland Security program, Virginia recently passed a law that would permit state and local police to arrest immigrants who were back in the country after having been convicted of felonies and deported.
The sponsor of the House measure, Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax), said that fighting terrorism was "the original motivation" for introducing the legislation but that it might ultimately be more useful in combating gang violence.
Both the new law and the Homeland Security program for state police will likely result in only a small number of arrests. But immigrant advocates are concerned that the measures could lead to officers mistakenly detaining people who are here legally.
"Quite frankly, immigration law is pretty complicated," said Judy Golub of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, noting that there are myriad visas and permits allowing people to stay in the country.
She pointed to a case that occurred in 1997 when immigration agents and local police arrested more than 400 people in Chandler, Ariz., in an operation targeting illegal immigrants. Some of those detained turned out to be legal residents. The Arizona attorney general's office later concluded that the sweep violated residents' civil rights, and the city settled two lawsuits for more than $500,000.
Jorge Figueredo, executive director of the Hispanic Committee of Virginia, a community-service organization based in Falls Church, said he was especially worried about the state law that allows police to arrest immigrant felons who have reentered the country after deportation.
"The most important question is, how are they going to do it?" he asked. "How are they going to know" who fits those qualifications?
Albo agreed that the law would be difficult to enforce, noting that police cannot directly access the relevant immigration information because it is spread among various federal databases. But he said he hoped that police officers could eventually call up such data on the computers in their patrol cars, allowing them to enforce immigration law in the course of their work.
The Virginia law follows a legal tradition in which states could authorize their police to enforce criminal -- rather than civil -- immigration violations, said Bo Cooper, former general counsel of the immigration service who now works at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. Such violations include reentering the country after being deported.
The movement to expand police authority to combat illegal immigration goes beyond a handful of states.
In Congress, Rep. Charles Whitlow Norwood Jr. (R-Ga.) has introduced the Clear Act, which would give state and local law enforcement authorities the power to routinely enforce federal immigration laws. The bill has 120 co-sponsors; a similar measure has been introduced in the Senate.
Police and local officials nationwide have been sharply divided over the idea.
Ramsey called a news conference in July to affirm that District police would continue their longtime policy of not asking people about their immigration status unless they were suspected of crimes.
And Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) wrote to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) last fall to urge her to oppose the Clear Act.
"A troubling consequence of this legislation is that it could cause members of certain groups not to report crimes or to come forward with information about crimes for fear of being deported," he wrote.
Some authorities have also said that their police departments do not have the resources to take on immigration responsibilities.
"Nobody expects federal immigration officers to make drunken-driving stops, so they shouldn't expect local police to make federal immigration stops," said Duncan's spokesman, David Weaver.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Translator's Lawyers Cite Contradictions
Detainee Letters' Status As Classified Is at Issue
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37734-2004Apr23.html
Attorneys for an Air Force translator at the Guantanamo Bay prison who faces a variety of criminal charges said military officials have offered contradictory explanations about whether they consider information found in his possession to be classified. The continually changing reasons make it difficult to determine the basis for many of the criminal charges against him, the lawyers contend.
The complaint came in 40 pages of legal papers filed last week in the court-martial of Airman Ahmad I. Halabi. His attorneys said investigators have repeatedly changed their reasoning about why the translations of letters from detainees to their families that Halabi possessed were considered classified.
"Halabi remains in jail and has been in pre-trial confinement for nine months, and still the government does not have a consolidated, consistent or intelligible position on the classification of information" in the case, Halabi's attorneys wrote. "Each time the defense points out the flaws in the classification logic, a different reason for classification of information is created or invented."
The legal documents were filed one month after the U.S. military dropped all criminal charges against Army Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain who also worked at the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba for al Qaeda and Taliban suspects. Yee's case was racked with disputes about whether the documents he possessed were properly deemed classified. Yesterday, two Democratic senators on the Armed Services Committee, Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) and Carl M. Levin (Mich.), asked the Pentagon to investigate the military's treatment of Yee.
Halabi, who has been held in solitary confinement on a California military base, is charged with mishandling classified material and attempted espionage, among other charges. The latter charge stems from an alleged plan, apparently never carried out, to pass information to someone in his native Syria.
A military spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Jennifer L. Cassidy, declined to comment on the attorney's assertions, saying they are "matters properly resolved by the military judge."
Military officials dropped the charges against Yee for the alleged mishandling of classified material on March 19, saying that holding a trial risked exposing secrets. Yee's attorneys disputed that assertion, noting that officials failed for months to agree on which of the documents found in Yee's possession were classified, and why. The hearings in the Yee case were delayed five times because of this security review.
According to Halabi's court papers, last July, soon after Halabi was arrested in Florida following eight months in Guantanamo Bay, officials said the copies of detainee letters that he had on his laptop computer were classified because the letters contained inmate identification numbers. The combinations of names and numbers made them a secret, they added.
But, in September, officials said having the names alone was a violation.
At a hearing last month, officials said neither the names nor the numbers, nor any combinations, were classified. Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Lance Wega said, though, that the "family names and addresses of detainees" in the letters remained classified.
In addition, officials said, a CD-ROM that Halabi had with information identical to that on the laptop was classified. Defense attorneys said that, earlier this month, an official at the Southern Command, the military unit that oversees the Guantanamo Bay prison, told them why the CD-ROM was secret, but that he added that the reason was itself classified. Halabi's attorneys wrote that the official's reason was "completely inconsistent" with all the other explanations given previously.
Halabi's military lawyers, Air Force Majors James Key and Kim London, wrote that the letters cannot be classified because they were created not by the government but by detainees -- and that, in any case, the letters are "old mail long ago released to detainees or their families." Guantanamo Bay translators such as Halabi translated the letters on non-secure computers and were not warned to treat the letters or inmate numbers as secret, the lawyers wrote.
The government also asserts that a sketch in Halabi's possession, which depicts the layout of some prison buildings, is classified.
"How can it be classified?" asked Donald Rehkopf, a civilian attorney for Halabi. "They've shown reporters through there, and any of them could have drawn it."
In September, officials also alleged that Halabi committed wrongdoing when, during a break in a hearing, he used a computer in his attorney's office to add some photos of his fiancee to his personal Web site and to remove others. Officials theorized that he might have been trying to destroy evidence or communicate with outsiders using coded messages, and cited the episode as a reason to keep him in jail. Armed with a search warrant, the government seized documents from the lawyer's computer.
But, Halabi's lawyers wrote, a military computer expert retained by them to examine the Web site concluded within minutes that no one, including Halabi, had altered the site since last May.
Rehkopf said military investigators got the impression that the Web site was changing over time because they were inadvertently varying the placement of capital letters in calling up some pages from the site. Some pages on the site require capital letters in specific positions.
An Air Force investigator stated that he spent 800 hours examining the Halabi Web site for evidence, and officials said last month they still suspected that there are hidden features in the site that allow outsiders to gather information secreted there. Last fall, the government dropped some charges that Halabi used the Internet to send secrets to unauthorized people.
Halabi's family says investigators mistakenly concluded he was sending secrets to Syria because he periodically communicated with the Syrian Embassy to arrange a trip there to be married.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Kucinich lays out plan to extract troops from Iraq
Ohio congressman is still campaigning against John Kerry
By Hal Marcovitz
The Morning Call
April 24, 2004
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a12_2kucinichapr24,0,6844606.story?coll=all-newslocal-hed
Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich brought his anti-war message to Bucks County on Friday, promoting a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq within 90 days and insisting that he can still influence the Democratic Party's platform.
Kucinich, a Democrat, met with about 50 supporters at a fund-raising breakfast in Newtown then spoke to about 750 students and faculty members at the nearby George School. The students at the traditionally Quaker school were an enthusiastic audience, interrupting him with their applause whenever he spoke against the war in Iraq, which was quite often.
''It was wrong to go in,'' he said. ''The question is, now that we're in, how do we get out?''
The answer, Kucinich said, is to place Iraq's oil industry as well as the security of the country into the hands of the United Nations until the government of Iraq is prepared to manage on its own. It would take just 90 days to set up the U.N. management apparatus, Kucinich said, at which point he'd withdraw American troops.
''There is a way out of Iraq,'' he said. ''As long as our leadership keeps saying we're in for the long run, we'll keep getting in deeper.''
It was a message that was appreciated by the young audience. George School student Alex Dettmer of Westchester, N.Y., said he is 16 years old and worries that the draft could be reinstituted.
''It bothers me, definitely,'' he said.
Mathematics teacher James Grumbach of Newtown said he has not made up his mind whom to support for president in Tuesday's primary but, after hearing Kucinich speak, he is willing to consider the congressman from Ohio.
''I have a tendency to vote for the underdog,'' Grumbach said. ''There's a chance I could make a choice and send a message to the Democratic Party.''
Kucinich also received a round of cheers when he said he supports same-sex marriage.
''This is an issue that will tell us something about ourselves as a nation,'' he said. ''Young Americans in particular know this is not a small matter. It relates to our integrity as human beings.''
Kucinich is the last candidate still actively opposing presumptive nominee John Kerry. In addition to Kerry and Kucinich, next week's ballot in Pennsylvania will include the names of former candidates Howard Dean and John Edwards, both of whom endorsed Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.
Christy Lewis, an Upper Black Eddy resident who is coordinating the Kucinich campaign in Bucks, said she believes Kucinich could receive as much as 20 percent of the vote in next week's primary.
Kucinich said he has pledged to endorse Kerry following the nomination process, but at this point believes it is still important to raise issues. Kucinich said he also hopes party leaders will permit him to address the Democratic National Convention this summer in Boston.
With few primaries left before the convention, Kucinich has accumulated just 27 delegates. Kerry has nearly 2,400, already more than the minimum 2,162 he needs for the nomination.
''I speak for millions of people,'' Kucinich said. ''Sooner or later, the party will come to the understanding that it has to be inclusive.''
hal.marcovitz@mcall.com
215-230-4930
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'Street theater' protests lending policies
April 24, 2004
By Tarron Lively and David Drebes
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20040423-111730-5822r.htm
Antiglobalization protesters yesterday staged a "street theater" that featured body bags and the Grim Reaper chasing Third World countries outside the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) headquarters downtown.
The more than 20 activists were just part of the thousands expected in the District this weekend to protest what they call the "homicidal and destructive" lending practices of the banks.
"Some poor countries are now forced to spend more on foreign debt than on health care and education combined. It's a race to the bottom," said activist spokesman Chris Doran, standing in a small park near the World Bank office in the 1800 block of H Street NW.
Mr. Doran's California-based PressurePoint is one of the groups organizing the weekend's events with the District-based Mobilization for Global Justice.
The organizers have said the protests will be peaceful and will end Saturday night, before hundreds of thousands are expected to arrive Sunday for a pro-choice rally, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. on the Mall.
Damian S. Milverton, World Bank senior communications officer, said earlier this week he hopes the protesters have traveled to developing countries and are "speaking from experience."
However, he acknowledged the banks have started a program to reduce the debt of 27 nations by more than $50 billion over the next 20 years and that debt cancellation will be discussed at this week's meetings.
Another antiglobalization protest is scheduled to begin at noon today at Franklin Square, near the McPherson Square Metro stop.
"From there, we're going to march past three to four locations, including the World Bank, the IMF and the White House," said David Levy, a spokesman for the Mobilization for Global Justice.
Also this weekend, more than 44,000 people are expect to attend an NFL draft party at FedEx Field in Landover, and about 60,000 are expected to participate in the University of Maryland College Park's annual outreach event.
The protests will coincide with the annual meetings and their 60th anniversaries.
Metropolitan Police Department officers were on hand for yesterday's protest. Department officials said extra officers will be on duty throughout the weekend, and that they plan to activate their closed-circuit television system, a network of 14 wireless cameras that are mounted primarily on downtown buildings.
The department also will use temporary cameras at Farragut Square, Lafayette Park and McPherson Square.
Sgt. Scott Fear, spokesman for the U.S. Park Police, said the agency has canceled days off this weekend and about 400 officers will be on duty.
Park Police officers from New York City and civil-disturbance units also will be on duty.
Police this weekend also plan to close several major downtown streets, including Pennsylvania and Connecticut avenues and 17th, 18th and 19th streets, all in Northwest.
Yesterday's event went without incident, despite concerns that organizers would be unable to obtain a permit to perform.
When the show started, about 10 performers representing poor countries lined up on the sidewalk. The Grim Reaper, wearing a skull mask and with the words IMF and World Bank written in white on her black cloak - charged toward the other performers.
"Look at all the poor countries," she cackled, swinging a scythe. "I'm going to destroy you all."
The countries played dead and fell to the ground. Onlookers were invited to place flowers around them as Mr. Doran read eulogies for each country.
"Zambia: killed by user fees," he said. "When one boy suffering from malaria approached a clinic, he was turned away because he couldn't afford to pay the 33 cent user fee enacted under neo-liberal economic policy. The boy, and millions like him around the world, died."
The show ended with the "countries" rising from the dead, tackling the Grim Reaper and breaking her scythe.
"Ain't no power like the power of the people," they chanted.
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Slouching toward Bethlehem
Saturday, April 24, 2004
ABS-CBN News
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?oid=49672&Section=Opinion
Today columnist Red Constantino called him the world's first independent nuclear inspector. And true to that calling, one of the first things a freed Mordechai Vanunu said, as a torrent of words flowed from his long stopped-up mouth, while close relatives vainly tried to stop him from talking lest he call down new sanctions on his head, was an invitation to the chief of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammad ElBaradei, to come to Israel and check out its nuclear arsenal. Not surprisingly, a Jewish mob howled, "Kill him, kill him, kill him," around the place where the very same cry was raised 2,000 years ago about another Jewish Christian who was telling the people some pretty unpleasant things about themselves, such as that before you embarrass another about the mote in his eye, take out the nuclear weapons from your arsenal; and before calling another a terrorist for giving up her life for her country's freedom, check out how your country harried her to that extreme by stealing the land that, sure, God gave you in the Old Testament but look how you repaid Him in the New.
To be sure, a lot of the things Mr. Vanunu said made good soundbytes, prompting BBC and CNN reporters and anchors to repeatedly quote them after the live coverage of his release ended and Israel's most famous prisoner of conscience was hustled away in a car. "I have no more secrets," he said. Yet, hadn't he earlier said, "They could not break me."
It wasn't for want of trying. They put him through unspeakable tortures through 18 years, 12 spent in solitary confinement, all for the sacrilege of exposing Israel's new Ark of the Covenant, its most sacred "self-defense" secret: a consistently denied but substantial nuclear stockpile that analysts said ranked Israel the sixth nuclear power in the world.
A hundred years ago, a vicious and cruel imagination invented and published the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, allegedly outlining a global Jewish conspiracy, and spread it about that the kindly Jews of those times, the people of Spinoza, dropped Christian children down wells to honor a cruel religion. This lie was the direct inspiration for the Nazi isolation and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, even as that is the direct inspiration for the West Bank Wall.
Eighteen years ago, the misguided heirs of that traduced and persecuted race took a leaf from the Protocols and dropped a Christian into a pit of utter darkness, with the demonic aim, not just of destroying a body, but extinguishing a soul.
No one can say what kind of life Mr. Vanunu can still hope to have after his experience of spiritual extinction -- or if he'll even have one -- as a "free man" in the larger prison that is Israel for a Christian Jew: forbidden to leave city limits unless he reports his intentions to the local police force; forbidden to approach any border terminal, including Ben-Gurion International Airport, the country's ports, or borders with the Palestinian Authority; 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; forbidden to approach foreign embassies and divulge details to anyone regarding the Dimona plant about which everything is already known by the world; and he will not have passport privileges, and therefore cannot leave the country. Only one thing is sure: Mr. Vanunu is not afraid of more of the same because he distinctly expressed the wish to go to Jerusalem even if the first time a Christian did that on a donkey, it did not turn out too well for him. (See Mel Gibson's movie.)
Israel is determined that one of the world's most famous prisoners of conscience shall have absolutely nothing. If it had been up to the authorities, he wouldn't even have his mind today.
The only thing he had, before his release and on that day on April 21 that he walked out of Ashkelon Prison, is an intact conscience. But his motive, says Constantino, is no less urgent.
One could sense the urgency in the way Vanunu tried to speak so breathlessly, partly from the fear of being snatched away from the world and buried again in Sheol, as a helicopter kept whirring overhead. He speaks so much and so fast because, obviously, he has a lot of catching up to do.
Yet beyond the 18 years this man lost for daring to be what others only dream of -- "make me the instrument of your peace" -- Mr. Vanunu needs to hurry us up because, in his words, there is no more reason now for Israel to be keeping so many weapons of mass destruction. All the so-called rogue states of the Arab world have opened themselves up to inspection and revealed -- what else? -- the unlikelihood that camel drivers are capable of the higher math required to create, build and sustain nuclear might. So why not Israel as well, he asks.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu was a technician at Dimona, Israel's nuclear installation in the Negev desert. Here he discovered and documented Israel's secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The clandestine armory came to light when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu's interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986.. Photographs revealed nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and "the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually." This in 1986 when America was intimately embedded with Saddam Hussein and knew exactly how far he was from any nuclear war-making capability.
Many in Israel called Mr. Vanunu a traitor for seeking to warn the world that his country had stockpiled up to 200 nuclear weapons. Official retaliation was swift: five days after the Sunday Times interview, Vanunu was kidnapped and drugged, shipped to Israel to be sentenced in a secret trial. At least the Nazi trials following the botched assassination attempt on Hitler were public.
Today Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is not party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Yet the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, and Israel's biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, are closed to international inspection. So that, while Israel shall have the capability to exterminate the Arab race and Islamic religion, the same shall be utterly powerless to prevent it. Why the Americans allow this sick state of affairs can only be explained by the fact that cars can still run on radioactive gasoline.
In a poem he wrote in prison, Vanunu captured very simply the role of the humble but indispensable whistle blower:
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.
Vanunu could have simply bowed his head and done his work as a cog in the machine, consoling himself that Israel's factory of death would have gone up anyway without him.
Yet he chose disobedience and paid the highest price. Today he speaks with urgency, as the tempo for war and division consistently outpaces the slow, dragging pace of peace. Death outraces life each day in the Middle East. Mr. Vanunu is lucky to still be alive and sane because the votaries of Armageddon, not just in Israel and in the Arab Middle East, but in Washington as well, are slouching like the Beast toward Bethlehem so the Prince of Peace shall know not love but only hate and arrogance in the land of his birth, nor peace in the geography of the entire Semitic race.
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