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NUCLEAR
Elite Guard to Cover U.S. Nuclear Sites
Top Officials Hold Fake Degrees
The Truth About Depleted Uranium Weaponry:
Talks on North Korean Nuclear Program to Resume in Beijing
Battlefield space: out of the silo
U.S.-Russia Plutonium Disposal Project Languishing
Nuclear Waste Reclassification Plan Approved by Senate Panel
MILITARY
Aid workers feel fatal chill of new Cold War
Powerful Afghan Governor Slams Disarmament Plan
Sudanese Fighters Raid Chad Village
Blair Pressed to Answer Red Cross Report
Iraq News Unnerves Tech Firms
Computer Systems Spur Growth for Contractors
Contracts Awarded
Federal Contracts Realistic Battles Without the Bullets
Europe's Chief on Terrorism to Reassure U.S. on Efforts
Two out of five Lithuanians want to keep troops in Iraq
Bremer knew, minister claims
Celebrations break out in Fallujah
Iraq Cleric to Widen War
Shiite Cleric's Militia Seizes Control of Baghdad Slum
Analysts Say Iraqi Agencies Unlikely to Follow U.S. Rules
U.S. Destroys Cleric's Baghdad Office
Sharon Tells Cabinet He Will Present New Withdrawal Plan
Prison Abuse: An MI Officer Sounds Off
Red Cross Report Describes Abuse in Iraq
Contractor: Army Happy With Interrogators
Military contractors -- Above the law?
Army to boost prison guard force amid abuse scandal in Iraq
Top brass 'picked man who ordered torture'
Most Iraqi detainees 'arrested by mistake'
Red Cross: Iraq Abuse Widespread, Routine
Soldier: Foul photos of inmates were prized
THE ROAD TO ABU GHRAIB : Gathering Intelligence in a War Zone
Inmates Scuttle Efforts to Repair Iraq Prison Image
Kremlin-backed president slain in bombing
Chechen President Killed in Bomb Blast
Chechnya Bomb Kills President, a Blow to Putin
Doctrine to restructure counterspy agencies
President backs probe of U.N. scandal
Navy launches vast maritime security plan
MP to Be First Tried for Abuses
Iraq prison abuse stains entire brigade
CACI Defends Screening of Interrogators
First Trial Set to Begin May 19 in Abuse in Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Terrorists court converts
The Israeli Torture Template
POLITICS
Senators Set Hearings on Iraq Prisoner Abuse
Senators Fault Pentagon as New Photos Emerge
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment
U.S. Must Find a Way to Move Past Images of Prison Abuse
From Texas to Abu Ghraib
Few friends rush to aid Rumsfeld
Conservatives Restive About Bush Policies
Bush Issues Strong Endorsement of Rumsfeld in Visit to Pentagon
ENERGY
World's hydrogen fuel stations up by 33 pct to 87
Excited Nanocrystals Yield More Solar Power
OTHER
Nancy Reagan Calls For Stem Cell Research
World Bank Panel Details Problems at Yacyretá Dam
ACTIVISTS
Iraqi activists push for better treatment of prisoners
2,000 march against guns
Conductor Protests At Israeli Ceremony
Mother's Day Rally for Assault Weapons Ban
The art of war
Honduras protests threaten mining investment
Cold Turkey
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Elite Guard to Cover U.S. Nuclear Sites
May 10, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-10-01.asp
The federal government plans to upgrade security across the Energy Department's network of laboratories and defense facilities, particularly those that contain weapons grade nuclear material. A new specialized security force will be put in place to guard the facilities that would have capabilities similar to the military's elite Delta Force or Navy SEAL units, said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
Abraham made the new initiative public Friday in a speech to top department security officers gathered at the Savannah River Nuclear weapons site, on the Georgia-South Carolina border.
The Energy Department, which develops and maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, is responsible for protecting these materials. Abraham stressed that the fissile materials, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon, "must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands."
"Since the stakes are so high," Abraham said, "everything is on the table," including "a special elite federal force" to protect the most sensitive installations and the "federalizing" of some security units currently managed by contractors.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Photo courtesy Congressman Zach Wamp) To reduce the number of nuclear facilities that need such high level protection, Abraham is moving to consolidate special nuclear material - plutonium and highly enriched uranium used for weapons.
The consolidation effort would remove the most sensitive nuclear material from Los Alamos National Laboratory's Technical Area 18 and the Sandia Pulse Reactor facility in New Mexico, and consolidate material stored at the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The new security measures are being established in response to repeated warnings from the intelligence community of terrorists' interest in acquiring U.S. nuclear materials. CIA Director George Tenet warned of al-Qaida's interest in getting these materials as early as 1998, he told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States on March 24.
"Al-Qaida's interest in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons is strong," Tenet told the Commission. "Acquiring these is a religious obligation in [Osama] bin Ladin's eyes. Al-Qaida and more than two dozen other terrorist groups are pursuing these materials," he said.
Compounding these threats, Abraham acknowledged recent reports of security lapses, such as lost keys, at some Department of Energy (DOE) sites, but he called the incidents "rare."
"But frankly, rare or not, they are unacceptable, and the failure of any and all levels of management to address instances such as these will not be tolerated," Abraham said.
To improve the protection of sensitive information in case of an attack in cyberspace, Abraham announced a Cyber Security Enhancement Initiative to help "protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of all our information systems to assure that we can continue to perform our missions even while under cyber attack."
The initiative, to be implemented within the next year, would deploy intrusion-detection systems to guard against potential cyber attacks, improve procedures to guard against internet threats and enhance the security of online information.
Citing past problems with computer disks and hard drives containing classified information, Abraham proposed "an initiative to move to diskless workstations for classified computing" to allow sensitive functions such as weapons design to be performed in a more secure diskless environment.
To eliminate issues of lost keys and key cards, Abraham said he intends to "do away with the use of mechanical keys as an important part of our protection system" and replace them with sophisticated new technologies that will allow "a keyless security environment, where access is not afforded by any physical item or object that can be lost or stolen."
Abraham also called for regular reviews of DOE security standards and procedures to ensure "a modern efficient, effective guard force able to meet 21st century threats" and for new programs to train security officers and test their readiness to respond to attacks or attempts to infiltrate facilities.
The Administration Building, TA-3, Building SM-43 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (Photo courtesy LANL) He also discussed initiatives to recruit and train the best possible candidates for DOE security jobs and to increase employee retention rates. The initiatives include faster background checks for employee security clearances and an intern program to help recruit "highly qualified technical personnel in the areas of cyber security, nuclear material control and physical security."
Abraham called for "a change in our management culture" to improve the way the department accepts, analyzes and responds to criticisms and concerns from outside the department as well as from employees, who Abraham said should be confident about raising questions or concerns without fear of retribution.
"If we are able to implement a system - a culture - where people can legitimately air concerns, then everyone will benefit. Our workforce will be more effective, the public's confidence in this department will improve, and America's security will be greatly enhanced," he said.
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, expressed support for the new security measures, but also concern for the large expenditures that will be necessary to implement them. Domenici is also chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee that funds DOE and the national laboratories.
Calling security of nuclear material "a top priority," Domenici said he looks forward to working with the department "to implement the Secretary's plan to deploy improved cyber security and other state-of-the-art technology to protect our sensitive material."
"But I continue to have concerns that security costs are outpacing any growth in the DOE budget," the senator said. "I will work with Secretary Abraham to consolidate special nuclear material where it makes financial sense and will not undermine the program."
The reforms Abraham announced follow recommendations the nongovernmental organization Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has been urging since its 2001 report "U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Security at Risk," the Washington, DC based group said Friday.
Danielle Brian, executive director of POGO, lauded Abraham's announcement saying, "Today Secretary Abraham has articulated the most important priorities for addressing homeland security vulnerabilities posed by the nation's nuclear weapons complex. The agency and its contractors, however, have a long history of stonewalling security reforms. We look forward to ensuring the department implements Abraham's initiatives."
POGO has urged consolidation of plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia Pulse Reactor Facility in New Mexico, and the Y-12 site. In addition, the group has called for an improved definition of the threats facing nuclear facilities, improved training for guards, and a move to an information environment that is not dependent on media such as CDs that can be stolen.
Work is already underway on some of the measures Secretary Abraham announced on Friday.
Planning for nuclear shipments from Technical Area 18 at Los Alamos to the Nevada Test site, which is considered less vulnerable to terrorist attack, is well advanced. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Linton Brooks said in April that the shipments will start in September and are expected to take about 18 months.
NNSA and the U.S. Department of Energy decided in December 2002 to move the materials after an analysis of the technical site's old facilities and the high cost of security. The transfer was put on hold in the summer of 2003 after cost estimates tripled from the original estimate of $100 million.
Brooks says spending on security is top priority for his administration and for the energy secretary as well. Testifying April 27 before the Committee on Government Reform, Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations, Brooks said Secretary Abraham "has directed spending on security take priority over other program spending until we can guarantee that security."
Security guard at a Department of Energy site (Photo courtesy DOE Office of Security) The Bush administration's nuclear security budget request for Fiscal Year 2005, submitted to Congress last week, is for over $707 million - a 75 percent increase since 2002, said Brooks.
About half of this funding is spent on the protective forces that provide front-line security at NNSA facilities, said Brooks. The number of guards has increased from 2,100 to over 2,400 since 2001, and their capabilities to defend have been upgraded.
"Security positions are being hardened against blast and heavy weapons. To deny an adversary cover, lighting has been improved and fields of fire cleared around perimeters and critical facilities. Protective forces are being equipped with thermal imaging and night vision devices to further enhance their ability to detect and engage any adversary," Brooks said. "And, when and if they must engage, protective forces will be using upgraded weapons and munitions with increased range, accuracy, and lethality.
Overall security performance "as measured by independent reviews" is improving, Brooks told the subcommittee. "In the past year, no force-on-force performance testing by the Office of Security and Safety Performance Assurance has found security forces unable to protect the assigned assets on their site."
Brooks said many security upgrades are already in place. "Critical material has been consolidated and the frequency of patrols around retained materials and critical facilities has been increased," he said.
"Vehicle parking and movement has been controlled to increase the standoff distances around facilities for protection from vehicle bombs. Vehicle searches, including canine searches for bomb detection, have been stepped up. Temporary vehicle barrier systems have been put in place and construction of permanent barrier systems has begun."
"While I am pleased with the progress we have made, our long term security must be based on more than guns, gates, and guards," Brooks said. "In the 21st century, America's technological prowess can provide invisible gates, omniscient over-watch, and lethal, accurate response capable of deterring or defeating any adversary."
The next generation of security applications will be based on a DOE study of needs and technologies available today to meet those needs that Brooks said should be completed in time to affect the Fiscal Year 2007 budget submission. In addition, a renewed research and development program to accelerate new security technologies is in the works.
In May 2003, the administration revised the definition of what is technically known as the Design Basis Threat - a profile of the type, composition, and capabilities of an adversary - to take into account the increased risk of terrorism.
Brooks told the subcommittee that "all NNSA sites have completed, and I have approved, plans to meet the Design Basis Threat by the end of Fiscal Year 2006."
Brooks said his administration is working closely with the rest of the DOE to meet that deadline and particularly with the Office of Security and Safety Performance Assurance on vulnerability analyses to validate planned security upgrades and detailed schedules for achieving implementation milestones.
More funding will be required to meet the new Design Basis Threat, said Brooks, because requirements to meet it were not fully evaluated before the FY 2004 budget request was made. He said $55.4 million will be squeezed out of the 2004 budget by "reprogramming" and another $89.9 million was added in the FY 2005 budget request.
The Nuclear Safeguards and Security Programs office is leading a team of security and budget specialists to each site to make sure their budgets cover all security requirements and ensure headquarters and sites are in agreement on priorities, Brooks said. A second team of experts has just completed visits to every site to review locks and keys procedures, collect best practices, and make recommendations for improvement.
Brooks said he wants to provide a "keyless" security environment within the next five to 10 years.
Meanwhile, Brooks acknowledged that one of the most challenging sites to protect is the 811 acre Y-12 facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. "These facilities do represent some of the most difficult security problems we face in some parts of the complex - aging, outdated facilities built in the early days of the Cold War, or earlier, when no threat of the current nature was envisioned."
The DOE explains that programs at Y-12 include manufacturing and reworking nuclear weapon components, dismantling nuclear weapon components returned from the national arsenal, serving as the nation's storehouse of special nuclear materials, and providing the U.S. Navy with nuclear propulsion systems.
In addition to the nuclear weapons work taking place at Y-12, the site stores 55,000 pounds of uranium hexafluoride, centrifuge equipment, and other materials removed from Libya in January.
Still, Brooks said he is "convinced" Y-12 will meet the deadline for implementation. Of the $89.9 million for Design Basis Threat requirements asked in the FY 2005 budget, about $25 million of that is earmarked for Y-12 in addition to nearly half the $55.4 million in the reprogramming request for a total of nealy $50 million.
Secretary Abraham is committed to a complete review of the entire weapons complex, Brooks said, including the suitability of Y-12 to continue as a federal nuclear site. But even before the review is complete, Brooks made his own conclusions clear.
"Moving Y-12 would be a lengthy, expensive endeavor that would impact the mission for at least a decade and would costs billions of dollars," he told the subcommittee. "During that time period, security at Y-12 would have to meet the same standard we are striving to achieve by the end of Fiscal Year 2006. For this reason, I do not believe moving Y-12 is a solution to our near term problems."
In June, Brooks will hold the first ever NNSA Safeguards and Security Summit, a gathering for top managers of federal nuclear sites, national laboratories, and nuclear power plants together with their senior security staffs.
"We are committed to making bold changes where necessary," Abraham said Friday, adding that the new security initiatives "are designed to build and support the most robust and motivated protective force in the world."
----
Top Officials Hold Fake Degrees
May 10, 2004
LOS ANGELES, (CBS)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/10/eveningnews/main616664.shtml
They are safety engineers at nuclear power plants and biological weapons experts. They work at NATO headquarters, at the Pentagon and at nearly every other federal agency. And, as CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, they're employees with degrees from phony schools.
"These degrees aren't worth the paper that they're printed on," says one insider, who asked CBS News to protect his identity.
The man worked at a so-called diploma mill where students pay a lot of money to get a degree online or through the mail for little or no work.
He says he's not surprised to know that there are people working at almost every level of government who have degrees from these types of operations.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles Abell has a master's from Columbus University, a diploma mill Louisiana shut down. Deputy Assistant Secretary Patricia Walker lists among her degrees, a bachelor's from Pacific Western, a diploma mill banned in Oregon and under investigation in Hawaii.
CBS News requested interviews with both officials. The Pentagon turned us down, saying, "We don't consider it an issue."
But using such a degree is a crime in some states. Alan Contreras cracks down on diploma mills for Oregon, a state that's taken the lead on this issue.
"You don't want somebody with a fake degree working in Homeland Security," says Contreras. "You don't want somebody with a fake degree teaching your children or designing your bridges."
But we found employees with diploma mill degrees at the new Transportation Security Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Departments of Treasury and Education, where Rene Drouin sits on an advisory committee. He has degrees from two diploma mills including Kensington University.
Kensington was forced out of business by officials in California and Hawaii. Another Kensington alum, Florida State Rep. Jennifer Carroll, just stepped down from the National Commission on Presidential Scholars.
Both Carroll and Drouin say they worked hard and thought their degrees were legitimate.
"The students are being sold a bill of goods that really don't help them at all," the insider says. "There are slick people out there, and it's happening every day, every minute probably somewhere in America."
And taxpayers have paid for bogus degrees some workers used for hiring, promotions and raises.
-------- depleted uranium
The Truth About Depleted Uranium Weaponry:
The Only Thing Depleting is Human Life
by Vincent L. Guarisco (Monday 10 May 2004) Media Monitors Network
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/6650/
"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
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.
-------- korea
Talks on North Korean Nuclear Program to Resume in Beijing
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12866-2004May9.html
After a helpful push from China -- which last month promised to double food assistance to North Korea -- mid-level officials from the Pyongyang government will sit down Wednesday in Beijing with their counterparts from the United States, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia.
The topic concerns ending North Korea's nuclear programs, though the North Koreans and Americans have not quite agreed on the precise agenda.
The talks, which the Chinese say will last at least five days, are designed to clear the diplomatic underbrush for more senior-level talks next month by the six nations on ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Few hold out hope that there will be any breakthroughs at the talks, but U.S. officials involved in the planning say the very fact of talking is productive.
"We would start a process with dialogue," one administration official said. "This gives us an opportunity to go into many issues."
Others within the Bush administration were more skeptical, portraying the sessions as diplomatic showboating designed to give the illusion of progress. "We're trying to keep the seats warm for the Kerry administration," quipped one administration official.
None of the officials interviewed would agree to be quoted by name or even organization, given the sensitivity of the dispute over North Korean policy within the administration. The U.S. delegation will be headed by Joseph R. DeTrani, a State Department official who holds the title of special envoy to North Korea.
Charles L. "Jack" Pritchard, who had held DeTrani's job before he quit last summer because he felt the administration was not serious about resolving the impasse, said he could not completely rule out some progress because the talks come so quickly after a state visit to China by North Korean leader Kim Jung Il.
"I would not put it past them [the North Koreans] to snub the Chinese" by refusing to give any ground, Pritchard said, but Kim Jung Il's visit "is a factor I can't disregard wholly."
Regional concern over North Korea's programs has risen in recent weeks after it was disclosed that U.S. intelligence has broadly concluded that North Korea has enough plutonium for at least eight nuclear weapons, an increase from an estimate of two before the crisis erupted in October 2002. At the time, the United States accused North Korea of having a clandestine uranium enrichment program, which led to North Korea's kicking out international inspectors and reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium.
Two previous sets of negotiations in Beijing by the six nations, in August and February, did not yield much progress, in part because the sessions were limited and there was little opportunity for extended give-and-take. The Bush administration has insisted Pyongyang agree first to a "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement," and North Korea has refused without a better understanding of the rewards for doing so.
At the talks in February, U.S. negotiators described three "coordinated steps" that the United States was prepared to take if the North Koreans agreed to the U.S. demands.
In the first stage, the United States was ready to discuss multilateral security assurances if North Korea made such a commitment. In the second stage, as verifiable benchmarks were achieved, the United States was prepared to offer technical and financial assistance to dismantle North Korea's nuclear programs and discuss ways that the country's energy needs could be met. In the final stage, once the program was nearly dismantled, the United States was prepared to enter into comprehensive negotiations leading to diplomatic relations and a permanent mechanism to replace the armistice ending the Korean War.
But North Korean officials have complained to Asian counterparts that the United States has not provided definitions about such terms as "verifiable" and "irreversible" and thus they have difficulty understanding what the United States really wants.
Much of the success of these talks may depend on whether the two sides can even agree on what they are talking about.
One administration official said the parties have not quite agreed on what they will discuss. "It's not really an agreement; it's close to an understanding," he said, before providing an explanation that hinted at the diplomatic complexities.
The Americans, he said, want to talk about the dismantling of the programs. "We're prepared to talk about the first step, which is a halt of the program, a freezing of the program, and what the [South] Koreans and the North Koreans call 'compensation' for that and which we call 'corresponding measures,' " he said.
The United States has defined "corresponding measures" as a multilateral security guarantee, but no aid. But others at the table -- China, South Korea and Russia -- have offered shipments of heavy fuel oil if North Korea halted its programs and began to dismantle them.
The official said the freeze would need a time limit of six to 18 months for North Korea to begin dismantling its programs. But North Korea denies it even has a uranium program, though the Bush administration insists that North Korean officials privately admitted having such a program in 2002.
The Bush administration has refused to hold direct talks with the North Koreans, except brief sessions during the six-nation negotiations. But the official said there would be "tremendous opportunities" for bilateral discussions during this week's meetings.
-------- missile defense
Battlefield space: out of the silo
May 10, 2004
New York Times /Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/09/1084041272768.html
It's not Star Wars, but a new anti-missile system has raised as bitter a debate, writes James Glanz.
Over the next few months rockets hidden in Alaskan silos will give America its first operating defence against intercontinental ballistic missiles since the 1970s. Although the system is not a secret, it has been revived with so little fanfare that few Americans realise it exists.
Among warfare experts, it has revived the bitter debate that began in the Cold War, culminating in an anti-ballistic missile treaty. It is inspiring the sort of passion that arose during the national fixation with President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars effort.
Unlike Star Wars, which faded into the realm of misbegotten high-tech dreams, the new system relies on agile but fairly ordinary rockets, rather than nuclear-powered lasers in space, to smash incoming warheads.
In the new debate, Pentagon planners see the system as a bulwark against the ultimate calamity, a nuclear attack - while sceptics ridicule it as a defence that will not work, against a threat that does not exist.
The decades have not washed away the political dimension of a missile defence, either. Deploying the system will fulfil a campaign pledge by President George Bush, as well as a more specific directive, issued in December 2002, that the nation have a functioning missile defence system by this year.
Critics of the system, which will cost $US10 billion ($13.8 billion) a year for the next five years, say it is being rushed before being fully tested. The critics call it a flawed defence against the ICBMs of yesteryear, not the suicide bombers and hijacked planes of the post-September 11 world.
Nevertheless, the system is taking on hard reality in the remote Alaskan town of Delta Junction. Outside the town, six white domes rise like igloos within a double-perimeter fence topped by security cameras.
The little domes are clamshell-shape doors that sit above silos dug 23 metres into the frozen earth. If one of the clamshells ever opens to release a missile, it will in all likelihood mean the nation's leadership believes the United States has become a nuclear target.
The silos are empty, but two huge cranes nearby should soon be outfitting some of the silos with three-stage interceptors. Once those interceptors, each topped with a bunch of thrusters and optical sensors called a kill vehicle, are hooked into a global network of radars, satellites, computers and command centres, one of Reagan's biggest dreams will be reality.
Critics of the shield find little hearing at the Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency, headed by Lieutenant-General Ronald Kadish, an air force pilot with long experience in developing military hardware like fighter jets.
"We should not choose to be vulnerable," Kadish says. "We have proven that from a technological standpoint and a practical standpoint we can intercept ballistic warheads in flight. And to say that we can technologically defend ourselves and then choose not to is, in my view, a recipe for failure."
The first system will rely on interceptors in a handful of silos at the army base of Fort Greeley at Delta Junction, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. In an attack, boosters would release the kill vehicle more than 150 kilometres above Earth. With a heat-sensitive telescope, the vehicle would search the chill of space for the warhead, then manoeuvre with its thrusters and try to pulverise the weapon by ramming it at 30,000kmh.
Even that description does little justice to the complexity of the system, which spans nine time zones and uses 21,000 kilometres of fibre optics to link sites as varied as a radar installation in the Aleutian Islands and in a command centre in Colorado. If it works as planned, the system may take the title of the biggest machine built from America's electrical grid.
Officials at the Missile Defence Agency have said the system was developed to stop what they characterise as unsophisticated threats from budding nuclear powers such as North Korea, not the highly developed arsenals of Russia or China. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said November's presidential election, not any imminent threat, was behind the decision to deploy the system 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," Levin says.
The White House has repeatedly said the deployment timetable is based just on the system's technical readiness. The system has also found significant international support.
Australia will buy air warfare destroyers with the latest Aegis class radar systems and SM3 ballistic missiles that will give them a missile defence capability. The destroyers, which will come into service in 2014, will cruise Australia's northern waters and can be deployed near combat zone to provide an umbrella of protection for troops.
More immediately and directly related to the defence shield protecting the US mainland, the Pine Gap satellite relay station will play a role in giving early warning to any incoming long-range missiles. The Jindalee over-the-horizon radar has the capacity to sense missiles aimed at Australia, bouncing radar off the ionosphere - 1000 kilometres above the Earth's surface - to get far-reaching coverage.
England and Greenland are dedicating some radar sites to the program's early warning system. The Japanese parliament recently put $US1 billion toward a missile shield that would involve American-made radars and interceptors aboard its Aegis cruisers.
The Bush Administration is spending $US700 million this year and has requested more than $US1 billion for next year to develop the sea-based interceptor system, which would be developed on American cruisers.
The system has not entirely abandoned its claims to grandiosity. 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. At a cost of $US1 billion, the radar will tower nearly 100 metres 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 big to pass through the Panama Canal and will be forced to motor around the tip of South America to its main base 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 destroy missiles shortly after launching, has been repeatedly delayed by technical problems. Despite the setbacks, Kadish said the laser "represents such a revolutionary capability that we are going to stick to it".
Even if all elements of the giant program work just as in the computer simulations, some experts do not see the point. The Cold War geopolitical landscape in which the system was conceived has shifted out from under it, says Dean Wilkening, the director of the science program at the Stanford Centre for International Security and Co-operation. "I don't understand the rush to deploy by 2004," Wilkening says. "I simply don't see the threat."
But with so much of the elaborate system in place and more on the way, defence specialist Steven Hildreth says questions like that may no longer matter. "I've sort of seen it as a juggernaut," he says. "It's on a collision course with destiny, if you will."
That destiny starts in the Alaskan countryside where a carved wood sign welcomes visitors to Delta Junction, "America's Friendly Frontier", population 980. Why Alaska? "Because it sits at the top of the world," Kadish said, where the trajectories of virtually all ICBMs attacking the US 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. The ground is loose and shifting, the construction season is short, and winter temperatures can reach -15C; so cold that tyres on stationary vehicles can freeze overnight into irregular shapes and refuse to become round again.
After the first shovel of soil was turned for the silos two years ago, the schedule left no time for error.
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. Hundreds of workers also built a large command centre jammed with electronics next to the missile field, and four kilometres of climate-controlled underground tunnels for pipes and utilities.
"We are shooting to be on alert by September 30 in response to the President's requirement to be on alert by the end of the year," says Colonel Kevin Norgaard, the director of the site activation command. "We are where we need to be today, to be there."
In contrast to the controversy the missile defence system elicits in some regions, it is popular in Delta Junction, where the short-term closing of Fort Greeley struck a grave blow to the economy. As the base reopens, city manager Pete Hallgren says: "The economic impact in our area is massive." In a town where the normal yearly operating budget runs to $US250,000, the Defence Department has earmarked $US25 million to help ease the impact on local services. The money will buy a new elementary school, a library, a landfill and a fire station, as well as partly finance a recreation centre.
"I'm one of those true believers, who always thought we needed one," Hallgren says of a national missile defence.
-------- treaties
U.S.-Russia Plutonium Disposal Project Languishing
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12895-2004May9?language=printer
With much fanfare, the world's two nuclear superpowers announced in 1998 that they would destroy 68 tons of plutonium stripped from bombs and warheads. The cost, counted in billions, would be borne largely by the United States and European governments intent on removing dangerous fissile material from circulation.
Six years later, the project sits stalled. The plutonium remains intact, and no construction has begun on either of the planned processing factories. In frustration, some U.S. analysts and politicians are doubting the Bush administration's commitment.
This has happened because the United States and Russia have been unable to agree on who would pay if an accident -- or sabotage -- occurred in Russia. The Bush administration wants Russia to take full responsibility, and the Russians are balking.
The stalemate comes when the fear of nuclear terrorism is growing and President Bush is pledging aggressive action. Nuclear specialists and some members of Congress say the case highlights a failure by the White House to back up its nonproliferation ambitions with action.
"How a little issue of indemnification can hold this up is beyond me," Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) told top Energy Department officials at a recent hearing. "This is a way to get rid of a huge chunk of nuclear-grade plutonium."
The project was blocked by "trivial negotiating issues," Domenici said. He added that he told the White House "that maybe they ought to put some bigger people in the position of negotiating." Plutonium is not easily obtained, but Russia is considered to be the site of the largest and most vulnerable stockpiles.
"It's a very messy, messy situation," said Kenneth Luongo, executive director of the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council. The project, he said, has been "in the works for a decade, and we haven't moved beyond the talking phase."
Agreements to build parallel plants in Siberia and South Carolina expired last year. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in March that the administration hoped to resolve the issue by this spring and asserted that it "is being worked at high levels."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are among those who have raised the issue with their Russian counterparts. Despite intensive discussions within the administration in recent weeks, a White House official conceded that the issue is "one of those things that have been on the one-yard line a long time." Abraham reported in his annual budget request that construction was officially 10 months behind schedule but should begin by May 2005 if an agreement can be reached. He said money will be needed to start building the plants that convert plutonium into mixed oxide fuel for nuclear reactors.
"We are confident that we can work it out. We are not that far apart, believe it or not," said Paul M. Longsworth, deputy Energy Department administrator, who acknowledged that the positions remain "pretty firm right now."
"Plutonium disposition is a 20-year program that is going to eliminate enough plutonium to make far more than 10,000 nuclear weapons," Longsworth said. "You've got to start it right."
On Feb. 11, in a speech intended to amplify his record on nonproliferation and inspire other countries to do more, the president declared that governments around the world "must do all we can to secure and eliminate nuclear and chemical and biological and radiological materials."
A particular worry is that terrorist organizations or rogue states will buy or steal a nuclear weapon or the fissile material that powers an atomic blast. Many scientists and public policy experts believe that an organized group or government that acquires fissile material would have little trouble assembling a crude weapon.
To build an atomic bomb from 50-year-old technology would require about 13 pounds of plutonium, said Thomas Cochran, director of nuclear projects at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Libya, which recently abandoned its fledgling secret nuclear program, acquired a bomb design of that vintage from the illicit supply network run by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
U.S. government facilities are also vulnerable, the General Accounting Office said in a report released late last month. The Energy Department's responses to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were "not sufficient" to ensure that all of its sites are prepared "to defend themselves against the higher terrorist threat present in a post-Sept. 11 . . . world," the GAO said.
In Russia, basic security improvements have not been made at dozens of military installations where more than 60 percent of the country's plutonium and weapons-grade uranium is kept, the GAO warned last year.
GAO auditors blamed Russia for failing to allow U.S. officials to visit key sites but also said Congress and the Bush administration exacerbated the delays by denying critical funds or refusing to grant contract waivers. When the report came out, the United States had spent $6 billion since 1992 to help Russia destroy or safeguard nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
"The big problem is there's a leadership gap. These are not big obstacles. They can be handled by leaders who are determined and can be focused," said former U.S. senator Sam Nunn, who with Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) backed the vast counterproliferation program that bears their names.
The project to destroy 68 tons of plutonium -- half in Russia and half in the United States -- was designed as part of the cooperative project to reduce the risk of fissile material falling into the wrong hands. Announced during the Clinton administration, the program was formally launched during a presidential summit in Moscow in 1998.
Domenici, who helped direct $200 million to the project in its first year, attended the summit as President Bill Clinton's guest. He has been among the sharpest critics of the Bush administration's inability to keep the program on track.
The sticking point is the issue of liability for potentially catastrophic problems. In threat-reduction agreements signed in the mid-1990s, Russia agreed to take responsibility in return for help from foreign governments in disarming former Soviet nuclear weapons and improving security.
"If something blew, Russia would pay. No ifs, ands or buts," said Leonard S. Spector, director of the Washington office for the Monterey Institute of International Studies' Center for Nonproliferation Studies. But on the plutonium program and a project known as the Nuclear Cities Initiative, the Russians insisted that if U.S. contractors were to blame, they or the federal government should be liable for damages and possible prosecution.
Sabotage is a particular worry, the Russians told U.S. negotiators, who have been led by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton.
"They kept saying, 'Hey, you can hire Chechen rebels under contract and they could blow up our facilities, and we would be powerless to prosecute,' " said an administration official closely involved in the issues, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "We said that's ridiculous. We don't hire people who will conduct sabotage."
The Bush administration is adamant that U.S. companies and officials are engaged in a goodwill effort and should not be held liable for unintended problems. The liability negotiations commanded attention at the 2002 summit of the world's most industrialized countries, which pledged $20 billion for 10 years of nonproliferation programs in Russia.
There is a disagreement within the administration, where sources said the Defense and State departments have demanded the more stringent liability provision, while the Energy Department believed that a somewhat less rigorous formula was sufficient.
"What you would have thought was an incidental legal issue looms so large," said Spector, who suggested sharing the burden, a structure established in the civilian nuclear power sector. "Everybody is frustrated that an additional hurdle is being presented that has to be overcome."
As the negotiations continue, the potential dangers remain, critics believe.
"The implications are that you're going to have 68 additional tons of weapons-grade plutonium lying around the United States and Russia," said Luongo, the nuclear security specialist. "And Russia, in particular, is where security is not up to global standards."
------- us nuc waste
Nuclear Waste Reclassification Plan Approved by Senate Panel
May 10, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-10-10.asp
The Senate Armed Services committee has added a rider to the $422 billion fiscal year 2005 Department of Defense authorization bill that will allow the U.S. Energy Department to reclassify millions of gallons of high level nuclear waste at South Carolina's Savannah River site as less hazardous.
The language would give the department the authority to leave the waste on-site, a move opposed by environmentalists as irresponsible and unsafe. The bill passed out of committee Thursday and is expected to hit the Senate floor next week.
The rider centers on high-level radioactive waste stored in 51 massive underground tanks at the Savannah River site, which contains more than half the radioactivity in the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex.
The federal government has kept this waste on-site with the aim of retrieving it and moving it elsewhere for safe storage. The Savannah River is a site burdened with the radioactive legacy of the Cold War. (Photo courtesy Energy Department ) Federal law currently requires the government to bury the waste deep underground.
The repository chosen for disposal of this waste, which under law must be encapsulated in glass for burial, is the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.
Although the liquid wastes can be drawn out and removed, the Energy Department's method for removing the most radioactive sludge out of the tanks has proven unsafe.
The department is exploring alternatives, but the Bush administration favors diluting the waste with grout and leaving it on-site permanently.
Savannah River has already diluted two tanks despite evidence that the residual radioactivity had concentrations far above the maximum limits allowed by federal regulations for shallow land disposal of waste.
"This is making a residual waste problem that could be remedied in the long term - with development of technology - into one that will be extremely difficult or impossible to remediate," says Arjun Makhijanim, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
Makhijanim authored a 77 page report released in March that detailed major flaws in the federal government's management of wastes at the Savannah River site.
The report found the Energy Department does not have a reliable inventory of how much waste and contamination is at the site and its long term plan to safeguard the waste is flawed.
More than a third of U.S. weapons plutonium and almost all of its tritium was produced at the Savannah River site.
For the Energy Department to leave the grouted tanks on site, the waste would have to be reclassified as less hazardous - last year a federal court in Idaho rejected the agency's attempt do this through a federal rulemaking process.
The court agreed with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which argued that the Energy Department's decision to reclassify high level nuclear waste in storage tanks as "incidental waste," violated federal law and would allow the agency to use a substantially less protective standard of cleanup the waste.
The judge wrote that the Energy Department "does not have discretion to dispose of defense [high-level waste] somewhere other than a repository established under [the Nuclear Waste Policy Act]."
The administration has appealed that ruling but has pressed Congress to provide it with a legislative remedy - the language in this rider accomplishes the goal. The Savannah plant has tanks similar to these at a federal facility in Hanford, Washington - at least 70 of the Hanford tanks have leaked some one million gallons of waste into the soil. (Photo courtesy Energy Department ) A similar move by the administration to convince Congress to reclassify the waste failed last year.
Deputy Secretary of Energy Kyle McSlarrow said the administration is "very pleased with the action take by Senate Armed Services Committee to clarify the Secretary's authority to proceed with accelerated cleanup of the tank farms at the Savannah River Site."
McSlarrow says the NRDC lawsuit and subsequent ruling are inhibiting efforts to dilute and secure the waste.
The rider does not, however, give the department authority to reclassify similar wastes at facilities in Washington and Idaho.
"We have several important issues to resolve and we look forward to continuing our discussions so that we can devise a solution that will work for these other states as well," McSlarrow said.
Critics say the administration is trying to shortchange the department's clean up responsibilities and to bully states into accepting the policy.
They note the administration has also asked Congress to allow the Energy Department to withhold some $350 million in cleanup funds from the sites in South Carolina, Washington and Idaho until the reclassification issue is resolved.
Washington Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell has vowed to battle the amendment and the funding issue on the Senate floor.
-------- MILITARY
Aid workers feel fatal chill of new Cold War
Humanitarian relief for the Third World is being jeopardised by changes to US and British foreign policy.
Kim Sengupta reports from Kabul
10 May 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=519719
The bodies were found yesterday in Bagh Chilsthan, a garden of withered roses and weeds not far from the centre of Kabul. They were of two Western men, one of them Swiss, who had been stoned and stabbed to death.
The remains, dressed in shalwar kameez which were now their blood-stained, dust-covered shrouds, were the latest grim examples of how the war on terror by the United States and Britain has cast a murderous shadow over international relief efforts.
The victims have not been identified. Aid workers are seen by many Afghans as the enemy. About 20, Afghans and foreigners, have been killed.
Three years after Tony Blair's pledge to the Afghan people after the war of "this time we will not walk away from you", in effect, that is what the US and Britain have done. Funds for redevelopment have dried up, security has unravelled, and the Taliban is resurgent again. And US troops are using aid as a bargaining chip to extract intelligence, putting workers for international agencies into the target area.
The former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who will launch a study calledAid in the new Cold War today, said: "The murder of aid workers in Afghanistan dramatically highlights the tragic consequences when the provision of humanitarian aid gets confused with the security operation.
"I find it particularly depressing that any of our aid effort should be diverted to fund the occupation of Iraq. Regardless of what any of us may think about the invasion of Iraq, we surely all agree that the poor around the world should not pay for the consequences."
In the height of the Cold War, the US secretary of state John Foster Dulles responded to the founding of the Non-Aligned movement by saying: "If you are not with us, then you are against us." Forty-six years later, after 11 September, President George Bush declared: "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
After the Second World War, the US made no secret that the world's wealthiest nation would use aid as part of its armoury in the struggle against the Soviet Union. In Latin America, the military regimes of Pinochet in Chile, Galtieri in Argentina, Stroessner in Paraguay and Castillo Armas in Guatemala all had American aid. At the same time, "unpalatable" leaders such as Allende in Chile and Castillo Armas's reforming predecessor, Jacobo Arbenz, were removed through CIA-organised coups.
The US provided aid and also persuaded the International Monetary Fund to provide huge loans to Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia and Marcos in the Philippines, three of the biggest personal looters of development money. In South Korea, facing the Communist north, Western aid financed 68 per cent of all imports, and 60 per cent of its investment.
There was also a steady flow of arms to friendly regimes in the poorest regions. The World Policy Institute in New York points out that in Africa alone, through the Cold War, the US delivered more than $1.5bn-worth of weaponry. It said that many of the top US arms clients - Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan and the Congo - "have become the top basket cases of the 1990s".
The Soviet Union, too, used aid to spread its sphere of influence, mainly through Comecon, to client states in the Warsaw Pact, South-east Asia and Africa countries such as Angola, Mozambique. Ethiopia and Tanzania.
In 1978, Judith Hart, Britain's minister for overseas development, said: "There are two basic ways in which the aid programme helps British industry. By helping foster income creation, it increases the overseas market for British goods. In the process it also provides opportunities for aid-financed exports."
But after the end of the Cold War there was a deliberate move by the West to disengage from strategic politics. During an African trip, President Bill Clinton declared: "The Cold War is gone. Colonialism is gone. My dream is that we might do the things that your grandchildren and mine will look back and say this was the beginning of a new African renaissance." This was backed by the passing of the 1998 US Code of Conduct bill imposing restrictions on US weapons sales to regimes accused of human rights abuse.
In 2001, the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) changed its guidelines on aid, untying recipient countries of aid from having to buy goods and services from donor countries. In Britain, the Labour government passed the International Development Act in 2002, which specified that Britain can offer development assistance only when "the provision of the assistance is likely to contribute to a reduction in poverty". Aid tied to buying only from Britain was discontinued by statute.
All this changed after the 11 September attacks. The DAC published a paper which showed it was prepared to support the use of aid to fight terrorism. In March, European Union foreign ministers in Brussels signed a raft of anti-terrorist measures including a clause tying aid to non-EU countries to co-operation on security. Countries banned from US military assistance because of their human rights record became eligible, including Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Pakistan.
The Philippines has been allocated $92m to fight the Abu Sayyaf group in Mindanao. Indonesia's ineligibility for military training after East Timor has been reversed under a counter-terrorism programme.
At the same time, to protect its citizens fighting the war on terror from possible prosecution in front of the International Criminal Court, the Bush administration has signed bilateral immunity agreements with 82 countries. Those who have refused to sign have been punished by having their aid cut, a total of $90m this year.
Britain has pledged £544m to Iraqi reconstruction. A leaked Department for International Development document said: "The burden of financing Iraq will mean ... that a number of current programmes in middle-income countries will close." This includes swaths of Latin America, north Africa, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe.
In Afghanistan, the US has spent $40bn on military operations, and international aid totals $4.5bn. Out of the latter, much of the $2.2bn earmarked for this year has been diverted to military projects and emergency relief.
Teena Roberts, the head of the Christian Aid mission in Afghanistan, said: "What is very worrying is that aid is being used to get information. I have also heard an American member of a provincial reconstruction team, whose job is humanitarian work, saying it was her job to be the eyes and ears of the US government. The effect is obvious. Aid workers become targets."
The UN, aid agencies, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent said: "Many states involved in Afghanistan no longer draw a distinction between military and humanitarian activities ... they have to be kept separate."
The US forces have made little effort to hide what they are doing. Delivering blankets and food to refugees at Dwamanda in the Pashtun south, Lieutenant Reid Finn said: "It's simple. The more they help us find the bad guys, the more good stuff they get."
The price is paid by others. At just before seven on an evening in February, eight workers from the National Solidarity Programme, a relief agency, stopped on the road to Sarobi, east of Kabul, to repair a punctured tyre. Two young men with Kalashnikov assault rifles, their faces covered with keffiyahs, appeared. When told they were aid workers, the gunmen accused them of spying for the Americans. They opened fire, killing five. The other three jumped into a ditch and escaped.
The five victims, Najibullah, Abdulraif, Mohammed Nadi, Sher Mohammed and Zalmai, were between 32 and 56. They were Tajiks and Pashtuns, and had worked in the area before without problems.
Last month, two workers for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance relief agency and a soldier were killed after gunmen burst into a guesthouse near Kandahar.
SDF has now pulled out of 72 areas. The programme co-ordinator, Ihsanullah Dileri, said: "This is a terrible situation. We had $60,000 to spend on each of these 72 areas. The programme will suffer terrible harm. But there is nothing we can do; it is too dangerous."
Wahid Waqfi, a CHA director, added: "We were neighbours of the Taliban government in Kandahar before 2001. They didn't attack us then. Why now? We know the answer."
UGANDA
The boys lie on the floor of the Kitgum Government Hospital in northern Uganda, huddled together in a corner for safety. They are "night commuters", among the thousands who trek across the bush into towns to escape the rebel Lords Resistance Army, which raids villages, abducting children to serve as soldiers and sex slaves. In the relative safety of the day, they will return to their homes.
Most of the children walk alone, some carrying infant brothers and sisters, others bedmats on their heads.
The LRA raises the tempo of forced recruitment to replenish the ranks after each military clash with government forces.
Uganda is the third largest recipient of aid from Britain - £55m in 2002-03. The war against the LRA is estimated to cost the country £56m in lost production capacity.
Three months after the 11 September attacks, at the request of President Yoweri Museveni, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, declared the LRA a terrorist organisation. In March 2002, the Ugandan government launched Operation Iron Fist against the rebels, diverting 23 per cent of its social services budget, much of it from international aid, to the military campaign. Some of the money was earmarked for anti-HIV campaigning.
PAKISTAN
In 1988, after Pakistan tested a nuclear device, and in 1999 when a coup brought General Pervez Musharraf to power, the US and Britain blocked millions of dollars in aid. Both countries expressed concern about human rights abuse and the presence of nuclear weapons in an unstable country run by a military regime which buttressed the Taliban in Afghanistan, and sanctions were imposed.
Eleven days after the terror attacks President George Bush lifted the sanctions. A spokesman said: "We intend to support those who support us."
In 2000, US aid to Pakistan was $88.5m. After the start of the war on terror, it jumped tenfold to $775m a year. British aid went up to $70m. Pakistan also benefited in other ways. President Musharraf's 2002 elections led to widespread accusations of fraud, but not from the US and Britain.
There was also little criticism from either of the aid donors when a Pakistani scientist with high government links was exposed for supplying nuclear technology to countries defined as "rogue states" by the Bush administration.
THAILAND
Thailand made the latest bloody entry into the war on terror with security forces killing about 112 Muslims in the south of the country. Thirty of the deaths came when soldiers stormed a mosque using machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades after a three-hour siege.
At first, the authorities claimed that those killed were Islamist fighters. But later the Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinwarta, said they were members of local youth gangs, not connected to terrorism. The Thai government does not admit to a "shoot-to-kill" policy, but it is noted for its severe police tactics. About 2,500 people were shot dead last year in an anti-drugs drive.
The Government has also refused to acknowledge that it has a problem of Islamic fundamentalism within its borders, despite simmering violence in the Muslim southern provinces. Critics argue that the unrest has been sustained by the Government's treatment of southerners as second-class citizens.
Thailand is an important US ally in South-east Asia, and has sent a contingent of 447 troops to Iraq. The country is a significant recipient of US civil and military aid.
-------- afghanistan
Powerful Afghan Governor Slams Disarmament Plan
Mon May 10, 2004
By Mike Collett-White
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=GEBXW021XBBCWCRBAE0CFEY?type=topNews&storyID=5084645
HERAT, Afghanistan - Afghanistan's most powerful regional strongman warned on Sunday that plans to disarm tens of thousands of factional fighters over the coming months could hurt national stability, not enhance it.
On the eve of a visit to his province by President Hamid Karzai, who has made rapid disarmament a central policy, Ismail Khan said in a rare interview that the fledgling Afghan army was too weak to fill the power vacuum that would be created.
Khan, the self-styled "emir of Herat," rules the strategic western province as a personal fiefdom, and, his critics say, trades freedom of expression and women's rights for the kind of stability most Afghan provinces could only dream of.
"The disarming of the mujahideen (holy warriors), who are helping to secure Afghanistan, will bring instability," the silver-bearded 65-year-old told Reuters at an official residence overlooking the ancient city of Herat, near the Iranian border.
Khan is revered as a leading warrior in the "jihad," or holy war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, and associates himself closely with "mujahideen" fighters who still hold sway in some regions outside Kabul.
"And yet they are disarming the mujahideen. The mujahideen is not bringing insecurity. There is not an alternative army yet to replace them," Khan said.
His comments underline differences between Karzai, who wants to consolidate the center's grip over provinces, and powerful regional commanders, often referred to as warlords, who pay scant regard to Kabul's directives.
Khan has clashed with Kabul in the past, both for being slow to hand over millions of dollars in customs revenue from goods entering from Iran and his apparent reluctance to disarm local forces who swear loyalty to him.
Estimates vary but experts put the number of soldiers closely affiliated to Khan at 5,000 to 10,000. Together with a large revenue base, that makes him the most powerful governor in the country.
The government wants to disarm 40,000 of an estimated 100,000 militiamen by the end of June before landmark elections in September intended to cement political stability after the U.S.-led war in 2001 that toppled the Taliban.
Recent violence in Herat and in the northern province of Faryab has raised new fears that regional power brokers threaten stability as do Islamic militants in the south and east.
KARZAI VISIT
Karzai's visit on Monday comes just over a month after a clash in Herat in which Khan's eldest son was killed by a local military commander known for his sympathies to Karzai.
Khan blamed General Zahir Nayebzada for the March 21 death of Mirwais Sadiq, who was civil aviation minister, and said the commander had been called to Kabul where he should be punished.
"I don't want to judge a criminal before he is handed punishment," he said of Nayebzada. "If I see that he is not punished, then I will make a judgment."
The gunbattle was another setback in attempts to bring Khan into the Kabul fold, and the government sent 1,500 soldiers from the Afghan National Army to Herat to impose order.
Khan is clearly angered at the deployment, which he says is unnecessary and a ploy by his rivals in the cabinet.
He did not identify individuals, but analysts and diplomats in Kabul believe relations with Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali are especially sour.
"Because of the security here, we have no need for them (Afghan troops). This is a political issue," Khan said.
Surrounded by murals portraying battle scenes from the anti-Soviet campaign, and sitting beneath a portrait of Karzai, Khan said he had declined several offers by Kabul to join the cabinet, and would remain in Herat for the foreseeable future.
He said the mujahideen faction called Jamiat-e-Islami, to which he belongs, was still considering whether to unite behind a single candidate to run against Karzai in elections in September. "It is too early to decide whether there will be a strong alternative or not," he said. "There is plenty of time; politics change very quickly. We are still in discussions."
-------- africa
Sudanese Fighters Raid Chad Village
Associated Press
Monday, May 10, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13445-2004May10.html
NDJAMENA, Chad, May 9 -- Hundreds of Arab militiamen from Sudan raided a village inside neighboring Chad, setting off gun battles with the Chadian army that killed 60 fighters, a Chadian soldier and six civilians, Chad's defense minister, Emmanuel Nadingar, said Sunday.
The Sudanese militia has been accused of carrying out atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region. The fighting in Darfur pits Sudan's Arab-dominated government and a militia made up of Arab nomads against black African residents, some of whom have taken up arms to demand more autonomy for Darfur, a western region on the border with Chad.
The acting U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Bertrand Ramcharan, last week blamed the militias for a "scorched-earth policy" and spoke of "repeated war crimes and crimes against humanity."
-------- britain
Blair Pressed to Answer Red Cross Report
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12424-2004May9.html
LONDON, May 9 -- Opposition politicians and antiwar critics demanded Sunday that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government respond to a confidential report from the International Committee of the Red Cross that raised concerns about British treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war.
Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon was due to appear before the House of Commons on Monday to respond to allegations of abuse by British soldiers that are similar to those involving American troops, but less severe.
Blair's office has refused to release the Red Cross report, which it received in February. A government spokesman said the organization's concerns had been addressed and specific actions taken. The Red Cross said its report had focused primarily on abuses by U.S. troops that were "tantamount to torture" but had also raised questions about British actions .
Robin Cook, Blair's foreign secretary who resigned from the cabinet last year to protest the war, added his voice to those demanding that officials disclose the contents of the report. "Until they do, really we cannot see what independent people are saying about the problem and how severe it is," Cook told the BBC.
Spokesmen for the opposition Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats have also demanded an explanation. "The most important thing here, right now, is that the government should publish whatever evidence it may have been given by the Red Cross," said Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy. "People have a right to know."
The government has been under attack over the prisoner issue since the Daily Mirror published photographs a week ago that purportedly depicted soldiers mistreating an Iraqi prisoner. While experts have raised doubts about the authenticity of the pictures, which the tabloid said it had obtained from two unidentified soldiers, the Mirror and other newspapers have followed up with a series of first-person accounts of abuses provided by other soldiers and by former prisoners. And the human rights group Amnesty International has also said it provided evidence to the government last year that Iraqis in British custody had been tortured and killed.
Over the weekend, the Mirror and other newspapers published fresh accounts of alleged abuses. The Sunday Times reported that soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were under investigation for alleged sexual assault and prisoner abuse.
The Independent on Sunday cited what it said were eight new cases in which soldiers allegedly shot dead Iraqi civilians in cold blood. The Defense Ministry has confirmed that military police have completed several investigations into alleged abuse and forwarded its recommendations to prosecutors.
Britain has 7,500 troops in southern Iraq and is considering sending at least 1,000 more to fill the gap caused by the withdrawal of Spanish forces after the election of an anti-war government in Spain.
-------- business
Iraq News Unnerves Tech Firms
MONDAY MORNING
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page E02
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13232-2004May9.html
When Paul M. Cofoni, president of the Computer Science Corp. division that does business with the federal government, heard the allegations that interrogators on contract to the U.S. Army were linked to the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, he immediately checked to see if his company had any interrogators.
"I double-checked to make sure, and none of our personnel are engaged on those contracts," he said. The company's business doesn't include interrogations.
Cofoni's inquiry was understandable. CSC, based in El Segundo, Calif., but with a big presence in the Washington area, bought Reston-based defense contractor DynCorp last year, and many of DynCorp's employees are in the Middle East providing security, managing the movement of supplies and repairing aircraft for the military.
"I thought I would have heard of it, but we do so many different things in so many different places," said Cofoni, who oversees a $5.4 billion business.
The allegations of abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison put the local technology community on edge last week. An Army report alleged that employees of Arlington defense contractor CACI International Inc. and San Diego's Titan Corp. were involved. Both companies said the government had yet to contact them and as far as they know their employees did nothing wrong.
The biggest local government contractors have thousands of outstanding contracts at any given time and some executives seemed concerned they may have overlooked even one job that could drag them into a public relations nightmare.
Executives at Anteon International Corp., a Fairfax contractor with employees in Iraq, also reviewed their company's work in "hot spots."
"We do have over 4,000 active task orders," said Dennis Kelly, senior vice president of corporate communications. "There's always a chance that we would be in an area that isn't a normal business area.
"So we did a double- and triple-check just to ensure that we didn't have anybody operating in one of these roles that have been discussed," he said. "We were quite sure that we did not. We just wanted to make sure that one didn't slip through the cracks."
Others said they were never worried. "We don't have anybody over there that would have that type of direct contact with Iraqi people," said George Farrar, a spokesman for Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc., a private consulting firm based in McLean.
Farrar said a "very small number" of the firm's consultants are in Iraq, but wouldn't be specific.
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Computer Systems Spur Growth for Contractors
List of Top Firms Is Rearranged By Acquisitions
By Anitha Reddy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page E03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13055-2004May9?language=printer
Companies that sell complex computer systems to the military and national security agencies dominate the race for government technology contracts, a trend confirmed by this year's ranking of the top prime contractors by Washington Technology magazine.
The list is produced annually by the magazine, which is published by a unit of The Washington Post Co. This year's compilation ranks companies by the value of federal technology contracts they won in 2003. The contract values do not include subcontracts, work on government projects for another contractor.
Acquisitions account for most of the changes on this year's list as companies of all sizes continue to buy competitors to get business with the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and the Homeland Security Department.
"It is still a very solid market," said Ray Bjorklund, who analyzes technology contractors for Federal Sources Inc., a consulting firm in McLean. But "a lot of companies have grown more from acquisitions than from actual growth in the business," he said.
Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda and Northrop Grumman Corp. of Los Angeles finished first and second for the fourth year in a row. Once traditional defense contractors, those companies now depend on computer networks as well as jets and tanks.
Computer Sciences Corp., a technology outsourcing and consulting company based in El Segundo, Calif., moved into the No. 3 spot as its business supporting operations in Iraq boomed. The value of its prime contracts exploded to $4.1 billion, from $1.9 billion in 2002, almost entirely because of its March 2003 acquisition of DynCorp, a Reston-based contractor.
"The areas that we're experiencing the greatest growth are all largely related to activities in the Middle East," said Paul M. Cofoni, president of CSC's federal business.
Demand is growing for services related to logistics, security, and intelligence technology, all areas of DynCorp expertise. In the case of logistics work, CSC employees not only build and monitor computer systems that track and analyze the movement of military supplies into Iraq, they also are stationed with military officials in the Middle East to distribute provisions.
CSC recently won a contract to design and produce identification badges containing biometric data and a system to scan the badges for the staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
The project is an example of the contracts that CSC can now pursue by combining the resources of a major technology services company with DynCorp's history of supporting the U.S. military in "hot spots" around the world, Cofoni said.
"A lot of our business is this nice confluence of our information technology and our international presence," Cofoni said.
DynCorp gave CSC the muscle to push Science Applications International Corp. down to No. 5 on the Washington Technology list. But unlike CSC, whose federal business grew only slightly after excluding DynCorp, SAIC grew rapidly without a sizable acquisition. The value of SAIC's prime contracts rose to $2.8 billion, from $2 billion a year ago.
SAIC is based in San Diego but has a huge campus in McLean, where 14,000 people work. The company does more than 80 percent of its business with the federal government and its revenue from regulated clients, mostly government agencies, jumped 24 percent in the year ended Jan. 31.
SAIC's roots in technical research and its long relationship with U.S. intelligence and research agencies have given the company an edge when competing for security-related contracts. Its scientists work on experimental national security projects, including ways to identify people from a distance based on their heartbeats or facial features. Other consultants are helping the government anticipate terrorist threats to critical parts of the public infrastructure, such as the Hoover Dam.
International Business Machines Corp. climbed to No. 11 from No. 18 as the value of its contracts soared to $910 million, from $394 million in 2002. IBM, the world's largest computer company, became the largest technology consulting company as well when it bought PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in 2002.
IBM's business with the federal government increased 36 percent last year, but PWC only contributed a fifth of that growth, said Anne K. Altman, who oversees the federal division. The division's biggest source of growth is upgrading computer systems and advising agencies on how to change the way they operate to take advantage of new technology, Altman said.
For example, IBM is working with the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection to shift its focus from customs enforcement to border security. Such projects allow IBM to combine its longtime expertise in hardware and software with its new strength in management consulting.
Altman said it has not always been easy competing for federal technology projects in a market dominated by the traditional defense contractors. Even now, Lockheed Martin beat Northrop Grumman, its nearest competitor for the most contracts, by more than $500 million. But IBM's rise represents the emergence of pure technology companies in the market, she said.
"If I told somebody I ran IBM Federal five years ago," Altman said, "they would have said, 'Oh, my condolences, Anne.' "
--------
Contracts Awarded
States News Service
Washington Post
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13056-2004May9?language=printer
Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems & Solutions of Gaithersburg won a $236.6 million contract from the Missile Defense Agency for the development, integration and installation of the command, control, battle management and communications capability for the Ballistic Missile Defense System.
AT&T's Government Solutions Division of Vienna won a contract valued at up to $134 million from the Army's Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation to develop live battlefield training systems.
Computer Sciences Corp. of Arlington won a contract valued at up to $24.66 million from the Missile Defense Agency for scientific engineering and technical assistance to the Ballistic Missile Defense System Program director and the deputy for system integration and engineering.
BAE Systems Technologies Inc. of Rockville won a $22.32 million contract from the Naval Air Systems Command's Aircraft Division for engineering and technical support services.
R.S. Information Systems of McLean won a $22 million contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs' Office of Cyber and Information Security for senior-level system engineering.
ICF Consulting of Fairfax won a contract valued at up to $18 million from the General Services Administration to support the new federal government eTravel Initiative.
Radian Inc. of Alexandria won a $10.57 million contract from the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for crew protection kits for the Medium Tactical Vehicle.
Alliant TechSystems Inc. of Radford , Va., won an $8.18 million contract from the Air Force for bulk explosives.
MCI Inc. of Vienna won a $7.88 million contract from the Army for a modern, digital cellular, command and control system to link together the various new sites of the Iraqi Armed Forces and the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team.
Darlington Inc. of Arlington won a $7.08 million contract from the Marine Corps Systems Command for joint enhanced core communication systems.
Total Resource Management of Alexandria won a $6.7 million contract from the Navy to engineer an enterprise asset management system that supports four naval bases in the Northwest.
Dynamix Corp. of Landover won a contract valued at up to $6 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for environmental services.
Professional Software Engineering Inc. of Virginia Beach won a $5.24 million contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center for engineering services to support information systems and network technology programs.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $3.44 million contract from the Army's Communications-Electronics Command for communication, detection and coherent radiation equipment.
Computational Physics Inc. of Springfield won a $2.85 million contract from the Navy's Office of Naval Research for engineering and analytical support for remote sensing.
FDGM Inc. of Chesapeake, Va., won a $1.49 million contract from the Naval Inventory Control Point for diesel cylinder heads.
Atlantic Coast Technologies Inc. of Silver Spring won a $1.43 million contract from the Rome Air Force Research Laboratory for research and development of target recognition using continuous acoustic signals.
Alutiiq Security & Technology LLC of Chesapeake, Va., won contract valued at up to $500,000 from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for law enforcement, security, marine craft, fire and rescue and special purpose clothing.
Integrated Systems Analysts of Arlington won a $289,804 contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center for watertight door kits.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $110,700 contract from the Army's Communications-Electronics Command for communication, detection and coherent radiation equipment.
Steiner B. Moore Corp. of Chesapeake, Va., won an $83,716 contract from the Special Operations Command's Naval Special Warfare Group to buy and install mezzanine and diamond mesh cages.
GTSI Corp. of Chantilly won an $83,438 contract from the Department of the Treasury for portable scanners.
Epsilon Systems Solutions Inc. of Portsmouth, Va., won a $71,623 contract from the Homeland Security Department's Coast Guard for dockside repairs to the USCGC Bear.
Intrinsic Semiconductor Corp. of Sterling won a $69,960 contract from the Air Force for research and development services.
Paragon Systems LLC of Herndon won a $68,131 contract from the U.S. Air Force for Hanscom servers.
Dela Technology Corp. of Rockville won a $58,070 contract from the Defense General Supply Center for voltage regulators.
Nurad Technologies Inc. of Baltimore won a $51,576 contract from the Defense Supply Center for antennas.
These contracts were awarded by the federal government to companies in Maryland, Virginia and the District. For more information, call States News Service at 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
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Federal Contracts Realistic Battles Without the Bullets
By Anitha Reddy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13223-2004May9.html
AT&T Corp.'s federal division won its first two contracts to build "live" training systems for the U.S. Army that let soldiers skirmish on open-air ranges, driving real tanks and firing real guns but shooting radio signals instead of bullets.
One contract, from the Army, is worth $74 million. The other is a subcontract from Lockheed Martin Corp. worth $60 million. AT&T won over Science Applications International Corp. in a final round of competition after three other bidders were eliminated.
Soldiers conduct elaborate training exercises that are sophisticated versions of laser tag. All the guns, tanks and shells are real, but they are not loaded with ammunition. The path of lasers beamed from the weapons tell soldiers and commanders which shots hit their targets.
The laser system was cutting-edge 20 years ago, but decades of innovation have made new equipment better able to model combat scenarios. Lasers, for example, can mimic only "line-of-sight" weapons, such as automatic rifles, that fire in a straight line; they can't emulate the arc of an artillery shell.
AT&T Government Solutions of Vienna plans to eliminate that disadvantage and others by using a system that relies on global positional satellite devices, sensors, and radios embedded in guns, vehicles and soldiers' uniforms.
Processors built into tanks, for example, will calculate the speed and trajectory of mock weapons and their targets. Then a device in the firing tank could send a radio signal to the "hit" tank, setting off a pyrotechnic device and causing smoke to rise from the tank. Or if a mock weapon would have wounded a soldier, a radio signal could set off a vibrating sensor in a soldiers' uniform to indicate an injury.
The prototype for the new system is scheduled to be demonstrated in September 2007, said Edward Babiuch, the contract's program manager at AT&T.
The location of the test has not been determined yet. One possibility is the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin in southeastern California. There, in the Mojave Desert on a range the size of Rhode Island, as many as 5,000 soldiers can conduct war games using "real tanks in real dirt," Babiuch said.
The contract from Lockheed Martin is to update the communications systems at the National Training Center, including the data networks that transmit information from the training range to commanders monitoring the games. Eventually, Babiuch said, wireless radio towers on the training range will collect information about the location of every soldier, vehicle, tank and bullet and sent it to the commanders building through underground fiber-optic cable.
-------- europe
Europe's Chief on Terrorism to Reassure U.S. on Efforts
May 10, 2004
By CRAIG S. SMITH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/international/europe/10EURO.html
PARIS, May 9 - Europe's new counterterrorism coordinator, Gijs de Vries, is scheduled to meet with Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security, in Washington on Monday to assure the United States that Europe is toughening its counterterrorism practices and to ask for closer cooperation between the United States and the European Union in combating terrorists.
Mr. de Vries's job was created by European Union leaders in the wake of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people and signaled that Europe was a target for the kind of large attacks that have hit countries from the United States to Indonesia. His job is to accelerate a range of European Union-level counterterrorism initiatives meant to consolidate intelligence and integrate responses to threats to the union's 25 members.
"Europe is united and committed in this fight," Mr. de Vries, 48, said Friday in an interview.
For years, the union has been criticized by the United States and other countries for a lack of coordination among members' police and judicial systems. The lack of continuity has let terrorism suspects move freely from country to country and find sanctuaries in Europe even though they are known to associate with violent groups. Several people believed responsible for the Madrid bombings were well known to security services elsewhere in Europe. Islamic militants in Europe also planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
European countries already have varying degrees of bilateral cooperation on counterterrorism, but the union has made only piecemeal efforts to address terrorist threats multilaterally. After the Madrid bombings, leaders of member countries listed such flagging initiatives and appointed Mr. de Vries to see that they were swiftly carried out and to propose additional measures.
Among the initiatives he is pushing member states to adopt is a European arrest warrant that would obligate all European Union members to exercise a warrant issued by any one member. Other initiatives include rules that allow national police forces to operate in neighboring countries and for groups of countries to form investigative teams to pursue terrorists.
Mr. de Vries, who has represented the Netherlands in the European Parliament and served four years as his country's deputy interior minister, will also propose initiatives when European leaders meet again in June, including a plan to pool intelligence from the members' domestic security services for analysis in Brussels, where the union has its headquarters.
"The security services of the 25 member states of the new union have agreed to step up their cooperation and to work together as 25," Mr. de Vries said.
Europe has intensified its focus as activity by Islamic militants here has increased, spreading anxiety that another major attack on a European Union member is in the works. On Sunday, the Italian antiterrorist police arrested five men suspected of membership in a militant Islamic group on suspicion of recruiting suicide bombers to attack in Iraq.
Italian officials told Italy's Ansa news agency that the men, an Algerian cleric and four Tunisians, were detained in a yearlong investigation into what they suspect are terrorist cells in Genoa, Italy. Italian officials said 71 people were arrested last year on suspicion of having links to international terrorist groups.
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Two out of five Lithuanians want to keep troops in Iraq: poll
VILNIUS (AFP)
May 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040510180124.bqsfy1nh.html
Fewer than half of Lithuanians support the deployment of their troops in the US-led coalition force in Iraq, according to a poll released on Monday.
Forty-one percent of respondents backed the presence of the Lithuanian force in Iraq, while fully 33 percent said they opposed it and 26 percent described themselves as undecided.
The survey was conducted by Spinter Tyrimai polling company April 27-30 among 1,005 people aged 18-75.
It also showed that 79 percent of Lithuanians support the idea that only volunteers should be sent on military missions and should have the right to return home whenever they wish.
Some 120 Lithuanian soldiers, conscripts who volunteered to go to Iraq, currently serve there under Danish and Polish command.
This is the first survey of the public's view on Lithuanian participation in the US-led coalition since the beginning of the Iraq conflict.
-------- iraq
Bremer knew, minister claims
Luke Harding in Baghdad
Monday May 10, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1213186,00.html
Iraq's first human rights minister launched a blistering attack yesterday on America's chief administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, saying that he had warned him repeatedly last year that US soldiers were abusing Iraqi detainees.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Abdel Bassat Turki, who resigned a month ago, said he informed Mr Bremer last November and again in December of the rampant abuse in US military prisons. "He listened very well. But that was all he did," he added.
Dr Turki also claimed that he had received "information" of abuses committed against prisoners "just this week", but refused to give details.
Following allegations of abuse, he said, he had asked for permission to visit Abu Ghraib prison last November - the month the photos were taken of US guards abusing naked Iraqi inmates. But Mr Bremer refused his request.
In December, a month before the US military set up its own secret inquiry into Abu Ghraib, he telephoned Mr Bremer to complain about the treatment of female detainees.
"They had been denied medical treatment. They had no proper toilet. They had only been given one blanket, even though it was winter," he said.
Dr Turki's claims heap embarrassment on the US-led coalition and the Pentagon, and suggest both had been aware of the widespread abuse much earlier than previously admitted. Dan Senor, Paul Bremer's spokesman, told the Guardian that Mr Bremer only found out about the "humiliation" of prisoners in January.
Yesterday Dr Turki said that in March he and other US-appointed ministers had demanded an investigation after a US soldier raped a woman prisoner, documented by Major General Antonio Taguba in his report on Abu Ghraib.
"We were told this matter would be dealt with in secret, and with only Americans attending," he said.
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Celebrations break out in Fallujah as US marines enter rebel Iraqi city
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP)
May 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040510155135.r4uvwekd.html
Celebratory gunfire ripped the Sunni Muslim bastion of Fallujah on Monday as US marines in a dozen armoured vehicles entered the war-battered city on a symbolic tour and met with local leaders.
Iraqi police and masked insurgents shot off rounds and people flooded the streets, waving Iraqi national flags and honking their car horns in jubilation over what they mistakenly believed was a deal between the marines and the city's leaders to scale back the US presence in Fallujah.
Locals said they believed if the city was quiet during the convoy tour marines would leave Fallujah for good.
But the marines immediately crushed the notion and said they would keep their positions around the edges of the city, rocked by the worst fighting in Iraq since the US invasion last spring.
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, led the 20-vehicle convoy of marines, police and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) into the heart of the city, with ICDC members waving the old Iraqi flag.
The marines headed into meetings with the city's mayor and within an hour Iraqis erupted in joyous celebration as people tumbled into their cars and started their own impromptu victory parades.
Marine spokesman Major T.V. Johnson said Mattis reviewed plans with Fallujah's mayor and tribal sheikhs for establishing "conditions so we can get in there and start spending money on the city on various projects."
But Johnson expressed befuddlement about the swirling rumours among Fallujans that the marines were on the verge of a further withdrawal.
"Eventually we want to recede to the horizon ... but just because we have one meeting in town it doesn't mean we're leaving Fallujah."
But Johnson's word would have fallen on deaf ears in the city awash in a carnival-like atmosphere.
A caravan of some 20 vehicles including trucks full of young men waving AK-47 assault rifles toured around the centre of the city, blaring their horns as people gathered on the street to greet them.
"Saddam, your name shocks America," shouted a group of 10 men being driven in the bucket of a digger in the middle of the convoy. One of the flags on a van proclaimed: "Hail the heroes".
The sound of gunfire crackled in the area as the convoy passed by burnt-out cars, damaged homes and mosques, with rubble strewn around a minaret, in a reminder of April's fighting.
Bilal Mohammed, 23, was standing on the front seat of a BMW car with his head outside the sun roof, holding an AK-47.
"I feel like every Muslim Arab is feeling today, that we have a victory that God himself gave us -- a victory over the unbeliever Americans. This is the end now, and it will be much better than before."
Along the road, Yussef Mosaif, who draped himself in the traditional red, green, black and white Iraqi flag, said: "America is the enemy of the Fallujah people and will be till the end of our lives."
On the city's main street, police Sergeant Yassin Hamed said: "This is a victory for the people of Fallujah and for all the Iraqi people over the Americans."
Since the marines struck a deal with former Iraqi generals at the end of April, Fallujah has been patroled by Iraqi police and the newly-formed Fallujah Brigade, an ad-hoc force of army veterans, many of them with links to Saddam Hussein's old Baath party.
Until now, marines have manned joint checkpoints with Iraqi security teams on the city's periphery, but Monday's convoy stood as an effective test of the calm ruling Fallujah since the police, ICDC and Fallujah Brigade took over responsibility here last week.
Last month's fighting, prompted by the March 31 murder and mutilation of four US security contractors on the city's main street, left hundreds of Iraqis and scores of marines dead.
The convoy could herald a greater pullback of marines from the edge of the city and accelerate the process of restoring normality and pumping 77 million dollars of reconstruction funds into Fallujah.
Fallujah's northwestern neighborhood of Jolan remains a haven of insurgents and marines are deployed, alongside ICDC, outside the district.
The coalition wants the Fallujah Brigade and police to round up the insurgents' heavy weapons and start taking steps to find the culprits behind the March 31 murders, as well as a February 14 attack on Iraqi police and ICDC that killed more than 20 Iraqi officers.
----
Iraq Cleric to Widen War After U.S. Bombs Baghdad HQ
Mon May 10, 2004
(Reuters)
By Suleiman al-Khalidi
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=5091197
NAJAF, Iraq - Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr Monday ordered his Mehdi Army to launch a broad new offensive against U.S.-led occupying forces following a U.S. crackdown on his strongholds in Baghdad and across the south.
U.S. bombs flattened his office in the capital overnight.
"We have now entered a second phase of resistance," said Sadr's chief aide at his main base in the holy city of Najaf.
U.S. commanders, helped by rival Shi'ite leaders, sound increasingly confident of containing Sadr's month-old uprising.
But efforts to foster a pro-American spirit in Iraq ahead of next month's handover of sovereignty to an interim government ran into more trouble with new revelations from the International Committee of the Red Cross about U.S. failures to prevent its soldiers abusing Iraqis.
Photographic revelations that soldiers sent to "liberate" them from Saddam Hussein have abused prisoners are undermining efforts to win over Iraqis, despite efforts by President Bush to assure them that a case heading for court martial next week is an isolated incident swiftly dealt with.
A report, published in the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by the ICRC, said Red Cross officials complained in October -- two months before the pictures in the court martial case were taken -- about prisoners being held naked in total darkness in Saddam's Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
A U.S. military intelligence officer defended the treatment at the time as standard practice, said the ICRC, which also disclosed that its president went to Washington in January to alert Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in person to the agency's concerns.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who faces calls to resign, said he learned of problems with prisons in Iraq only in January. Bush, fighting for re-election, has stood by him.
His main U.S. ally in Iraq was also under fire to confront allegations that British soldiers also abused prisoners. Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized but faced further questioning.
VIOLENCE
The killings of a South African and a New Zealand engineer in a drive-by shooting in the northern oilfields and a bomb that slowed up oil exports from the south also struck at U.S. efforts to stabilize the country ahead of the June 30 handover.
U.S. Marines made an effort to show they have restored peace to the Sunni Muslim city of Falluja by driving an armored convoy into the center for the first time since a bloody siege last month. But scenes of armed guerrillas cheering the convoy's departure, suggested that peace remains rather fragile.
Responding to what appears to be the main military threat at present, U.S. aircraft bombed Sadr's offices in the restive Baghdad slum of Sadr City overnight, witnesses said.
At least one bomb fell on the single-storey building around 2 a.m. (2200 GMT Sunday) and virtually destroyed it. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. military, which reported 19 members of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia were killed in a series of clashes in the impoverished Shi'ite neighborhood Sunday.
The raid was part of a stepped up military campaign against an uprising launched by the Shi'ite cleric against U.S.-led forces a month ago. Sadr has taken refuge in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, south of the capital, with thousands of men.
U.S. forces, spurred on by mounting irritation with Sadr among Shi'ite elders, have squeezed the outskirts of Najaf. With British forces around Basra, they have been taking back key positions like police stations in a string of towns across Shi'ite southern Iraq. An armored U.S. column rolled again into the center of the holy city of Kerbala Monday.
NEW OFFENSIVE
Sadr's chief aide in Najaf told Reuters he was hitting back.
"Our policy now is to extend the state of resistance and to move it to all of Iraq because of the occupiers' military escalation and crossing of all red lines in the holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf," Qais al-Khazali said.
Sadr has threatened to launch suicide bombers should U.S. troops intrude on sacred ground. There have also been signs that militants from the Shi'ite south might join forces with minority Sunni guerrillas to the north and west, despite a history of strife that saw Sunnis oppress Shi'ites under Saddam Hussein.
In Kirkuk, main city of the northern oilfields, gunmen killed a South African and a New Zealand engineer and an Iraqi in a drive-by shooting, police said.
In the southern oilfields, also crucial to putting Iraq back on its feet, exports were reduced sharply after saboteurs blew up a pipeline Saturday, the U.S. Army said. It was still ablaze at the southern tip of the Faw Peninsula, near Basra.
Arab television Al Jazeera aired a video tape it said was from an unknown Iraqi group that vowed to kidnap and kill Arab and foreign workers -- especially Kuwaitis -- in Basra.
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Shiite Cleric's Militia Seizes Control of Baghdad Slum
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13066-2004May9.html
BAGHDAD, May 9 -- Gunmen and commanders loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr took over the giant Sadr City slum in Baghdad on Sunday, seizing control of police forces, municipal administration and schools and blocking freedom of movement in an area just five miles east of U.S. administration headquarters.
Teenagers wielding rocket-propelled grenade launchers commanded entrances to the slum, home to about a third of Baghdad's 5 million residents. The youths waved commands to visitors with one hand and slung rifles around with the other.
With the quick takeover, which was completed at dawn, Sadr City joined two southern towns, Najaf and Kufa, now under the control of Sadr's militia.
The immediate trigger for the uprising in Sadr City was a U.S. raid Saturday night on a former office of Sadr's organization and the detention of two of Sadr's lieutenants, Amr Husseini and Amjad Saedi. U.S. officials said the men were responsible for Sadr's finances and operations in eastern Baghdad.
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said the decision to raid the building was "based on intelligence suggesting that a large group of armed Moqtada militia were attempting to reestablish operations and reoccupy the building."
"After the arrests and following the call of the leader . . . we decided to rise up with him and stop the Americans from coming into Sadr City again," said Sheikh Latif Moqtadai, commander of a small militia unit. His group manned an intersection on Orfali Street on the western edge of Sadr City, which was named for Sadr's father, Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, a revered grand ayatollah who was assassinated in 1999.
A cluster of young men surrounding Moqtadai nodded. The men, with scarves wrapped around their heads and wearing sandals, brandished AK-47 rifles, while others in the area carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers, their pointed projectiles locked in place.
Sadr, 30, has defied a U.S. arrest warrant for involvement in the murder of a Shiite cleric, Abdel-Majid Khoei, who was killed last year. Sadr has taken refuge around Najaf, home to the shrine of Ali, a cousin of the prophet Muhammad and the first Shiite imam, a development that has complicated the U.S. drive against him because commanders say they want to avoid storming the holy city.
The commanders say they are chipping away at Sadr's forces by hitting them in several other southern cities, including Diwaniyah, Karbala, Kut and Kufa, just east of Najaf. U.S. tanks roared deep into Kufa for the first time Sunday.
In less than eight weeks, the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority is supposed to transfer at least nominal authority to a new Iraqi government. Sadr's rebellion against the American-led occupation, which started more than a month ago, has dimmed prospects for a smooth transfer.
A rebellion also continues in central Iraq, spearheaded by Sunni Muslims. Shiite religious and political factions have grown nervous about a U.S. decision to reach out to members of Hussein's former army and Baath Party to pacify the Sunni revolt in the western city of Fallujah. Hundreds of opponents of the Baathist revival demonstrated peacefully Sunday in downtown Baghdad.
Sadr's Shiite rivals also fear they might have to deal with the radical cleric and risk intra-Shiite fighting. Sadr has rejected proposed political transition plans, which so far have excluded him.
"This problem cannot be left to hang there unsolved," said Sabeeh Jasim, a former political prisoner who runs a relief charity in Baghdad. "The turmoil can only grow."
Sadr City's warren of alleys had already proved to be volatile territory. The slum erupted in violence on April 4, a few days after the chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, closed Sadr's newspaper, al-Hawza, and a day after the arrest of one of Sadr's chief aides. But the violence had subsided after a U.S. counterattack, and until Sunday, Mahdi Army forces had withdrawn from the streets.
Members of the Mahdi Army, which numbers in the thousands, blocked streets with all manner of debris: fruit crates, stones, cinder block, automobile bumpers and iron grating. They set tires aflame and also burned the abundant street-side trash in the neighborhood. Heavy cranes and bulldozers were placed on main thoroughfares, available to block any American approach.
Owners of the few open businesses and shops kept assault rifles by their counters. Posters of Sadr, an index finger jutting at an angle, covered walls around one-story houses, shops and mosques.
Around midday, masked men shot rocket-propelled grenades at the Karameh police station, which was guarded by a pair of tan Bradley Fighting Vehicles and a lone police guard. The Bradleys rattled side streets with heavy fire and 10 others soon rumbled into Sadr City to escort them out. U.S. military officials said the Americans killed 18 insurgents at Karameh and at another police station. U.S. officials also said they had secured the sites, but the Karameh station stood abandoned. Other municipal buildings were vacant as well.
Clutches of young men formed an inner cordon of checkpoints deep in Sadr City near Sadr's abandoned main offices. They ushered autos onto side streets, where suspicious eyes gazed into the passing vehicles, particularly four-wheel-drive vehicles, which many Iraqis view as the cars of foreigners. Checkpoints popped up where none had existed. New flocks of youths, some armed, diverted traffic onto narrow streets to face lines of cars herded there from the opposite direction.
On Orfali Street, Moqtadai tried to reorganize the watch. "You will not be able to shoot from here," he told his underlings. "The civilian cars are in the way. Let's move from here."
A youth in a black scarf arrived and asked about a jeep that, he said, had been circling nearby. A visitor assured him it was only his awaiting transportation. "We have to be sure," he said. "We're afraid of spies who will tell the Americans where we are gathering."
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Analysts Say Iraqi Agencies Unlikely to Follow U.S. Rules
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12896-2004May9.html
With less than two months before the Coalition Provisional Authority is to transfer sovereignty to an Iraqi government, CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer III has been establishing rules for key agencies in the fields of intelligence, defense and the law that analysts say may not survive long because they reflect American rather than Middle Eastern values.
The new Iraqi intelligence service, which the CPA has created to replace Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat, will not collect intelligence that helps or harms any "legal" political party or Iraqi government official, under an order Bremer signed April 1. Nor will the agency carry out covert activities against "any Iraqi citizen or group based on race, religion, sect, gender, language, origin or tribal affiliation," the order said.
In some cases, Bremer's orders go beyond U.S. government practices. For example, after the U.S.-led coalition transfers limited sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government June 30, officers in the new Iraqi armed forces will have to wait 18 months after resigning or retiring before they are permitted to hold any political office, under Bremer's order establishing the new Ministry of Defense.
"There is no chance at all that a follow-on government [in Baghdad] will observe these orders," said Patrick Lang, a retired colonel and former head of the Middle East division of the Defense Intelligence Agency. "They need to walk away from us."
"No one has any illusion that it all is going to last," said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a specialist in the Middle East. He said Iraqis will reshape all the orders and ideas that Bremer's group is promulgating, no matter what is put down on paper.
"It makes perfect sense as attempts to lead into the future," Cordesman said, "but Americans need to understand we are just creating a climate for Iraqis . . . and it will be modified by them."
Lang agreed with Cordesman that the Iraqis will "adapt their government to their own traditions and culture."
"We can write all those things into law and it won't do any good," Lang said. "Saddam had a constitution with some of those same words, but none of it worked because they ignored it. That's their culture."
A poll of Iraqis taken in February found that only 42 percent of those surveyed understood that a transitional constitution had been approved, and that only half of that number understood that a constitution is "a nation's fundamental law," according to a recent Defense Department report.
Some of Bremer's orders are designed to keep military and intelligence officers out of the Iraqi political system to avoid having a new dictator emerge, as Hussein did 35 years ago. According to a Baghdad newspaper report, the newly named defense minister, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, and the director of the intelligence service, Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed Shehwani, have already moved into political activities, working behind the scenes to reach an understanding with Moqtada Sadr, the Shiite cleric leading an anti-coalition insurgency.
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who specializ