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NUCLEAR
At the Dentist's: Risk of X-Rays and Pregnancy
Pakistan - China Nuclear Plant Deal Set
The Truth About Depleted Uranium Weaponry
War on Iraq Is A Nuclear War And The Fallout Is Coming This Way
Simulation Gives Glimpse of Nuke Terror
China inks deal to build second nuclear plant in Pakistan
S. Asia nuclear rhetoric raised risks
North Korea building new ballistic missile bases: report
Pyongyang says it would never sell nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda: report
Inside North Korea: leaders open to ending nuclear crisis
S.Korea Hopes to Discuss Nukes With North
This Time It's Real: An Antimissile System Takes Shape
Simulation Gives Glimpse of Nuke Terror
Terror plot aimed at NATO foiled
Saudi says one family behind Yanbu attack
Nuclear Weapons Exact a Terrible Price
Colorado's Weapons of Mass Destruction:
Georgia Funded to Monitor Radioactivity at Savannah River Site
DOE to continue funding radiation monitoring this year
Weapons reduction to have little effect on Pantex
MILITARY
In Sudan, Militiamen on Horses Uproot a Million
African Union not asked to send troops to Iraq: Chissano
Czechs to request Russian helicopters as debt repayment
Czech Army to spend 62 million euros on discarding obsolete ammunition
Indonesia buys more arms from Poland
Dien Bien Phu -- one of the 20th century's greatest battles
Gulf War soldier on hunger strike
Inquest opens into 1953 UK nerve gas death
Britain Says Doubts About Abuse Photos Won't Halt Inquiry
Contractors Implicated in Prison Abuse Remain on the Job
How To Discipline Private Contractors
Boeing hires ethics watchdog: report
Germans back Beijing in Taiwan dispute
Iraq déjà vu Vietnam
Marines Plan Switch in Fallujah
The General in Charge of Iraqi Force Is Replaced
Pressure Builds Against Sharon
Quartet Tentatively Backs Sharon Gaza Plan
Sharon to Alter, Not Discard, Pullout Plan
Nicaragua Destroys Cold War Anti - Aircraft Missiles
Indian tribes fear for way of life
White House Rejects Jordan's Request for Statement on Palestinians
Jordan's Call For U.S. Policy On West Bank Is Rebuffed
NATO Simulates Al Qaeda Nuclear Attack
Australia: Most now oppose war
CACI Wants to Review Report on Alleged Abuse
U.S. Sent Specialists To Train Prison Units
Army Conducting 20 Criminal Inquiries in Treatment of Iraqis
Panel Is Told Mars Mission Should Be International
Intelligence Reform Will Not Be Quick
U.N. Warns of Delay in Iraqi Election
U.N.'s Plans to Oversee Voting in Iraq Hinge on Drop in Violence
UN expected to sanction US-led force
Iraq Prison Supervisors Face Army Reprimand
US probes claims of Indians being ill-treated in Iraq
Current Iraq Troop Levels to Be Maintained Until End of 2005
The Role - Another Open Letter to the Troops in Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Test Program Screens Rail Passengers for Bombs
Former Detainees Allege Post-9/11 Abuse
Military Defenders for Detainees Put Tribunals on Trial
Repaving the Long Road Out of Prison
POLITICS
WMD Probe Panel Won't Seek Subpoena Power
Agency Sees Withholding of Medicare Data From Congress as Illegal
Iraq is World's Most Dangerous Journalistic Assignment
French TV to show images of US helicopter killing Iraqis
From Fallujah to Photos, One Fiasco After Another
In U.S., Seeking To Limit Damage
Let them eat cakewalk
CBS Delayed Abuse Report At the Request Of Gen. Myers
Kerry Vows to Protect Israel in PeaceMoves
Group Says Kerry Released Edited Version of Military Records
OTHER
Rhodia Fined $18 Million for Fire-Prone Hazwaste
ACTIVISTS
Peace Between Peoples Update: Najaf, Friday 4-30-04
Republicans Lure the Arts to Politics and Protests
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
VITAL SIGNS
At the Dentist's: Risk of X-Rays and Pregnancy
May 4, 2004
By ERIC NAGOURNEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/health/04DENT.html
Women who have dental X-rays while pregnant may be at higher risk of having babies with low birth weights, researchers say.
Writing in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle said that among women they studied, those with low-weight babies were twice as likely to have had multiple dental X-rays.
As a result of the findings, the American Dental Association said it had issued a restatement of its guidelines, suggesting that dentists use neck collars "whenever practical" to shield the thyroid gland during X-rays. The thyroid gland is believed to be the pathway through which the radiation affects the fetus. The group also said that pregnant women should put off having elective X-rays, when possible.
But the lead author of the study, Dr. Philippe P. Hujoel, who teaches dental public health, said that even if confirmed in other studies, the risk was small. A pregnant woman who has had X-rays, or faces the prospect of having them, should not worry, he said.
"She should not be concerned too much if she does have a toothache and some radiographs need to be taken," Dr. Hujoel said.
Neglecting a dental problem could be unwise, the association said, noting some studies that have shown a link between dental disease and pregnancy problems. The association also suggested that the low birth weights reported in the study might have been a result of disease, not X-rays.
The study is based on a review of more than 5,000 births. Of those, 1,117 babies weighed less than five and a half pounds, which is considered underweight.
When the researchers looked at the women's dental-care histories, they found an apparent association between the underweight babies and exposure of the mother to 0.4 milligrays of radiation or more from dental X-rays. That is about twice the exposure that occurs when a dentist takes four bitewing X-rays, the researchers said.
-------- china
Pakistan - China Nuclear Plant Deal Set
May 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-China-Nuclear.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan and China were signing a deal Tuesday for the construction of a nuclear power plant, the second such plant to be built in the country with Beijing's help, a senior government official said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali will witness a ceremony to be held in the capital Islamabad for signing the deal to construct the 300 megawatt nuclear power plant, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
China is longtime ally of Pakistan, and the deal comes a day after a car bomb attack in Gawadar, a small southwestern town on the Arabian Sea, killed three Chinese engineers and wounded nine others.
No group has been claimed responsibility for the attack, but police say they have detained two men for questioning, and efforts were underway to arrest the attackers.
On Tuesday, a government official said in spite of Monday's bombing, both countries have decided to go ahead to sign the deal to built the plant in Chashma, 135 miles southwest of the capital Islamabad.
China had earlier helped Pakistan to built its second 300 megawatt nuclear power plant in Chashma.
Pakistan has not released any details about the deal, but an official, who has been involved in the process to negotiate the deal, said this time Pakistani engineers will have more involvement in the project.
Pakistan's first nuclear power plant was built in the southern city of Karachi in the 1970s with Canadian help.
It was shut down a few years ago, and Pakistan has recently decommissioned it.
Pakistan became a nuclear power in 1998 when it detonated nuclear devices in response to nuclear tests by archrival India.
Pakistan has said its nuclear program is to protect its security, and its nuclear power plants have been monitored closely by the international community.
-------- depleted uranium
The Truth About Depleted Uranium Weaponry
"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. "~~Michael Parenti, political scientist and author
By Vincent L. Guarisco
05/04/04
"ICH"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6143.htm
Ever notice how crafty the inventors of modern weaponry working for the Pentagon are -- giving their weapons misleading names that deliberately give the opposite impression of the actual intended use? None is more Orwellian, nor more ghoulish, than "Depleted Uranium," or its even less intrusive acronym -- "DU."
Since the early 80's, the all-too-aware world has sounded the alarm about depleted uranium, from a full-blown international outcry to United Nations warnings transmitted through blood-stained pages of the Geneva and Nuremberg conventions to the echos of wooden mallets feverishly slamming down in the world court at the Hague.
The message is very clear -- the radiation level in depleted uranium is NOT depleted, in fact, it WON'T be depleted to any safe degree for about two billion years. In retrospect, that's a long time to beg for forgiveness, not only for what we have done, but for what we continue to do on multiple battlefields.
Fact---only approximately 14 percent of Americans at best understand the full matrix surrounding depleted uranium.
Listen up -- depleted uranium is a deadly weapon of mass destruction that has been banned by virtually every nation on the planet. Its illegal use by the United States breaks all existing international treaties, conventions, protocols, and articles of war. It was first introduced into our arsenal around 1983 under the leadership directives of then President George H. W. Bush, and used in the first Gulf War in Iraq to the tune of 350 tons of exploded poison.
The main difference between father Bush and his son is that junior unleashed his radioactive arsenal mainly in Iraqi urban centers and civilian neighborhoods, rather than in desert battlefields. Untold thousands of Iraqi people, U.S. soldiers, and coalition troops will pay the price for generations in chronic illness, widespread cancers, long-term disabilities and genetic birth defects.
Last year, the Christian Science Monitor sent reporters into Iraq to investigate long-term effects of depleted uranium. In his May 15, 2003 report, http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0515/p01s02-woiq.html staff writer Scott Peterson tells of seeing children playing on top of a damaged tank near a vegetable stand on the outskirts of Baghdad -- a tank that had been destroyed by armor-piercing shells coated with depleted uranium. Wearing his mask and protective clothing, Peterson pointed his Geiger counter toward the tank. It registered 1,000 times the normal background radiation.
The families who survived the tragic decade of sanctions, and the recent shock-and-awe bombing campaign of Baghdad may not survive the radiated aftermath of this continued military sacrilege. The highly toxic "Highway of Death" in 1991 after Desert Storm was only a warm-up session compared to what is happening in Iraq during Enduring Freedom under George W. Bush.
DU was introduced into our arsenal under the pretension that by incorporating this radioactive concoction into our munitions, it somehow makes them more armor piercing. Even if this is true, what they (the marketing department) forget to mention is that DU is perhaps the most lethal time-released agent ever to be unleashed on mankind except for maybe one exception -- its kin -- the Atom Bomb.
Its poisonous effectiveness continues to take life long after the tanks, fighter jets, helicopters, Bradley vehicles, unmanned drones and troops have long gone, put simply, DU is a prolonged latent kiss of death that genetically keeps on embracing for generations to come.
It's a fact that other nations will forever hold us responsible for what our government has done in our name, they fully understand that we are willing participants who supply the needed funds that build these weapons; ignorance is not an acceptable excuse for war crimes committed against humanity! This will not soon be forgotten or forgiven.
Because I'm the offspring of an Atomic Veteran, and have witnessed what can happen to loved ones exposed to radiation, I hereby claim my right to rename DU --"Death Unlimited." May this horrible name always serve as a subliminal reminder whenever you hear others fraudulently attempting to reference it otherwise.
The documented track record associated with DU is a hideous reality, a carcinogenic killer causing birth defects, lung disease, kidney disease, leukemia, breast cancer, lymphoma, bone cancer, and neurological disabilities, etc.
When DU munitions explode, it becomes an atomized dust devil that fills the air with a blanket of radioactive poison, which travels in the wind and is easily inhaled and ingested. Then it enters the soil polluting ground water and infecting the food chain. Eventually, the uranium extends past its immediate epicenter impacting the surrounding environment. This stuff is nothing to play with.
What is most astonishing is that most Americans have never even heard of DU, and few (14%) fully understand what it is, where its being used, and who is being targeted by its usage. DU is one of the Pentagon's best-kept secrets, its most widely-used genocidal weapon for wiping out entire populations quietly and covertly.
Sara Flanders, co-director of the International Action Center and coordinator of the DU Education Project, writes http://www.coastalpost.com/03/09/11.htm that the Pentagon "continues to assert that there are no 'known' health problems associated with DU. But Army training manuals require anyone who comes within 75 feet of any DU-contaminated equipment or terrain to wear respiratory and skin protection."
Although the Bush Pentagon denies publicly that DU weapons can cause sickness, it's own internal reports warn that the radiation and heavy metal of DU weapons could cause kidney, lung and liver damage and increased rates of cancer. Flanders says the Pentagon continues to deny health problems associated with DU. But Army training manuals require anyone who comes within 75 feet of any DU-contaminated equipment or terrain to wear respiratory and skin protection.
Who comes up with this crazy stuff? Was DU conceived somewhere deep some murky hushed corridor of the Project for a New American century (PNAC)? Or perhaps it came from some other think tank that funded a secret scientific lab deep in the belly of the Atomic energy weapons program?
What was the dialogue? Did they say---gee, let's invent a quiet nuclear weapon that can surreptitiously be deployed inside conventional weaponry to progressively eliminate our enemies (and their families) long after we are gone to help reduce future risks of blowback, retribution and revenge?
They had to entertain the idea that every plan has a degree of downside -- surely they knew that by using these weapons in battle our own troops would be exposed too, in fact, even more so because they store, transport, handle and load these DU munitions into the very guns that fire them.
So why do they continue with this knowing full well the danger to our own troops? Do they purposely shorten the lifespan of our soldiers to shave several costly years off healthcare and pension plans? What are we to think about all this? Are they premeditated murderers?
According to Dr. Doug Rokke, U.S. Army health physicist who led the first clean-up of depleted uranium after the Gulf War, "Depleted uranium is a crime against God and humanity." (Listen to Rokke's interview on the subject at http://traprockpeace.org/RokkePressConf23July03.html )
Rokke's own crew -- 100 employees -- was devastated by exposure to the fine dust. "When we went to the Gulf, we were all really healthy," Rokke said. However, after performing clean-up operations in the desert (mistakenly without protective gear), 30 staff members died, and most others -- including Rokke himself --developed serious health problems. Rokke now has reactive airway disease, neurological damage, cataracts, and kidney problems.
"We warned the Department of Defense in 1991 after the Gulf War. Their arrogance is beyond comprehension," Rokke said.
Unbelievable? Think again. Or better yet---ask the more than 150,000 Gulf War Vets who have filed claims after previously serving in Iraq's toxic wastelands during the first Gulf War. After doing so, they were shamelessly denied their benefits by the risk management boys who said that Gulf War Syndrome was a figment of their imagination. Heck, the masters treat their dogs better then them!
Is it any wonder that Uncle Sam took away their M-16's before they returned home? With arms in hand, I would love to know which way those same gun barrels would point after receiving such crap in the VA after serving so valiantly. Conspiracy theory?
Everyone can't be wrong, so answer me this---why in Sam-Hell does the Pentagon continue to use these weapons even though there is an overwhelming abundance of scientific data from around the globe to back these claims?
George W. Bush justifies his continued carnage with a convenient "Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator who gassed his own people and threatened his neighbors..."
But Admiral Gene LaRocque, who fought the Cold War as a commander of a nuclear-armed carrier task force in Europe and served as a war planner in the Pentagon, says war has become a "spectator sport" for most Americans. LaRocque said:
"I had been in thirteen battle engagements, had sunk a submarine, and was the first man ashore in the landing at Roi. In that four years, I thought, What a hell of a waste of a man's life. I lost a lot of friends. I had the task of telling my roommate's parents about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight, part of your life-for what? Old men send young men to war. Flag, banners, and patriotic sayings...
"We've institutionalized militarism. This came out of World War Two... It gave us the National Security Council. It gave us the CIA, that is able to spy on you and me this very moment. For the first time in the history of man, a country has divided up the world into military districts.... You could argue World War Two had to be fought. Hitler had to be stopped. Unfortunately, we translate it unchanged to the situation today...
"I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country." Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them."
Are George Bush and his Pentagon guilty of war crimes against the people of Iraq? By unleashing this most deadly of weapons of mass destruction, are they demonstrating reckless disregard for the health and safety of American troops?
You be the judge.
War on Iraq Is A Nuclear War And The Fallout Is Coming This Way
By Stephanie Hiller,
May 4, 2004
Coastal Post
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/05/03.htm
In May, 2003, the United States dumped 2,200 tons of depleted uranium on Iraq, according to reliable sources, and it's logical to assume that more depleted uranium is being employed in the current attacks on Faluja that began April 8 to put down Iraqi resistance to the American presence there.
According to independent geoscientist Leuren Moret, the war on Iraq-like the war on Afghanistan-is a nuclear war. "Depleted uranium is a nuclear weapon and it is a weapon of mass destruction under the U. S. government's definition of weapons of mass destruction," Moret says.
The Pentagon has repeatedly denied that DU is harmful, despite the symptoms of half the returning veterans from the first Persian Gulf Wars who are now disabled. But researchers have shown that the Pentagon has been fully aware of the consequences of what is called "low level radiation" since 1942, when depleted uranium was first suggested for development as a military weapon under the Manhattan Project.
On Sunday, April 6, the New York Daily News reported that nine soldiers who returned from Iraq last summer had symptoms typical of DU poisoning. The News arranged for them to be tested by Asaf Duracovic, a former colonel in the Army Reserves who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and one of the world's foremost experts on the medical effects of radioactive weaponry. Depleted uranium was found in the urine of four of the men - Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and Cpl. Anthony Yonnone-the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict
Recently completed laboratory analyses show two members of Uranium Medical Research Centre's (UMRC) field investigation team are contaminated with Depleted Uranium (DU). The two field staff, one from Canada and the other, Beirut, toured Iraq for thirteen days in October 2003; five months after the cessation of Operation Iraqi Freedom's aerial bombing and ground force campaign. Using mass spectrometry, UMRC's partner laboratory in Germany measured DU in both team members' urine samples. (Please see http://www.umrc.net/UMRC_bulletin_07_Feb_2004.asp)
If short-term visitors and soldiers have been so affected, what of the people, living near bomb sites, breathing the air every day, drinking the water? What of the children who play in these sites and collect pieces of exploded materiel to sell so their families can eat?
Using figures developed by Japanese physicist, Professor Yagasaki from the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, and explained in his presentation at the World Conference on Depleted Uranium Weapons held in Hamburg last October, the radioactivity of 2,200 tons (or 440,000 pounds) of depleted uranium together with some 1,000 tons used in Afghanistan, is the atomicity equivalent to 400 Nagasaki bombs.
Depleted uranium is cheap and plentiful. When uranium is processed for fission bombs or fuel rods for use in power plants, only U-235, about half a percent of the total, is used. Most of what's left over is U-238, so-called "depleted" uranium. The US has over a million tons of the stuff, and storage is becoming a serious problem.
Though less radioactive than U-235, DU is still highly radioactive and chemically toxic as well. "There is no allowable level of risk," says Moret. Nearly twice as dense as lead, DU is used in tanks and airplanes, as well as bullets, handguns, cannons, all the way up to large bombs weighing more than 5,000 pounds.
It's not dangerous until it blows up
Depleted uranium is pyrophoric. Relatively innocuous as a metal alloy used in planes, tanks, missiles, bullets and rounds, when depleted uranium burns, it releases a radioactive gas. Larger particles may settle to the ground, but winds blowing across the desert may carry the fine particles to locations in a 1000-mile radius from the explosion. As a result, areas as far west as Egypt and as far east as India are likely to be contaminated. "The US. has staged a nuclear war in the Middle East, from Iraq and Central Asia, to the northern half of India. Half of Egypt, Israel, the Saudi Arabian peninsula, Turkey, Iran, the Russian oil-rich states, the Caspian oil region, and northern are now, or will be, all contaminated."
Depleted uranium-U-238-has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. It's effects will be with us forever. It is in the soil, in the groundwater, in food, but the worst of all, it is in the air. When inhaled, it enters directly into the bloodstream. One uranium particle behaves in the body like a tiny nuclear bomb, sending out alpha and beta particles and gamma rays to adjacent cells. These are permanently damaging to the cells and chromosomes and lead to a host of deadly diseases, including cancer and leukemia. They also cause mutations of the genetic material that will show up in subsequent generations as terrible birth deformities, weakened health, and infertility.
Moret says the fallout from these foreign wars is headed our way. Spread by powerful desert winds, the fallout will be carried certainly as far as Britain (where dust storms from the Middle East commonly leave residual dust) and then across the Atlantic Ocean. It will also travel across Asia and the Pacific Ocean and be slowly and silently deposited across the North American continent.
American citizens have already been exposed to radiation from a variety of sources including malfunctioning nuclear power plants, the disasters at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, above-ground bomb tests conducted from 1957 to 1963, and the enormous existing pile of depleted uranium, about 1 million tons, poorly stored in the United States. Radiation has caused the geometric rise of cancers in the US-1 in 3 Americans-compared to 1 in 20 before the second World War. It is also responsible for the rise in autism, learning disabilities, chronic immune deficiency disorders (chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr and so forth), higher rates of infant mortality and the general weakening of the public's health.
Leuren Moret was formerly employed at the Lawrence Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, and the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab. Since walking out on her job to become a whistleblower at Livermore, she has devoted her time to the study of the effects of nuclear radiation. She has worked with scientists like Dr. Ernest Sternglass, Marian Fulk, Dr. Asaf Durakovic of the Uranium Medical Research Center, Dr. Doug Rokke of Traprock Peace Center and many others. Her testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held December 13-14, 2003, in Tokyo was largely responsible for the unanimous verdict on depleted uranium, and that the President Bush and the United States is guilty of war crimes against that country.
First published in Awakened Woman at www.awakenedwoman.com
-------- europe
Simulation Gives Glimpse of Nuke Terror
May 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Black-Dawn.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- European officials conducted a simulation showing how al-Qaida could kill 40,000 people and plunge the continent into chaos if a crude nuclear device were detonated outside NATO headquarters in Brussels.
``We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe,'' said former Sen. Sam Nunn, who helped organize the exercise, dubbed Black Dawn. ``To win this race, we have to achieve cooperation on a scale we've never seen or attempted before.''
Nunn spoke to reporters Tuesday, a day after the closed-door war games attended by top officials including the European Union's security chief, Javier Solana, and his new counterterrorism czar, Gijs de Vries.
In first part of the scenario, European officials were asked how they would respond to intelligence that al-Qaida had obtained enough highly enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb.
In the second, they were confronted with computer projections and video displays illustrating the impact of terrorists exploding the device at NATO's headquarters on the outskirts of Brussels, immediately killing 40,000 people, overwhelming hospitals with hundreds of thousands of injured, spreading panic through Europe and plunging the world economy into turmoil.
``Once you are in this phase, there are no good options,'' said Michele Flournoy, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who helped prepare the exercise.
More than 50 people from 15 countries and a dozen international organizations attended the exercise, mostly EU ambassadors but also civilian and military officials from NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Interpol and other bodies.
Nunn appealed for the Europeans to step up funding for increased protection at sites where weapons-grade uranium and plutonium are stored -- particularly in former Soviet states.
He said preventing al-Qaida from getting its hands on such material was the best chance of stopping it from building a bomb.
``It's well within al-Qaida's operational capabilities to recruit the technical expertise needed to build a crude nuclear devise,'' he said. ``The hard part is getting the nuclear material, but we do not make it nearly hard enough.''
Nunn, a Democrat from Georgia and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, helped push through a $10 billion program in 1991 to destroy and safeguard weapons of mass destruction in Russia and other former Soviet republics. But he said at least 60 percent of sites still must be secured.
He said European leaders should make good on pledges made two years ago as part of a $20 billion commitment by the Group of Eight to provide more funding for that program over 10 years.
They should also push President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin to do more when the G-8 group of world leaders meets next month in Georgia, he said.
Solana and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer convened the exercise to show the extent of the danger.
``The threat of catastrophic terrorism is not confined to the United States or Russia or the Middle East,'' Solana said. ``The new terrorist movements seem willing to use unlimited violence and cause massive casualties.''
Nunn urged increased protection for weapons-grade uranium kept at research sites, which are often poorly guarded university facilities; accelerated destruction of tactical nuclear weapons by both the United States and Russia; enhanced international intelligence sharing; and more help to find new jobs for poorly paid Russian nuclear scientists.
-------- india / pakistan
China inks deal to build second nuclear plant in Pakistan
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
May 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040504143554.nqmnsi7z.html
China Tuesday agreed to build a second nuclear power plant in Pakistan, a day after a car bomb killed three Chinese engineers working at a port project in southwest Pakistan, officials said.
Under the deal China will build a second plant at Chashma, some 270 kilometers (167 miles) south of Islamabad, capable of producing 300-megawatts of electricity.
The agreement was signed by China National Nuclear Corporation president Kang Rixin and Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission chairman Pervez Butt, an official statement said.
Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali and Chinese Vice Minister for Science and Technology Zhang Huazhu also attended the ceremony.
The 600-million-dollar C-2 (Chashma-2) project is likely to be completed in six years. A similar capacity plant built in Chashma with Chinese help became operational in 1999.
"The plant is for civilian use," a Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission spokesman told AFP.
"Construction of C-2 will increase economic activity, employment opportunities for thousands of engineers and scientists," the statement said.
"It will help in the expansion of industrial capability, enhancement of energy security ... and reduced emission of atmospheric pollutants."
Commissioning of the second unit would give Pakistan "a high degree of self-reliance in nuclear power technology," it said.
The deal was signed a day after the car bomb in southwest coastal town of Gwadar killed three Chinese engineers helping to build a multi-million dollar seaport. Nine Chinese workers and a Pakistani driver and a police guard were injured when their van passed by an explosive-laden car triggered by remote control on Monday.
Islamabad strongly condemned the attack and vowed it would never allow "a few terrorists" to undermine Pakistan-China friendship and cooperation.
Police have arrested 13 people following the blast which officials suspect was carried out by hardline groups from surrounding Baluchistan province angry that local people had been passed over for jobs in the 248-million dollar port project.
Chinese consul general Sun Ghun Ye said despite the attack none of the 400 Chinese workers and engineers would abandon the project.
China, Pakistan's strongest and oldest ally, is financing some 200 million dollars of the Gwadar project.
Pakistan has relied heavily on China for its defence needs since 1990 when the United States stopped supplying it with military hardware over its nuclear programme.
Pakistan confirmed it had nuclear weapons in May 1998 when it matched tests conducted by India.
----
S. Asia nuclear rhetoric raised risks
May 04, 2004
By Anwar Iqbal
UPI South Asian Affairs Analyst
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040504-112448-6880r.htm
Washington, DC, May. 4 (UPI) -- India and Pakistan blocked official channels of communication during the 2001-02 border crisis, increasing the possibility of a nuclear conflict in one of the world's most populous regions, says a new report released in Washington.
"The lack of official channels and agreed methods of communication during the crisis had dangerous implications for the two nuclear-armed states," says the report released by a Washington think-tank, the Stimson Center.
The author, Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, argues that the 2001-02 crisis had three distinct phases. In the first phase -- Dec. 13, 2001 to May 14, 2002 -- India threatened the use of conventional force against Pakistan. In the second phase -- May 14, 2002 to June 17, 2002 -- this threat was supplemented by an appeal to the international community to pressure Pakistan to stop supporting jihadi groups.
During both phases, New Delhi played down nuclear dangers to avoid lending credence to Pakistan's claim of Kashmir as a "nuclear flashpoint."
During the third phase -- June 17, 2002 -- April 18, 2003 -- this policy was reversed, as New Delhi sought to reaffirm nuclear deterrence as well as conventional military options if Pakistan continued to support unconventional warfare against India.
"This important analysis clarifies that contradictory signaling can be expected during a crisis in South Asia since national leaders will be addressing domestic, cross-border, and international audiences," says Michael Krepon, the Stimson Center's director of programming on South Asia. "Given these inconsistent messages, it follows that nuclear risk reduction requires the avoidance of war and crises."
Roy-Chaudhury asserts that Indian and Pakistani leaders will need to find ways to keep channels of communication open during an intense crisis; improve the clarity and understanding of signaling; limit the number of "actors" engaged in nuclear signaling; understand better the internal dynamics of each other's political systems and principal signalers; and create and maintain a reliable "back channel" of communication during a crisis period.
He points out that during the 10-month long military mobilization of 2001-02, New Delhi deliberately downgraded its relations with Islamabad. It withdrew India's ambassador to Pakistan, and eventually asked his Pakistani counterpart in India to leave, and halved the strength of respective diplomatic missions. This increased the dependence of both states on public diplomacy and rhetoric as the most significant channel of bilateral communication, he observes.
During much of the border confrontation, India and Pakistan used the media to send "signals" on nuclear as well as conventional matters, the author says. "These signals were multiple in nature, carried out at multiple levels, and addressed to multiple constituencies -- internal, regional, and international."
For both India and Pakistan, he explains, the most important constituencies were the domestic public, each other, and the United States, which had the most influence in the region.
"Although India attempted to convey clear messages, its nuclear signals appeared confusing, and, at times, were at cross-purposes with one another. It is also not clear whether these signals were even perceived as intended by Pakistan or the other parties. If they were, it is not clear whether they were fully understood, or even taken cognizance of, especially by Pakistan," says Roy-Chaudhury.
The nuclear signaling by both New Delhi and Islamabad was unprecedented in terms of the duration as well as the variety and multiple levels at which the signals emanated. The 10-month border confrontation, December 2001 -- October 2002, was the longest period of military mobilization by both countries since their independence in 1947.
"A variety of nuclear signals took place -- flight tests of ballistic missiles, public speeches -- to the public and the armed forces -- and press briefings. These also emanated at multiple levels in both countries -- the political, military, and bureaucratic leadership," the report said.
Prior to the nuclear tests of 1998, there were two instances of nuclear signaling -- during the spring 1990 Indo-Pakistani military crisis and India's military "Exercise Brasstacks" in 1987. During the Kargil conflict of May-July 1999, nuclear signaling by Islamabad was restrained.
During the 2001-02 border crisis, the author says, the first nuclear signal from Islamabad came from President Pervez Musharraf in his March 23, 2002 speech when he spoke of teaching am "unforgettable lesson" to India if it dared to attack Pakistan.
The second nuclear signal from Islamabad came on April 6, 2003, when in an interview to the German weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Musharraf, said that if the (Indian) pressure on Pakistan became too great, "as a last resort, the atom bomb is also possible."
In his response, Indian Army chief Gen. Padmanabhan said if any country was "mad enough" to initiate a nuclear strike against India, then "the perpetrator of that particular outrage shall be punished severely."
In the third phase, India increased its rhetoric, and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee claimed that if he had not attacked Pakistan it was not because Pakistan's nuclear deterrence had worked. "If Pakistan had not agreed to end infiltration, and America had not conveyed that guarantee to India, then war would not have been averted," he said.
Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes went a step ahead and said: "We can take a bomb or two or more ... but when we respond there will be no Pakistan."
Later, in an interview to BBC, he warned: "Pakistan has decided that it wants to get itself destroyed and erased from the world map, then it may take this step of madness (using nuclear weapons), but if (it) wants to survive then it would not do so."
-------- korea
North Korea building new ballistic missile bases: report
SEOUL (AFP)
May 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040504060207.6umhgyoq.html
North Korea is building two underground bases for new ballistic missiles with a range of up to 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles), a newspaper reported Tuesday, citing a South Korean intelligence official.
The Stalinist country has completed 80 percent of the work on the bases, indicating deployment of the new intermediate missiles was imminent, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper said in Seoul.
"US intelligence satellites have spotted about 10 new ballistic missiles and mobile launching pads kept at the two places," the daily quoted the unidentified official as saying.
One of the new bases was in Yangdok, 80 kilometers east of the capital Pyongyang, and the other was in Hochon in South Hamgyong province, the official said.
There were no details about the new intermediate missiles but previous US intelligence reports have said they were an improvement on the Scud and Rodong-type weapons that are the mainstays of North Korea's arsenal.
A missile is normally classified as intermediate if it has a range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. If the new missile's range is confirmed, its deployment would represent a major boost for North Korea.
The country has already deployed short-range Scuds and Rodongs with a range of 1,300 kilometers, while actively developing longer-range Taepodong missiles with a range of up to 6,000 kilometers, according to South Korean analysts.
South Korea's defense ministry estimates North Korea has about 600 Scuds and and 100 Rodong missiles. Pyongyang stunned the world in August 1998 by test-launching over Japan a Taepodong-1 missile with a range of up to 2,000 kilometers, claiming it was a satellite launch.
Washington is worried by North Korea's proliferation of missile technology and its development of longer-range missiles capable of hitting US territory.
Experts said North Korean missiles with a range of up to 4,000 kilometers could hit the US Pacific Ocean territories of Guam and Hawaii.
"Most of America's allied forces and navy ships can be targeted by the North's new missiles," said Kim Myung-Jin of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul.
"The North's missile development will push the United States to build a missile defense network in the region," he said.
Missile exports have been a major source of hard currency earnings for cash-strapped North Korea, which is accused by the United States of being a leading global proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
----
Pyongyang says it would never sell nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda: report
LONDON (AFP)
May 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040503234124.o5sziem9.html
North Korea would never sell nuclear missiles to al-Qaeda and does not want to suffer the same fate as Iraq, according to high-ranking officials quoted Tuesday in London's Financial Times newspaper.
The FT article was based on a two-hour interview in Pyongyang between Selig Harrison -- a US expert on North Korea -- and high-ranking North Korean officials including Kim Yong-nam, President Kim Jong-il's deputy, and foreign minister Paik Nam-soon.
"We're entitled to sell missiles to earn foreign exchange," Kim Yong-nam said, according to the FT report.
"But in regard to nuclear material our policy past, present and future is that we would never allow such transfers to al-Qaeda or anyone else. Never."
A nuclear impasse between Washington and Pyongyang erupted in October 2002 when the US charged that North Korea had not kept its part of the bargain by breaking a 1994 nuclear freeze and launching a secret nuclear weapons program.
The United States said it had learned "conclusively" that the Stalinist state was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program based not on plutonium but on uranium enrichment.
"We want a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, and we have no intention of getting engaged in a nuclear arms rrace with neighbouring nations," said Kim Yong-nam, according to the FT report.
"The only reason we are developing nuclear weapons is to deter an American pre-emptive attack," he said.
"After all, we have been singled out as the target for such an attack and we are the justification for the development of a new generation of US nuclear weapons.
"We don't want to suffer the fate of Iraq," he was quoted as saying.
Washington is demanding the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programs, both plutonium and enriched uranium, before it will offer concessions to the impoverished state.
Harrison is the director of the Asia programme at the Centre for International Policy in Washington.
According to the FT, he has had high-level access to North Korean leaders since 1972, when he became the first American to visit Pyongyang after the Korean war and was the first journalist to interview former leader Kim Il-sung.
----
Inside North Korea: leaders open to ending nuclear crisis
By Selig Harrison
May 4 2004
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1083180253162
The combination of a shadowy nuclear weapons programme and a Communist leadership obsessed with secrecy has made North Korea a byword for crisis.
North Korean leaders rarely talk in depth with visitors, but when they do the result is much-needed new perspective on one of the most pressing security issues confronting the world today.
Based on four days of intensive conversations with senior officials in Pyongyang, it is clear that North Korea is eager to resolve the nuclear weapons crisis - but only by concluding a step-by-step denuclearisation agreement linked with progress towards the normalisation of ties with the US.
Economic pressures, intensified by bold, market-based reforms, make such a deal critical for the stability of Kim Jong-il's regime. But he will not accept the Bush administration's demand for the "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling" (CVID) of his nuclear weapons programme all at once, without knowing what he will get in return.
This is the assessment that emerges from interviews in Pyongyang with Kim Yong-nam, number two to Kim Jong-il; Paik Nam-soon, foreign minister; Kim Gye-gwan, vice-foreign minister; Gen Ri Chan-bok, spokesman for the Korean People's Army; and others.
At the start of my two hours with Kim Yong-nam, president of the Supreme People's Assembly, whom I had met four times before, he said he had just come from watching a CNN programme about Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack. "It seems Mr [George W.] Bush is being kept very busy with Iraq," he said.
"We don't think he is at all serious about resolving the nuclear issue with us in a fair way, since we obviously can't accept 'CVID first'. My feeling is he is delaying resolution of the nuclear issue due to Iraq and the presidential election.
"But time is not on his side," he added. "We are going to use this time 100 per cent effectively to strengthen our nuclear deterrent both quantitatively and qualitatively. Why doesn't he accept our proposal to dismantle our programme completely and verifiably through simultaneous steps by both sides?"
In step one, explained Kim Gye-gwan, North Korea would freeze its plutonium programme in exchange for multilateral energy aid, an end to US economic sanctions and the removal of North Korea from the US list of terrorist states, which would open the way for World Bank and Asian Development Bank aid. "This would be the starting point toward complete dismantlement," Kim Gye-gwan said, "if the United States becomes our friend."
Pressed for details, he declared a freeze meant that "we would not enlarge the stockpile. The amount frozen would depend on what the US is prepared to do." Thus, if the payoff in energy aid was big enough, inspectors would be granted the access necessary to confirm how much plutonium had been reprocessed; the plutonium could then be placed under controls and further reprocessing could be prohibited.
Initially, Kim Gye-gwan said the freeze would only ban reprocessing and would not cover the operation of nuclear reactors for civil power generation. Later he indicated that this demand was negotiable.
North Korea has proposed that negotiations on the freeze start immediately, during the meeting of a six-nation working group in Beijing on May 12, but Kim Gye-gwan said the US wanted the agenda restricted to CVID.
Kim Yong-nam has dismissed suggestions that North Korea - or a unified Korea - would refuse to give up nuclear weapons capabilities because neighbouring Russia and China are both nuclear powers and Japan might yet become one.
"No," he said. "We want a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, and we have no intention of getting engaged in a nuclear arms race with neighbouring nations.
"The only reason we are developing nuclear weapons is to deter an American pre-emptive attack. After all, we have been singled out as the target for such an attack and we are the justification for the development of a new generation of US nuclear weapons. We don't want to suffer the fate of Iraq."
Gen Ri Chan-bok said: "We don't mind the possession of nuclear weapons by Russia and China, because they're not a threat to us. Although Japan is not friendly, I don't know whether Japan is developing nuclear weapons or not, but in any case, our nuclear deterrent is not against Japan or anyone else, just against the United States."
On April 13, Richard Cheney, US vice-president, gave a speech in Shanghai branding North Korea a proliferator of nuclear and missile technology. Mr Cheney warned specifically that Pyongyang might sell nuclear material to al-Qaeda.
These allegations evoked categorical denials. "We make a clear distinction between missiles and nuclear material," declared Kim Yong-nam. "We're entitled to sell missiles to earn foreign exchange. But in regard to nuclear material our policy past, present and future is that we would never allow such transfers to al-Qaeda or anyone else. Never."
Paik Nam-soon, the foreign minister, said: "Let me make clear that we denounce al-Qaeda, we oppose all forms of terrorism and we will never transfer our nuclear material to others. Our nuclear programme is solely for our self-defence. We denounce al-Qaeda for the barbaric attack of 9/11, which was a terrible tragedy and inflicted a great shock to America. Bush is using that shock to turn the American people against us, but the truth is that we want and need your friendship."
The biggest change in North Korea since my last visit three years ago is the social ferment resulting from economic reforms initiated by Kim Jong-il in mid-2002. North Korea is slowly moving toward a mixed economy.
The showcase of this change is the Tong-Il market in central Pyongyang, where about 2,200 vendors sell everything from farm produce to television sets. Twenty similar indoor markets are now under construction throughout Pyongyang and more are planned.
Some of the food sold in these markets comes from rural co-operatives that are now permitted to sell any surplus they produce over the government procurement quota, and some is grown in private plots. But much of the food and some of the consumer goods are imported from neighboring Manchuria by a network of officially-sanctioned Korean and Chinese middlemen.
State-owned factories no longer receive subsidies to cover their losses and are encouraged to find their own markets for their products, trade with each other and keep and reinvest any profits.
The jury is still out on the economic impact of price and wage reforms that have rewarded farmers with higher prices and given higher wages to groups critical to the regime's power - notably miners, some industrial workers and the armed forces.
Politically, the higher prices for farmers have stabilised Kim Jong-il's support in the countryside. In the more populous urban areas, however, the wages of white collar workers have not been increased enough to keep pace with inflation, including government bureaucrats.
Many resident diplomats and aid officials say that unless North Korea can attract large-scale foreign aid to rebuild its infrastructure, especially its electricity, water and transport systems, its economic problems will remain serious. The economic potential of the reforms will not be realised and their net social and political effects could be destabilising. Kim Jong-il needs a nuclear deal with the US in order to open up an influx of aid, trade and investment.
At the same time, hardliners will go along with such a deal only if it includes significant aid commitments, and if it removes the threat of a US pre-emptive strike, which has led to the escalation of the North Korea nuclear effort during the past two years.
Could the US and its allies ever be sure that a closed society such as North Korea lives up to a denuclearisation agreement?
I told my interlocutors that no US president would give Pyongyang the binding security guarantee that it had sought in the nuclear negotiations. The Pentagon would insist that the US retained the option of a retaliatory second strike in the event that North Korea should attack South Korea, Japan or the US.
Surprisingly, one of my North Korean interlocutors said Pyongyang might reconsider its demand for a security guarantee if a new administration proved less hostile than the current one. The presence of US diplomats and businessmen in Pyongyang after the normalisation of the US-North Korea relationship might be a better guarantee against a pre-emptive strike, he said, than a paper security assurance.
But the window of opportunity for a nuclear deal could quickly close when - or if - Pyongyang conducts another long-range missile test or a nuclear test.
Asked how long North Korea could wait before conducting such tests, Kim Yong-nam replied: "There is no deadline in the negotiations. We're patient. But if the United States doesn't alter its position, we can't foresee what will happen and we'll have to decide about testing when the time comes."
Despite insistent probing, it was not possible to penetrate the mysteries still surrounding Pyongyang's nuclear effort: has it mastered the miniaturisation techniques necessary to equip missiles with nuclear warheads? Does it possess nuclear bombs deliverable from aircraft, and if so, how many? Or is it still at the stage of experimenting with nuclear "devices" that are not yet militarily operational? In short, is there more bluff than reality to the North Korea nuclear alarm?
During his recent visit to North Korea, Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, saw evidence that North Korean scientists knew how to reprocess plutonium, but he did not see evidence that they knew how to implode a plutonium-based nuclear weapon.
Calculated ambiguity greeted questions about the nature of the "nuclear deterrent" Pyongyang says it possesses.
"That's a confidential military issue," said Kim Gye-gwan. "But remember that the bomb dropped by the US at Nagasaki was made after four months of preparation. It's now a half century later, and we have more up-to-date technologies, so you can come to your own conclusions on this matter."
Paik Nam-soon said: "I don't think mere devices and the possession of nuclear material constitute a genuine deterrent. When we say deterrent, we mean a capability that can deter an attack."
Gen Ri Chan-bok's reply about testing suggested that there might indeed be an element of bluff in what North Korea says. At first, he replied: "When we can't develop without a test, we'll test." But then he added: "Even without a test, we can develop, complete and manufacture nuclear weapons."
Selig Harrison, director of the Asia programme at the Center for International Policy in Washington, has had high-level access to North Korean leaders since 1972, when he became the first American to visit Pyongyang after the Korean war and first US journalist to interview the late Kim Il-sung. His second meeting with Kim in 1994 set the stage for the nuclear freeze agreement that was negotiated a week later by then-US president Jimmy Carter; it was the breakdown of this agreement in December 2002 that led to the current nuclear crisis.
This was Mr Harrison's eighth visit to North Korea. He is author of Korean Endgame: a Strategy for Reunification and US Disengagement (Princeton University Press).
--------
S.Korea Hopes to Discuss Nukes With North
May 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Talks.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A high-level South Korean delegation flew to North Korea on Tuesday to urge its neighbor to work toward resolving an international standoff over its suspected nuclear weapons development.
South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun led the delegation to the North's capital, Pyongyang. The Cabinet-level talks run Wednesday through Friday.
Six nations involved in the nuclear dispute are expected to hold a third round of talks before the end of June. The first two rounds, attended by delegates from the United States, Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas, took place in Beijing.
``I will advise (North Korea) that results must come out of the third round of six-nation talks,'' Jeong Se-hyun said.
The six nations are scheduled to hold low-level meetings on May 12 in Beijing to lay the groundwork for the third round, Jeong said.
The United States is seeking a verifiable and irreversible dismantling of the North's nuclear weapons programs. North Korea has said it would dismantle its nuclear facilities only if Washington provides economic aid and makes a nonaggression pledge.
During the Cabinet-level talks in Pyongyang, South Korea plans to appeal for military cooperation with North Korea, in addition to joint economic initiatives that are already underway, Jeong said.
South Korea is expected to call for military talks to ease tensions between the nations. The two sides agreed to military talks in the last round of Cabinet talks, but did not fix a date.
In Seoul, a newspaper reported that the communist state is building two underground bases for long-range ballistic missiles that it has been developing. Chosun Ilbo, quoting unidentified senior intelligence sources, reported that 80 percent of the construction of the two bases was complete.
The newspaper, South Korea's largest, said the missiles could reach as far as Hawaii. For years, North Korea is believed to have been developing a missile that could hit parts of the United States, but there are doubts about whether they have been completed, as well as questions about their accuracy and other technical aspects.
North Korea has deployed missiles capable of hitting South Korea and parts of Japan. It alarmed the region in 1998 by firing a missile that flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific.
-------- missile defense
This Time It's Real: An Antimissile System Takes Shape
By JAMES GLANZ
May 4, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/science/04MISS.html?ei=1&en=58472a349686f66c&ex=1084626040&pagewanted=print&position=
DELTA JUNCTION, Alaska - As early as this summer, rockets hidden in silos near this wind-swept town will give the nation its first operating defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles since the 1970's.
Although the system is not a secret, it has been revived with so little fanfare that few Americans seem to realize it exists.
Among warfare experts, it is reviving the type of bitter debate that began in the cold war, culminating in an antiballistic missile treaty. And it is inspiring the same sort of passion that arose during the national fixation with President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars effort, officially the Strategic Defense Initiative. Unlike Star Wars, which faded into the realm of misbegotten high-tech dreams, the new system relies on agile but fairly ordinary rockets to smash incoming warheads rather than nuclear-powered lasers in space. In the new debate, Pentagon planners see the system as a bulwark against the ultimate calamity, a nuclear attack, while skeptics ridicule it as a defense that will not work against a threat that does not exist.
The decades have not washed away the political dimension of a missile defense, either. Deploying the system will fulfill a campaign pledge by President Bush, as well as a more specific directive, issued in December 2002, that the nation have a functioning missile defense system by this year.
Critics of the system, which will cost $10 billion a year for the next five years and, potentially, hundreds of billions when the full defense envisioned by the Pentagon is installed, say it is being rushed before being fully tested. The critics call it a flawed defense against the ICBM's of yesteryear, not the suicide bombers and hijacked airplanes of the world since Sept. 11.
Nevertheless, the system is taking on hard reality in this remote town. On a sunny but numbingly cold day, six white domes rise like igloos within a double-perimeter fence topped by security cameras. Just across a road, the charred and denuded trunks of a fire-ravaged forest of black spruce appear to stand sentry. The folded blues and whites of the Alaska Range loom among wispy clouds off in the distance.
In this setting, the little domes are actually clamshell-shape doors that sit above silos dug 70 feet into the frozen earth. If one of the clamshells ever swings open to release a missile riding a tongue of flame, it will in all likelihood mean that the nation's leadership believes the United States has become the target of a nuclear attack.
The silos are empty, but two huge Manitowoc industrial cranes nearby should soon be outfitting some silos with three-stage interceptors. Once those interceptors, each topped with a bundle of thrusters and optical sensors called a kill vehicle, are hooked into a global network of radars, satellites, computers and command centers, one of Mr. Reagan's biggest dreams will be reality.
Critics of the shield find little hearing at the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, headed by Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, an Air Force pilot with long experience in developing military hardware like fighter jets. "We should not choose to be vulnerable," General Kadish said in an interview. "We have proven that from a technological standpoint and a practical standpoint we can intercept ballistic warheads in flight. And to say now that we can technologically defend ourselves and then choose not to is, in my view, a recipe for failure."
A Space-Age Battering Ram
The first system will rely on interceptors in a handful of silos here at Fort Greeley, an Army base, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. In an attack, boosters would release the kill vehicle more than 100 miles above earth. With a heat-sensitive telescope, the vehicle would search the chill of space for the warhead, then maneuver with its thrusters and try to pulverize the weapon by simply ramming it at speeds faster than 20,000 miles an hour.
Even that description does little justice to the complexity of the system, which spans nine time zones and uses 13,000 miles of fiber optics to link sites as varied as a radar installation on the bleak island of Shemya in the Aleutians and in a secret command center at Cheyenne Mountain, Colo. If it works as planned, the system may take the honorary title of the biggest machine ever built from the nation's electrical grid.
As the nation discovered in the blackout last summer, of course, large machines can be unpredictable. The missile defense system, in fact, is so enormous and complex that it may never be fully tested unless an attack occurs. In highly controlled tests, the interceptors scored hits five times in eight tries.
Critics say a true adversary would deploy cleverly designed decoys or metallic chaff or huge balloons around the warhead that would easily confuse the defense.
"It's totally useless," said Dr. Richard L. Garwin, a physicist who has advised the government on security for nearly 50 years and who, in 1998, was on a panel led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, to assess ballistic missile threats.
Dr. Garwin said the president was "wasting money and he's impairing our security, because it will not work against ICBM's from anyone who has it in for the United States."
Officials at the Missile Defense Agency have said the system was developed to stop what they characterize as unsophisticated threats from budding nuclear powers like North Korea, not the highly developed arsenals of Russia or China. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said the election, not any imminent threat, was behind the decision to deploy before full tests.
"It's a date which obviously was set politically so they could say before the election that they've deployed a system," Mr. Levin said. "I doubt that they'll say in that announcement that they'll deploy a system which may or may not work."
Mr. Levin has also sharply criticized the administration's request for more than $500 million in the 2005 fiscal year to double its arsenal of interceptors, from 20 to 40, before any of the original batch has been tested. The first two tests of the full interceptor are scheduled for this summer.
"This is like deploying a military aircraft missing the wings, the tail and the landing gear," said Philip E. Coyle, a former chief of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon, who is a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. "And without testing to see if that aircraft can do its mission without wings, a tail or landing gear."
The White House has repeatedly said the deployment timetable is based just on the system's technical readiness. Republicans on the Armed Services Committee, including its chairman, John W. Warner of Virginia, have voiced strong support.
The system has also found significant international support. England and Greenland are dedicating some radar sites to the program's early warning system.
In Japan, Parliament recently appropriated $1 billion toward a missile shield that would involve American-made radars and interceptors aboard its Aegis cruisers. The United States is talking with Australia about placing radar on its soil and more cruisers off its shores. The Bush administration spent $700 million in the 2004 fiscal year and has requested more than $1 billion in 2005 to develop the sea-based interceptor system, which would be deployed on American cruisers, as well.
Some experts point out that some of the harshest naysayers have barely changed their criticisms since Star Wars was proposed. That plan featured fanciful - and largely impractical - elements like nuclear-powered lasers based in space. A blanket dismissal on technical grounds no longer resonates as it once did, those experts say.
"Before, it was so grandiose, so complex, so big," said Steven A. Hildreth, a defense specialist at the Congressional Research Service. "There was no real empirical evidence to support the contention that it was possible. Here, with this, at least we have some limited data points that can support the contention that these defenses can hit a warhead and destroy it."
Aspiring to Grandiosity
The system has not entirely abandoned its claims to grandiosity. Beginning some time next year, the Pentagon expects to begin testing an advanced radar built on a heroic scale atop a floating oil platform so that it can rove about the world to provide high-resolution images of mock warheads and decoys in tests - or the real McCoy. At a cost of $1 billion, the radar will tower nearly 300 feet above the water and include a deck almost the size of two football fields.
After being assembled on the Texas Gulf Coast, the radar will be too large to pass through the Panama Canal. It will have to motor around the tip of South America at an estimated nine knots to its primary base off Adak Island in the Aleutians.
Another futuristic component, an immensely powerful laser mounted in the nose of a Boeing 747 that would fly near hostile countries and try to zap their missiles to oblivion shortly after launching, has been repeatedly delayed by technical problems. Despite the setbacks, General Kadish of the Missile Defense Agency said, the laser "represents such a revolutionary capability that we are going to stick to it."
Major contractors on the project include Boeing, Bechtel and Raytheon, which is constructing the kill vehicles, each of which weighs 140 pounds and takes 18 to 24 months to build in a warren of high-tech clean rooms in Tucson. "We're building them as we speak," said Dean Gehr, director of business development for missile defense programs at Raytheon Missile Systems.
Even if all elements of the giant program work just as in the computer simulations that the Pentagon is using to train the people who will operate the shield, some experts do not see the point. The cold war geopolitical landscape in which the system was conceived has shifted out from under it, said Dr. Dean A. Wilkening, director of the science program at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.
"I don't understand the rush to deploy by 2004," Dr. Wilkening said. "I simply don't see the threat."
But with so much of the elaborate system in place and more on the way, Mr. Hildreth of the Congressional Research Service said, questions like that may no longer matter. "I've sort of seen it as a juggernaut," he said. "It's on a collision course with destiny, if you will."
Armed at the Top of the World
That destiny starts in the Alaskan interior, 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks along a winding highway where Mount Hayes, elevation 13,832 feet, appears suddenly around a bend. A carved wood sign welcomes visitors to Delta Junction, "America's Friendly Frontier." The town has a population of 980, and buffalo burgers are a local delicacy.
Why Alaska? "Because it sits at the top of the world," General Kadish said, where the trajectories of virtually all ICBM's attacking the United States would pass. "We can do the job better there, cheaper, in the long run, and be effective whether the warheads are coming from the east or the west."
Building silos and the electronics and communications systems to operate them in this part of the world comes with other challenges, said Lt. Col. John K. Leighow of the Army Corps of Engineers and a deputy district engineer for the Ballistic Missile Defense Support Division.
The ground is loose and shifting, the construction season is short, and winter temperatures can reach 50 or 60 degrees below zero, so cold that tires on stationary vehicles can freeze overnight into irregular shapes and refuse to become round again.
After the first shovel of soil was turned over for the silos two years ago, the schedule left no time for error, Colonel Leighow said, adding: "It was go, go, go. The biggest challenge we've had with this program has been schedule."
A curious-looking yellow building with a white dome, for communicating with the interceptor, was built partly inside an immense cocoon to protect workers from the elements, he said. Hundreds of workers also built a large command center jammed with electronics next to the missile field, and two and a half miles of climate-controlled underground tunnels for pipes and utilities.
A project manager for Bechtel, Mike Hayner, said the shifty soil led contractors to use a novel method to build the silos. They drilled a series of holes 70 feet deep and 3 feet wide around what would become the perimeter of each silo, carefully squirting concrete slurry into each hole as they drilled to keep the holes from collapsing.
After the entire perimeter had been filled with concrete, the workers excavated the middle and outfitted it with a steel silo fabricated in the "lower 48," at the Oregon Iron Works of Clackamas, Ore.
"We are shooting to be on alert by 30 September in response to the president's requirement to be on alert by the end of the year," said Col. Kevin Norgaard, director of the site activation command. "We are where we need to be today, to be there."
The missile defense system is extremely popular in Delta Junction, where the short-term closing of Fort Greeley struck a grave blow to the economy.
As the base reopens, Pete Hallgren, the city manager, said, "The economic impact in our area is massive." In a town where the normal yearly operating budget runs to $250,000, the Defense Department has earmarked $25 million to help ease the impact on local services. The money will buy a new grade school, a library, a landfill and a fire station, as well as partly finance a recreation center, Mr. Hallgren said.
"I'm one of those true believers, who always thought we needed one," Mr. Hallgren said of a national missile defense.
-------- terrorism
Simulation Gives Glimpse of Nuke Terror
May 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Black-Dawn.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- European officials conducted a simulation showing how al-Qaida could kill 40,000 people and plunge the continent into chaos if a crude nuclear device were detonated outside NATO headquarters in Brussels.
``We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe,'' said former Sen. Sam Nunn, who helped organize the exercise, dubbed Black Dawn. ``To win this race, we have to achieve cooperation on a scale we've never seen or attempted before.''
Nunn spoke to reporters Tuesday, a day after the closed-door war games attended by top officials including the European Union's security chief, Javier Solana, and his new counterterrorism czar, Gijs de Vries.
In first part of the scenario, European officials were asked how they would respond to intelligence that al-Qaida had obtained enough highly enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb.
In the second, they were confronted with computer projections and video displays illustrating the impact of terrorists exploding the device at NATO's headquarters on the outskirts of Brussels, immediately killing 40,000 people, overwhelming hospitals with hundreds of thousands of injured, spreading panic through Europe and plunging the world economy into turmoil.
``Once you are in this phase, there are no good options,'' said Michele Flournoy, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who helped prepare the exercise.
More than 50 people from 15 countries and a dozen international organizations attended the exercise, mostly EU ambassadors but also civilian and military officials from NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Interpol and other bodies.
Nunn appealed for the Europeans to step up funding for increased protection at sites where weapons-grade uranium and plutonium are stored -- particularly in former Soviet states.
He said preventing al-Qaida from getting its hands on such material was the best chance of stopping it from building a bomb.
``It's well within al-Qaida's operational capabilities to recruit the technical expertise needed to build a crude nuclear devise,'' he said. ``The hard part is getting the nuclear material, but we do not make it nearly hard enough.''
Nunn, a Democrat from Georgia and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, helped push through a $10 billion program in 1991 to destroy and safeguard weapons of mass destruction in Russia and other former Soviet republics. But he said at least 60 percent of sites still must be secured.
He said European leaders should make good on pledges made two years ago as part of a $20 billion commitment by the Group of Eight to provide more funding for that program over 10 years.
They should also push President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin to do more when the G-8 group of world leaders meets next month in Georgia, he said.
Solana and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer convened the exercise to show the extent of the danger.
``The threat of catastrophic terrorism is not confined to the United States or Russia or the Middle East,'' Solana said. ``The new terrorist movements seem willing to use unlimited violence and cause massive casualties.''
Nunn urged increased protection for weapons-grade uranium kept at research sites, which are often poorly guarded university facilities; accelerated destruction of tactical nuclear weapons by both the United States and Russia; enhanced international intelligence sharing; and more help to find new jobs for poorly paid Russian nuclear scientists.
--------
Terror plot aimed at NATO foiled
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By David R. Sands
May 04, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040503-093237-9774r.htm
Turkish police said yesterday they had foiled a plot by suspected al Qaeda-linked terrorists to bomb a major NATO gathering in Istanbul next month, as Turkey's ambassador to Washington said his country is determined to stage a safe and successful summit.
Prosecutors in Ankara announced that they were questioning 16 suspected members of the Turkish branch of Ansar al-Islam, who were arrested Thursday in the northwestern city of Bursa.
A separate arm of the Islamist terrorist group operated in northern Iraq and was linked to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Authorities said the cell planned to carry out bomb attacks when President Bush and 25 other NATO leaders meet in Istanbul on June 28-29. Mr. Bush is planning a bilateral visit with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan before the summit opens.
"Unfortunately, we have gained a lot of experience in Turkey dealing with terrorist plots," Turkish Ambassador O. Faruk Logoglu said in an interview with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.
The envoy said details remain sketchy on the Bursa plot, but added, "As we move toward the NATO summit, you can be assured that the Turkish authorities will be doing everything in their power to make it a safe gathering and an enjoyable one."
Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim country with a strict secular constitution, already had been on a heightened state of alert after bomb attacks in November that targeted two Istanbul synagogues, the British Consulate and a branch of a British-owned bank. About 60 people were killed in the attacks, which were blamed on an al Qaeda cell in Turkey.
Turkish investigators said guns, bomb-making equipment and forged identity papers had been found during a search of the Bursa group, which reportedly was targeting a local synagogue in addition to the NATO operation.
On Iraq, Mr. Logoglu said Washington and Ankara have recovered from the bitter division over Turkey's unwillingness to support the U.S.-led war in Iraq last year. But he said Turkey remains anxious about efforts by Kurds in northern Iraq to carve out an independent enclave.
Turkey long has feared that such a state could spark a revival of a violent Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey, one that costs tens of thousands of lives before being suppressed in the 1990s.
Although a final Iraqi constitution will be written next year, "all our fears so far have unfortunately been confirmed by the evolving realities on the ground," he said.
On a separate issue, Mr. Logoglu said Turkish Cypriots deserved new international respect for their April 24 vote to support a U.N.-backed plan to end three decades of ethnic division on Cyprus.
The plan was defeated, despite strong U.S. and European endorsements, when Greek Cypriots overwhelmingly rejected the idea.
"This vote means it is time for the reintegration of the Turkish Cypriots, who have been willfully and wrongfully excluded from the international community," Mr. Logoglu said.
He said Turkish Cypriots had voted in support of the U.N. plan in the hopes that their long international isolation could be eased.
"I see no reason under the sun why some of their expectations should not be met," Mr. Logoglu said.
------
Saudi says one family behind Yanbu attack
Sees link to dissidents working abroad, but group denies ties
News video showed Saudi police standing near a burned vehicle Saturday after gunmen attacked a Western engineering firm in Yanbu.
Reuters TV / Saudi TV
May 04, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4877691/
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia said on Tuesday four men who killed five Westerners in a suspected al-Qaida attack on a Saudi energy site were two brothers and their uncles, and one had links to a Saudi dissident group in London.
Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz has said he believes Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida was behind Saturday's attack in the oil and petrochemical hub of Yanbu.
There has been no claim of responsibility for the shootings, which killed two Americans, two Britons and an Australian. The gunmen dragged the corpse of one American through the streets of the Red Sea town before being shot dead by police.
Two Saudi security personnel were also killed.
Violence in the Middle East and concerns over potential disruptions to petroleum supplies have helped to push oil prices to their highest levels for 13 years.
U.S. light crude rose more than 80 cents a barrel on Monday after the killings at Yanbu, which heightened fears that militants might target oil infrastructure in the world's top crude exporter.
The Interior Ministry named the attackers as brothers Sami and Samir al-Ansari and their uncles Ayman and Mustafa, all Saudis.
Suspected militant
It identified Mustafa as a suspected militant wanted by Saudi authorities who had entered the country illegally after working with well-known Saudi dissident figures abroad.
"He last left the country in 1994 to join Saad al-Fagih and Mohamed al-Mas'ari to work with them in their suspicious committee," it said. "He recently entered the country illegally, crossing the borders in order to carry out vile plans."
Fagih and Mas'ari, two British-based Saudi opposition figures promoting democratic reform in the conservative kingdom, set up the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR) in 1993.
"This is a desperate and hopeless attempt by the Saudi government to find some link (between us and terrorists), after trying many times and failing," Fagih told Reuters by telephone.
"The Saudi government has to decide if it is accusing us, Israel or al-Qaida, and then those accusations can be taken seriously," he said in reference to initial comments by Crown Prince Abdullah blaming "Zionist hands" for the attack.
He said someone called Mustafa al-Ansari had frequented the CDLR in 1996, but he did not know if it was the attacker.
The U.S. ambassador to Riyadh on Monday praised the kingdom's crackdown on al-Qaida militants but re-issued a warning to the 35,000 Americans in the Gulf state to leave after the shooting.
"They are making great progress. That is shown in the way they are working through the most wanted (militant) list," James Oberwetter said. "However, there is a still long way to go."
Fifty people were killed in Riyadh last year in a string of suicide bombings blamed on al-Qaida. Security forces have killed or arrested eight on a list of 26 top militants since December.
Swiss-based ABB Lummus, targeted in Saturday's attack, said it was evacuating all 90 foreign staff from Yanbu and that a project it was carrying out for a Saudi petrochemical firm would be delayed.
-------- treaties
Nuclear Weapons Exact a Terrible Price
Urs Cipolat,
May 4, 2004
Daily Californian
http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=15193
In today's world, nuclear weapons no longer create security, they threaten it. In 1996, the World Court declared the use of nuclear weapons illegal under international humanitarian law, because these weapons of mass destruction cannot distinguish between combatants and innocent civilians and create unnecessary suffering. Maintaining the current U.S. nuclear arsenal of more than 10,000 warheads is extremely expensive. This year alone, it will cost the U.S. taxpayer $6.5 billion, or $180 million per day.
If we know that nuclear weapons pose an acute danger to our security; that their use is illegal because of their inhumane and indiscriminate power; and that maintaining them is consuming enormous resources, which could otherwise be used to improve our ailing public schools and universities or strengthen our exhausted conventional military forces, how can we tacitly accept our government's and the National Weapons Labs' push for the development of new generations of nuclear weapons and increased nuclear weapons spending of up to $30 billion over the next four years?
Under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of 1970, the United States remains committed to the gradual reduction and eventual elimination of its nuclear arsenal. Article VI of the treaty stipulates that "Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament." Accordingly, the United States is obliged to disengage from activities that risk fueling a new nuclear arms race, and to continuously reduce its nuclear arsenal. This has been confirmed at the last Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2000, when the United States signed on to "An unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States parties [to the NPT] are committed under Article VI."
The nuclear weapons activities at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories are in direct violation of these international commitments.
The ongoing research into new generations of nuclear weapons -- so-called bunker busters and mini-nukes -- and the related expansion of laboratory capabilities represent vertical proliferation prohibited under the treaty. In addition to providing the other eight nuclear-weapon states, including North Korea, with a powerful incentive to put the reduction of their arsenals on hold and develop similar new nuclear weapons, these activities give the 180 non-nuclear-weapon states an equally powerful incentive to break their non-proliferation commitment under the treaty and start working toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Recently discovered nuclear weapons programs in Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and possibly Iran underscore this logic.
One cannot go around with a cigarette in one's mouth, asking the rest of the world not to smoke. Yet this is precisely what the United States is doing. Only the total elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide in compliance with legal commitments under the treaty and under the strict control of the International Atomic Energy Agency can stop nuclear proliferation. New nuclear weapons research and design programs, combined with the expansion of nuclear weapons labs, undermine the international non-proliferation regime, stimulate the spread of nuclear weapons, and enhance the risk of these horrific weapons actually being used.
The impending expiration of its lab oversight contracts with the Department of Energy offers UC [University of California] a unique opportunity to disengage from aiding and abetting in the violation of international law and the potential commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws of war. Conversely, successful bids for the continued management of Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Labs could mean that UC and its weapons scientists may one day be sued under emerging international criminal law.
Urs A. Cipolat is a lecturer on Law, Ethics and Science at UC Berkeley. He serves as program director at the Global Security Institute in San Francisco. Respond at opinion@dailycal.org.
This article is available at http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=15193.
Dr. Urs A. Cipolat Program Director Global Security Institute 300 Broadway Suite 26 USA - San Francisco, CA 94133 (415) 397-6760 (415) 397-6761 urs@gsinstitute.org www.gsinstitute.org
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- colorado
Colorado's Weapons of Mass Destruction:
The Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant
Democracy Now!
Tue., May. 4, 2004
http://www.pacifica.org/programs/dn/040504.html
We speak with Colorado University professor Len Ackland about the former plutonium-processing Rocky Flats nuclear bomb making plant. Ackland is author of the book Making A Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West that examines the four-decade history of Rocky Flats.
Democracy Now! is broadcasting today from the studios of Free Speech TV in Boulder, Colorado. Just eight miles south of here lies the former plutonium-processing Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, next to that is The Rocky Mountain Arsenal - a former chemical weapons plant where deadly sarin, mustard gas and napalm were manufactured. Not far from there lies a sprawling 480-acre toxic waste site known as the Lowry landfill.
Over the last half century, Colorado has been the center of the U.S. nuclear weapons programs - within the state alone there are 49 active underground missile silos each. Today we will look at the history of this area in relation to the military industrial complex and its impact on the future.
Rocky Flats was built in the early 1950s to produce plutonium warhead triggers for nuclear weapons. It closed four decades later when the FBI raided the plant in 1989 to investigate allegations of environmental crimes. But Rocky Flats reentered the news recently with the publication of a new book called "The Ambushed Grand Jury."
This was no ordinary account. It was an inside look by a Colorado rancher named Wes McKinley who has spent a dozen years serving on a grand jury investigation of a nuclear cover-up at the site that involved the Justice Department.
Meanwhile there is growing concern over plans to reuse sites like Rocky Flats and to recycle water and sludge from a landfill that some say is contaminated with radioactivity.
We begin with taking a look at the history of Rocky Flats.
- Len Ackland, professor of journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the author of the book Making A Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West.
- Grand Jury Accuses Justice Department of Rocky Flats Nuclear Cover-Up
We speak with Wes McKinley, a Colorado rancher and the foreman of a grand jury that investigated activity at Rocky Flats about the charges he makes in his new book The Ambushed Grand Jury: How the Justice Department Covered Up Government Nuclear Crimes and How We Caught Them Red Handed.
- Wes McKinley, a Colorado rancher and the foreman of a grand jury that investigated activity at Rocky Flats. He is co-author of Ambushed Grand Jury: How the Justce Department Covered Up Government Nuclear Crimes And How We Caught Them Red Handed
- Recycling Plutonium: How the EPA Plans to Disburse Toxic Waste From the Lowry Landfill to the Sewage System and into CO Farmlands
We speak with Colorado University Environmental Studies professor Adrienne Anderson about the Lowry Landfill. Citizen groups claim the landfill is widely contaminated with highly radioactive plutonium and other deadly wastes. The EPA now wants to treat the contaminated groundwater at the landfill and discharge it into the Denver metro sewage system.
Adrienne Anderson, professor of Environmental & Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1997 Anderson filed a federal whistleblower case on a plan to mix plutonium waste with sewer sludge, process it into fertilizer and then use on American farms. She currently works with farmers and unions to stop practices like this taking place around the country today.
-------- south carolina
Georgia Funded to Monitor Radioactivity at Savannah River Site
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
May 4, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-04-095.asp
The U.S. Department of Energy announced Monday that it will provide the Georgia Department of Natural Resources $300,000 to continue its radiation monitoring activities of the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons plant through December 2004.
The extension will provide the Georgia Department of Natural Resources with more time to evaluate its needs for future monitoring and arrange for alternate funding. The grant also requires that Georgia provide the Department of Energy any analysis of data and/or statistical evidence that would suggest the Department of Energy's own monitoring program be revised.
"At the request of Governor Sonny Perdue and Georgia Representatives Max Burns and Charlie Norwood, we granted this additional funding to ensure continued operations of monitoring through the end of the calendar year," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. "We believe this is a reasonable request."
To date, the Department of Energy has provided the state of Georgia $2.2 million for monitoring activities.
Current waste management practices at the Savannah River Site threaten to make the watershed of the Savannah River into a high-level nuclear waste dump, according to a report issued in March by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a nonprofit research organization based in Takoma Park, Maryland.
The report, details tritium contamination of the Savannah River and the environmental injustice caused by contamination to those who subsist on fish from its waters.
The Savannah River Site (SRS) on the Georgia - South Carolina border produced more than one-third of the plutonium for U.S. nuclear bombs, as well as almost all of the tritium, and other nuclear materials for the U.S. weapons program. Past waste dumping and mismanagement and a failure to implement a sound cleanup plan have created extensive water pollution beneath the site as well as risks for water resources in the region.
"Current cleanup policies at SRS will very likely leave a million or more curies of radioactivity in high-level waste on the Savannah River Site," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, IEER president and principal author of the report. "The DOE is turning SRS into a de facto high-level radioactive waste dump."
Makhijani says the Energy Department should "urgently" develop plans to recover buried radioactive wastes and highly contaminated soil, so that the main sources of water pollution over the long term are minimized.
"We are going to work in a bi-partisan way in the state of Georgia to hold the federal government's feet to the fire," said State Representative Nan Orrock, a Democrat, Majority Whip of the Georgia House of Representatives. "The Department of Energy simply must not be allowed to put our most precious natural resource - water - at risk in this appalling way."
"All that we want is a bi-partisan measure to put back into funding the testing for tritium and other radioactive products in the river," said State Representative Ron Stephens, a Republican who represents Savannah. "My constituents drink this water."
"There are serious problems that need to be dealt with in an expeditious manner, properly and correctly," said State Senator Regina Thomas, a Democrat who represents Savannah. "There are contaminants in our water supply and the Department of Energy should create a cleanup plan so as to eliminate pollution of our water."
----
DOE to continue funding radiation monitoring this year
Associated Press
Tue, May. 04, 2004
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/8582708.htm
ATLANTA - The U.S. Department of Energy will continue funding Georgia's monitoring program to determine if harmful radiation is leaking from the Savannah River Site near Augusta, a state official said.
Carol Couch, director of the state Environmental Protection Division, said Monday that the federal agency will provide $300,000 through the end of this year for the monitoring.
The state, she said, will begin to seek alternative funding for next year and beyond.
The DOE operates the 198,000-acre site, which sits directly across the Savannah River from Georgia. The state monitors for radiation in the waters of the river and in the air at seven stations between Augusta and Savannah. It also oversees testing for radiation in milk, crops, soil and river sediment.
The DOE provided $1.8 million over the past three years to set up the state agency's monitoring program. Georgia had counted on $700,000 to operate the program in 2004. State officials said the DOE had led them to believe the funding would continue for several more years.
"We granted this additional funding to ensure continued operations of monitoring through the end of the calendar year," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. "We believe this is a reasonable request."
The Savannah River Site used to produce radioactive plutonium for hydrogen bombs. All five reactors have been permanently shut down but the site still harbors millions of gallons of high-level radioactive waste in underground storage tanks.
Information from: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, http://www.ajc.com
-------- texas
Weapons reduction to have little effect on Pantex
By BETH WILSON beth.wilson@amarillo.com
The Amarillo Globe-News
Friday, June 4, 2004
http://www.amarillonet.com/stories/060404/new_weaponspan.shtml
"I wish the editorial staff at the Globe news would THINK before they commit themselves to an opinion in the paper's editorial pages. Their support of the President's attempts to ammend the constitution to ban gay marriage is LAME at best, and certainly uncaring towards their fellow citizens." - From tjaybob43 [Join this discussion]
A planned reduction in nuclear weapons has no "near term" effect on the BWXT Pantex Plant, an official with the National Nuclear Security Administration said Thursday.
NNSA Administrator Linton F. Brooks submitted a classified report to Congress earlier this week and talked Thursday with reporters in a telephone news conference.
The report covered the significant reduction in the nation's total nuclear weapons stockpile by 2012 as outlined in the Moscow Treaty announced by President Bush in 2001.
Brooks said the reduction was the largest percentage reduction in history.
"We have a long, robust tradition of not talking about numbers and total stockpile," he said. "The numbers I'm prepared to use are almost in half and the smallest in several decades. That ought to at least give you the sense we are talking about a very significant decision."
Brooks said many of the weapons stockpiled are going through a life-extension program at Pantex. But because the number of weapons will be reduced, the number needing maintenance will be fewer.
"The change will be over time at Pantex in that they'll do fewer life extensions and much, much more dismantlements," he said.
Brooks said there will be no "near term changes" in personnel or facilities at Pantex.
"What this means is simply when Pantex gets through with the life-extension program, there will be continued work," he said. "So I think the right way to think about it at Pantex is kind of the same size effort we planned - only going on longer because there will be all this dismantlement."
Jud Simmons, public affairs officer at Pantex, said he was unable to give further details about the report and referred questions to NNSA headquarters.
U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, has not seen the reduction report, but he described the plan as a continuation of a trend.
"The numbers in our stockpile have been on the way down since the end of the Cold War," Thornberry said. "That makes it even more important to make sure the weapons we have left are well-maintained."
Pantex workers do that maintenance work, in addition to disassembling warheads.
The work will shift back and forth from maintenance to disassembly over time, Thornberry said, but Pantex will continue critical work involving America's nuclear arsenal.
Globe-News Weekend Editor Kevin Welch contributed to this report.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
In Sudan, Militiamen on Horses Uproot a Million
May 4, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/international/africa/04DARF.html?pagewanted=all&position=
YALA, Sudan, May 2 - Hawa Muhammad, 15, lost just about everything when the men on horseback came. They took her family's horses, donkeys and small herd of goats and sheep. They took her cooking pots and her clothing. They took her mother and her father, too.
"The men on horses killed my parents," she said, referring to the Janjaweed, loose bands of Arab fighters. "Then the planes came."
Now it is she to whom her six younger sisters turn when their bellies rumble. She recounted her tale as if in a trance.
Hawa left her village on the run and settled with thousands of others at the camp in Kalma, outside Nyala, part of a tide of a million people that the United Nations and others say has been displaced in this vast region of western Sudan. The government in Khartoum has closed the region to outsiders for much of the last year.
Hawa's account of how the attack unfolded is the same as those heard in camp after camp across Darfur, as well as the settlements across the border in the desert of eastern Chad, where the United Nations estimates another 100,000 villagers have streamed.
Many were driven away by the Janjaweed, a few thousand uniformed militia men who have worked with government soldiers and aerial bombardments to purge villages of their darker-skinned black African inhabitants.
The government denies any relationship to the Janjaweed, but ousted villagers say the links are strong, and their accounts are backed by numerous aid workers and outside experts.
Human rights groups and international officials charge that the Janjaweed have been used as a tool of the government to pursue a radical policy resembling ethnic cleansing.
The conflict has pitted Arab nomads and herders against settled black African farmers. The tensions have been worsened by droughts in the north and the slow creep of the desert southward.
For 20 years rebels in southern Sudan have sought to topple the Arab-dominated government in the north. Two million people died in that larger conflict, and a peace agreement is considered near.
But since early 2003 two rebel groups in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, initiated a separate rebellion, complaining that the region's people, especially the black Africans, were being marginalized.
Sudan's decades-old civil war was much about religion - the north is mostly Muslim, the south animist and Christian. Darfur's conflict is over ethnicity and resources; it pits Muslim against Muslim.
The rebels here scored some early victories, and the government responded with a fury, angering countries that thought it was finally taking the country toward peace after decades of civil war.
The army has used helicopter gunships and old Russian-made Antonov planes loaded with bombs. But the Arab-African rivalry has long festered here, and the most ruthless weapon has been the mounted Janjaweed fighters, who know no rules of war.
The Janjaweed ride camels and horses and use automatic weapons against those they come across. They ride into villages en masse and shoot anyone in sight. As the militiamen torch and loot, the villagers grab what they can and run.
An empty village is an eerie place. There are no babies crying, no goats bleating, no women pounding grain into mush. The only sound comes from the wind as it whips over the huts that used to house families but now lie toppled and torched.
Today there are many such villages in the vast Darfur region. Eleven ghost villages line the main road just northwest of here. Each stands frozen, just as it was when it was overrun.
Some were cleared months ago. Others were attacked as recently as last week. In each it is clear that life came to a sudden halt. Beds are overturned, and pots lie on their sides. In front of one hut is a child's sandal, but no child anywhere.
Fatima Ishag Sulieman, 25, did not have time to get away. She was in bed when the Janjaweed moved in. Two men entered her hut. They hit her, then they raped her in front of her family.
"I screamed, and they ran away," she said in Arabic.
Ms. Sulieman and others uprooted from their homes end up in camps, some of them organized settlements and others squalid outposts. She now lives under a tree at a secondary school in Kas, in southern Darfur. All around the schoolyard are other villagers, most of them women and children. Many of them, she says, experienced what she did.
Others suffer in different ways.
Adam Hassan, a weathered man in an equally weathered robe, described a dual attack. First it was Arab men on horseback, he said, who swooped down on his village, outside Kaliek. Then, he said, soldiers moved in.
In Mr. Hassan's case it was his two sons, ages 7 and 10, who were killed.
Mr. Hassan now stays with his wife and two surviving daughters at the Kas schoolyard. He wants desperately to return to his land and pick up again where he left off.
Like so many of the uprooted villagers, Mr. Hassan is a farmer. He relies on the heavy rains that come in June to add some life to the dusty earth. His sorghum and ground nuts keep his family alive.
But he and hundreds of thousands of other farmers in Darfur will miss this year's planning season. It is too unsafe for them to farm. That reality has aid agencies gearing up for what will be more and more hunger in the days ahead.
"I may have to stay here forever," he said at his campsite, looking glum. "There are too many Janjaweed."
The United Nations, which conducted its own tour of Darfur last week, said the crisis in western Sudan would last another 18 months - if the government managed to disarm the men on horseback soon.
But it remains to be seen whether the lawlessness will be tamed. On one recent day, men on camelback still lurked on the outskirts of an empty village outside Kas. They took off when visitors arrived.
Farther down a dirt track, a man on the back of a donkey approached another destroyed village, an assault weapon balanced on his lap.
His name was Ismael Abbakar, and he said he knew how the village had been emptied - he took part, in fact - although he claimed to be protecting the villagers, not driving them away.
Last year, when the chaos in Darfur began spinning out of control, he was raising cattle for a living. Now, though, he is a government soldier who patrols alone with his government-issued weapon. He pulled out an identification card to prove his affiliation.
In Darfur the distinction between soldier and outlaw has grown murky.
Ahmed Angabo Ahmed, the commissioner of the Kas region, acknowledged enlisting some armed robbers in the police and army to hunt down the rebels. He said his new recruits were on the side of the law now and were not Janjaweed.
"The Janjaweed are outlaws," he said.
--------
African Union not asked to send troops to Iraq: Chissano
(AFP)
May 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040504162322.1g34ilxy.html
LISBON, May 4 (FP) - Mozambique's President Joachim Chissano, the chairman of the African Union, said in Lisbon Tuesday the African Union had received no request from Washington to send African troops to join any peacekeeping force in Iraq.
"Mozambique has not been sollicited by the United States, nor has the presidency of the African Union," Chissano said at a joint press conference with Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso.
"Should we receive any request, it would be up to the (African Union) security and defense council to study the request," he said.
The Mozambican president, on an official visit to Portugal, was responding to a report that appeared Saturday in the weekly Expresso here stating that Washington was examining the possibility of setting up, in Africa, a rapid intervention force of 75,000 men for stabilization and peacekeeping missions, notably in Iraq.
Under a front-page headline that read "US take African troops to Iraq" the paper said the "US want to establish in Africa a rapid intervention military force of 75,000 members."
"The situation in Iraq, as well as the recent intervention in Haiti and the need to free American troops from 'tasks which can be carried out by others' were reasons given by the State Department and the Pentagon (for the creation of the force)," the paper added.
The weekly cited an Angolan foreign ministry source, who said that Angola had refused to take part.
"Joining such a force could run the risk of transferring to Angola the horrors of terrorism," the paper quoted a senior Angolan foreign ministry official as saying.
US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said last week Washington is mulling plans to create a 75,000-strong peacekeeping force to intervene in trouble spots around the world.
-------- arms
Czechs to request Russian helicopters as debt repayment
May 04, 2004
(AFP) PRAGUE
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040504112346.hexiit5q.html
The Czech Republic plans to ask for 29 combat helicopters as part payment of Russia's outstanding debt of 19 billion koruna (588 million euros, 708 million dollars), Deputy Defence Minister Jaroslav Kopriva said Tuesday.
He said the Czech general staff would have to approve acquisition of the 18 Mi-171 and 11 Mi-35 helicopters worth a total of about 183 million dollars (152 million euros).
The military acquired seven Mi-35s, a new version of the Mi-24 helicopter, from Russia last autumn. The Mi-171 is an updated, better-equipped version of the Mi-17.
The Defence Ministry originally wanted three giant An-70 Antonov transport planes, but when Russia offered only smaller and older Il-76MF aircraft it opted for additional helicopters instead.
"We are now discussing the uses of the machines in the future and negotiating about the ones we already have," Kopriva said.
The military currently operates 18 Mi-24s and 18 Mi-17s. The older helicopters will be decommissioned between 2005 and 2010, Kopriva said, adding that the new deliveries would allow them to be replaced at less cost than modernising them.
"This will not cost the state budget a single koruna," Defence Minister Miroslav Kostelka said.
According to Defence Ministry armaments section director Jiri Martinek, however, the military will have to invest around 1.2 billion korunamillion euros, 45 million dollars) to upgrade the helicopters to meet NATO standards in communication and combat identification systems.
The helicopters are equipped with night-vision systems and other modern systems.
The ministry would like to sell the older helicopters and Kostelka said that it is possible that Russia will re-purchase them, which is currently being negotiated.
In March, Prague and Moscow signed an agreement stipulating that Russia's outstanding debt to the Czech Republic could be paid in supplies of nuclear fuel, military supplies and electric energy destined for re-export over the next two years.
Inherited from the days of the ex-Soviet Union, the Russian debt to the Czechs is composed of a civil part (managed by the Ministry of Finance) and a military part (under the Defence Ministry).
-----
Czech Army to spend 62 million euros on discarding obsolete ammunition
PRAGUE (AFP)
May 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040504134339.aqhre8s0.html
The Czech Defence Ministry is to spend 2.0 billion koruna (62 million euros, 75 million dollars) on disposing of almost 90,000 tonnes of redundant army ammunition by mid-2007, defence ministry spokesman Ladislav Sticha told AFP on Tuesday.
Contracts will be signed with two Czech companies this month on the first phase, the liquidation of 39,000 tonnes of obsolete ammunition, he said.
One-tenth of that, mainly missiles, guided missiles and air-force bombs will be dismantled by Czech experts.
The remainder, most of which consists of outdated cartridges, will be destroyed.
A decision on whether to sell or destroy other obsolete ammunition will be taken later, he added.
"We will be liquidating 90,000 tonnes of the 130,000 tonnes of ammunition that we store altogether," Sticha told AFP.
The annual cost of guarding unnecessary and outdated ammunition is 300 million koruna, according to the independent Supreme Audit Office.
The defence ministry said that since 1993, when the Czech Republic was founded following the split of Czechoslovakia, the Czech military has used 8,435 tonnes of ammunition, sold 25,698 tonnes and liquidated, and paid for the liquidation of, another 37,040 tonnes.
-----
Indonesia buys more arms from Poland
(AFP)
May 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040504144147.u75gpf8f.html
Indonesia on Tuesday expanded the list of arms it plans to buy from Poland with the help of a 75 million-dollarmillion-euro) export credit line granted by Warsaw, the two countries defence ministers said.
"We want to make new purchases. On our list are things that are already in the works: 11 Mi-2 helicopters and four Skytruck planes.
"We are also interested in buying 11 extra Skytrucks," Indonesian Defence Minister Air Marshal Suprihadim told a joint news conference with Polish counterpart Defence Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski, who said Indonesia was "also interested in buying long-distance radars".
Indonesia has been turning to alternative arms suppliers since Washington halted most military contacts with Jakarta in 1999 following the military's failure to stem violence in East Timor.
The export credit as granted during a visit to Indonesia by President Aleksander Kwasniewski in February.
-------- asia
Dien Bien Phu -- one of the 20th century's greatest battles
DIEN BIEN PHU, Vietnam (AFP)
May 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040504023153.ji0p8x6c.html
Fifty years ago this week France was forced to abandon all hopes of recreating its colonial empire in Indochina with its calamitous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, one of the 20th century's greatest battles.
The bloody campaign in the remote, mountainous valley in northwestern Vietnam pitted Vo Nguyen Giap, the 42-year-old father of the popular Vietnamese army, the Viet Minh, against Christian de la Croix de Castries, a colonel in the armoured division and head of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.
The former, a strategist of guerrilla warfare, was born into a well-off peasant family and brought up on a diet of Confucianism and nationalism. The latter was an ex-cavalryman from a famous French aristocratic family.
The French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was born out of a decision by General Henri Navarre, France's military commander in Vietnam, to provoke a full-scale battle with the Viet Minh to crush them once and for all.
Five hundred kilometres (310 miles) northwest of Hanoi along the Lao border, Dien Bien Phu was considered an ideal place to draw the guerrilla army into a fight, as well as disrupt their supply routes from Laos and China.
The Vietnamese, however, were determined to score a major victory on the battlefield to reinforce their position in discussions underway to end the war.
After the French began building their entrenched position on the valley's large plain in November 1953, assembling some 15,000 French, North African, pro-French Vietnamese and foreign legionnaires, the Vietnamese Politburo gave the green light for an assault.
Originally planned for January 25, Giap took a critical decision to call off the attack in the face of opposition from his Chinese advisers and own officer corps, saying he did not feel his troops could secure an outright victory.
Subsequent recruitment and conscription enabled him to boost the troops under his command to around 50,000, giving him the numerical advantage he sought.
The bloody battle eventually began on March 13 and raged until the last exhausted and shell-shocked French defenders hoisted the white flag on May 7.
But the fate of the French side was effectively sealed over a 36-hour period on March 13 and 14 with the loss of the two key hills of Him Lam and Doc Lap overlooking the valley.
With these in Viet Minh hands, the French had lost the high ground they needed, and now sat defenseless in the sights of Vietnamese gunners manning 105mm artillery and anti-aircraft guns.
Giap, having used 260,000 conscripted civilian porters to haul food, weapons and ammunition onto camouflaged hill positions, had already won the battle that was to come.
The following weeks were punctuated by a furious series of assaults and counter-attacks. The French could only wait for the end in agony, short of ammunition and rations, hoping for reinforcements to come in by parachute after the airstrip was destroyed on March 28.
The end came on May 7, when the Vietnamese captured the last hill in their way, dynamiting the French bunker and taking out survivors with grenades. At 5:30 pm, de Castries surrendered. He was released four months later.
"The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was a modern military engagement and a victory for what had only a few years earlier been a guerrilla army," according to Christopher Goscha, an historian at the University of Lyon II.
It was less the result of French weakness than the organizational abilities of the Viet Minh and their success in "executing a modern battle," Goscha said in October's edition of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.
But it came at a cost to both sides. Around 3,000 French troops died or disappeared and 10,000 were captured. As many as 10,000 Vietnamese soldiers died, historians say.
-------- britain
Gulf War soldier on hunger strike
Alexander Izett said he was willing to die
Tuesday, 4 May, 2004
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3682525.stm
A former soldier has gone on hunger strike in an attempt to secure a public inquiry into Gulf War Syndrome.
Alexander Izett said he was ready to die to force the military to "come clean" over the issue.
The former lance corporal from Cumbernauld stopped eating last Saturday, on his 34th birthday, at his home in Germany.
Mr Izett said he developed brittle bone disease after being vaccinated in the run-up to the Gulf War in 1990 to 1991.
He took his case to the Scottish Parliament earlier this year but has become frustrated with the progress being made by MSPs.
In a letter to his local MSP Cathy Craigie, the ex-soldier said he was "heart-broken" that he could not get the treatment he needed in Scotland.
He wrote: "This is a last desperate attempt in trying to force the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to tell the truth regarding my suffered illness of Gulf War Syndrome."
He wrote: "I'm now too ill to do anything else but make this final stand.
"I was willing to fight and die for my country. Now I am willing to die to make that country come clean and tell the truth of not only my suffering, but that of thousands of my fellow sufferers of Gulf War Syndrome."
Mr Izett said he wants a UK-wide public inquiry into Gulf War Syndrome because the Ministry of Defence continues to deny the existence of the condition.
Nine injections
He said sufferers should be given priority on the NHS, better pension rights and compensation payments for them and their families.
He said he received nine inoculations, including one for the plague and another for anthrax, whilst serving with 25 Engineer Regiment, based in Osnabruck, Germany.
Veterans believe vaccinations made them ill
In the event he never served in the war in Iraq because it lasted only a few weeks and he left the Army in May 1991 after serving for six years.
He said he became ill in 1993 and has since broken his ribs, knee cap and shoulder and suffered from depression and stomach ulcers, leaving him unable to work.
In a bid to get better treatment, he moved to Germany and he now lives in Bersenbrueck near Bremen on a 70% war pension of £72.50 a week, which he secured after a long legal battle with the MoD.
Mr Izett said he would take fluids for the first 14 days of his protest. He said he was being looked after by his wife, from whom he is separated.
Speaking from his home, he said: "When Tony Blair got into power he promised a full public inquiry and we are still waiting. It's all promises. I want to see action."
Holyrood's Public Petitions Committee agreed to write to the Scottish Executive about Gulf War Syndrome after hearing an emotional plea from Mr Izett in March.
----
Inquest opens into 1953 UK nerve gas death
By Michael Holden,
May 4, 2004
MSNBC
http://famulus.msnbc.com/famulusintl/reuters05-04-061514.asp?reg=europe&vts=5420040642
LONDON, May 4 - An inquest opened on Wednesday into the death of a British serviceman who died almost exactly 51 years ago during secret military experiments into the effect of deadly nerve agents.
Ronald Maddison, a 20-year-old Royal Air Force engineer, died in May 1953 following tests conducted by British Ministry of Defence (MoD) scientists at the Porton Down chemical and biological weapons laboratory.
He collapsed shortly after scientists placed a 200 mg patch of the deadly chemical warfare agent Sarin on his arm.
The original 1953 inquest into his death, held in secret for reasons of ''national security,'' concluded he had choked to death and recorded a verdict of misadventure.
London's High Court overturned the decision in 2002 and ordered a new inquiry into claims Maddison was one of a number of guinea pigs who believed they were simply taking part in tests to find a cure for the common cold.
''It is important, whenever practical, that there should be a public, full, fair and fearless investigation into cases of death,'' Chief Justice Lord Woolf said, adding Maddison's family had been kept ''in total ignorance of what was the true situation in relation to their relative.''
The British government says at least 20,000 servicemen have taken part in tests at Porton Down since trials began in 1916. Advocates and family members say soldiers who volunteered may have been duped into giving their consent, unaware they would be exposed to deadly nerve agents and uninformed of the risks.
Maddison's case is the only one in which a serviceman is believed to have died immediately as a direct result of tests, but other test veterans claim to have suffered long-term health problems.
A large number of those who underwent tests at the laboratory are expected to attend the inquest, which is expected to last between six and eight weeks at a court in Wiltshire, western England, where Porton Down is located.
The military says it has seen no evidence that survivors of the experiments suffered long-term damage, or that any servicemen were duped into giving consent for the tests.
It said it had no opposition to the new inquest.
''The Ministry of Defence has assisted the coroner whenever and wherever possible,'' a ministry spokesman said.
Following a four-year police investigation into whether scientists should face criminal charges, lawyers concluded last year that there should be no prosecutions.
The history of nerve gases began in Germany in 1936 when Dr Gerhard Schrader discovered the gas tabun while working on insecticides.
Sarin was developed in 1938, a volatile liquid designed to paralyse and kill, with a lethal dose when breathed of about 100 milligrammes per cubic metre of air.
In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult killed 12 people in a Sarin gas attack on Tokyo's subway system
----
Britain Says Doubts About Abuse Photos Won't Halt Inquiry
May 4, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
LONDON, May 4 - The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair said today that barring "evidence to the contrary," it had accepted "at face value" as possible evidence of a crime photographs purporting to show British soldiers beating and humiliating a hooded Iraqi prisoner.
In a somber statement to the House of Commons, the armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, said that despite suspicions expressed in Parliament and in the news media that scenes depicted in photographs published in The Daily Mirror last weekend were faked, the special investigative branch of the Royal Military Police would conduct a thorough investigation into the possibility of prisoner abuse.
"Very grave allegations have been made that challenge the reputation of the British Army both here, in Iraq and elsewhere," Mr. Ingram said. "I can assure the House that if British soldiers are found to have acted unlawfully, then appropriate action will be taken. But our immediate priority is to establish the truth as quickly as possible and we are determined to leave no stone unturned."
The seriousness with which Mr. Blair's government conveyed its approach to the uproar reflected a mounting perception that allied efforts to stabilize and rebuild Iraq are being undermined by the shock and anger that have enveloped the Muslim world over the accusations of prisoner abuse. And there is a broader sense radiating from the Muslim world that the episode, which occurred during a campaign to rid Iraq of the vestiges of a brutal dictator, has called into question American and British moral authority despite official condemnations of the alleged abuses.
Political analysts said that while doubts about the authenticity of the British photographs persisted inside the government, serious cases of abuse had already been established among American forces. As such, Mr. Blair does not want to be seen as prejudging the British inquiry or dismissing it as merely part of a vendetta by a tabloid that has turned against his government on the political front.
One member of Mr. Blair's party, Donald Anderson, who chairs the foreign affairs committee in Parliament, said that extensive damage had already been done and would take an extensive effort to repair.
Mr. Ingram disclosed that since the outset of hostilities in Iraq, 33 cases involving civilian deaths, injuries or ill treatment had been opened by military investigators. He said 12 were still under investigation and of the 21 that had been completed, 15 were closed without charges and 6 were referred for possible prosecution. He gave no further details.
In responding to the accusations raised by the tabloid Daily Mirror, Mr. Ingram said investigators had asked for and received some 20 photographs from the newspaper, which said it had received the photos from two soldiers in the Queen's Lancashire Regiment who witnessed an eight-hour beating and torture session of the unidentified Iraqi. Photos show him being kicked and struck with a rifle butt, while another purports to show a British soldier urinating on him.
Mr. Ingram said other investigators were already pressing the inquiry in Iraq, in Britain and on Cyprus, where the regiment implicated in the prisoner abuse story is now.
But in response to questions from a Tory opposition member, Nicholas Soames, Mr. Ingram said it was premature to comment on charges that the photos had been staged or faked, or whether The Daily Mirror had offered "financial inducements" to anyone willing to provide evidence of prisoner abuse.
Mr. Soames said that Britain's response to the charges must show that "in bearing arms" soldiers "have an exceptional responsibility of respect for others" and for maintaining "the highest standards of decency at all times."
A former military officer, Mr. Soames indicated that the Conservatives would closely monitor the investigation to ensure that the army's reputation was protected if the charges proved unwarranted.
He spoke of the Lancashire regiment as having won for Britain more battle honors than any front-line army unit, from Waterloo, where Napoleon Bonaparte was finally defeated, to the June 6, 1944, allied landing at Normandy, France.
"If a wrong has been done, then clearly it must be dealt with," Mr. Soames said. "But let this house keep in perspective 300 years of the most loyal, gallant and distinguished service to the crown and nation."
-------- business
CIVILIAN EMPLOYEES
Contractors Implicated in Prison Abuse Remain on the Job
May 4, 2004
By JOEL BRINKLEY and JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/international/middleeast/04CONT.html
WASHINGTON, May 3 - More than two months after a classified Army report found that two contract workers were implicated in the abuse of Iraqis at a prison outside Baghdad, the companies that employ them say that they have heard nothing from the Pentagon, and that they have not removed any employees from Iraq.
For one of the employees, the Army report recommended "termination of employment" and revocation of his security clearance. For the other, it urged an official reprimand and review of his security clearance.
But J. P. London, chief executive of CACI, one of the companies involved, said in an interview on Monday that "we have not received any information or direction from the client regarding our work in country - no charges, no communications, no citations, no calls to appear at the Pentagon."
Ralph Williams, vice president for communications for Titan, the other company, also said Monday that the company has heard nothing, and that none of Titan's workers have been recalled.
Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said Monday evening that they had no information on whether the workers were still on the job or why the report had not been conveyed to the companies.
In a statement issued Monday, CACI defended its employees, saying they are well-trained former military personnel.
The classified Army report asserted that at least one employee of CACI was among those "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib," the Iraqi prison.
It is unclear whether the second employee implicated works for CACI or Titan, since the Army report mentions both companies. Neither company would comment.
CACI said in its statement that one of the men listed in the report "is not and never has been a CACI employee," but the statement did not name him.
Companies with employees in Iraq usually refuse to identify them, citing security concerns.
CACI International, a 41-year-old public company whose main business is information technology - it manages the State Department's e-mail system, for example - said it has opened its own investigation.
But Dr. London noted with apparent irritation that the military still had not provided the company with a copy of the classified military report, completed Feb. 26, that makes allegations about CACI's employees.
Two civilian contractors were cited in the report. One of them, Steven Stephaniwicz, is described as a civilian interrogator, an employee of CACI assigned to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade.
Dr. London said the company opened an intelligence service division in the late 1990's whose mission is "intelligence information collection, analysis, field support and human intelligence that could include these types of interviews." It remains a small part of the business, he added.
Still, Joe Vafi, an analyst who follows the company for Jeffries & Company in San Francisco, said CACI "has hired a lot of former military, former intelligence."
CACI was founded in 1962 as the California Analysis Center, Inc. But as its mission grew more diverse, it changed its name simply to CACI Inc., in 1973.
It has about 9,400 employees and revenues of $843 million last year. About 63 percent of the company's business is under contract to the Defense Department and 29 percent to other federal agencies.
The other contractor implicated, John Israel, identified as a civilian translator assigned to the same brigade, is described in one place in the Army report as a CACI employee and in another as an employee of Titan, which provides translators for the Army throughout Iraq.
They and other civilian contractors, the report says, were allowed to "wander about" the prison "with too much unsupervised, free access to the detainee area."
It further states that both Mr. Israel and Mr. Stephanowicz made false statements to investigators about their knowledge or participation in the abuses, and that Mr. Israel apparently did not have security clearance.
Mr. Williams said Titan would not identify its employees working in Iraq but added, "we have no contracts that involve the physical handling of prisoners. The only service we provide is linguistic services."
Though he would not confirm that Mr. Israel worked for Titan, he said all of Titan's employees are still on the job in Iraq.
Titan, like CACI, is a public company that provides information and communication services under contract to federal defense and intelligence agencies. Founded in 1981, it has about 12,000 employees and revenues of about $2 billion a year.
Neither Mr. Israel nor Mr. Stephanowicz could be located on Monday.
The contracts for these workers are classified, the companies said.
But Angela Styles, who served as an administrator for federal procurement policy in the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2003, said the rules and statements of work governing federal contractors in this context are usually are quite broad.
"I would be shocked if there was anything more specific than you will assist the D.O.D. with the detention of prisoners," she said.
Allen Weiner, a professor of international law and diplomacy at Stanford University law school, said that ultimately the military commanders are responsible for the contractors' behavior.
"The law of war which applies in times of intense brutality assumes a high degree of control by commanders for the acts of their subordinates," he said.
But he added that, even with that responsibility, the commanders may not have had as much control as they would like.
"One can assume," he said "that once the contract is let, there may not be the same formal operational control that one would expect through the chain of command."
Joel Brinkley reported from Washington for this article and James Glanz from Des Moines.
----
How To Discipline Private Contractors
What consequences do the companies involved in Abu Ghraib face?
By Phillip Carter
Tuesday, May 4, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099954/fr/rss/
Criminal charges have been filed against the U.S. military personnel accused of torturing prisoners at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Reports have also alleged that government contractors coached these soldiers on how to abuse the Iraqis, in apparent violation of international and domestic law. These contractors are not subject to military justice, and so far, the Justice Department has taken no steps to prosecute them. When private military contractors break the law, what can be done to discipline them?
Quite a bit, as it turns out. Misbehaving firms can have their government contracts terminated; they can be barred from competing for future contracts; and they may also be subject to civil and criminal liability. However, nearly all of these penalties are at the discretion of the agency that issued the original contract. Procurement officials, political leaders, prosecutors, and judges get to decide whether to sanction contractors for allegedly breaking the law in Iraq.
The first and easiest way to discipline contractors is to fire them. Practically, this means terminating their government contract, cutting them off from thousands (or millions) of taxpayer dollars. The two contractors implicated in the Abu Ghraib scandal, CACI Corp. and Titan Corp., hold contracts with the Army for the provision of linguistic support at prison facilities in Iraq (among other things). Under Part 49 of the Federal Acquisition Regulations, the government may kill these contracts in the event of a "material breach" or other "default" on the contractor's part. Such a breach can mean simple failure to perform under the terms of the contract, as well as criminal conduct by employees or by the corporation itself. The discretion to terminate these agreements rests with the Army, though the contractors could appeal this decision to the courts.
Continue Article
Private contractors who misbehave can also be prohibited from bidding for future contracts. Part 9 of the Federal Acquisition Regulations commands procurement officials to award contracts only to "responsible" companies. The alleged conduct by CACI and Titan employees could lead procurement officials to designate those firms as not responsible.
A more serious way to discipline bad contractors is through "suspension" or "debarment" proceedings. Military procurement officials can decide not to consider a private contractor for future federal contracts for a certain period of time. For example, in July 2003, the Air Force suspended three divisions of Boeing from eligibility for new contracts in response to misconduct relating to the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program. "Serious improper misconduct" by an employee during the performance of a contract can serve as grounds for suspension or debarment. A criminal indictment (of either an individual or a company) may be enough to support a debarment, as can an internal investigation like the one conducted by the Army at Abu Ghraib. However, if the grounds for debarment depend on an individual employee's conduct, that conduct must be attributed to the corporation, which may, say, have shown negligence in failing to investigate, train, or supervise its employees. The decision to suspend or debar a company rests with the executive agency-in the case of Abu Ghraib, the Army.
Government contractors can also be criminally prosecuted (as described in this "Jurisprudence" article) if they misbehave badly enough, but the Justice Department told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that it has no current plans to prosecute any contractors involved with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Civil suits may also be brought against the contractors and the U.S. government, as was done following the U.S. Navy's downing of an Iranian passenger jet in 1988. Families of the dead passengers attempted to sue the government contractors who built the U.S.S. Vincennes and its weapons systems under the Federal Tort Claims Act. However, this lawsuit failed, in part because of a legal doctrine known as the "government contractor" defense, which shields government contractors from liability when they build something or provide services in accordance with government specifications. This defense, and other procedural obstacles, would likely prevent the Iraqi detainees from suing contractors in American courts for damages resulting from their treatment at Abu Ghraib.
----
Boeing hires ethics watchdog: report
(AFP)
May 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040504152327.2uktzudf.html
CHICAGO The Boeing Company has hired an ethics watchdog to alert the US government to any future wrongdoing by the aerospace giant in connection with defense contracts, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The compliance officer will oversee Boeing's ethics-compliance programs, file regular progress reports with the Pentagon and highlight any transgressions, the newspaper said.
The Air Force insisted on the appointment as part of a broader settlement, following two ethics scandals involving rocket and air tanker contracts, according to sources cited by the Journal.
Following the first industrial espionage scandal, the Pentagon suspended Boeing from competing on government rocket contracts, and late last year, it suspended a controversial multibillion-dollar air tanker deal with Boeing.
A former US Air Force official who was involved in the tanker deal and later went to work for Boeing, admitted violating federal conflict-of-interest rules in the matter last month.
Darleen Druyun, 56, will be sentenced in August.
The scandals have strained relations between the company and the Pentagon and lawmakers on Capitol Hill at a time when Boeing is increasingly dependent on revenues from its military unit.
In 2003, the Chicago-based company, and number two US defense contractor, said revenues from military hardware and weapons exceeded those of its core aircraft making unit for the first time.
In 2004, the aerospace giant expects to reap 60 percent of its revenues from its IDS or Integrated Defense Systems unit.
Boeing could not immediately be reached for comment on the report.
-------- china
Germans back Beijing in Taiwan dispute
Expatica
4 May 2004
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=52&story_id=7201
BERLIN - Germany has declared its most explicit support yet for Beijing's position towards Taipei, rejecting any Taiwanese independence and criticising any moves that increased tension across the Taiwan Strait.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and visiting Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao issued a joint statement in Berlin in which they traded support with one another on key policy issues, including Germany's bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.
"The German government opposes the independence of Taiwan," the statement said. "It opposes all steps directed towards an increase of tensions in the Taiwan Strait." Analysts said Berlin had been more non-committal on the topic in the past.
Taiwan has been beyond the control of the communist authorities since 1949 and has developed a democratic system. Beijing regards it as a renegade Chinese province. Beijing has stated it would be a grounds for war if Taiwan formally declared independence.
The people of the island are to vote in a referendum in 2006 on a new constitution.
The five-page joint statement, entitled "Partnership in Global Responsibility", also stressed that human rights were a key issue in the two nations' relations. Beijing affirmed it would follow the principles of the UN Charter and promote human rights.
The Germans said "noted" that China was "actively preparing" to ratify the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights.
The two nations said the Berlin and Beijing would cooperate in reforming the Security Council, adding: "China welcomes the greater role to be played by Germany in the United Nations." The two would work jointly "in developing a cooperative world order".
Wen Jiabao's four-day official visit to Germany includes witnessing a string of contract signings for major German investments in China. Soon after landing in Munich Sunday, he attended a ceremony to see a deal signed for a major new Volkswagen plant in Shanghai.
Wen Jiabao was accompanies by dozens of ministers, businessmen and diplomats.
DaimlerChrysler signed a contract Monday to follow German rivals VW and BMW into China, setting up a venture with Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Company to manufacture 25,000 C- and E-class Mercedes cars in China per year.
Next up after the talks with Schroeder was a general agreement on German aid in modernizing the outdated heavy-industry centres of northern China as well as a contract with German semiconductor company Infineon to build a new plant near Shanghai.
The trip is Wen Jiabao's first to Europe since taking office last year. He was to visit Brussels, Dublin and London later this week.
During a visit to a Siemens gas turbine manufacturing plant in Berlin on Monday, he said China would invest heavily in new power generation, raising capacity this year alone by 30 million kilowatts.
German exports to China rose 25 percent in value last year to just short of EUR 20 billion.
Siemens chief executive said he was still hoping to win Berlin's approval for the export of a redundant plutonium plant to China.
The company saw no reason to withdraw its application despite an announcement from China last week that it has dropped plans to buy the plant at Hanau near Frankfurt.
-------- iraq
'Iraq déjà vu Vietnam'
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
By David Antoon, Colonel, USAF Ret.
YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (United States)
http://yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=1914&mode=thread&order=0
When I was an innocent and naïve young man, I served three tours of duty in Vietnam, an immoral war that left some fifty thousand Americans and three million Vietnamese dead. Each of these deaths, both American and Vietnamese, represented the loss of a relative -- grandparents, parents, sons, daughters, brothers, or sisters -- and left a void only known by those families who have suffered such losses. Today, Vietnamese children suffer birth mutations, cancers, and untimely deaths from the Agent Orange that was deposited in their ground water by America decades ago.
And now a misguided America is using its war machine with the same horrible results in another fraudulently manipulated war. Depleted Uranium (with a half-life of 1.5 million years) has replaced Agent Orange as the contaminant of choice. Iraqis and Afghanis have become the victims instead of Vietnamese. AC-130 gun-ships are again raining down indiscriminate death in Iraqi cities as they did three decades ago on Vietnamese villages. And young innocent Americans ("fungible" units as described by Rumsfeld in one of his jocular press briefings) are vainly dying again at the hands of a misguided, mendacious and immoral administration. American and Iraqi families are experiencing a void that we all hope to never know.
With Vietnam, the falsified Gulf of Tonkin incident was used to "buy" America's support for war. The objective of this war became a moving "goal post;" "domino theory;" "democratization;" the fraudulent and morbid score of body counts; and finally to "avoid defeat." American sentiment was purchased this time with claims of WMD's and an Oscar-winning performance at the United Nations describing non-existent "Yellow Cake." In less than a year the goal posts have moved from WMDs, to regime change, to "freedom," and now to "smoke out" the terrorists that we are creating daily with our terrorism and illegal occupation. In response to the chaos in the besieged city of Fallujah, the military commentators are now talking about "avoiding defeat," instead of outright victory. The goal posts won't stand still.
Three decades ago, Colin Powell, in his first tour of duty in Vietnam did search and destroy missions. During his second tour of duty, Major Powell was assigned to investigate the My Lai massacre where he dismissed the reports of the real heroes in this atrocity, those who reported the crime. He has again demonstrated in his position with the current administration that he is still a "dutiful soldier." At the beginning of the war in Iraq, Secretary of State Powell stated that the numbers of Iraqi casualties was of no concern to him or his government. The U.S. government has done no accounting, but NGOs estimate the number of innocent Iraqis killed in Iraq to exceed 20,000 thus far. Human carnage seems to follow Powell wherever he goes.
As in Vietnam, the killing of the "enemy" is so much easier if soldiers are "desensitized" and the "enemy" is "dehumanized." Today, BBC reported that an American General and her soldiers were responsible for Iraqi prisoners being forced into naked sexual poses where they were photographed with American troops in uniform. They were even tortured with electrical wires attached to their genitals. Interviews with American snipers on NPR, describe shooting Iraqis as sport. Apparently, the "dehumanization" of the "enemy" has been successful as evidenced by these "desensitized" transgressions.
This month the Toledo Blade was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Tiger Force atrocities in Vietnam, including the killing and torturing of innocent Vietnamese, and the wearing of body parts of their victims as "necklaces." Tiger Force was recently reactivated in Iraq to shoot and kill from over a mile away, any Iraqi approaching the oil pipelines. It doesn't matter if they are innocent bystanders or not. It's another way to endear our occupation to the Iraqi people.
Al Jazeera has reported and documented over 450 innocent elderly men, women, and children killed and buried in the Fallujah city soccer field now being used as a make shift grave. They report that American forces are shooting at anybody who moves and have also prevented the injured from being transported to hospitals for emergency care. Even Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reports that the American military has bombed Al Jazeera offices, and persecuted and killed its reporters and cameramen. Their crime was providing truthful reporting and images to the outside world, news that has been suppressed by American forces.
Senator John McCain has lashed out at his colleagues in the Senate who have referred to the war in Iraq as another "Vietnam." Many, if not most Vietnam veterans would strongly disagree with Senator McCain. Large numbers have joined forces in the organization, Vietnam Veterans Against War. It should be noted that more Americans have died in the first year of the Iraq war than died in the first year of the Vietnam War. Senator McCain is only correct in the observation that the consequences of this misadventure will be far, far graver than they were in Vietnam.
I am no longer innocent and naïve. I consider writing this letter more patriotic than anything I did during my thirty years in uniform. I confess that I am a humanitarian who does read newspapers, and books, and history. As the American war machine continues its horrors in Iraq, a country without WMDs, without infrastructure and civil order, and now without a popular government, the world easily sees the war's real purpose -- control of natural resources and protection of our lone "ally" in the region. Most of the world, and even now many Americans realize this war too, is a mistake. Military occupation in Vietnam, or Iraq, or Palestine, or Chechnya is doomed to failure. History has shown us that installing a government of the occupier's choosing, and not of the occupied, is doomed to failure.
How many lives, American and Iraqi, must be killed or destroyed? How much of our national treasure must be expended before the misguided officials in Washington are willing to admit their mistake? Must the draft be reinstated, as is now being planned, to feed this military monster? Must our campuses again burn as young people refuse to become the "fungible" fodder of this administration?
A decade from now, will we again be building a granite monument to our thousands of brave military soldiers who died in vain? Two or three decades from now will a senior member of this administration write a book and say, "the Iraq war was a mistake?"
Yes, this is deja vu Vietnam. The only question now is, "When will it end?"
[David Antoon is a Vietnam Veteran and retired U.S. Air Force officer, a devoted husband and father who worries about what kind of world his children, and all children, will inherit. He fears the damage to America's reputation and credibility with a misguided, immoral, and illegal foreign policy specifically in regard to the military occupation of Palestine, and now Iraq, will not be repaired in his lifetime.]
David Antoon encourages your comments: david_antoon@hotmail.com
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Marines Plan Switch in Fallujah
Iraqi Ex-General Said Likely to Lose Brigade Command
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63985-2004May3.html
FALLUJAH, Iraq, May 3 -- The U.S. Marines have taken steps to replace the overall commander of a group of former Iraqi soldiers charged with restoring order in this restive city, a senior U.S. military official said Monday. The move appeared aimed at defusing a growing controversy over the former army general initially selected to lead the unit.
The senior military official, who spoke to reporters in Baghdad on condition of anonymity, said Jassim Mohammed Saleh, a former army division commander who served in President Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard, would no longer be the overall leader of the new Fallujah Brigade. Instead, he will help lead one of the three battalions that will form the brigade, the official said.
The brigade likely will be led by Mohammed Latif, a former intelligence officer who was expelled from the country by Hussein's government, the official said. The official said Latif would have to undergo more vetting before he was appointed.
In the southern city of Najaf, militiamen loyal to a Shiite Muslim cleric attacked a U.S. military base with mortars overnight, then opened fire in the afternoon from several directions, news services reported. U.S. troops responded with tank and machine-gun fire, demolishing a building that was described as the source of the shooting.
No American casualties were reported; military officials said 20 insurgents and an unknown number of civilians were killed in the fighting.
U.S. forces are massed around Najaf in response to an insurrection led by the cleric, Moqtada Sadr, and his militia. A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Pat White, told the Associated Press after Monday's fighting that U.S. troops would "maintain our defense posture" until someone "much, much higher than me makes a different decision."
Meanwhile, one American soldier was killed Monday and two were wounded when they were attacked south of Baghdad. The soldiers were members of a 1st Armored Division unit providing security around a weapons cache discovered Sunday night, said Maj. Dave Gercken, a spokesman for the division.
A Marine was killed Monday as a result of enemy action in Anbar province while conducting what were described as security and stability operations, Marine officers said.
The military also identified six troops killed Sunday in western Iraq as five U.S. Navy sailors and one soldier from the Army's 1st Infantry Division. The six were assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and were at a base camp near Ramadi that was hit by at least one 120mm mortar shell. Three sailors were killed immediately, and the two other sailors and the soldier died later from their wounds, said Marine Capt. Bruce Frame, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command.
In Baghdad, Iraq's U.S. administrator said he was optimistic that important agreements would soon be reached on the shape and leadership of the interim Iraqi government that is to assume sovereignty on June 30. The administrator, L. Paul Bremer, said U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi would return to Iraq in a few days to continue negotiations with U.S. and Iraqi officials.
"I think it's a little early to say what the process will be, but we expect to have an interim government in place by the end of the month," Bremer said.
The Fallujah Brigade was created in an attempt to give Iraqis primary responsibility for pursuing insurgents who have been battling Marines there for a month. It was not clear whether the decision to name a new overall commander was made by Marine officers here or by more senior military and civilian officials in Baghdad and Washington. Saleh had been lauded by Marine commanders, but officials at the Pentagon and at the U.S. military command in Baghdad questioned his credentials and cast doubt on his fitness to lead the brigade.
Saleh, a Sunni Muslim who is originally from Fallujah but had been living in Baghdad, had served as the commanding general of the Iraqi army's 38th Infantry Division. Earlier in his military career, he was an officer in the Republican Guard, an elite branch of the army sometimes used by Hussein to suppress internal dissent.
The Iraqi National Congress, a political organization headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite Muslim politician who has been a vocal proponent of excluding former senior members of the military from service in the new security forces, said Saleh commanded a Republican Guard battalion that participated in suppressing a Shiite insurrection in 1991.
"We are not going to have, as part of the defense of this country, someone who has blood on their hands," the senior military official said.
Chalabi and two other Shiite members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council issued a statement Monday condemning Saleh's appointment. "We stand strongly against this move because it seriously threatens the security and future of Iraq," the statement said. "The command of the brigade and many of its members repressed the people in the uprising of March 1991 and supported Saddam's regime throughout his dictatorial rule."
Saleh also irritated U.S. officials over the weekend when he proclaimed in a series of interviews that there were no foreign fighters among the insurgents in Fallujah. Marine officers estimated there to be about 200 foreign guerrillas in the city before Saleh's force took control on Friday. The top Marine commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, said Saleh was under orders to pursue the foreigners.
Conway said on Saturday that his staff had vetted the leaders of the new force, including Saleh. A senior Marine officer said their names had been run through U.S. government databases "and nothing detrimental came up."
A senior Marine officer acknowledged that Saleh and other leaders of the new force did not have spotless records, but the officer said it was critical to have leaders who command respect in the city. Saleh, the officer noted, was cheered by residents as he entered Fallujah on Friday dressed in his olive-green army uniform. "It's a balancing act," the officer said. "You want somebody who has influence -- and you generally won't find that among people who did not have some position of authority before."
Although the Fallujah Brigade is supposed to crack down on insurgents, the force will likely include some of the same gunmen who fought against the Marines last month. Marine commanders say they hope leaders of the brigade will persuade Iraqis who participated in the fighting to switch sides and pursue foreign fighters.
The senior military official in Baghdad said the decision to appoint Latif as brigade commander was not just a result of concern with Saleh's record but also because Latif appeared more influential.
According to Conway, Latif participated in the meetings with Marines that led to the Fallujah Brigade's formation. He said Latif had been exiled by Hussein's government for seven or eight years.
"He is very well thought of, very well respected by the Iraqi general officers," Conway said. "You can just see the body language between them. And if I had to guess at this point, when we have this brigade fully formed, he demonstrates a level of leadership that tells me that he could become that brigade commander."
Chan reported from Baghdad.
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FALLUJA
The General in Charge of Iraqi Force Is Replaced
May 4, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/international/middleeast/04IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 3 - American military commanders said Monday that they had selected a new commander for the Iraqi security force in Falluja, dropping a general who had been accused of involvement in widespread repression under Saddam Hussein.
The American commanders said they had chosen Muhammad Latif, a former intelligence officer, to lead the Iraqi security force. Unlike the man he is replacing, Jasim Muhammad Saleh, Mr. Latif appears to have been regarded as an opponent of Mr. Hussein.
According to a former Iraqi officer who served under him, Mr. Latif was imprisoned for seven years in the 1990's after he disobeyed an order from Mr. Hussein involving the movement of his troops.
"They have done initial vetting of Latif, and he has passed the vetting," a senior American officer said.
General Saleh, on the other hand, was regarded by many Iraqis as so close to Mr. Hussein that his resurrection by the Americans ran the risk of putting in charge of the city the very people they had been fighting to expel. Several Shiite members of the Iraqi Governing Council had protested General Saleh's involvement because of his reported role in the violent crushing of the Shiite uprising against Mr. Hussein in 1991.
The American officer said Monday that General Saleh would most likely retain some responsibilities in the security force, possibly as a commander of one of the battalions.
The Falluja security force, a hastily assembled group of about 900 Iraqis, is seen by the Americans as a means to secure control over the city without an assault by the Marines. Fighting over the past month, set off by the killing and mutilation of four American contractors, has left hundreds of Iraqis and dozens of American soldiers dead.
Fighting continued in many parts of Iraq on Monday. South of Baghdad, an American soldier was killed and two others were wounded in an attack on a group of soldiers who were guarding a weapons cache that had been discovered the night before. An American marine was killed in Al Anbar Province west of Baghdad during a "security and stability" operation there.
In the holy Shiite city of Najaf, sustained gun battles broke out between American soldiers and the followers of Moktada al-Sadr when members of his militia, known as the Mahdi Army, attacked an American base and a convoy. Witnesses said that each of the gun battles lasted more than an hour.
American soldiers recently took up positions in the city after the departure of Spanish troops.
While there were no reports of American casualties, hospital officials in Najaf reported that five Iraqis had been killed and 20 wounded. As in many of the encounters in Iraq, where the guerrillas do not wear uniforms, hospital officials in Najaf said they were unable to determine whether those killed were insurgents or civilians.
There were indications Monday that the violence in Iraq would intensify, much as American officials predicted it would as they prepared to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30. On Monday morning, a Baghdad neighborhood was papered with leaflets warning people to stay off the main road to Baghdad International Airport, which is heavily traveled by American soldiers and civilians.
By Monday evening, heavy fighting had broken out near the airport between American soldiers and guerrillas, with the Americans calling in heavy artillery, which could be heard from miles away. The road to the airport was closed, at least temporarily.
The continuing violence raised new questions about the ability of the Americans and the United Nations to implant a political process here.
On Monday, a United Nations official outlined a process by which Iraqis would nominate members of an Iraqi electoral commission, which would be empowered to help draw up rules and create an electoral infrastructure for nationwide elections scheduled for January.
Under the process described by the official, ordinary Iraqis could nominate people to serve on the electoral commission, though the final decision on membership would be left up to the United Nations, the Iraqi Governing Council, and L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator in Iraq.
But because of the violence, only 13 of the country's 18 governorates are currently able to nominate members of the commission. The official said his team would push ahead with the process anyway, and hope that the security situation improved.
One of the few bright spots for the Americans this week was the escape of Thomas Hamill from his Iraqi kidnappers, which was spelled out in greater detail Monday. Mr. Hamill, a private contractor from Mississippi, was kidnapped by insurgents on April 9, but managed to slip away from his captors Sunday and run to a group of soldiers from the New York National Guard who were on patrol near the city of Samarra.
On Monday, as Mr. Hamill left the country for an American hospital in Germany, the American soldiers described how they found him. Mr. Hamill, they said, was holed up inside a small mud-brick hut in a desolate area when he heard the sound of American Humvees. He pushed his way through the door and ran toward the American troops.
"He was shouting, 'I'm an American, I'm an American P.O.W.' " said Lt. Joseph Merrill. "He was unshaven and thinner than when he was taken, but other than that he was O.K. He was just real happy to see us."
One of the soldiers, Sgt. Mark Forbes, said Mr. Hamill had told him that he had had several opportunities to get away, but that he was always in the desert with no more than a bottle of water.
"He said: `I could have escaped a bunch of times, but where was I going to go? I only had a bottle of water and no map. Where was I going to go?' "
-------- israel / palestine
Pressure Builds Against Sharon
Israeli Vows He Will Not Resign
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62666-2004May3.html
JERUSALEM, May 3 -- Domestic political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intensified Monday following his Likud Party's overwhelming rejection of his plan to withdraw troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip. Opposition legislators called for new elections and lawmakers from nationalist and religious parties demanded that he honor the outcome of the vote.
Sharon, addressing Likud lawmakers on the opening day of the summer session of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, said he would not resign. He warned that both the party and the lawmaking body "will have to take some difficult decisions that will impact on the futures of us all."
In a statement released by his office early Monday, Sharon said he would "respect" the referendum results. But he left the door open to continue pushing for the Gaza withdrawal, which he has made a cornerstone of his administration, saying he would consult with political allies to "thoroughly examine the implications and steps we intend to take."
"I will come up with a plan that will get wider support," he told the Likud lawmakers.
The Knesset late Monday rejected a motion of no confidence in Sharon's social and economic policies, with 62 members voting against the measure and 46 favoring it. The vote was requested by the dovish Meretz party and the Arab and communist parties.
Political commentators said the Likud vote greatly weakened the prime minister both domestically and internationally and would hinder any efforts to reinvigorate Middle East peace efforts.
"You have a party split in at least two, and you have a negotiation that's one-sided," said Asher Arian, a senior fellow with the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem. "It was a shattered situation from the beginning, and now you have even more pieces of broken glass."
Some Israeli politicians and commentators attacked the lopsided results of the Likud referendum -- the 99,700 party members who voted rejected the plan by 60 percent to 40 percent -- as a sign that the party was unsuited to lead Israel. They complained that the vote effectively stymied the will of 60 percent of the public who, according to recent surveys, favored the proposed withdrawal.
"It has been proven that Likud is subordinate to settlers," said Shimon Peres, a former prime minister and leader of the opposition Labor Party. He called for new elections, saying Likud was not representing the views of the country.
"It is inconceivable that 50,000 people will decide the fate of 10 million," he said, giving a rough estimate for the number of Likud members who voted against Sharon's plan and the number of Israelis and Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"We didn't capture the Likud," responded Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, spokesman and political secretary of the Yesha Council, Israel's primary settler organization, which led the fight against Sharon's proposal.
He said the vote against Sharon's plan represented a broad consensus in the country not to reward terror with unilateral concessions to the Palestinians: "First we have to fight terror, then negotiate and make a political process." He added that Sharon "wants to continue with his plan, but we don't think he has the tools in the Knesset to do it because the Likud is not with him in this decision."
The rebuke of Sharon by his own party will also cripple international attempts to restart peace efforts, analysts said. Representatives of the group known as the quartet -- the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia -- which has attempted to shepherd the Middle East peace process, are scheduled to meet Tuesday at the United Nations.
"How can you make a decision if you don't know who's in control of Israel?" said Zvi Rafiah, an Israeli political commentator. "The first order is: Who's in charge? Is it Sharon? Will he fire the ministers who didn't help him? Will he have the party behind him? . . . The quartet cannot do anything now before there is a settling of the dust in Israel."
Palestinian officials and analysts, already dismayed by President Bush's recent endorsement of Sharon's plan and his announcement of a U.S. policy shift that made other key concessions to Israel, said prospects for peace are as dim as at any point in the 31/2 years of the current violence between Israel and the Palestinians.
"I hope President Bush declares the assurances he gave Israel are off the table and that he will bring the parties back to the negotiating table to honestly implement the road map," said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, referring to a Bush-backed peace plan that has been dormant since late last summer.
"I don't know how many times the peace process has to be killed," said Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian political analyst. "I don't believe there can be any revival of the peace process under the existing government of Israel."
[In the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza early Tuesday, an Israeli attack helicopter fired a missile at a group of armed Palestinians, killing two and wounding at least 17, residents and doctors said, the Associated Press reported.]
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Quartet Tentatively Backs Sharon Gaza Plan
May 4, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/international/middleeast/04CND-MIDE.html?hp
UNITED NATIONS, May 4 - Senior envoys of the United States, Europe and the United Nations gave qualified endorsement today to the stated intention of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel to continue pursuing his plan to withdraw from Gaza and parts of the West Bank in spite of the plan's rejection by members of Mr. Sharon's Likud Party.
Meeting at the United Nations amid signs of growing Arab antipathy toward American policies in the Middle East, the envoys stopped short of an outright endorsement of Mr. Sharon's now somewhat uncertain withdrawal plans.
But they seemed determined to seize on the possibility of a withdrawal as a way of re-energizing the all but dead peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
In a joint statement after their session, the envoys said Mr. Sharon's plan "should provide a rare moment of opportunity in the search for peace in the Middle East."
The envoys included Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations and the senior envoys of Russia and the European Union.
Aides to Secretary Powell have been trying intensively in the last several weeks to get the envoys, known as the Quartet, to endorse Mr. Sharon's withdrawal plan. The Quartet members have been resisting, in part because of their unhappiness with the way President Bush last month endorsed Israeli positions on the future status of the West Bank and Palestinian refugees.
An envoy at the meetings called the statement today "a gallant attempt to make the most of a Gaza withdrawal," in spite of all the problems such a pullout might entail.
Among these problems, according to officials involved in the discussions, are concerns at the United Nations and in Europe that the pullout be complete, that no parts of Gaza remain in Israeli hands and that Israel does not continue to maintain tight control over borders and sea and air access to the area.
European, United Nations and Russian officials also pressed Mr. Powell to reiterate the American position that even though Mr. Bush has endorsed the Israeli stance that it not return to its pre-1967 borders and not have to accept the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, these disputes must be resolved by negotiations, not fiat.
In another development related to the churning situation in Israel and the Arab world, Secretary Powell suggested that intensive discussions were still under way with Jordanian representatives that could lead to some accommodation of the demands of King Abdullah II of Jordan for a letter from Mr. Bush this week on Palestinian rights.
The king, who will visit the White House on Thursday, wants the president to make a new statement saying that any Palestinian loss of homes or land in a final settlement with Israel be compensated for in some fashion. The White House has rejected the demand, at least for now, administration officials said on Monday.
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Sharon to Alter, Not Discard, Pullout Plan
May 4, 2004
By GREG MYRE and ELISSA GOOTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/international/middleeast/04mide.html
JERUSALEM, May 3 - A day after his own party dealt him a resounding defeat, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Monday that he would modify his plan for an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and would continue pressing for its approval, members of his party who met with him said.
Mr. Sharon's right-wing Likud Party rejected the Gaza pullout proposal 60 percent to 40 percent in a referendum on Sunday, forcing the prime minister to re-evaluate the future of his main political initiative.
Sunday's vote had no legal standing, and Mr. Sharon remains free to seek formal government approval for the measure. But the defeat has cost him the political momentum and has raised questions about the stability of his coalition government, which is barely a year old.
In talks on Monday with Likud members of Parliament, Mr. Sharon said he would not abandon the plan, though he acknowledged that it would be altered, participants in the meeting said.
"The people of Israel elected us in order to find the way to achieve calm, security and peace and to advance Israel's economy, and this is what I intend to do," Mr. Sharon said in a prepared statement.
The plan that was voted down Sunday called for Israel to withdraw from all 21 of its settlements in Gaza and from 4 small settlements in the West Bank before the end of 2005. Mr. Sharon says he is prepared to act unilaterally because he does not consider the Palestinian leadership to be a reliable negotiating partner.
He did not say what changes he was considering, and it was not clear whether they would translate into increased support in his cabinet, where several members either oppose the Gaza pullout, or have offered only tepid support. But if he waters down the plan to retain some of the Gaza settlements, he risks alienating those who have supported it.
"The prime minister said, 'We have to put together a plan, perhaps not an identical one, in order to continue forward,' " Ehud Olmert, the deputy prime minister, said after Mr. Sharon's meeting with Likud lawmakers.
"There is no doubt disengagement is inevitable and unstoppable," Mr. Olmert said earlier in an interview with Israel radio. "The alternative to disengagement is more murder, terrorism and attacks without us having an answer for what 7,500 Jews are doing among 1.2 million Palestinians" in Gaza.
Opinion polls have shown that, nationwide, a solid majority of Israelis support the Gaza withdrawal, and political analysts say Mr. Sharon appears to have the backing of a majority of legislators.
However, Mr. Sharon, a lifelong hawk who has been a leading advocate of settlement-building for decades, has been unable to persuade his traditional right-wing allies to get behind the plan in large numbers.
Many are ideologically opposed to making territorial concessions to the Palestinians and say that to do so now, during a time of fighting, would be a "reward for terrorism."
The Palestinian leaders have said they would welcome an Israeli pullout if it is part of a comprehensive peace effort negotiated by the two sides. After the vote Sunday, the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, called on Mr. Sharon to drop the unilateral plan and open negotiations with the Palestinians.
Ismail Haniya, a senior leader in the Islamic faction Hamas, said the vote reflected Israel's desire to "continue the occupation of Palestinian land."
"The rights of the Palestinians are determined by the Palestinians themselves and not by an Israeli referendum," he said in a statement.
In Gaza, Palestinian security officials said Israeli troops had demolished about 20 houses, most of them near the road where a pregnant Israeli woman and her four young daughters had been killed by two Palestinian gunmen in a roadside ambush on Sunday.
[Early Tuesday, an Israeli helicopter fired a missile during a raid in Khan Yunis, in Gaza, killing at least one Palestinian militant and wounding about 14 people, Palestinian medics told Reuters. The army said the raid followed incidents in the area.]
Meanwhile, Jewish residents of the Neve Dekalim settlement in Gaza on Monday placed the foundation stone for what they said would be an expansion of their community. The residents, who gathered under a blue and white Israeli flag, said the move was in response to Mr. Sharon's proposal and the deadly ambush.
Residents in the nearby Gush Katif settlement had planned to take part in a children's march on Monday to celebrate their victory in Sunday's vote, but the mood was somber after the killing of the pregnant woman, Tali Hatuel, 34, and her four daughters. Neighbors trickled into a blue tent set up in the Hatuel family's yard, and they comforted David Hatuel, Mrs. Hatuel's husband and the family's sole survivor.
In the streets, residents were still discussing the pullout plan and Mr. Sharon, who was so instrumental in developing the settlements years ago.
"He built all these homes," said Ora Shomron, waving an arm at the collection of stucco homes in the settlement as she stopped by the Hatuel home to pay a condolence call. "And when he built them here, everyone said: 'Why is he building? Nobody's going to live here.' Now all the houses are full with families, and he wants to kick us out of here. I don't understand it."
Greg Myre reported from Jerusalem for this article and Elissa Gootman from Gaza.
-------- latin america
Nicaragua Destroys Cold War Anti - Aircraft Missiles
May 4, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nicaragua-missiles.html
MANAGUA, Nicaragua (Reuters) - Nicaragua on Tuesday destroyed 333 surface-to-air missiles it obtained from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, partially bowing to U.S. demands to scrap its missile stockpile, defense officials said.
A similar number of the SAM-7 missiles will be destroyed in July, Defense Minister Adan Guerra told a news conference. They are among some 2,000 surface-to-air weapons held by Nicaragua.
President Enrique Bolanos said in a message read to reporters that the destruction was a ``genuine indication of our interest in reaching a regional balance of weapons in Central America.''
But it remains to be seen whether Nicaragua will destroy all of the shoulder-fired missiles, as Secretary of State Colin Powell requested during a visit last year.
Nicaragua obtained the missiles from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, when the left-wing Sandinista government that took power in a popular revolt was at war with U.S.-backed Contra rebels.
U.S. officials say they fear the weapons could fall into the hands of political extremists or drug traffickers.
Bolanos has argued that Nicaragua no longer needs its missiles but army chiefs are reluctant to give them up, in part because of a long-running border dispute with Honduras.
The United States wants the countries of Central America to sign a mutual nonaggression pact that would also restructure their security forces into nimble units better suited to fighting criminal gangs than civil wars.
----
Indian tribes fear for way of life
May 04, 2004
By Michael Astor
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040503-093227-2893r.htm
XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil - Children are leaping from mango trees and skinny-dipping in the mild water of the Xingu River without a care.
But up by the grass-roofed longhouses, the village elders fret that their way of life will come to an end soon.
"We're worried for our children and grandchildren," said Rea, a Kayabi Indian woman. "Our Xingu is an island, and if the white man enters with his machines, he'll break it all down in no time."
Xingu is Brazil's oldest and probably most successful Indian reservation - a 10,800-square-mile sprawl of pristine rain forest where 14 Indian tribes live much as their people have for thousands of years.
The reserve was established in 1961, just a few years after many tribes in the region had their first contact with white civilization.
It was located in the middle of a vast undeveloped stretch in the state of Mato Grosso - "thick forest" in English. Today, the park is surrounded by fields and pasture in the center of Brazil's fastest developing agricultural region.
The Indians, whose numbers have nearly doubled to about 5,000 since 1961, say they are feeling the pressure.
"In 20 years, there won't be enough land for all of us. If you look at the park, it's just a triangle with a little rectangle on top," said Awata, the schoolteacher at Capivara, one of several Kayabi villages that line the river.
In the villages, life goes on much as it always has, but there are signs all around of the encroachment of white civilization.
Shiny metal water faucets are now a fixture in most villages, thanks to a well-digging project that aims to protect the Indians from polluted headwaters outside the park. Once-crystalline rivers are muddied from erosion caused by farming and logging upriver.
"We can no longer fish with bows and arrows, so we need to buy fish hooks from the white man," said Mairawe Kayabi, president of the Xingu Indian Land Association, who like many Indians uses his tribe's name as a last name.
The sound of Indians stomping and chanting still is heard in the villages, only now it is as likely to emerge from a cheap tape recorder as from a live ceremony.
In the Ngojhwere village, the cooking grill is a bicycle wheel with its spokes hammered down. Three metal car wheels turned onto their sides raise the grill over the wood fire burning on the dirt floor.
Breakfast is piraucu, a big freshly caught river fish.
The Indians stew it in water. When it's ready, they wrap it in pieces of a big gummy manioc pancake called "beiju," with hot pepper and store-bought salt for seasoning.
The women now use steel pots instead of clay to fetch water and cook.
Satellite dishes sit outside many of the longhouses, feeding a few Brazilian TV channels to generator-powered television sets.
"All the stuff on the television puts stuff in the young people's heads," Mairawe said. "They are attracted to whatever comes from outside. This is a cause for a lot of disagreement among the leadership."
For ceremonies, the Indians still strip naked and paint their bodies with red powder from ground urucum seeds and the black ink of the jenipapo fruit. But most days they wear Western clothing - the women preferring long cotton dresses, the men shorts and T-shirts.
Kuiussi, chief of the Suya Indians, who wore a skimpy swimsuit during a journalist's visit, warns visitors not to take pictures of Indians wearing Western clothes.
"If people see the pictures, they'll say we're not Indians - that we're mixed [race] - and that's not true," he says. "We are all Indians here."
Although Kuiussi worries about outside influences, son Wetanti, 25, sees no problem keeping a foot in both worlds. He proudly displays a small album that begins with photos of him naked, painted and feathered and ends with him looking disco-ready in white slacks, a black T-shirt and wraparound sunglasses.
The Suya had their first contact with white men in 1959. Today the village is on the edge of the Xingu reservation - face to face with white civilization.
"Right now, we have to fight to maintain our traditions. The world won't be the same for our children and grandchildren, so we have to hold on to what we have as long as we can," said Kuiussi. "Maybe in the future, they'll want to farm or do something with the land to make money, but not in my lifetime."
The park owes its existence to the four Villas Boas brothers. During a government expedition to Brazil's hinterlands in the 1940s, the pioneering Indian defenders saw firsthand the devastating effect of contact with white civilization on Indians and their culture.
The brothers - Orlando, Claudio, Alvaro and Leonardo - lobbied the government to set aside land for the reservation, then persuaded 14 tribes from around the region to move into it.
At the time, wildcat miners, loggers and farmers were starting to make their way into the region.
"We taught [the Indians that] if they wanted to survive, if they wanted their children to survive, not to let anyone in. We told them if anyone came, to fight them," Orlando Villas Boas, who died last year, said in 1998.
On at least one occasion, Indians took the advice to heart. They killed 11 loggers who refused to leave, Mr. Villas Boas said. "No one even thought of coming here after that."
Today, the Indians perform joint patrols with the Federal Indian Bureau and Brazil's environmental protection agency. But when no officials are around, the Indians aren't afraid to put on war paint and pick up bows, arrows and even hunting rifles to expel invaders.
Problems can arise among the Indians.
Many tribes moved to the park from hundreds of miles away, from places where the terrain was different, and they have had trouble adapting to life in the Xingu.
Kayabi elders complain that the materials needed to make traditional objects are not available in the park.
"The old people didn't like it when they got here," said Jywapan Kayabi, one of the chiefs at Capivara. "They couldn't find the kind of wood they needed to make their bows and arrows, or the kind of grass they used to weave their baskets."
Communication is another problem. Because each of the 14 tribes has a distinct language, they can communicate with one another only in Portuguese, a language few Indians speak.
The Indians in the northern part of the park still don't have much contact with tribes in the southern part, even though they share a more compatible culture and occasionally visit one another's villages for festivals.
"If we see their dances, we might understand some of what they're singing, but we can't join in the singing," said Ionaluka, who is the rare offspring of a mixed marriage between a Suya and a Kayabi.
-------- mideast
White House Rejects Jordan's Request for Statement on Palestinians
May 4, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/international/middleeast/04jord.html
WASHINGTON, May 3 - The Bush administration has rebuffed Jordan, turning down a request by King Abdullah II for a written statement this week that Palestinians deprived of land and homes would be compensated in a future peace accord with Israel, administration officials said on Monday.
The officials said that discussions over the possibility of a letter from President Bush on future Palestinian compensation had intensified over the last few days in preparation for King Abdullah's visit to the White House, scheduled for Thursday.
They said the visit was not in doubt as of Monday but that the king had made clear that he wanted a letter from Mr. Bush to be issued at the time of his White House meeting.
"There may be a letter, but not until after the visit," an administration official said. But he added that any letter would probably not contain the promises sought by the Jordanians. The matter would be negotiated in coming weeks, he said.
The king's visit, originally scheduled for last month, was postponed after the furor in the Arab world over President Bush's promise to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel to support Israel's ultimate retention of some settlements in the West Bank and rejection of the longtime Palestinian demand for a right of return to family homes abandoned in 1948 in what is now Israel.
Mr. Bush, seeking to encourage Israel's plan to withdraw forces and settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, made the declaration in a letter and in public comments. Israeli officials said Mr. Sharon wanted the letter to get support for his plan among members of his governing Likud Party.
As it happened, the Likud Party soundly rejected Mr. Sharon's plan on Sunday. On Monday, administration officials said they still regarded the plan as a good one.
"We remain of the view that this proposal to withdraw from Gaza, it does represent an opportunity and could represent an opportunity," said Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman. "It will be up to Prime Minister Sharon to decide how he proceeds within his party or within his government."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is expected to meet on Tuesday at the United Nations with European, United Nations and Russian counterparts to discuss the future of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
American officials said they did not expect much of a push forward for the peace effort, known as the road map, which calls for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians leading to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
American, European and United Nations officials said in interviews that the situation was too clouded right now, given the Likud rejection of Mr. Sharon's plan. Some said they remained hopeful that the plan could be revived, perhaps if Mr. Sharon reshaped his government.
The visit of King Abdullah had originally been scheduled to discuss peace with Israel, American efforts in Iraq and the Bush administration's desire for an Arab League declaration favoring democratic reforms among Arab countries.
But in early April, Mr. Bush's statement that Israel should not have to return to its pre-1967 borders, and that Palestinians and their descendants who lost land in Israel in 1948 should eventually be settled in a Palestinian state rather than in Israel, forced the king to postpone the visit.
Jordan contends that the United States should amplify Mr. Bush's declaration by saying that Palestinians denied a "right of return" should be compensated and that Israel should cede territory to the Palestinians in return for seizing West Bank territory settled by Israelis.
--------
Jordan's Call For U.S. Policy On West Bank Is Rebuffed
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64143-2004May3.html
The White House has decided not to provide Jordan's King Abdullah with a letter acknowledging possible Palestinian territorial claims if Israel retains settlements in the West Bank, U.S. officials said yesterday.
The king, who is due to meet with President Bush on Thursday, had sought written assurances after Bush exchanged letters with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon three weeks ago recognizing key Israeli concerns in any peace deal. Abdullah, in a sharply worded private letter to Bush, also had sought clarification that the issue of Jewish settlements and Palestinian refugees will be decided in final negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
European officials, who have also sought a similar clarification of U.S. policy, will press the same case today when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell travels to the United Nations for a meeting of a Mideast coordinating group known as the Quartet. The group, which includes the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States, is expected to issue a statement that acknowledges the possibility of progress in the peace process -- and to emphasize that Israel and the Palestinians will need to settle key issues themselves, a U.S. official said.
The State Department had pushed for some way to accommodate Abdullah's request, but officials would not disclose why the White House had rejected the notion.
Bush's meeting with Sharon -- and the exchange of letters -- was intended to bolster Sharon's proposal to unilaterally abandon all Israeli settlements in Gaza and a handful in the West Bank. But that plan suffered a setback Sunday when Sharon's Likud party overwhelmingly rejected it in a nonbinding referendum. Sharon said yesterday he would rework the plan but was committed to it, a point his aides emphasized in phone calls with U.S. officials.
In what was widely interpreted as a major shift in U.S. policy, Bush had written Sharon that "in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers," it was unrealistic for Israel to return to the borders that existed before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. Bush also said Palestinian refugees should be expected to settle in a Palestinian state, giving up their demand to return to Israeli lands.
Bush noted that his statement was acknowledged in all previous efforts to reach a peace settlement. But Arab officials said that those peace efforts also proposed concessions to Palestinians for accepting new borders and giving up the right of return. Abdullah had sought a letter acknowledging those claims as a way to assuage Arab anger at the Bush administration's apparent policy shift.
Last week, when Abdullah -- who postponed a previous visit to Washington to protest the administration's policy -- met with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, he told him that "any Middle East solutions excluding Palestinians will not be successful." The official Jordanian news agency quoted Abdullah as saying that "we will soon undertake several contacts in order to ensure that the final status issues concerning the Palestinian cause must be negotiated between the concerned parties."
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday the Likud's rejection "is certainly a setback" for Sharon, but that "we will continue to look for opportunities to move forward towards peace."
Asked whether the vote was also a setback for the administration, Boucher replied: "I don't think we've hitched our wagon to any single effort. . . . We saw this as an opportunity, but it's not necessarily the only opportunity."
Boucher said that Sharon has indicated he still wants to push forward some version of his plan and that polls indicate most Israelis support it. "We still think it's a good idea," he said.
-------- nato
NATO Simulates Al Qaeda Nuclear Attack
War games predict 40,000 dead, Europe in chaos if NATO hit
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,118975,00.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/05/04/black.dawn.ap/
BRUSSELS, Belgium - European officials conducted a simulation showing how Al Qaeda could kill 40,000 people and plunge the continent into chaos if a crude nuclear device were detonated outside NATO headquarters in Brussels.
"We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe," said former Sen. Sam Nunn (search), who helped organize the exercise, dubbed Black Dawn (search). "To win this race, we have to achieve cooperation on a scale we've never seen or attempted before."
Nunn spoke to reporters Tuesday, a day after the closed-door war games attended by top officials including the European Union's security chief, Javier Solana (search), and his new counterterrorism czar, Gijs de Vries (search).
In first part of the scenario, European officials were asked how they would respond to intelligence that Al Qaeda had obtained enough highly enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb.
In the second, they were confronted with computer projections and video displays illustrating the impact of terrorists exploding the device at NATO's headquarters on the outskirts of Brussels, immediately killing 40,000 people, overwhelming hospitals with hundreds of thousands of injured, spreading panic through Europe and plunging the world economy into turmoil.
"Once you are in this phase, there are no good options," said Michele Flournoy, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (search), who helped prepare the exercise.
More than 50 people from 15 countries and a dozen international organizations attended the exercise, mostly EU ambassadors but also civilian and military officials from NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency (search), Interpol (search) and other bodies.
Nunn appealed for the Europeans to step up funding for increased protection at sites where weapons-grade uranium and plutonium are stored - particularly in former Soviet states.
He said preventing Al Qaeda from getting its hands on such material was the best chance of stopping it from building a bomb.
"It's well within Al Qaeda's operational capabilities to recruit the technical expertise needed to build a crude nuclear devise," he said. "The hard part is getting the nuclear material, but we do not make it nearly hard enough."
Nunn, a Democrat from Georgia and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, helped push through a $10 billion program in 1991 to destroy and safeguard weapons of mass destruction in Russia and other former Soviet republics. But he said at least 60 percent of sites still must be secured.
He said European leaders should make good on pledges made two years ago as part of a $20 billion commitment by the Group of Eight to provide more funding for that program over 10 years.
They should also push President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin to do more when the G-8 group of world leaders meets next month in Georgia, he said.
Solana and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer (search) convened the exercise to show the extent of the danger.
"The threat of catastrophic terrorism is not confined to the United States or Russia or the Middle East," Solana said. "The new terrorist movements seem willing to use unlimited violence and cause massive casualties."
Nunn urged increased protection for weapons-grade uranium kept at research sites, which are often poorly guarded university facilities; accelerated destruction of tactical nuclear weapons by both the United States and Russia; enhanced international intelligence sharing; and more help to find new jobs for poorly paid Russian nuclear scientists.
-------- pacific
Australia: Most now oppose war
Tuesday, May 4, 2004
(CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/05/03/australia.iraq.troops/
SYDNEY, Australia -- Australian public sentiment over the war in Iraq has swung once again with most people now believing Canberra should not have joined the U.S.-led invasion last year, according to a new poll.
After initial opposition to war plans, support for the U.S.-led action increased to a majority during the early phases of the invasion which began in March 2003.
But as the conflict drags on and coalition casualties mount, opinion appears to have swung back.
The Newspoll survey, conducted last weekend and published in The Australian newspaper on Tuesday, found 50 percent now opposed the war while 40 percent still agreed with the conservative coalition government's decision to participate.
Australia currently has about 850 troops still in Iraq, after originally sending more than 2,000 troops, fighter aircraft and naval vessels, to the coalition invasion.
And in what is shaping as a potential election issue, Australians are fairly evenly split on when the remaining troops should be brought back from Iraq.
Prime Minister John Howard this week indicated that Australian troops would remain in Iraq until at least August 2005, and suggested a small increase in the numbers was possible.
Howard and senior government members publicly condemned the decision last month by Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic, to withdraw their troops.
Labor opposition leader Mark Latham has indicated he would like to see those troops brought home before the end of the year.
According to the Newspoll survey, 47 percent agree with Latham and 45 percent with Howard.
The issue of Iraq is expected to be a key factor in upcoming national elections, tipped for October this year.
Howard, who is fighting for a fourth consecutive term in power, on Monday announced he would visit the United States in mid-June to discuss the Iraq situation. More troops sent
Howard said he would meet U.S. President George W. Bush and senior members of his administration between June 2 and June 4.
"A key focus of our discussions will be on our shared commitment to the future of Iraq with less than one month to go before the transfer of sovereignty there," Howard said in a statement.
"I will also consult on the challenges ahead as we confront together the threat of global terrorism," he said.
As part of the same overseas trip, Howard plans to visit Britain and be in France for D-Day commemorations.
The government also announced on Monday it was sending 53 extra troops to Iraq to help train the nation's fledgling army.
Defense Minister Robert Hill said the team would provide training in weapons, leadership and drill procedures for three Iraqi army battalions and a brigade headquarters staff.
-------- prisoners of war
CACI Wants to Review Report on Alleged Abuse
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64123-2004May3.html
CACI International Inc. said yesterday that an outside law firm will conduct its investigation of its employees' conduct in Iraq and review its operations around the world.
The Arlington defense contractor's chairman, meanwhile, complained that the government hasn't allowed the company to see an internal Army report that, according to portions made available to The Washington Post, says two CACI employees, along with two military intelligence officials, were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for abuses of prisoners allegedly committed by soldiers at Abu Ghraib detention facility outside Baghdad.
Details of the report were published previously in the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
"There are things flying around . . . and I'm sitting here having not seen anything from the government," J.P. "Jack" London, the company's chairman and chief executive, said yesterday. The government, he said, has not told the company its employees are accused of wrongdoing. The company has confirmed some employees were interviewed by the Army.
CACI said yesterday it has never employed one of the two men named in the report, but it declined to say which one.
Six soldiers have been charged with physical and sexual abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Seven others will be reprimanded, Army officials announced yesterday.
Pictures of the alleged mistreatment, aired on television and printed in newspapers around the world, have shocked people and inflamed Arab countries.
The law firm hired by CACI, which it declined to identify, "has competence with these types of matters," London said. "Frankly, we want to make sure that there isn't something going on that we were not aware of. We don't have any intent to support illegal behavior by our employees, if there is any."
CACI provides services such as engineering and integrating computer systems for government clients, including the Department of Defense, where it gets the bulk of its revenue.
Lawyers for some of the soldiers charged with abuse said CACI employees acted as interrogators at the prison. The company has declined to say how many people it has in Iraq or to describe their work, but it has posted ads seeking interrogators, intelligence analysts and counterintelligence agents on several Internet job boards.
"This particular type of work is something we've been performing for several years, this intelligence-gathering," London said. Asked how the company trains employees to conduct interrogations, London said CACI recruits "people who have these competencies and have demonstrated those capabilities." Many of them, he said, have previous military experience.
Military use of private contractors has escalated rapidly in the past 15 years, said Deborah Avant, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University who has studied the practice. Private companies have traditionally been hired to provide services such as food preparation and logistical support but more recently have been used for more demanding jobs such as providing security for U.S. officials.
Until now, though, Avant said, she was not "aware of a situation where the U.S. military has outsourced interrogation."
Employees of San Diego-based Titan Corp., which employed translators at Abu Ghraib, are also involved in the investigation, U.S. investigators have said. According to the New Yorker, the Army report quotes a Titan employee who witnessed the abuse.
A company spokesman, Wil Williams, said he did not know whether Titan was involved in the investigation. "I know of no allegations against Titan or any of its employees," he said.
Staff writers Sewell Chan in Baghdad and Renae Merle in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
U.S. Sent Specialists To Train Prison Units
Allegations of Abuse Highlight Inexperience
By Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64172-2004May3.html
Presented with reports of abusive behavior by U.S. military guards at Baghdad's main prison, the Army two months ago quietly dispatched to Iraq a team of about 25 military police experienced in running detention facilities to shore up training and supervision, Army officials said yesterday.
It was the first group of such specialists sent to Iraq since the invasion last year, the officials said. The move followed an internal Army investigation that found military police at the Abu Ghraib prison largely unprepared for their role as guards and accused them of grossly mistreating Iraqi detainees, the officials said.
The decision to send the special team reflected an acknowledgement by U.S. military commanders that the abuse of detainees and laxness in oversight evident at the prison may extend beyond the small group of enlisted soldiers and officers charged or reprimanded so far and require broader remedial action.
Although military police are frequently used to take control of prisoners in the field and escort them to detention centers, most are not trained to operate prisons, the officials said. That responsibility falls to a tiny share of the Army's military police force -- about 970 out of 38,000 troops -- who receive specific training to run correctional facilities. The Army maintains several such permanent prisons in the United States and abroad.
The 25 specialists dispatched to Iraq will operate as a "mobile training team," the officials said, working with military police units that have rotated into the country in recent weeks to replace other forces.
U.S. military authorities have made no attempt to excuse the reported behavior of the guards at Abu Ghraib. Widely published photographs of their alleged actions showed naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts with one another. In one case, a prisoner, pictured standing on a box with wires attached to his hands and feet, was reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he stepped down.
The episode has focused attention not only on the training of military police guards, but also on the techniques used by military intelligence agents and private contractors responsible for interrogating prisoners. An internal Army investigation has reported that the accused prison guards -- enlisted personnel from a reserve military police unit -- were acting on instructions from the interrogators, who told the guards to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."
A spokesman for the Army's military intelligence school at Fort Huachuca in Arizona said soldiers receive extensive instruction in laws prohibiting physical or mental torture in interrogations. But a brief summary of the instruction notes that "certain applications" of legitimate interrogation techniques "may approach the line between lawful actions and unlawful action."
Intelligence operatives in Iraq have been under enormous pressure to identify and locate insurgents and determine the breadth of their support. Last fall, an internal Army review blasted the military intelligence-gathering operation in Iraq, saying it was being undercut by problems in the use of technology and the training of specialists. The report was especially critical of "the poor quality" of training given to some reserve intelligence troops.
Partly in response to such criticism, U.S. military commanders in the region began a major effort last fall to improve the quality of intelligence-gathering and analysis in Iraq, and also the transmission of intelligence products back to combat units for use in the field. The first major result was a better understanding of the networks that have sustained the insurgency -- a development that U.S. officials later credited with leading to the capture of former president Saddam Hussein in December.
But nothing the Pentagon has said about the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib has suggested that the techniques yielded useful information. Experts in military law said yesterday that the reported behavior unquestionably violated international norms on the treatment of prisoners.
"It's clearly illegal," said John F. Perry, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. "Whether it's illegal as cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, or it's illegal as torture, there's really no debate that it crossed the line."
More interesting and significant, Perry and other experts said, is how high up the chain of military command the assignment of responsibility should go.
The Army's internal investigation, completed in March by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, found "clear friction and lack of effective communication" between Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the accused soldiers, and military intelligence officials operating in the prison. Although Taguba recommended that Karpinski be relieved of command and reprimanded for command failures related to the abuse, she has said responsibility for the abuses should be shared by her superiors, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
Yesterday some legal specialists backed her argument.
"In international law, the standard is not only whether you knew but whether you had reason to know," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. "The question is: How far up the chain of command should people have been vigilant about the practices that were going on?"
Several military legal experts also said the Baghdad case may reflect a general loosening in standards for handling detainees stemming from conditions at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where captives from the war on terrorism are held. Indeed, Taguba indicated that the Guantanamo experience has provoked a sharp debate inside the military over the role of military police.
In late August and early September 2003, a team from Guantanamo overseen by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller visited Iraq to advise U.S. prison operations there. Among its recommendations were that military police guards act as "enablers" for interrogations, Taguba reported.
But Taguba challenged the notion that Iraqi detainees should be treated similarly to suspected terrorists in Guantanamo. He sided with another officer, Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, who recommended in another report last November that military police avoid even a supporting role in interrogations.
While many of the reported tactics in the Abu Ghraib case exceeded legal bounds, some of the less abusive ones appeared in line with certain "stress and duress" techniques known to be used by U.S. military and CIA interrogators. Last year, after the deaths of two Afghan prisoners in U.S. custody at Bagram air base outside Kabul, human rights groups pressed the Bush administration for a clearer position on permissible interrogation measures.
On June 26, 2003, the administration pledged for the first time that the United States would not torture terrorism suspects or treat them cruelly in an attempt to extract information. "All interrogations, wherever they may occur," must be conducted without the use of cruel and inhumane tactics, Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II wrote to Congress.
Human rights activists believed the administration had agreed to bar such techniques as depriving prisoners of sleep, withholding medicine and forcing prisoners to stand for long periods in painful positions. U.S. authorities have used each technique against captives held abroad in the war on terrorism, according to current and former national security officials interviewed last year by The Washington Post.
Staff writer Dana Priest contributed to this report.
--------
Army Conducting 20 Criminal Inquiries in Treatment of Iraqis
May 4, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/international/middleeast/03CND-ABUS.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 4 - The Army disclosed today that it is conducting criminal inquiries into 20 cases of suspected abuse of Iraqi prisoners as the furor over mistreatment of some captives continued to grow.
Leading lawmakers from both parties demanded answers on the origin and extent of the problem, as Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army's vice chief of staff, announced the 20 investigations, two of which involve homicides.
As top officials of the Bush administration tried to minimize the diplomatic and political damage, some legislators said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld should come to the Capitol to face questioning. Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader, said on the Senate floor that Mr. Rumsfeld should appear "no later than the end of this week" to explain what Pentagon officials knew about "this extraordinary disconnect, this unbelievable failure of communication."
Several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee emerged from a closed briefing by uniformed Army officials to express anger over the abuses and dissatisfaction with the Bush administration's and the Pentagon's response to date.
"We need to have a hearing as soon as possible with Secretary Rumsfeld testifying, and other service secretaries, if necessary, as to how this whole situation evolved, what action is being taken, and what further action needs to be taken to prevent a recurrence of this terrible situation," said Senator John McCain of Arizona, a leading Republican on the committee.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, headed by Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, announced this afternoon that it would hold a closed hearing on Wednesday into the abuse of prisoners.
Mr. Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news briefing this afternoon that he was "deeply disturbed" by the reports.
"We're taking and will continue to take whatever steps are necessary to hold accountable those that may have violated the code of military conduct and betrayed the trust placed in them by the American people," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Calling the abuse of prisoners "totally unacceptable and un-American," Mr. Rumsfeld said he disagreed with critics who have said the Pentagon moved too slowly. Defense Department officials have moved correctly and efficiently, he said. "The system works," he said. "The system works."
The secretary said he hoped the disclosures would not have a long-lasting impact on the image of American military people, whom he has repeatedly described as among the best in the world.
Mr. Rumsfeld was not asked whether he would go to Capitol Hill, and he did not bring up the issue.
Meeting at the United Nations today with senior envoys from Europe and the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that pictures of the abuses had "stunned every American" and that he was "deeply concerned" about the negative reaction of the Arab world.
But he added that he hoped that Arabs and others would realize that the United States would punish the perpetrators of these abuses "in a way that the world can observe and watch" and thus set a different kind of example, of criminal actions being punished.
"The one thing you can be sure of is that justice will be done," Mr. Powell said.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the controversy would not interrupt plans to turn over sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30. "I think the president expressed the view of all Americans, indeed all people, when he said that it was sickening and outrageous," she said in response to a question after a speech at the Anti-Defamation League Conference in Washington.
As for the June 30 deadline, she said, "Iraqis need to know that they're going to regain their future - the control of their own future."
General Casey said military authorities had reviewed a total of 35 cases in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 20 still under review.
This morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee heard General Casey promise that the people responsible would be punished. "We're extremely disappointed that anyone would mistreat detainees in the manner that has been, that they have in Iraq," he told reporters in a Capitol corridor. "The Army is a values-based organization. And what you see on those pictures is not indicative of our training or of our values. It is a complete breakdown in discipline."
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, said the abuse of prisoners could endanger the national security of the United States, as well as its prestige before the world. "For the security of this nation we must be open about this, we must root them out, and we must assure the world thereby that in this open society, actions of this kind are going to be dealt with both criminally and within the military code as appropriate," Mr. Levin said.
Another leading Democrat on the committee, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, said, "We have a great sense of revulsion, not only because of these actions, but we also recognize what the dangers are for American troops if they are ever taken prisoners and the kind of treatment that they would be subject to. And this has been a major setback to our interests in that region."
Today's closed briefing was hurriedly arranged after the committee chairman, Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, called the Pentagon on Monday night and said the committee needed some answers. "Speaking for myself, I'm gravely concerned about this situation," Mr. Warner said. "I have been privileged to be associated with the military for over a half-century, been on this committee for 25 years now, and this is as serious a problem of breakdown in discipline as I've ever observed."
The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told The Associated Press today that Mr. Bush first became aware of the accusations of abuse some time after the Pentagon began looking into them, but that he did not see the photographs of sexual humiliation until they were made public and did not learn of the classified Pentagon report about the episode until news organizations reported its existence.
President Bush was campaigning in Ohio today and did not mention the prisoner-abuse affair in his appearances in the Toledo area or Dayton.
Mr. McCain, who endured more than five years of harsh treatment as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, said he had no way of knowing whether the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were isolated, or whether they represented wider mistreatment, perhaps at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, or in Afghanistan.
"There are so many allegations swirling around this situation, that we must have a public hearing, with the secretary of defense testifying, in order to clear up all of these allegations," Mr. McCain said. "Not an hour goes by that there isn't an additional allegation."
Meanwhile, Mr. McCain said he was also very angry that a 53-page Pentagon report on what is known so far about the abuses was sent to news organizations before it was sent to the Armed Services Committee. "That's quite a commentary," he said.
Senators McCain and Warner said they were sure that most military people were living up to their country's ideals, but that the actions of even a few could cause terrible damage.
Mr. Warner said, "The rest of the men and women of the armed forces of the United States are professionally carrying out their duties all over the world, and we cannot let this single, but tragic, incident tarnish their service."
Senator Levin agreed. "The actions of these individuals have jeopardized members of the armed services in the conduct of their mission and have jeopardized the security of this country," he said. "It's a few individuals that have apparently conducted these despicable actions. We hope it's a few. We don't know how systemic it is."
Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting for this article from the United Nations.
-------- space
Panel Is Told Mars Mission Should Be International
May 4, 2004
By WARREN E. LEARY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/science/space/04SPAC.html
President Bush's goal of sending astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars should be part of a plan done in cooperation with other nations, representatives of foreign space programs said yesterday.
Witnesses told a nine-member presidential commission studying the new space exploration initiative that such an ambitious effort should be international in scope and that other nations were interested in taking part.
Kiyoshi Higuchi, executive director of the Japanese space agency JAXA, said his nation was interested in the American plan but was awaiting more details.
Testifying in the first session of a two-day hearing at the Asia Society in New York, Mr. Higuchi said he was looking for similarities between the goals of the United States and programs that Japan had under way or planned. He noted that Japan had a lunar exploration program involving unmanned spacecraft and that the American proposal called for sending robotic craft, as well as people, to the Moon.
Daniel P. Sacotte, director of exploration programs for the European Space Agency, said that those involved in the European program had wide experience in international cooperation and that their expertise could be tapped.
"Space exploration is a global undertaking," Mr. Sacotte said.
The testimony came at the last of five public hearings held around the country since February by the commission, which is charged with drawing up plans to fulfill the human exploration goal announced by Mr. Bush in January.
The commission chairman, Edward C. Aldridge, a former Air Force secretary, said the group would give its recommendations to the president in the first week of June. The commission will highlight several strategies for going to the Moon and Mars, including what it would take to engage public support for such a program, he said.
Mr. Bush has asked for $1 billion in new money for the program to be combined with $11 billion taken from other programs in NASA's $15 billion annual budget.
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Intelligence Reform Will Not Be Quick
Many Groups to Weigh In on Changes
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63926-2004May3.html
The White House, Congress and two independent commissions are discussing wholesale reform of the nation's intelligence community in the wake of its failures to detect the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and accurately describe Iraq's weapons programs, mistakes that were highlighted in recent public hearings.
But despite warnings from some members of the national commission investigating the terrorist attacks that they will soon recommend intelligence reform, many government officials say it will be at least a year until any substantive change is realized.
None of the panels has completed its work, and any recommendations for substantial change will be politically controversial, particularly if they involve control of the Pentagon's intelligence programs, which account for the vast majority of U.S. intelligence spending. The large number of agencies and congressional committees with vested interests in the current intelligence structure guarantees that change will be difficult, as past commissions recommending reforms can attest.
Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which last month released a critique of intelligence failures before the attacks, describes reform of the intelligence community as a major focus of the panel's report to be delivered July 26. "It could possibly be our most important recommendation," Kean said recently, "but I don't think any of us can honestly say what that recommendation will be yet."
The Senate and House intelligence panels also will be making their own recommendations over the next few months based on separate inquiries into the failure of prewar estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. Appeals Court Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman, co-chairman of President Bush's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, said recently that his newly formed group has just begun its inquiry into the Iraq failure and some intelligence successes, such as Libya. There, U.S. and British knowledge of Moammar Gaddafi's programs forced the Libyan leader to cooperate in destroying his weapons and stockpiles. Silberman's panel reports next March.
"We want to hear from all our commissions," said Sean McCormack, spokesman for the president's National Security Council, "but we are not ruling out any idea that could immediately provide protection to the American people."
Even CIA Director George J. Tenet has said there could be other ways for the intelligence community to be organized, but veterans of previous attempts at reform are urging caution. They are particularly concerned about one proposal that appears to be gaining popularity: creating a new director of national intelligence separate from the CIA and other intelligence agencies, but with overall budgetary and operational authority over the entire intelligence apparatus.
Tenet is the director of central intelligence (DCI) as well as CIA director. In the DCI role, he has only secondary control over the budgets of Pentagon-based agencies that receive nearly 90 percent of the intelligence community's roughly $40 billion annual budget. His relationship with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld determines how much influence he has over the use of the Pentagon's intelligence assets.
Proponents of a single director of central intelligence believe putting one official in charge of all intelligence agencies, including the Defense Department's, would make the collection and dissemination of information more efficient.
Kean said his commission is looking at the idea, but neither he nor other members of the panel have reached any conclusions. A similar idea, proposed more than a year ago by retired Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), has recently received attention inside the administration and on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), ranking minority member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and other committee Democrats have proposed establishing a national director of intelligence (NDI) who would have overall operational and budgetary control over Defense Department intelligence agencies, which would remain in the Pentagon. The new NDI would have the same relationship with the CIA, without the direct administrative responsibilities.
Harman said recently she is pushing for action before November and has made a presentation to members of Kean's commission. "The DCI concept should have changed when the Cold War ended," Harman said. "Lacking budgetary authority, the DCI ends up being an advocate rather than a disinterested broker."
Most reformers forget how complicated it can be to change the intelligence community, said L. Britt Snider, who for 25 years has worked on intelligence issues in senior posts on Capitol Hill, at the Defense Department and at the CIA. The intelligence system is woven through numerous agencies, and officials report to at least 12 congressional committees, each with entrenched interests in the current structure.
"This is the first time a president has indicated a possible interest," Snider said. Reform "has not had that in the past, and nothing will happen without the president aboard and taking an interest."
But he warned that "the interests of the Defense Department have to be understood." The Pentagon handles more than 90 percent of the money spent on intelligence because protection of troops is the primary concern in the allocation of funds. In the past, Snider said, legislators, particularly on the House and Senate Armed Services committees, "were afraid of making changes that could harm military forces in deployed situations." Devoting more intelligence resources to terrorism, he added, could reduce intelligence gathering on other threats.
Former senator Warren Rudman (R-N.H.), who participated in several past reform attempts and served for many years as chairman of the PFIAB, said some quick efforts at reform have left the intelligence community "worse than we were in the first place." He said he was concerned about "creating massive new structures for politically expedient reasons."
Tenet has argued against a national director of intelligence, saying initially that the creation of that post would add another layer to the bureaucracy. "Rather than focus on a zero-sum game of authorities, the focus should be on ensuring that the DCI and the secretary of defense work together on investments tied to mission," he told Kean's panel.
He believes the "way into the future" is a system under which the intelligence community functions through new combined entities. In one recent example, intelligence officials from the Pentagon, FBI and other agencies were brought to work at the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center. "That's the way we are moving," he said.
Tenet feels strongly about rebuilding human intelligence capabilities and the need to be able to carry out covert operations against terrorists. But he said he believes the president's chief intelligence officer must be directly involved in the CIA's covert activities, each of which must be approved by the president. As CIA director and, earlier, as the top staff member of the Senate intelligence committee, Tenet has seen firsthand the political fallout from the failure of such activities.
"If you separate the DCI from troops, from [agency] operators and analysts, I have a concern about his or her effectiveness, his or her connection," he said.
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U.N. Warns of Delay in Iraqi Election
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64142-2004May3.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 3 -- National elections in Iraq scheduled for January could be postponed unless security there improves, the top election official for the United Nations said Monday.
"If the security situation does not improve, one of the things that is clear is that the U.N. won't participate in Mickey Mouse elections," Carina Perelli, the director of the U.N.'s electoral assistance division, told reporters in New York. "Elections under the gun," she said, do not go "hand in hand."
Perelli said that despite the ongoing violence in Iraq, technical preparations for elections are advancing faster than expected. The United Nations will establish an independent electoral commission by the end of the month after negotiating a new electoral law ahead of schedule. "Security aside, right now we are better than on track," she said.
Perelli, a Uruguayan election specialist who recently concluded a three-week visit to Iraq, said the United Nations will soon return to Iraq to work out a series of unresolved issues, including whether Iraq will be governed by a presidential or parliamentary political system.
The United Nations is trying to create a new electoral system from scratch in Iraq, a country that has little experience with democracy. In February, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said that he could help organize elections in Iraq by the end of the year if Iraqis reached agreement on a new electoral law by May. That would provide U.N. and Iraqi officials with a minimum of eight months to prepare for elections.
As a first step, the United Nations has invited individuals from across Iraq's political, religious and tribal spectrums to vie for a few positions on the electoral commission. U.N.-appointed officials will narrow the field of candidates to 20 individuals and select an executive director general of elections and seven-member board of commissioners from the group. The United Nations will also appoint an international election commissioner to advise Iraq's electoral commissioners.
Perelli said that aspirants can obtain entry forms at any of 13 regional coalition sites throughout the country until May 15. She said that although coalition sites in five of Iraq's 18 governates were too dangerous to distribute the forms, contenders could get copies of the form on the Internet or travel to another site to obtain one.
U.S. occupation authorities have appropriated as much as $260 million to finance the elections, Perelli said. But she said the cost could rise if Iraqis living outside the country are allowed to vote.
In an effort to ensure their competence and independence, candidates for the electoral posts will be questioned by a panel of three international election specialists and required to sign a paper renouncing participation in politics as long as they serve on the commission. They will have to accept a "curtailment of the exercise of their civil and political rights," she said. They will be the "enforcers of the legitimacy of the process," she added.
Perelli said the United Nations would try to avoid selecting commissioners based on their political, tribal or religious affiliation. That is a major departure from the U.S.-led occupation authorities, who apportioned political seats on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council on the basis of affiliation.
The process has done little to strengthen the standing of politicians and political parties, which are viewed favorably by only 3 percent of the Iraqi population, according to a local poll cited by Perelli. "The anti-political party feelings of the population is extremely high," she said.
The decision has fueled anxiety by Iraq's factions that they may be left out if they do not aggressively promote their own causes. "There is a concern right now in terms of the different groups feeling that it is now or never" or they could be left out of Iraq's political future, she said.
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ELECTIONS
U.N.'s Plans to Oversee Voting in Iraq Hinge on Drop in Violence
May 4, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/international/middleeast/04NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 3 - Planning for national elections in Iraq is ahead of schedule, but violence must decline for the United Nations to oversee them, the chief of the organization's electoral assistance division said Monday.
"If security does not improve, the U.N. won't participate in elections," said the official, Carina Perelli.
Ms. Perelli said an estimated $260 million had been set aside to pay for the voting, scheduled for January 2005, and she expressed confidence that an electoral commission could be formed by the end of May, six weeks ahead of schedule.
"Security aside, we are better than on track," she said at a news conference, detailing the technical steps that had been taken.
She acknowledged that there had been a deterioration in security since she began her mission to Baghdad this year to advise on elections, but she reasoned that the act of holding elections itself could bring stability.
"We don't know how the situation is going to be," she said, "but once you announce an electoral process, if the voters start to believe in it and take ownership of it, then a process of fighting for the right to hold elections can occur."
Ms. Perelli, 46, a political scientist from Uruguay, has been chief of the electoral unit since 1998 and is experienced in setting up balloting in conflicted places like East Timor, Liberia and Afghanistan.
Asked what encouraged her to think that elections could go forward in Iraq, she said, "Basically, what I have seen is a very, very strong desire and commitment to have their voices heard for the first time."
Under the current arrangement, a caretaker administration takes over from the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority on June 30, and the electoral commission, advised by Ms. Perelli and her team of experts, will then prepare the way for elections for a 275-member national assembly by Jan. 31. That assembly will then write a constitution, and a second national election will take place in December 2005.
Ms. Perelli said the plan now was to hold three simultaneous elections on Jan. 31 for the assembly, for provincial assemblies in various regions of Iraq and for the assembly for the autonomous province of Kurdistan.
Nominations for the seven-member electoral commission and the nonvoting post of director general of elections opened on Sunday and will continue through May 15. The final names will be vetted by a three-member panel of international election experts, and the commission applicants must pledge to drop all political party activities if chosen.
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UN expected to sanction US-led force
Reuters
By Alister Bull
May 4, 2004
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/03/1083436540305.html
Washington UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said he expects the Security Council to authorise a multinational force for Iraq and that Washington is stepping up diplomacy with France, Germany and Russia.
But he sees little chance of the three nations, that opposed the US-led Iraq invasion, sending their troops to Iraq soon.
Mr Annan acknowledged that the global security climate had worsened since the war last year.
"When you look at the situation in the Middle East and the countries around, the violence has increased. There (are) more terrorist attacks," Mr Annan told NBC's Meet the Press. "Would these have happened without an attack on Iraq? Is the attack on Iraq responsible for that? It is difficult to say precisely. But the fact is we do have a very difficult security environment around the world, not just in Iraq."
Mr Annan said the resolution, which the US is considering but has not yet circulated, would cover the period after June 30, when Washington plans to hand sovereignty to an Iraqi caretaker government to rule until elections next year. "There will be a resolution authorising a multinational force and encouraging governments to come together in a genuine international effort to help stabilise Iraq," he said.
The resolution would bless any new caretaker Iraqi government and authorise a multinational force under US command. The UN would not send its own peacekeeping forces or direct any security operations.
Mr Annan said the force might help the US withdraw some of its troops if enough countries sent soldiers. But French, German and Russian troops would probably not be among them. "At this stage, I cannot say that they are ready to do it. But, down the line, one never knows," he said.
On the other hand, Mr Annan said he was aware the US was stepping up its contacts with the three governments. "It's not as if there is no relationship between the three countries and the United States, and I think the contact and discussions are intensifying. Secretary (of State Colin) Powell was in Germany recently and I know the President has been on the line with some of these leaders," he said.
UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who left for Baghdad at the weekend to help form an interim government by June 30, has drawn fire for calling Israeli treatment of Palestinians a "poison" that has complicated his efforts in Iraq.
But Mr Annan said Mr Brahimi was reflecting views of those he met and the comments should not be used against him during his efforts in Iraq.
"One may disagree with the words he used... but I think to use his statement to prevent him from playing a constructive role would be a mistake."
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Iraq Prison Supervisors Face Army Reprimand
Probe of Interrogations May Bring More Charges
By Sewell Chan and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64176-2004May3.html
BAGHDAD, May 3 -- The top U.S. commander in Iraq has moved to issue the highest form of administrative rebuke against six commissioned and noncommissioned officers who supervised an Army-run prison where Iraqi prisoners allegedly suffered physical and sexual abuse, officials announced Monday.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez notified the six on Saturday of his intent to give each a general officer memorandum of reprimand, a document that can effectively end an officer's career by making promotion impossible. A seventh officer is to receive a letter of admonishment, a lesser penalty.
Military officials would not disclose the names or ranks of any of the seven.
The punishments would be the most serious actions against officers in a wide-reaching controversy over mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. They were disclosed as Iraqi newspapers, which had not published for the past three days to honor the birthday of the prophet Muhammad, condemned the abuses as symbols of American hypocrisy.
Sanchez's move to reprimand the supervisors stemmed from an administrative investigation, begun in January, into allegations that military and civilian guards at Abu Ghraib had subjected Iraqi prisoners to beatings and sexually degrading acts. A separate criminal probe resulted in charges being filed against six soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company. Four other members of the unit are under investigation.
The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq said in Baghdad that a third investigation into interrogation practices could result in additional criminal charges and administrative penalties. The spokesman, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said the military is determined to uncover the root of the abuses, which are alleged to have occurred in October and November.
In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said two other probes had arisen from the Abu Ghraib allegations. The Army inspector general's office opened a review in February of other U.S. detention operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the head of the Army Reserve is reviewing training of reservists assigned to detention facilities.
As the repercussions of the abuse controversy widened, there were new disclosures Monday regarding the influence that military intelligence, or MI, operatives wielded inside the prison, which houses 5,000 of the 8,000 detainees held by the United States in Iraq.
Military interrogators routinely used sleep deprivation and other forms of psychological intimidation to elicit information from prisoners in the cellblock where the alleged abuses occurred, according to the former top military police commander in Abu Ghraib.
"The purpose of that wing of the prison was to isolate prisoners with intelligence, so that they would provide it during MI interrogations," the commander, Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, wrote in a statement to The Washington Post.
"The cooperative efforts to obtain actionable information that I was aware of, as directed by MI, included withholding of clothing for some prisoners, rationing of cigarettes and limiting sleep to four hours in a 24-hour period," he wrote.
Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th Military Police Battalion, based in Ashley, Pa., confirmed that he received a notice of reprimand. He said that despite the prevalent use of psychological tactics against prisoners, he was never aware of illegal abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who oversaw all 16 Army-run prisons in Iraq as commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade when the alleged abuses occurred, also faulted military intelligence officers on Monday.
"The prison was actually under the control of the military intelligence command at that time," she said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."
She added, "This was an interrogation -- an isolation-procedure -- issue, and that was run and orchestrated by a separate command from the Military Police Brigade."
Karpinski said she was not a target of Sanchez's reprimands. On Saturday, she told The Post that she had received a letter of admonishment from her superior, Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan.
In a 53-page report, portions of which were made available to The Post, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba concluded that there was no clear line of authority at the prison.
Overall, the report portrays the prison as being run by a poorly led, undermanned and demoralized group of U.S. soldiers. Because of Army personnel policies, it notes, the 800th MP Brigade did not receive replacements as members left for medical reasons or because their terms of service were finished. Also, the report found, the troops' quality of life was "extremely poor." They lacked many of the facilities provided to soldiers at other U.S. bases in Iraq, such as mess halls, barbershops and post exchanges, which offer magazines, toiletries and other personal items for sale.
The report repeatedly criticizes commanders' decisions, but especially focuses on Phillabaum, calling him "an extremely ineffective commander and leader."
Taguba found "clear friction and lack of communication" between Karpinski, who oversaw detainee operations inside the prison, and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, who had control of the overall detention facility.
"There was no clear delineation of responsibility between commands, little coordination at the command level, and no integration of the two functions," Taguba wrote. "Coordination occurred at the lowest possible levels, with little oversight by commanders."
Taguba faulted a Nov. 19 order that explicitly turned over control of the facility to the military intelligence brigade. As a result, Taguba concluded, military guards, who are not trained in interrogation procedures, were given responsibility for "setting conditions" to elicit the maximum information from detainees.
While Taguba did not excuse the actions of the guards, he saved his harshest criticism for four individuals: Pappas; Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who directed the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center inside the prison; and Stephen Stephanowicz and John Israel, two employees of CACI International Inc., an Arlington-based security firm that hired interrogators to work at the prison.
These four men, Taguba wrote, "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." He added that he strongly recommended "immediate disciplinary action" against the four men. Efforts to reach the four on Monday were not successful.
Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had not yet read Taguba's report, which was completed in March and approved in April. Details of the report have been published by the New Yorker magazine, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.
Ricks reported from Washington.
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US probes claims of Indians being ill-treated in Iraq
Tue May 4, 2004
(AFP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&e=4&u=/afp/20040504/pl_afp/india_us_iraq_040504143744
NEW DELHI - American officials in India said they were looking into allegations that Indian civilians working for the US military in Iraq (news - web sites) were being ill-treated by their employers.
A US embassy spokesman in New Delhi said the allegations were being checked following an expression of concern by the Indian government over media reports Indians were being made to work like "slaves" in US military camps.
"We take all reports of abuse seriously and all allegations of mistreatment are investigated. We are committed to treating all persons under coalition authority with dignity, respect and humanity," the spokesman told AFP.
Reports published in leading national dailies on Tuesday quoted two Indian brothers, employed in American military camps in Iraq, as saying US troops abused them and made them work long hours with little food.
"We were slaves in American kitchens. We barely got two hours of sleep," one of the brothers, Hameed, told the Hindustan Times paper in Kollam in southern Kerala state.
His brother Shahjahan was quoted as saying, "Once I told the kitchen in-charge that as I was a devout Muslim I could not cook pork. I was beaten up with rifle butts."
The two brothers, who were identified in the report by their first names only, were among 25 Indians recruited in August by private agencies in Kerala, the report said.
They had been expecting to work in Kuwait but were transported across the border into Iraq, where they ended up in US military camps.
Once they realized they had been duped, the brothers managed to leave, returning to India on April 28.
Shahjahan said there were at least 70 other Indians in US camps in Iraq.
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Current Iraq Troop Levels to Be Maintained Until End of 2005
May 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Iraq-US-Military.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. commanders plan to keep American troops at the current level in Iraq -- about 135,000 -- until the end of 2005, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
The decision acknowledges Iraq is much more unstable and dangerous than generals had hoped earlier this year, when they planned to cut the number of troops occupying Iraq to about 115,000.
Since then, violence by Sunni and Shiite Muslim extremists has surged, making April the deadliest month for American troops since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Several U.S. allies also have decided to pull their forces out, most notably Spain, which had about 2,300 troops in one of the most volatile areas of south-central Iraq.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday ordered about 10,000 active-duty Army soldiers and Marines to prepare to ship out to Iraq in the next few months.
They will help replace 20,000 soldiers in the Army's 1st Armored Division and 2nd Armored Calvary Regiment who were being kept in Iraq for as long as three months past their one-year tours of duty.
Another 10,000 active-duty troops will be called up to fill out the replacement forces, Rumsfeld said.
The troops coming into Iraq will be more heavily armed than the forces they replace, with more tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored Humvees, said Lt. Gen. Norton Schwartz of the Pentagon's Joint Staff.
``The mission remains essentially the same. It's security and stability,'' Schwartz told reporters at the Pentagon.
Many of the troops being sent to Iraq have served there or in Afghanistan before. They will return to a country where ambushes and roadside bombs are more common and the political situation is unstable, with the United States set to hand limited power to a yet-unnamed Iraqi caretaker government on July 1.
The active-duty units ordered to Iraq Tuesday include the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, N.Y. The Marine units are the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Pendleton, Calif., and the 24th MEU from Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Rumsfeld also approved sending 37,000 support troops to Iraq on Tuesday as part of the scheduled rotation of forces. Most of those troops are in National Guard and Army Reserve units.
Keeping such high troop levels in Iraq will further strain a military already stretched thin. All or part of nine of the Army's ten divisions are in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The 10th Mountain Division has units in both Iraq and Afghanistan. About 25,000 Marines already are in Iraq, many of them in and around the volatile city of Fallujah.
``I think we can handle the tempo,'' Schwartz said. ``It is demanding, no question about it. But I haven't come to the conclusion that we need to grow the force yet.''
A U.S.-based Army airborne brigade will be ready starting Friday to handle any emergency, said Army Lt. Gen. Richard Cody.
Still, keeping 20,000 more troops in Iraq will require more money, Schwartz said. Pentagon officials say they have not decided whether to ask Congress for additional money before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30.
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The Role - Another Open Letter to the Troops in Iraq
By STAN GOFF
May 4, 2004
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/goff05042004.html
In 1994, I was running an A-Detachment in 3rd Special Forces, ODA-354 to be precise, a team that specialized in free-fall parachute infiltration and special (strategic) reconnaissance. 3rd Special Forces Group's area of operation encompassed sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, and our team was specifically designated for the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So we had two language requirements on the team, Spanish and French (even though most Haitians actually speak Haitian Kreyol).
I had a communications sergeant on my team named Ali Tehrani. His father was an expatriate Iranian who'd married a German, and Ali had been raised in extremely comfortable circumstances in Europe, where his father and the society around him pushed him to fluency in English, German, Spanish, and French. Ali also spoke decent Italian. He was the most fluent French-speaker on the battalion, and a year before we were sent to Haiti with the 1994 invasion, Ali had been sent to the camps constructed by the United States military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the purpose of detaining tens of thousands of Haitians who were trying to escape the brutal repression and grinding poverty of Haiti in ramshackle boats. Ali was needed there because of his language fluency.
Ali was typical of many of the "non-white" members of Special Forces in two respects. He was demonstrably patriotic - compelled, it seemed, to prove his devotion to the American security state - and he adopted the prevailing attitude within much of Special Operations of Negrophobia - a kind of institutional disdain for Black troops that served to bloc other "non-whites" with whites in SF. It's a peculiar mechanism of white supremacy where there is not a master-race mentality so much as a deficient-race ideology from which all others could self-exclude. This - along with an anabolic version of masculinity - served as one form of social glue in SF culture, though there were a few exceptions.
Ali's Negrophobia wasn't virulent like that I had witnessed in other SF troops. In fact, he was willing to grant exceptions among individual Black soldiers fairly easily. It was more part of his obsessive desire to fit in.
Ali had spent six months "working the camps" at Guantanamo in 1993.
When we received word of our mission to invade Haiti in 1994, he reacted violently. His revulsion toward Haitians was visceral and white-hot. Given that my own team's mission might depend on both Ali's language capabilities ("my" language was Spanish) and on our ability to establish rapport with local Haitians, Ali's outburst sent up a warning flare in front of me, and I made time to sit down with him for a long talk.
Ali was, aside from his passive racism and the simmering rage that one could always sense just below his surface, a very intelligent and sensitive man. I always suspected that he may have suffered either physical or psychological abuse as a child.
When we talked, we fairly quickly concluded together that his aversion to Haitians had something to do with the role he had been thrown into against the Haitians at the camps, the role of jail-boss, and he agreed to keep that in mind and to subordinate his conditioned reflexes on the matter to mental time-outs in order to assure that he would behave appropriately while we were on the mission in Haiti, which he did... most of the time.
But the point I'm getting to is this. The antagonism that Ali experienced as an individual toward Haitians was structured by the institutional antagonism built into the jailer-and-jailed relationship. Ali had internalized the external reality that he was a prison guard and they were the prisoners. His job was to dominate, to bend Haitians to his will, and every exercise of human agency by the Haitians threatened that. Their very humanity - that combination of independent consciousness and will - was structured by the prison-camp phenomenon to be an enemy force in relation to Ali and the other prison-keepers.
In 1971, Stanford University Professor of Psychology Phillip Zimbardo designed an experiment that would come to be known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Subjects were recruited and paid a modest stipend, whereupon they were separated into "prisoners" and "guards," and placed in a mock prison built in a Stanford basement. The prisoners were stripped, deloused, shackled, and placed in prison clothes, while the guards were given authoritative uniforms, sunglasses, and batons. Long story short - within two days there was a near prison riot, psychosomatic illness began to break out, white middle-class kids in the role of guards became rapidly and progressively more sadistic and arbitrary, and the two-week experiment had to be abandoned after only six days... before someone was badly hurt or killed.
The experiment seemed to support the truism that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." But that conclusion serves as a description, not an explanation. It describes what happens to the individual, but it fails to account for the role of rationalization that legitimates the domination, and it completely fails to account for institutional support of that domination.
When one uses the term "systemic," she is saying that the source of this abuse is not individual moral failure, but a predictable expression of the system and its structures.
The abuses of detainees, by US troops, by CACI International and Titan Corporation mercenaries, and by the CIA in Iraq, is "systemic."
But in the same way that the system found an expression in the thoughts and emotions of Ali Tehrani, in the same way that the structure of domination and subjection pushed him to rationalize away his shared humanity with his Haitian captives, we can now see in the leering grins of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, who are regular people - like the experimental subjects in the Stanford Prison Experiment - who quickly learned to behave as sadistic torturers. The military has admitted that 60% of these detainees are neither combatants nor threats.
As this is written, the US military is about to release hundreds of detainees who fall in that category, and there will be more horror stories coming, because it was systemic.
People were not only humiliated and forced to pose in degrading positions with each other naked. They were forced to masturbate in front of taunting guards. Some were sodomized with foreign objects. It appears that some were also beaten to death during interrogation - one whose body was put on ice for a day then carted away the next on a litter with a faked intravenous infusion in the arm.
Now the cover stories are being spun out like webs.
We are being asked to believe that:
(1) The only abuse that occurred against anyone detained by American forces in Iraq was photographed and reported.
(2) No abuses occurred anywhere that were not photographed or reported.
(3) The one percent of US troops who are the "bad apples" all happen to serve together in the same unit... the unit that is the only one guilty, and that happened to get caught because of the photographs.
(4) The aggressive investigation now being proclaimed by everyone from George W. Bush to CENTCOM, about abuses that were already on record in the military (an internal investigation had already been launched in February by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, but was kept from the public), would have happened had the photographs and story not been aired on national television.
(5) The military was not attempting to cover up their own investigation, and that they would have informed the public of these abuses even had Seymour Hersh not put the whole miserable episode into print.
(6) The military did not cover anything up in the two weeks between the time CBS warned them that they were going to air an expose and when they actually did air it.
(7) No one in the chain of command above Brigadier General Janis Karpinski is responsible for the failure to halt these abuses, even though Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez was informed of the investigation of these abuses, complete with sworn statements and photographs, by General Taguba last February.
Other abuses and violations of the Geneva Conventions and Laws of Warfare are already on record, some with videos available on the web, such as:
(1) Shooting people who are clearly not armed and who are engaged in no threatening behavior.
(2) Shooting into ambulances.
(3) Shooting wounded people who are not armed.
(4) Shooting wounded people who are obviously no longer capable of fighting.
(5) Shooting into crowds.
There has never been a Stanford Military Occupation Experiment to complement the Stanford Prison Experiment, unless we just count the military occupations themselves. There is a structured, systemic antagonism between an occupying military and the people whose land they occupy. And there will be no investigations of any of it, because there never are, unless and until the American public is confronted with them.
The National Command Authority and its cheerleaders cannot say out loud... this is what we are doing, and it can't get done unless we dehumanize the occupied. This reality, this system, will express itself in the thoughts and emotions of you, the troops who carry it out, because this military occupation is in a sense making a prison of Iraq and making you, the troops, its turnkeys.
It will only be those exceptional individuals among you in the military who refuse to surrender their humanity - no matter how little you may understand the big picture - and who will witness. You who do break with the system and witness are very important people, important to history, because your refusal to surrender your own moral integrity to the system may lead to our collective salvation by ending this felonious occupation. The troops who filed reports about the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison were such exceptions.
So were Tom Glen and Ron Ridenhour.
In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch wrote in 1979 about US leadership during the occupation of Vietnam:
"Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity... all politics becomes a form of spectacle. It is well known that Madison Avenue packages politicians and markets them as if they were cereals or deodorants; but the art of public relations penetrates more deeply into political life... The modern prince [an apt turn of phrase for the current member of the Bush political dynasty] ... confuses successful completion of the task at hand with the impression he makes or hopes to make on others. Thus American officials blundered into the war in Vietnam... More concerned with the trappings than with the reality of power, they convinced themselves that failure to intervene would damage American 'credibility...' [They] fret about their ability to rise to crisis, to project an image of decisiveness, to give a convincing performance of executive power... Public relations and propaganda have exalted the image and the pseudo-event."
What these images of the Abu Ghraib humiliation and torture have done in the United States is collide with the "exalted image and the pseudo-event" of the Bush propaganda apparatus, just as the images of the My Lai massacre did in 1969. That collision between the reality and the real image of war startles civilians here in the La-La Land of wide screen TV and suburban SUV's, and it shakes them out of their opiated shopper dream-state.
My Lai is what General Colin Powell was remembering when he implemented "the Powell Doctrine" for the military, which includes a co-opted press and a vigorous attempt to keep things like flag-draped coffins off of those wide screen TVs.
Most of you don't remember My Lai.
On March 16, 1968, units of the Americal Division, to which Powell was assigned as a staff officer in Chu Lai, entered a Vietnamese village called My Lai and spent four hours raping women, burning houses, then finally massacring men, women, and children - including infants who dying women tried to shield with their own bullet-riddled bodies. The massacre was stopped by a Georgia-born helicopter pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson who landed his chopper between the few surviving Vietnamese and the blood-intoxicated soldiers, and ordered his door gunners to open fire on the Americans if they failed to stand down.
A few weeks later, General Creighton Abrams, then commanding general in Vietnam, received a letter from a young Specialist-4 in the Americal Division named Tom Glen:
"The average GI's attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting to accomplish in the realm of human relations... Far beyond merely dismissing the Vietnamese as 'slopes' or 'gooks,' in both deed and thought, too many American soldiers seem to discount their very humanity; and with this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry humiliations, both psychological and physical, that can have only a debilitating effect upon efforts to unify the people in loyalty to the Saigon government, particularly when such acts are carried out at unit levels and thereby acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy... [American soldiers attack Vietnamese] for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves... Fired with an emotionalism that belies unconscionable hatred, and armed with a vocabulary consisting of 'You VC,' soldiers commonly 'interrogate' by means of torture that has been presented as the particular habit of the enemy. Severe beatings and torture at knife point are usual means of questioning captives or of convincing a suspect that he is, indeed, a Viet Cong... It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs... What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated."
Glen's letter was forwarded from Abrams' office to the Americal Division and ended up with Major Colin Powell in Chu Lai.
Powell never followed up by questioning Glen, and instead ended his "investigation" of Glen's allegations after accepting uncritically the claim by Glen's commander that Glen hadn't been close enough to "the front" (whatever that was supposed to be in Vietnam) to have any knowledge of such alleged abuses. Powell then began his career as a damage-control expert in the military by writing a letter, dated December 13, 1968, in which he said, ""There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs... [but] this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the Division... In direct refutation of this [Glen's] portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." He went on to impugn Glen's account for having been brought to light only reluctantly and lacking sufficient detail.
This was, of course, horseshit. Abuses were systemic.
Glen had only heard through rumors about My Lai. It was another GI, Ron Ridenhour, an infantryman who was not willing to surrender his humanity to occupier-racism, who finally pieced together, on his own initiative, the story of the My Lai massacre, and brought it to public light. When the photographs of the massacre were combined with Ridenhour's account, and the American public was confronted with the reality of an entire unit participating in a systematic massacre of civilians, it marked a turning point in the loss of political support in the United States for continued military occupation of Vietnam.
Powell himself admitted war crimes in his memoir, My American Journey, where he wrote, "I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male... If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him." Powell would also come to the defense of Brigadier General John Donaldson who had the door gunners on his own helicopter shoot Vietnamese for sport. Donaldson was exonerated, naturally, in a military investigation.
Powell not only developed as a skilled cover-up artist, he would eventually incorporate this ability to manage public perception about war as a key element in the "Powell Doctrine," which he imposed on the military and the press. He never forgot My Lai, and he has always believed that exposure of My Lai and other atrocities were responsible for the US defeat in Vietnam.
Donald Rumsfeld shares these beliefs with Colin Powell. They are both wrong. The two phenomena that collide with this Powell-Rumsfeld orientation were and are (1) the decision of their 'enemy' never to quit, and (2) the inevitability that someone who is part of the occupation force will be confronted with these contradictions between "the exalted image and the pseudo-event" and the real character of war - and that this someone will expose it in an attempt to rescue his or her own humanity.
The war in Vietnam was lost by the French then the Americans because they didn't belong there, and the resistance endeavored to do whatever was necessary to make that point. This is also the situation in Iraq.
So I'll leave to others the analysis of whether the troops facing courts martial are scapegoats (they are, and they are also probably guilty as hell), and whether or not the military is letting the officers off with reprimands and walking papers to prevent the fire spreading (which it is). I'll just emphasize that the war in Iraq cannot be won. Not because of the inability of US troops to fight, but because we don't belong there. And since that's the case (which I firmly believe it is) every life - Iraqi, American, or otherwise - that is lost or ruined... is wasted.
All this talk of whether Military Intelligence or the mercenaries working for CACI International or the CIA or the MP commanders were responsible is diversionary bullshit so we won't see how Iraq itself has become the Stanford Military Occupation Experiment.
Because if we conclude that the problem is systemic, then the only thing to do to stop this is to walk away. And the Bush administration sent troops there for the purpose not of building democracies, but of building permanent military bases in the heart of oil country, and if they walk away, they can't rightly build bases, can they?
So we can either blithely obey and support our new Neros, or we can continue to cling to the absurd notion that the vandal can rebuild the house they just ravaged, or we can do what we might to make them walk away. Troops that come forward will play a key role in this moral imperative.
Every troop that comes forward with accounts of the inhumanity of this war - while jeopardizing his or her career - is serving to hasten an end to this criminal enterprise of the Military-Petroleum Complex. These troop/witnesses will serve to hasten an end to the suffering of Iraqi families and the suffering of the families of the occupying forces. They will serve to prevent more torture, more humiliation, more suspicion and hatred, and more lives being thrown away on this imperial folly.
Every troop who keeps his secrets, who faithfully serves the system and never bears witness, can travel for the rest of his life.
She can go to Rio de Janeiro.
He can go to Bangladesh.
She can go to Lagos, or Montreal, or Tokyo, or Moscow, or Antarctica.
But no matter where he goes, there he'll be - alone with the growing weight of his own silence on his head, wrapping himself in his own rationalizations, and restlessly turning away from the faces that look back at him in the mirrors of his memory.
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Test Program Screens Rail Passengers for Bombs
May 4, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-rail.html
NEW CARROLLTON, Md. (Reuters) - The government launched a pilot program on Tuesday to screen U.S. rail passengers and their bags for bombs, but expectations are measured as planners assess whether the approach is practical.
``We need to learn through this and see how it works in the transit environment,'' Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security, told reporters at a Maryland station.
Demand for tighter U.S. rail security surged after the March 11 Madrid bombings that killed nearly 200 people.
Moving ahead of congressional demands to broaden transportation security, the Homeland Security Department announced a plan in recent weeks to further address needs for commuter systems and Amtrak.
Authorities are testing technology developed by L-3 Communications and a unit of General Electric Co. already used in other areas.
The GE device uses a puff of air blown onto passengers standing in a walk-through booth to detect trace amounts of explosives. It costs about $130,000 per unit and is already in use at nuclear power plants, company officials said.
The L-3 system scans bags for bombs and is a modified version of screening technology used at airports overseas. An individual unit costs roughly $500,000.
But homeland security officials are unsure if the enhancements will suit the pace and volume of a commuter station. Passenger volume is swift and rail schedules are tight because trains from various systems share tracks, signals and stations.
Additionally, criteria for rail screening is limited. The intention is only to screen trains when there is a specific threat to the nation's railway system, Hutchinson said.
There are no plans to screen in subway systems.
Homeland security officials are also mindful of the political, financial and practical pitfalls of big-ticket security programs. The multibillion-dollar overhaul and federalization of airport security after the 2001 hijack attacks included the installation of bag-screening technology and 45,000 screeners.
Screeners would be needed to operate the rail security program as well.
Amtrak President David Gunn said recently that rail screening should be done if technology can be adapted. On an average weekday, Amtrak carries 66,000 people on 250 trains.
Commuter lines carry hundreds of thousands of passengers daily.
The 30-day pilot program is based outside Washington at the New Carrollton station where 1,000 passengers use commuter and Amtrak service daily.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Former Detainees Allege Post-9/11 Abuse
Associated Press
Tuesday, May 4, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64389-2004May3.html
NEW YORK, May 3 -- A Middle Eastern immigrant alleges that he was violated during a body-cavity search at a federal jail following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The lawsuit filed Monday by the man and another former detainee contends they were put in solitary confinement, beaten and verbally abused by jail guards. They were later cleared of allegations that they had terrorist ties but were deported after pleading guilty to other charges. Javaid Iqbal, who admitted having false papers and bogus checks, now lives in Pakistan; Ehab Elmaghraby, who pleaded guilty to credit-card fraud, lives in Egypt.
Unlike a pending civil complaint by other Sept. 11 detainees, also filed federal court in Brooklyn, the new suit identifies guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center by their last names and accuses them of more extreme abuses.
Elmaghraby, a former restaurateur, and Iqbal, a former cable technician, "were subjected to numerous unreasonable and unnecessary" strip searches, the suit says.
One guard allegedly paraded Elmaghraby naked in front of a female co-worker. The same guard later inserted a flashlight into Elmaghraby's rectum as others watched, the suit said. Both men say they were shackled, punched and called "Muslim bastards" and other epithets.
The men seek damages for physical and emotional harm.
The detention center in Brooklyn was cited for brutal treatment of detainees in a report last year by the Justice Department inspector general. Federal prosecutors recently decided against bringing criminal charges against any guards.
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Military Defenders for Detainees Put Tribunals on Trial
May 4, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/politics/04GITM.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 3 - The Bush administration's plan to use military tribunals to try some of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which has faced considerable skepticism, has been receiving some of its sharpest attacks from the military defense lawyers who are participating in the process.
Senior government planners once expected that the first of the prisoners to go before a tribunal would plead guilty as part of an agreement to reduce their jail time. But the five military lawyers assigned to defend the first group of prisoners have radically altered that hope, the officials now acknowledge.
The uniformed lawyers have been especially forceful, not only in asserting their clients' innocence but also in denouncing the tribunal system as inherently unfair and rigged.
The Pentagon wants the military commissions, the first for the United States since the end of World War II, to be seen as fair at home and abroad. But the military lawyers, in playing the kind of attack-the-system role that William Kunstler was known for, have become widely quoted around the world and acclaimed by some as heroes after appearances in London and Australia in which they denounced the tribunals.
Nonetheless, senior military officials said that while they disagreed with the view that the tribunal system is unfair, they had no problem with the defense lawyers' making harshly critical comments.
Last month, an audience at Oxford University in England was stunned, witnesses said, when two of the lawyers, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift of the Navy and Maj. Mark Bridges of the Army, said the tribunals were not capable of producing a fair and just result.
The several hundred people who had gathered for a talk about the Guantánamo detention facility did not expect to hear the American officers' objections.
Murray Wesson, a Rhodes Scholar from South Africa who attended, wrote on his Web log: "What I was unprepared for, given that these were, after all, military lawyers, was how critical of the process they were. Indeed, they went so far as to describe the tribunals as `fundamentally flawed' and insinuated that they would not amount to fair trials."
The day before the Oxford event, Maj. Michael Mori of the Marines, another defense lawyer, said at a London news conference, "The system is not set up to provide even the appearance of a fair trial."
Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who was at the event in Oxford, said he was surprised by the public tactics of the military lawyers.
"These folks have been amazing. It's just something I never expected," said Mr. Ratner, whose group, based in New York, is challenging the Guantánamo detentions in federal court. "I always assumed that the prisoners would get an adequate defense, but they're denouncing the entire system with public press conferences."
The rules for the tribunals, released in the spring of 2002 after intense internal debate among lawyers in the administration, provide for defendants to have military lawyers at government expense and also hire their own civilian lawyers at their own expense.
The crimes the suspects may be charged with are crimes of war, as well as aiding the enemy and spying. The accused may present evidence at their trials and cross-examine witnesses for the prosecution. Conviction requires a vote of two-thirds of the tribunal. The death penalty requires a unanimous vote.
The feature of the commission that has drawn the most criticism is that there is no provision for any review outside the military.
Major Mori, who represents an Australian detainee, has become a minor celebrity in Australia, where he has visited and where his interviews with Australian reporters based in the United States appear regularly. One such reporter, Karl Stefanovic of Channel Nine, a major national network, said news accounts had compared Major Mori to Tom Cruise, who played a valiant military defense lawyer at Guantánamo in the film "A Few Good Men."
"When people hear him talk for the first time, they are quite surprised at the way he openly attacks the system," Mr. Stefanovic said.
Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, who was a judge in the Air Force until being assigned to defend a Sudanese detainee, said she had told audiences of her "great concerns about whether he can receive a fair trial with rules that are written that are twisted against the defense."
Like the other defense lawyers, she was critical of rules requiring that motions do not go to the panel of judges "but to the same officer who approved the charges in the first place."
That person, Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway of the Air Force, said in an interview that he believed that the rules were fair but that "I don't object to defense counsel challenging the system. Their job is to zealously defend their client."
Colonel Shaffer, like her colleagues, said she did not worry that her comments could harm her career. "I'm just being a staunch supporter of the Constitution and its notions of fairness," she said.
Col. Will Gunn, an Air Force lawyer who is the chief defense counsel, said that he had heard criticism from other officers who did not understand the special task a lawyer has in zealously defending a client.
Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel of the Navy, one of the lawyers, has complained that the tribunal process lacks the needed checks and balances to be fair.
Commander Swift said he worried that his client, a 34-year-old Yemeni named Salim Ahmed Hamdan, was suffering psychologically from being kept in isolation. He said that Mr. Hamdan had been in Afghanistan trying to get to Tajikistan to fight against the government on behalf of Muslims. When he could not get there, he found a job on Osama bin Laden's property near Kandahar, Afghanistan. In the turmoil following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he borrowed a car to take his pregnant wife and daughter to safety in Pakistan. Upon Mr. Hamdan's return, Commander Swift said, he was arrested by Afghan forces.
Last month, Commander Swift filed the first lawsuit on behalf of a detainee directly challenging the military tribunal system. It asserts that the Bush administration's plans for his client violate the Constitution, federal law and the nation's obligations under the Geneva Conventions.
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Repaving the Long Road Out of Prison
May 4, 2004
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/politics/04PRIS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
PITTSBURGH - For years, as politicians rushed to pass tougher crime laws and build more prisons, many of them - Republicans in particular - scoffed at traditional efforts to rehabilitate inmates as soft-headed and ineffective.
But in recent months, with states facing increasing prison costs and growing evidence that most inmates end up being arrested again after they are released, leaders and lawmakers of both parties, from President Bush to congressmen, governors and state legislators, are taking a new interest in preparing inmates for life on the outside.
They are not calling it rehabilitation but re-entry, programs that help inmates make the transition from prison to returning home. These include drug treatment, job training and finding housing.
"We've got a broken corrections system," Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, said. "Recidivism rates are too high and create too much of a financial burden on states without protecting public safety."
The problem, Mr. Brownback said, is that the public went too far in its desire to get tough on crime, and scrapped much of what was known as rehabilitation. What people forgot, he said, is that 97 percent of the nation's inmates eventually are released and have to go somewhere.
Sixty-seven percent of the 630,000 state and federal prison inmates who will be released this year are likely to be rearrested within three years, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nine million people are released from jails annually.
In his State of the Union address, Mr. Bush proposed a $300 million initiative for re-entry programs, to be conducted by religion-based groups. In addition, the National Governors Association has created a Prisoner Re-entry Policy Academy, putting on workshops in seven states to improve the process.
Similarly, the Council of State Governments has formed a Re-entry Policy Council, working with 100 experts, to come up with a manual. The report will contain recommendations on how states can better help newly released prisoners find jobs, get decent places to live and re-establish relationships.
At the same time, the National Institute of Corrections, a branch of the federal Bureau of Prisons, has developed a new model for re-entry that it is trying to use in nine states.
Mr. Brownback says he plans to introduce legislation this spring, with bipartisan support, to try to overhaul the corrections system. It will call for reducing recidivism from 67 percent to something closer to 20 percent, a revolutionary goal.
Although restoring rehabilitative programs has long been a goal of liberals, Mr. Brownback sees this differently. "I think this can be a classic compassionate-conservative issue," he said, if religion-based groups get involved in the job training, mentoring and drug treatment.
Nowhere has the effort to improve the re-entry process been more successful, and had more bipartisan support, than here in Pittsburgh, in Allegheny County. One program, sponsored by the Allegheny County Department of Human Services for offenders with mental illness coming out of Pennsylvania prisons, has reduced recidivism to only 9.9 percent.
Jean Hull, a former state-prison inmate who had a diagnosis of manic depression, served her full two-year sentence for resisting arrest without even applying for parole because her illness left her too afraid to face the outside world. Under Pennsylvania law, Ms. Hull, 38, would simply have been released on her own, with no further supervision or help beyond a bus ticket to nowhere, were it not for for the Allegheny County program.
The program, for both county jail and state prison inmates with mental illness, arranged to have Ms. Hull picked up at the Pittsburgh bus station and then bought her clothes, found her housing and made sure she had her medications. "Without the program, I would have ended up back in prison, or on drugs, or dead," she said.
The State Senate Budget and Finance Committee recently recommended that the program serve as a model in the state as a way to save money. State Senator Jane Clare Orie, a Republican and a former prosecutor, was one supporter.
"I think until now many people, especially Republicans, unfortunately, viewed this kind of program as not law and order, as being weak on crime," Ms. Orie said. "But when we show them that it saves money and lessens the number of people who commit new crimes, then that's a sell that works for them."
For liberals, she said, "you sell them by showing there will be more services for inmates."
She added, "So you have to sell them differently. But it's a win-win for everybody."
The Pittsburgh program tries to help some of the most troubled inmates, those with not only mental illness but also drug addiction, homelessness and often multiple earlier prison terms, putting them at high risk of re-arrest.
It began as a result of a consent decree, because of chronic overcrowding in the Allegheny County jail and the lack of treatment for inmates with mental illness.
But its founder, Amy Kroll, the director of forensic services for the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, turned it into a comprehensive program for mentally ill offenders that now includes a mental health court, a drug court and a re-entry component as well as the part that helps state prison inmates.
Ms. Kroll, a former prison guard and a police emergency psychiatric clinician, requires her staff of 26 to go to jails and prisons and get to know each inmate well before the inmate is released.
"We try to be detectives, to find out everything about a person," Ms. Kroll said.
Each time a person is released, Ms. Kroll or a staff member is waiting. The staff member takes the released prisoner to a Kmart and provides $200 to buy clothes and other necessities, like toothpaste.
"The most important thing we do is lower our clients' anxiety," Ms. Kroll said. "Most people fail because of their anxiety at getting out, especially the mentally ill."
The shopping serves another purpose. She tells offenders: " `It's your choice.' Inmates get no choices, and so most of our inmates have an incredibly hard time making choices."
Next it is off to the medical assistance office. The staff has already done the paperwork to make sure that the offenders' psychiatric medications will be ready. Most mentally ill people released from prison have no supply of pills and often must wait weeks before getting their medications, often leading to a relapse.
From there Ms. Kroll's staff takes the newly released to the Social Security office, to apply for supplementary Social Security benefits because of their illness. Then they go to prearranged housing. They are also given bus passes.
The average cost is $3,000 a person, well below the national average of $25,000 a year for a prison inmate, Ms. Kroll said. The money comes from the county, the state and several foundations.
One of Ms. Kroll's first inmates was Ronald Williams, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He had been in the county jail for a year, convicted of stalking. At the time of his arrest, Mr. Williams had also been homeless for six years.
But Ms. Kroll kept visiting him in jail, getting to know him, and took him to Kmart on his release. Mr. Williams, 64, is doing so well that he rents his own apartment and manages a gypsy-cab company.
He keeps a photograph of Ms. Kroll and her two young daughters in his wallet, and he often has breakfast with them. "I call them my nieces," he said. "I call her Mother Teresa."
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
WMD Probe Panel Won't Seek Subpoena Power
May 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Intelligence-Commission.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The presidential commission investigating the intelligence agencies' mistaken pre-war assessments of weapons of mass destruction will not seek subpoena power, a spokesman says.
Meanwhile, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says he and other members are concerned that agency leaders have failed to hold anyone accountable for three years of blunders.
The inquiry commission's chairmen -- former Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Va., and Republican Laurence Silberman, a retired federal appeals court judge -- have decided they do not need subpoena power to require people to testify or provide information, said spokesman Larry McQuillan.
``At this point, they are satisfied that they can get all the cooperation they need,'' McQuillan said. ``Both men have been assured personally by President Bush that every federal department and agency will cooperate.''
McQuillan declined to comment on whether the decision could later be reversed. ``I don't want to go into hypotheticals,'' he said.
Bush formed the commission in February -- formally named the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction -- in response to mounting criticism involving the flawed prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs, whose existence was a leading argument for war.
As part of its mandate, the commission will also look at how well the intelligence agencies are able to evaluate the threat of weapons of mass destruction from foreign governments, terrorist groups or private networks distributing the weapons or materials. The commission is expected to report to Bush by March 31 of next year.
Bush has been criticized by some lawmakers and Sept. 11 victims' families over his insistence on limiting the subpoena power of another commission investigating the al-Qaida attack.
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., said he would defer to Silberman and Robb's judgment, though as co-chair of a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, he found subpoena power valuable: ``Not because you used it frequently,'' he said, but because ``people understood if they didn't come voluntarily, they could be forced to come.''
``We got a lot of cooperation, too, at the beginning,'' he added.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of nine weapons commission members, has said he thinks the panel should have subpoena power. ``It gives a certain credibility to a commission,'' he said in an ABC interview.
McCain could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday. In an interview last week, he said the pace of the commission's start was ``a little slow'' because of sometimes lengthy background checks.
``I would like to start the first day,'' McCain said. But ``I have no complaints so far.''
Recently, at least one senior lawmaker considered friendly to the CIA -- and the more than dozen other agencies that comprise the intelligence community -- has been publicly critical.
In a speech at Kansas State University on Monday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said members of Congress were troubled because no one in the agencies has been held accountable for intelligence failures over the past three years, starting with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
``Almost two years since the publication of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that declared Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was reconstituting his nuclear program, no one has been disciplined or fired,'' he said. ``Are we asking too much?''
Roberts also referred to CIA Director George Tenet's reported assurances to Bush that the existence of Saddam's weapons programs was a ``slam-dunk case.''
``Rarely is any intelligence case a 'slam dunk,''' Roberts said.
A CIA spokesman declined to comment on Roberts' remarks and said the agency is going to cooperate fully with the commission.
The commissioners have been operating out of the New Executive Office Building, one block from the White House, but plan to move this week to another location in the Washington area, which McQuillan declined to disclose.
He said the commission is working on hiring 65 to 70 staffers -- a bit smaller than the Sept. 11 Commission's staff of almost 80 -- though he wouldn't say how far along the process is. Many of those employees will need security clearances.
The commission has chosen its executive director: retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, deputy administrator to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, who left Iraq on April 23.
McQuillan said the commission had an administrative session in late March and plans another this month.
He said requests for information have been issued to various agencies, and some commissioners have met with officials including members of Australian intelligence and the five-member commission in Britain investigating intelligence failures there regarding Iraq's weapons programs.
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Agency Sees Withholding of Medicare Data From Congress as Illegal
May 4, 2004
By ROBERT PEAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/politics/04DRUG.html
WASHINGTON, May 3 - The Congressional Research Service says the Bush administration apparently violated federal law by ordering the chief Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress indicating that the new Medicare law could cost far more than White House officials had said.
In a report on Monday, the research service said that Congress's "right to receive truthful information from federal agencies to assist in its legislative functions is clear and unassailable." Since 1912, it said, federal laws have protected the rights of federal employees to communicate with Congress, and recent laws have "reaffirmed and strengthened" those protections.
The actuary, Richard S. Foster, has testified that he was ordered to withhold the cost estimates last year, when Congress was considering legislation to add a drug benefit to Medicare. The order, he said, came from Thomas A. Scully, who was then the administrator of Medicare.
Mr. Foster said Mr. Scully threatened to discipline him for insubordination if he gave Congress the data.
The research service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, said Mr. Scully's order "would appear to violate a specific and express prohibition of federal law." The actuary, it said, has a duty to "make professional and reliable cost estimates, unfettered by any particular partisan agenda."
In March, Bush administration officials suggested that they would provide the actuary's cost estimates to Congress. "We have nothing to hide, so I want to make darn sure that everything comes out," Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, said on March 16. But a month later, in a letter to Congress, the administration refused to provide the documents.
Mr. Scully has confirmed telling Mr. Foster that "I, as his supervisor, would decide when he would communicate with Congress."
William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Monday that the propriety of Mr. Scully's action was being investigated by the agency's inspector general. In any event, Mr. Pierce said, "we are looking to the future, not the past."
On Monday, the administration opened a campaign to persuade millions of older Americans to sign up for prescription drug discount cards.
Secretary Thompson said Medicare beneficiaries nationwide would have access to at least 39 cards offering savings of 10 percent to 25 percent off the retail prices charged to people without drug insurance.
"For the first time," Mr. Thompson said, "we are going to pool the purchasing power of Medicare beneficiaries to drive down the prices they pay for prescription drugs." Before choosing a card, he said, beneficiaries should carefully compare the prices available with different cards for the drugs they use.
Mr. Thompson said beneficiaries could start using the cards next month and could continue using them until January 2006, when Medicare's drug benefit begins.
A big challenge for beneficiaries is to overcome the confusion surrounding the new cards. Sponsors of the discount cards said that many of the prices posted on the official Web site, www.Medicare.gov, were still incorrect - an assertion disputed by Mr. Thompson - and some sponsors were quoting prices different from those posted by the government.
Neil D. LaGrow, 80, of Culpeper, Va., who said he spent $890 a month on 15 medications, predicted that the discount cards would be "tremendously helpful."
Howard J. Bedlin, vice president of the National Council on the Aging, a research and advocacy group, said the cards would be "very valuable" to low-income people. Individuals with annual incomes of $12,569 or less and couples with incomes of $16,862 or less will be eligible for a credit of $600 a person on their cards.
In addition, Mr. Bedlin noted, some major drug companies, like Merck and Novartis, have said they will offer their medicines at no charge or for a very small fee to low-income people who use up the $600 credit. Moreover, he said, some states will pay drug costs for low-income people who exhaust the $600 allowance.
For people with incomes above the thresholds, Mr. Bedlin said, the value of the discount card will vary, depending on what drugs they take.
Congressional Democrats said the savings would prove illusory for most beneficiaries.
"This sounds like a good deal, but it isn't," said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader.
Representative Pete Stark of California, senior Democrat on the Ways and Means health subcommittee, said: "The cards provide maximum confusion and minimal savings. These deep discounts were a figment of the Republicans' imagination."
Prices available with the new drug cards are, in many cases, higher than those available to any consumer using online pharmacies.
Peter M. Neupert, chairman of drugstore.com, said: "In general, our prices are lower than those offered by many of the Medicare card sponsors. Our operating costs are a bit lower than those of bricks-and-mortar drugstores."
In addition, Mr. Neupert said, his company's Web site is easier to use than the new Medicare site.
-------- propaganda wars
Iraq is World's Most Dangerous Journalistic Assignment
by Jim Lobe,
May 4, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2465
More than two dozen journalists have been killed in Iraq since last year's launch of the U.S.-led invasion, making the Middle Eastern nation the world's most dangerous journalist assignment by far, according to the New York-based watchdog, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Iraq thus ranked number one among the Ten World's Worst Places to Be a Journalist, an annual listing by CPJ in honor of World Press Freedom Day, May 3.
The war-torn Middle Eastern country, where more U.S. troops were killed in April than in any one-month period since the waning days of Washington's direct military involvement in the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago, was followed on this year's list by Cuba, Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, and Bangladesh in the top five.
China, Eritrea, Haiti, the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, and Russia rounded out the list, although CPJ noted just last Thursday that two radio journalists who had covered corruption and crime in remote areas of Brazil were killed by unknown assailants in just the past week.
"In all of these places, reporting the news is an act of courage and conviction," said CPJ's executive director, Ann Cooper. "Journalism is essential in helping all of us understand the events that shape our lives, and our need and desire for information cannot be eliminated by violence and repression."
World Press Freedom Day is not only being marked by the release of the "Worst Places" list. In Paris, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres) will release its global review of the persecution of the press for 2003.
It found that 42 journalists - mainly in Asia and the Middle East - were killed in connection with the professional work during the year, the highest total since 1995. About one third died in connection with the Iraq War, according to the report.
In its 2003 annual report released two months ago, CPJ found that 36 journalists were killed last year as a direct result of their work. But a number of other cases reporters being killed were still under investigation by the group to determine the likely motivation and circumstances at the time of the report's release.
Of the 25 journalists killed in action in Iraq since March 2003, 12 have been killed in 2004 alone - all of them Iraqis, according to CPJ.
Post-war Iraq, the group said, is filled with risks for reporters, beginning with common banditry, gunfire, and bombings in which they are not specifically targeted. The growing insurgency, however, has created a new threat by systematically targeting foreigners, including journalists and the Iraqis who work for them.
At least six Iraqi media workers have been murdered, and several more have received death threats, according to the report, which also noted that armed groups have so far abducted eight journalists this year, although all were subsequently released.
At least seven - and possibly nine - journalists have been killed by gunfire from U.S. forces who have also detained and mistreated mostly Arab or Iraqi journalists, according to CPJ. In recent weeks, senior U.S. officials have complained bitterly about the coverage of two Arab television stations, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, which they said is inciting anti-U.S. sentiment in the Arab world.
Cuba rated the number two slot this past year for its and arrest and long-term imprisonment last year of 29 journalists and the ongoing harassment of their families. Conditions of their imprisonment in maximum-security facilities, according to CPJ, amount to "psychological torture" that has spurred several hunger strikes.
Independent reporters who were not imprisoned, CPJ said, also continue to face intimidation by the police and constant warnings that they could be subject to a crackdown.
Zimbabwe's four-year campaign against the non-government press reached a high point last year, according to CPJ with the closure of the Daily News, the country's only independent and most popular daily newspaper.
The country's Media and Information Commission (MIC), all of whose members are appointed by the government, declined to register the newspaper in defiance of two court orders, while in February, the Zimbabwean Supreme Court upheld legislation requiring media outlets and journalists to be licensed by the MIC. Last year, the government deported the last foreign reporter based in Zimbabwe, Andrew Meldrum of Britain's Guardian newspaper.
The Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan, the last of the totalitarian regimes that survived the Soviet Union's collapse, earned a high spot on this year's list as a result of it maintenance of strict control over all media and its systematic harassment of the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), one of the only independent sources of news that penetrates the control of President-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov. Stringers and free-lancers associated with RFE/RL have been detained, threatened with lengthy imprisonment, and in one case last September, was injected multiple times with an unknown substance by domestic security agents.
Bangladesh's fifth position was due to the chronic violence - probably more than any other country in Asia - to which reporters have been subject from a variety of sources. In the past eight years, seven journalists have been murdered, but CPJ has also documented literally dozens of violent attacks against journalists who have exposed corruption or crime by local politicians and businesses. "Despite promises from government officials to apprehend those responsible for assaults, the majority of attacks on journalists go unpunished," according to CPJ.
With 41 journalists currently in prison, China remains the world's leading jailer of journalists, now for the fifth year in a row. While the newly installed government of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao has cultivated a more liberal image, in reality it has escalated an assault on the growing independent media in China with a series of arrests of high-profile editors and closures of several publications.
The crackdown reached its height earlier this year with the arrest of three popular editors from 'Southern Metropolis News' for alleged corruption. The motive, however, appears to have been their hard-hitting reporting on the resurgence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS ).
If China is the world's top journalist jailer, however, Eritrea has held that distinction in Africa the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the authorities rounded up a number of prominent independent reporters and imprisoned them in still-undisclosed locations. A total of 17 journalists are now in secret jails across the country, although no charges have been formally filed against them.
Meanwhile, Haiti has become a growing concern to press watchdogs, particularly since the uprising that eventually led to the exile in late February of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. A Spanish television correspondent was killed during the uprising, several radio stations have been burned down, and threats against journalists are common.
At least three journalists have been killed by Israeli gunfire in the West Bank and Gaza since April 2003, according to the report, which noted that Israeli troops often harass or attack Palestinian journalists and restrict their freedom of movement. Palestinian armed groups have also threatened and assaulted reporters, CPJ said.
The group said Russian President Vladimir Putin 's "managed democracy" is also making independent journalism increasingly difficult. Politicized lawsuits and hostile corporate takeovers by businessmen with close ties to the Kremlin has permitted it to reduce coverage of corruption and human rights abuses in Chechnya.
----
French TV to show images of US helicopter killing Iraqis
Tue May 04 2004
Drudge Report
http://drudgereport.com/flash8.htm
French cable television station Canal Plus on Tuesday will broadcast images, stolen in Iraq, of a US army helicopter killing three Iraqis who do not appear to be posing any threat, one of whom was wounded.
The show "Merci pour l'info" (Thanks for the news) obtained the footage, seen by an AFP correspondent, from a "European working as a subcontractor for the US army" who left Iraq two weeks ago.
The man claims to have hidden the tape, dated December 1, 2003 and filmed at an unidentified location in Iraq, at the US base where he lived and worked.
The three-and-a-half minutes of footage were taken from the helicopter firing at the three individuals, who were considered by the US military to be suspicious.
Conversations between the helicopter pilot, the sharpshooter and their commanding officer -- who had a video link and is giving orders in real time -- can be heard on the tape.
The footage shows how the three men were killed one after the other. After the deaths of his two companions, the third attempted to hide under a truck, but was hit by helicopter gunfire.
"Got the guy right here," says the sharpshooter, as the wounded man is seen crawling on the ground.
"Good. Fire. Hit him," replies the officer.
In March, the rights watchdog group Amnesty International said "scores of civilians have been killed apparently as a result of excessive use of force by US troops, or have been shot dead in disputed circumstances."
The broadcast also comes as the United States confronts mounting anger over the alleged abuse of coalition prisoners in Iraq and the release of photos showing US troops humiliating Iraqi detainees.
Developing...
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From Fallujah to Photos, One Fiasco After Another
by Jim Lobe,
May 4, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2469
When in 1970 Life magazine published photos taken by Senator Tom Harkin, then a lowly congressional aide, of the infamous "tiger cages" in which suspected Viet Cong men, women and even children were kept secretly - and crippled - by the U.S.-run South Vietnamese prison system, it was another nail in the coffin of a conflict on which most of the U.S. public had already soured.
Judging from the outrage expressed here so far, the broadcast and publication of the photos of physical and sexual abuse of prisoners by their US guards in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad are also having a demoralizing effect, but the impact on the broader US "war on terrorism" may be felt more acutely abroad.
The ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Joseph Biden, has described the photos and the abuses depicted in them as "the single most significant undermining act that's occurred in a decade in that region of the world in terms of standing," and called on President George W. Bush to go further than his statement Friday that he felt "deep disgust" for what had taken place.
The New York Times called the disclosures "an enormous victory" for Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist group. "The invasion of Iraq, which has already begun to seem like a bad dream in so many ways, cannot get much more nightmarish than this."
And, after reviewing reaction from various media in the Arab world, Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the University of Michigan mused, "I really wonder whether, with the emergence of these photos, the game isn't over for the Americans in Iraq. Is it realistic, after the bloody siege of Fallujah and the Shiite uprising of early April, and in the wake of these revelations, to think that the US can still win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi Arab public"? he asked.
The photos, which show the taunting by female guards of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners, who are also arranged in explicitly sexual positions, were first broadcast by CBS TV's Sixty Minutes II last Thursday.
They, as well as an internal report by a two-star general about abuses committed by prison guards and military intelligence, were also the subject of a lengthy article in the New Yorker magazine by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
The 53-page report, by Army Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, called for disciplinary action against 10 members of the Army, including a brigadier general, a colonel and two civilian contractors hired by the military to help conduct interrogations, and possible criminal prosecutions against at least six people.
According to Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, the abuses were isolated and committed by "just a handful" of soldiers, and should not be seen as representative of the military's overall performance.
But Taguba's report, which was also obtained by the Los Angeles Times, described the abuses as "systemic and illegal" and suggested that the problem might be far-reaching.
Taguba found that, in apparent violation of army regulations, interrogators from military intelligence asked military police (MPs) guards to "set physical and mental conditions for the favorable interrogation of witnesses."
Those directives resulted in the performance of what Taguba found were "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" committed against detainees, including "punching, slapping and kicking detainees; videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear; (and) forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped."
Those abuses were documented by direct evidence, including photographs, while Taguba also found "credible" evidence of threatening male detainees with rape, sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and "perhaps a broomstick," and threatening detainees with a pistol, among other abuses.
The report also noted the existence of "ghost detainees" - prisoners who were shifted from unit to unit within Abu Ghraib prison so as to be hidden during visits by representatives of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC).
While Taguba's report did not directly address abuses committed by prison authorities outside Iraq, he suggested that similar practices might have been used against other prisoners both in Iraq and elsewhere.
In that connection, his report noted that a team from the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba visited Iraq eight months ago to see how better intelligence could be acquired from detainees held there. The team, which was headed by the Guantanamo commander, recommended that MP guards act as "an enabler for interrogation."
In his report, Taguba opposed the idea, asserting, "there is a strong argument that the intelligence value of detainees held at (Guantanamo) is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq."
More than 60 percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib, according to Taguba, were innocent civilians who had simply been caught up in sweeps and were thus of little or no intelligence value.
The notion that humiliating practices against prisoners might be practiced beyond Abu Ghraib was endorsed by Amnesty International (AI) on Friday. "Our extensive research in Iraq suggests that this is not an isolated incident," the group said in a statement, noting "frequent reports of torture or other ill-treatment by coalition forces during the past year."
Human Rights Watch (HRW) also suggested the behavior of the US soldiers in the photos "suggests they felt they had nothing to hide from their superiors."
The New York-based group also pointed to the Pentagon's failure to date to respond to allegations of serious abuses committed by US forces in Afghanistan, including beatings, severe sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme cold and at least two deaths in custody.
"It's clear that the United States has not taken the issue of prisoner abuse seriously enough," said HRW director, Kenneth Roth.
Myers admitted Sunday that he had asked CBS not to air the photographs the week before the network actually broadcast the program, particularly in light of the tensions in Iraq and the Arab world set off by the bloody US siege of Fallujah. But after Arab media obtained some of the photos, CBS went ahead.
To the consternation of a number of analysts, Myers also admitted Sunday that he had not yet read the Taguba report, despite the seriousness of its findings. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also said through a spokesman that he also had neither received nor been briefed on it.
"The fact that they hadn't read it indicates how low down the totem pole these issues were for them until, of course, it hit the press," Hersh told CNN on Monday. "I really think that's an incredible example of very bad leadership."
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In U.S., Seeking To Limit Damage
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64194-2004May3.html
The Bush administration is struggling to develop a damage-control strategy to counter the mounting global backlash against the United States after revelations that U.S. military and intelligence personnel abused Iraqi prisoners, according to U.S. officials.
The search for a strong response follows a review of international reaction by the State Department's Intelligence and Research Department that revealed devastating fallout and criticism well beyond the Islamic world, from Brazil and Britain to Hong Kong, U.S. officials said.
"It's very, very sobering," said a State Department official briefed on the INR review. He requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "It's like the song by the Who, 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' That's the widespread perception we have to deal with."
U.S. diplomats around the world have sent troubling cables back to Washington including angry commentary in editorials and government condemnation of the abuse, with warnings that the graphic photographs of naked Iraqi prisoners with their gloating jailers could seriously affect U.S. standing and broader foreign policy, U.S. officials said. Many U.S. embassies have asked for guidance on how to respond, they added.
"There are certainly a lot of people who are very disturbed by the pictures and the reports that are coming out," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
The administration has rushed to get top foreign policy officials to condemn the abuses. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, was hastily added to the Sunday talk show lineup, and Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, appeared on morning programs yesterday. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who will assume responsibility for Iraq after the handover of power on June 30, is to appear on CNN's "Larry King Live" tonight.
The effort to produce a convincing explanation of what happened at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison comes as the State Department prepares to release its annual report accounting for how the United States supports human rights and democracy around the world. The report is due out Wednesday.
The administration's position is that the acts were by a handful of offenders violating U.S. policy and that they will be dealt with harshly. After talking with Guatemalan President Oscar Berger Perdomo, Powell called the abuse "despicable acts" and stressed that the United States is in Iraq "to help, not to hurt."
"And so the acts of a few, I trust, will not overwhelm the goodness coming from so many of our soldiers, and I'm sure that the investigations will get to the bottom of this and make sure that any problems that exist in the prison system will be fixed, and fixed promptly," Powell said.
But U.S. officials are concerned because the fallout extends well beyond the Middle East to public opinion among European allies, including countries in the U.S.-led coalition.
The INR survey cited a British commentary calling the treatment at Abu Ghraib "barbaric idiocy" and an Italian commentator warning that the abuse reflected a failure of leadership that will produce hundreds of new recruits for al Qaeda, said the State Department official familiar with the review. Britain and Italy are two of the key European contributors to the U.S.-led coalition.
In Brazil, the INR review noted, a commentary called for global condemnation of the U.S. abuses and describing treatment at Abu Ghraib as "the bastard daughter" of the open-ended detention of suspected al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The international outrage has been so fierce that the current approach of blaming a few individuals is inadequate, U.S. officials say. "We're now realizing that we can't expect the Pentagon to handle all of these criticisms and requests to focus on the public affairs disaster this has caused," said the State Department official, who is involved in the strategy discussions.
"We're frantically working this issue and trying to come up with a strategy," he added. "We need to beat this back. People want not just words but action . . . to deal with this international firestorm."
----
Let them eat cakewalk
May 04, 2004
ZNet InterActive
by Paul Street
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5462
Reflect for a moment on the one hundred and thirty-seven United States troops who died in Iraq during the second April of America's occupation. Their faces are available for your review on the front page of last weekend's USA Today. They are part of the largest one-month American GI body count since the beginning of the war. And the U.S. death toll is mounting at a rapid pace into May.
At this rate, the number of American dead should hit one thousand at some point this spring or summer. The president, who orders mostly working-class youth to an early grave - the April victims' median age was 23 - in an illegal, immoral, and deceptively sold war, has been unavailable for the growing number of GI funerals. He's been too busy, among other things, with fundraisers, feeding the overstuffed coffers of the largest campaign finance war-chest in the record of modern plutocracy.
Imagine yourself as "Abdul M," an Iraqi whose entire family, including a daughter and a wife, was killed when American "defense" planners blew-up 18 civilians in a house they thought sheltered Saddam Hussein in Al Mansur. "I dug them out," Abdul told "Frontline" last year, "with my own bare hands. I carried them out with my own bare hands. I buried them with my own bare hands."
There are many stories like Abdul's in "liberated" Iraq. Abdul's deceased loved ones are two among many thousands of Iraqis who have been killed in the process of being "liberated" by the United States of America. The exact number of those victims is unclear - the occupation authorities see no need to count Iraqi dead - but estimates range well into the many tens of thousands. This is before the depleted uranium used by the benevolent American military takes its full, long, and terrible toll.
Contemplate the untold number of Iraqis who have been tortured and humiliated by U.S. military personnel in the course of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The recent revelations of torment and abuse by U.S. troops in Saddam's leading prison are surely just the tip of the iceberg.
Think about the strategic imperial disaster - as well as the moral atrocity - that the occupation has become. Reflecting on recent U.S. torture revelations, the New York Times editorial board recently opined that "the invasion of Iraq, which has already begun to seem like a bad dream in so many ways, cannot get much more nightmarish."
Think about the anti-American hatred that is understandably seething across the Arab world and the recruiting bonanza that the occupation is for Islamic terror groups and the likelihood of newer and bigger terror attacks on Americans at home and abroad.
And think about the lack of global sympathy that Americans will receive after such attacks take place, thanks to the remarkable extent to which the occupation has furthered global alienation from the U.S., the world's rogue superpower.
Recall the large number of persons and individuals (very possibly including you if you are reading this on ZNet) and organizations who vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq. The opponents included a fair number of establishment personalities and groups, who worried that an invasion of Iraq would be a catastrophe for American global power.
Now join me on a trip into the private lives of some key war masters. Turn with me to pages 409-411 of Bob Woodward's recently published book Plan of Attack (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004), which claims to give "the definitive account of how and why George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq."
Here we learn about a glorious dinner party that took place in the residence of super hawk Vice President and former Haliburton chief Dick Cheney on the Sunday night of April 13, 2003. The guests included Kenneth Aldeman, a friend of Cheney and a former assistant to Donald Rumsfeld at the U.S. Defense Department during the 1970s. Also attending were Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, who lead the charge for war, and Cheney's war-hawk chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Three days before the dinner, Adelman published a Washington Post op-ed that delighted Cheney. Titled "Cakewalk Revisited," Adelman's opinion piece ripped those who had predicted disaster in Iraq. Adleman claimed that the invasion was a "cakewalk," as he himself predicted it would be in February 2002. When Cheney graciously invited him to dine as a way of saying thank you, Adelman cut short a Parisian vacation to attend.
"When Adelman walked into the vice president's residence that Sunday night," Woodward writes, "he was so happy he broke into tears. He hugged Cheney for the first time in the 30 years he had known him." During dinner, "Wolfowitz embarked on a long review of the 1991 Gulf War." That must have been entertaining.
Cheney said "he had not realized that a trauma that time had been for the Iraqis." Well, yes, more than a hundred thousand deaths leaves a little distress in its wake.
Adelman brought the discussion back to the present. "Hold it! Hold it!," he interjected (by Woodward's account). Let's talk about THIS Gulf War. It's so wonderful to celebrate." "He said," Woodward writes, "he was just an outside adviser, someone who turned up the pressure in the public forum. 'It's so easy for me to write an article saying do this. It's much tougher for Paul to advocate it. Paul and Scooter, you give advice and the president listens. Dick, your advice is the most important, the Cadillac. It's much more serious for you to advocate it. But in the end, all of what we said was still only advice. The president is the one who has to decide. I have been blown away by how determined he is.' The war has been awesome, Adleman said. 'So I just want to make a toast, without getting to cheesy. To the president of the United States.' they all raised their glasses, Hear!, Hear!. Adelamn said he had worried to death as time went on that there would be no war." (Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 409-410).
Later in the festive gathering, "Cheney said he had just had lunch with the president. 'Democracy is the Middle East is just a big deal for him. It's what's driving him.'" Then Adelman raised a delicate point. "Let me ask, before this turns into a love fest [too late, P.S.). I was just stunned that we have not found weapons of mass destruction." "'We'll find them,' Wolfowitz said. 'It's only been four days really,' Cheney said. 'We'll find them.'" (Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 409-411)
How many people have died in Iraq because of the U.S. invasion since that day when Cheney, Wolfowitz, Adelman, and Libby raised their glasses in a heavily fortified mansion of unimaginable privilege, located within a short cab-ride's distance from some of the worst scenes of urban misery in the industrialized world? The exact count is unknown, for the reasons mentioned above, but it is certainly a large and ugly number - one that makes you wonder about the soul of a man who was "worried to death" that "there would be no war." Imagine that as a concern that keeps you up at night!
Let them choke on their "cakewalk" now. Here's to the demise of George W. Bush, his wicked cabal, and his evil empire!
Paul Street (pstreet99@sbcglobal.net) is an urban social policy researcher in Chicago, Illinois. His writings have appeared in In These Times, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, Dissent (USA), Dissent (Australia), Black Commentator, Dissident Voice, The Journal of Social History, and many other outlets.
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CBS Delayed Abuse Report At the Request Of Gen. Myers
Associated Press
Tuesday, May 4, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64325-2004May3.html
NEW YORK, May 3 -- CBS News delayed for two weeks airing a report about U.S. soldiers' alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners, following a personal request from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Gen. Richard B. Myers called CBS anchor Dan Rather eight days before the report was to air, asking for extra time, said Jeff Fager, executive producer of "60 Minutes II."
Myers cited the safety of Americans held hostage and tension surrounding the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Fager said, adding that he held off as long as he believed possible given it was a competitive story.
With the New Yorker magazine preparing to run a detailed report on the alleged abuses, CBS broadcast its report last Wednesday, including images taken last year allegedly showing Iraqis stripped naked, hooded and being tormented by U.S. captors at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
Fager said he felt "terrible" being asked to delay the broadcast.
"News is a delicate thing," he said. "It's hard to just make those kinds of decisions. It's not natural for us; the natural thing is to put it on the air. But the circumstances were quite unusual, and I think you have to consider that."
Rather revealed the two-week delay in a postscript to viewers at the end of Wednesday's broadcast.
Fager said he believed the story was better because of the delay; CBS was able to interview Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt about the alleged incidents because the network waited.
Myers, speaking on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, confirmed that he asked CBS for the delay. "You can't keep this out of the news, clearly," he said. "But I thought it would be particularly inflammatory at the time."
-------- us politics
Kerry Vows to Protect Israel in PeaceMoves
U.S. Would Not Disengage, He Says
By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64018-2004May3.html
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) told a prominent Jewish group yesterday that the "security of Israel is paramount" and pledged that as president he would never push Israel into peace agreements against its interest. At the same time, he criticized President Bush for too often "disengaging" from the effort to forge a U.S.-Palestinian settlement.
On a day when Israeli politics were especially unsettled, Kerry's noontime remarks to leaders of the Anti-Defamation League seemed aimed at treading a middle path. While repeating some of his standard criticisms of Bush's foreign policy, he said the emphatic U.S. support for Israel -- which has won Bush a measure of support from what is historically one of the Democratic Party's most reliable voting blocs -- would be no less steadfast in a Kerry administration.
"As president, my promise to the people of Israel is this: I will never force Israel to make concessions that cost or compromise any of Israel's security," Kerry said. "The security of Israel is paramount. . . . We will also never expect Israel to negotiate peace without a credible [Palestinian] partner. And it is up to the United States in my judgment to do a better job of helping the Arab world to help that partner to evolve and to develop."
Kerry made only a quick nod to the news of the moment: the vote in a Likud Party referendum Sunday to reject Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to unilaterally withdraw troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip. Bush and Kerry had embraced Sharon's plan at the same time they endorsed several concessions to Israel about the terms of an eventual settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The snubbing of Sharon by his party was a setback for Bush, and leaves the path to a settlement more uncertain than ever.
"Obviously, yesterday's vote raises questions about where things are going," Kerry said. "Israel has long wanted to be out of Gaza. . . . And whatever the future of this particular plan, if elected president I will guarantee you that I will work continuously, never disengaging as this administration did for so long, in a way that will advance that cause."
Rather than dwell on the uncertainties of the present, Kerry devoted much of his talk to personal reminiscence. In animated tones, he spoke of his first visit to Israel, which he said was under the auspices of the ADL and the late Leonard P. "Lenny" Zakim, longtime director of the group's New England chapter. Kerry said he went to the Golan Heights, visited the Sea of Galilee and "actually stood on the Mount of the Beatitudes and read the Sermon on the Mount to those gathered with me."
The highlight, though, came when Kerry, a licensed pilot, persuaded the Israeli Air Force to let him see the country from above, by taking the controls of a training jet.
"So I went up to about 12,000 feet and proceeded to go in and do a loop," Kerry recounted, to appreciative laughter from the audience. "And I want you to know, ladies and gentlemen, that to be able to come out upside down and look down and catch the horizon in back of me, and see all the way down into the Sinai, to the old base that had been given up, all the way across into Jordan, all the way out into the Gulf of Aqaba, and to see Israel beneath me . . . and to see it all upside down was the perfect way to see the Middle East and Israel."
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Group Says Kerry Released Edited Version of Military Records
By Brian Faler
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63971-2004May3.html
A group of Vietnam veterans will release a letter today criticizing Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry's efforts to run as a "war hero" while releasing "only carefully screened portions" of his military records.
"You now seek to clad yourself in the very medals that you disdainfully threw away in the early years of your political career," the group wrote. "In the process, we believe you continue a deception as to your own conduct through such tactics as the disclosure of only carefully screened portions of your military records."
The group consists of veterans who, like Kerry, served on "swift boats" during the conflict. The letter will be released at an event sponsored by the Dallas-based Spaeth Communications Inc. -- whose founder, Merrie Spaeth, is mentioned on the Bush White House Web site as a "prominent" alumni of its fellows program.
The veterans organization demanded that Kerry authorize the Navy to release his complete military records. Kerry's campaign recently released a large number of the Democrat's military and health records that offered glowing assessments of his tour of duty. The Massachusetts senator spent 4 1/2 months in Vietnam, during which he received Bronze and Silver stars, along with three Purple Hearts.
Michael Meehan, a Kerry campaign spokesman, dismissed the group's criticism, noting that Kerry had received some of the Navy's highest commendations for his service in Vietnam. He added that Kerry has released most of his records and more than has President Bush.
Those Who Couldn't Beat Him Join Him
Some of the people who spent the fall and winter working to defeat Kerry in the Democratic primaries are now joining his bid for president.
Kerry's campaign in recent days has hired a dozen operatives who were senior advisers to former rivals Howard Dean, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman and John Edwards, and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark.
Team Kerry, in particular, has recruited heavily from the defunct Edwards campaign. The new Kerry hires include Miles Lackey, Edwards's chief of staff, who will serve as a deputy campaign manager in charge of Kerry's policy-development team and speechwriting. Edwards's former policy director, Robert Gordon, will manage Kerry's domestic policy team. Also from Edwards: press secretary Jennifer Palmieri, who will do that job for Kerry in Ohio. Another ex-Edwardian, communications specialist David Ginsburg, was just hired by Kerry.
In addition, Karen Hicks, who ran Dean's state operation in New Hampshire, was added as Kerry's deputy national field director.
Kerry spokesman Meehan said it was "not unusual" for a candidate to hire people who had worked to defeat him a few months earlier.
But people outside the campaign said they could not recall a recent presidential nominee, Democrat or Republican, who had hired so many who worked for his rivals.
Scanlon Tops List of Biggest Donors
The Republican Governors Association reports that its largest donor in 2002 was Capitol Campaign Strategies, a public relations firm run by Michael Scanlon, a former spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). Scanlon and Jack Abramoff, a powerhouse lobbyist close to DeLay, have between them earned more than $45 million representing casino-rich Indian tribes over the past three years, fee arrangements that have drawn scrutiny.
Staff writers Paul Farhi and Susan Schmidt contributed to this report.
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-------- environment
Rhodia Fined $18 Million for Fire-Prone Hazwaste
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
May 4, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-04-093.asp
Rhodia Inc. has been fined $18 million as a result of its guilty pleas to two knowing violations of the Resource, Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) at Rhodia's elemental phosphorus manufacturing plant in Silver Bow County, Montana. The criminal fine is the largest ever paid for criminal environmental violations in the District of Montana, and one of the largest ever paid for prosecution of hazardous waste crimes in the country.
In the District Court of Montana on Thursday, Chief Judge Donald Molloy also sentenced Rhodia to perform 1,000 hours of community service.
On January 14, 2004, Rhodia pled guilty to two felonies committed in violation of RCRA. Pursuant to a plea agreement approved by the court, Rhodia will also be required to clean up the ite pursuant to orders by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under RCRA.
The Silver Bow Plant manufactured elemental phosphorus from at least 1986 until 1996. Elemental phosphorus was used by other manufacturers to produce fertilizer, pesticides and food grade phosphoric acid.
Elemental phosphorus waste is classed as a hazardous waste under RCRA, because it can spontaneously ignite when exposed to air, posing a threat to the environment and public health.
In 1996, the Silver Bow Plant was put into mothball status, and was closed in 1997.
Rhodia has admitted that from January 1999 until August 2000, after the Silver Bow Plant was closed, it illegally stored elemental phosphorus sludge, a hazardous waste, at the site in a large concrete tank known as a 100 foot clarifier.
Rhodia also has admitted that it illegally stored carbon brick and precipitator dust contaminated with elemental phosphorus waste, a hazardous waste. The carbon brick and precipitator dust had been discarded from a furnace at the site.
The illegal activity was discovered in May 2000, when the EPA and Montana Department of Environmental Quality executed a search warrant at the Silver Bow Plant.
"The successful conclusion of this case is another clear indication of our commitment to protect the environment of the state through investigation and prosecution of environmental crimes," said Bill Mercer, U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana. "Deterrence of this type of crime is best achieved through an active enforcement effort."
Under the plea agreement approved by the court, Rhodia will be required to perform remediation of all hazardous wastes at the Silver Bow Plant, subject to approval by the EPA. Rhodia will be subject to five years' probation, and the period of probation could be extended should remediation at the Silver Bow Plant take longer than five years.
Publicly traded on the Paris and New York stock exchanges, Rhodia is one of the world's largest manufacturers of specialty chemicals, providing products and services to the consumer care, food, industrial care, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, automotive, electronics and fibers markets. Rhodia generated net sales of €5.5 billion in 2003 and employs approximately 23,000 people worldwide.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Peace Between Peoples Update: Najaf, Friday 4-30-04
Dear Friends,
This small group of American peacemakers went to Najaf last week and met with both sides. Perhaps their presence contributed to the uneasy peace that is starting to break down there. Following is a good on-the-ground description of what it's like.
In the name of the Prince of Peace, Carol Wolman
Peace Between Peoples Update: Najaf, Friday 4-30-04
(written in Amman, 5-4-04, 12:00 am)
Dear friends,
As you already know, our delegation has left Iraq. Some members have already returned to the U.S., and some of us will be spending a few more days in the Middle East before returning home. However, we will be continuing to send information about the trip in the coming days; the updates we have sent are but a tiny glimpse of all we have seen and heard in our time here. Whatever we send seems incomplete and fragmentary, but we are trying to share as much as possible.
In this update, we are going to share some of our last day in Najaf, and our trip back to Amman through Kerbala. We have developed some of our film and have scanned a few pictures to attach.
There are four parts to the story of our last day in Najaf: a final visit to the US military base; a visit to Kufa, a stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army; our drive from Najaf to Kerbala, and the discussion along the way; and a talk in Kerbala with Dr. Sharhistani.
The entire day was rushed, as we had to get everything done and still get to Kerbala before dark. No one wants to be driving around here in the dark! We did get to Kerbala just before dark, but were late for our appointment with Dr. Sharhistani, so we re-scheduled for later. There was no time to get to an internet to report. The next day, Saturday, we left Kerbala early, drove all day, and arrived in Amman at 2:30 am. The time since then has flown past, and this report is overdue.
Our second visit to the US base
One of our prime motivations for visiting the base again was to talk with Dennis Gray, an Associated Press reporter who, we were surprised to discover, was "embedded" inside the base. We had gotten his e-mail address and asked him to meet us at the gate. It took a while, but we did finally have the pleasure of meeting him. He seemed interested in our project, asked a lot of questions, and took notes while we answered. I don't know if he has filed a story on us, or if it has made it past the editors. But we enjoyed talking with him, and were impressed to hear of his experiences in Cambodia and southeast Asia in the horrifying days of Pol Pot. Our interactions were sincere and mutually respectful. We left feeling glad that we had made the effort to contact him.
One thing did seem odd to us, though. Here was the only US reporter we had met in our entire trip, reporting on the situation in Najaf. from inside the barbed wire and defensive walls of the US camp. He had never walked freely down the streets of Najaf, as we did every day, and see the people going about their daily routine. He had never gone to the internet café to file a report, or stopped in at a neighborhood store for a bag of chips or some cookies. What kind of view did he have of Najaf? What can he tell the American people about what is really happening in Najaf?
Another plus to our visit at the base was the opportunity for more interaction with US soldiers. On our first visit, we had only spoken with one US soldier, but this time we got to talk with several. All of them were friendly, and like the first one, committed to doing their duty and serving their country. We didn't fault them for that, but tried to explain our point of view, and why we were there. I broke the ice with one of them by asking if I could have a closer look at the .50 caliber machine gun he was manning. I told him, truthfully, that I had grown up on a diet of war stories and movies, playing with toy guns until I was old enough to have real ones, and playing war with my seven brothers. I told him how they laughed at me now that I was a member of Peace Action, since all through my youth I had been the "military-minded" one in the family.
We began to talk, first about weapons and military history, then he told me how he was a career soldier, and how both his father and grandfather had been soldiers. From there we began to talk of family in general, about how he was hoping to be home for his daughter's upcoming birthday in August. He reminisced about how his buddies ribbed him for coaching her t-ball team, and how he would visit her classroom at school. Very candid, and very human thoughts and feelings, coming from a soldier standing at his post in a strange land, looking out over the sandbagged machine gun toward a road full of unknown people going about their business. Any one of them might be an enemy, so here he was, dug in to defend himself against the very people he was fighting to free. What is wrong with this picture?
He would not be drawn into political discussions, simply saying that he was a soldier, and would keep his political opinions to himself. We were, of course, very curious as to the feelings of the troops themselves, and asked how they felt about being there. They all said they had a job to do, that they would do what they were ordered to do, as any good soldier would. But between the lines, it seemed clear to us that all of them would rather be home with their families. Their unit had, after all, been in Iraq for over a year already, with no end in sight.
One soldier came right out with it, in an eloquently simple response to the question "What message do you have for the folks back home?" He simply said, "Help!" What we think he meant by that was that, as a soldier, he knew that the decision was out of his hands. If his orders said "Fight," he would fight. If his orders said, "Go home," he would go home. He knew that he couldn't change the orders; only a political decision could do that. And that political decision had to come from the folks back home. When we spoke to the soldiers of the decay of democracy in the US, of how elections are turning into auctions, with the offices going to the highest bidder, there was no argument, and even, in some cases, agreement. It comes back to us, then. You, dear readers, who are US citizens; us, the members of the Peace Between Peoples Delegation; and every American who believes in freedom, equality, and humanity.
We did our best to make it clear that we were not here as anti-Americans; that we were not calling them murderers or monsters. But we believed, and made no secret of it, that the war in Iraq was wrong from the start. While most Iraqis had welcomed the invasion to get rid of Saddam Hussein, they were now hoping the US would leave. Peter quoted the most recent poll of Iraqis, which showed less than 20% wanted the US to stay, while 70% wanted the US to leave. And we talked about that fact that, in modern warfare, with it's marvelously destructive weapons that kill from a distance (artillery, air strikes, cluster bombs, etc.), 70% or more of the casualties will be civilians. As we talked, I looked out again from the sandbagged bunker toward the road. I thought about the contradiction of a liberating army, defending itself from those it had come to liberate. And of the irrationality of how, when the fighting started, the brunt of the suffering would be borne by the unarmed citizens of the town, who drove daily through the sights of the cannons and machine guns that faced outward from the camp.
Our visit to Kufa, held by the Madhi army
We had decided to go to Kufa to attend the Friday prayer services held by the supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr. He is the person referred to in the US media as the "radical cleric" who is defying the US and calling for them to leave. The US, in turn, call him a rebel and a criminal, and demand that he surrender and disband his forces. Estimates of his military strength (as well as of his character and intentions) vary. One person told us that he had 100,000 followers nationwide, which is still a small number in a country of 24 million people. But in Kufa, we glimpsed his strength.
Because we had waited quite a while to meet Dennis at the US camp, we missed the prayer meeting. Friday, not Sunday, is the holy day around here. We drove into Kufa in a taxi that we caught on the road outside the US base. It took only a few minutes to go from the US armed camp to the armed camp of the Madhi army. And there, too, we entered past machine guns and rocket launchers. We weren't sure where exactly we were going, so we had the driver drop us off in a likely looking spot, between a mosque and a marketplace. There were a lot of parked cars, and taxis and busses were going back and forth. It looked to be the Grand Central Station of Kufa.
It didn't take long to spot a number of men with AK-47's strolling casually around, and then, one by one, we began to see the pointy-nosed RPG's (Rocket Propelled Grenade, a modern descendant of WWII's bazooka), the "heavy artillery" of the Mahdi army. There was a relaxed atmosphere, and I got the impression things were winding down for the day, now that the prayer meeting was over. The armed men weren't in formation, or in defensive positions; they were just walking around in various directions. We saw foxholes dug in front of the mosque, ready to defend it against any attack. And after a while, a truckload of armed men drove into town and stopped across the street. They were chanting some kind of cheer, and punctuating it with raised fist gestures. They seemed to be in good spirits, as they clambered down from the truck and went into a building. Later, as we cowered under a bus stop to escape a sudden drenching rain, a group of young men around us responded to a crack of lightning with what may have been the same chant. They were smiling, and again seemed to be feeling confident.
They were also mostly young men. We had heard that al-Sadr's appeal is mostly to the young, the poor, and the dispossessed. Kufa in general bore out that statement. The town was poor, and wasted in a way that gave it a bleak and somewhat depressing air. It seemed hard to believe that these poorly armed youths were holding back the US army, with all of its tremendous firepower. Just a few days ago, in the fighting that we heard from our hotel, scores of them had been killed by US airpower on the edge of town. AK-47's and RPG's are no match for F-15's and Spectre gunships. It was a David and Goliath confrontation, in a way, but Goliath was holding back. Perhaps the greatest force protecting the Mahdi was the mosque itself, and the US fear of provoking the wrath of millions of Shiites by attacking them there.
We had two interactions with the people there. First of all, we were ignored on arrival. We decided to go find a cup of tea, make ourselves visible, and wait to be approached. We didn't make it very far into the market before someone came inquiring, and asked to see our passports. "Why are you here?" The eternal question. We answered that we had come for the prayer service, but had been held up, and so arrived late. When we told them that we were in Iraq to oppose any US attack on Najaf, they seemed to find it hard to believe, but when we mentioned that we had met in Najaf with two of al-Sadr's top people, faces began to light up. We were led over toward the mosque, but didn't quite make it.
As we crossed the street (it was starting to rain), a bearded man in a cleric's garb took an interest, and asked about us. He was very interested in the fact that we were there in opposition to the US occupation, and when he saw our banner in Arabic, he was delighted. He asked a young man who was with him to take a picture of him with it, and we launched into a photo session. I was worried about the cameras, as the rain was getting heavier, but people started crowding around to get in the picture. We snapped a few too, and then the rain came down and everyone ran for cover. We headed for the bus stop mentioned above, and joined a crowd of soaked but cheerful men. The rain was punctuated by thunder and lightning, but didn't last long. People drifted away and left us standing there, so we headed back to the market once again, looking for a bite to eat. It turned out that the bearded man was a leader of the Mahdi army from Sadr City in Baghdad, and that the young man with him was a reporter from Time Magazine. Small world!
We walked through the market place, and finally found a falafel stand, where we had some great falafel sandwiches. People were friendly, and we handed out what we called our "magic sheets" which explained in Arabic that we were US citizens who had come to Iraq to oppose any attack on the holy city of Najaf. We had prepared this sheet before entering Iraq as a way of introducing ourselves and our mission, and they were received well almost universally all through our trip. Kufa was no exception; many people came up asking for the sheets, and we gave out all we had. After our falafel, we had tea from a neighboring stand. It was all quite sociable, and when we asked if we could take some pictures, suddenly everyone wanted to be in the picture!
The visit ended on a less friendly note. Suddenly, there was an angry looking young man there, demanding that we come with him. We followed him to the mosque, where again we went through the "Why are you here?" routine, and we explained, yet again, our mission. When the message finally got through, the angry young man simmered down, but it became clear that they wanted us out of there, if only for our own protection. (Everyone we met wanted to protect us! No wonder we got in and out safely!) They even got us a cab for the ride back to Najaf.
The drive to Kerbala
(I realize this is getting a bit long-winded, and it's late, so I'm going to be painfully brief from here on.)
We were fortunate to have a driver who spoke excellent English and was well educated, and we took advantage, asking him numerous questions, which he answered thoughtfully. Most were the same ones we had asked everyone, about how they felt about the US occupation, what would happen if the US just left, and so on. I won't go into it all now, but want to share a couple of remarkable things he said, and that we had not heard before.
He raised the idea (which someone else had brought up to him) that a major reason for the US invasion of Iraq was to create a theater of war that would draw anti-American elements from all over the Middle East. They could come to Iraq and fight the Americans! It would be a magnet for Al-Quaeda, for every America-hating mujahadin. And that would keep them busy, and lessen the possibility that they would take the trouble to go all the way to the USA to attack Americans. A novel idea, eh?
He supported this interpretation by pointing out that, for a year since the occupation of Iraq by the US, there has been no serious attempt at guarding the borders of the country. Trucks, busses, and cars enter Iraq with little or no searching; border security is non-existent. He told of coming in from Syria in a bus loaded with people and baggage galore, and of not being searched at all. That bus, he pointed out, could have been loaded with weapons and explosives or "freedom fighters" from other countries. Our own experience was the same; we were not searched at all when we entered Iraq, or when we left. Isn't it strange that, in a country where the US is willing. in the name of establishing security. to detain and hold without charges thousands of people (and torture and sexually abuse them, as recent reports indicate), to declare open war on cities such as Fallujah and call in air strikes on populated areas, they would leave the borders of the country unguarded?
Our talk with Dr. Sharhistani in Kerbala
Again, I will be painfully brief, but must include the essence of our conversation. First, though, let me say that Dr. Sharhistani is very knowledgeable about what is happening in Iraq. He has been instrumental in the negotiations between the UN and al-Sistani (whose office we visited upon our arrival in Najaf) seeking a transition from the current Governing Council to a democratically elected Iraqi government. We were very fortunate to be able to speak with him. He is a remarkable gentleman who not only took the time from his busy schedule to meet with us, but went out of his way to help us arrange details of our travel arrangements!
The political crisis in Iraq is more serious than the military crisis, and is feeding the flames. It is becoming clear to the Iraqi people that the US is not interested in real democracy, but merely a façade of democracy that will legitimize the continued control of Iraq by the US. The interim constitution recently adopted, with much arm-twisting, by the Governing Council, makes the reality of US intentions clear. Even when elections are held, supposedly in January of 2005, the representatives elected by the Iraqi people will have less power than the Governing Council chosen by the US occupation authorities. Any law or measure they pass will have to be approved by 75% of the US-appointed body, PLUS be approved by all three of the executive officers (the President and two Vice-Presidents). In a pinch, the US-appointed Council could call for the dissolution of the elected congress, and force new elections! This is the democracy the US is bringing the people of Iraq, and forcing it down their throats with the barrel of a gun!
Some parting thoughts.
Today we visited a Roman amphitheatre here in Amman. On the hill above it to the north, we could see the ruins of the Citadel, the ancient site of generations of rulers. We learned from a guide some of the history of the area, of civilization beginning here almost 10,000 years ago, of waves of conquest, of trade routes, of empires and armies struggling to possess and control these lands. And it's still going on today.
(What timing! Again, as I write, the call to prayer sounds in the morning darkness from the mosque up the hill.)
There is a lesson here, waiting to be learned. Are we ready, after thousands of years of strife and war, to put aside our weapons and empires and delusions of grandeur (and power and wealth), and be guided by a spiritual power? Can we begin to realize that the "war in Iraq" started thousands of years ago, not in 2003 or 1990, or even 1919? And that the "war in Iraq" is not only in Iraq, but everywhere that men and women see each other as enemies, and not as human beings.
Mario
All of the expenses for our delegation have come from private pockets, and principally from Peter and Meg Lumsdaine. Donations can be sent to them at:
Peter Lumsdaine PO Box 7061 Santa Cruz, CA 95061
(Note: We understand, and hope that you do also, that these reports and letters are being written in haste, and drawn largely from memory, in order to share our impressions and the sense of urgency we feel. Please do not mistake them for pronouncements, condemnations, or revelations. They are a mosaic, from which many pieces are missing. We invite you all to take part in their completion, sharing with us the missing pieces that you may have at hand.)
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Republicans Lure the Arts to Politics and Protests
May 4, 2004
By JULIE SALAMON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/arts/04PROT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Could it be that President Bush has made politics cool again for the arts in New York? Nothing in recent memory has stirred the far corners of this world like the prospect of the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 and of the crowds that will visit to record the event and to protest or support it.
This occasion has made unlikely partners of scruff and style, uniting old-time protesters, counterculture artists and mainstream producers as well as the "Sex and the City" crowd from the world of design, galleries, public relations and sleek magazines.
"Right now what's sexier than politics?" asked Heather Grayson, the actress and playwright who attracted strong notices for her solo show "After the Storm," based on her experiences as a soldier in the first American war against Saddam Hussein.
Dozens of arts organizations are making plans for at least four nights of political theater during the convention at East Village clubs, established theaters like Symphony Space, public libraries and of course the streets. The Internet is throbbing with information and strategies exchanged by people often identifying themselves by first name only or by acronym (FEVA, UFJP, THAW, WW3, NoRNC).
They want to make it clear that this is not the same old same old. In a recent e-mail discussion of who should speak for the various groups, Alexandra Tager, who rents art to the film industry when she is not organizing protests, said, "This presents a P.R. challenge to those of us who hope to tell our story to the world and to debunk the myths and stereotypes of violent-uninformed-crunchy-freaky-scattered protesters bent on wreaking havoc for the heck of it."
At the office of Downtown for Democracy, a political action committee, Erik Stowers, a founder, said, "Usually when reporters hear artists are doing something, they go, `Ha ha ha, they're going to dance around a building.' "
That is not what Christopher Wangro, a special events impresario, has in mind. "The Bush administration's ideas and policies have really ignited people," he said, adding that the convention "gives us a chance to respond."
Mr. Wangro has a long list of noncrunchy, nonfreaky credentials. Now a private operator, he is the former director of special events for New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation and has produced big public events like a parade of elephants for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey and Pope John Paul II's appearance in Central Park.
He began planning for the Republican convention about a year ago. He and some colleagues arranged a series of discussions with focus groups, advertising and marketing executives, and strategists who had worked in the Clinton and first Bush administrations. From those discussions came the Imagine Festival of Arts, Issues & Ideas, which is planning at least 50 events.
Fund-raising began in March, when Agnes Gund, emerita president of the Museum of Modern Art, held a cocktail party at her home on the Upper East Side. Details of the festival are to be announced on May 24.
"We're not partisan," said Boo Froebel, an Imagine Festival organizer, who is a curator for the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria on 42nd Street. Then she added: "But we don't want people to neuter themselves of political opinion. This is not the `boring' festival."
At Symphony Space the Thalia Follies, a cabaret show of political satire, will run every night of the convention. To help write the sketches, E. L. Doctorow, Roy Blount Jr. and Mary Gordon have already been recruited. After the show the audience can stay to watch television coverage of the convention on a big screen onstage. "You can get wine and beer and even popcorn to throw at the screen in congenial company," said Isaiah Sheffer, artistic director of Symphony Space, who organized similar shows during the Vietnam War and Watergate but not since.
The Asia Society will present Forgiveness Project, a multidisciplinary theater work based on a classic Chinese opera about a warrior's revenge, and there will be a staged reading of Sophocles' "Electra" at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library. Dance Theater Workshop will offer a Teen Poetry Slam with Danny Simmons (co-founder of Def Poetry Jam), and Joe's Pub will have something, not yet decided. The Bowery Poetry Club will remain open 24 hours a day with a roster of politically themed theater, music and poetry.
Deanna Zandt, creative administrator for the Poetry Club in the East Village, said her idea was "to give people a place to come together to have a good time, to burn off some energy, to have a safe outlet for their outrage at this."
Which doesn't mean there will not be plenty of street theater, perhaps still the easiest way to attract attention. "There's going to be 15,000 journalists of various kinds in New York City for those four days, and they're going to be bored a lot of the time," said Andrew Boyd, whose Billionaires for Bush troupe made its debut at the Republican convention in Philadelphia in 2000. "Our experience in Philadelphia was that the journalists were looking outside the convention for the pulse of the street, and in many cases it was more interesting to the public and the journalists than the proceedings at the convention."
The Billionaires pretend to be rich people - sort of updates on Thurston Howell III, the millionaire on "Gilligan's Island," carrying martinis and golf clubs - and mock Bush administration policies by pretending to praise them. (Saying things like "We're very happy George Bush is in town and happy 40 million people in this country don't have health care.")
Convention planners appear to be unperturbed. "We are confident that the N.Y.P.D. and the U.S. Secret Service will create a security plan that will allow the Republican National Convention to conduct its business in a safe and orderly manner, while ensuring that other individuals are allowed to voice their opinions at that time in New York City," Rori Patrise Smith, a convention spokeswoman, said.
During the convention in Philadelphia, Mr. Stowers of Downtown for Democracy handcuffed himself to other protesters in a human chain intended to block the route between the convention and delegates' hotels. Instead, Mr. Stowers and others in the chain were arrested and spent nine days in jail.
"I think street theater is great, but I decided after that if your intention is to defeat Bush and foil the Republican attempt to hijack our country, the most direct method is to directly engage in the political system," Mr. Stowers said. So he organized Downtown for Democracy, or D4D, registered it as a political action committee and has been raising money through events intended to attract cultural types more inclined to network and party than to protest. In March a reading featuring Jonathan Franzen, Paul Auster, Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Cunningham at Cooper Union raised $75,000; an art auction earlier netted $130,000
The money so far has gone to five Congressional candidates and to Moving America Forward, a political action committee in New Mexico, a swing state. "People can't quite grasp what we're doing at first," said Mr. Stowers, 25, who studied archaeology and anthropology at Brown University, dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Princeton and then began work on a novel.
Instead, Mr. Stowers is using e-mail. So much that he was wearing braces to protect inflamed nerves in his hands during an interview in his office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as he worked to promote D4D's next event: a design auction, promoted on the organization's Web site as featuring furniture, lighting, flooring and tabletops, both new and vintage, by American designers.
New and vintage could also describe what is happening. While a smattering of plays, visual art and music emerged in reaction to United States involvement in Iraq, many people in the arts became disengaged from politics once the war began.
"There had been a lot of anxiety about taking a stand or being too political," said Valentina Fratti, a theater director and organizer for Theaters Against War, or THAW, a group of 200 theaters that formed about 18 months ago to organize protests against the invasion of Iraq. "That climate has completely changed. Now everyone seems to have a united goal, and the details of the politics don't matter. People want to get rid of Bush."
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